Belinda wrote: ↑Tue Sep 30, 2025 11:56 am
Immanuel Can wrote: ↑Mon Sep 29, 2025 10:51 pm
ThinkOfOne wrote: ↑Mon Sep 29, 2025 9:14 pm
Not sure if I understand you correctly, but it seems that you are of the mind that "Christian morality" prescribes actually loving and helping one's neighbor. Nothing could be further from the truth.
While there are some Christians who actually believe in doing that, there seem to be many more who are either apathetic or dead set against it, especially Evangelical Christians. There's a distinction that needs to be made between the morality espoused by Jesus while He walked the Earth and "Christian morality". There's a wide gulf between the two.
Wow.
Well, I can tell two things: one is that you've never been anywhere near a Developing World country, or met any evangelical missionaries. The second is that you don't wait for facts to trouble you, when you've got an opinion to offer.
Africans are pragmatic and welcome Christian and Muslim missionaries for the schools and hospitals they provide.
You'll find that the Christian missionaries "provide" very, very different things from what the Muslims do. You'll also find that the evangelical missionaries actually turned out to be a major reason why many tribes and ancient languages survived at all, as Lamin Sanneh as pointed out.
Missionary motive to colonise peoples
Missionaries and colonists are not the same people at all. Colonists are secular, and come either to claim territory or resources. The missionaries in Africa came to reach the people with the news of salvation. Consequently, the colonists did what colonists do, and the missionaries learned the languages, established peaceful relations with the people, pacified the tribal warfare, provided education and medicine, improved foodstocks, and cushioned the first contact between colonists and the local people. As Sanneh points out, those tribes that experienced evangelical missionaries still exist, and have their languages, and have survived the contact with the West; those that had none have mostly been eradicated -- if not by outright violence, by the disparity between the development level of their own technologies and those of the West.
Urbanised Africans who are to a significant degree separated from their rural roots are specially at risk from ideological missionary interference .
The opposite is actually true, you'll find. Those in tribal conditions are either cut off from civilization completely or under terrible stress from their interactions with it. Those in the cities have already capitulated to the collision between the tribal and the Western. But the missionaries are found in both places, and are the shock-absorbers that make that contact safe at all for tribal people.
The problem with anti-colonialism is that it has no idea of what the alternative is or was. If we assume (as we obviously must) that it was inevitable, because of globalization) that advanced Western societies were going to come into contact with tribal ones at some point, then we must ask under what conditions that was optimal -- with or without the compassionate intervention and provision of missionaries, particular evangelical ones. And the answer is clear:
with.
Primitive tribes cannot survive contact with the secular West, if there is nobody to smooth the process. Nowhere have they been able to do so. It's far too radical, and the imbalance between their knowledge and technologies and the modern ones is truly vast. It inevitably disrupts and destroys the tribal culture, unless somebody cushions the transitions -- and secular colonists simply have no reason to care very much about that.
Moreover, now that contact between the West and ancient tribes has already taken place, there's the question of what is to be done now. There's absolutely no way for ancient tribes to "unknow" what they've come to experience, or to recover a language that was never written down by the missionaries, or to remember their stories when the TV and internet are yelling different stories in their ears. Unless you want to deny them all the benefits of modern medicine, education and commerce, and force them into a regressive state of anthropological fixation, then the only path now is forward; not refusing Western conditions, but adapting to them in cushioned, non-destructive ways.
Postcolonialism, therefore, turns out to be nothing more than a naive, impossible and unproductive hatred of modernity, a useless resentment of a cultural collision that was going to happen inevitably anyway, and an imaginary valourization of cultures that were always marked mostly by poverty, sickness, tribal xenophobia, ignorance, superstition, misogyny, cruelty and deficiency of resources.
And why would we want to return native peoples to that?
)