Gaurav Desai is Associate Professor in the Department of English and the Program of African and African Diaspora Studies at Tulane University.

Subject to Colonialism – CL

By Gaurav Desal

Duke University Press

Copyright © 2001 Gaurav Desal
All right reserved.
ISBN: 9780822326359

Chapter One

“Race,” Rationality, and the Pedagogical Imperative

An Archaeology of Racial Knowledge

In an intentionally provocative piece, “Race, Empire, and the Historians,” Christopher Fyfe writes, “In colonial Africa, authority was manifested very simply. White gave orders, black obeyed. A white skin (or more properly, a skin imputed white) conferred authority. It was an easy rule to understand and enforce, and it upheld colonial authority in Africa for about half a century. Yet some historians seem unwilling to remember it.” Fyfe’s project in the essay is to challenge historians, both African and non-African, to rethink the role of race in the project of African colonialism. That white historians may feel ashamed and embarrassed to raise the issue may be understandable, suggests Fyfe, but the fact that African historians in the majority also sweep the issue under the carpet seems astounding to him.

Fyfe’s call for a serious attention to the workings of racism in the colonial economy invites a second related set of inquiries that are the topic of this chapter. If, as Fyfe and Frantz Fanon have argued, racism was in many ways the legitimizing force of colonial authority, to what extent was it underwritten by discourses on race? And if popular discourses on race have often been the subject of scholarly analysis, why have those racial discourses having scientific aspirations been of less interest to Africanists? Could the reason partially be the disciplinary divisions that separate us, rendering such a project incomprehensible? Or could it be that today we are unmoved by the “pseudoscience” of “racial” thinking, at least in its strong biological form, since it no longer seems to pose as great a threat? Or could it be, on the contrary, that we are all too afraid that returning to the question of race may allow it to rear its ugly head?

The underlying assumption of this chapter is that by selectively drawing on texts written by a wide range of disciplinary actors we may better be able to understand the relative role of racial thinking at different nodes of the colonial economy. To talk of the “relative” role of racial thinking is to already move away from Fyfe’s foundationalist rhetoric to a less programmatic post-foundational account. Or to put it differently, it is to insist on reintroducing “race” into the mix of African(ist) colonial discourse theory while resisting any attempt to theorize it as a “sovereign hierarchical operator.” For despite Fanon and Fyfe’s accurate portrayal of the racially structured Manichean colonial world, the actual discursive justifications for colonial social practices were often more confused, less clear-cut. In mapping out the role of “racial” thinking in such a world, we note that the battles over biology (“race”) versus culture, historical process versus essential identity, and, finally, sameness versus difference could not always be reduced to a prefigured formula. For if colonialism was at its heart about the exertion of an external political power-real or imagined-over an indigenous community, it was no less also about the establishment of a rhetorical power in the same domain. The ability to call the shots of “sameness” (“they are like us”) or “difference” (“they are not like us”) in differently motivated circumstances, and to call these shots forcefully, was the crux of the rhetorical game.

“Race,” then, was a crucial component of the rhetorical interplay between “sameness” and “difference” in the colonial context. But as Ann Laura Stoler has persuasively argued, it was always mediated by other loci of differentiation such as gender, class, religion, and sexuality, which could also be mobilized by colonial ideology in various combinations either simultaneously or with purposeful contradistinction. What characterizes racial discourse in the colonial context, then, is not its originary nature but rather its emergence in a form embedded in social practices and institutions. This means that “the quality and intensity of racism vary enormously in different colonial contexts and at different moments in any particular colonial encounter.” If in this chapter I foreground the role of “race” in the discourses of African rationality and pedagogy, I do so not to establish it as a foundational category of colonial discourse theory but rather to trace its uneven trajectory and often indeed its disappearance in this terrain. Or, put differently, one might say that I am trying to relieve the foundationalist burden often put on discourses of “race” in order to see them as sites of political contestation. By focusing on a central obsession of colonial thinking in Africa-the question of the rationality of the black African-I hope to trace the awkward relationships between constructions of race and pedagogy on the part of colonial observers and the subsequent erasure of this history in postcolonial African(ist) discourse.

“Is the African capable of rational thought?” This seemingly simple-not to mention-condescending colonial question was related to several others: First, on the biological order, “Does the black race possess the physiological apparatus to achieve the accomplishments of whites?” Next, “Would educational opportunities enhance the prospects of Africans or would they instead only alienate them from their people?” And, “If the introduction of Western education was seen to be detrimental, how would colonialism justify itself without claims to a strong pedagogical motive?” Again, “How does one go about selecting the Africans who would benefit the most from Western teachings and education?” Lastly, “What kind of education should be provided to those who would seem not to benefit from a Westernized education?”

The question, “Is the African capable of rational thought?” is, then, considerably more complex than its seemingly simple formulation suggests, but unfortunately the answers given to it in most historical reconstructions of Africanist thought have treated it as a transparent one. Since “rationality” is more easily identifiable as a philosophical issue than is “race,” much of the discussion on the subject has fallen within the purview of philosophers and to some extent anthropologists with a philosophical bent. But like the historians whom Fyfe discusses, students of African philosophy have often sidestepped the issue of race per se. This reluctance is all the more surprising, since it is clear that the anxieties surrounding the question “Is there such a thing as an African philosophy?”-a question that has plagued African studies for a long time now-have arisen in the historical context of racism. In this context, the evaluations of “rationality,” “mentality,” “primitive thought,” “indigenous ontologies,” and so on, despite the euphemisms, are often about race and racial worth. How these attributes get defined and who gets to define them, how they occasionally get measured and who goes about measuring them, are all part of the story of the racialized discourse of colonial social thought.

Within the tradition of African philosophical studies the most easily available answer to the question of African rationality has been to point to such markers as Edward Tylor and Herbert Spencer, who in their social Darwinism suggested that “primitive” cultures were just lower on the evolutionary scale, that is, that they had been unable so far to fully evolve institutions characteristic of the more civilized (i.e., European) nations. The account is thickened with a few quotations from Hume, Kant, and Hegel about the in capacities of the “Negro” or the lack of history in Africa. Then comes Lucien Levy-Bruhl, who wrote a series of books, most significantly How Natives Think (1910/1926) and Primitive Mentality (1922/1923), in which he promoted the idea of “primitive thought” as “prelogical” (a term he later renounced in favor of the term “mystical”). Levy-Bruhl is seen by some, including E.E. Evans-Pritchard, as embodying the next stage in a “progressive” history (from evolutionary models to relativistic ones) and by yet others such as Mudimbe and Appiah as occupying a space continuous with the ethnocentric colonial paradigm. The next stage in this progressive drama is usually marked by Placide Tempels, the Belgian missionary whose 1945 book Bantu Philosophy is seen to be a revolutionary break with the previously unsympathetic and Eurocentric tradition. Indeed, Tempels’s work is repeatedly cited in the literature of postcolonial African philosophy as the paradigmatic text that opened up the conditions of possibility for an Afrocentric philosophy of Africa. It is in Tempels’s text that Bantu ontology (particularly of the Luba and Katanga peoples) is finally seen to find a place in a global philosophical tradition. When one notes the level of energy surrounding this text in the circles of African(ist) philosophy, one gets the distinct feeling that historically it was this text, ironically written by a white missionary, that served to vindicate black African rationality. If the African has a coherent philosophical system, then he must, of necessity, be a “rational” being.

This brief review of the literature makes the answer of the estimations of African rationality within the colonial episteme seem simple-it is a narrative of a clear teleological progression. I want to suggest, however, like most thumbnail sketches, this one is too neat to be of any great value to a serious understanding of the workings of colonial knowledge-or more accurately, colonial belief-about the African native. In this regard, we may be better served if we were to follow Michel Foucault’s directive to the critical archaeologist and introduce into this narrative contemporaneous texts and readings that have subsequently been left out of the conventional histories.

Consider, for instance, what may seem to us today as an overly sympathetic reading of Levy-Bruhl by anthropologists of the day such as Evans-Pritchard and Franz Boas. Why did these anthropologists, despite their own at times radical skepticism of Levy-Bruhl’s thought, find it necessary to defend him against his critics? Of the many possible motives that Evans-Pritchard may have had for being a sympathetic reader of Levy-Bruhl, surely a significant one was the recognition that Levy-Bruhl did depart from what was increasingly threatening to be one of the orthodoxies of the day-abiologism that reduced mentality to the brain. It was important for Evans-Pritchard (as it was for perhaps the most ardent critic of “race thinking” in the early twentieth century-Franz Boas), to recognize that Levy-Bruhl was “speaking not of a biological or psychological difference between primitives and ourselves, but of a social one.” Let us remember that anthropology was at this time struggling to formulate models of cultural relativism that were not founded on-indeed, that attempted to debunk-any biologism. Thus for all his misconceptions, anthropologists of his day were disposed to reading Levy-Bruhl as a fellow traveler fighting against the real enemy of biological determinism.

To understand the protectionism of an Evans-Pritchard or a Boas toward a figure like Levy-Bruhl is to understand that intellectual paradigms are always judged diacritically. Against the biologism of the day, Levy-Bruhl seemed to these “culturalists,” even if misguided, nevertheless one of their own. If this protectionism is lost on observers today, it is because in our own post-structuralist and anti-essentialist dispositions we have lost the diacritical lens through which biological or racial essentialism seems a threat. Unlike in their own times, when the world was divided between the biological determinists and the culturalists, we seem retrospectively in our own histories to divide the world of the early twentieth century between the “primitivists” (Levy-Bruhl) and the “rationalists” (Evans-Pritchard). But to continue to do so with no regard to the strategic similarities that these scholars themselves perceived among themselves is to engage in an act not only of bad faith but also of bad scholarship.

As critical archaeologists attentive to the absences and gaps in the conventional disciplinary histories, we need to reread the colonial library with an eye attuned to such alliances that today seem to us insignificant. Doing so leads us to listen to voices that were undoubtedly important in their day but seem to have lost their resonance in our more recent histories of colonial discourse. Such a revisionary project of a critical archaeology of African(ist) philosophy would, for instance, find renewed interest in a text such as Primitive Philosophy, which was offered by a district officer in what was then northern Rhodesia, as a specifically philosophical as opposed to anthropological contribution to the debate. Virtually written out of every contemporary history of colonial discourse on Africa, Primitive Philosophy by Vernon Brelsford is at the most basic level an attempt to review and critique the existing literature on primitive thought and mentality. At the same time it may also be read as a text that seeks, in its own limited way, to open out a new branch of investigation-theorizing “race.” In many ways, Brelsford participates in some of the common misconceptions of his day-references to Africans as “savage” or “childlike” are not at all uncommon in his text. But although he does not give up an uncritical developmentalist model, he marks an important moment in the trajectory of African(ist) thought in so far as he most directly addresses what he sees as the errors of biologism. Brelsford opens his chapter “Savage Mentality and Thought” by commenting on Francis Galton, who in his search for racial attributes and abilities once compared the intelligence of the Demara with a dog, only to conclude that “the comparison reflected no great honor on the man.” Writing in the early 1930s, Brelsford argues that although one would expect such absurd conclusions to be criticized or at least ignored, they are instead increasingly gaining the authority of a science that claims to be able to correlate mental ability with racial (physiological) attributes. Brelsford sees this project not only as dangerously racist but also as scientifically wrong. Although theories of the mind may best be left to philosophers, Brelsford claims that even good science disproves the theories of the eugenicists: “Medical science is increasingly tending to prove, by its wonderful operations in which whole pieces of the brain are removed without any observed interference with mental processes, that mind is, to a great extent, independent of the brain.”

Thus although Brelsford’s Primitive Mentality has been virtually ignored by historians of African(ist) colonial discourse, it signals us to the important battles being fought against eugenics in the early half of the century and directs us to a path that can be usefully followed in the trajectory of African(ist) knowledge. My aim in the rest of this chapter is to follow Brelsford’s lead and to present an alternative account of the historical discourses associated with African rational ability. Although acknowledging the important contributions of students of African philosophy, I seek to complicate the standard account offered by the discipline by adding into the picture texts drawn from two different but related traditions: (1) the writings of the ethno-psychiatrists and their critics-the former a rather heterogenous group who at various points articulated theories of the “arrested development” of Africans, oftentimes argued for race differentials on hereditary grounds, and in some cases went about devising intelligence tests and other such calibrations that could be used to question the ultimate educability of Africans; and (2) those texts written in the psychoanalytic tradition, drawing primarily on Freud and Adler and including the works of J. F. Ritchie, Octave Mannoni, and Fanon. Although a comprehensive history of the practices of colonial education is beyond the purview of this chapter, I do provide a symptomatic reading of the anxieties around “literary” and “industrial” education in Africa, since it is clear that the discourses on black rationality and mental ability were often propagated against the backdrop of the pedagogical project.

Continues…
Excerpted from Subject to Colonialism – CLby Gaurav Desal Copyright © 2001 by Gaurav Desal. Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.