The Influence Of European Colonization

The importance of racial hierarchy in understanding European colonization efforts can largely be linked back to power, control and wealth. One of the greatest tools that the Europeans had during their conquests in the Americas and Africa was their use of religion as a means of rendering the native peoples that they intended to take advantage of docile. Essentially, it seems that in the cases where European explorers were easily able to spread their religion, as opposed to meeting resistance, they more or less treated the natives with relative respect because their goals were already being met without having to apply excessive pressure. This can largely be seen with the shifting views towards native Americans by various European countries and
the treatment of native South Americans by the Spanish when compared to the relationship that the Portuguese had with the people of the Kongo. In essence, what we see is that whereas in South America the Maya were met with brutality for their resistance to the spread of Catholicism, and whereas the natives in North America were dehumanized because of their own resistance, in the Kongo the natives were relatively respected because they were useful and easy to control through religion. In the case of Wyatt MacGaffey’s article, “Dialogues of the Deaf: Europeans on the Atlantic Coast of Africa” from Implicit Understandings, which focuses on the relationship between the Portuguese and natives of the Kongo, we see what happens when the religious influence of European explorers is largely accepted.
To begin with, one reason that the relationship between the Kongolese and the Portuguese thrived when compared to what we see between the various European countries and the natives of the Americas is that Nzinga Nkuwu, who was king to the Kongolese, enthusiastically embraced Christianity when it was brought to his attention (MacGaffey 253). This enthusiasm seems to be due to his assumption that this new religion was actually an extension of the belief system that he had already belonged to, and that the Portuguese, due to their pale skin, were spirits honoring him with entry into this expanded system (MacGaffey 253, 257). This, then, is likely why the spread of Christianity came so easily to the Kongo, and is why other important natives accepted it with similar enthusiasm, some going as far as to destroy the idols that they had (MacGaffey 253). It seems, then, given this assumption that the Portuguese were spirits, that in large part no serious racial hierarchy developed because the Kongolese already appeared to view the Portuguese to be superior, and so there was no need to press the issue any
further. Meanwhile, Inga Clendinnen’s book, Ambivalent Conquests: Maya and Spaniard in Yucatan, 1517-1570, shows the skittish response that the Spaniards had when they began to doubt that the Maya were as accepting of their religion as they had initially thought.
This is a topic that I discussed in Thinking Question 3, but because it is a flipped circumstance in relation to what happened in the Kongo it seems worth discussing again. Essentially, whereas the relationship that the Portuguese had with the Kongolese is what can be expected when European superiority is accepted with open arms, what happened to the Maya is an example of what happens when European ideas are rejected, regardless of if these ideas are actually rejected or just seemingly rejected. As far as the Spanish understood things, when idols were discovered among the Maya, what they seemed to perceive was the possibility of their hold over the native population slipping due to the failure of their usurping religion taking hold (Clendinnen 73). Because religion was such a key weapon for the Spanish, their response was reactionary and brutal. The Spanish started an inquisition against the Maya for their idolatrous ways, which, over the course of three months, resulted in the death of 158 Mayans (Clendinnen
77). However, as is pointed out in the essay “François Bernier and the Origins of the Modern Concept of Race” by Pierre H. Boulle, racial hierarchy did not begin to take form in the way that it is understood in modern culture until 1684 with the publication of François Bernier’s journal article “A New Division of the Earth” (Boulle 11). Yet, even then this is simply when the idea was formed because at the time, as Boulle points out, the concept of differing races was not well received (Boulle 20). What Benier posited, though, was that four races existed, and that Native Americans belonged to the same race that most Europeans did (Boulle 14-15).