Mission schools were the most problematic origin of the colonial native middle class

Evidence

For colonial administrators, however, the most problematic origins for the native petit bourgeoisie were the mission schools. From the fifteenth century and before, the missions had all along served as a part of the rationale for European colonialist and imperialist aspirations. Still, the correspondence between the ends of missionary work and the goals of imperialism had never been entirely true. For one, the missionaries themselves, in the case of English imperialism, were often recruited from colonized peoples: that is, Scots, Irish, and Welsh. Such soldiers for Christ could be often quite ambivalent about the colonial power. Just as troubling were the potential conflicts between faith and imperial interests. During the construction of slave systems and afterward, the teaching of the tenets of Christian beliefs had taken as one of its presumptions the fact of the savage and the savage’s or pagan’s need. It was thus axiomatic that the proof of the missionary’s success was the creation of civilized Christians—natives whose familiarity with European (or Euro-American) cultures and habits were as intimate as their experience with Christ. — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 854

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to postcolonial theory’s account of the colonized intellectual produced by mission education — the very figure later celebrated and critiqued in Black Atlantic and diaspora studies.