Decolonizing Childhoods. Liebel, Manfred
imperialism – ‘that is, that the West had to invent for itself “the child” before it could think a specifically colonialist imperialism’ (Wallace, 1994: 176). This connection, however, should not be understood as a one-sided causality, but as a reciprocal relationship, which has intensified over the centuries. As early as in the ‘discovery’ and conquest of the ‘new’ continent called America, since the end of the 15th century, when the new concept of childhood was still emerging in Europe, the child metaphor was used to describe the ‘primitive peoples’ who were perceived as ‘wild’ and ‘uncivilized’ (see Chapter 8). We can therefore assume that the ideas and mentalities that shape the conquest and the new experiences have also influenced the development of the new childhood concept.
Bill Ashcroft’s On Postcolonial Futures (2001) is one of the few contributions of postcolonial theory that has drawn attention to these connections. According to Ashcroft (2001: 37), ‘it was the cross-fertilization between the concepts of childhood and primitivism that enabled these terms to emerge as mutually important concepts in imperial discourse’. The Indian psychologist and social theorist Ashis Nandy (1983; 1987) had already previously pointed out that the new concept of childhood, which had emerged in Europe in the 17th century, was associated with the notions of primitivism. The idea of social progress had been transferred to the field of cultural differences in the colonies. Thus, for example, colonized India was located in the infancy of civilizational progress.
Ashcroft also points to the important fact that, at the time when the child emerged as a philosophical concept, ‘race’ as a category of physical and biological distinction was produced. ‘Whereas “race” could not exist without racism, that is, the need to establish a hierarchy of difference, the idea of the child dilutes the hostility inherent in that taxonomy and offers a “natural” justification for imperial dominance over subject peoples’ (Ashcroft, 2001: 37). The connection of the child with the savage goes along with the general assumption that the ‘races’ represent different stages of development in the 19th century. Thus, for example, the French Orientalist Ernest Renan, in his book The Future of Science, first published in 1848, argued that the conditions of humanity and human intelligence must be studied in the earliest stages of development. The researcher had to combine the experimental investigation of the child and the exercise of his reason with the experimental investigation of the ‘savages’ and therefore to deal intensively with travel reports from the newly discovered areas on earth. To him this was urgent, because he expected that the savages would quickly disappear under the influence of their civilization (Renan, 1891: 150).
The moral conflict that results from colonial conquest and occupation for the ‘enlightened’ Europe is subdued by its naturalization as a parent–child relationship, equated with the contradictory impulses of parents between exploitation and care. The child, at once both other and same, according to Ashcroft (2001: 36–7), ‘holds in balance the contradictory tendencies of imperial rhetoric: authority is held in balance with nurture; domination with enlightenment; debasement with idealization; negation with affirmation; exploitation with education; filiation with affiliation. This ability to absorb contradiction gives the binary parent child an inordinately hegemonic potency.’
The interrelations between the new concept of childhood and the colonization of foreigners and continents were already applied in the ideas of the liberal English philosopher John Locke, and the French enlightenment protagonist Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who both influenced childhood history, albeit in various ways. In his Essay Concerning Human Understanding, first published in 1690, Locke conceived the child as a ‘tabula rasa’ or blank page (Locke, [1690]1995). Thus, he gave parents and school masters great responsibility for what is written on this blank page. At the same time, the concept was of great importance to the imperial enterprise, as the idea of an empty space was an important prerequisite for the colonization understood as civilization. While Locke imagined the newborn child as an empty space which had to be filled, Rousseau, just 100 years later, in his novel-essay Emile, or on education ([1762]1979), conceived the child as ‘pure nature’ which represents a worth as such and is ultimately digested by civilization. Following Rousseau, the parallel to colonization consists in the idea of the ‘good savage’. According to Ashcroft (2001: 41),
Locke’s metaphor of the child as a blank page, an unwritten book, makes the explicit connection between adulthood and print, for civilization and maturity are printed on the tablet of the child’s mind. For him the child is an unformed person who, through literacy, education, reason, self-control and shame, may be made into a civilized adult. For Rousseau, the unformed child possesses capacities for candour, understanding, curiosity and spontaneity which must be preserved or rediscovered. In the tension between these two views we find encapsulated the inherent contradiction on imperial representations of the colonial subject.
Both perspectives justify the paternalistic actions of the colonial enterprise, since the innocence of nature, like the blank page of the unformed child, is equivalent to absence and exclusion. According to Uday Singh Mehta (1999: 48), exclusionary strategies involve ‘civilizational infantilism’. Neither the child nor the colonial subject has access to meaning outside the processes of colonization and education.
The idea of literacy gained a similar function in the sense of acquiring the ability to read and write, even if it was imposed on an already alphabetized society.1 It is based on the distinction between civilized and barbarian peoples and nations, and constitutes a hierarchy among them of more or less developed beings. Thus, the discrepancy between childhood and adulthood, caused by the emergence of the need to learn reading and writing, in the late Middle Ages, can be seen in the direct context of the discrepancy between the imperial centre and the unintelligible people in the colonies.
Just as ‘childhood’ began in European culture with the task of learning how to read, so education and literacy become crucial in the imperial expansion of Europe, establishing ideological supremacy, inculcating the values of the colonizer, and separating the ‘adult’ colonizing races from the ‘childish’ colonized (Ashcroft, 2001: 39).
In this sense, colonialism has always been ‘educational colonialism’ (Osterhammel, 2005: 110), which pretended to ‘free’ the colonized from tyranny and spiritual darkness. The equality of the colonized with children provided an opportunity to dismiss this claim even as a moral duty and ‘the white man’s burden’ (Kipling, 1899). ‘Colonial rule was glorified as a gift and act of grace of civilization, and was respected as humanitarian intervention’ (Osterhammel, 2005: 110). To this end, particularly the schools, which were either run by missions or the state, were used. They have always aimed to convey a certain kind of thought and morality that goes beyond formal reading and writing, a kind of ‘moral technology’ (Wells, 2009: 111), ‘epistemic violence’ (Spivak, 1988; Cannella and Viruru, 2004; de Sousa Santos, 2008) or ‘colonization of consciousness’ (Comaroff and Comaroff, 2008).
One of the most influential consequences of childhood and colonial conquest was the concept of development that emerged in the late 19th century and constituted non-European countries as permanently