Link of Interest: Article on "The Convert," by Danai Gurira
Silver Goggles | February 18, 2012
NPR has an article interviewing Danai Gurira, a Zimbabwe-American woman who spent most of her childhood in Harare, and whose latest play The Convert explores the psychological impact of colonialism.
Imperialism didn’t just happen materially, through military conflict and through ruthless greedy treaties. Earlier this week, I attended a talk on the psychic portrait of contemporary colonialism by Professor George Taiaiake Alfred, a Mohawk indigenous intellectual who’s worked for the Canadian government on Indigenous affairs (and is thus in the best position to critique All That’s Wrong with it).
There’s a quote floating around, which runs like this: “When the white man came, we had the land and they had the Bible. They asked us to close our eyes and pray. When we opened our eyes, they had the land and we had the Bible.” I’ve seen it attributed to American Indians, but Google tells me that Bishop Desmond Tutu, African spiritual leader, was the first one to say it.
Missionary schools were among the first formal schools (formal according to Western standards, that is) in Malaysia, particularly the Western peninsula, where I’m from. Until the education reform a few short decades ago that rendered all national education into Malay, missionary schools existed alongside vernacular schools (Chinese & Tamil schools), established by, well, missionaries. Many of them have very old and very good reputations. They also taught in English. Both my parents, growing up in the 60′s and 70′s, attended these missionary schools (hence why they communicate to each other in English as a common language, since they spoke/speak different dialects).
But these things always come with a caveat, don’t they? A missionary’s got a mission, ostensibly to help those less fortunate. Not all the students that these missionary schools took in were that less fortunate, but they might as well have been, since they’re not Christian and all. Remember: Glory, gold and God. And so it is, that religion was every bit as used as a tool of imperialism. Marx doesn’t call religion the “opium of the masses” for no good reason.
“There were many, many women who ran to the church — some of them became nuns, some of them became teachers — basically so that they could be free,” Mann says. “Women were often fleeing being sold off … or being given away, without their own permission, to be … as in this play, the 10th wife of an old man.”
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