CHAPTER ONE
INTRODUCTION
“…I see racism in stores being sold as cream, on television as movies and in church as baptismal name and many other places we all know but refuse to acknowledge. The labours of our heroes past have already gone in vain because our mentality has been colonized…I hope that either the world accepts us or we accept ourselves…”
Anonymous
1.1 BACKGROUND TO THE STUDY
According to Western State centre (2012), during the reformation of the 16th and 17th century, one of the key questions among religious hierarchy was whether blacks and Indians had souls and were humans. This was at the time when Europeans were freshly exposed to Africans and people from North and South America. The question brought a division between the catholic and the protestant. However, the catholic was the first to come up with an answer. The catholic agreed that Blacks had souls and therefore it became an offence in most Catholic colonies to kill a slave without reason, (Western State Centre dismantling racism project 2012). Due to the importance and necessity of slavery, religious was used to justify slavery and racism as people of color were classified as pagans and soulless. The conversion of a large number of people of color to Christianity and the eventual decline in importance and power of religion and religious leaders, the need arises to employ a new way to promote racism so as to justify slavery. This eventually led to the employment of biological, zoological geographical and botanical theories to promote and justify slavery and by implication, racism.