Intellectual Conquer
Four hundreds years ago, Spain and Portugal started to take over the world. The basic idea was to go to the third countries which were considered powerless against their power. The book I read Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe was about African culture and the conquer of Portuguese, and describes the whole scene in case of Ibo tribe.
In Ibo they have tremendous culture and the way of life style. There is no chief or the king to control the land. There are only seniors to give people advice from the years of experiences. People followed to rules which were accumulated from the past to make their lives in the better way in the land. They had their own God and mysterious spirits power. They have art objects to express their belief system and the rules of in their lives, instead of writing.
When the Portuguese came in the land of Ibo, they demanded a space to build the church. Ibo people thought that they should be punished by Ibo's God, and people gave them a land of the Evil Forest which has the power to eliminate the people who don't follow the God. However, Portuguese were alive. Portuguese rescued twins who were thrown away in the Evil Forest if they were born as twins. However, those twins grew up just as normal as other kids the village. In Portuguese start to make people of the land to wonder their God. Here is the words of a missionary in the book when he was talking with one of the seniors through translator. "Your God is small and powerless. Jesus is the God of gods. If you truly believe in your God, you believe in Jesus."
Portuguese brought not only Christianity, but government system and schools. Spending a decade, they achieved to put people who denied Christianity and the government in the prison and torched them.
The way they conquered the land was so slow that the people of the land hardly know what was really happening. People started to lose their identification as tribesmen. The new people came into their sacred land and proved that our God is powerless which had been powerful in couple thousand years. Now many of them are Christian, and which means they deny all the tribe's culture, rituals, ceremony, belief system, household style, and tribe's history. Now they go to school and learn Western culture.
Conquering is the saddest thing which happened in the history of the world. New people take everything out of the tribe. They erased history, art, religion, culture, and the way of living. It is so terrible because it is an intellectual conquer. It is not only physical conquer, but to change the tribesmen's whole identity. This is such a disrespect to tribesmen. Other culture is never inferior just because we don't know, understand, not expectable, and unwritten. People weren't smart enough to understand very important thing to live and share the earth. It is not acceptable to do same thing again in our history.
An example in the United States, Europeans took over Indians, killed them, intellectually and physically conquered their land. Europeans made the land of the freedom by killing the people of the land. Now they call Indians "minority" in this white country. People don't like to talk about this history nowadays. As one of fashions, Indian's culture is popular now. The fact is that this is nothing more than curiosity. This is just one fish in Capitalism, mass production world. As I walked into this kind of store, I saw tons of objects but nothing about their history and culture. The history of Indian will be vanished in the future. We must make a move before it's too late. I love to see the world bonding together, but I hope this doesn't mean to westernize the whole world.
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