(For previous posts in this series, see here.)

The British, in my opinion, were much smarter colonial powers than (say) the French or the Belgians. The Belgians were arguably the worst, as can be seen in what they did to the Congo under Emperor Leopold. As is the usual pattern, the colonialists used religion as a pacification tool. “[Leopold] claimed he was doing it to protect the “natives” from Arab slavers, and to open the heart of Africa to Christian missionaries, and Western capitalists.” [Read more…]

(For previous posts in this series, see here.)

Perhaps the biggest disruption caused by the British colonialists was the massive change in rural life and agricultural practices as a result of the conversion from a somewhat communal, subsistence form of agriculture, where much of the local resources used for food production (such as water supplies, grazing land for animals, and forests as a source of food and fuel) was held in common, to a plantation economy with strict private ownership.

Sri Lanka before colonial rule was a feudal country and in such systems land usage was controlled by the feudal lords or by tradition. The colonial powers, on the other hand, were mercantilist and later capitalist and in such systems, it was necessary to have clear rules about who owned what, especially land. Since many of the farmers in rural areas in Sri Lanka did not officially have title to the land they cultivated, the land being either held in common by the village or rights assigned by custom or by the feudal lords, it was easy for the central government to get ownership and convert that land into single crop plantations under the control of large British-owned companies.
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(For previous posts in this series, see here.)

It is well known that in the colonies conquered by the Europeans, the Bible and the gun went hand in hand. Soon after a country was militarily overpowered, missionaries were often the next group to go in under their protection, even before merchants and traders. These missionaries were the first to establish a permanent presence in many areas of the country, setting up rudimentary medical facilities, classrooms, and churches. Although they did have the backing of the military, the missionaries were often personally courageous and even humane people, taking aid and a strange message to the remotest parts of a distant and foreign land and often having to deal with an initially suspicious and hostile population, and by doing so, winning souls for Jesus. Chinua Achebe’s novel Things Fall Apart gives a good description of this process at work in Nigeria.

Many of the missionaries with their schools and hospitals and social work represented the kinder, gentler face of colonialism, the velvet glove hiding the iron hand, and thus masking the basic exploitative nature of colonial rule. By preaching about Jesus, they sought to replace local religious myths and totems, that often represented local interests, with Christian myths and totems that were common to a larger group. They thus tried to create allegiance to a larger political entity than the village or tribe, and to get the local people to identify with the values of the colonists.

Many of the missionaries in Sri Lanka had the same attitude towards the locals that the administrators of the Indian schools in America had, that what was best for the Sri Lankan people was to suppress as much as possible local language and custom and have them adopt western ways. So successful were they that this attitude persisted long after the British formally left. Missionary schools taught by foreign priests and nuns continued to exist after we gained independence, and punishing students for not speaking English was also common in some Sri Lankan missionary schools.

Even during my own education, long after independence in a school set up by Anglican missionaries, the chaplains and some of the teachers were English, but they were generally progressive people who genuinely seemed to have the interests of the Sri Lankans at heart. (At least they seemed so to me when I was a schoolboy. It could have been the case that they were simply good actors. But I doubt it. To be really effective as a missionary, you have to be a true believer, convinced that you are truly serving god by converting the locals. While such people are misguided, they are usually incapable of willful deceit.)

By preaching Christianity with its idea that what happens in this world is not important, that what really counts is the health of your soul and that your reward is in heaven, they promoted a message of acquiescence to colonial rule and thus sought to blunt the appeal of those who argued for revolting against the occupiers. That dynamic has always been there, with religion undermining the message that redressing injustice and exploitation in this world is an important goal and that people should unite to overthrow their oppressors whether they be their own people or foreign rulers.

We saw that same thing happen with the slaves in the US. Their adoption of Christianity probably resulted in greater acceptance and endurance of their suffering under the slave owners. The slaves were encouraged to seek consolation by looking forward to their rewards in heaven and not seek justice on Earth, thus blunting the efforts of those who argued that they had a right to a good life here and now and that slavery was an abomination.

I have written before about how Christianity has been systematically used as a cover for political and economic exploitation. Religion has been a wonderful ally to those seeking to maintain the status quo.

It is not an accident that religious missionaries were among the first groups of people to follow colonial conquerors and received the full patronage and protection of the colonial rulers. The famous African quote “When the missionaries came to our country they had the Bible and we had the land. They said ‘let us pray’ and we closed our eyes to pray. At the end of the prayer, they had the land and we had the Bible” captures accurately how religion served the interests of the colonial powers.

Next in the series: The economic transformation created by the colonists.

POST SCRIPT: I don’t get Twitter

Although I signed up for a Twitter account a long time ago to see what it was all about, I have never used it. But I get messages that people have signed up to follow my “tweets”, as the messages (limited to 140 characters) are called. I completely share Tom Tomorrow’s bafflement as to why anyone would want to follow me, or anyone else for that matter, on Twitter.

Jon Stewart doesn’t understand the appeal of these new networking crazes either.

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(For previous posts in this series, see here.)

While many of the things introduced by the British had beneficial features, almost every one had its own negatives, apart from the introduction of universal suffrage. The reason was that each of these things was not created exclusively for the benefit and advancement of the local population but to increase the ability of the colonial powers to control the population and exploit the country’s natural resources for the benefit of England, especially a climate that was ideally suited for the growing of food and spices. Any benefits that did accrue to the locals were incidental.

For example, although the new road and rail networks provided greater mobility for the population, that was not their primary intent. Instead they were designed to facilitate the transport of the products of the new cash crop plantations to the coastal ports for export. One can see even now how the winding rail lines through the central hill areas follow the path of the plantations. These systems, along with the telephone and telegraph systems, also enabled easier access to, and thus greater control of, the entire country to the small band of British colonial officers based in the urban centers, enabling them to keep tabs on what was going on.

Also, while the police and army consisting of Sri Lankans brought about greater security for people, they could, and were often used to suppress opposition, especially as the independence movement started to grow in strength.

The goal of any colonial power is very simple and unambiguous: to exploit the resources of the conquered country for the benefit of the ruling classes in the conquering country. The ultimate mechanism for achieving this is also simple: raw power. But power only takes you so far for so long. To achieve long-term dominance one needs to win the allegiance, or at least the acquiescence, of significant sectors of the local population. So while the foundation of achieving the political and economic goals of the colonialists lay with brute force (they had the guns after all), the task of winning the hearts and minds of the people to feel positive about their subjugation by their foreign rulers fell largely, though not exclusively, to the missionaries.

By setting up schools and churches, these people sought to create an important class of people: those who were of the local population but who identified more with the interests of the colonial power. They did this by giving benefits such as land and titles and leadership positions in legislative and administrative bodies to those who were willing to use them to advance British interests. Over time, this group became identified as being ‘national’ leaders, even though they spoke English, wore western dress, lived a western lifestyle, and had little in common with the people they supposedly represented.

This is not to say that all the colonialists were cynical exploiters. Many of them, especially at the middle and lower levels, probably were genuinely interested in the welfare of the ‘natives’ (as we were so quaintly called) and sought to improve their lives by bringing modernity to what they perceived as backward people. This is probably more true of those missionaries and educators (and often the same person played both roles) who built churches and schools with the goals of saving the heathen from hell and replacing their pagan beliefs with what they saw as belief in the one true god. I have little doubt that most of these people sincerely thought that teaching children English and making them adopt western ways of life in terms of clothing, speech, and lifestyles was a good thing.

It is not unlike what happened with Native American children in the US who were forcibly removed from their families on the reservations and sent to distant boarding schools where they were systematically stripped of all their traditional cultural connections and forced to adopt the majority white culture. In those schools, children were, for among other things, forced to cut off their long hair and were punished if they were caught speaking in their own languages and not in English.

Many of the people who implemented what we now condemn as a woefully wrong-headed and cruel policy did so out of the best of intentions, thinking that the only way to save the Indians from what they saw as the wasteland of life on the reservation was to have them adopt the ways of white people. The Olympic gold medal-winning athlete Jim Thorpe is probably the best known of all of them. He attended Carlisle School in Pennsylvania, which had as its founding principle: “Kill the Indian and save the man.”

But while bribes and coercion can result in some people being willing to serve the interests of their colonial masters, to achieve the best results you need to have local people who think that the ways of the colonial powers are truly better and that by advancing those interests, they are also advancing the interests of the local people. You need to win the hearts and minds of a significant group of the local population.

This is where the missionaries came in, as I will discuss in the next post in this series.

POST SCRIPT: How not to win hearts and minds

A US soldier excoriates Iraqi police recruits. (Very strong language advisory.) I wonder how the interpreter deals with the constant stream of profanity. Does he gloss over it? Censor? Literally translate? Translate idiomatically?

In a comment on my earlier post on portrayals of the developing world in western culture, Jared raised a really interesting point about his odd experience of taking a class on “British Colonialism in India” and finding that, while he was the only non-Indian student, he was also the only one who seemed to think that the practices of the British colonialists were not altogether benign. He was rightly surprised that although we now tend to look on colonialism as a bad thing, the descendents of the very people who were colonized, the ones most likely to have been aware of, and even scarred by, the negatives of it seemed to take a much more positive view of it. He wondered why this was so, and the next series of posts gives my long-winded answer to his question.
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