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 Exploration, the compilers placed their selections from the greats of 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 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.
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
