EUROPEANS AS A RACIAL CASTE
Regardless of their sectoral affiliation, Europeans living in colonies constituted a single community. Their physical features set them off from those they dominated. They had a common cultural frame of reference, based on shared ties to a distant continent.
Because their version of civilization had political, economic, and religious components and because colonialism’s underlying rationale was civilizational, they saw themselves as part of a comprehensive project involving each sector yet transcending them all. Most Europeans took as an article of faith that they were superior to other people in intelligence, morality, self-control, and governing skills. Where they lived as a small group scattered among a non-European majority, they shared fears of what might happen should a violent uprising break out.Whether from a sense of superiority or a sense of fear or both, Europeans distanced themselves from their subjects. A recurring practice was to take small differences between individuals on different sides of the racial dividing line and magnify them into significant differences between races. The goal was to transmute observed or imagined differences from normatively neutral descriptors into normatively and emotionally loaded badges of unequal value. To be colonized was to be subaltern—that is, beneath one’s superiors and other than them.20 Social distance was symbolized and reinforced by physical distance. A British missionary in early twentieth-century New Guinea, Rev. W. J. Saville, had pertinent advice on this subject: “Never touch a native, unless to shake hands or thrash him.”21
The political advantage of a superiority complex was that it could be used to teach colonized peoples their inferiority. If the colonized accepted this message much of their anger at being subordinated and exploited could be deflected inward.
The dominant race took care to promulgate an inferiority complex. Europeans often referred to themselves as adults and to non-Europeans of all ages as children. Children were expected to use deferential terms when speaking to adults, while adults could address children by first name. Terms of abuse described colonized peoples as not fully human, and in extreme cases as animals. Through official regulations and informal pressures Europeans went to extreme lengths to ensure that no nonEuropean gave orders to anyone with a white skin.Europeans learned to address their subjects in peremptory fashion and imperative mode. An English-Swahili phrase book published in 1944 listed instructions a white person could be expected to use when landing from a canoe: “Here we are. I will get out first. Push the boats further up. Carry me on your shoulders. Go steadily. Don’t let me fall. There are six boxes, two bags, and a chair. Take them all out. Don’t make a noise. Come here, you and you and you. Carry these things for me.”22
Schoolchildren were taught about European accomplishments in literature, art, architecture, science, technology, and government. Little or nothing was said about the values or precolonial achievements of non-European cultures. The silences blared a loud message: there was nothing outside the colonizer’s culture worth learning. Sometimes the indigenous past was addressed, but with the intent of demeaning it while elevating those in power. Writing in the late 1950s, the Dahomean writer and political activist Albert Tevoedjre recalled a song he and his classmates were taught in the 1930s:
France, ta main puissante a brise nos liens
Des tyrans nous vendaient comme betes de somme.
Ils tuaient nos enfants et ravagaient nos biens,
Mais tu nous delivras et fis de nous des hommes.23
[France, your powerful hand destroyed our bonds to tyrants who sold us like beasts of burden. They killed our children and destroyed our belongings. But you delivered us and made us into men.]
In the colonial setting race became a proxy for class, and the two became markers of caste. Caste lines permanently marked off groups defined as unequally valuable. These features gave the system a coherence and durability quite apart from the institutional features emphasized in this book. But the elements were complementary. Europeans’ sense of their racial solidarity and superiority reinforced at the subjective level the cross-sectoral institutional alliances that constituted objective bases for dominance.