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An African Voice

The Role of the Humanities in African Independence

Duke University Press

Colonial Legacies

The Ambiguities of Colonialism

After seventy-five years of colonial rule African independence in the 1960s was for most a new experience, but the quest for freedom was as old as colonialism itself. During the nineteenth century Europeans had occupied vast sections of the African continent—Boer and Briton in South Africa, the Portuguese holding Mozambique and Angola, French and English interests nibbling at enclaves along the western coast from Cape Verde to the Niger Delta, then the final rush of occupation that followed the Berlin Conference of 1884–1885. African resistance had been various, sometimes intense, sometimes confused, and ultimately impotent in the face of superior Western military technology. With the eventual establishment of colonial administrations, opposition was forced into such refinements as independent African churches, political movements masquerading as cultural organizations, or token representation in colonial legislative bodies. At the same time there were Africans who welcomed colonialism or at least resigned themselves to foreign domination, arguing that Africa could learn much from the outsiders, modernizing their economic and political institutions in preparation for the time when African societies might take their place in the world community of nations.

Thus, during the colonial era, an ambivalence developed among many Africans, particularly those familiar with the West, an ambivalence in which an admiration for Western ideas and institutions clashed with traditional African ethical and social standards. If this raised confusion and uncertainty in the minds of those Africans who regarded the worlds of Europe and Africa as antithetical, to others it promised a happy integration of complementary cultures, brought into being by those Africans familiar with both worlds. When political independence arrived in mid-twentieth-century Africa, the ambivalence of colonial times remained to complicate the pressing problems of new nations—how to convert the artificial geography of European colonies into stable, cohesive nations, how to turn the benefits of economic growth from Western profit to African advantage, how to assert a genuinely African culture in the modern world.

Antecedents1

Ambivalence was not the hallmark of the Europeans who came to Africa. Portuguese clerics along the coasts of Kongo and Angola baptized slaves bound for the Americas, serene in the conviction that the outward-bound chattels had been rescued from the eternal damnation of their seeming barbarism. Dutch settlers arriving in South Africa during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries felt no remorse as they decimated indigenous hunters and herdsmen while appropriating the lands of those they regarded as inferior beings. In West Africa the nineteenth century opened as European, chiefly British, humanitarians mounted a major attack on the Atlantic slave trade, an essential component of which was the replacement of pagan, slave-trading societies with Christianized cultivators of those agricultural commodities in growing demand in the West. The coastal towns of Freetown, Monrovia, and Libreville were all founded as rehabilitation centers for former slaves, but the reforming impulse extended well beyond resettlement, involving no less than a new look for the whole of West Africa's traditional civilizations.

In communities like Saint-Louis at the mouth of the Senegal River, the dominant French presence was marked by what came to be called assimilation, that is, the total conversion of indigenous peoples to European culture, at least in its Gallic variation. Africans who came under British influence were subjected, like the former slaves of Freetown, to Anglican Christianity and the ethical, cultural, and social standards of Victorian England. The objective was not colonies but the establishment of independent communities directed by an African middle class of farmers, artisans, and traders—a clearly superior alternative, it was argued, to economies based primarily on the sale of surplus population. As with the French, the British effort was essentially assimilationist, an early instance of Western technical assistance, and a genuine effort to remake indigenous societies in the image of what was regarded without question in Europe as the most advanced civilization the world had yet achieved.

As exercises in cultural persuasion these efforts were not an immediate success. Tropical disease took a heavy toll among the missionaries and government officials posted to West Africa, while local populations remained largely indifferent to alien ways and religious beliefs. Nevertheless, small and significant gains were made. European ideas and institutions took root gradually in coastal points like Goree, Cape Coast, Accra, and Lagos, these cosmopolitan centers serving as seed ground for the dissemination of Western values and standards that percolated into the interior, carried by the shifting African population migrating ceaselessly between town and country.

Some Africans actively sought to acquire and master the elements of Western culture. There were those attracted by European technology, not only the evident advantages of mechanical contrivances but scientific, mathematical, and linguistic skills as well. These inroads led naturally to other imports such as personal dress, housing, and, of course, religion. In Senegal a small métis, or mulatto, population—descendants of European-African alliances—embraced the language and culture that France had hoped to implant in her African holdings. At Freetown the liberated slaves who poured in during the first half of the nineteenth century were quickly attracted to the Western culture they found in their new home. Torn loose from familiar surroundings, the new arrivals accepted Christian conversion, sent their children to be educated in the mission schools, mastered English, adopted forms of European dress, and settled down as aspirant bourgeois tradesmen, clergy, or schoolteachers. If the transformation was not as complete as among the métis of Senegal, the movement was clearly in the direction of a Western way of life.

The growing influence of European culture was exemplified in the careers of a number of West Africans, some self-made men sympathetic to the drive of Western enterprise and acquisitiveness, others singled out by European missionaries for special training in such fields as education, medicine, or the ministry. These acolytes helped staff a network of mission stations established at points throughout the African interior; more than that, they reached beyond their function of Christian conversion, advocating the civilization of the West as a means of revitalizing and modernizing traditional African societies. Such an individual was the Abbé P. D. Boilat, a young mulatto cleric, who set himself the task of encouraging the assimilation of French culture in Senegal as priest, educator, and publicist. Another was James Africanus Beale Horton, son of a Sierra Leone liberated slave, who spent an active career urging the establishment of modern, Westernized, independent states throughout West Africa. Perhaps the most celebrated of all, Bishop Samuel Ajayi Crowther, survived the agonies of enslavement through rehabilitation at Freetown and eventually emerged as a leading exponent for the assimilation of the bourgeois Victorianism espoused by his British missionary sponsors.

Boilat left Africa to live in France long before the era of colonial control, and Horton died prematurely on the eve of the Berlin Conference, perhaps already partially disillusioned by the racial prejudice and the increasing economic and political interference that preceded the onset of overt colonial occupation. Crowther's long life extended from the early years when Freetown meant personal liberty to the days of protectorates and crown colonies. He had begun his career as cleric and missionary for the Anglican Church Missionary Society, working both in Sierra Leone and Yorubaland. He then assisted in the establishment of missions on the Niger before being chosen by the Society in 1864 as bishop of a vast West African diocese that included those river establishments and stretched from Senegal to the equator.

Significantly, existing British-directed C.M.S. missions and colonies like Lagos and Sierra Leone were excluded from Crowther's jurisdiction as there was resistance to the prospect of white missionaries serving under a black bishop. Crowther nevertheless pressed on with a vigorous program, stressing the development of a prosperous commercial agriculture that exported cotton, groundnuts, arrowroot, indigo, and other crops to the European markets, produced by communities of sober Christian farmers based on Western models. In his propagation of Christian doctrine, however, Crowther did not ignore local custorn. Traditional fables, proverbs, and songs were adapted to support and strengthen Christ's message, along with appropriate indigenous ceremonies and religious terms. In order more effectively to broadcast the faith, Crowther urged preaching in the vernacular, a practice that he supported by publishing grammars in Yoruba, Nupe, and Ibo, as well as Yoruba translations of several of the Scriptures.

Crowther remained as bishop for over a quarter century, but his later years were beset with problems of mission efficiency and the resistance to change by the people he had sought to convert. Hindsight sees the folly of trying to redesign a whole culture in a few short decades, but beyond parochial African complications lay difficulties originating in Europe. Gradually the early nineteenth century humanitarian enthusiasm faded, to be replaced eventually with full-blown imperialism, as imperialism reflected in missionary programs as much as in the policies of their European governments. Crowther's control over his own diocese was gradually circumscribed, and by the time of his death in 1891, he had been effectively superseded as bishop. But by that time the affairs of West Africans were no longer self-directed. Europeans had taken control. The colonial era had begun.

The Shock of Colonialism

It would be a mistake to assume that Africans automatically turned away from European colonialism, sickened by the brutality of arbitrary force, repelled by the finality of alien power. Some did, of course, but these were usually leaders of traditional states under attack by invading armies—for example, the Mandinka empire builder, Samouri Touré, or Jaja, the mercantile opportunist of the Niger Delta who defied none less than imperial Britain at the height of her imperial glory.

Among Africans who had been schooled in the ways of the West, the reaction was complex. There were throwbacks to the Abbé Boilat, looking forward to the day when assimilation would be complete and a black European replica would take his place in the world. Another few rebelled, urging their people to cleave to their time-honored traditions and customs. Most, however, reflected the inconsistencies and opportunities of their anomalous position. Educated in the West, they sought the advantages of modernization for their own people; yet, as Africans, they were dismayed by the consolidation of foreign power and sensed the danger that important traditional institutions and values might be contaminated and destroyed.

Many members of the small but crucial group of educated Africans saw a special role for themselves as men of two worlds. As sympathetic advocates of European culture, they felt themselves particularly well suited to explain the advantages of the modern world to their own countrymen. Equally, they saw their African heritage as an inestimable asset to foreign rulers whose unfamiliarity with local customs and institutions frequently confounded effective administration. In this special role as mutual interpreter, it must be added, they glimpsed the opportunity to share in the exercise of power.

The authority wielded by Blaise Diagne, Senegal's deputy to the French chamber from 1914 to 1934, may go a long way to explain his warm support of French domination in Africa. Other Africans similarly favored showed a like regard for French colonialism; throughout the British colonies, by contrast, official suspicion of educated Africans circumscribed the sharing of power and converted potential collaborators into early nationalist opponents. In Nigeria, for example, Herbert Macaulay may well have been propelled on his career as a violent, British-baiting patriot by the early rebuff to his hopes for advancement in the colonial administration. On the Gold Coast the nationalist leader J. E. Casely Hayford reversed the process, abandoning his initial role as administration gadfly in favor of subsequent cooperation as he searched for concessions and influence.

There were principles involved as well. Clergymen and publicists like Edward Blyden of Liberia, Majola Agbebi and James Johnson of Nigeria, or S. R. B. Attoh Ahuma on the Gold Coast were variously concerned with the assertion of African independence in the face of colonial authority. Overt political resistance was out of the question; the alternative was cultural affirmation, in divine worship, or through use of local dress and language, indices that signified deeply felt distinctions between the cultures of Africa and Europe. Attoh Ahuma heaped scorn on the black white man as "a creature, a freak, and a monstrosity." Blyden urged African Christians to throw off missionary controls, those "foreign props and supports," and establish their own independent, self-governing churches. James Johnson baptized babies with African names and endorsed polygamy and household slavery as not incompatible with Christianity. Agbebi supported the word with the deed, helping found the first independent church in Nigeria, wearing African dress even while traveling in the West, marrying his daughter in a traditional ceremony, even publicly defending odious anachronisms like human sacrifice and cannibalism.

Such behavior belied a fundamental seriousness, a profound misgiving that widespread, uncritical acceptance of European ways could lead to destruction of the essential African civilization. Johnson pointed to the rise of drunkenness and adultery that followed exposure to European custom; Agbebi complained of social anarchy and moral deterioration among Africans who had been taught contempt for their own institutions. Blyden insisted on the unique qualities of black culture—a divine gift, he called it, the destruction of which would deprive mankind of its spiritual completeness and perfectibility.

In practice, however, ethnocentrism proved elusive. Attoh Ahuma preferred the noble African plowman to pen-pushing counterfeit Europeans but admitted that Western civilization had important contributions to make in Africa. James Johnson inveighed against Western dress but wore none other himself. Blyden, the racial exclusivist, kept his European name, cultivated a wide acquaintanceship among political, religious, and intellectual leaders in England, and entertained a lifelong admiration for Western letters, including the classical languages of Greek and Latin. For all their advocacy of an independent church movement, neither Blyden nor Johnson followed Agbebi in supporting conviction with action, Johnson remaining to the end a loyal cleric of the Anglican church. Blyden flirted with Islam, which he declared was well adapted to the spiritual needs of blacks, but, interestingly, he called Mohammedanism a "form of Christianity."

These inconsistencies were not hypocrisy but ambivalence, not faltering devotion to Africa but recognition of European strength, less weakness of character than clarity of vision. They were men of two worlds, true cultural hybrids. They understood the values of Western civilization and yearned for their benefits in Africa as much as had predecessors like Bishop Crowther and Africanus Horton. More than that, they appreciated the advantages to be gained from access to the sources of power. Blyden was drawn to William Gladstone by a mutual interest in classical literature, but Blyden employed that acquaintance to urge favors for Africa from an all-powerful British statesman.

In like fashion, familiarity with Europe by the Gold Coast barristers, John Mensah Sarbah and J. E. Casely Hayford, helped their countrymen to deal with the constraints of imperial power. Trained in English law, both were able to challenge the authority of British colonialism on the Gold Coast and on occasion to help block legislation regarded as objectionable and contrary to African custom. In Nigeria Herbert Macaulay played an analogous role, leading a twenty-year campaign of embarrassing the colonial authorities and defending traditional institutions through adroit employment of such Anglo-Saxon fundamentals as freedom of speech and the constitutional guarantee of petition and rule of law.

Neocolonial Influences

The euphoria that accompanied independence in Africa was understandable and predictable. Colonialism was ended. The African was free henceforth to determine his own destiny. Yet, the more thoughtful were already pondering the morning after. Formal, nominal sovereignty, they feared, might yet prove the easier part. Genuine freedom, leading to stable, prosperous, purposeful African societies, could be more elusive.

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Excerpted from An African Voice by Robert W. July. Copyright © 1987 Duke University Press. Excerpted by permission of Duke University Press.
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