Revealing the Hegemonologue

My earliest inkling of a personal connection to colonialism came at the age of seven or eight. Enrolled in the Wolf Cubs of Canada (a junior section of the Boy Scouts), I returned from a weekend outing with a comic book that told the tale of how Robert Baden-Powell came to found the World Scouting Movement. During his service in the Boer War, Baden-Powell had enlisted the assistance of boys to scout in support of the British regulars defending Mafeking. The comic book graphically portrayed the story of these predecessors of the Boy Scouts and how they distinguished themselves in the war. I remember being fascinated by the illustrations that were used to tell the story: images of heroic battles in faraway places, of splendidly uniformed British troops and fierce-looking deep-purple-skinned Zulu warriors. I had a vague sense that my own little Wolf Cub uniform connected me to all of this and, from that day on, I saw our weekly pledge—that included the promise to do our duty to God and the Queen 1 —in a rather different light. Of course, this was neither my first nor my most profound confrontation with the legacies of colonialism. Indeed, as a preschooler, a favorite record was an audio play of the life of American frontier icon Davy Crockett in which he triumphed over the dangers of the “wilderness,”. battled hostile “Indians,” and was sent to Congress—all the elements of an epic story of the righteous conquest and civilization of North America. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

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