So, the word “Africa” has Greco-Roman origins: “Africa” in Latin means “sunny,” and “Aphrike” in Greek means “without cold.” But what the Greeks and Romans used to designate its northern regions, Europeans would soon use to refer to the entire continent. And by declaring the whole region to be Africa, Europe defined a homogeneous population, understood to be black. Thus, the term “African” came to hold racial as well as geographical meanings. Ali Mazrui maintains that consequently, academics, in an effort to reclaim African history as valuable and “African,” have endlessly attempted to prove that our African ancestors were all “negroid.” Mazrui argues that “[t]o insist that nothing is African unless it is Black is to fall into the white man’s fallacy.” Likewise, to make overgenerous claims about the African past has been a pronounced tendency of scholars and commentators eager to refute racist claims about Africa’s supposed “primitivism” and “barbarity.” The result is that much of African history has been suffocated between two extremes of ideological interpretation.25
Scholars such as Frank Snowden, Jr., have observed that the earliest recorded contacts between Europeans and black Africans were not informed by the sort of Western chauvinism that would finally define this relationship. For example, Ethiopia, as the ancients called all of black Africa, occupies a prominent place in Homeric poems, and Ethiopians are mentioned with more kindness than Homer’s kindred tribesmen. In the Iliad, the poet locates Ethiopia near the warm rim of the inhabited earth—“On the warm limits of the farthest main”—and in the Odyssey, he divides the people and the land into two parts, one toward the sunrise and the other toward the sunset. The Ethiopians were Homer’s “blameless race,” and Memnon was held to be amongst the noblest of men: “to Troy no hero came of nobler line / or if nobler Memnon it was thine.”26 According to Mudimbe, Memnon was “the black son of Eos and a descendent of Tros and Dardanos,” and “an ancestor of Ethiopian Kings.” Hesiod called him the “King of Ethiopians.” And again in characterizing the black-skinned and frizzy-haired Eurybates, who was both Odysseus’s herald and close companion, Homer likened him to the great wanderer himself: “For it was in Eurybates[’s] large soul alone, Odysseus viewed an image of his own.” Emphasis was placed on the justice and magnanimity of these individual Ethiopians, and, by extension, of their entire people. Diodorus Siculus, a first-century BC Roman historian, said that “Memnon led to Troy, 2000 soldiers and 200 chariots and signaled his valor and reputation with the death and destruction of many Greeks till he was slain by an ambush lain for him by the Thessalonians.”27
Moreover, Greek dramatists made Ethiopians central figures in some of their plays: Sophocles and Euripides each wrote a drama entitled Andromeda, though neither version survives. These plays were constructed around the experiences of the Ethiopian princess Andromeda, the beloved daughter of Cepheus and his queen Cassiopea. Homeric traditions also associated Olympian divinities with Ethiopian religious festivals. The poet tells us that on the occasion of a meeting of the council of divinities held in the interest of the long-suffering Odysseus, Poseidon was absent, having gone to receive a sacrifice of bulls and rams from the Ethiopians.
But now Poseidon had gone to visit the Ethiopians worlds away.
Ethiopians off at the farthest limits of mankind,
a people split in two, one part where the Sungod sets
and part where the Sungod rises. There Poseidon went
to receive an offering, bulls and rams by the hundred—
far away at the feast the Sea-lord sat and took his pleasure.28
Likewise, when Iris, goddess of the rainbow, went as messenger to Boreas and Zephyrus “to ask for their assistance in the funeral rites of Patroclus, she was invited by the denizens of the wind to join them in a feast they were celebrating.” Iris refused by saying:
not now; for I must again make my way
over the ocean currents to the land
Where dwell the Ethiopians, who adore
The Gods with hectacombs, to take my share of sacrifice.29
Diodorus relates that when he went to Egypt, the priests told him of the Greeks who had been there and included Homer. They also told him that each year Egyptians carried tabernacles of certain of their gods to Ethiopia and after certain celebrations there, brought the shrines back to Egypt—“as if the Gods had returned out of Ethiopia: The Ethiopians say that the Egyptians are settlers from among themselves. . . . The customs of the Egyptians, they say, are for the most part Ethiopian, the settlers having preserved their old traditions. Considering the kings gods, paying the great attention to funeral rites . . . these are Ethiopian practices; also the style of their statues and the form of their writing are Ethiopian.” With the conquest of Egypt by Alexander in 332 BC and the Roman occupation soon after, firsthand accounts of sub-Saharan Africa accumulated dramatically.
No doubt in part because of these occupations, it was not long before contrary attitudes toward Africa begin to find expression in classical literature. Long before this, however, Herodotus, for example, had written that Africans had “speech that resembles the shrieking of a Bat rather than the Language of Men,” lacked “individual names,” were “dog-headed humans,” and even “headless beings.”30 In the first century AD, even after direct Roman contact with black Africans, the Roman scholar Pliny the Elder would confirm that “by report [Africans] have no heads but mouth and eies in their breasts.” As Mudimbe observes:
Pliny’s geography of monstrosity faithfully mirrors Herodotus’s description, albeit in a more detailed way. To Herodotus’s general geographic frame of monsters—dog-headed and headless peoples (IV, 191)—living in the eastern region of Libya, Pliny opposes a curious table of “tribes” inhabiting a vague area around the Nigri fluvio eadem natura quae Nilo [“the river Black which has the same nature as the Nile”]: the Atlas peoples, who have no names; the cave-dwellers, who have no language and live on the flesh of snakes; the Garamantes, who do not practice marriage; the Blemmyae, who are headless and, as already indicated by Herodotus, have their mouths and eyes attached to their chests; the Satyrs; and the Strapfoots.31
What is important about the coexistence of the negative and positive descriptions of black Africans by the ancient Greeks is that by the fifth century BC “Africa” was already a veritable tabula rasa on which Europeans would inscribe their deepest fears and anxieties about the human condition, as well as their most ardent and highest aspirations for human civilization. And, despite even more frequent contact through the first century AD, these attitudes persisted. To recall Sir Thomas Browne’s pregnant observation: “[W]e carry within us the wonders we seek without us: there is all Africa and her prodigies in us.”32 But it was the centuries of the European slave trade, and the subsequent “scramble for Africa” at the turn of the century, that led to Africa’s almost total demonization as the opposite of all that humanity aspired to be.
The twentieth century both inherited, and contributed to, the generally shared opinion that Africa is a benighted place completely lacking in civilization. The view that Africa lacks “history” (and therefore memory and reason) is most closely associated with the Enlightenment. The claim was standardized by Hegel’s The Philosophy of History, published in 1790, according to which the peoples of the world are divided into those who have an active historical presence and influence and those who do not, who are passive, without creative powers, and therefore condemned to be conquered and led. Hegel states that Africa “is not a historical continent: it shows neither change nor development.” Its people are “capable of neither development nor education. As we see them today, so they have always been,” ignorant, static, deracinated. And whatever good Hegel could find in Africa, he attributed it to other peoples.
Historical movement in [Africa]—that is in its Northern part belongs to the Asiatic or European world. Carthage displayed there an important transitory phase of civilization, but as a Phoenician colony, it belongs to Asia. Egypt will be considered in reference to the pa
ssage of the human mind from the Eastern to the Western phase, but it does not belong to African Spirit. What we properly understand by Africa is the Unhistorical and Underdeveloped spirit, still involved in the conditions of mere nature, and which had to be presented here only as the threshold of World’s History.33
The European custom of crediting non-Africans with African achievements has remained remarkably vigorous since Hegel’s day. In 1930, C. G. Seligman, a famous English historian, articulated the Hamite theory, which holds that whites were responsible for African civilization. He writes bluntly: “The civilizations of Africa are the civilizations of the Hamites, its history the record of these peoples and of their interaction with the two other African stocks, the Negro and the Bushman.” He then asserts that the two other “stocks” are inferior, and any advances in civilization they have made are due to the extent to which they have been subject to “Hamitic” influence.34 Seligman’s work typified the imperialist and racist assumptions that have structured and infected the formal study of African history. As Basil Davidson asserts: “Time and again the achievement of men in Africa—men of Africa—have been laid at the door of some mysterious but otherwise unexplained ‘people outside of Africa’ . . . over the past fifty years or so, whenever anything remarkable or inexplicable has turned up in Africa, a whole galaxy of non-African peoples are dragged in to explain it.”35 Even as late as the sixties, the Oxford historian Hugh Trevor-Roper was arguing that the African past was nothing more than the “unrewarding gyrations of barbarous tribes in picturesque but irrelevant corners of the globe. . . . History is essentially a form of movement, and purposive movement too. . . . 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.”36
If theorists such as Seligman proved especially useful in justifying the systematic exploitation of a continent and its inhabitants during the Age of Imperialism, the same sort of thinking, in a more contemporary guise, has come to serve those who would deny the persuasive archaeological evidence that Africa is the birthplace of humankind.
The discovery in the seventies in Hadar, Ethiopia, of the skeleton of “Lucy,” the hominid who lived approximately 3.2 million years ago and who has been identified as the human family’s common ancestor; along with the discovery in 1979, in the Kibish region of Laetoli, Tanzania, of a 165-foot-long trail of the earliest hominid footprints, have left little doubt that, in the words of paleontologist Christopher Stringer, “what unites us is far more significant than what divides us. Our variable forms mask an essential truth—that under our skins, we are all Africans, the metaphorical sons and daughters of the man from Kibish.”37 The idea that the ancestors of human beings had evolved in Africa was first suggested by Darwin; but despite his authority, and despite the major archaeological findings of scientists such as Raymond Dart and Mary and Louis Leakey (as well as popularizations of their work such as African Genesis by Robert Ardrey), many people in the West find this idea shocking and have been passionately resistant to it. There can be little doubt that centuries of representations of Africa as a continent peopled by barbarous savages have contributed enormously to this resistance. When a Time magazine cover featuring an artist’s depiction of a reconstructed Lucy announced that she was the Ur-mother, the “Eve,” of the human family, its readers were incredulous, judging by the letters to the editor and the resulting commentary on television talk shows. It may be some time before a general acceptance of Sir Thomas Browne’s inspired speculation that “there is all Africa and her prodigies in us.”
Can scientific evidence, and popularizations of the history of African civilizations, help to erase racist depictions of Africans, depictions at least two and a half millennia old? “Africa is at war,” Ali Mazrui has written, “It is a war between indigenous Africa and the forces of Western civilization.”38 But the war, in fact, is one over defining and preserving the heritage of African civilizations in the face of systematic denials of the nature and extent of that very heritage. It is, in other words, a war over interpretation and representation. For far too many of us in the West, Africa remains—even at the dawn of the twenty-first century—the vast, unchanging, irredeemable Dark Continent.
Recent historiography has made remarkable progress in defeating the long tradition of pernicious and misleading accounts of African civilization: staple works such as the Cambridge History of Africa, The UNESCO History of Africa, The Encyclopedia of Africa South of the Sahara, Encarta Africana, and Africana: The Encyclopedia of the African and African American Experience are solid scholarly contributions to establishing the range and the complexity of the African past. More speculative work has forced us to see the historical reconstruction of the past as ideologically tainted. In 1987, for example, a radical view was put forth by Martin Bernal in his controversial work Black Athena, in which he asserts that the Greco-Roman past was distorted by Western historians who altered it to fit an “Aryan model,” denying its African and Asiatic roots. Bernal, like many scholars, now contends that the growth of Western civilization owes a great deal to Asiatic and African worlds, and that assimilation and influence occurred in both directions, not merely the one traditionally supposed.
While correcting the errors of two millennia of history is critically important, that corrective impulse is not without its own perils. As the historian Caroline Neale shows, reactions to histories such as Trevor-Roper’s gave rise to a generation of apologists and cheerleaders for black Africa, who ignored anything that might reflect poorly upon Africa; that is, any history that would even inadvertently reinforce images of, say, illiteracy or lack of technological development. Neale has argued that by doing this, this generation of apologists played into the hands of racist Western historians by implicitly accepting their views of “civilization.” So, historically, scholars have challenged the idea of social evolution—that is, a picture of stagnation in precolonial Africa—instead of also critiquing Western ideas of progress. She contends that historians felt pressured to show “not that whatever Africa had had was somehow humanly worthwhile, but that Africans deserved the respect of others, and could respect themselves, [only] because they had had in their past the things that Europeans valued!”39
Finding a way to let the African past speak on its own terms, in its own multiplicity of voices, to an audience of Westerners both black and white is the challenge I faced in writing this book and the series it accompanies. I have tried to do this, always acutely aware of the vast record of both racist and romantic depictions of Africa, of my desire to redress that grievous imbalance, and of the fact that each of us speaks from a specific place in the world, replete with biases and prejudices—and, in my own case, a great deal of wishful thinking on behalf of my African ancestral past. In my heart, I want all of the pharaohs to have been “black.” (They were not.) I want the lost Ark of the Covenant to be located in St. Mary’s Church in Axum. (Not likely, but the jury is still out.) I want there to have been a great collection of black scholars at the Sankoré Mosque in Timbuktu between the fourteenth and the sixteenth centuries. (There were.) I want so much for the African past and future . . . a past that has been denigrated for so very long, and a future that often seems in danger of being stillborn. I want all this—but not at the expense of scholarly evidence and reliable data. To elevate Africa above what height of achievement can be supported by dependable evidence would, in fact, be to demean the heritage that I claim to love so deeply.
It is difficult for most of us even to begin to comprehend the sheer size of the African continent, the second largest in the world. The United States would barely cover the Sahara Desert alone! “In fact,” as the writer John Reader notes, “the United States, China, India, and New Zealand could all fit within the African coastline, together with Europe from the Atlantic to Moscow and much of South America.”40 And yet, despite its vast geographical size, the continent’s population of 748 million is only slightly larger than Europe’s. One hundred th
ousand years ago, our human ancestors, possibly no more than one hundred, first migrated from the African continent and colonized the remainder of the world, Reader argues, only to return 500 years ago “behaving as though they owned the place.” Modern Africa consists of fifty-one countries. Its people speak some 1,500 languages (not counting dialects), yet we often speak about “Africa” as if it were a single country in which people speak one indigenous language. “Say something in African to me,” Americans often ask African visitors, not realizing that fully “one-quarter of the world’s languages are spoken only in Africa,” as the Pulitzer Prize–winning scholar Jared Diamond has shown.41
In ten months, I visited twelve African countries, and traveled tens of thousands of miles, in run-down trucks and Land Cruisers; dugout canoes, dhows, and diesel barges; by camel and by foot; camped my way across the Sudan’s Nubian Desert from Khartoum to Delgo; and navigated the treacherous terrain of the magnificent Ethiopian Highlands in search of the lost Ark of the Covenant. Despite the extent of these travels, Africa remains as endlessly mysterious and fascinating to me as it was when I, at that age of ten, devoted my evenings to memorizing the name of the leader of each new African nation—when Africa was indeed still only a book—and a nightly newscast—to me.
My own attitudes about Africa and my African heritage can best be summed up in an anecdote that Ghanaians like to tell about their African American cousins. In 1957, Kwame Nkrumah became the first president of a newly independent Ghana. Himself a graduate of the historically black Lincoln University, Nkrumah issued a call to black Americans to come to Ghana, claim their patrimony, and help to build the new nation. The first group of black Americans who heeded Nkrumah’s call solemnly collected themselves at Labadi Beach in Accra, where they participated under a full moon in a ritual of denunciation of American racism and of their American citizenship. Then they flung their passports as far out to sea as they could.
The Henry Louis Gates, Jr. Reader Page 58