The First Ethiopians. Malvern van Wyk Smith

      In Ethics, Theory and the Novel, after examining various critical discourses pertinent to how we read and benefit from texts, some reviewed in this Introduction and all inspired by ‘the moral scepticism that post-structuralism derives largely from Nietzsche…[and] the Enlightenment’ (1994, 12), David Parker settles for a dialogic model of literary-ethical evaluation:

      The various theories of culture or existence that the best imaginative literature comprehends tend to be set in dialogical interrelationship with each other, in a searching, mutually revealing exploration in which there is no final vocabulary or master-narrative ( 5).

      It must be clear to the reader that the concept of ‘dialogical interrelationship’ had over the years come to direct my own reading of the European discourse of Africa. ‘World is incorrigibly plural’, announces Louis Macniece in ‘Snow’, and this has seemed good advice. Mikhail Bakhtin’s notion of the ‘dialogic imagination’ (1981), with its implication that all discourse is essentially interactive and always subsumes a conversation, a speaker and listener, coupled to his further elaboration of heteroglossia and the carnivalesque provocativeness of all utterance, whereby signification is rarely monologic but mostly contestational, not definitive but propositional, has increasingly opened up possibilities of reading Euro-African texts differently and provisionally as dense and often contradictory semantic structures.

      If the construction of Africa is discursive, it has also been inherently dialogic. Writers who set out to publicise their views about Africa normally did so not merely to repeat what everyone before them had said, but to offer what they took to be new, corrective and even dissenting material. That with the benefit of hindsight, we can now see that often they produced no more than a litany of conformity does not mean that they intended to chant in unison. The mere fact that many authors wrote as if they expected dissent, as if they were aware that they were entering a highly contested field regarding the continent and its people, must at least be grounds for caution and revison in the modern reader. ‘The attempt to describe another culture is never simply an act of appropriation, nor are images of the other merely versions of the self-image of the observer’, suggests Rod Edmond (1997, 21). The texts of such encounters, riven by anxiety and contradiction, are not monologic but contestational.

      In the discourse of race, a field notably marked by essentialist claims, it is particularly important to observe such caveats. In his seminal examination of the deep contradictions that persist in our discourses of race – ‘Western society seems to be repelled by the consequences of racial thinking yet forced to accept its importance’ (1996, 2) – Kenan Malik concludes that the only viable way of resolving the dilemmas of ‘inequality as a practical reality’ is an ongoing dialectic, Bakhtinian in essence: ‘The dialectical approach to humanity sees the universal and the particular in a state of constant tension and dialogue’ (267). Furthermore, hard as it may be, we can choose: ‘Human beings [are] conscious active subjects constantly making and remaking the world around them’ (268).

      Nor are such insights new. In 1670, summing up the African section of his English rendering of D’Abbeville Sanson’s Geographical Description of the Four Parts of the World (1656), Richard Blome clearly saw just such diversity in Africa:

      If we would have believed certain authors among the ancients, this Africa had been represented to us with unsupportable heats, unsufferable droughts, fierce and cruel beasts, perfidious men, horrible and affrightful monsters; whereas time, which daily discovers things unknown to the ancients, hath made us see that the greatest heats of Africa hath some refreshments; that the driest sands have some wells, some waters; that the vastest solitudes have some green fields, some fruits; that the beasts are not so dangerous but that men may defend themselves from their fury; nor the men so faithless, but that they have commerce and society among themselves, as also with strangers; [and] that their dragons, serpents, griffons, etc. are for the most part imaginary (82).

      Like many before and after him, Blome insists that the visitor to Africa should read the continent between the lines and listen to the edges of conversations to understand the many meanings that ‘Africa’ and its people had come to acquire over the ages.

      Lawrence Cahoone argues that ‘every text is built on some kind of exclusion or repression, hence it belies itself and, when read carefully, undermines its own message’ (1996, 17). As we have seen, in much postcolonialist critical discourse ‘the return of the repressed’ is usually taken to confirm in all such writing the repetitive Eurocolonial record of perfidy and oppression, but Cahoone’s verdict (inspired by postmodernist insights) alerts us to the more exciting possibility that all such texts also contain other stories, stories that may countermand, complicate or even discredit their avowed themes of racial superiority and imperial mastery. As Pierre Macherey has argued, there can be no text ‘which is completely self-conscious, aware of the means of its own realization, aware of what it is doing’ (1966/1978, 27). Arnold Krupat (1992) and E.M. Beekman (1996) have used such insights to show how the colonial archive may be explored to yield readings very different from those of a conventional postcolonialism.

      In the present study, which attempts to identify the sources of the very earliest European images of Africa in Egyptian, North African, classical Mediterranean and early Christian cultures, such countervailing dynamics will emerge constantly as the discourse of that encounter reveals itself to be unstable and contradictory. It will, for instance, transpire that concepts we may presently regard as typical indicators of prejudices generated by Eurocolonial misconceptions of Africa and as firmly diagnostic of Western racism and imperialism, actually had their origin not in the colonial record but in Africa itself, specifically in Egyptian, Nubian and Mediterranean-African conceptions of the rest of the continent. That the grossly caricatured image of Negroid facial features that we would now associate with the worst phases of European racism was devised not in Mediterranean Europe, but was an Egyptian and, indeed, Nubian creation (see Chapter 8) formulated precisely so as to distinguish the African ‘other’ from the superior world of Nile Valley civilisations, is just one demonstration of the pervasive presence of the dissident subtext in the discourse of Africa.

      If, as proposed by Bakhtin, all discourse is dialogic and expressive of the fundamental situation that a speaker is persuading a listener, it is also true that all texts tend to be both energised and scarred by anxieties concerning their own rhetorical and appropriative procedures. Conrad’s Heart of Darkness is probably the most teasing and spectacular instance of such textual neurasthenia in the library of African encounter, but traces of similar self-subverting or at least doubt-generating procedures may be found in Africanist texts from Herodotus to Hemingway. In these texts, the authorial voice is always in dialogue, promotionally or defensively, addressing a (non-African) audience that may consent or dissent, but is always prone to register responses different from those the author may have intended. We also have to accept that there may be a ‘profound silence between cultures which finally cannot be traversed by understanding’ (Ashcroft et al., 1989, 86).

      Yet none of this necessarily leads to cognitive paralysis; on the contrary, these inevitable hazards of making and reading texts challenge the imagination and prompt our interpretive skills. In the words of Linda Colley, speaking of a much later period, ‘read scrupulously [such texts] usefully disrupt the notion that there was ever a single, identifiably British, still less “European”, perspective on the non-European world’ (2003, 15). Similar insights prompted Roland Barthes’s seminal formulation of textual polyphony:

      We know now that a text is not a line of words releasing a single ‘theological’ meaning (the ‘message’ of the Author-God) but a multidimensional space in which a variety of