Slave Emancipation and Colonialism

Presbyterian missionaries willing to stop the slave trade penetrated a remote part of Africa in the 1870s. They became enmeshed in a political arena in which European firearms and trading goods attracted Africans more than the Gospel. Missionaries soon became entangled in local warfare with groups which were involved in slave trade. When the safety of the Scottish missions was seriously threatened by slave raiders, missionaries asked for a British military intervention. Evangelists and military officers were often at odds. Whereas missionaries expected their African converts to become independent farmers producing goods for the export market, colonial administrators strove to turn Africans into workers at the service of plantations or the distant mines of South Africa. Some Africans, on the other hand, formed alliances with the new overlords and others embraced Western education in order to deal with a changing political world that had significantly transformed their lives. Therefore, colonialism appears to be a multifaceted process in which opposing forces converge in a contentious environment.

César J. Solá-García is an Associate Professor at the University of Puerto Rico. He holds a Ph.D. in African History from the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor Campus. Solá-García currently investigates on topics such as African students at Soviet universities from the 1920s onwards, and the image of Africa as depicted in Hollywood films.