This phrase comes from an 1899 poem of the same title by that ideologue of British imperialism Rudyard Kipling,[1] which was the arrogant notion that Europeans had a divinely mandated duty to free Africans (and other colonial peoples) from the prison of heathen darkness and savagery by bringing them into the light of Christian civilization and modernity. Perhaps the most boldly articulated embodiment of the “white man’s burden” was the mission civilisatrice of the French, which one French colonial governor, Raphael Sallers, described it thusly as late as 1944, at the Brazzaville Conference in Brazzaville, Congo:
Evidently, the purpose of our civilization is to bring civilization to others. So we civilize, that is to say, we are not content to provide merely a surplus of material wellbeing, but we also impose moral rules and intellectual development. And by what methods and according to whose example should we do this, if not by our own methods and according to the example of our own civilization, in the name of which alone we may speak? For what authority would we have to speak in the name of the civilization whose people we are trying to improve? (from Shipway 1999: 142).
[1]. The first verse of this seven verse poem—to get a sense of what Kipling composed—reads:
Take up the White man's burden --
Send forth the best ye breed --
Go bind your sons to exile
To serve your captives' need;
To wait in heavy harness
On fluttered folk and wild --
Your new-caught, sullen peoples,
Half devil and half child.
(Source: Kipling, R., & Washington, P. (2007). Poems. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, p. 96.) Notice the reference to colonized peoples as “half devil and half child” by a man whose ancestors less than a thousand years before could not have held up a candle, in terms of civilizational achievements, to the ancestors of those he is now labeling thusly.
Rudyard Kipling