The Marks of Colonization.

August 25, 2013

Each African country in which I have spent time, even briefly, has been different from the others.  So far South Africa seems to be the most European to me.  I find myself wondering often if it is because the Dutch, who originally colonized the country, stayed on.  In the cases of many countries, the colonizers seem to have returned to their European homes. 

In some countries, like Ghana, the indigenous people groups “won” their freedom from the colonizing country and took over the leadership of their country.  In South Africa it was different as the indigenous people groups did not “win” their freedom, instead they struggled through Apartheid and must contend with the colonizers on an ongoing, daily basis.  This is of course only my reflection from an outsider’s point of view, it is possible that South Africans themselves see their lives in a totally different way.  What I hear often from the descendants of colonizers is that they are from South Africa but they are not African.

In some ways this is like the United States of America.  The colonizers never left.  The Europeans continued to push into the Native American lands until they had implanted themselves from sea to shining sea.  And then America created an abysmal other part of history by bringing black slaves from Africa.  “We” pushed the indigenous population into reservations and then forcibly removed other people groups from their native country and forced them to live on this new soil with no hope of returning to their original roots.  The African Americans are not colonizers.  And what of the Americans that are of Asian heritage, or South American heritage?  They are not from colonizer stock either.  This is the first time that I have given thought to this kind of issue, and it has all stemmed from what I am seeing and experiencing here in South Africa.

In three days I will return to Addis Ababa, Ethiopia for a week.  I will be staying with a good friend while I am there and, leaving behind my own time of being a student for a week, I will focus on my own lesson planning for the semester at the Nile Theological College that is upon me.  I decided not to go directly to Juba, South Sudan from South Africa because the culture shock would be too great.

I have found this to be true each time I have gone anywhere besides Nairobi or Addis Ababa.  When I returned to the United States last summer, 2012, I chose to leave via Dubai (UAE) and to return via Dubai.  It was a grueling journey that I won’t repeat because it required more hours in the air and more legs to the journey than a straighter shot would have; but it helped having a step in between the U.S. and South Sudan.  While Dubai clearly is not a developing country, it is a different culture.

Nairobi, Kenya is a different city altogether from Addis Ababa or Pretoria.  Nairobi is gigantic, mammoth, modern.  It is more European than Addis Ababa, without being a colonized city.  The colonizers I think perhaps conformed more to Africa than expecting Africa to conform to the colonizers. 

As I have more thoughts on these issues, I will continue to blog and to share them.  Perhaps you, my reader, will find them of interest.  Perhaps you have not contemplated these things before either and will value having a new perspective opened to you through my own perspective and my own eyes seeing things both in a new way, and just plain new things.  In this way we can share this continuing journey of mine.  Together.

Blessings,

Debbie