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By Exhibiting The Indigenous Peoples The Colonisers Were Dehumanising Them ...

By exhibiting the indigenous peoples the colonisers were dehumanising them and subsequently in doing so were affirming their rights as a superior race to rule. The portray of the indigenous people as ‘the other' and as inferior played an important part in both the justification for colonialism and the continued separation and hierarchy in colonialism. According to Bauman ‘colonialism has been interpreted as a war over identity.' In more modern times systems were set up in the European colonies to establish and maintain the social and political supremacy of the colonisers over the colonised. The most infamous of this was the system of apartheid in South Africa. This dissertation argues that humanism as a discourse in relation to development in the aftermath of colonialism has arisen as a result of the de-humanisation of the indigenous peoples during the colonial period. The following section examines this in more detail.
The Development of Humanist Discourse in the Aftermath of Colonisation
The racist discourse of the 19th century has been replaced with humanist discourse in the 21st century. Colonialism largely came to an end at the end of World War Two, although unfortunately it's repercussions did not end when colonialism did as the following section details. Humanist development discourse has developed in relation to the development of post-colonial states. Bauman argues that humanism is the joining of ‘personal morality and imperial epistemology'. This essay argues that humanism has emerged as a reaction to the de-humanised way in which colonialism and also as a response to and means to dealing with the ethnic and religious wars that have plagued post-colonial states particularly in Africa since independence.
Before examining this it is first essential to understand what it meant by humanist development. Humanism is non-religious school of thought based on the premise of the worth of people and the ability to determine right from wrong. ‘The dominant ethos of humanist philosophy, however, seems to be the belief in a cultivable human subjectivity and the ability of an autonomous human consciousness to do the cultivating.' Those in the humanist school believe that there are universal human principles and that human's actions should be based upon evidence as opposed to religious ideas. A humanist is someone who tries to lead a moral and ethical life making decisions on the basis of evidence as opposed to on the basis of religion. So this was certainly not the case during colonial times, where ideologies of supremacy were not so much based on fact but a perceived fiction.
The Oxford English Dictionary provides the following definition of humanism - ‘humanism (noun) 1 a rationalistic system of thought attaching prime importance to human rather than divine or supernatural matters. 2 a Renaissance cultural movement which turned away from medieval scholastic-ism and revived interest in ancient Greek and Roman thought.


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