The First Ethiopians. Malvern van Wyk Smith
revealed the vast number of relevant works on northern and western Africa that had been published by 1815 – indeed, so vast that the second volume was never published.
Part of the problem of reinterpretation that this new wave of scholarship had to confront was the sheer abundance of low-grade information that had stacked up over the centuries, as Anthony J. Barker found in 1978. His work, The African Link, which attempted to review ‘British Atitudes to the Negro in the Era of the African Slave Trade 1550–1807’, revealed that a mass of descriptive literature on Africa was available in Britain by the eighteenth century, but that most of it was derivative or merely compendious in the repetitive accumulation of indiscriminate and uncomprehended detail. The material was there, but the keys were lost.
Nevertheless, these Renaissance and Enlightenment compendia – one thinks of the great collections of travel accounts from Ramusio (1550), De Bry (1597–1628), Hakluyt (1598–1600), and Purchas (1625) to the Churchills (1704), Harris (1705), Astley (1745), and Osborne (1745) – although often soulless in their limited comprehension of African societies, would, for my purpose and for that very reason, prove invaluable in their revelation and confirmation of the popular images of Africa and its peoples at the time. Poor history can still make good stories, and it was the European ‘story’ of Africa that increasingly concerned me. Furthermore, the sheer descriptive and anecdotal density of these compendia does at times reflect a substantive, despite inadequate, ethnographic impulse that must caution against sweeping dismissal. A recent verdict such as that of Kate Lowe, that ‘to the majority of Europeans, the defining feature was African skin colour, and nothing else [my emphasis] … mattered, and consequently nothing else was recorded’ (Lowe, 2005, 6), is simply not true, ignoring as it does libraries full of earnest, albeit amateurish, ethnographic record.
Histories of ‘the image of Africa’ rather than of the continent itself soon began to emerge as popular narrative sources became academically respectable, the discourse of revision unfolded, and African Studies programmes proliferated, especially in the United States of America. Philip D. Curtin’s The Image of Africa: British Ideas and Action 1780–1850 appeared in 1964, and remained for decades an important survey of the colonialist assumptions that continued to rile revisionists. By 1966, Robin Winks could assemble an impressive cohort of Africanists to contribute the African chapters to his Historiography of the British Empire-Commonwealth, even if, despite his opening comment that ‘societies not yet nations are using the anvil of their history to beat out their claims to a separate identity’ (1966, 3), none of the authors of the African chapters were black Africans. He also had to confront an awkward truth: ‘The problems represented by nationalism, racial antagonisms, oral traditions, and illiterate or semi-literate societies are not readily reducible to the historian’s traditional tools and attitudes’ (1966, 21). Yet, despite such difficulties, the Nigerian scholar K.O. Dike (1956), as well as Michael Crowder (1968), L.H. Gann and Peter Duignan (1968), and Monica Wilson and Leonard Thompson (1969) succeeded in producing seminal new histories of West, sub-Saharan and Southern Africa, and would soon be joined by several others.
By 1975, Theodore Besterman could produce a voluminous World Bibliography of African Bibliographies, a further witness to the rapid expansion of African Studies programmes. Five years earlier, John N. Paden and Edward J. Soja had opened their three-volume collection of essays, The African Experience (1970), with a report on the ‘phenomenal growth’ of African Studies in the United States as, in the words of Gwendolen Carter in the Preface, ‘the sheer drama of the process [of African independence had] captured world-wide attention’ (1: viii). The drama had also, of course, captured the attention and inspired the polemics of an emergent black scholarship committed to exposing the roots and course of colonial discrimination and slavery, projects that demanded the further rewriting of African history. As one contributor to the Paden-Soja volumes, John A. Rowe, put it: ‘It seems hardly a coincidence that 1957 saw both the independence of Ghana … and the introduction of African history into American classrooms’ (1970, 1. 154).
A slate of doctoral dissertations on the Eurocolonial encounter with Africa, all revisionist and all offering strictly binarist and minatory readings of that encounter, soon emerged. Some of these theses and the articles or monographs they inspired confronted the relatively straightforward histories of explorers, settlers and colonial administrators (Rogers, 1970; Casada, 1972; Smith, 1972; Gallup, 1973; Luther, 1979), but others turned to the more indirect production and proliferation of images of Africa in literary sources (Knipp, 1969; Rose, 1970; Miller, 1972; Linnemann, 1972; Steins, 1972; Jacobs, 1975; Schneider, 1976; Harris-Schenz, 1977; James, 1977; McDorman, 1977; Taube, 1979; Milbury-Steen, 1980).
Some were the workmanship of an early wave of African scholars studying at American and European universities, although their findings could also not proceed much further along the binarist tracks evidently sanctioned by their supervisors (Opoku, 1967; Wali, 1967; Fanoudh-Seifer, 1968; Okoye, 1969/1971; Adewumi, 1977). The argument of one of the earliest of these is typical: ‘The dominant image of the Negro … is one of hopelessness, passivity and innocent naivety, and the relation envisaged between the white and black races is one of teacher and taught, the ward and the novice’ (Wali, 1967, 62). Several articles and monographs of these years duplicated the findings of such dissertations (Randles, 1956, 1959; McCullough, 1962; Bolt, 1971; Frederickson, 1971; Johnson, 1971; Walvin, 1972; Mark, 1974; Parry, 1974; Barnett, 1975; Street, 1975; Berghahn, 1977; Mahood, 1977; Lorimer, 1978).
In a response to one of these, Christine Bolt’s Victorian Attitudes to Race (1971), Janet Robertson lamented an approach that was a common limiting feature of several: ‘History is a dialogue with the past, not a diatribe against it’ (1975, 2). All aimed to illuminate the bleak racial polarities of a past from which these modern observers deemed themselves to have become immune.
A few of the studies in question detected some redemptive qualities in an atavistic approach to Africa that would now be associated with high modernism, notably the art of Picasso, the psychology of Jung, the fiction of Conrad, Celine and Loti, and the African adventures of Blixen, Greene, Hemingway and Van der Post. In such works, Africa becomes the primal stage for the European’s confrontation with his (almost never her) primitive nodal self, and for engagement with psychic depths and verities not accessible in the modern ‘developed’ world. This line of exploration seemed, however, to have been exhausted and to hold little further promise for my own investigation into the furthest origins of the West’s images of Africa.
Most of the scholarship in question proceeded from an assumption that had also been mine, namely that European images of Africa could be definitively sourced and substantiated in the Victorian age, or the Enlightenment, or the Renaissance, with the result that such scholars could only treat racism as a given, a malicious conceptual aberration that should and could have been avoided, and not as the intimate correlative of cognitive processes that had anticipated racist thinking long before it had achieved any specific identity in Western discourse. Much of this discourse of blame was inspired by a conviction that the ‘truth’ of the colonial encounter and its ravages could be readily ascertained and condemned.
The discussion thus unfolded as cumulative content analysis, on the assumption that the deplorable behaviour of European colonialists and their literary spokespersons was the result of ignorance and perfidy that could have been avoided (or could still be corrected) by better information, compunction, and what Thomas Kuhn has called a ‘gestalt switch’ (cited by Hacking, 1981, 3), a fundamental but willed change in the European conception of its ‘Others’ (Anderson, 1995, 190). In other words, inspiring most of the studies reviewed was a conviction that the colonial authors in question had had a Cartesian independence of cognition and will that should have been more honestly and humanely exercised. It still dominates the arguments of recent studies in the field (Hood, 1994; Byron, 2002; Kidd, 2006).
An additional problem was that, insofar as this descriptive-analytical reading of the Eurocolonial library of Africa could yield any illumination, its main findings had all been secured by a few of the earliest studies in the field, notably those of Wylie Sypher (1942), Harold Reeves Collins (1951), Katherine George (1958), W.G.L. Randles (1959), Alta Jablow (1963) and Dorothy B. Hammond (1963). Collins’s Columbia thesis of 1951, ‘British Fiction during the Age of Imperialism’, exposed most of the stereotypes