European Influence

The second half of chapter 20 made me feel as if the second wave of colonization was not all bad for the native peoples. While the racism and economic instability was definitely an issue, the Europeans did offer at least one good thing when they came to colonize. I think the biggest thing they did had to do with the education of the native people. Before the Europeans came, a lot of people were illiterate and did not have the ability to have access to things that previously seemed out of reach. However there were a lot of negative things that happened even with good intentions. Things did not actually work out to the best possible scenarios as a lot of times the people who embraced the European cultures were the wealthier elite classes that looked down upon their own people for not wanting to conform. Another big part of Western culture that spread to the colonies was Christianity. More specifically, the reading said that in Africa it only took 50 years for half of the population that were not Muslims to convert to Christianity. I think that the best thing to come out of these negatives was the formation of a new, more united identity that occurred in Africa. Before the colonization, most of the African people did not even refer to themselves as Africans; rather they were identified by the language they spoke or if they were Muslims. The unifying thing that brought them together was ironically the oppression that they all had to endure under European rule.