Colonial knowledge required portraying subjects as mysterious rather than ordinary

Evidence

One such key demand was that the Muntu must be mystified. In order to understand the Muntu, there must be some opaque character about him. If the Muntu was to be presented as an ordinary man, in the same way that the Belgians were ordinary, then the colonial mission would have been pointless. Kwame Anthony Appiah makes the point clear in his book Cosmopolitanism (2006) when he points out that anthropologists are not likely to describe their subjects in ordinary terms as people who eat dance, cry, mate and die. That would make the whole enterprise pointless. — Frans Dokman, Beyond Bantu Philosophy_…, 459

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Scholars compare colonial knowledge penetration to staging an exhibition of authority.; European curiosity was framed as natural, masking its own historical construction