Robert, sorry for the delay in responding. Thank you for reading this so closely. That Gandhi line resonates because it captures something that’s still very much with us: “civilization” as a label the West gives itself, while the actual work of empire—conquest, extraction, classification—gets treated as background noise. One of the things I’m trying to show in the essay is that calling Africa “a country” isn’t just a slip of the tongue. It’s the leftover habit of that same way of thinking—the power to simplify other places while keeping complexity for yourself.
That’s why the comparisons matter. Russia gets handled carefully. Asia is broken down into regions. The Pacific is named island by island. Africa alone stays whole in everyday speech. That difference isn’t accidental, and it isn’t just ignorance. It comes from a time when European governments, scholars, and missionaries needed Africa to be legible as one thing in order to rule it, study it, and manage it. Administration trained perception, and those categories stuck years after the empires themselves faded.
This is where Du Bois helps move Gandhi’s insight to something concrete. Du Bois didn’t go to Ghana to make a symbolic return or to “reclaim” African identity. He went at the invitation of Kwame Nkrumah to work on the Encyclopedia Africana. The goal wasn’t romance or affirmation—it was practical and intellectual: to create a framework that treated Africa as many histories, many societies, many political worlds, rather than as a single backdrop.
By the time Du Bois arrived in Accra in the early 1960s, he had already spent decades showing how modern Western thinking works by handing out detail unevenly—depth at home, blur elsewhere. Ghana mattered to him not because it solved anything, but because it was a rare moment when political independence and intellectual ambition lined up. A Black-led state was claiming the right to describe itself.
Du Bois was clear-eyed about this. He didn’t imagine Africa as unified or pure. He knew it was fractured by colonial borders and shaped by extraction. His decision to become a Ghanaian citizen in 1963 wasn’t about nostalgia. It was about where serious historical work still seemed possible.
That brings us back to Gandhi, and to the end of the essay. Power doesn’t just control land or people; it shapes language. It decides who gets complexity and who gets flattened. The continent of Africa wasn’t turned into a single place because that reflected reality, but because empire needed it that way. The point isn’t to scold people for saying the wrong thing—it’s to notice how the wrong thing came to sound so normal in the first place.
This is such an insight -- the power to simplify other places while keeping complexity for yourself.
I.e. power here would seem to be the ability of those who sensed control throughout history to guide our childhood tendency to go with the simplest, first explanations we hear.
But Canadian feminist Barbara Pressman once noted, "Where there is a power imbalance, that is the issue."
Making power imbalances be the issue seems to be the challenge.
My work is with attachment disorders in children. As children we start out as 'pattern-dependent organisms', constantly seeking patterns to increase predictability -- and what patterns we are shown and perceive and incorporate depend on the variables of childhood experience as well as the experiences of the childcare providers.
The parallels to historical systems' ability to to show us some patterns but not others keeps my attention.
Thank you for this.
I am reminded of Gandhi's reply when asked what he thought about western civilization.
"I think it would be a good idea."
Your frames and reframes are very helpful for sharing with others.
Robert, sorry for the delay in responding. Thank you for reading this so closely. That Gandhi line resonates because it captures something that’s still very much with us: “civilization” as a label the West gives itself, while the actual work of empire—conquest, extraction, classification—gets treated as background noise. One of the things I’m trying to show in the essay is that calling Africa “a country” isn’t just a slip of the tongue. It’s the leftover habit of that same way of thinking—the power to simplify other places while keeping complexity for yourself.
That’s why the comparisons matter. Russia gets handled carefully. Asia is broken down into regions. The Pacific is named island by island. Africa alone stays whole in everyday speech. That difference isn’t accidental, and it isn’t just ignorance. It comes from a time when European governments, scholars, and missionaries needed Africa to be legible as one thing in order to rule it, study it, and manage it. Administration trained perception, and those categories stuck years after the empires themselves faded.
This is where Du Bois helps move Gandhi’s insight to something concrete. Du Bois didn’t go to Ghana to make a symbolic return or to “reclaim” African identity. He went at the invitation of Kwame Nkrumah to work on the Encyclopedia Africana. The goal wasn’t romance or affirmation—it was practical and intellectual: to create a framework that treated Africa as many histories, many societies, many political worlds, rather than as a single backdrop.
By the time Du Bois arrived in Accra in the early 1960s, he had already spent decades showing how modern Western thinking works by handing out detail unevenly—depth at home, blur elsewhere. Ghana mattered to him not because it solved anything, but because it was a rare moment when political independence and intellectual ambition lined up. A Black-led state was claiming the right to describe itself.
Du Bois was clear-eyed about this. He didn’t imagine Africa as unified or pure. He knew it was fractured by colonial borders and shaped by extraction. His decision to become a Ghanaian citizen in 1963 wasn’t about nostalgia. It was about where serious historical work still seemed possible.
That brings us back to Gandhi, and to the end of the essay. Power doesn’t just control land or people; it shapes language. It decides who gets complexity and who gets flattened. The continent of Africa wasn’t turned into a single place because that reflected reality, but because empire needed it that way. The point isn’t to scold people for saying the wrong thing—it’s to notice how the wrong thing came to sound so normal in the first place.
This is such an insight -- the power to simplify other places while keeping complexity for yourself.
I.e. power here would seem to be the ability of those who sensed control throughout history to guide our childhood tendency to go with the simplest, first explanations we hear.
But Canadian feminist Barbara Pressman once noted, "Where there is a power imbalance, that is the issue."
Making power imbalances be the issue seems to be the challenge.
My work is with attachment disorders in children. As children we start out as 'pattern-dependent organisms', constantly seeking patterns to increase predictability -- and what patterns we are shown and perceive and incorporate depend on the variables of childhood experience as well as the experiences of the childcare providers.
The parallels to historical systems' ability to to show us some patterns but not others keeps my attention.
Thank you again from Vermont. If you want to write more directly, my email is robert.h.spottswood@gmail.com.