Having traveled a considerable amount throughout the course of my life, from growing up in Switzerland, to visiting family in India, to spending a semester abroad in Germany, it should come as no surprise that I am an avid and vocal supporter of people — especially students — taking the time to visit new cultures and countries and learn new perspectives.
What gives me pause is when people — especially students — gush about how badly they want to visit places like Africa, South America and India, to do their part in “helping” the less fortunate cope with or overcome the poverty that is overtly plaguing those “third world countries.” Of course, in their minds, the intentions behind the “helping” are completely pure; the actions are, however, in line with the textbook definition of neocolonialism.
Old-school colonialism used military means or political force to make other people into subjects. Neocolonialism is a softer, but still manipulative, form of power which influences other countries, especially former dependencies, using economic, political, cultural or other pressures. This process is readily seen when people from financially and politically stable countries (usually from Europe or America) pack up a backpack and visit a community in a “developing” country for a couple of weeks to help build a school or a well, teach English or to spread the word of the Bible.
Short-term Christian mission trips are a good example of well-intentioned neocolonialism. Often financed by rigorous fundraising, the trip consists of a group of teenagers and young adults led by a couple of adult chaperones who travel to “third world” communities in the name of Jesus Christ and Christianity.
Although the trips themselves are not deliberately carried out as such, the foray onto supposed “developing third world” countries followed by often-unsolicited teaching of English and/or the ways of the Bible come across to locals, as well as outsiders, as an invasion of a place and community that was doing perfectly well on its own.
Moreover, the “impoverished” countries visited by missions are often seen as less fortunate, uneducated, underdeveloped and in dire need of saving. Thus, a power imbalance is developed, wherein the Westerners conducting the trips are automatically in a position of power because of their supposed better lives enhanced by materialism, religion, physical fitness and education.
Putting one group of people (usually people of color) in a position more inferior to group of people (usually Western white people) is the basis for colonialist thinking. Colonialists spread across the world with the intention to save those “less-fortunate” in Africa, South America and India — to give them a supposed better life while taking their resources as an assumed “thank you.”
The clincher is that, at the time, those who were being “saved” had no desire for it; they did not want Westerners trampling over their land, taking their resources, and proclaiming themselves as saviors. Today, I have no idea or insight as to whether “impoverished” communities that host missionaries are doing so knowingly and willingly or not.
The fact does remain, however, that entering a community, using its already-scarce resources and forcibly teaching the local people Western languages and religions is not only unnecessary, but it also puts forth the wrong message: that people of color around the world are automatically inferior, less fortunate and in need of saving, and that white people are the ones who have to save them, as they have done for countless bloody centuries thus far.
