ABSTRACT
The fiction of empire and Henty’s works in particular have impacted significantly on twentieth-century race relations. Because Henty used popular colonial wars for the setting and plot of his novels, it is important to undermine Henty’s glorification of these wars, and also to highlight the ways in which similar narratives wrongly romanticized the history of the colonized. And ironically, despite the commitment on the part of pioneer pan-Africanists to rehabilitate the damaged image, identity, and culture of the colonized, these pioneers, as a result of their colonial education, often demonstrated some ambivalence toward their own culture and people. They seemed to view themselves through the eyes of the colonizer, as they struggled to break the chains of psychological oppression. It is difficult to quantify the impact of colonialism on Africa. Politically, colonial rule undermined traditional authority and its system of justice; economically, Africans were coerced to produce export or cash crops for European markets and to pay taxes to the colonial power, while their raw materials were exploited. The production of cash crops at the expense of food crops became the main source of famine in the early stages of colonial occupation and through the years of decolonization and beyond. Socially, colonialism provided increased mobility between regions and created new cities and towns, modern hospitals, and schools. But access to these opportunities was limited to a “select few,” who became the “elite that was more European than African in outlook”. Although the railroads that were built (through forced labor) took many African lives, they were primarily a commercial venture designed to facilitate the shipment of mineral resources and raw materials to Europe (Azevedo 112-13). Culturally, the advent of Christianity upset traditional religious beliefs by condemning the African way of life in general; it also denigrated concepts such as the extended families which had previously been a source of support, and a “protection against age, adverse social changes and natural calamities.” As Mario Azevedo observes, although Christianity trained “many Africans in its schools, some of
whom became the leaders of the new nationalist movements,” it also caused “severe psychological and social dislocations” (114).
