2 Colonization and Decolonization: The Historical Processes

Prof. Ipshita Chanda

Colonization and Decolonization: The Historical Processes

Aim of the section: To introduce the student to the phenomena of slavery and colonization and link them to the politics of colonial rule and decolonization. These processes are directly related to the anti-colonial nationalist movements on the African continent and in the African diaspora, thus creating the context or location of ‘African and Caribbean literatures in Europhone languages’ of which Anglophone African Literatures is a part (to be considered in Module 3).

Importance of section to the course as a whole: In order to understand the literatures written in Africa and in the diaspora in the English language, we must ‘locate’ the texts in their milieu. This module will attempt to historicize that milieu, outlining the conditions for the formation of the modern map of Africa, as well as introduce the student to the politics and society of a colony and its struggle for independence. This provides the material out of which the texts are fashioned, so the student is encouraged to use these background modules extensively, throughout the course.

1. COLONIZATION

The History of the word

In 1888, Henry Morgan Stanley crossed the Congo river which runs through the centre of Africa – he called the account of his journey “In Darkest Africa”. By the turn of the century, huge corporations, whose rapacious mission is described with subtle mastery by Joseph Conrad in the opening pages of The Heart of Darkness, were flourishing in Europe. Their purpose was the exploitation of resources in Africa and Asia. Conrad gives us a sense of the far reaching tentacles of capital, controlling the world seated in the heart of Europe where he locates the heart of darkness, which spreads its civilizing poison to the rest of the world. Literally, a worldwide ‘search and occupy’ operation brought into the ambit of the market all resources, including labour. These could be acquired through movement and then controlled by the colonizer/capitalist. In some cases, as in England, the colonies came under the rule of the monarchy, and elevated the ruler to the position of Emperor with dominion over foreign territories. This led to a hierarchy between the colonizer and the colonized as the former’s culture had been introduced into the colonized society as more civilized, modern, international etc. This cultural imperialism was opposed by colonized thinkers who reinterpreted the history of Africa and connected the change wrought in the pre-colonial societies by imposition of European structures of rule and social control.

Here we study the effects of colonization upon the African continent and in the ‘new’ world, where Africans were forcibly transported as slaves. We will consider aspects of the phenomenon of colonization that relate to the conditions of those parts of Africa and the Caribbean which were English colonies relating them to the colonization of India in order to facilitate understanding through our own experiences.

The Concept of ‘History’

1.2A Africa

In October 1963, H.R. Trevor- Roper delivered a series of lectures at the University of Sussex, reprinted in The Listener of November and December, where he declared:

Perhaps in the future, there will be some African history to teach. But, at present there is none: there is only the history of the Europeans in Africa. The rest is darkness… This account implied that Africa did not enter the civilized world until Europe penetrated her dark jungles, substantiating the description of the ‘dark’ continent. Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart makes a telling comment on this misrepresentation. At the end of the book, after Okonkwo has hanged himself, causing a crisis in the village of Umuofia, the District Magistrate thinks that the story of this stubborn traditionalist should find a place in his book, aptly titled Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger. First, he thinks Okonkwo’s story should be given a few pages, then he prunes it down to some lines because there is so much to say about so many things. The irony is that Achebe has just written an entire novel out of the incident that will merit only a few lines in the District Magistrate’s book. This episode shows that ‘history’ depends upon the perspective of the writer, not upon absolute, objective truth: what is valuable to the colonized is trivial for the colonizer. The history of Africa is emblematic of the conflict waged over sign systems by two opposing parties. In the case of societies once colonized, this conflict is between the local people who have gained independence through using recognizable signs common to a group not necessarily of the same cultural nationality. The postcolonial ‘nation’, built in imitation of Europe, is a political and affective construct. It functions as a distinguishing mark in the international context and provides a kernel around which people can construct both themselves and a community. The specific form of colonization and the history of the colonizing power decide the exact contours of the erstwhile colony’s evolution into a nation through contact with colonial administrative and cultural policies.

B Caribbean

The earliest written histories of the Caribbean are European reports which begin with the coming of the colonizers and record achievements of the society without mentioning the presence of slaves, written from a European perspective similar to that of Trevor Roper on African history. While the English travel writer Froude described the Caribbean as sterile mimicry of Europe, Naipaul, an Indo-Caribbean describes this loss of history as nihilistic:

History is built around achievement and creation and nothing was created in the West Indies (The Middle Passage, 1962). This hidden or erased history, according to Wilson, is that told by any islander and held in common by all, but for which there is no documentary reference (1:7: 66).The violence of erasure is added to the epistemic violence and loss evident in the prohibitions on African cultural expressions, an imposed language, a school education in which the disciplines of History and Literature endorsed the superiority of the colonizers and made their perspective dominant. Hence, Caribbean writers as diverse as Vic Reid and Junot Díaz, Nourbese Philip and Erna Brodber, Earl Lovelace and Kei Miller, share a collective commitment to rehumanize and indigenize those subjects who have been denied a relationship to the past based on established genealogy, succession as they were forcibly torn from their homes. In response, Derek Walcott insists on “the supremacy . . . of imagination over history” (1:7; 61) .This has been named the ‘poeticist tradition of history’

Cultural Colonization

The cultural policy of the British colonizers depended upon their perception of the colony. At the start of colonial rule in India, the policy of cultural colonization was outlined by Thomas Babbington Macaulay’s Minute on Education 1835, which proclaimed:

We must at present do our best to form a class who may be interpreters between us and the millions whom we govern, –a class of persons Indian in blood and colour, but English in tastes, in opinions, in morals and in intellect.

This policy was first tested in India and then transferred to the African colonies. But there was a difference between the attitude of the colonizers to India and the African territories. The lack of a script in the latter societies fashioned the idea of ‘primitive uncivilized societies’, different from the literate ‘Hindu’ civilization. In earlier literature, especially in classical Persian, ‘Hindu’ was a blanket term for all those who inhabited Hindustan or India. The colonial systems of classification constructed and named a Hindu religion based on the scholarship of European Indologists. However, the existence of written documents in India from very ancient times could not be denied. So the primitivity of African colonies formed the basis for the educational and the proselytizing efforts there. The colonizers thus had a double aim, which has been summed up as ‘Philanthropy at 5%’ or ‘Christianity and Commerce’, meaning that while they looked to extract profits from the colonies, European colonizers also attempted to justify their presence there by claiming that they were taking on the onerous task of civilizing the natives, bringing them education and the civilized Christian religion to replace their historyless, scriptless primitive barbarism. The effects of Christianity can be seen in Achebe’s novels as well as texts like Mugo Gatheru’s Child of Two Worlds.

Scramble for Africa

The demands of capital set up the Triangular Trade transporting slaves to the Caribbean and the ‘new’ world. This forced movement of African people from the continent across southern parts of America, was instrumental in capital formation. Africa was exploited for all its resources, human and non-human. But the very lucrative colonial enterprise also rested on a delicate balance between cost and expenditure. Once many European nations had acquired land in Africa and Asia through means as diverse as war and dowry settlements, the necessity of protecting each nation’s right to unhindered exploitation turned into a community concern. The European powers who owned land in Africa and had subjugated populations to take into account, sat together at the Berlin Conferences in 1884-5, under the aegis of king Leopold of Belgium, to clearly demarcate on the map of Africa, the areas of influence of each contending European nation.

Thus Africa was carved up into the modern nations we know today. This map was constructed not as a response to demands of the people of the continent but for administrative convenience of the colonizers. Besides, it also resolved the disputes and battles the European powers had to fight among themselves in alien lands to protect their economic interests.

The Berlin Conferences, by parceling Africa out to European nations, ensured that Europe’s economy would thrive on the back of African labour and raw materials – just as capital was built on the labour of slaves of African descent throughout the ‘new’ world. The division of Africa into protectorates or areas of influence of different European powers institutionalized the civilizing mission and the colonial economy as state policy. The different European powers built up the colony’s systems of administration and cultural dissemination in keeping with their own national cultural resources.

The introduction of European languages and the Roman script followed this pattern – Anglophone, Francophone and Lusophone African literatures and performative arts are results of this process. Thus, the local culture interacts with the imposed culture of a European colonizer. The result is known as ‘post’colonial culture – implying the culture that was produced as a result of contact between colonizer and colonized, each with their own customs and traditions and ways of living. Thus ‘post’ refers to the incidence of contact, rather than the relation between these two after the departure of the colonizers, because the interaction and change between European colonizers’ culture and local colonized’s culture began form the moment of incidence, and continues to this day.

2. KINDS OF COLONISATION

Settler Colonization

This refers to the settling of the colonizers among the native people – mostly where the climate is conducive for farming and settlements of Europeans: e.g. Northern Rhodesia (now Zambia), Kenya, Nyasaland (now Malawi) Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe). The Crown Lands Ordinances in the British protectorates of Africa dispossessed the native farmers of their land, taking everything in the name of the Crown because the native peasants did not have title deeds acceptable in English law courts. In Southern Africa, the spirit of pioneering seemed paramount, for the most inhospitable climates were chosen for the ultimate profit they could yield, labour being available. Thus return of the land was a demand of the nationalist anti-colonial movements, and culminated in places like Kenya in armed insurrection: the Mau Mau guerillas, celebrated in Ngugi’s work, are born from these circumstances.

Slavery and Plantation Agriculture

During the second half of the 17th century, colonialism was linked to mercantilism (based on establishing gold and silver reserves and a favourable trade balance) and, in the British and French possessions in particular, to sugar and coffee plantations using slave labour imported from West Africa. The object of each of these imperial systems was to extract profits from the systems of trade in sugar, slaves, and manufactured goods. Mercantilism was most fully expressed in what is referred to as the triangular and quadrilateral trades; in their most complicated form these linked Europe, West Africa, the West Indies, and the eastern seaboard of what is now the United States in reciprocal commerce largely for the benefit of the British, French, and Dutch.

Mercantilism peaked in the 18th century, before being replaced by the industrial capitalism that it had nurtured. Barbados became an English Colony in 1624 and Jamaica in 1655. The Lesser Antilles islands of Barbados, St. Kitts, Antigua, Martinique and Guadeloupe, Saint Lucia were the first important slave societies of the Caribbean, switching to slavery by the end of the 17th century as their economies converted from tobacco to sugar production. By the middle of the 18th century, British Jamaica and French Saint-Domingue had become the largest and most brutal slave societies of the region; Britain abolished the slave trade in 1807 and the slavery itself in 1833. This led to great difficulty in the new colony of Trinidad. To deal with this problem, Trinidad imported indentured servants from the 1830s until 1917. Initially Chinese, free West Africans, and Portuguese from the island of Madeira were imported, but they were soon supplanted by Indians. Indentured Indians would prove to be an adequate alternative for the plantations that formerly relied upon slave labour. In addition, numerous former slaves migrated from the Lesser Antilles to Trinidad.

Indirect Rule

The largest application of Indirect rule was in British Asia, in hundreds of pre-colonial states, first seen at work under the East India Company’s system of subsidiary alliances in the Indian subcontinent. The ideological underpinnings, as well as the practical application, of indirect rule in Kenya and Nigeria is usually traced to the work of Frederick Lugard, the High Commissioner of the Protectorate of Northern Nigeria from 1899 to 1906. In the lands of the Sokoto Caliphate, conquered by the British Empire at the turn of the century, Lugard instituted a system whereby external, military, and tax control was operated by the British, while most every other aspect of life was left to local pre-British aristocracies who may have sided with the British during or after their conquest. The theory behind this solution to a very practical problem of domination by a tiny group of foreigners of huge populations is laid out in Lugard’s influential work, The Dual Mandate in British Tropical Africa.

3. RELATIONS BETWEEN AFRICA AND THE CARIBBEAN

The region shares a tumultuous history of colonization, plantation slavery, indenture, and independence. Yet it is not a uniform or monolithic history. Even when different territories experienced similar events, they did so on very different timetables, and often what they experienced differed substantially. People from all the continents in the world formed the basic demographic of the Caribbean. Despite the contributions made by the Asians to the common culture of the Caribbean, the basis of Caribbean society is the ‘Black’ or ‘Afro- Caribbean’ population which, as the Jamaican scholar and cultural leader Rex Nettleford has written, was central in the “dynamic process of adjustment, rejection, renewal and innovation… the products of this cultural process are what constitute the mandates for a national cultural expression.”

Some broad features distinguished colonization in Africa from the Caribbean:

1. The slaves were the mainstay of the plantation agriculture of the Caribbean islands but formed the lowest rung of society in a settler colony: they did not have the advantages of education or participation in the social and political spheres. They were seen as human chattel. Hence, the colonial policy of the European powers was very different in the Caribbean than it was in Africa. Though based on racial discrimination in both places, the fact of slavery brutalized the people of African descent in the islands much more than the free but colonized Africans of the continent, depriving them of human conditions of life.

2. The traumatic ‘Middle Passage’ which transported the slaves from their own continent to the islands, severed the traditional ties of the Africans with their homeland. Preservation of traditional culture was more difficult and dangerous in the islands. Africans from various parts of the continent were bought and sold across the islands. Hence a slave was deprived of support from his own ethnic community. This was possible on the African continent, where communities still lived together and were able to preserve and use their cultural heritage despite colonial oppression.

3. Enslaved Africans came from all parts of the continent and were forcibly separated from their communities and acquired a blanket definition of ‘Africans’, which was equivalent to their social and economic position as ‘slaves’. When they arrived at the plantations, despite being from the same continent they often formed very diverse groups who did not share languages or customs. Hence their negotiation with and resistance to common conditions of slavery, rather than a remembered or shared culture, formed the basis of the Afro-Caribbean communities. Elements from many African ethnic traditions melded together to form the ‘Afro-Caribbean’ culture. The Caribbean was a site where cultures of different ethnic groups were preserved in memory and reinvented in dialogue with other African traditions, as the means to resist the linked oppressions of colonization, capitalism and racism.

4. NATIONALISM

‘Anglophone’ is defined as marker of specificity of Caribbean and African script culture in English. This indicates the commonality of language and literature in the formation of a ‘national’ identity. But it also underlines the dilemma of a geopolitical entity populated by diverse groups of people who have defined themselves as a single ‘nation’ and are trying to negotiate diversity. This is the case with India, with the Caribbean and a number of African nations. The Anglophone Caribbean, whose literature this course considers, is emblematic of the plural nation. It does not exist geopolitically as a nation, but it is a grouping in the mind, based on commonalities and differences between the different members of the group. The greatest commonality is the language, English. Hence attempts to carve an identity as a group of people in the early 19th century was also dependent on the language for both ideas of the self and expression of all forms, from literary to political. The eclipse of the local language by English, the vehicle of a new religion and a new culture, was parallel to the dispossession of land by the Crown lands ordinances introduced in different areas of the British protectorate in Africa.

Linguistic and political nationalism (See also Module 2): The acquisition of English for various means – to answer the colonizer in his own tongue, to gain the status derived from knowing the colonizer’s language, the ability to turn the language against its imposer: all these were aims espoused by different African thinkers in their response to the presence of English as a civilizing vehicle in their educational systems and through that into the culture resulting from colonial contact. The idea of nationalism introduced into the colonies as a result of contact with liberal humanities education in the English language. The first generation of nationalists were educated in the British system, often travelling to the ‘mother country’ and coming in direct contact with the culture that was imposed upon the colonies. The seeds of anti-colonial resistance were planted during these encounters and the strategies were also greatly influenced by their European experiences.

The “experience of India”: In Nigeria at least, this was evident to colonizers and colonized. As Charles Buxton points out, that the babus who were earlier laughed at because they tried to ape the Europeans, “have become the statesmen of India. They were a minority, but without their consent and cooperation, we could not carry out the administration at all.” Richard Hailey, the colonial administrator who wrote An African Survey (1938), avows the ‘Indian dimension’ in the process of decolonization, and so does popular opinion at the time.

Militant nationalism: In areas of settler colonization, the nationalist struggle for ‘freedom’ included a demand for the return of lands taken by the settlers. In some places like Kenya and Tanzania, this demand was backed by guerilla attacks against the colonial state leading to brutal suppression. The armed struggle for land and rights was considered nationalist by the Africans, but dubbed terrorism by the colonial authorities. These movements, often using indigenous forms of community-building like common oath-taking, dependent on local beliefs for popularity, believed that independence from colonial rule included return of native lands usurped by the colonizers. In that sense they posed a threat to the settled class-hierarchy : peasants dispossesed by the Crown Lands Ordinances were reduced to abject poverty and forced to work as labourers in the lands that they had earlier owned in order to pay cash taxes . When independence came, land-reform did not follow – rather the settler lands were bought by those who could afford them, these buyers being both white settlers and the newly rich black elites. Thus, land redistribution remained a contentious issue in post-independence settler colonies

5. DECOLONISATION AND NEOCOLONIALISM

The withdrawal of the colonizers from their areas of influence in the colonies was the result of local nationalist movements described above. The impulse came from contact with the ideologies of national sovereignty and human rights as well as the enforcement of economic and political domination by colonial administrations. This process of decolonization depended upon the nature of colonial rule and policy. In the English colonies, liberal democracy and the parliamentary form of government with political parties ensured that the economic and social control remained in the hands of the English educated leaders. Besides, no fundamental change occurred in the economic organization of the colony. According to Hailey, the British policy of decolonization was the process of coming to terms with the middleclass leadership of the colony by transferring political and ceremonial power, According to Hailey, the British policy of decolonization was the process of coming to terms with the middleclass leadership of the colony by transferring political and ceremonial power, without economic reorganization. Hailey called this the ‘Indian dimension’. There was a difference: in India there had been a flourishing middleclass prior to the coming of the English while in Africa, the middleclass was newly formed by a peripheral economy that grew around the colonial economy. They remained closer to their local cultures: witness the influence of oral forms on Indian English writers, as distinct from Anglophone African writers.

Colonization shaped a form of economic paternalism (See Hetherington) which continued following the withdrawal of European powers from the colonies in the aftermath of the Second World War (1939–45). For example, Britain continued to apply existing and past international economic arrangements with the former colony countries, and so maintained colonial control over all the modes of production despite being foreign nationals. The Commonwealth served to legitimize the economic system of colonialism long after it was formally declared to be in the past. African thinkers like Ghanaian president Kwame Nkrumah coined the term neo-colonialism to describe this situation. Following privileged access to the erstwhile colonizer, the national economy of the former colony is opened to the multinational corporations of the neo-colonial country. This continued the economy of dependence, the newly independent country remaining peripheral to the economy of developed neocolonial countries.

6. AFRICA IN THE WORLD

Nationalism and Creolization: Negritude

There is a specific line of descent that links contemporary philosophers of transnationalism, such as Glissant, the créolistes, and Antonio Benítez-Rojo, to Frantz Fanon, the Martinican prophet of nationalism. Fanon dismantles romantic assumptions concerning national identity. Whereas the traditional European idea of nation implied a common and homogeneous social, culture, and ethnic identity, and usually even a common origin in the sense of history, Fanon represents the traditional culture of the past as open to reinterpretation rather than as an inert given. He grounds a successful national consciousness in dynamic rather than ossified oral traditions.

However, a challenge to even dynamic nationalism is posed by the philosophy of Negritude, arising from the work of another Martinican philosopher and poet, Aime Ceasire. Negre is the word for black in French – and the celebration of blackness as complementary to whiteness, the positive valuation of the black as necessary to complete civilization, is characteristic of the African variety of Negritude professed by Leopold Sedar Senghor of Senegal. But Cesaire is not so intent on proving the complementarity of black and white: rather he wants to repudiate all standards of white evaluation, and profess an independent standard for black civilisation. For him, racism and the consequent economic deprivation and violence undergone by former slaves across the Americas and colonised in Africa form the basis of a common culture of blackness. This he names Negritude, defined negatively against white supremacist views.

This prompts Glissant to formulate his poetics of the rhizome, as separate from a culture that grows from a single unbroken ‘root’, the latter model is inadequate to understand the transnational culture built up through movement, forced and voluntary, that is peculiar to the islands. He challenges rigid ideals about the purity of inherited cultures. Thus, arguing for a model of cross-cultural identity that locates Caribbean culture in the regional context of the Americas rather than in individual Caribbean nations. His “Poetics of Relation” (1989) highlights the interconnectedness of the dynamics of creolization in the Americas, that is, of the transnational and cross-cultural processes of intermixing and transformation that produce creole societies.

Pan Africanism

Pan-Africanism, the understanding of oneself as connected to others of African descent in other sites through a shared origin and history of enslavement and/or colonization, is a response to colonialism and racism. In the nineteenth century, the direct experience of these two forms of domination led Afro-Caribbean intellectuals to define, prioritize, and articulate their local, transregional, and transnational affinities in ways that at once mirror and refract those of the colonizer. It illustrates further that colonialism imposes and inspires specific modes of transnational engagement on the part of the colonized that shape not only their relationships with the “mother country” but also their decisions about whether and how to conceptualize, position, and articulate their identities vis-à-vis the world. This ideal is criticised by Fanon, who saw as inherently flawed the continent wide approach of the Pan- Africanists of his time and their promotion of a transnational “black culture” that failed to account for the nation and national liberation as a precondition for culture.

6.3. Nationalism and Transnationalism

The basis of ‘nationalism’ in the Caribbean is multiple. Given its history, it has never been inhabited by a single race from the moment of the European incursion. There must have been internal traffic within the islands earlier – but the advent of the colonizer and the inclusion of the islands in the net of global capital at its formative stage, made the Caribbean a unique example of plural nationhood. No society in the Caribbean is homogenous. Hence we must use different conceptual tools to understand these societies. One of these tools may be the concept of ‘trans-nationalism’.

Transnationalism is a crucial characteristic of the Caribbean inhabited by many nations and cultures with a common African heritage based on both the experience of slavery and the memories of an imagined home on the continent. In these conditions, the actual political boundaries between nations do not obstruct the networks of peoples of African descent .