During the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the Tswana, Maale, and Nigériens counterbalanced evangelical Christian mission colonization by incorporating local customs and practices into Christianity. We will define and dissect the terms “civilization” and “modernity” to describe how medicine and religion reinforced and changed African and white Christian cultures. I define “civilization” as a white, Christian ideology that formulated how missions historically oppressed black Africans; evangelical missions rationalized white supremacy by claiming that inept and inferior black Africans needed cleanliness and morality training. However, I define the term “modernity” as a culturally hybrid African response to mission evangelism; after hearing …show more content…
Firstly, evangelical Christian missions sought to “civilize” and dominate black Africans through racial subjugation. Narrowing our focus, we see that white Christian missions discriminated against and oppressed the Tswana people and Nigérien lepers to colonize the two groups. When Comaroff says that early missionaries “expected to find a ‘diseased continent’ and heal it” he asserts that missions assumed Africans spread disease because their black bodies, clothing, and homes conveyed promiscuity, sweat, and dirt (1997: 354). Essentially, early missions thought that Tswana families and neighbors spread germs between open-door, dirt-floor huts; to stop germs from spreading, missions reprimanded locals to clean up their homes. Furthermore, British missions reviled black Tswana female bodies as “greasy” because Tswana women spread contagion, and possibly death, among missionaries through physical contact (Comaroff 1997: 336). Afraid of contracting venereal disease …show more content…
In the nineteenth century, legislation passed that empowered doctors with advanced education to cleanse disadvantaged patients with biomedicine. Comaroff argues that biomedicine “became...a discipline, taking on the ethos of professionalism” after the Medical Act of 1858, which limited medical practice to well-educated doctors (1997: 328, 326). After the Medical Act of 1858, only wealthy doctors who learned advanced anatomical and physiological operations in prestigious universities could practice medicine. With legal leverage, these doctors developed biomedicine as a science in which medical tools, chemical liquids, and plant substances cured ailments and cleaned urban decay. As British doctors gained socioeconomic status, media outlets claimed that doctors engaged in “heroic” biomedical cures to save the urban poor from their foul behaviors and miasmic living environments (Comaroff 1997: 326). Because city slum dwellers often had many children, lived in close quarters, and could not afford to bathe, doctors sought to improve their health by teaching them proper hygiene. Indeed, Comaroff notes that the London Mission Society (LMS) advertised “the power of doctors to heal social ills in unsanitary British cities” to associate cleanliness with prestige and dirt with deficiency (1997: 332). When LMS missionary David Livingstone arrived in
Practitioners with a lack of formal education did medical care in the 17th century. Many women and laypeople in that time had lots of expertise in herbal medicines and folk antidotes to cure colonists. The first curer people would turn to if they were sick would be a neighbor or a family member. However, there was a new type of physician in the 18th century. This was usually a young man from a wealthy family who went to an elite university who didn 't see himself as a doctor, but more as a scientist. The new physicians learned anatomy through dissection, assisted researchers, and helped with medical experiments. They also observed surgical procedures, and sat through lectures about new advances in the department of medical science. Alongside the scientists, there were also surgeons. The military was where many surgeons
After the Civil War, African Amerians organized their own churches and religious denominations. “The church was integral to the lives of most black people. It fulfilled spiritual needs through sermons and music” (pg. 319). These churches would also help the sick, the bereaved, and those in need when they didn’t even have the money to spare. “The church service itself was the most important aspect of religious life for most black congregations” (319).
One difference lay in the attitude of English colonists toward Africans and Native Americans. Somehow, the English, especially those who were missionaries, were more reluctant to try to convert Africans to Christianity than they were Native Americans. Perhaps, they saw Africans as more like uncivilized savages who could only be converted
“African societies developed diverse forms, from large centralized states to stateless societies organized around kinship or age sets rather than central authority. Within this diversity were many shared aspects of language and beliefs. Universalistic faiths penetrated the continent and served as the basis for important cultural development in Nubia and Ethiopia.
Black religion was no longer regarded as exemplary or special. During a time of growing segregation and violence, some black leaders attempted to counter this perspective seen by whites by embracing the romantic racialist notions that “blacks possessed peculiar gifts.” These gifts being directly connected to the importance of black churches in a time of direct exclusion of blacks from other pieces of society.
When most western people think about Native American or African religions there is a certain stigma that comes with the topic. This is in part because there is a lot of misinformation in the world about Native American and African religions. When most westerners think of African religions they think of voodoo and black magic. Likewise, the view of Native American religions is still looked at through the lens of the pilgrims who wrote about Native Americans as being savages and less than human. These stereotypes were all formed from a lack of accurate information. African and Native American religions are very similar. It is difficult to find a lot of accurate information on African and Native American indigenous religions because of the lack of written history but there is a lot of oral history that has been passed down from generation to generation. From this information, it is clear that Native American and African religions have many more similarities than they do differences. Three of these similarities will be discussed in this paper. The first topic of discussion is the similarity between African and Native American people when it comes to their perception of the spirit world. Following this topic are the similarities between Native American and African views on the afterlife and finally, the diversity of beliefs within African and Native American religions.
Starting with the first effect of imperialism, the introduction of Christianity in Umuofia, Okonkwo’s fatherland. Four years into Okonkwo’s exile, his good friend Obierika payed him a visit, informing Okonkwo of the arrival of missionaries in Umuofia. The Christian followers had to come to Umuofia to build a church and to convert locals into their anomalous religion. Most importantly, “what moved Obierika to visit Okonkwo was the sudden appearance of the latter’s son, Nwoye, among the missionaries in Umuofia.” (Achebe 143) The introduction of Christianity was one of the many effects set upon the African villages. Locals were becoming
The European missionaries wanted to come to Africa to share the good news of Christianity to the natives. However, often times the missionaries would get caught up in the valuable resources of Africa and make a turn for the cruel side. The novel Heart of Darkness, shows how corrupt the Europeans
Based off the book Things Fall Apart, the videos we watched in class, and the poem “The White Man’s Burden”, the white man’s burden of spreading Christianity was more harmful than helpful. In both the book and the film the African Tribes were already fully functional as a whole. They had systems in place such as forms of government, art, social systems, and economic systems. After the whites came to convert them, things started to fall apart and become chaotic.
Cultural superiority is the basis of Nathaniel’s attempts to set up a mission in Africa, and “Persuaded of Americans’ election as the chosen people, he ignores local Congolese customs, resists help and information from villagers, and strenuously insists throughout on his own exceptional destiny” (Strehle). He also,“In the distorted evolutionary logic of nineteenth-century imperialism, Nathan considers Africa as inadequately evolved, backward, primitive—a childish culture dwarfed by its grown-up Western colonizers—and thus in need of help from the advanced West.” (Strehle). Said beliefs caused Nathaniel’s superiority complex that caused him to attempt crushing African culture opposed to assimilating into it. The result? A grotesque love child of the taboo, an improper reliance on Christianity for those who abandoned their Congolese culture. When explaining to Nathan the trouble that his church is causing, her claims the village chief held the following concerns; “‘His concern is with the important gods and ancestors of this village, who have always been honored in certain sacred ways”’ (Kingsolver 128). The African people lost their ways due to imperialist religion that was forced upon
Black Christianity in the South came into being "not only because of white missionaries and pastors but also in what historians have called the
Teachings of Christianity entered Africa long before the full swing of the slave trade. Christianity first entered the African continent in the early AD, around the first to third century from Israel through Egypt. This “first wave” had minimal effects on the region, and hardly spread into the southern regions. It wasn’t until the “Age of Discovery” (15th to 18th Century) when the Europeans made contact with Africans that Christianity took a hold in Africa. African nations took on Christian Monarchy as leadership, and began converting their populaces. The spread of Christianity in Africa, however, was not a full coverage of the continent. Not only did Christianity experience barriers in conversion due to an already present
The African Methodist Episcopal Church also known as the AME Church, represents a long history of people going from struggles to success, from embarrassment to pride, from slaves to free. It is my intention to prove that the name African Methodist Episcopal represents equality and freedom to worship God, no matter what color skin a person was blessed to be born with. The thesis is this: While both Whites and Africans believed in the worship of God, whites believed in the oppression of the Africans’ freedom to serve God in their own way, blacks defended their own right to worship by the development of their own church. According to Andrew White, a well- known author for the AME denomination, “The word African means that our church was
The evolutionary capability of Vodun to change over time from a religious capacity to a political one is one of the strong points of the religion. In fact, the infringement of white influence on Black religion was a response to the development of Vodun. New World Africans consistently evolved and changed Vodun over time by continuously incorporating different aspects of white influence, such as the centrality of the Bible and the belief in one supreme God; in
To begin, missionaries sent from Britain were some of the only people who genuinely cared about the Africans, along with doctors and colonial officials who wanted