ABSTRACT
It is worth pointing out that enslavement and colonisation did not only materially exploit and politically subordinate African resources and ways of life but at the same time transformed and subjected Africans to the imaginings and caprices of imperial culture and psychology. Colonisation was carried out by an expansionist regime that owed its success to both military and mercantile power, which it ruthlessly deployed in the practice of trade, conquest and enslavement. So it was that the imperial powers were able to assert, maintain and reproduce white supremacy across the globe. White supremacy can thus be conceptualised as a set of discourses and practices that subjugated non-European people and cast them in the position of subjected Others, while it advanced the interests of European nations. The set of knowledges and ideas about Africans devised by Europeans in the context of imperialism has been termed ‘Africanist discourses’ (see, for example, Miller 1986).
