“apparent incapacity for improvement,” and that their inability to take a distance from the concerns of each passing moment kept them from developing either memory or any productive kind of imagination. Burton was particularly critical of Africans who attempted to take on European ideas, clothing, or behavior (especially under the influence of Christian missionaries), and his outpourings in this line received enough public notice for them to be attacked by African writers, including the then well-known black physician, scientist, and banker James Africanus Horton, who castigated Burton for advancing false and insulting racial theories.52
A number of things help to account for the sharp differences between what almost seem to be two different Richard Burtons speaking in these voices. One is that in some degree his views changed over time. The negative comments mostly reflect his experiences at the end of the 1850s, when he had his first encounters with Africa and Africans in the continent’s eastern regions, starting with the journey he undertook to the third major Muslim pilgrimage site, Harar in Somaliland, and followed by his attempt to find the source of the Nile in the central African lake regions in the company of another British army officer, John Hauning Speke. Although each trip achieved its aim in some ways, both were painful failures in others, especially for Burton. He undertook the Harar trip as a continuation of his earlier visit to Medina and Mecca, and expected to do it, too, in disguise, as a Muslim merchant. The plan seemed to go well at first but had to he abandoned when Burton was convinced along the way that his light complexion (he neglected to bring along the nut oil he had used to darken his skin in Arabia) would put his life in danger in Harar itself—not because he would be suspected of being a Western European, but because people were likely to take him as a Turk, an identity no less hated in East Africa than that of “Frank.” Thus he made his entrance into Harar in uniform as a British officer and not as a Muslim pilgrim. Even so, he was effectively imprisoned for ten days by the Amir, who ruled the place with a strong and often violent hand. Burton’s life seems to have been in real danger, the Amir fearing that his presence would fulfill an old prophecy about the kingdom losing its independence should any European succeed in entering it. In the end, however, Burton was allowed to go free, chiefly because the ruler feared that the British might retaliate if he harmed one of their officers, curtailing his profitable participation in the slave trade.
While in Harar, Burton pursued his longstanding interest in local cultures and histories (he believed that his ties to local people from whom he sought information on this score may have aided in preserving his life), but one lesson of the visit was that he would not be able to pursue his cultivation of an “Oriental” identity on African soil, and his next African projects chiefly involved geographical exploration in the style of other famous nineteenth-century travelers such as David Livingstone and Henry Morton Stanley. These, however, turned out to bring greater dangers and worse suffering than the Harar trip, partly because of the difficulties of organizing enough local people to support the undertaking, the perils presented by the climate and terrain, the hostile reception given the visitors by local tribes (which ended with Burton being severely wounded and having to be carried in a litter for some weeks), and partly because of the conflict that developed between Burton and his partner Speke. The two were badly matched, Speke being an enthusiast for big-game hunting with no interest in native cultures or religions and no familiarity with local languages. But he was an intrepid if sometimes careless explorer, and it was he who succeeded in locating the source of the Nile in Lake Victoria, at a time when Burton was laid up with illness. The grounds on which he believed in his discovery were shaky and uncertain, involving what he thought he had been told by local people with whom he had no common language, but he succeeded where Burton failed. The latter, partly out of jealousy, refused to credit Speke’s claims, and the venomous and public controversy between them dragged on for years, ending only with Speke’s death in 1864, from a self-inflicted gunshot wound that may have been an accident but some believed to be suicide.
Like the Harar episode, the Nile project presented Burton with a very different experience from those he met with in either India or Arabia, and some of what he wrote about it simply reflects the contrast. That many of his comments are bound to strike people with more modern sensibilities as vile and contemptible is testimony to an evolution in attitudes that we should cherish as an advance in both understanding and human empathy. But affirming our commitment to this gain should not close our eyes to the truth of some of Burton’s observations (a number of which, as we shall see, still applied to the life Chinua Achebe described a century later). As Fawn Brodie insists:
There was filth, mutilation, ignorance, indolence, drunkenness and violence. The natives did live in huts populated with “a menagerie of hens, pigeons, and rats of peculiar impudence,” like the poor in Ireland, as he was careful to point out. Certain tribes did burn their witches, again, as he noted, like Europeans of a not-too-distant date. … In several tribes, if an infant cut his upper incisor teeth before the lower, he was killed or sold into slavery. If twins were born, they were often both killed. … Burton saw the disregard for life among his own bearers. One bought a slave child, who as he discovered shortly, could not keep up with the caravan because of sore feet. The owner decided to abandon her, but cut off her head lest she benefit someone else.53
The splendor of nature in Africa could not compensate Burton for the sense of alienation he felt there: “The absence of all association, the sense of loneliness and estrangement, the absurd distance from friend and family seem to diffuse an ugliness over every African river, however fair.” The continent was a “stranger-land,” at the other pole from the Arabia where he so easily felt at home, and which he described in the foreword to the Thousand and One Nights translation as “the land of my predilection … a region so familiar to my mind that even at first sight, it seemed a reminiscence of some by-gone metempsychic life in the distant Past.”54 The antipathy Burton felt toward African life was not so complete as to blind him to features he could admire; even in the eastern regions whose conditions made him speak about “degeneration” and “bestiality,” he noted elements close to those he would later cite as evidence for intelligence and cultivation, reporting that “many negro and negroid races” possessed “an unstudied eloquence which the civilized speaker might envy, and which, like poetry, seems to flourish most in the dawn of civilization.” But such observations were mostly drowned out by the tide of revulsion.55
One reason why later writings such as the proverbs book could shift the balance toward the positive judgments noted above may simply have been that the impact of Burton’s first experiences in Africa was no longer so immediate and potent, receding at the same time that he acquired more experience of native languages and thinking. Curiously, however, not only did his recourse to racial categories not diminish in the face of his recognition that African tongues and speech testified to genuine intellect and creativity, the moment when Burton presented African cultural forms as evidence for black people’s unquestionable intellectual capacity was also the one when strictly biological and physical thinking became more prominent in his writing. Burton was not alone in taking this direction: he pursued it in concert with the friends and associates with whom he banded together to found the Anthropological Society of London in 1863. The group broke away from an older organization, the Ethnological Society, precisely to give greater emphasis to the physical and biological basis of racial and cultural difference (a viewpoint encouraged by the publication of Darwin’s Origin of Species in 1859); the shift was signaled by the substitution of “anthropological” for “ethnological” in the new organization’s name. Other considerations motivated the break as well, in particular a desire to speak freely in meetings and discussions about sexual behavior in “primitive” societies and about physical sexual features both male and female; such things were forbidden at the Ethnological Society because their sessions were open to women, a problem the new group dealt with by excluding them. Burton stood close to James Hunt, the Anthropological Society’s president and a leader in compiling and using data on measurable physical differences in such things as skull and brain size, and facial and bodily proportions. Burton contributed to all this by collecting skulls in Africa (beginning on the trip in search of the Nile’s source); he often spoke about the racial elements he thought he could discern in various parts of people’s faces or torsos, and like Hunt gave much attention
