"A colonial culture is one which has no memory. The discontinuities of colonial experience make it almost inevitable that this should be so. A political entity which has been brought into existence by the actions of an external power; a population consisting of the descendants of conquerors, of slaves and indentured labourers, and of dispossessed aboriginals; a language in the courts and schools which has been imported like an item of heavy machinery; a prolonged economic and psychological subservience to a metropolitcan centre a great distance away....One hardly needs to labour the point that such conditions make it extremely difficult for any section of the population to develop a vital, effective belief in the past as a present concern, and in the present as a consequence of the past's concerns.
The passage of time alone cannot cure the condition; nor a self-assertive nationalism; nor for that matter political independence. However, it mustn't be supposed that the absence of a memory, in the terms defined above, need inhibit the perpetuation of fierce historical enmities. On the contrary. Precisely because the sense of history is so deficient, these enmities tend to be regarded as so many given, unalterable facts of life, phenomena of nature, as little open to human change or question as the growth of leaves in spring or the movement of clouds across the sky. A white South African, for example, feels no need to ask himself how the black man came to be his inferior; he simply knows that the black man is inferior."
I thought this was well articulated and worth consideration. Not that it denies other points made in the discussion of the American view of history or society (and the diff between U.S. and Europe) -- but it adds a very interesting frame within which to situate that discussion.
So, comment? Especially for those of you living in former colonies: Africa, Latin America, Australia, New Zealand.
Is the notion of history similarly complicated there by colonialism -- past and present?
I was especially impressed by the assertion that self-assertive nationalism and political independence do not resolve problems raised by the "colonial" consciousness of history.
.....anyway.... your turn.
Joanna