The colonization of consciousness in South Africa

Abstract

This essay documents an early phase in the colonization of consciousness, and the consciousness of colonization, among a South African people. Here, as elsewhere, European domination was as much an attempt to seize control of the signs and practices of everyday life as an exercize in material coercion. Nineteenth-century evangelists in the South African interior relied on techniques of persuasion, seeking to introduce an existential ‘state of colonialism’ which anticipated the colonial state. Whatever else it might have been, the history made on this frontier was one of struggle over power and meaning. We trace the attempt of the civilizing mission to invade three domains of African life: its natural resources, techniques of production, and language. We argue that, in order to grasp how new hegemonies were laid down amidst local resistance, it is necessary to distinguish two levels of operation in colonizing cultures. For while its ideological message was widely rejected, the mission enmeshed local peoples in the underlying forms of the European system - the commodity form, linguistic forms, and so on. Thus was initiated the process that incorporated many African peoples into the political economy of Empire.