Images of Africa

I have been thinking about the impending 25th of May which is Africa Day and noticed that Africa and Africans mean a lot of different things to many writers over the years.

It is said that Africa is the world’s second-largest and second-most populous continent, after Asia in both aspects. At about 30.3 million km² including adjacent islands, it covers 20% of the earth’s land area and 6% of its total surface area. With 1.4 billion people as of 2021, it accounts for about 18% of the world’s human population.

It is also generally said that Africa has 40% of the world’s gold and up to 90% of its chromium and platinum.

The largest reserves of cobalt, diamonds, platinum and uranium in the world are in Africa. It holds 65% of the world’s arable land and 10% of the planet’s internal renewable fresh water source.

So Africa is very rich even when she does not fully benefit from her resources.

It depends where the writer is standing at the time of writing. There has been many Africans to different writers and commentators.

In Shakespeare’s play, Othello, Iago, in his attempts to disempower Othello the black man, depicts him as bestial and animal-like, drawing on the cultural misconception of Africans as monstrous and subhuman.

Through this play, you see that Renaissance England’s sense of social order demanded the supremacy of white men and any cultural space for black man empowerment seemed dangerous.

However, according to Wendy Belcher, Africans have always been meaning makers, whether in writing or not. They are fully comfortable in their own systems and philosophy.

For example, African rock art is perhaps the oldest art in the world, dating to at least 77 000 years ago.

Africans engraved and painted rocks all over Africa, with the greatest concentration in the Sahara and Southern Africa. African rock art does not contain letters, but it does include inscripted meanings that can be “read.”

Western scholars used to assume that rock art engaged in simple realism—picturing ordinary animals and human beings in domestic activities. But research has revealed that much of the art is symbolic with, for instance, animals depicted in postures with cosmological significance.

Further, many depict a sequence of events such as different stages in a hunt, battle, dance, or religious festival.

Thus, one might argue that certain pieces of African rock art are narratives since they use symbolism and metaphor and because they portray sequences, changes in time and place.

For the likes of Trevor Roper, the idea is that history in Africa begins with Europe. In The Rise of Christian Europe, Trevor Roper writes: “Perhaps in the future there will be some African history but at present there is none. There is only the history of Europeans in Africa and the rest is darkness and darkness is not a subject of history.”

To such writers from the nineteenth century Europe when they say they were opening up Africa, that place is simply “full of trees.” Conrad writes in Heart of Darkness:

“Trees, trees, millions of trees, massive, immense, running up high; and at their foot, hugging the bank against the stream…. It made you feel very small very lost, and yet it was not altogether depressing that feeling…. The reaches opened before us and closed behind us, as if the forest had stepped leisurely across the water to bar the way for our return. We penetrated deeper and deeper into the heart of darkness…”

The African environment is being portrayed as frightening, treacherous and having an ill-will towards the white intruder.

Negative depiction can also come through what some white characters erroneously say and think about non-Europeans, even when the author himself might not be racist at all. In Olive Schreiner’s The Story of An African Farm, for example, the independent white lady, Lyndall, attempting some “philosophic” talk, speaks thus about an African who passes by:

“Well, let me see,’ she said, closing her book and folding her hands on it. ”There at the foot of the kopje goes a kaffir, he has nothing on but a blanket; he is a splendid fellow – six feet high, with a magnificent pair of legs … he is going … and I suppose to kick his wife with his beautiful legs when he gets home. He has a right to; he bought her for two oxen.

There is a lean dog going after him, to whom I suppose he never gives more than a bone from which he has sucked the marrow; but his dog loves him as his wife does.”
Negative depiction can come through the form of the non-European’s mysterious and often inexplicable behaviour.

But Walter Rodney argues that, in fact it is Europe that underdeveloped Africa. In his 1972 book called How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, Rodney describes how Africa was deliberately exploited and underdeveloped by European colonial regimes. One of his main arguments throughout the book is that Africa developed Europe at the same rate that Europe underdeveloped Africa!

In Chapter 1 of his book, Rodney defines development and underdevelopment, stressing the comparative nature of these terms. Developed nations are industrialised and have higher incomes per capita than underdeveloped countries. Chapter 2 describes development in Africa before the era of European imperialism. African societies were initially communal and family centric, with social relations and religion revolving around kinship and ancestors.

Chapter 3 addresses the exploitative relationship between Europe and Africa before colonialism. Europe’s advanced state of development compared to its trading partners allowed it to dictate the terms of trade and dominate key trade routes.

The growth of global trade turned Africa into an extension of Europe’s capitalist market and also created dependency in Africa, which relied on what Europe was prepared to buy and sell. The slave trade flourished in this period because Europeans needed their labour to develop the Americas.

Slavery was so profitable that Europeans engaged in the trade for centuries. Chapter 4 focuses on Europe’s role in under-developing Africa up to the colonial era. The slave trade devastated Africa’s work force, causing instability in other industries, like mining and agriculture.

I also like the poetry from the negritude movement. Négritude was an anti-colonial cultural and political movement founded by a group of African and Caribbean students in Paris in the 1930s who sought to reclaim the value of blackness and African culture.

From this movement, David Diop’s “Africa, my Africa” remains key to me. Through it, he shows passionate love for Africa under slavery and colonialism. The poem is both emotional and militant and a few poems from the continent could match it. He begins in almost an ecstatic chant:

“Africa my Africa
Africa of proud warriors in ancestral savannahs
Africa of whom my grandmother sings
On the banks of the distant river
I have never known you…”

If you are an African abroad, you pause and breathe, feeling emotionally charged. David Diop lived from 1927 to 1960. He was born in Bordeaux, France, to a Senegalese father and a Cameroonian mother. From such a distance, he became super nostalgic of Africa which he had visited once in a while, each time falling in love deeper than before.

David Diop was often considered one of the most promising French-West-African poet. His short life’s work often involved his longing for Africa and his empathy for those fighting against the French colonisation of the mainland. He writes with unmistakable sympathy:

“Africa my Africa
Africa of proud warriors in ancestral savannahs
Africa of whom my grandmother sings
On the banks of the distant river
I have never known you
But your blood flows in my veins
Your beautiful black blood that irrigates the fields
The blood of your sweat
The sweat of your work
The work of your slavery”
Africa, tell me Africa
Is this your back that is unbent
This back that never breaks under the weight of humiliation”

But midway, Diop employs a grave voice of an ancestor or an elder that suddenly begins to challenge Africa’s first “impetuous” voice in the first half of the poem, to stand up and do something about her condition of being colonised and enslaved:

“Is this your back that is unbent
This back that never breaks under the weight of humilation
This back trembling with red scars
And saying no to the whip under the midday sun
But a grave voice answers me
Impetuous child that tree, young and strong
That tree over there
Splendidly alone amidst white and faded flowers
That is your Africa springing up anew
springing up patiently, obstinately
Whose fruit bit by bit acquires
The bitter taste of liberty.”

In 1960, Diop and his wife were killed in a plane crash returning to France from Dakar. Most of his work was unpublished and supposedly destroyed in the crash.

The pathfinders of the Negritude movement were black students from Franco-phone Africa who met in Paris for their studies in the 1930’s. These were Aime Cesaire from Martnique, Leopold Senghor from Senegal and Leon Damas from Guyana. They fashioned out a kind of poetry that celebrated black beauty, black culture and the beauty of black personality.

And yet from the wars of liberation came poets who saw the intense oppression of Africans as an ugly thing that gave birth to the struggle to restore a beautiful Africa. Father of the Angolan war of liberation, Agostinho Neto, was a great poet.

He also had prominent colleagues from that war who were poets. The story of Agostinho Neto is almost synonymous with the story of the MPLA, which championed the struggle for Angolan independence and is the ruling party since 1976.

Aware that no one else would fight on behalf of the oppressed Angolan black race but themselves, Neto joined the war of liberation of Angola. He scribbled somewhere; a sad but hopeful farewell poem/song:

“My mother (all black mothers)
Whose sons have gone
You taught me to wait and hope…
But life
Killed in me the mystic hope
I do not wait now
I am he who is awaited.”

The poem further bites into raw flesh and gets down to capture the black white divide in colonial Angola:

“Today
We are naked children in bush villages
School less children – playing with a ball of rags
In the sands at noon.
We ourselves
Contract workers burning live
In coffee plantations
Ignorant black men
Who must respect the white man
And fear the rich…
Your children
Hungry
Thirsty
Ashamed to call you mother.”

Neto’s poems which were smuggled out of prison are some of the best known of all Angolan poetry. These poems are also said to form the basis of many popular songs sang during the struggle for Angolan independence.

They have been translated into many languages including English, Chinese, French, Italian, Romanian, Russian, Serbo-Croat, Spanish and Vietnamese! They are read and studied up to this day in Angola and abroad.

Very little new material is read from the opposite combatants in the Portuguese supported army.
Giving a keynote speech at the Zimbabwe International Book Fair on 22 October, 2018, Professor Peter Wasamba from Kenya demonstrated how and why Africa is the future and how Africans can ensure this.

Wasamba highlighted that the existing future of the book actually lies in the growing population of Africa! “The future is in Africa in terms of innovation because numbers never lie,” he said. “The future is African!” he added.

He explained that Africa is the world’s second largest and second most populous continent and therefore has the capacity of being the major consumer of books in the global village, he argued.

Memory Chirere