Six theses regarding the anthropology of African religious movements [1981]

This chapter focuses on the brutal facts of military, technological, and economic Western superiority, deep-seated convictions and beliefs which in the eyes of many contemporaries made colonization a noble and necessary undertaking. It accounts the honest and intelligent agents of colonization. The role which religion through the missions played in formulating and sustaining colonialism is not reduced to mere ideological justification or pragmatic collaboration. Colonial rule appears as a system and historical explanations seek to discern the developments that brought about a state of affairs at a given time. The chapter approaches the topic of connections between religious and secular colonization. It mentions colonial connections between religious and secular concerns that converged in practices closely related to the complex of hygiene, namely games and sport. Limitation of historical perspective is imposed when, for instance, the common places between muscular Christianity and British imperialism are located only in the values of an upper class and its schools.