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.
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 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 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 Eurocolonial 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 foundations 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 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,
