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 preconceptions 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 surprisingly, 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 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 (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).
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
