shapes and bumps.56
How can we understand Burton’s turning in this direction just at the moment when he was praising the precision and expressive power of African languages and the high cultural level of their proverbs, declaring at the same time that the distance between “savage” and “civilized” was much less than commonly supposed? And how can a person so aware, as he was in the case of the Jews, that significant “racial” characteristics can be generated by culture and history no less than by biology, have insisted on the determining power of measurable physical features? These tangled questions stand near the center of any attempt to grasp how Burton’s preconceptions and experiences shaped his understanding of cultural relations and whether there was any consistency to his thinking. They are important in grasping broadly shared nineteenth-century attitudes as well.
A key to unraveling them has been supplied by Dane Kennedy: behind Burton’s emphasis on the biological determination of differences between human groups was his opposition to one particular and prominent way of affirming human universality in his time, the one advanced by Christian evangelicals. For them what mattered most about human beings was the state of their souls; cultural difference was a marginal concern compared with the spiritual core common to humans everywhere and the need to bring all individuals into the fold of faith. By contrast, looking for a physical basis of differences in thinking and behavior was a way to shine a more intense light on cultural diversity too.
Evangelical Christians played a large role in nineteenth-century culture. Much of the puritanical moralism signaled by the term Victorian, and against which Burton spoke out all through his life, arose from the evangelical campaign to shape everyday life around rigorous adherence to Christian precepts. Thus it is not surprising that Burton was anything but friendly to the missionary project of conversion pursued by evangelicals in the 1860s. Among their converts were the most prominent of the Africans who rose up against Burton’s negative pronouncements about African life and culture. Like the Sepoy whom he decried on his first trip to India, such people appeared in his eyes as ungainly hybrids, neither genuinely African nor truly European. He saw the Africans who had embraced the missionary message as coming from the same mold, dressing themselves up in “the cast-off finery of Europe” and behaving accordingly. Like some of Burton’s other reactions to Africans, this one seems to have been fed by a visceral dislike that issued in judgments both superficial and mean-spirited; later he came to recognize that people such as his chief critic, James Africanus Horton, were capable of genuine cultivation and accomplishment. All the same, I think it is wrong to see these notions as in tension with Burton’s own engagement with disguise and cultural synthesis, as some writers have. On one level, his dislike of Christianized Africans constituted his own version of the Muslim suspicion and distrust of converts he noted in both India and Arabia; in addition, it gave expression to his understanding that merely changing one’s religious faith could not bridge the distance between cultures, because it did not address the pervasive contrasts in everyday behavior and the presuppositions about the world underlying them that bulked so large in cultural identity.
Burton’s objections to the missionary project rested on an additional ground, his conviction that core elements of Christianity fit badly with African life as it existed, especially in contrast with the other non-native religion that was expanding its presence on the continent during the nineteenth century, Islam. Muslim doctrine and ethics set itself against practices that constituted immediate and powerful barriers to moral and social advancement in Africa: “cannibalism and fetishism, the witch tortures, the poison ordeals and legal incest, the ‘customs’ [to be described below] and the murders of albinos, of twins.” That it left in place other objectionable things, “polygamy, domestic slavery, and the degradation of women,” was true, but abolishing them (as Christian missionaries desired) would have required a fundamental social restructuring. “Unlike Christianity,” as Dane Kennedy summarizes Burton’s view, “which left its converts socially deracinated and morally unmoored, [Islam] supplied them with a syncretist faith that accommodated itself to ancestral traditions while contributing a new social and ethical framework for meeting the wider world.”57 It was this cultural fit, not any theological consideration, that led Burton to see Islam’s influence there as positive, while Christianity’s was not.
Here as elsewhere, however, Burton’s ability to grasp such contrasts in cultural terms did not lead him to retreat from his emphasis on racial difference conceived biologically. The “first step in moral progress” Islam provided prepared “the African … for a steady onward career, as far as his faculties can take him.” Such a formula makes modern readers cringe, a reaction that is bound to be deepened in the face of two positions Burton took that were in accord with it. The first of these was his attitude toward slavery. In several writings he argued that slavery was an appropriate and justifiable condition in situations where people’s degree of social and intellectual development had not reached a sufficiently “civilized” level, and that Africans were still in the process of reaching such a point. Although no longer so justified as it had once been, slavery had until recently served as a vehicle of improvement, taking people out of situations whose isolated and undeveloped conditions offered few resources for bringing them to a higher plane of existence.58 The second notion Burton and his friends such as Hunt defended against Christian-inspired views (and those of the Ethnological Society) had to do with whether differing human groups were all branches of a single tree, or whether instead they descended from separate origins and lineages. Christianity, rooted in the Biblical idea of a single creation, entailed a monogenist view of humanity, a single point of human origin; but the Anthropological Society promoted polygenism, which traced differing groups to different evolutionary pathways, along which some had advanced farther than others. Few notions are more offensive to advocates of human equality today, and it is not easy for us to recognize the very different implications that the choice between the two notions carried. All the same, as Kennedy has recognized:
Burton’s embrace of a polygenist understanding of race was motivated not just by his belief in the separate genesis of Africans, but by his desire to defend their distinctive social practices and sense of cultural identity against extinction. He was most fervently outspoken in his advocacy of the polygenist position during his years in West Africa because it was there that the missionaries had made their most significant inroads against indigenous systems of behavior and belief. … What appears to us a paradox—the convergence of curiosity about other cultures as autonomous systems operating outside any absolute standards with the view of race as a biological fact whose various groupings are distinct, fixed, and hierarchically ordered—was entirely consistent and logical to Burton.59
The idea that cultural contrasts were rooted in racial difference firmed up the ground on which different ways of life could be granted independence against the homogenizing thrust of European and especially Christian claims to cultural universality.
It was this perspective that allowed Burton to arrive at some remarkable and even sympathetic understandings of practices often regarded as merely cruel and barbaric. Of these, few were looked on with greater horror by Westerners than the “customs” of the West African kingdom of Dahomey, the ritual acts by which groups of people were put to death to provide companions for a defunct king. Burton had listed the “customs” along with cannibalism and infanticide as among the most barbarous of African practices in his 1863 book Wanderings in West Africa. But the next year he was sent to Dahomey to try to put a stop to the practice, and once there he became convinced that it was too deeply rooted in native beliefs and loyalties to be abolished (a judgment that recalls his reports to Napier about intra-familial violence in Sind).
These beliefs and loyalties, moreover, were akin to some that underlay “civilized” practices: rather than “love of bloodshed,” what the executions expressed was “filial piety.” “The Dahoman, like the ancient Egyptian, holds this world to be his temporary lodging. His true home is Ku-to-men, Deadman’s Land. It is not a place of rewards and punishments, but a Hades for ghosts, a region of shades, where the King will rule for ever and where the slave will for ever serve. The idea is perpetually present to the popular mind.” When a king dies,
