The recent interest in Nelson Mandela's life make me think of two books about colonalist methods. In both : Caleb's Crossing by Geraldine Brooks and Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe the newcomers look for promising young men with the idea of winning them over and making them local leaders who are friendly to the colonizers. Mandela, I learned this week, was sent to boarding school in late adolesence, when he "was being groomed to become a chief." His subsequent career was not what was expected of him, to say the least. But the fact that he was tapped for great things, being the son of a family of the elite, is not surprising. Co-opting a ruling group is something that colonializers and conquerers have done for epochs.
Geraldine Brooks's novel tells the story of the first Wamponoag native to graduate from Harvard College in the mid-17th century. The son of the most powerful man in his group of Native Americans, he agreed to be educated in the school set up expressly to claim young natives for the Christian God. His purpose was, as Brooks tells it, the better to counter the influence of the newcomers by understanding what they stood for. In the end he dies before he can do anything, and his people are first decimated by disease, and then pushed to the edge of history and power: it was 346 years before anothet Wamponoag graduated from Harvard.
The Achebe book is a classic of modern African literature. The main character does not embrace European ways, but all around him, there are those who are seduced by Christianity, led by men from families that had been on the edges of power.
In neither of these cases are the heroes "rice Christians," who joined the newcomers in order to be fed in times of famine, Rather, they are men who in "ordinary," pre-colonial times would have led their people. Mandela was extraordinary in breaking out of the mold, and the world is a better place for that.
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