Slower Than a Massacre: The Multiple Sources of Racial Thought in Colonial Africa
Author(s)
Glassman, Jonathan
Abstract
Jonathon Glassman contends that most studies of racial thought present it as a distinctly Western invention, carried to the rest of the world during the process of imperial expansion. He challenges that consensus by looking at the intellectual sources of race-thinking in a corner of East Africa that suffered violent tension in the final years of the colonial era between people who had come to think of themselves as belonging to separate racial categories. Although Western concepts were not irrelevant, Glassman shows how indigenous thinkers used them selectively to craft a locally compelling discourse that drew on a diverse range of intellectual traditions, foreign and domestic. Among those traditions was a multi-racial and ecumenically tolerant Islamic modernism, with which Zanzibari intellectuals challenged the claims that the West represented the only universalist civilization. A central irony is how even this liberal discourse, once put to the work of nationalist mobilization, became transformed into an exclusionary rhetoric or racial dehumanization. By arguing that the racialization of discourses of difference must be seen as the product of complex circuits of discourse among African intellectuals themselves, he contributes to a small but growing literature on race in which Western thinkers, and concepts of white supremacy, were of marginal significance. In this way, Glassman’s article raises critical questions about explanations of race that assume the experience of the West, and of the United States in particular, are the norm.
