African Genius. Basil Davidson

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       ‘Just plain nonsense. . . .’ and after

      AT ONE OF THEIR GATHERINGS OF 1861 THE DISTINGUISHED Victorians of London’s Ethnographical Society found themselves with a delicate problem. They had invited a foreigner, a gentleman from France, to speak on travels through the unexplored forests of equatorial Africa. And why not? They were men who took pride in a liberal breadth of international outlook. Unfortunately this French gentleman, this M. du Chaillu for whom their shocked Transactions could afterwards find no Christian name, had not proved satisfactory. In discussing a horde of largely naked savages called the Mpongwe, M. du Chaillu had appeared to suggest that these natives might be other than they seemed. He had gone so far as to argue for certain redeeming features. He had even spoken with some respect of their religion.

      It was understandable that the ethnographers should have felt a need to set matters right in the wake of such remarks. They lived in dangerous Darwinian years when the frontiers and even the foundations of proper and accepted belief had begun to take a serious buffeting. There were even moments, if you took a long view, when it seemed as though there were no longer any natural and reliable divide to save the members of the Ethnographical Society from a distant origin in beings so unfortunate as those they called the ‘tawny Bosjeman’ and the ‘leather-skinned Hottentot’. Carried to logical conclusions, such opinions could only be subversive of established law and order. Feeling that something must be done, the ethnographers called in Captain Richard Burton. He, they knew, could be relied upon to use his great authority in the proper way.

      Captain Burton did not let them down. This already famous explorer began by offering a redeeming African feature to match M. du Chaillu’s. He opined that ‘an abnormal development of adhesiveness, in popular language a peculiar power of affection, is the brightest spot in the negro character’. Yet this was about as much as could sensibly be said for the natives he had known. M. du Chaillu, they must believe, had been lucky: he had run into a better lot than usual. Compared with them, however, there was the ‘superior degeneracy of the eastern tribes’, not to mention all the others one could think of. No doubt the Mpongwe might have some sort of religious belief. It might also be true that ‘the religion of the Africans is ever interesting to those of a maturer faith, as the study of childhood is pleasing to those of riper years’. But one ought not to go too far.

      Not only, in Burton’s view, had Africans failed to develop from the primitive to the less primitive: they had also reached a point of helplessness at which, if left to themselves, they would never do any better. In that great schedule of hierarchical progress from Savagery to Civilisation imagined by the more conservative Victorians, with Europe at the peak and zenith of the line, the Africans were simply not in the race. Perhaps they had once set out, though this was more than doubtful: if so, they had long since stopped running. Exactly why was not known. But the reason, whatever it might be, was generally agreed to lie in some fatal deficiency of their nature. Some experts thought it was a matter of the African brain’s being too small for civilised development. Others argued that the root of the trouble lay not so much in brain size as in diminished frontal lobes, or an insufficiently reliable ‘supragranular layer of cortex’. The results, in any case, were understood to be deplorable. Once an African had become adult, Burton opined in a view widely accepted, ‘his mental development is arrested, and thenceforth he grows backwards instead of forwards’.

      Defended by their travellers, these Victorians held firm to their hierarchies of racial progress and found plenty of evidence to fortify them. Returning from the Upper Nile in 1866 Sir Samuel Baker assured them that the African ‘mind is as stagnant as the morass which forms its puny world’, and other explorers said much the same. It followed that the evolutionists had clearly got things wrong; and there was quiet satisfaction among the more respectable members of the Ethnographical Society, in that same year of 1866, when the impetuous Dean Farrar proposed once and for all to set the record straight by dividing humanity into three great classes, ‘the Savage races, the Semi-civilised races, and finally the two Civilised races’—the latter categories, of course, including none like the Mpongwe.

      We are generally a long way from such views. But they are worth recalling if only for their perfectly dramatic contrast with those of modern science. In 1896 a well-known teacher of philosophy at Durham University, F. B. Jevons, published an Introduction to the History of Religion which became a standard work. Seventy years later a modern anthropologist of Africa, among the most eminent of his day, could summarise current opinion on Jevons’s book by describing it as a ‘collection of absurd reconstructions, unsupportable hypotheses and conjectures, wild speculations, suppositions and assumptions, inappropriate analogies, misunderstandings, and misinterpretations, and, especially in what he wrote about totems, just plain nonsense’.

      Old views about Africa are worth recalling for another reason. Though vanished from serious discussion, they still retain a kind of underground existence. The stercoraceous sediment of Burton’s opinions, and of others such as Burton, has settled like a layer of dust and ashes on the minds of large numbers of otherwise thoughtful people, and is constantly being swirled about. What this leads to, despite all factual evidence to the contrary, are endless suspicions that writers such as Lothrop Stoddard were or are just possibly right when they wrote or write about the ‘natural and inherent inferiority’ of Africans; that ‘in the negro, we are in the presence of a being differing profoundly not merely from the white man but also from [other] human types’; or that ‘the negro . . . has contributed virtually nothing’ to the civilisation of the world. However scientifically mistaken, these notions apparently remain part of our culture.

      Often it is the aggressive violence of such opinions that most surprises. But perhaps one ought not to be surprised. These notions arose essentially from an identification of categories of ‘race’ and ‘class’. Outside their comfortable windowpanes Victorian men of property saw the hateful Devil of a new proletariat, hungry, abused, always liable to strike; and they feared what they saw. At another remove they viewed the Africans in the same obscuring light: as beings of ‘the lower orders’ whom civilisation, if it were to survive, must keep sternly ‘in their place’. They accordingly tended to think of Africans not only as children incapable of growing up, but as dangerous and potentially criminal children. All but a few agreed that these ‘natives’ could not safely be admitted to the salons of human equality.

      If views like these have managed to remain alive, it is also true that the twentieth century has done something to clear them away. Even during the central colonial period, when inquiry into the nature of African humanity was generally at a low ebb, anthropologists who followed Durkheim

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