Myths of the Native

by Scott Nesbit (Fall 2001)

The Colonizer

Though various empires throughout history have been imperialistic, Imperialism itself
has maintained a similar form in each of its manifestations. In his essay, Literature and
Society, Ngugi Wa Thiong'o explores the action and strategy of Imperialism. Thiong'o
writes, "the aim of any colonial mission is to get at a people's land and what that land
produces." To ensure economic and political control, the colonizing power tries to
control the cultural environment: education, religion, language, literature, songs, forms of
dances, every form of expression, hoping in this way to control a people's values and
ultimately their world outlook, their image and definition of self.

Thiong'o continues this explanation, citing Amilcar Cabral, on the subject of the rule of
the colonizer over the colonized:

[colonial rule] cannot be sustained except by the permanent and organized repression of
the cultural life of the people in question. It can only firmly entrench itself if it physically
destroys a significant part of the dominated people.
One repressive strategy used by colonizers is the re-education of the native. Though the
colonizing empire may indeed entrench itself in the land which it means to take, the
empire must also entrench itself in the minds of the people whom it means to rule.
Therefore, the colonizer must present a model of reality which is seemingly absolute and
flawless as a replacement for what comes to be considered the old, savagely imperfect
modes of thought ascribed to by the natives. During re-education, natives are inundated
with negative images of themselves and their culture, as well as idyllic, nearly perfect
images of the colonizer. For one to more wholly understand the significance of native re-
education, one must look closely at the mentality of the educator. An example of the
deification of the image of the colonizer is found in the history of the English
colonization of India. In this case, the English colonizers presented the image of the ideal
Englishman to the Indians. This ideal was conveyed for the most part through literature,
for the actual Englishmen who were in India, especially those involved with the West
India Trading Company, did not present the near-godly perfection which the English
assumed as a basis for their right to re-educate the inferior Indians.

Cannadine gives us an insight into the mind of colonial England:

The really important category was status', and . . . it was 'fundamental to all other
categories'. Hierarchy was the conventional vehicle of [the Empire]: it provided the
prevailing ideology of empire, and it underpinned the prevailing spectacle of empire . . .
It bears repeating that one aspect of this hierarchical-cum-imperial mindset was indeed
the cultivation and intensification of racial differences based on post-Enlightenment
attitudes of white and western superiority and of coloured and colonial inferiority (along
with the cultivation and intensification of gender differences based on attitudes of white
and male superiority and white and female inferiority). When, as they sometimes did,
Britons thought of the inhabitants of their empire…in collective rather than in
individualistic categories, they were inclined to see them, literally, in terms of crude
stereotypes of black and white, and no-less crude relationships of superiority and
inferiority.

Alatas also discusses this crude knowledge and its crude conception:

The negative image of the people subjugated by Western colonial powers, which
dominated the colonial ideology, was drawn on the basis of cursory observations,
sometimes with strong built-in prejudices, or misunderstandings and faulty
methodologies. The general negative image was not the result of scholarship. Those
who proclaimed the people of the area indolent, dull, treacherous, and childish, were
generally not scholars.

Those British who lived in Britain, never lost the basic sense of their superiority of rank
and wisdom over mere colonials'. In the eighteenth century, Whig grandees and their
clients looked down on returning nabobs as vulgar upstarts. In the nineteenth century,
Britons in Australia were dismissed for being Irish Catholic, or the descendants of
convicts, or both.

Ironically, it was precisely these teachers who re-taught the natives using the biased,
stereotypes, which became the native's scholarship, and the opinion of an overwhelming
majority of Britons.

The Native as Violent Savage, Ignorant Laborer, and Sexual Deviant

Re-education drastically reduces the amount of necessary physical violence on the part of
the colonizer, for the re-educated native (ideally) is submissive instead of rebellious.
Thiong'o describes the ideal function of re-education: "[the colonizer] would like to have
a slave who not only accepts that he is a slave, but that he is a slave because he is fated to
be nothing else but a slave. Hence he must love and be grateful to the master for his
magnanimity in enslaving him to a higher, nobler civilisation."

This inferior image of the native is the primary active force in colonialist re-education.
Kutzer discusses "three common stereotypes of African natives prevalent in writing by
the British: the noble savage, the bestial savage, prone to cannibalism and other unnamed
'savage rites'; and the childlike savage." The natives were commonly considered
terrifyingly violent savages. Kutzer quotes Richard Burton's description of the Africans:
The cruelty of the negro is, like that of a schoolboy, the blind impulse of rage combined
with the want of sympathy. Thus he thoughtlessly tortures and slays his prisoners, as the
youth of England torment and kill cats…he mentally remains a child, and is never
capable of a generalization.
This violent image places the native in a dire opposition to the colonizer, in which case
the only solutions are assimilate or be destroyed as a result of their ignorance and savage
imperfection.

The imperfection of the natives is often considered bestially, as in the description of the
Irish by colonial Britons, who characterized them as being "lazy, morally depraved as
well as subhuman," thus leading Dr. James Kay to write: "this race must really have
reached the lowest stage of humanity". The natives often had a functional, labor-focused
status in the colonizer's hierarchy—a position similar to that of livestock, who are
considered for their efficientness in labor. Alatas quotes a British Government official
who writes:

From a labor point of view, there are practically three races, the Malays (including
Javanese), the Chinese, and the Tamils (who are generally known as Klings). By nature,
the Malay is an idler, the Chinaman is a thief, and the Kling is a drunkard, yet each, in his
special class of work, is both cheap and efficient, when properly supervised.
This devaluing of the native's existence as a human, gives the colonizer a superior, almost
God-like presence and power. "The advantage of power," writes Lewes, "is that it
enables one to define the reality of the powerless."

Another common form of the anti-native myth presents an image of the native as sexually
deviant. Lewes discusses the "view of 'the wild exotic'," which portrayed "Eastern
men…as paragons of effeminacy and self-indulgence; [and] Eastern women as immoral,
sexually insatiable courtesans." Lewes quotes a Dutch pamphlet which was published
early in the sixteenth-century:

'These folke lyven lyke bestes without any resonablenes and the wymen be also as
common. And the men hath conversacyon with the wymen who that they ben or who
they fyrst met is she his sister/his mother/his daughter/or any other kindred. And the
wymen be very hoote and dysposed to lecherdnes.'
Lewes analyzes a British children's story from the middle of the nineteenth-century, in
which the rape of a woman is a reflection on the attitude of the colonizer to the native:
Such views of African female sexuality produced pornographic doggerel such as 'Lady
Hamilton: or Nelson's Inamorata' (1851)—a chilling blend of imperialism and rape
fantasy. A sailor describes an oceanic encounter with a boat occupied by five black men
and a woman. Although the natives are apparently peaceful (or at least sane enough to
avoid provoking an armed British frigate), the British sailors 'pops off the men, then the
girl and the boat / We takes as our true lawful prize.' Naturally, the 'prize' is enthusiastic
about being gang raped by a boatload of sailors who have just slaughtered her
countrymen. When the seamen 'all [have] a fuck just our friendship to float,' they,
'[please] her right up to her eyes'…The sailors re-create the African woman as they would
like her to be. She becomes a property who recognizes that she, 'like Africa, is something
to be defined, charted, probed, exploited and overcome.'
Colonial literature, concludes Lewes, contains many images which suggest "that women
raped forcefully enough will generally come to admire the manly force of their attackers.
Applied to the imperial project, the lesson is that Englishmen need only vanquish native
populations ruthlessly enough, and the English will be accepted—indeed, welcomed as
masters."

The re-education of the natives by way of the aforementioned anti-native stereotypes is

effective by way of its ability to dehumanize the native not in the minds of the people of
the empire, but in the minds of the natives as well. Teaching and enforcing the new
hierarchy, the natives are placed mentally and physically in a position of extreme
submission to the colonizer.

Works Cited

Alatas, S.H., The Myth of the Lazy Native

Cannadine, David, Ornamentalism
Kutzer, M. Daphne, Empire's Children
Lewes, Darby, Nudes From Nowhere
Said, Edward, Culture and Imperialism

Prepared by Marya J. Inocencio for ENGL 330 class SY 16-17