Imperialism In West Africa

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Introduction The culture of a society can be characterized by tangibles such its art and its literature, and by intangibles such as language, religion and folklore. Culture does not always homogenize around an ethnicity, but often ethnicity forms the basis for culture. When a tribe, village, community or nation becomes large and powerful, cultural proclivities often become cultural and ethnic identities. As a community or nation begins to expand its territory - whether in search of resources or security, it cannot help but impose its culture on those it encounters in its expansion. This imposition of language, art, religion, music, values etc., (through invasive imperialism or intrusive colonialism) whether deliberate or incidental, is the …show more content…
The simple fact that a power has a presence in another culture leads to the impression that this culture must be inferior; France wouldn’t have bothered with West Africa (or Southeast Asia, for that matter) if they hadn’t needed “fixing”, after all. Imperialists have often excused the violent and destructive results of their incursions into foreign lands under the banner of humanitarianism, which often were almost transparent efforts to disguise the underlying reasons for their presence: the exploitation of people and natural resources for their own economic gain. Ethnocentrism then becomes the vehicle through which they justify and create these humanitarian efforts, and thus the cycle of ethnocentrism and imperialism feeding off of one another …show more content…
Missionary work by Christians (primarily Catholics in the late 17th, 18th and 19th centuries) was seen as a moral imperative, and with that missionary work came a form of cultural apocalypse for many people. In the late 1600s, for example, the French and the Portuguese began sending missionaries into Indochina. Because the western European languages were Latin in origin, the character-based languages of Indochina, especially Vietnam, were difficult to learn to read and write. The missionaries developed a romanized character set that assisted them in pronouncing the Vietnamese language. When France decided to annex and colonize Indochina, they were armed with a ready-made and complete dictionary of romanized Vietnamese words. To neutralize the intellectual threat of the literati and the Vietnamese aristocracy, they would need to sever the connection of the people to their written history and literature. Through the westernization of Vietnam’s education system, the traditional character-based language was replaced with the romanized alphabet developed by the Portuguese and French Catholic missionaries, and eventually several thousand years of historical writing had been rendered completely indecipherable to nearly everyone in Vietnam - effectively erasing the richness of Vietnamese culture accessible only through native literature prior to the
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