The Colonial Misunderstanding

“When the missionaries arrived, the Africans had the land and the missionaries had the Bible. They taught us to pray with our eyes closed. When we opened our eyes, they had the land and we had the Bible.”
Jomo Kenyatta, Kenya’s first elected Prime Minister and President

In *The Colonial Misunderstanding*, Jean-Marie Teno sheds light on the complex and problematic relationship between colonization and European missionaries on the African continent.
The film examines Christian evangelism as the precursor to European colonialism in Africa—indeed, as the ideological model for the relationship between North and South even today. In particular, it explores the role of missionaries in Namibia on the centenary of the 1904 German genocide of the Herero people there. It reveals how colonialism destroyed African beliefs and social systems and replaced them with European ones, as if they were the only acceptable paths to modernity. As Prof. F. Kangué Ewané says in the film: “I can forgive Westerners for taking away my land …but not for taking away my mind and soul.”
Through an examination of the work of German missionary societies in Africa whose mission was to bring Christianity—and by extension, European culture and European rule—to the heathens, Jean Marie Teno reveals The Colonial Misunderstanding.