“The White Man’s Burden Has Not Been Very Heavy”

Carol Anderson

doi:10.1017/CBO9781139032544.003

2 - “The White Man’s Burden Has Not Been Very Heavy”

The NAACP’s Anticolonial Struggle against South Africa, 1946–1951

Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 December 2014

Carol Anderson

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Carol Anderson: Affiliation:
Emory University, Atlanta

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Summary

No country like the Union of South Africa can be recognized as capable of exercising a colonial mandate.

– NAACP Colonial Conference, 1945

The NAACP’s postwar agenda was firmly established at the April 1945 Colonial Conference. That meeting, in many ways, generated the Association’s road map to colonial liberation: South Africa (South West Africa); Italy (Libya, Eritrea, Somalia); the Netherlands (Indonesia); France (Morocco and Tunisia); and Britain (Kenya). With a strategy similar to the methodical case-by-case approach it had used to expose the sham of separate but equal, the NAACP recognized that the way each colony was governed presented a prime opportunity to strategically undermine and delegitimize the rationales that had, for too long, transformed the brutality of white supremacy into the narrative of benevolent colonial rule.

South West Africa (current day Namibia), in particular, was a testament to how far the myth of the “white man’s burden” had fallen short. The colony had been a mandate under the old League of Nations system and, as such, was a “sacred trust of civilization” administered, in this case, by South Africa. That jarring juxtaposition – a sacred trust held by a racially repressive regime – led the NAACP to emphasize two key principles that were essential for challenging the viability of colonialism in a world birthed by the Atlantic and UN Charters.

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Type: Chapter
Information: Bourgeois Radicals
The NAACP and the Struggle for Colonial Liberation, 1941–1960
, pp. 69 - 132

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781139032544.003 [Opens in a new window]

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Print publication year: 2014

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