The First Ethiopians. Malvern van Wyk Smith
(Azurara, 1453; Cadamosto, 1455/1507), or of the first century of Portuguese encounter with Ethiopia (Castanhoso, 1564; Bermudes, 1565), are cast as chivalric romances, hence the African actors in them are often not seen as social beings but as the local avatars of cosmic moral forces against whom the champions of Catholic Christianity must contend.
Thus a simple judgemental response on a modern reader’s part to Portuguese ‘racism’ in such a context may be problematic. Columbus took texts such as Mandeville’s and Marco Polo’s Travels with him on his voyages not because he was foolish or gullible, but because the distinction between empirical experience, scientific knowledge, and ‘romance’ did not exist at that time. This was so both because of what Foucault would have regarded as a major epistemic difference between Columbus’s and our understanding of what constitutes ‘true knowledge’, and an equally fundamental difference in conceptions of which genres are appropriate for the conveyance of ‘truth’ as against ‘fantasy’. In Chapter 9, we shall see how Diodorus Siculus’s account of the ethnic groups and cultures of north-east Africa in the late pre-Christian centuries (now often cited as evidence of Hellenistic attitudes to Africa) was not meant as either history or ethnography, but is merely incidental to a fabular account of the origins of the Greek pantheon. It thus renders a select society of ‘Ethiopians’ as ‘sacred’ or ‘worthy’, while dismissing the rest of the continent as ‘savage’. This is not ethnography so much as mythography.
If narrative can be as disruptive as it can be coercive, romance in particular can exploit these Janus-like effects. Umberto Eco has argued that romance is the most slippery and subversive of all genres, juxtaposing events, points of view, values and ideologies not readily commensurable in reality, but creating interesting synergies in the realm of ideas. ‘Romance has no continuing city as its final resting place’, argues Northrop Frye (1976, 172) as he goes on to develop the anarchic potential of the genre, as Umberto Eco has also done: ‘Romance must always have as its base a misconception … and from that fundamental misconception … must arise developments, digressions and, finally, unexpected and pleasant recognitions’ (Eco, 1983/1995, 81).
Seamus Heaney proposes that ‘Poetry is a symbolic resolution of conflicts insoluble in experience’ (1989, 1412), and much the same may be claimed for romance. I have shown elsewhere that romance was regularly and suggestively invoked in the literature of the early South African frontier to develop resolutions to racial conflict that would not have been countenanced in reality (Van Wyk Smith, 1999a). The counter-realist nature and contrivance of romance, often invoked in European attempts to render the ‘difference’ of African realities, is not necessarily and only productive of ‘othering’. Techniques of defamiliarisation typical of romance can be manipulative and misrepresentative, but they can also suggest new ways of seeing, of generating different insights and disturbing possibilities, and of relaying the significance of challenging encounters.
Several other developments over the last few decades in our understanding of how the mind works, how knowledge is constituted, and how ‘hidden texts’ (in cartography, for example) function have proven illuminating for my own researches. Chief of these is the emergence of the concept of memetics, the brainchild of Richard Dawkins (1976), but extensively promoted elsewhere (Dennett, 1996; Lynch, 1996; Blackmore, 1999; Aunger, 2000). The huge popularity of Dawkins’s idea of the meme, defined as a ‘gene analogue’ and ‘a self-replicating element of culture, passed on by imitation’ (Dawkins, 2003, 120), has slotted neatly into the rapid development of the science of genetics over the last few decades, encouraging the argument that, like genes, memes or packages of ideas (racism or religion, for example) have a self-replicating and tenacious power of their own in the human mind. ‘Cultural transmission is analogous to genetic transmission’, argues Dawkins (1976, 189). He goes on to suggest that cognate memes combine to form memeplexes, ‘gangs of mutually compatible memes’ (117) that in turn combine to shape the major cultural and ideological programmes that inform human behaviour and define cultural norms and belief systems. Such memeplexes can be ‘viruses of the mind’ (as in racism and other cultural prejudices) or they can benefit human existence (as in humanitarianism or convictions of fundamental human liberties).
There has been much resistance to the notion of the memeplex, notably from sociologists and Marxists alarmed that Dawkins’s arguments might confer on cultural prejudices and practices such as racism and capitalism an archetypal or foundational identity inaccessible to human intervention. However, Dawkins has provided the answer to this anxiety right from the start: ‘We are built as gene machines and cultured as meme machines, but we have the power to turn against our creators. We, alone on earth, can rebel against the tyranny of the selfish replicators’ (1976, 201).
Once again, as a white South African who had grown up in a society that could be described as a classic example of a polity wholly infested with the memeplex of racism but now re-inventing itself as a ‘rainbow nation’, I could learn much from Dawkins’s ideas. Even as his theory made it clear that facile notions of racism as a social aberration that could merely be legislated away were unrealistic, it confirmed that we are masters of our own ideas and can change them, however tough such transformation might be. Memeplexes, narrative packages, cultural chromosomes – all have become useful terms in the assessment of the subtlety and perdurance of human mindsets. Said’s ‘Orientalism’ could be regarded as a memeplex, a set of replicable cultural prejudices, and as such it may also be confronted and remedied like any other stubborn cultural shibboleth. Likewise, racism is not a ‘primordial maladaptive practice’ (Blackmore, 1999, 35) inherent to the Eurocolonial ideological make-up, but rather an intellectual fungus that can be eradicated, albeit with difficulty. As Susan Blackmore has shown, ‘one of the consequences of memetic evolution is that humans can be more altruistic than their genes alone would dictate’ (1999, 146).
Dawkins’s notions of meme and memeplex have generated or are paralleled by other concepts of the same kind, all suggesting that cultural habits such as racism are coherent (albeit reprehensible) assemblies of ideas that create the illusion of the primordial or self-evident. Thus Ian Stewart and Jack Cohen speak of ‘extelligence’ as ‘the contextual and cultural analogue of internal personal intelligence’ (1997, 10) or as ‘all of the “cultural capital” that is available to us’ (243) and that has ‘its own characteristic structure and behaviour’ (x). Like the memeplex, such ‘extelligence’ can over time build up its own coercive logic, and can be both boon and curse; but it is not mandatory.
Fredric Jameson has proposed the term ideologeme for similar purposes, and I am indebted to my colleague, Dan Wylie, for the invention of another, the narreme. Narremes are strands of narrative structure that seem to have their own replicatory logic and seem to support, ‘naturally’, the ideologemes that they convey, the ideologeme being defined as ‘a conceptual or belief system, an absolute value, an opinion or a prejudice’ that readily takes on a ‘protonarrative’ quality (Jameson, 1981, 87–88). Myths, faiths, folklore and prejudice can thus all present themselves as self-evident and self-validating cultural ‘stories’ that are hard to resist. Jameson stresses ‘the fundamentally narrative character of such ideologemes’ (88), thus underscoring again the dangerously but illusively coercive power of narrative.
Finally, Claude Levi-Strauss’s notion of the mytheme (which may originally have inspired Dawkins) as an irreducible motif that enters into many stories and has a symbolic-cultural origin and explanatory function beyond the individual story in which it occurs, is clearly pertinent as well. All of these foster what Jerome Bruner has called ‘hermeneutic composability’ or the illusion that ‘a story “is as it is” and needs no interpretation’ (1991, 9). The cultural force or leverage of such stories is self-evident, but not irremediable, and the Eurocolonial library of Africa can offer many pertinent records of dissent and resistance to such ‘grand narratives’.
The notion of the perdurable memeplex would in due course clarify for me the nature and force of the theme of ‘two Ethiopias’, the one ‘worthy’, the other ‘savage’, that over more than two millennia became habitual in the European discourse of Africa. As I explain in this volume, notably in Chapter 8, by late-dynastic