The colonial enterprise required representing Africans as opaque and extraordinary 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

Category: Causal Relationships

• XREF: Echoes Appiah’s Cosmopolitanism on how anthropology mystifies subjects; also connects to Edward Said’s Orientalism logic about the colonized needing to be exotic.
• SEED: Article angle: the epistemic requirement of mystification — why any hierarchical relationship between a studying ‘us’ and a studied ‘them’ needs the object to be non-ordinary.

Related

• Colonial knowledge required portraying subjects as mysterious rather than ordinary (similarity 0.94)
• The colonial mission produced effects opposite to the missionary’s own intentions. (similarity 0.80)
• Questioning African intellect forced rethinking of colonial administration and mission methods. (similarity 0.80)
• A well-meaning missionary’s work can unintentionally serve colonial oppression (similarity 0.79)
• Colonial educators had assumed Africans were blank slates needing civilizing. (similarity 0.79)
• Colonialism is a coherent system requiring cultural and epistemic violence, not merely bad colonists. (similarity 0.78)
• Studying people for an alien audience’s benefit objectifies them without their consent. (similarity 0.78)
• The Bantu Philosophy controversy tested the colonial civilizing-mission ideology at its foundation (similarity 0.78)