In reading “Out of My Life and Thought,” I am learning about something that I’ve often wondered but never truly sought: a colonial perspective on Colonialism.
I had never heard of Albert Schweitzer, but while loading up on books in Ann Arbor’s great Dawn Treader used book store, my mother handed me a tattered 1960 edition of Schweitzer’s autobiography/recollections/theories collection. Nowadays, he would have written a blog.
Who was Schweitzer? He was a really smart guy. He spoke French, German, and English, and probably some Latin. He thought a lot about philosophy and theology, specifically historical Christianity. He had both a doctorate and a frock. He was a world-renowned organist, and then decided to become a medical doctor at the age of thirty, upon which he moved to the Congo colony, where he founded a hospital.
But Schwietzer’s pretentiousness and rhetoric are almost comical when read today. With a 1933 copyright, “My Life and Thought” chronicles a still Euro-centric world in which America is rarely mentioned, the Middle East, Asia, and South America never, while referring to Africa as the “Primeval Jungle.” While Schweitzer writes affectionately about 18th and 19th century German and French pipe organs, his language à la Africa, while ultimately humane, is a lab report for his research on these “primitive and semi-primitive” peoples.
But Schweitzer didn’t agree with the way the authorities carried out Colonialism.
“Have we white people the right to impose our rule on primitive and semiprimitive peoples–my experience has been gathered among such only? No, if we only want to rule over them and draw material advantage from their country,” Schweitzer writes, “Yes, if we seriously desire to educate them and help them to attain to a condition of well-being.”
But the Europeans had already opened Pandora’s box.
“If there were any sort of of possibility that these peoples could live really by and for themselves, we could leave them to themselves. But as things are, the world trade which has reached them is a fact against which both we and they are powerless. They have already through it lost their freedom.”
The Senegalese can seemingly be obsessed with money, in that, their economic society–based now on a Western concept of money–does not allow true financial stability but to a select few. Sure, they joke about it a lot, but under all their jokes about us giving them money, there’s some truth to it–I’m sure it would be put to good use.
“That of those who were commissioned to carry out in our name the seizure of our colonial territories many were guilty of injustice, violence, and cruelty as bad as those of the native chiefs, and so brought on our heads a load of guilt, is only too true. Nor of the sins committed against the natives today must anything be suppressed or whitewashed.”
Colonialism approached people in the worst possible way. It said, “We are right, and you are wrong.” Moreover, The colonizers truly viewed the colonized as inferior.
“But willingness to give these primitive and semiprimitive people of our colonies an independence which would inevitably end in enslavement to their fellows, is no way of making up for our failure to treat them properly.”
This sounds exactly like Iraq. We fucked with them, opened their sustainable world up to our unsustainable ways, treated them poorly, spat on them culturally, but leaving them alone would only be leaving them to deal with the snake we left in their living room. We see this today in the “things were better under the French” sentiment held by some Senegalese. Were things better? Economically, yes–probably–though I don’t know the numbers. Socially, no–I figure–though at least the French were managing the snake in the salon.
Schweitzer continues,
“The tragic fact is that the interests of colonization and those of civilization do not always run parallel, but are often in direct opposition to each other. The best thing for primitive peoples would be that, in such seclusion from world trade as is possible, and under an intelligent administration, they should rise by slow development from being nomads and seminomads to be agriculturalists and artisans, permanently settled on the soil.”
I had written about this in African West Europe. The Senegalese–like the Americans–need to learn how to live sustainably, but the only sustainable change is slow change, change that builds on itself. Schweitzer is talking about going back to one’s roots, knowing what works for a society. He’s also talking about taking care of one’s self before taking care of others. He mentions how famine often coincided with a healthy lumber export in the Congo. People would neglect the basics in order to make money, not the “right way” to go about a western-modeled economy.
One could say the Senegalese went about this with the government-financed GOANA agricultural program, though actual results indicate it was poorly-instituted bureaucratic bullshit (At the national press conference covering the first harvest from the program, much of food displays were discovered to be plastic, as the actual crops had either died, or weren’t yet ready to be harvested).
Schweitzer goes on to say that a) Africa is not going to denounce world-trade, and b) world trade is not going to ignore Africa, thus, “it becomes very hard to carry to completion a colonization which means at the same time true civilization.”
And finally,
“The real wealth of these peoples would consist in their coming to produce for themselves by agriculture and handicrafts as far as possible all the necessities of their life.”
Sustainability. Everything is about sustainability. After my Senior year of high school, I traveled for two weeks to Bulgaria. Before becoming a Soviet satellite, Bulgaria was 99% agricultural, and people we talked to whose relations had lived then said life was good. This percentage dropped to 40% by the time the Wall fell, and ever since then, Bulgaria has been struggling with two things: 1) their Soviet-implemented industries are not as sustainable or as effective as the traditional agricultural ones, and, 2) the strange combination of left-over communism with present day democratic capitalism often leads to government corruption and mismanagement.
Stay tuned for my forthcoming entry on the views of social activist Grace Lee Boggs à la sustainability and agriculture-based societies in urban Detroit.
Rhetoric aside, I think there’s a lot of truth to what Schweitzer is saying in that, first and foremost, Colonization is not how you should approach new cultures, and, furthermore, Colonization can often present its satellites with a model of an unsustainable economy, but more importantly, unsustainable cultural livelihood.
