The First Ethiopians. Malvern van Wyk Smith

      INTRODUCTION

      To us in the West, Africa is that part of the world which remains most deeply endowed with the two central facets of the other; that is, the mysterious and the exotic.

      —Patrick Chabal, ‘The African Crisis: Context and Interpretation’, 1996, 45

      I thought for some reason even then of Africa, not a particular place, but a shape, a strangeness, a wanting to know.

      —Graham Greene, Journey without Maps, 1936

      This book is a history of the idea of ‘Africa’ in the consciousness of the early Mediterranean and European world. G.M. Young once remarked that ‘the real, central theme of history is not what happened, but what people felt about it when it was happening’ (1952, vi), and the present study has been conceived in these terms.

      In 1979 Jean Devisse concluded the second volume of the magisterial The Image of the Black in Western Art, produced for the Menil Foundation by a team of scholars under the general editorship of Ladislas Bugner, with the following thoughts:

      Many see the sixteenth century as the starting point of relations between Europe and Black Africa, and in a way this is not inexact, give or take fifty years. This book, however, proves that these relations had a long prehistory. If Africa hardly dreamed of Europe before the middle of the fifteenth century, Europe, on the other hand, had had certain images of the black continent and its peoples for centuries before (1979, 2: 2. 258).

      Despite Devisse’s optimism that the Bugner enterprise had ‘proven’ the long antecedence of European images of Africa and Africans, these volumes also made it clear that much further work was needed to explain the provenance and import, rather than merely to record the persistence, of such images. In his Preface to the first volume of The Image of the Black in Western Art, the general editor had himself suggested one way forward: ‘What is most urgently needed is an in-depth examination of the literary sources in relation to our theme.’ This sentiment chimed well with my own interests at the time.

      A life-long personal engagement with a particular set of perceptions of Africa, namely those of a white South African, seemed to confer privileged insights into the iconographic history of Africa in the European imagination even as it challenged the very substance and legitimacy of such concepts. Unlike Patrick Chabal, I am not one of ‘us in the West’, but have experienced Africa as both ‘mysterious and exotic’, yet also as home and intimate. Growing up in one of the world’s most unambivalently pariah states, namely apartheid South Africa, yet with no other country to think of remotely as home, I had to embark on an early intellectual pilgrimage to resolve how I could relate to that vast landmass and its people north of me, a world of which I was an unmistakable part, but that was somehow also forbidden and (officially) irredeemably ‘other’.

      An early venture into such explorations produced a study of the poetry of the Anglo-Boer War (Van Wyk Smith, 1978), in which I attempted to place the substantial legacy of verse that this southern African conflict of 1899–1902 had produced within the wider history and context of the emergence of the poetry of war. In 1988, at the time of the by-then inevitably controversial commemoration of the rounding of the Cape of Good Hope by the Portuguese in 1488 and the resultant colonisation of southern Africa, it seemed appropriate to compile an anthology of poetry inspired by this theme, from the Lusiads onward, that stressed not the celebratory and imperialist aspects, but rather the tragic endeavours and missed opportunities of that high emprise (Van Wyk Smith, 1988).

      But by the late 1980s, it had also become clear to me that the southern African encounter between indigenous peoples and Europeans, and the conflicts among rival imperial powers in the region, had not only rehearsed ancient European-African disharmonies, but were the local manifestation of racial dynamics, expansionist drives, and perceptual paradigms that had impacted on proto-European responses to the continent and its people since ancient times. These responses seemed to demand a thorough archaeology of the earliest European ideas about Africa. If mine was an image of Africa as the product of a particular kind of racist ancestry and upbringing in South Africa but shared by many others, an early rudimentary truth I had to confront was that the origin of such images was highly elusive, and lay well beyond the simple racism of my own background.

      It became clear to me that the ‘Africa’ that fascinated me was not a place but an idea; not so much a subject for geo-historical and ethnographic investigation, as the site and product of myth and discourse. I found, moreover, that moving backwards through the centuries of European-African encounter persistently produced the effect of déja vu – at each stage the evidence suggested conjunctions and prejudices already firmly in place and stereotypically invoked. The backward trawl through the high imperialism (and racism) of the nineteenth century, the Enlightenment, the Renaissance, and the Christian Middle Ages repeatedly suggested that unsympathetic European perceptions of Africa and its people somehow always had the status of the already self-evident. Even the Greeks and Romans seemed to be invoking ideas about black Africans and their continent that had come from somewhere else.

      In a recent substantial collection of essays, Black Africans in Renaissance Europe, one of the editors speaks of ‘firmly held classical and medieval preconceptions relating to the African continent’ (Earle and Lowe, 2005, 3), yet no contributor explains how pejorative and racist views about Africa and Africans could have become ‘firmly held … preconceptions’ by classical times. Not surprisingly, the outcome is another series of binarist indictments without much enlightenment.

      The ‘somewhere else’ referred to above has turned out to be pharaonic Egypt. The crucial informing paradigm for almost all subsequent Euro-Mediterranean comprehensions of Africa derived ultimately from Egyptian conceptions of an African hinterland, conceptions that by archaic Greek times had resolved into the Homeric notion of ‘two Ethiopias’ invoked in both the Iliad and the Odyssey (see Chapter 1). As the following study will