So one is lucky to be able to revel in the sunshine of recognition by others. Or perhaps just naïve.
2009
Africa’s Tarnished Name
It is a great irony of history and geography that Africa, whose landmass is closer than any other to the mainland of Europe, should come to occupy in the European psychological disposition the farthest point of otherness, should indeed become Europe’s very antithesis. The French-African poet and statesman Léopold Sédar Senghor, in full awareness of this paradox, chose to celebrate that problematic proximity in a poem, “Prayer to Masks,” with the startling imagery of one of nature’s most profound instances of closeness: “joined together at the navel.” And why not? After all, the shores of northern Africa and southern Europe enclose, like two cupped hands, the waters of the world’s most famous sea, perceived by the ancients as the very heart and center of the world. Senghor’s metaphor would have been better appreciated in the days of ancient Egypt and Greece than today.
History aside, geography has its own brand of lesson in the paradox of proximity for us. This lesson, which was probably lost on everyone else except those of us living in West Africa in the last days of the British Raj, was the ridiculous fact of longitudinal equality between London, mighty imperial metropolis, and Accra, rude rebel camp of colonial insurrection; so that, their unequal stations in life notwithstanding, they were named by the same Greenwich meridian and consequently doomed together to the same time of day!
But longitude is only half the story. There is also latitude, and latitude gives London and Accra very different experiences of midday temperature, for example, and perhaps gave their inhabitants over past eons of time radically different complexions. So differences are there, if those are what one is looking for. But there is no way in which such differences as do exist could satisfactorily explain the profound perception of alienness which Africa has come to represent for Europe.
This perception problem is not in its origin the result of ignorance, as we are sometimes inclined to think. At least, it is not ignorance entirely, or even primarily. It was in general a deliberate invention devised to facilitate two gigantic historical events: the Atlantic slave trade and the colonization of Africa by Europe, the second event following closely on the heels of the first, and the two together stretching across almost half a millennium from about A.D. 1500. In an important and authoritative study of this invention, two American scholars, Dorothy Hammond and Alta Jablow, show how a dramatic change in the content of British writing about Africa coincided with an increase in the volume of the slave trade to its highest level in the eighteenth century. That content
shifted from almost indifferent and matter-of-fact reports of what the voyagers had seen to judgmental evaluation of the Africans… The shift to such pejorative comment was due in large measure to the effects of the slave trade. A vested interest in the slave trade produced a literature of devaluation, and since the slave trade was under attack, the most derogatory writing about Africa came from its literary defenders. [Scottish slave trader Archibald] Dalzel, for instance, prefaced his work [The History of Dahomy] with an apologia for slavery: “Whatever evils the slave trade may be attended with … it is mercy … to poor wretches, who … would otherwise suffer from the butcher’s knife.” Numerous proslavery tracts appeared, all intent upon showing the immorality and degradation of Africans… Enslavement of such a degraded people was thus not only justifiable but even desirable. The character of Africans could change only for the better through contact with their European masters. Slavery, in effect, became the means of the Africans’ salvation, for it introduced them to Christianity and civilization.1
The vast arsenal of derogatory images of Africa amassed to defend the slave trade and, later, colonization gave the world a literary tradition that is now, happily, defunct, but also a particular way of looking (or, rather, not looking) at Africa and Africans that endures, alas, into our own day. And so, although those sensational “African” novels which were so popular in the nineteenth century and the early part of the twentieth have trickled to a virtual stop, their centuries-old obsession with lurid and degrading stereotypes of Africa has been bequeathed to the cinema, to journalism, to certain varieties of anthropology, even to humanitarianism and missionary work itself.
A few years ago, there was an extraordinary program on television about the children of the major Nazi war criminals, whose lives had been devastated by the burden of the guilt of their fathers. I remember how I felt quite sorry for them in the beginning. But then, out of nowhere, came the information that one of them had gone into the church and would go as a missionary to the Congo. I sat up.
“What has the Congo got to do with it?” I asked my television screen. Then I remembered the motley parade of adventurers, of saints and sinners that had been drawn from Europe to that region since it was first discovered by Europe in 1482—Franciscan monks, Jesuit priests, envoys from the kings of Portugal, explorers and missionaries, agents of King Leopold of the Belgians, H. M. Stanley, Roger Casement, Joseph Conrad, Albert Schweitzer, ivory hunters and rubber merchants, slave traders and humanitarians. They all made their visit and left their mark, for good or ill. And the Congo, like the ancient tree by the much used farm road, bears on its bark countless scars of the machete.
Paradoxically, a saint like Schweitzer can give one a lot more trouble than a King Leopold II, villain of unmitigated guilt, because along with doing good and saving African lives Schweitzer also managed to announce that the African was indeed his brother, but only his junior brother.
But of all the hundreds and thousands of European visitors to the Congo region in the last five hundred years, there were few who had the deftness and sleight of hand of Joseph Conrad, or who left as deep a signature on that roadside tree. In his Congo novella, Heart of Darkness, Conrad managed to transform elements from centuries of transparently crude and fanciful writing about Africans into a piece of “serious” and permanent literature.
Halfway through his story, Conrad describes a journey up the River Congo in the 1890s as though it were the very first encounter between conscious humanity, coming from Europe, and an unconscious, primeval hegemony that had apparently gone nowhere and seen nobody since the world was created. Naturally, it is the conscious party that tells the story:
We were wanderers on a prehistoric earth, on the earth that wore the aspect of an unknown planet. We could have fancied ourselves the first of men taking possession of an accursed inheritance.2
“Prehistoric earth … unknown planet … fancied ourselves the first of men.”
This passage, which is Conrad at his best, or his worst, according to the reader’s predilection, goes on at some length through “a burst of yells,” “a whirl of black limbs,” “of hands clapping,” “feet stamping,” “bodies swaying,” “eyes rolling,” “black incomprehensible frenzy,” “the prehistoric man himself,” “the night of first ages.” And then Conrad delivers his famous coup de grâce. Were these creatures really human? And he answers the question with the most sophisticated ambivalence of double negatives:
No they were not inhuman. Well, you know that was the worst of it—this suspicion of their not being inhuman.3
But to return to the word “fancied,” which Conrad’s genius had lit upon:
We could have fancied ourselves the first of men taking possession of an accursed inheritance.
I suggest that “fancied” is the alarm word insinuated into Conrad’s dangerously highfalutin delirium by his genius as well as simple reason and sanity, but almost immediately crowded out, alas, by the emotional and psychological spell cast on him by the long-established and well-heeled tradition of writing about Africa. Conrad was at once a prisoner of this tradition and its most influential promoter, for he, more than anyone else, secured its admission into the hall of fame of “canonical” literature. Fancy, sometimes called Imagination, is not inimical to Fiction. On the contrary, they are bosom friends. But they also observe careful
protocol around each other’s property and around the homestead of their droll and difficult neighbor, Fact.
Conrad was a writer who kept much of his fiction fairly close to the facts of his life as a sailor. He had no obligation to do so, but that was what he chose to do—to write about places that actually exist and about people who live in them. He confessed in his 1917 author’s note that
Heart of Darkness is experience too, but it is experience pushed a little (and only very little) beyond the actual facts of the case for the perfectly legitimate, I believe, purpose of bringing it home to the minds and bosoms of the readers.4
One fact of the case which Conrad may not have known was how much traffic the River Congo had already seen before it saw him in the 1890s. Even if one discounts the Africans who lived on its banks, there had been many Europeans on the river before Conrad. There was a European sailing ship on the Congo four hundred years before he made his journey, and fancied himself the first of men to do it. That degree of fancying needs a good dose of fact to go with it.
The Portuguese captain, Diogo Cão, who discovered the river for Europe in 1482 was actually looking for something else when he stumbled on it; he was looking for a passage around Africa into the Indian Ocean. On his second voyage, he went beyond his first stop up the river and heard from the inhabitants of the area about a powerful ruler whose capital was still farther up. Cão left four Franciscan monks to study the situation and resumed the primary purpose of his expedition. On his way back, he once more detoured into the Congo to pick up his monks; but they were gone! He seized, in retaliation, a number of African hostages, carried them off to Lisbon, and delivered them to King Manuel of Portugal.5 This unpropitious beginning of Europe’s adventure in the heart of Africa was quickly mended when Cão returned to the Congo for the third time in 1487, bringing back his African hostages, who had meanwhile learned the Portuguese language and Christian religion. Cão was taken to see the king, the Mweni-Congo, seated on an ivory throne surrounded by his courtiers. Cão’s monks were returned to him, and all was well. An extraordinary period ensued in which the king of Congo became a Christian with the title of Dom Afonso I. Before very long,
the royal brothers of Portugal and Congo were writing letters to each other that were couched in terms of complete equality of status. Emissaries went back and forth between them. Relations were established between Mbanza and the Vatican. A son of the Mweni-Congo was appointed in Rome itself as bishop of his country.6
This bishop, Dom Henrique, had studied in Lisbon, and when he led a delegation of Congo noblemen to Rome for his consecration, he addressed the pope in Latin.
Nzinga Mbemba, baptized as Dom Afonso, was a truly extraordinary man. I have written of him elsewhere, but want to emphasize that he learned in middle life to read and speak Portuguese. It was said that when he examined the legal code of Portugal he was surprised by its excessive harshness. In jest he asked the Portuguese envoy what the penalty was in his country for a citizen who dared to put his foot on the ground! This criticism was probably reported back to the king of Portugal, for in a 1511 letter to his “royal brother,” Dom Afonso, he made defensive reference to differing notions of severity between their two nations.7 Can we today imagine a situation in which an African ruler is giving, rather than receiving, admonition on law and civilization?
The Christian kingdom of Dom Afonso I in Congo did not fare well and was finally destroyed two centuries later after a long and protracted struggle with the Portuguese. A major source of the problem was the determination of the Portuguese to take out of Congo as many slaves as their vast new colony in Brazil demanded, and the Congo kings’ desire to limit or end the traffic. There was also a dispute over mining rights. In the war that finally ended the independence of the kingdom of Congo and established Portuguese control over it, the armies of both nations marched under Christian banners.
If this story reads like a fairy tale, that is not because it did not happen but because we have become all too familiar with the Africa created by Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, its long line of predecessors going back to the sixteenth century, and its successors today, in print and the electronic media. This tradition has invented an Africa where nothing good happens or ever happened, an Africa that has not been discovered yet and is waiting for the first European visitor to explore it and explain it and straighten it up, or, more likely, perish in the attempt.
In Conrad’s boyhood, explorers were the equivalent of today’s Hollywood superstars. As a child of nine, Conrad had pointed at the center of Africa on a map and said: When I grow up I shall go there! Among his heroes were Mungo Park, who drowned exploring the River Niger; David Livingstone, who died looking for the source of the Nile; Dr. Barth, the first white man to approach the gates of the walled city of Kano. Conrad tells a memorable story of Barth “approaching Kano which no European eye had seen till then,” and an excited population of Africans streaming out of the gates “to behold the wonder.”8
And Conrad also tells us how much better he liked Dr. Barth’s first-white-man story than the account of Sir Hugh Clifford, British governor of Nigeria, traveling in state to open a college in Kano, forty years later. Even though Conrad and Hugh Clifford were friends, the story and pictures of this second Kano event left Conrad “without any particular elation. Education is a great thing, but Doctor Barth gets in the way.”9
That is neatly and honestly put. The Africa of colleges is understandably of little interest to avid lovers of unexplored Africa. In one of his last essays, “Geography and Some Explorers,” Conrad describes the explorers he admired as “fathers of militant geography,” or even more reverentially as “the blessed of militant geography.” Too late on the scene himself to join their ranks, did he become merely a militant conjurer of geography, and history? Let it be said right away that it is not a crime to prefer the Africa of explorers to the Africa of colleges. There were some good people who did. When I was a young radio producer in Lagos in the early 1960s, a legendary figure from the first decade of British colonial rule in Nigeria returned for a final visit in her eighties. Sylvia Leith-Ross had made a very important study of Igbo women in her pioneering work African Women, in which she established from masses of personal interviews of Igbo women that they did not fit European stereotypes of downtrodden slaves and beasts of burden.10 She graciously agreed to do a radio program for me about Nigeria at the turn of the twentieth century. It was a wonderful program. What has stuck in my mind was when she conceded the many good, new things in the country, like Ibadan University College, and asked wistfully: “But where is my beloved bush?”
Was this the same hankering for the exotic which lay behind Conrad’s preference for a lone European explorer over African education? I could hear a difference in tone. Sylvia Leith-Ross was gentle, almost self-mocking in her choice, and without the slightest hint of hostility. At worst, you might call her a starry-eyed conservationist! Conrad is different. At best, you are uncertain about the meaning of his choice. Until, that is, you encounter his portrait, in Heart of Darkness, of an African who has received the rudiments of education:
And between whiles I had to look after the savage who was fireman. He was an improved specimen; he could fire up a vertical boiler. He was there below me and, upon my word, to look at him was as edifying as seeing a dog in a parody of breeches and a feather hat walking on his hind legs. A few months of training had done for that really fine chap. He squinted at the steam-gauge and at the water-gauge with an evident effort of intrepidity—and he had filed teeth too, the poor devil, and the wool of his pate shaved into queer patterns, and three ornamental scars on each of his cheeks. He ought to have been clapping his hands and stamping his feet on the bank, instead of which he was hard at work, a thrall to strange witchcraft, full of improving knowledge.11
This is poisonous writing, in full consonance with the tenets of the slave trade—inspired tradition of European portrayal of Africa. There are endless variations in that tradition of the “proble
m” of education for Africa; for example, a highly educated African might be shown sloughing off his veneer of civilization along with his Oxford blazer when the tom-tom begins to beat. The moral: Africa and education do not mix. Or: Africa will revert to type. And what is this type? Something dark and ominous and different. At the center of all the problems Europe has had in its perception of Africa lies the simple question of African humanity: are they or are they not like us?
Conrad devised a simple hierarchical order of souls for the characters in Heart of Darkness. At the bottom are the Africans, whom he calls “rudimentary souls.” Above them are the defective Europeans, obsessed with ivory, petty, vicious, morally obtuse; he calls them “tainted souls” or “small souls.” At the top are regular Europeans, and their souls don’t seem to have the need for an adjective. The gauge for measuring a soul turns out to be the evil character Mr. Kurtz:
He had the power to charm or frighten rudimentary souls into an aggravated witch-dance in his honor, he could also fill the small souls of the pilgrims with bitter misgivings—he had one devoted friend at least and he had conquered one soul in the world that was neither rudimentary nor tainted with self-seeking.12
The alleged tendency of Africans to offer worship to any European who comes along is another favorite theme in European writing about Africa. Variations on it include the veneration by Africans of an empty Coca-Cola bottle that falls out of an airplane. Even children’s stories are not free of this insult, as I once learned from foolishly buying an expensive, colorful book for my little girl without first checking it out.
The aggravated witch-dance for a mad white man by hordes of African natives may accord with the needs and desires of the fabulists of the Africa that never was, but the experience of Congo was different. Far from falling over themselves to worship their invaders, the people of this region of Africa have a long history of resistance to European control. In 1687, an exasperated Italian priest, Father Cavazzi, complained: