Missionary Practices on the Gold Coast, 1832–1895: Discourse, Gaz ...

With the gradual shift in the cultural practices within the colony, human interaction is reduced to a religious “hierarchic conception” (160). This shift is determined by an “Aristotelian spirit” (153), which recognizes the domination of “perfection over imperfection, of force over weakness, of eminent virtue over vice,” (152). According to Todorov, the subjugation and transformation of the “other” is natural to European consciousness, and hence, the “other” was unlikely to see justice. “Columbus wanted the Indians to be like himself.” That is, they must be effectively assimilated into his culture whose “rightness is self-evident.”⁴⁷ In this framework, the “conversion must be total: no individual, no fraction of the individual, no practice, however trivial it may seem, must escape” (204). Todorov provides new interpretations of the political, cultural, and psychological issues in the context of violence against the local inhabitants, assimilation, and the preservation of racial purity in the colonial environment. He offers not only an insight into the missionary’s criteria of judging and dominating and “doctrine of inequality”⁴⁸ as events unfold, but also draws on a cultural and intellectual argument of “race,” and the interlocutor that has shaped popular opinion about the image of the missionary and colonialism.

The connection between imaginary representation, physical domination and the interpretation of race in disseminating negative images of non-Europeans is sufficiently documented in Edward Said’s Culture and Imperialism (1993).⁴⁹ In his book, Said gives an insightful view on how western literary works played decisive roles in mediating and defining differences in cultures. For Said, western colonial discourse was largely devoted to constructing a literary tradition that drew on images of Western cultural superiority and obliterated the existence of non-Europeans. What Said missed to address within the German context is found in Susan Zantop’s Colonial Fantasies (1997), which explains how pre-colonial German narratives contributed to Germany’s “latent colonialism” (2) and fantasies of “otherness” to produce a “constant tension with nightmares in which a savage, devouring ‘phallic’ femininity, in the form of impenetrable jungles threatens to annihilate the innocent European colonist” (45).⁵⁰