Strayer: CH 20: Identity and Culture during the Colonial Era

Education seemed magical to people who’d been previously illiterate. For them it was a way to break the bondage of Colonialism.  They had few alternatives literally. It was either education or possibly being culled into forced labor, especially in Africa. It also meant that natives could get the education to get better pay. It allowed a certain amount of social mobility and elite status, but perhaps this was also a kind of collusion or collaboration for those natives who attained higher paying jobs via education, especially if they were administrative jobs in nature. The natives felt so seduced by European culture and what upward mobility within it could afford them. In India for example, Bengalis ignored their Hindu faith’s prohibition against consumption of beef because to consume western foods felt more sophisticated. European religions such as Christianity were especially spread strongly in Africa where confidence had been shaken in their pagan religions for a multitude of reasons, but mainly, missionaries were providing the bulk of education opportunities in the colonial world. Although, there was certainly syncretic elements carried over from their pagan religions in the form of medicines and chants. Christianity, however didn’t make much inroads in India. Interestingly, Hindu mystics and scholars such as Swami Vivekananda seem to have integrated some of Christianity’s tenents into Hinduism, but re-fashioning Hinduism to be both militant and charitable. Hindus decided that they ought to make Hinduism a more respected religion by committing to charity, feeding the poor, things that their Christian colonial rulers would both respect and admire. They felt the best way to preserve Hinduism was to have it’s scholars go west and share some of it’s wisdom with intellectuals. For Africans and Indians, they began to look at their history and accomplishments to find achievements on par with European innovations. It seems that the idea of a pan-tribalism was an artificial creation by European colonial powers. There probably were tribes, but not to the extent that they were tribes after Europeans forced them to be defined due to asking Africans to state their tribe and family groups on legal documents, and work applications et cetera. It’s really been a major problem in African history in modern times because this lead to national states in that post-colonial era, which conflagated into conflicts between peoples that both hadn’t existed as tribes in the past or they didn’t get along to begin with.

 Some hoped living a European lifestyle would somehow afford them more equality with whites, but not a clear cut equality. Some felt that by embracing European culture that they could somehow uses the tools of European laws and culture to reinvigorate their own sense of nationalism. Some Vietnamese leaders like Nguyen Thai Hoc, who was executed for crimes against the French believed until the end that they could will the colonial system to achieve their own political ends. The leader who would later lead North Vietnam, Ho Chi Min actually attended the Post-World War I peace talks hoping he could use European political venues to legally petition the European powers to grant Vietnam independence, long before he was ever a communist:  http://isq.sagepub.com/content/12/1/133.extract