Page 88 - A People Called Afrika

A PEOPLE CALLED AFRIKA

tives of the scramble for Afrika, tacking the continent’s diver-
sity and fluidity with an administrative rigidity that would en-
able them to corral the people into more ‘manageable’ units.

According to Terence Ranger in an article titled The In-
vention of Tradition Revisited: The Case of Colonial Afri-
ca, the way that the colonialists chose to approach their task
was to create new identities and traditions for the Afrikans.
He says, “…for Africa, the divide with the past was espe-
cially clear, corresponding as it did to the cleavage between
pre-colonial and colonial societies. The colonial period in
Africa… was not only marked by the importation of Europe-
an neo-traditional inventions of identity – the regiment, the
boarding school, the refeudalised country house – and the
inclusion of Africans within them as subordinates, but also
by systematic inventions of African traditions – ethnicity, cus-
tomary law, ‘traditional’ religion. Before colonialism, Africa
was characterized by pluralism, flexibility, multiple identi-
ty; after it African identities of ‘tribe’, gender and genera-
tion were all bounded by the rigidities of invented tradition.”

Perhaps the greatest system of control employed by co-
lonialists was not the threat or use of force against the op-
pressed (even though this was a constant reality), but rather
the gradual erosion of culture, values and societal norms
that held Afrikans together. This superimposition of new
practices - which were presented as superior to those which
existed prior – i.e. the denigration of what was in favor of
the new and the celebration, approval and promotion of
those who quickly embraced and pleased those ‘in authori-
ty’ would quickly have shown the Afrikans that the road to a
more painless life in the new ‘realities’ that they were facing

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