White-man’s Africa in literature

There exist uniform ways of negatively depicting Africa and other non-European people in different literary works by European writers of the nineteenth century. Europe developed systematic ways of looking at “other people.” There is clearly an ideology from which the writers of such books operated. The negative depiction of Africa is basically done through ethnocentrism. This is all to do with depicting Africans and other non-Europeans as objects that are not completely as human as Europeans. There are numerous ways in which these forms of negative depictions are enacted in the works of European travellers and those of early white settlers. The negative depictions are very subtle so much so that an unwary reader can let them pass. As a small African boy, I was also an active victim. I loved reading many of these novels about white people coming to Africa for the first time or white people on farms in Africa. All I wanted was to improve my English language. The first and simplest form of this negative depiction is the absence of Africans from novels set in situations in which Africans are the majority and even where Africans are part of the issues which the European characters are engaging. An example is Olive Schreiner’s iconic novel called The Story of An African Farm. Of course, Schreiner’s novel is not about race relations, but, the idea that natives only appear in the story once in a while – as servants who walk in and out with food or pass by a kopje behind which whites are having a dialogue – is enough denigration of the Africans. This negative depiction can also come in the form of the author’s descriptive language which tends to show lack of respect for Africans. For example, Karen Blixen in her Out of Africa describes Kamante, the Kenyan cook thus: “Kamante could have no idea as to how a dish of ours (white people) ought to taste, and he was, in spite of his conversion, and his connexion with civilization, at heart an errant Kikuyu, rooted in the traditions of his tribe and his faith in them, as in the…of living worthy of a human being. He did at times taste the food that he cooked, but then with a distrustful face, like a witch who takes a sip out of her cauldron.” Negative depiction occurs through what some white characters erroneously say and think about non-Europeans, even when the author himself might not seem racist at all. In 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 be in the form of the African character’s mysterious and often inexplicable behaviour. For instance, in Doris Lessing’s The Grass is Singing, a novel from Rhodesia, it is not clear why Moses kills Mary Turner and why Moses does not run away after his crime. Instead, Moses hands himself over to the police in a manner that definitely suggests the futility and irrationality of the African personality. Complex as Lessing might want the circumstances surrounding Mary’s murder to be, Lessing unconsciously renders Moses’ rationality, the African rationality, questionable. Even the African terrain itself is often not spared some negative depiction. Often, it is shown as empty and uninhabited as seen in Doris Lessing’s short story, “A sunrise on the Veld.” Here a white boy runs across the African terrain and claims, through interior monologue, that if the terrain is empty, he (a new comer and white boy) should own it. At a more alarming level, the African environment, as in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, is portrayed as frightening, treacherous and having ‘ill will’ towards the white intruder: “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.” Perhaps the worst form of negative depiction of non-Europeans is binarism. This is a mode of thought predicated on seemingly stable oppositions such as good and evil or male and female. Binarism is demonstrated in Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, the eighteenth century novel, which is the prototype for all literature on non-Europeans. In a clear binary style, “European” stands for Christian, kindness, all-conquering and all-knowing whilst “non-European” stands for savage, cannibal and the-soon-to-be-conquered-and-civilised. This binarism is also evident in later texts like J. Buchan’s Prester John and Haggard’s King Solomon’s Mines. The parrot in Robson Crusoe is taught to speak back to Crusoe in Crusoe’s English. Crusoe teaches the cannibal survivor, Friday, the English language too and refers to him as “my man Friday.” The good-bad binarism, it should be noted, is always in favour of Europe. To historian, Peter Fryer, this kind of image of Africa is meant to justify exploration into non-European regions, slavery and subsequent colonialism. This benefited the rising European capitalist system. The capitalist class “required a violent racism not merely as an ideological rationale but as a psychological imperative,” Fryer adds. This is not difficult to confirm if one looks at the rise of the adventure and romance genres over the centuries. Stories from Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (19719) to Scott’s Waverly (1814) through to the later writers like Robert Stevenson, J. Conrad, J. Buchan and Kipling are full of the occurrences “of traditionally romantic features” found in Defoe. In many of the travel romances one finds that the landscape is charged with grandeur. It is a literature of the capitalist hunt. A tradition of what became known as the “colonial text” including not only literary works, but writings like “political treaties, diaries, acts and edicts, administrative records, gazetteers and missionary reports” was established. These were all “infused with imperial ideas of race pride and national prowess.” Prowess, it should be noted, has a tendency to depend on one’s subjugation of the other. In the case of Europe, it depended partly on her writers depicting European ventures abroad as heroic acts in the lands of darkness, cannibals, savages and mysteries. Demand is interrelated with supply and B.V. Street notes, “The Growth of Empire at this time and the literature of experiences of so many travellers in distant exotic lands, provided a readymade alternative (to conventional literature) and from the 1870s onwards the fiction took up this theme.” And for as long as any style, be it dance or dress, becomes fashionable, the tendency is that it is reproduced unanimously and taken to with little critical attention, if any at all. Negative depiction of non-European people and Africans in particular, in literature, fed the ego of capital and imperialist ventures. In its popular version, transmitted through schools, cheap newspapers, juvenile literature and the musical-hall, racism told the British Working Class that black people were savages whom British rule was rescuing from heathenism and internecine strife. Modern Europe, through conquest, became hostile to all images that were not like its own image. Europe became the centre and measure of standards. It manipulated the concept of “civilization” and yet, before active imperialism, Africa had centuries of self-sustained life. Asked by his colleague whether he thought it is “sport” at all to kill Africans, a white soldier during the 1896 Shona-Ndebele rebellions, says the following words to his friend in Schreiner’s Trooper Peter Halket of Mashonaland: “Oh, they don’t feel, these niggers, not as we (whites) should, you known. I’ve seen a (black) man going to be shot, looking full at the guns, and falling like that! – without a sound. They’ve no feeling, these niggers; I don’t suppose they care much whether they live or dies, not as we (whites) should, you know.” It is important to note that the writers themselves, besides writing only were sometimes part of the imperial project on the ground. They worked for it and survived out of it. For instance, Rudyard Kipling is synonymous with the British ventures in the Far East that he is often referred to as “the poet of Empire.” He never saw himself as separate from the colonial venture. In his 1897 poem, “Recessional,” Kipling expresses the idea that British imperialism conquers the world on behalf of God himself. Part of it reads: “God of our fathers, known of old, Lord of our far flung battle-line, Beneath whose awful hand we hold Dominion over palm and pine – Lord God of Hosts, be with us yet, Lest we forget – lest we forget!” Conrad, John Buchan and R. Haggard were part of the adventures and “hunting” trips in Southern and Central Africa. In some cases, they held administrative posts and presented academic writings to “navigate” direction that the colonial ventures should take. Buchan, for instance, wrote The African Colony: Studies in the Reconstruction, published in 1903, expressing colonial ideas and attempting to chart a way forward. These kinds of stories were even read aloud in school to while away time. This type of literature became the alternative to the conventional Victorian novel by Dickens and others who would dwell on the English life and environment. Cohen argues, “it (the new novel) let the reader turn his back on the troublesome, the small, the sordid and it took him… to the frontier to perform mighty deeds.” Even the conventional nineteenth century European novel on Africa itself, at times, refers directly to the stifling European life-style. For instance, in Haggard’s Allan Quatermain, Sir Henry complains to his friends (in order to justify the new adventure they would like to undertake to the region around Mt Kenya in Africa): I’m tired of it too, dead-tired of doing nothing except pay the squire in a country that is sick of squires. For a year or more I have been getting restless… I am sick of shooting peasants and patridges and want to have a go at some large game again… In that situation, Africa is not seen as a place that has its unique civilization. It is seen as the alternative world, a rehabilitation space where those who are in search of danger as a form of mental rejuvenation should go. It is therefore very tempting for the writer to paint that space with fantasies and mysteries. Both the European writer and the reader are not looking for real Africa. They are looking for their own Africa and in most cases they find it because they create it. Although this literature was written with the juvenile European reader in mind, this literature later found its way in the African schools. As Ngugi-Wa-Thiongo points out, texts like Prester John and King Solomon’s Mines were made key readers in the African schools. In most cases, the black student identified with colonials in the story because the narrative justified the colonials’ activities. Ngugi confesses to have become a companion of the explorers in Treasure Island. Although Ngugi has survived this ideological bombardment and can describe the function of its tentacles, some people have not recovered. Unfortunately, some of these could be leading African politicians, scholars and even writers. To those who are discerning, the nineteenth century European literature on Africa, is a reference point to the magnitude at which literature can relate with the ideas of its day. It is also a pointer at how subtle ideology can be, blending with the arts until one does not clearly identify it immediately for what it is. Memory Chirere