The First Ethiopians. Malvern van Wyk Smith
titles such as Ethnicity in Ptolemaic Egypt (Goudriaan, 1988), The Invention of Racism in Classical Antiquity (Isaac, 2004) or Memories of Odysseus: Frontier Tales from Ancient Greece (Hartog, 1996) typically make no or minimal reference to Africa, Ethiopians, or black people. Leading surveys such as Charles Freeman’s Egypt, Greece and Rome: Civilizations of the Ancient Mediterranean (1996) habitually fail to list Ethiopia, Nubia or Meroë in their indices. Benjamin Isaac, purporting to write on the origins of Mediterranean racism, side-steps the crucial theme of black-white relations in the period with the excuse that black Africans ‘did not form much of an actual presence in the Greek and Roman worlds’ (2004, 49), and in any case had had a largely ‘mythical’ status in the classical mind (50). The modern mind boggles.
Yet Africanist historiography has also habitually fostered isolationist agendas. In 1948, Jean-Paul Sartre published his essay ‘Black Orpheus’, which called upon French-African writers to let themselves be heard. As the introduction to Leopold Senghor’s influential Anthologie de la nouvelle poésie nègre (1948), it served as a rallying call for a new generation of African (and Africanist) writers. Authors such as Camara Laye, Ferdinand Oyono and Aimé Césaire would promote negritude as a ‘Black Aesthetic’ in opposition to and indeed as a denial of the European intellectual world, now disqualified, in their view, by its scandalous burden of colonialist and ethnocentric legacies (Mudimbe, 1988).
Such a stark division came to be regarded as the only legitimate response to the ‘experience [of slavery] that has defined and appears to continue to shape our [i.e., black people’s] relationship with the rest of the world. It is the one single experience that binds all Black people together’; thus the ‘sense in which every Black writer is an exile’ (Ogude, 1981, 21–22).
The full dimensions of this ‘Black Aesthetic’ and the evolution of its exclusionist aspects over the last half-century cannot be explored here, but we may note that an African-American academic as prominent as Henry Louis Gates Jr, while claiming to reject binarist notions of a ‘Black Aesthetic’ or negritude, in 1987 still espoused the legacy of exclusivist thinking in arguing for ‘our own [aesthetic] theories …, black, text-specific theories’, and in insisting that black people learn ‘to read a black text within a black formal cultural matrix’ (1987, xxi). Such sentiments continue to yield astonishing claims of an Africanist essentialism that would hardly be tolerated if applied to a Western postmodernist world now. Thus Abiola Irele, expounding ‘The African Imagination’, claims for it ‘a special dimension’ that has ‘imparted to black expression a particular tonality’ that conveys ‘an African belonging that commands the vision of an entire people regarding their place in the world’ (1990, 53).
Lurking behind such beliefs is a racial essentialism and ethnocentric logic that, ironically, simply reverses the manifestations of white European racism that for so many centuries discounted African people. At a graphic level, it ‘posits the existence of a basic divisional line across the Southern Sahara: to the north of this line, one finds white peoples and non-African ways of thinking; to the south, one finds the Black race and African ways of thinking’ (Lewis and Wigen, 1997, 118). We shall witness the blight of such perceptions in the chapters to come.
These have become the orthodoxies of a dialectic initiated by Senghor and Sartre – even though Sartre is also on record as having come out with the extraordinary statement that ‘there is always some way of understanding an idiot, a child, a primitive man or a foreigner if one has sufficient information’ (1948, 47). The truth is that Sartre was not fundamentally interested in an emancipatory ‘Black Aesthetic’ or an emergent African liberationist militancy. One of his inspirations, however, was Frantz Fanon, and in Fanon we come to a figure and a way of looking at Africa and Africans that continue to have far-reaching implications, not only for any study of European images of Africa (such as mine), but also for any understanding of the ways in which both the revisionist Western discourse of Africa, as well as an Africanist counter-discourse, have unfolded (Young, 1995; Read, 1996; Irele, 2001; Loomba, 2002). Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s tribute of 1991 captures the intensity of the impact as well as the evolving objectives of what might be called the Fanonist enterprise: ‘Frantz Fanon became the prophet of the struggle to move the centre [of the universe from Europe to Africa], and his book, The Wretched of the Earth [1961, trans. 1964], became a kind of Bible among the African students from East, West and South Africa’ (1991, 198).
Fanon’s version of Africa and the colonial encounter was, of course, no less dependent on an image of Africa than any other, and not necessarily closer to the ‘truth’ of colonialism than were the biases it sought to displace. Yet Fanonist pronouncements such as ‘the black man is the white man’s fear of himself’ or ‘the real Other for the white man is and will continue to be the black man’ (1952/1959, 161) have reverberated down the decades of postcolonialist critique in credos such as R.S. Khare’s: ‘The Other, like the self, is an irreducible cognitive template of human culture’ (1992, 4); or V.Y. Mudimbe’s that ‘Europe … invented the savage as a representation of its own negated double’ (1994, xii). They have inspired Henry Louis Gates Jr to conclude: ‘As a psychoanalyst of culture, as a champion of the wretched of the earth, [Fanon] is an almost irresistible figure for a criticism that sees itself as both oppositional and postmodern’ (1991, 458).
The ready enlistment of postmodernism here in the recuperative programme of postcolonialism is diagnostic and will occupy us later. That the Manichaean heresy of the fourth century (which posited an absolute dichotomy between equal forces of good and evil in the cosmos) was itself hugely popular in the early Christianity of the Maghreb Africa from which Fanon would eventually speak, has not been noticed by many; but Fanon spoke in accents resonant of that ancient debate: ‘The primary Manichaeism which governed colonial society [has been] preserved intact during the period of decolonization; that is to say, the settler never ceases to be the enemy, the opponent, the foe that must be overthrown’ (1961/1964, 40).
Yet a current inspection of Fanon’s two major texts, Peau noir, masques blancs (1952, translated as Black Skin, White Masks, 1959) and Les damnés de la terre (1961, translated as The Wretched of the Earth, 1964), reveals a febrile, emotive and naïve dramaturgy of racial conflict that can only have derived its potency from the harrowing Algerian struggle that had inspired these works and which had been carried over to the heroic early phases of the postcolonial era. Fanon’s major thesis, that colonial occupation destroys not just the political and socio-economic independence of black people, but the very essence of their being, their sense of self-hood, a thesis corroborated by the works of Mannoni (1950) and Memmi (1965), is an important one. It has understandably remained an inspirational tenet of liberationist discourse.
Less inspired and more problematic was Fanon’s insistence that the colonial struggle was an utterly manichaean contest between dire enemies that had to be carried into all aspects of existence and could be invoked to sanction violence: ‘Violence was cathartic and unifying, transforming disempowered and atomised colonial subjects into a powerful political force’ (Vaughan, 2001, 18). For the rest, the intellectual substance and persuasive rhetoric of Fanon’s polemics could be thin and even preposterous, as in the following playlet from Black Skin, White Masks:
I put the white man back into his place; growing bolder, I jostled him and told him point-blank: ‘Get used to me, I am not getting used to anyone.’ I shouted my laughter to the stars. The white man, I could see, was resentful. His reaction time lagged interminably…. I had won. I was jubilant (Fanon in Goldberg 1990, 119).
Nevertheless, Fanon’s morality-play version of racial contestation constituted and enlisted a powerful body of images of Africa, the foundational status and potency of which continued to become clearer in the unfolding genealogy of the imagined Africa of my project. When in 1979, in the course of the annual BBC Reith Lectures, East African academic Ali Mazrui recommended that African states should set up ‘a continental nuclear consortium’ (808) to protect themselves from South Africa and Israel – one correspondent had already charged that ‘a more frightening concoction of Nazi-style cant I have not had the privilege to hear in years’ (781) – it was still Fanon speaking.
