Mission and Anthropology.
Anthropology is simply defined as the study of human societies, their cultures, and their development. It can be argued that the 19th-century anthropology took shape as a tool of imperialism. Anthropology became a famous study in the mid-19th century when the Western world began its innovations. It started to discuss certain forbidden religious dogmas hitherto subjects. There emerged the subject of the study of the origin of human beings outside of the religious teachings. Anthropology further developed towards the classification of the human race, their anatomy, and settlement. It brought out the characterizations between the ‘civilized’ and the ‘savages’. Using such perspectives, the European anthropologists explored and extracted the differences between the Europeans and African people.
Anthropology was, therefore, used to justify racism. It was used as a tool for the Europeans understanding, and the primitive people were contracted with the Europeans whose ways and standards of life was viewed as normative. Anthropologists traveled far and wide and in the deep interior of Africa’s’ untamed’ continent to capture the knowledge and the lifestyles of the ‘savages’.