Through the Looking-glass: Colonial Encounters of the First Kind (original) (raw)

1988, Journal of Historical Sociology

Notwithstanding Gramsci or Foucault. there remains a tendency, in historical sociology. to explain processes of domination in terms of political and economic forces. In the study of state formation and imperialism. realpolitik is given precedence over ritual, material factors over the moral suasion of the sign. Yet European colonialism was also a cultural project. In Southern Africa, nonconformist missions. the vanguards of empire, conjured up new maps, new systems of relations, new notions of time, production and personhood. From their very first encounters with native communities, it is argued, they sowed the state of colonialism on which the colonial state -and a more enduring condition of dependencywas founded. * * * * * About sunset the king, attended by his brothers and a few more persons, came to our tent ... 1 said that I had brought a small present for him. as a token of friendship-while opening it he remained silent, not moving wen his head, only his eyes towards the parcel. I then took from it a gilded copper comb and put it into his hair, and tied a silver spangled band and tassel round his head, and a chain about his neck, and last of all presented him with a looking glass ... To early 19th century missionaries, the vanguards of British colonialism, the African interior presented itself as virgin ground to be broken, landscape to be invested with history (Ranger n.d.: 1). But, in the Protestant imagination, this was not only a matter of 'taking hold of the land.' It required seizing the hearts and minds of its wild inhabitants, rousing them from a state of nature that rendered them indistinguishable from their rude surroundings. It involved, indeed, the cultivation of a particular self-consciousness, through which the savage would come to recognize his true reflection, see himself as a wayward child of God, and will his own transformation. The naturalism that pervaded this discourse masked the coerciveness of colonialism and the part of Christian evangelism within it. For the European was to labor hard to displace the savage world, to clear away the 'mists' that clouded the native eye. Yet, despite his metaphors of mastery, his sense of himself as a bearer of eternal truths, the missionary was to be caught up in a reciprocal process. Bent on realizing a pious fantasy in the African wilderness. he had eventually to come to terms with the disconcerting image of himself that the wilderness gave back as the