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The Image of Africa and Africans

in the Early Mediterranean World

M

alvern

van W

yk Smith

The First

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Introduction

To us in the West, Africa is that part of the world which remains most deeply endowed with the two central facets of the other; that is, the mysterious and the exotic.

—Patrick Chabal, ‘The African Crisis: Context and Interpretation’, 1996, 45

I thought for some reason even then of Africa, not a particular place, but a shape, a strangeness, a wanting to know.

—Graham Greene, Journey without Maps, 1936

This book is a history of the idea of ‘Africa’ in the consciousness of the early Mediterranean and European world. G.M. Young once remarked that ‘the real, central theme of history is not what happened, but what people felt about it when it was happening’ (1952, vi), and the present study has been conceived in these terms.

In 1979 Jean Devisse concluded the second volume of the magisterial The

Image of the Black in Western Art, produced for the Menil Foundation by a team

of scholars under the general editorship of Ladislas Bugner, with the following thoughts:

Many see the sixteenth century as the starting point of relations between Europe and Black Africa, and in a way this is not inexact, give or take

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fifty years. This book, however, proves that these relations had a long prehistory. If Africa hardly dreamed of Europe before the middle of the fifteenth century, Europe, on the other hand, had had certain images of the black continent and its peoples for centuries before (1979, 2: 2. 258). Despite Devisse’s optimism that the Bugner enterprise had ‘proven’ the long antecedence of European images of Africa and Africans, these volumes also made it clear that much further work was needed to explain the provenance and import, rather than merely to record the persistence, of such images. In his Preface to the first volume of The Image of the Black in Western Art, the general editor had himself suggested one way forward: ‘What is most urgently needed is an in-depth examination of the literary sources in relation to our theme.’ This sentiment chimed well with my own interests at the time.

A life-long personal engagement with a particular set of perceptions of Africa, namely those of a white South African, seemed to confer privileged insights into the iconographic history of Africa in the European imagination even as it challenged the very substance and legitimacy of such concepts. Unlike Patrick Chabal, I am not one of ‘us in the West’, but have experienced Africa as both ‘mysterious and exotic’, yet also as home and intimate. Growing up in one of the world’s most unambivalently pariah states, namely apartheid South Africa, yet with no other country to think of remotely as home, I had to embark on an early intellectual pilgrimage to resolve how I could relate to that vast landmass and its people north of me, a world of which I was an unmistakable part, but that was somehow also forbidden and (officially) irredeemably ‘other’.

An early venture into such explorations produced a study of the poetry of the Anglo-Boer War (Van Wyk Smith, 1978), in which I attempted to place the substantial legacy of verse that this southern African conflict of 1899–1902 had produced within the wider history and context of the emergence of the poetry of war. In 1988, at the time of the by-then inevitably controversial commemoration of the rounding of the Cape of Good Hope by the Portuguese in 1488 and the resultant colonisation of southern Africa, it seemed appropriate to compile an anthology of poetry inspired by this theme, from the Lusiads onward, that stressed not the celebratory and imperialist aspects, but rather the tragic endeavours and missed opportunities of that high emprise (Van Wyk Smith, 1988).

But by the late 1980s, it had also become clear to me that the southern African encounter between indigenous peoples and Europeans, and the conflicts among rival imperial powers in the region, had not only rehearsed ancient European-African disharmonies, but were the local manifestation of racial dynamics,

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expansionist drives, and perceptual paradigms that had impacted on proto-European responses to the continent and its people since ancient times. These responses seemed to demand a thorough archaeology of the earliest European ideas about Africa. If mine was an image of Africa as the product of a particular kind of racist ancestry and upbringing in South Africa but shared by many others, an early rudimentary truth I had to confront was that the origin of such images was highly elusive, and lay well beyond the simple racism of my own background.

It became clear to me that the ‘Africa’ that fascinated me was not a place but an idea; not so much a subject for geo-historical and ethnographic investigation, as the site and product of myth and discourse. I found, moreover, that moving backwards through the centuries of European-African encounter persistently produced the effect of déja vu – at each stage the evidence suggested conjunctions and prejudices already firmly in place and stereotypically invoked. The backward trawl through the high imperialism (and racism) of the nineteenth century, the Enlightenment, the Renaissance, and the Christian Middle Ages repeatedly suggested that unsympathetic European perceptions of Africa and its people somehow always had the status of the already self-evident. Even the Greeks and Romans seemed to be invoking ideas about black Africans and their continent that had come from somewhere else.

In a recent substantial collection of essays, Black Africans in Renaissance

Europe, one of the editors speaks of ‘firmly held classical and medieval

precon-ceptions relating to the African continent’ (Earle and Lowe, 2005, 3), yet no contributor explains how pejorative and racist views about Africa and Africans could have become ‘firmly held … preconceptions’ by classical times. Not sur-prisingly, the outcome is another series of binarist indictments without much enlightenment.

The ‘somewhere else’ referred to above has turned out to be pharaonic Egypt. The crucial informing paradigm for almost all subsequent Euro-Mediterranean comprehensions of Africa derived ultimately from Egyptian conceptions of an African hinterland, conceptions that by archaic Greek times had resolved into the Homeric notion of ‘two Ethiopias’ invoked in both the Iliad and the Odyssey (see Chapter 1). As the following study will show, the Homeric conceit of a ‘western’ and ‘eastern’ Ethiopia became a powerful and pervasive discriminatory template for the earliest Mediterranean and subsequent European encounters with inner Africa, and for the earliest assessments of its peoples. Furthermore, the vexed question of how ‘African’ ancient Egyptians themselves were – or saw themselves to be – resolved itself in the course of my investigations into the

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likelihood that while Egyptians were certainly African, they were not ‘Negroid’ or ‘broad African’ in the sense in which such terms are now understood in African-American academic discourse. Rather, they were descended from one or more of the several phyla of pre- or non-Negroid peoples who in the late Holocene period inhabited the continent from north-east Africa to the Cape of Good Hope (see Chapters 2–5). This distinction had steadily encouraged the rulers of pharaonic Egypt to distance themselves from other Africans, and the consequent racial typology that they developed prompted later Greek and Roman commentators in turn to perpetuate and celebrate the notion of an elite culture of ‘worthy Ethiopians’ based on the lands and legends of Meroitic Nubia and, later, Aksumite Ethiopia, and to dismiss the rest of sub-Saharan Africa as ‘savage Ethiopia.’

What had also become clear by the 1970s was that an exercise in the history of ideas such as mine could not be confined to a mere content analysis of a limited range of texts from the colonial past. The reading of such texts, as of the whole phenomenon of colonial and transcultural encounter, had been and were being transformed in the aftermath of the colonial era by the rise of Third World scholarship and anti-colonial polemics, and by a revolution in our understanding of the discursive, cognitive and linguistic processes that condition all truth claims. My project, it appeared, would require not only a distant reach into the very origins of European ideas about Africa, but a broad survey of whether, why, how, and to what extent not only European but all observers are purportedly trapped within historically and cognitively conditioned horizons. It seemed important to establish whether, in the language of popular neuropsychology, we are hard-wired to see only what our conceptual grids allow us to see; for if this should indeed be the case, no genuine cross-cultural enlightenment could ever be possible.

A seminal work in the revisionary discourse of Europe’s encounter with its ‘others’ was Edward Said’s Orientalism (1978) – to which we shall come – but that work was itself the product of a ferment of debate and rewriting of history that had both inspired and recorded the processes of decolonisation. Said had been anticipated by writers and activists such as J.A. Hobson (1901, 1902), E.D. Morel

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(1920), Frantz Fanon (1952, 1961), Oscar Mannoni (1950), C.L.R. James (1958, 1963) and Albert Memmi (1965), but it was Said who launched that particular wave of the discourse of postcolonialism, in the ebb of which we still find ourselves.

Before moving on to an examination of the impact of figures such as Fanon and Said on postcolonial debates, however, we need to glance at the broader context of these polemics in the changing dimensions of the historiography of Africa, and as they were deployed in the dismantling of colonial empires.

Hegel had notoriously argued in 1822 that Africa was ‘the land of childhood’ (1822/1902, 111) and that its people were beyond the grasp of history: ‘The Negro … exhibits the natural man in his completely wild and untamed state…. In Negro life the characteristic point is the fact that consciousness has not yet attained to the realization of any substantial objective existence…. At this point we leave Africa, not to mention it again’ (95–103). By 1850, Robert Knox would ask: ‘What signify these dark races to us? Who cares particularly for the Negro, or the Hottentot or the Kaffir?’ and go on to suggest that ‘it matters little how their extinction is brought about’ (cited by Malik, 1996, 101). From here it is not difficult, with the benefit of hindsight, to draw a genealogy of European perceptions of Africa and Africans that leads directly to Hugh Trevor-Roper’s equally shocking claim in the early years of the postcolonial debate:

Perhaps, in the future, there will be some African history to teach. But at present there is none, or very little: there is only the history of the European in Africa. The rest is largely darkness … the unrewarding gyrations of barbarous tribes in picturesque but irrelevant corners of the globe (1965, 9).

Such views have survived in surprising quarters. In a cult novel of the 1980s, Milan Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being, the following sentiment occurs: ‘We need to take no more note of it [a soul not reincarnated] than of a war between two African kingdoms in the fourteenth century, a war that altered nothing in the destiny of the world, even if a hundred thousand blacks perished in excruciating torment’ (1984, 3). From Hegel to Trevor-Roper, the relationship between Africa and Europe became that summed up by Stanley Leathes in Volume 12 of the Cambridge Modern History: ‘Almost the whole of Africa has thus become an annex of Europe’ (1910, 4), or, perhaps more ominously, by E.A. Benians: ‘In Europe the occupation of Africa has increased wealth and trade, and cheapened some of the comforts of life; what it will mean for Africa cannot yet be judged’ (1910, 666).

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By the time Trevor-Roper made his pronouncement, such meanings for Africa were being vociferously judged. It should be remembered, however, that Trevor-Roper’s verdict was at least partly provoked by an emergent African historiography making equally startling claims about the originary status of Africa itself, legitimated in turn by Perham’s ‘colonial reckoning’ (1961) that had set in after the Second World War. In South Africa in 1960, British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan had memorably reminded the apartheid government of the ‘winds of change’ blowing through colonial Africa, and of which they would soon feel the cold blast. Ghana had achieved independence in 1957, a triggering event that would not only fundamentally change the political dispensation of Africa, but that would also inspire a discourse of dismantlement aimed not just at the institutions, but at the discursive maintenance of the assumptions of colonialism.

Reviewing two quite contradictory early myths about Africa, that of Hobbes and that of Rousseau, in which Africa was either a continent ‘in which there was no account of Time; no Arts; no Letters; no Society; and, which [was] worst of all, continued fear and danger of death’ or the site of ‘a golden age of perfect liberty, equality and fraternity’, T. Hodgkin captured the simplistic terms in which the discourse of Africa had traditionally been conducted, and warned that such binaries would no longer do (1957, 174–5). Lord Elton’s Imperial Commonwealth of 1945 was probably the last magisterial review of its subject that could sum up British colonial activity in Africa as follows: ‘British explorers had called a new Continent into existence, and gradually British emigrants had begun to people it’ (1945, 363) – evidently on the assumption that the continent’s own inhabitants did not count as ‘people’. Pervasively discriminatory assumptions about what had transpired between colonisers and colonised still prevailed. Boies Penrose, whose Travel and Discovery in the Renaissance 1420–1620 remains a seminal study of its subject, nevertheless was of the opinion that ‘intermarriage with the natives resulted in the creation of a half-caste population with the weaknesses of both races and few of their better qualities’ (1952, 74).

Such verdicts I recognised as the absolute creeds of the world in which I had grown up. They also suggested that all travel writing and colonial history was irresistibly appropriative, as remarked by James Duncan and Derek Gregory: ‘All travel writing, as a process of inscription and appropriation, spins webs of colonizing power’ (1999, 3).

But a ‘discourse switch’ was under way. In another seminal work of the time, Margery Perham and John Simmons’s African Discovery: An Anthology of

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nineteenth-century African exploration into a new context, despite betraying assumptions that Africa was not in ‘the civilized world’:

The contemporaries for whom the explorers wrote were probably more interested in the character of the continent than of its peoples. That order is reversed today and to many the most interesting subject upon which their evidence can be sought is that of the state of African society when untouched by direct contact with the civilized world (1942, 16).

In 1920, E.D. Morel, appalled by his own experiences in the so-called Congo Free State, had published one of the first major exposures of colonial atrocities,

The Black Man’s Burden: The White Man in Africa from the Fifteenth Century to the First World War. In 1944, Alexander Campbell’s Empire in Africa, sponsored

by the Left Book Club, offered a radical Leninist analysis of such expansionism, and by 1962 Melville J. Herskovits, whose Myth of the Negro Past had appeared in 1941, would write:

Africa, when seen in perspective, was a full partner in the development of the Old World, participating in a continual process of cultural give-and-take that began long before European occupation. Neither isolation nor stagnation tells the tale. It is as incorrect to think of Africa as having been for centuries isolated from the rest of the world as it is to regard the vast area south of the Sahara as ‘Darkest Africa’, whose peoples slumbered on until awakened by the coming of the dynamic civilization of Europe (cited by Ngũgĩ, 1972, 3–4).

As the present study will show, Herskovits’s upbeat reading of pre-colonial African society, inspired by new visions of African historiography and quoted affirmatively by Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o in 1972, was itself an oversimplification of complex transcultural and historical dynamics, but for the next three to four decades, such assumptions would be foundational in the writings of a generation of revisionist historians of Africa, whether from the West or from Africa itself.

The disarticulation of colonial authority, both in politics and in colonial discourse, became the widely shared project of a new African historiography. The ‘real’ African past had to be recuperated, and the indigenous rather than the Eurocolonial rendering of that past had to be promoted. That process, and the new images of Africa consequently devised, are not a material part of the present study, as my focus is precisely on those perceptions – and their sources – that

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promoters of a revisionary African history wished to discredit. Nevertheless, a brief survey of some of the tenets of this polemic will help to contextualise the key issues that concern me, and must preface a more serious interrogation of how and to what extent the operations of discourse theory may be a help or hindrance in our reading – at present – of the European library of Africa.

The first wave of revisionist African historiography, more or less up to the appearance of Edward Said’s Orientalism in 1978, tended to be content-based, concerned with providing new information, unproblematically considered as ‘correct’, about the European exploitation of Africa. Behind many such works lay a conviction that an emergent postmodernism would soon regard as naïve, namely that the ‘truth’ of colonialism could readily be ascertained, and that the attitudes and perceptions of the past could be ‘corrected’ by the provision of more information from indigenous sources in particular. Richard Gray, reviewing an important later contribution to this enterprise, David W. Phillipson’s African

Archaeology (1985), summed up the iniquities to be addressed, yet also the

problems posed by the proposed remedies:

Africa invites stereotypes. Few Europeans and North Americans would dare to generalise so confidently about their own continents as they have so often done about Africa. The first modern, colonial, stereotype was that of a barbaric continent, one without history until quickened by outside forces. The second, which accompanied the process of decolonisation, was of an original Arcadia, prosperous and progressive until engulfed by the slave trade and European conquest…. Inevitably, the disillusionment which has often accompanied the decades of independence is provoking another reassessment (1985, 646).

Between the end of colonialism and the above comment lay a revolution, not only in liberationist political terms, but in our understanding of how notions of ‘truth’ and the ‘correct’ rendering of historical events, including those of colonialism, are themselves contingent and historically determined. What we shall see is that the sceptical and agnostic imperatives of postmodernist insights, engaged by many a postcolonial campaigner, would have the startling effect of rendering the optimistic hopes and convictions of a recuperative postcolonial project highly problematic, if not downright forlorn.

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In the meantime, a number of new works had set about reviewing the colonial history of Africa, and had managed to uncover much new or neglected information. In 1950, John W. Blake, afterwards Lord Blake, read a paper to the Royal Historical Society making a plea for ‘an integrated study of African history from the point of view of Africans’ (69). That such a history ‘from the point of view of Africans’ could be written by non-African outsiders we might now regard as a contradiction in terms, but it was an enthusiastic call.

Launched at the same time and beginning publication in 1950 was the massive Ethnographic Survey of Africa, which eventually ran to some forty parts of 100– 200 pages each, with prominent contributors such as Hilda Kuper, Daryll Forde, Edwin Ardener and G.W.B. Huntingford. There was not a black African among them. Titles such as Africa Emergent (Macmillan, 1949) and The Emergent

Continent (Halladay, 1972) became popular among authors who appreciated the

urgency of revision, but nevertheless regarded Africa as a distant planet – in the words of W.M. Macmillan, former Professor of History at the University of the Witwatersrand, ‘If in any sense there is a single “African problem” it is nothing less than the bringing of civilization to Africa’ (1949, 9). Colin M. Turnbull’s

The Lonely African (1963) attempted to bridge the gulf by sentimentalising

its subject, but Basil Davidson, in a series of seminal and still highly readable works starting with Old Africa Rediscovered (1959), set about opening up an astounding but persuasive history of a continent effectively ‘lost’ to Western readers since before the Renaissance. Davidson described here and afterwards (1961, 1966, etc.) an Africa that by 1000 CE had developed mighty kingdoms, iron smelting and working, and extensive trade links across the Sahara with Mediterranean countries, and across the Indian Ocean with Arab states, India and even China. His Black Mother (1961, revised 1968) became an inspiration for students in South Africa, both white and black. For me, it was one of the earliest spurs towards the present study.

In 1962, Roland Oliver and J.D. Fage published the first edition of their Short

History of Africa, which would remain over many editions a standard introduction

to its subject, its approach adumbrated by Ronald Segal in the Penguin African Library version of 1975: ‘Much of Africa’s past has now been excavated from ignorance and error. Yet the study of African history has hardly begun’ (1975, 10). A similar service was rendered by Ronald Robinson, John Gallagher and Alice

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Denny in Africa and the Victorians: The Official Mind of Imperialism (1961/1970), which presented ‘the paradoxical nature of late-Victorian imperial expansion in Africa’ (1970, 25) as a process that neither matched the visions of the proconsuls of empire nor wholly deserved the chastisements of Afrocentrist critics.

The balanced assessments characteristic of such works have not fared well. Oliver and Fage would go on to become the doyens among English historians of Africa, co-responsible for the editing of the eight-volume Cambridge History of

Africa that began publication in 1974. Their version of a recuperative history of

Africa would, however, fall short of the expectations and agendas of indigenous historians of the very continent that the work was designed to promote. The rival

UNESCO General History of Africa began publication in 1981, and in Chapter 1,

I deal with its questionable representations of ancient Egypt’s relationships with the rest of Africa. When in 1985 Roland Oliver felt obliged to write a sharply dissident review of such fanciful historiography (867–8), this time as exhibited in Volume 7, Africa under Colonial Domination 1880–1935, he was savaged by the Nigerian historian, Chinweizu, as a lackey of ‘colonialist ideology’ and as now redundant: ‘Oliver’s review is the sort of attack which a jaded orthodoxy is liable to make on its supplanters as it is being pushed off the stage’ (1985, 1062).

The impulses of reaction and rejection that marked the emergence of an indigenous African historiography between the 1950s and the 1980s, and inspired such hostile responses to its Western counterpart (however sympathetic), will remain a theme of the present study. As we shall see, such dissent was rendered increasingly inevitable in the wake of broader controversies and contradictions generated by the uneasy league between postcolonial and postmodernist onslaughts on the ‘master narratives’ of Western colonialism and imperialism.

More orthodox literary, historical and ethnographic research continued to open up new stopes of information on the Euro-African past. The first volume of Robin Hallett’s The Penetration of Africa: European Enterprise and Exploration

Principally in Northern and Western Africa up to 1830 appeared in 1965 and

revealed the vast number of relevant works on northern and western Africa that had been published by 1815 – indeed, so vast that the second volume was never published.

Part of the problem of reinterpretation that this new wave of scholarship had to confront was the sheer abundance of low-grade information that had stacked up over the centuries, as Anthony J. Barker found in 1978. His work, The

African Link, which attempted to review ‘British Atitudes to the Negro in the

Era of the African Slave Trade 1550–1807’, revealed that a mass of descriptive literature on Africa was available in Britain by the eighteenth century, but that

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most of it was derivative or merely compendious in the repetitive accumulation of indiscriminate and uncomprehended detail. The material was there, but the keys were lost.

Nevertheless, these Renaissance and Enlightenment compendia – one thinks of the great collections of travel accounts from Ramusio (1550), De Bry (1597– 1628), Hakluyt (1598–1600), and Purchas (1625) to the Churchills (1704), Harris (1705), Astley (1745), and Osborne (1745) – although often soulless in their limited comprehension of African societies, would, for my purpose and for that very reason, prove invaluable in their revelation and confirmation of the popular images of Africa and its peoples at the time. Poor history can still make good stories, and it was the European ‘story’ of Africa that increasingly concerned me. Furthermore, the sheer descriptive and anecdotal density of these compendia does at times reflect a substantive, despite inadequate, ethnographic impulse that must caution against sweeping dismissal. A recent verdict such as that of Kate Lowe, that ‘to the majority of Europeans, the defining feature was African skin colour, and nothing else [my emphasis] … mattered, and consequently nothing else was recorded’ (Lowe, 2005, 6), is simply not true, ignoring as it does libraries full of earnest, albeit amateurish, ethnographic record.

Histories of ‘the image of Africa’ rather than of the continent itself soon began to emerge as popular narrative sources became academically respectable, the discourse of revision unfolded, and African Studies programmes proliferated, especially in the United States of America. Philip D. Curtin’s The Image of Africa: British Ideas

and Action 1780–1850 appeared in 1964, and remained for decades an important

survey of the colonialist assumptions that continued to rile revisionists. By 1966, Robin Winks could assemble an impressive cohort of Africanists to contribute the African chapters to his Historiography of the British Empire-Commonwealth, even if, despite his opening comment that ‘societies not yet nations are using the anvil of their history to beat out their claims to a separate identity’ (1966, 3), none of the authors of the African chapters were black Africans. He also had to confront an awkward truth: ‘The problems represented by nationalism, racial antagonisms, oral traditions, and illiterate or semi-literate societies are not readily reducible to the historian’s traditional tools and attitudes’ (1966, 21). Yet, despite such difficulties, the Nigerian scholar K.O. Dike (1956), as well as Michael Crowder (1968), L.H. Gann and Peter Duignan (1968), and Monica Wilson and Leonard Thompson (1969) succeeded in producing seminal new histories of West, sub-Saharan and Southern Africa, and would soon be joined by several others.

By 1975, Theodore Besterman could produce a voluminous World Bibliography

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Studies programmes. Five years earlier, John N. Paden and Edward J. Soja had opened their three-volume collection of essays, The African Experience (1970), with a report on the ‘phenomenal growth’ of African Studies in the United States as, in the words of Gwendolen Carter in the Preface, ‘the sheer drama of the process [of African independence had] captured world-wide attention’ (1: viii). The drama had also, of course, captured the attention and inspired the polemics of an emergent black scholarship committed to exposing the roots and course of colonial discrimination and slavery, projects that demanded the further rewriting of African history. As one contributor to the Paden-Soja volumes, John A. Rowe, put it: ‘It seems hardly a coincidence that 1957 saw both the independence of Ghana … and the introduction of African history into American classrooms’ (1970, 1. 154).

A slate of doctoral dissertations on the Eurocolonial encounter with Africa, all revisionist and all offering strictly binarist and minatory readings of that encounter, soon emerged. Some of these theses and the articles or monographs they inspired confronted the relatively straightforward histories of explorers, settlers and colonial administrators (Rogers, 1970; Casada, 1972; Smith, 1972; Gallup, 1973; Luther, 1979), but others turned to the more indirect production and proliferation of images of Africa in literary sources (Knipp, 1969; Rose, 1970; Miller, 1972; Linnemann, 1972; Steins, 1972; Jacobs, 1975; Schneider, 1976; Harris-Schenz, 1977; James, 1977; McDorman, 1977; Taube, 1979; Milbury-Steen, 1980).

Some were the workmanship of an early wave of African scholars studying at American and European universities, although their findings could also not proceed much further along the binarist tracks evidently sanctioned by their supervisors (Opoku, 1967; Wali, 1967; Fanoudh-Seifer, 1968; Okoye, 1969/1971; Adewumi, 1977). The argument of one of the earliest of these is typical: ‘The dominant image of the Negro … is one of hopelessness, passivity and innocent naivety, and the relation envisaged between the white and black races is one of teacher and taught, the ward and the novice’ (Wali, 1967, 62). Several articles and monographs of these years duplicated the findings of such dissertations (Randles, 1956, 1959; McCullough, 1962; Bolt, 1971; Frederickson, 1971; Johnson, 1971; Walvin, 1972; Mark, 1974; Parry, 1974; Barnett, 1975; Street, 1975; Berghahn, 1977; Mahood, 1977; Lorimer, 1978).

In a response to one of these, Christine Bolt’s Victorian Attitudes to Race (1971), Janet Robertson lamented an approach that was a common limiting feature of several: ‘History is a dialogue with the past, not a diatribe against it’ (1975, 2). All aimed to illuminate the bleak racial polarities of a past from which these modern observers deemed themselves to have become immune.

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A few of the studies in question detected some redemptive qualities in an atavistic approach to Africa that would now be associated with high modernism, notably the art of Picasso, the psychology of Jung, the fiction of Conrad, Celine and Loti, and the African adventures of Blixen, Greene, Hemingway and Van der Post. In such works, Africa becomes the primal stage for the European’s confrontation with his (almost never her) primitive nodal self, and for engagement with psychic depths and verities not accessible in the modern ‘developed’ world. This line of exploration seemed, however, to have been exhausted and to hold little further promise for my own investigation into the furthest origins of the West’s images of Africa.

Most of the scholarship in question proceeded from an assumption that had also been mine, namely that European images of Africa could be definitively sourced and substantiated in the Victorian age, or the Enlightenment, or the Renaissance, with the result that such scholars could only treat racism as a given, a malicious conceptual aberration that should and could have been avoided, and not as the intimate correlative of cognitive processes that had anticipated racist thinking long before it had achieved any specific identity in Western discourse. Much of this discourse of blame was inspired by a conviction that the ‘truth’ of the colonial encounter and its ravages could be readily ascertained and condemned.

The discussion thus unfolded as cumulative content analysis, on the assumption that the deplorable behaviour of European colonialists and their literary spokespersons was the result of ignorance and perfidy that could have been avoided (or could still be corrected) by better information, compunction, and what Thomas Kuhn has called a ‘gestalt switch’ (cited by Hacking, 1981, 3), a fundamental but willed change in the European conception of its ‘Others’ (Anderson, 1995, 190). In other words, inspiring most of the studies reviewed was a conviction that the colonial authors in question had had a Cartesian independence of cognition and will that should have been more honestly and humanely exercised. It still dominates the arguments of recent studies in the field (Hood, 1994; Byron, 2002; Kidd, 2006).

An additional problem was that, insofar as this descriptive-analytical reading of the Eurocolonial library of Africa could yield any illumination, its main findings had all been secured by a few of the earliest studies in the field, notably those of Wylie Sypher (1942), Harold Reeves Collins (1951), Katherine George (1958), W.G.L. Randles (1959), Alta Jablow (1963) and Dorothy B. Hammond (1963). Collins’s Columbia thesis of 1951, ‘British Fiction during the Age of Imperialism’, exposed most of the stereotypes of African subjects, while Randles

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plotted out very persuasively the mytheme of Monomotapa in the imagination and literature of Renaissance Europe. Katherine George, in a brilliant ten-page paper published in Isis, identified the consistent tendency in European literature from Herodotus to Haggard ‘to emphasize the strange, the shocking, and the degrading qualities of the peoples and cultures they deal with, and thus to emphasize the gulf between the civilized and the primitive worlds’ (1958, 63).

Complementary insights emerged from Wylie Sypher’s examination of British anti-slavery literature of the eighteenth century, which summed up its findings as follows: ‘The African appears … as a thoroughly noble figure, idealized out of all semblance to reality, and living in a pastoral Africa – a pseudo-African in a pseudo-Africa’ (1942, 9). These remained the signatory themes of the discourse, and were most comprehensively canvassed in two theses submitted by Hammond and Jablow, also at Columbia, in the early 1960s and subsequently developed into their book, The Africa That Never Was: Four Centuries of British

Writing About Africa (1970), republished in 1977 as The Myth of Africa.

The popularity of the Hammond and Jablow volume confirmed that there was little left to add to a minatory, binarist discourse of dismantlement that condemned all British – and by extension all Western – writing about Africa from at least the Renaissance to the nineteenth century as bigoted, insulting, ignorant and racist, and as exposing European prejudice while saying nothing worthwhile about Africa. The gist of such discourse was captured many years later by Alberto Manguel: ‘The West recognizes the Other only to better despise it, and is then astonished at the answer reflected back’ (2006, 70). Jablow’s verdict summed up and anticipated those of a generation of like-minded commentators:

The ‘beastly savage’ and the ‘noble savage’ are conventions equally lacking in realism. Both represent opposite poles on the single scale of English values…. All the virtues of character esteemed by the British – courage, a sense of honour, truthfulness, refinement, intelligence – are embodied in the one; the other epitomizes the non-valued opposites – cravenness, dishonesty, gluttony, and stupidity (1963, 44).

As the present study will show, Jablow’s invocation of the eighteenth-century trope of ‘beastly’ and ‘noble savage’ pointed in the right direction, but failed to discern the true sources and implications of a conceit of ‘two Ethiopias’ as old as Homer. But the stark and punitive alterity, a manichaean binarism, deployed in almost all of the works identified above, inevitably led to a dead end. In 1978, G.D. Killam, who had himself produced such a work of thematic content

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analysis and categorisation, Africa in English Fiction 1874–1939 (1968), and who could thus recognise the looming impasse, summed up common misgivings in a review of Brian Street’s The Savage in Literature: Representations of ‘Primitive

Society’ in English Fiction 1858–1920 (1975):

There is a pattern in such books as Street’s that is dictated by the body of literature they set out to scrutinize. And the pattern in the literature is dictated by a typicality in the assumptions made by the authors who write the books (1978, 483).

And, one had to add, in the assumptions of scholars who continued to produce critiques such as Street’s.

The tendency towards an accusatory and manichaean reading of the Euro-colonial record of African encounter was encouraged by an increasing number of black African writers entering the discourse (Dike, 1956; Mphahlele, 1962/1974; Akinjogbin, 1967; Dathorne, 1974; Echeruo, 1978). They would lay the founda-tions of a substantial black revisionary enterprise, even as they often still failed to move beyond the binarist confines of prevailing models and the demands of an adversarial agenda. In these years Chinua Achebe notoriously called the Conrad of Heart of Darkness a ‘bloody racist’ (1978, 9), and Ezekiel (Es’kia) Mphahlele, embittered by exile from South Africa, expressed the rage subsumed in such scholarship, and which had also sharpened my own quest for the sources of white racism: ‘Whites have launched a barbarous onslaught on the blacks and after long long [sic] centuries of hurt, pillage and plunder by whites, the blacks are faced with unequivocal fascism’ (1974, 56). Behind such indictments one could detect the cadences and anger of Frantz Fanon, and he would increasingly come to occupy my field of vision.

By the mid-1970s, the stark binarisms of an emerging Africanist and revisionist historiography had become a major characteristic of and inspiration for African-American scholarship; an enterprise also set on drawing an empowering legitimacy from the uncompromising discourse of alterity just reviewed, and

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perpetuating its more aggressive claims. From such beginnings emerged the militant aims and tenets of academic Afrocentrism.

In Chapter 1, I deal more specifically with Afrocentrist speculations about ancient Egypt’s relations with Africa and the entanglement of these ideas with those of Martin Bernal’s Black Athena (1987), but some observations are pertinent here. Former South African President Thabo Mbeki once invoked as a scholarly commonplace ‘the irrefutable fact that the Egyptians who built that great civilization were “black with kinky hair” as the great Greek historian, Herodotus, said’ (2006, 26). The reference is to the Histories (2, 104), where it is not the Egyptians but the Colchians of the Black Sea, perhaps settler descendants of the numerous Nubian troops drafted into Egyptian armies, that are described as ‘black-skinned and [with] woolly hair’. Yet Herodotus immediately goes on to qualify his surmises as ‘amount[ing] to but little, since several other nations are so too.’ Elsewhere, writing about Egyptian funeral customs, Herodotus makes it clear that when Egyptians ‘lose a relative, [they] let their beards and the hair on their heads grow long’ (2: 36; my emphasis). While remarking that Egyptians were darker than Greeks, nowhere in the Histories does Herodotus regard them as either Negroid or ‘kinky-haired’.

Yet President Mbeki’s ‘irrefutable facts’ are now also the gospel truths of a militant Afrocentrist academic enterprise that has established its own ortho-doxies, despite the fact that such tenets have been comprehensively discredited by scholarly research (Howe, 1998; Shavit, 2001), as well as by informed African opinion – Kwame Anthony Appiah speaks of ‘a cultural brew as noxious as any currently available in popular culture’ (1993, 24). When in June 2005 National

Geographic published the reconstructed face of Tutankhamun on its front

cover, as well as an article detailing the scientific care and forensic expertise that had yielded an image of a pharaoh who was quite obviously not Negroid African (Williams, 2005), the response was immediate. ‘This misrepresentation of King Tutankhamun as pale skinned and ski nosed is once again an effort to Europeanize Egypt’, fumed one correspondent (Oct. 2005: Forum). Behind such reactions lie several decades of a revanchist Africanist discourse that is relevant here as a further indication of how controversies over the possession of African history and culture have unfolded; and how they continue to make the attempt to source Western conceptions of Africa and Africans ever more controversial. As early as the 1950s, the Senegalese scholar Cheikh Anta Diop averred as an article of faith that ‘Ancient Egypt was a Negro civilization…. The ancient Egyptians were Negroes’ (1954, xiv), and such claims have become the received wisdom of the African-American academy (Noguera, 1976; Asante, 1988). Such

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ideologies did not arise in a vacuum. They are contingent on the recuperative zeal that came to inspire Africanist historiography as it emerged from the colonial era. In the United States in particular, such convictions have been an inevitable and burgeoning product of the revisionary zeal inherent in African-American biblical discourse ever since the early nineteenth century. Colin Kidd speaks of ‘a Black vindicationist hermeneutic which reject[s] out of hand the corrupting whiteness of white Christianity’ (2006, 248), and therefore, what is regarded as its endemically biased historiography. We shall return to Afrocentrism.

Such views have also been the inevitable outcome of both the isolation in which African history has customarily been pursued, and the binarist manichaean drive that has imbued its Africanist narratives from the start. Indeed, the isolation of the history of Africa from that of the rest of the world seems at times to have been fostered by authors from both outside and inside the continent, producing startling conundrums. So, for instance, S. Davis’s

Race-relations in Ancient Egypt (1951) is silent about Race-relations between Egyptians

and other Africans, concentrating instead on Greeks, Romans and Hebrews. Jonathan M. Hall’s Ethnic Identity in Greek Antiquity (1997) is solely concerned with the Greeks’ sense of their own identity. Books with inviting titles such as Ethnicity in Ptolemaic Egypt (Goudriaan, 1988), The Invention of Racism in

Classical Antiquity (Isaac, 2004) or Memories of Odysseus: Frontier Tales from Ancient Greece (Hartog, 1996) typically make no or minimal reference to Africa,

Ethiopians, or black people. Leading surveys such as Charles Freeman’s Egypt,

Greece and Rome: Civilizations of the Ancient Mediterranean (1996) habitually

fail to list Ethiopia, Nubia or Meroë in their indices. Benjamin Isaac, purporting to write on the origins of Mediterranean racism, side-steps the crucial theme of black-white relations in the period with the excuse that black Africans ‘did not form much of an actual presence in the Greek and Roman worlds’ (2004, 49), and in any case had had a largely ‘mythical’ status in the classical mind (50). The modern mind boggles.

Yet Africanist historiography has also habitually fostered isolationist agendas. In 1948, Jean-Paul Sartre published his essay ‘Black Orpheus’, which called upon French-African writers to let themselves be heard. As the introduction to Leopold Senghor’s influential Anthologie de la nouvelle poésie nègre (1948), it served as a rallying call for a new generation of African (and Africanist) writers. Authors such as Camara Laye, Ferdinand Oyono and Aimé Césaire would promote negritude as a ‘Black Aesthetic’ in opposition to and indeed as a denial of the European intellectual world, now disqualified, in their view, by its scandalous burden of colonialist and ethnocentric legacies (Mudimbe, 1988).

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Such a stark division came to be regarded as the only legitimate response to the ‘experience [of slavery] that has defined and appears to continue to shape our [i.e., black people’s] relationship with the rest of the world. It is the one single experience that binds all Black people together’; thus the ‘sense in which every Black writer is an exile’ (Ogude, 1981, 21–22).

The full dimensions of this ‘Black Aesthetic’ and the evolution of its exclusionist aspects over the last half-century cannot be explored here, but we may note that an African-American academic as prominent as Henry Louis Gates Jr, while claiming to reject binarist notions of a ‘Black Aesthetic’ or negritude, in 1987 still espoused the legacy of exclusivist thinking in arguing for ‘our own [aesthetic] theories …, black, text-specific theories’, and in insisting that black people learn ‘to read a black text within a black formal cultural matrix’ (1987, xxi). Such sentiments continue to yield astonishing claims of an Africanist essentialism that would hardly be tolerated if applied to a Western postmodernist world now. Thus Abiola Irele, expounding ‘The African Imagination’, claims for it ‘a special dimension’ that has ‘imparted to black expression a particular tonality’ that conveys ‘an African belonging that commands the vision of an entire people regarding their place in the world’ (1990, 53).

Lurking behind such beliefs is a racial essentialism and ethnocentric logic that, ironically, simply reverses the manifestations of white European racism that for so many centuries discounted African people. At a graphic level, it ‘posits the existence of a basic divisional line across the Southern Sahara: to the north of this line, one finds white peoples and non-African ways of thinking; to the south, one finds the Black race and African ways of thinking’ (Lewis and Wigen, 1997, 118). We shall witness the blight of such perceptions in the chapters to come.

These have become the orthodoxies of a dialectic initiated by Senghor and Sartre – even though Sartre is also on record as having come out with the extraordinary statement that ‘there is always some way of understanding an idiot, a child, a primitive man or a foreigner if one has sufficient information’ (1948, 47). The truth is that Sartre was not fundamentally interested in an emancipatory ‘Black Aesthetic’ or an emergent African liberationist militancy. One of his inspirations, however, was Frantz Fanon, and in Fanon we come to a figure and a way of looking at Africa and Africans that continue to have far-reaching implications, not only for any study of European images of Africa (such as mine), but also for any understanding of the ways in which both the revisionist Western discourse of Africa, as well as an Africanist counter-discourse, have unfolded (Young, 1995; Read, 1996; Irele, 2001; Loomba, 2002). Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s tribute of 1991 captures the intensity of the impact as well as

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the evolving objectives of what might be called the Fanonist enterprise: ‘Frantz Fanon became the prophet of the struggle to move the centre [of the universe from Europe to Africa], and his book, The Wretched of the Earth [1961, trans. 1964], became a kind of Bible among the African students from East, West and South Africa’ (1991, 198).

Fanon’s version of Africa and the colonial encounter was, of course, no less dependent on an image of Africa than any other, and not necessarily closer to the ‘truth’ of colonialism than were the biases it sought to displace. Yet Fanonist pronouncements such as ‘the black man is the white man’s fear of himself’ or ‘the real Other for the white man is and will continue to be the black man’ (1952/1959, 161) have reverberated down the decades of postcolonialist critique in credos such as R.S. Khare’s: ‘The Other, like the self, is an irreducible cognitive template of human culture’ (1992, 4); or V.Y. Mudimbe’s that ‘Europe … invented the savage as a representation of its own negated double’ (1994, xii). They have inspired Henry Louis Gates Jr to conclude: ‘As a psychoanalyst of culture, as a champion of the wretched of the earth, [Fanon] is an almost irresistible figure for a criticism that sees itself as both oppositional and postmodern’ (1991, 458). The ready enlistment of postmodernism here in the recuperative programme of postcolonialism is diagnostic and will occupy us later. That the Manichaean heresy of the fourth century (which posited an absolute dichotomy between equal forces of good and evil in the cosmos) was itself hugely popular in the early Christianity of the Maghreb Africa from which Fanon would eventually speak, has not been noticed by many; but Fanon spoke in accents resonant of that ancient debate: ‘The primary Manichaeism which governed colonial society [has been] preserved intact during the period of decolonization; that is to say, the settler never ceases to be the enemy, the opponent, the foe that must be overthrown’ (1961/1964, 40).

Yet a current inspection of Fanon’s two major texts, Peau noir, masques

blancs (1952, translated as Black Skin, White Masks, 1959) and Les damnés de la terre (1961, translated as The Wretched of the Earth, 1964), reveals a febrile,

emotive and naïve dramaturgy of racial conflict that can only have derived its potency from the harrowing Algerian struggle that had inspired these works and which had been carried over to the heroic early phases of the postcolonial era. Fanon’s major thesis, that colonial occupation destroys not just the political and socio-economic independence of black people, but the very essence of their being, their sense of self-hood, a thesis corroborated by the works of Mannoni (1950) and Memmi (1965), is an important one. It has understandably remained an inspirational tenet of liberationist discourse.

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Less inspired and more problematic was Fanon’s insistence that the colonial struggle was an utterly manichaean contest between dire enemies that had to be carried into all aspects of existence and could be invoked to sanction violence: ‘Violence was cathartic and unifying, transforming disempowered and atomised colonial subjects into a powerful political force’ (Vaughan, 2001, 18). For the rest, the intellectual substance and persuasive rhetoric of Fanon’s polemics could be thin and even preposterous, as in the following playlet from Black Skin, White Masks:

I put the white man back into his place; growing bolder, I jostled him and told him point-blank: ‘Get used to me, I am not getting used to anyone.’ I shouted my laughter to the stars. The white man, I could see, was resentful. His reaction time lagged interminably…. I had won. I was jubilant (Fanon in Goldberg 1990, 119).

Nevertheless, Fanon’s morality-play version of racial contestation constituted and enlisted a powerful body of images of Africa, the foundational status and potency of which continued to become clearer in the unfolding genealogy of the imagined Africa of my project. When in 1979, in the course of the annual BBC Reith Lectures, East African academic Ali Mazrui recommended that African states should set up ‘a continental nuclear consortium’ (808) to protect themselves from South Africa and Israel – one correspondent had already charged that ‘a more frightening concoction of Nazi-style cant I have not had the privilege to hear in years’ (781) – it was still Fanon speaking.

If Fanon provided the moral passion and aggressive energy of the first generation of postcolonial polemicists, Edward Said was to furnish the intellectual ordnance of the second generation. Sharing Fanon’s manichaean, contestational view of the colonial and Third World struggle against Western imperialism, Said infused into this paradigm the epistemological tenets of Foucault that knowledge, language and power are intimately related, and that a given culture’s language acts as both a conceptual armature and a straitjacket from which escape is well-nigh impossible: ‘Each society has its regime of truth, its “general politics” of

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truth, that is, the types of discourse which it accepts and makes function as true’ (Foucault, 1972, in Cahoone, 1996, 379). The absolute distinctions and imbalances between those with and those without power (the fundamental colonial situation) are enhanced by and expressive of the fact that, cognitively, each culture is trapped within the paradigms of experience and visions of power made possible, even dictated, by its language.

In addition, in The Order of Things (1966, translated 1970), Foucault proposed the notion of the episteme, or time-bound habit of mind, which ensures that human understanding and empathy is not only difficult and imperfect across different languages and cultures, but also across the centuries. Beyond the perceptual horizons allowed by our languages and temporality, we cannot ‘see’ the worlds of other cultures and times. Hayden White speaks of ‘ruptures in Western consciousness, disjunctions or discontinuities so extreme that they effectively isolate the epochs from one another’ (1978, 235).

The stark denial of any transcultural understanding or negotiation implied by such arguments of course renders a postcolonialist critique itself untenable and would, if true, have made the present study impossible. With Louis Montrose, one wants to say: ‘I find this aspect of Foucault’s social vision – his apparent exclusion of a space for human agency – to be extreme. In other words, my intellectual response is that his argument is unconvincing, and my visceral response is that it is intolerable’ (cited by Cheney, 2007, 265).

Nevertheless, the intellectual pedigree that Said could invoke in support of a Foucauldian revamp of Fanon, enlisting linguists and philosophers from Saussure to Derrida, ensured that Third World proponents of postcolonialism (and notably those from the Indian subcontinent) now had an elite theory to bolster Fanonist indignation on the one hand, and to expose the delinquency of Eurocentric colonialism on the other. Though Said made many attempts over the quarter of a century that followed the publication of Orientalism in 1978 to soften the rigour of its charges (1983, 1985, 1986, 1989, 1998), its essentialising and totalising condemnation of Western transcultural discourse speaks from every page. ‘Orientalism’ as ‘a Western style for dominating, restructuring and having authority over the Orient’ (1985, 3) ‘assumed an unchanging Orient absolutely different … from the West’ (96). Said’s conclusions were blunt and, after 200 pages of argument and indictment, uncompromising: ‘It is therefore correct that every European, in what he could say about the Orient, was … a racist, an imperialist, and almost totally ethnocentric’ (204).

Said seemed to revel in the harsh simplicity of his claims, and in this anticipated the mood of many followers:

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The argument, when reduced to its simplest form, [is] clear, it [is] precise, it [is] easy to grasp. There are Westerners, and there are Orientals. The former dominate; the latter must be dominated (36).

According to Said, the ‘ruthless cultural and racial essences’ of the West had been elevated and manipulated into a ‘streamlined and effective’ mechanism for confronting and subjugating the non-European world. Little wonder that as recently as 2005, David Parker has been driven to the conclusion that such arguments ‘are better understood as the elaboration of a gigantic conspiracy theory than as constructive thinking’ (3). More pointedly for my own project, if Said’s claims were to be conceded for the West’s annihilating discourse of the East, how could the Eurocolonial library of Africa, far more blatantly racist and dismissive than that of the East, warrant any attention at all? The margins within which a Western discourse of Africa might be thought to have anything useful or ‘true’ to contribute about its subject were dwindling to invisibility.

The ongoing debate about ‘Orientalism’ and its implications for the scholarly study of the East in the Western academy need not detain us here (see Ahmad, 1992; Behdad, 1994; Mackenzie, 1995; Teltscher, 1995; Young, 1995; Moore-Gilbert, 1997; Cannadine, 2001; Buruma and Margalit, 2004; Irwin, 2006; Jasanoff, 2006), but some of its tenets and African inflections warrant attention.

Crucially for me, Said inadvertently suggested a way forward from the moribund thesis industry of content analysis and blame-mongering inspired by simplistic assumptions that European observers could have written more empathetically about Africa if only they had been more honest and less racist. For if Foucault and Said were right about an absolute cultural and linguistic determinism, namely that ‘Europeans were ontologically incapable of producing any true knowledge about non-Europe’ (Ahmad, 1992, 178), then the authors of the centuries-old Eurocolonial library of Africa could not be accused of perfidy, but had instead to be understood (and exonerated?) as the victims of conceptual determinants beyond their control. Better still – those writers from Homer and Herodotus onward who, despite such glacial forces of conceptual arrest stacked against them, had nevertheless steadily reported that African cultures could be complex, varied, different, yet comprehensible, now not only deserved more respect and serious attention, but might yet be recruited into a discourse of reclamation that seemed ever more urgent.

Several Saidean acolytes drew attention to further directions that could be pursued, some even when denying such options. So, for instance, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak in a much-cited essay, ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’ (1985a),

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held that the colonial subject could only ever speak as a ventriloquist’s dummy in colonial discourse, even when sympathetically and authentically presented in a first-person voice, since, as she put it elsewhere, ‘the project of imperialism has always already historically refracted what might have been absolutely Other into a domesticated Other that consolidates the imperialist self’ (1985b, 253). Some of Kipling’s first-person Indian tales are pertinent here – their narrators appear authentically Indian, yet are comprehensively manipulated. This ‘process more insidious than naked repression’ would also occupy Abdul R. JanMohamed, for whom ‘any evident “ambivalence” is in fact a product of deliberate, if at times subconscious, imperialist duplicity, operating very efficiently through the economy of its central trope, the Manichaean allegory’ (1985, 61). How such a ploy could be at once ‘deliberate’ and ‘subconscious’, JanMohamed does not explain, but the uncompromising manichaeism evident here was diagnostic of a first cohort of postcolonialists inspired by Fanon and Said. It was propagated assiduously as a timeless and cosmic absolute by writers such as JanMohamed:

Fanon’s definition of colonial society as a Manichaean organization is by no means exaggerated. In fact, the colonial mentality is dominated by a Manichaean allegory of white and black, good and evil, salvation and damnation, civilization and savagery, superiority and inferiority, intelligence and emotion, self and other, subject and object (1983, 4). Yet such pronouncements ineluctably drew me to the dissident recognition that they simply did not match the evidence of my everyday experience as a bilingual speaker in a multicultural African country, and even less the testimony of many texts in the discourse of Africa that I had come across. With Benita Parry, I felt that Said had fostered ‘readings that are indifferent to textual gaps, indeterminacies and contradictions’ (1992, 26), and that Spivak’s anxieties did not express either the sentiments or the performance of generations of colonised speakers who could speak clearly from their host texts.

Nevertheless, the stark and punitive manichaeism inherent in Said’s thesis continued to supply former-colonial and Third World critics and their sympathisers in the West with a new arsenal of theoretical weaponry that could be deployed against all Western (univocally read as ‘imperialist’) scholarship. JanMohamed’s contributions (1983, 1985), and Hugh Ridley’s (1983 – see below), were among the earliest, but they were joined by many others dedicated not only to the dismantling of the Eurocolonial archive, but also to the disparagement of much Western cultural and intellectual achievement deemed to underlie it

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(Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o 1972, 1981; Mudimbe, 1988, 1994; Salami, 1998; Afzal-Khan and Seshadri-Crooks, 2000). ‘Institutional colonialism was maintained by language as much as by guns,’ declared Chris Tiffin and Alan Lawson (1994, i), and a large echelon of postcolonialist scholarship has come into being to explore the ‘linguistic turn’ and a consequent cognitive determinism in the colonial project. Mahmoud Salami has argued that all European authors are ‘politicized and ideologized whether [they] like it or not’ (1998, 151), hence their work merely encodes ‘accumulated Western guilt’ (155). Evidently, such ‘accumulated Western guilt’ is akin to Calvin’s notion of Original Sin – it might be forgiven, but must remain a crippling moral and cognitive curse from which no Western mind can escape.

By 1982, Peter Marshall and Glyndwr Williams felt obliged to complain that ‘Europe’s reaction to the blackness of the Negro has been exhaustively examined by recent scholars’ (228). By then, this discourse of exhaustion, focusing relentlessly on a perceived inability of European commentators to say anything ‘true’ or worthwhile about Africa and its people had led to totalising and exasperated conclusions such as those of Hugh Ridley:

Colonial literature [is] an exclusively European phenomenon with next to nothing worthwhile to say about other races and cultures. No more than anti-Semitic literature can be used as a handbook to Jewish culture should colonial literature be treated as a source-book on the Third World (1983, 3).

There did not seem much left to say after this. The postcolonial project of disparagement, energised by the scandals of slavery, colonialism, racism and the Holocaust, constantly revivified by contemporary liberation struggles, the Civil Rights movement in the United States, and the universal abhorrence of the apartheid policies for which my own country had become notorious, seemed set to derail any serious attempt to rehabilitate the textual record of the centuries of encounter between Africa and the Western world.

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Yet the sheer vehemence of this discourse, paradoxically, continued to suggest other lines of approach. A seminal contribution to the debate, at one level indicative of the mounting impediments with which my own project had to contend, came from Australia – Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin’s The Empire Writes Back (1989). The work’s title and informing impulse derived from Salman Rushdie, although its central assumptions shared little of the playful iconoclasm of Rushdie’s novels. For its authors, the English language was itself an endocultural racialised code, deeply implicated in the cognitive ravages of imperialism. It was the bearer of a ‘cultural conspiracy’, appropriating the non-imperial world and enforcing a ‘violent hierarchy’ of knowledge and power. According to this view, ‘Europe and its others’ are locked in a permanent binary opposition, a conceptual grid of violation in which language with its own coercive dynamic towards enforcing difference plays the major constitutive role. Thus ‘the nexus of power involving literature, language, and a dominant British culture’ (4) meant that the very process of encrypting the ‘other’ into a text was already a violation, an imposition and a disempowerment of the subject. All writing – and most especially all transcultural writing – was in a sense illicit, and, in the colonial context, expropriative. It would appear that none of the European texts about Africa that I had been studying should even have been written. If I seem to be lampooning The Empire Writes Back – its insights were widely respected and are still cited – it is not to discredit its scholarship, but to indicate how a punitive discourse of postcolonial rectitude was itself heading for a speechless abyss even as it increasingly refined and redefined the kinds of question one had to ask of Eurocolonial texts.

The unease generated by the uncompromising stance of The Empire Writes

Back is codified in its style. A lexis of violence articulates its thesis – language,

we are told, intrudes, invades, subverts, intervenes, seizes, demands, asserts, disfigures, oppresses, dislocates, denigrates and violates everything it used to be thought of as merely imparting. In this, the work echoed its Fanonist and Foucauldian inspirations and anticipated other critiques of a manichaean cut. So, for instance, Sara Suleri’s The Rhetoric of English India (1992), despite promising a more nuanced reading of Eurocolonial discourse, is marked by a discursive pathology of such vehemence – ‘anxiety of empire’ (13), ‘epistemological terror’ (15), ‘cultural terror’ (17), ‘discursive terror’ (18), etcetera, all the way to ‘imperial horror’ (112) – that it could only confirm what it had set out to challenge. ‘The astounding specificity of each colonial encounter’ (13) that it promises to celebrate reveals only ‘a binary rigidity … which is an inherently Eurocentric strategy’ (4).

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For several decades, the bleak binarism displayed by works such as these echoed through the discourse. Jan Nederveen Pieterse assembled an exhibition in the Tropical Museum, Amsterdam, and wrote an accompanying text to demonstrate ‘how much of Western culture is made up of prejudices about other cultures, how much of Western identity is constructed upon the negative identity of others’ (1992, 9). Benita Parry has devoted several studies (1987, 1992, 1997) to an apparent critique of the relentless construction of ‘a model of colonial discourse overwhelmingly concerned with processes of othering’ (1987, 33), yet has been unable to free herself from talking about ‘imperialism’s epistemic violence’, its ‘agonistic space’ (29) and its ‘valorizing gladiatorial skills’ (54). Indeed, her call to arms is uncompromising: ‘The common pursuit of all who engage in the study of colonial discourse [must be] to reveal the limits of a Western modernity which had accommodated slavery and colonial genocide and was complicit with the imperial project’ (1997, 10).

Yet some champions of Said’s Manichaean model of colonialism nevertheless managed to open up spaces in the binarist severity of his thesis. Homi Bhabha (1982, 1994), once referred to by Robert Young as forming with Said and Spivak the Holy Trinity of postcolonialism, posed important challenges to Saidean doctrine, notably in his notion that the colonial subject, despite always being mediated through the lenses and pages of the coloniser, could frequently disrupt colonialist assurance through parody, mime and unguarded reportage. In my own reading, I had come across many instances of such delightful one-up-manship on the part of reported African subjects. One example comes from Guy Tachard’s account of a Khoi servant from the governor’s household at the Cape of Good Hope who in the 1680s had deserted,

saying that he would not submit to the rack of a regular life, that the Dutch and such other nations were slaves to the earth, and that the Hottentots [Khoikhoi] were the masters of it, that they were not forced to stand with the hat continually under the arm, and to observe a hundred uneasy customs; that they ate when they were hungry, and followed no other rules but what nature had taught them (1688, 72).

An even more striking spoof of colonialist presumptions occurs in an early seventeenth-century Dutch source that records a local response on the Gold Coast to European traders’ complaints about theft: ‘[They said] we are rich and have great stores of wares, and brought ships full unto them, and took great pains and labours to sell it, and were so long before we sold it, that they thought

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it fit to help us therein, that we might the sooner be rid thereof’ (Artus, 1600, in Purchas, 1625, 6: 318). A sharper local response was recorded by Charles Wheeler, who in the early eighteenth century had spent ten years in West Africa:

The discerning natives account it their greatest unhappiness that they were ever visited by the Europeans. They say that we Christians introduced the traffic of slaves, and that before our coming they [had] lived in peace; but, say they, it is observable that wherever Christianity comes, there come with it a sword, a gun, powder and ball (Smith, 1744, 266).

Although these utterances are all of the ‘they say’ variety, and Gareth Griffiths has warned that there is always ‘a real concern as to whether what we are listening to is really a subaltern voice’ (1994, 75), there can be little doubt about the immediacy and authenticity of the voices just behind these reports. They once again confirmed for me that the Orientalist paradigm was wide of the mark regarding a significant sector of the Western discourse of Africa.

If supporters and exponents of Said’s views have at times contributed provocative possibilities for my own project, so of course have an array of critics who from the outset had taken issue with Orientalism. One of the earliest, Dennis Porter, spotted two major flaws in Said’s argument that would at first hardly be commented on – his achronicity and his fundamental essentialism: ‘Said asserts the unified character of Western discourse on the Orient over some two millennia’, and ‘he ignores in both Western scholarly and creative writing all manifestations of counter-hegemonic thought’ (1983/1993, 152).

These shortcomings failed to register with most of the scores of British and American reviewers who welcomed the book – ‘Said’s Orientalism appears to be a monolithic and uncontested discourse’ marvelled Lata Mani and Ruth Frankenberg in 1985 (191) – but they became ever clearer. By 1994, Ali Behdad charged that ‘in denouncing the essentialist and generalizing tendencies of Orientalism, Said’s critical approach repeats these very faults’ (11). A few years later, a sustained critique came from Bart Moore-Gilbert (1997), who argued that

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