Coming on the heels of Theodore Roosevelt's return from his 1909 East African hunting safari, the Pittsburgh Gazette-Times ran an editorial cartoon showing how both the people and animals of Africa had been forever changed by their encounter with the former president. Lions, snakes, birds, tigers, monkeys, and Africans in caricature all wear wire-rim glasses and big, toothy, Rooseveltian grins. “Gone, but not forgotten,” reads the caption, while a bow-tied raccoon in the lower corner—spokesman for Gazette-Times cartoonist “Ole May”—says respectfully of T. R.'s influence, “Some men always leave their impress” (Gros 307). The impression this American cartoonist depicts Roosevelt as leaving on Africa is nothing compared to the impression Africa made on American readers in African Game Trails, Roosevelt's two-volume travel/hunting narrative depicting an exotic Africa full of primitive people and animals. By reading African Game Trails, Americans saw more than T. R.'s famous grin in the faces of Africa's prehistoric people and animals; they saw the negative reflection of their own modernity, a reflection that formed a stunning chiaroscuro of perceived black primitivism and white so-called modernity, color-coded in the racialized language of early twentieth-century America. As Roosevelt writes primitivism onto Africa in African Game Trails, he impresses on Americans the notion that if Africa is to come out of the past and into the modern world, it will be through the intervention of whites. This racialized and temporalized image of Africa aligns itself well with the imperial expectations of a self-defined “modern” nation eager not only to justify claims in Africa, but also to find a rationale for further expansion across the globe.

African Game Trails by Theodore Roosevelt was released in 1909 to huge commercial success. It was so popular among adult readers that it went through several editions and was quickly adapted by Marsall Everett into a juvenile picture-book, Roosevelt's Thrilling Experiences in the Wilds of Africa. While immensely popular, neither Roosevelt's African Game Trails nor the juvenile adaptation was anything new to the American reading public. That very lack of originality is probably what made the books so popular, however. Both texts fit into the well-established genre that Richard Phillips calls “adventure stories,” defined as “the narratives of explorers, surveyors, geographers, [hunters] and other storytellers who describe journeys ‘into the unknown’” (1). The popularity of Roosevelt's narrative was not out of the ordinary. Phillips says, “Adventure was perhaps the most popular literature … of the modern period. … [A]dventures were printed in large quantities and read by mass audiences … around the world” (10, 46). The “plots and characters” of these adventure stories—both fictional and nonfictional—were “so formulaic and familiar” that audiences demanded conformity, not creativity, in the tales (46). Roosevelt's book, true to its genre, plods through a predictable narrative strain of hunting, avoiding danger, succeeding under great odds, and so on. The publisher's preface to the juvenile adaptation reads,

[In this book you will read of] the thrilling incidents and narrow escapes [Roosevelt] passes through, the tropical natural scenery in which he dwells, the many unknown and strange quadrupeds, bipeds and quadrumana he meets, the fabulous wealth of the African fauna and flora, which baffles the eyes, and you will see enacted before your wondering and admiring eyes a drama so unique, so exceptional and so extraordinary as to surpass anything you have either seen or heard of before.

(Everett 33)

Despite claims to uniqueness (“drama so unique … as to surpass anything you have either seen or heard of before”), the Roosevelt texts were very much like other adventure stories of the day. In fact, it would be no stretch of the imagination to assume that J. H. Moss, the publishing company, used this as the preface to all of its adventure stories, modifying only the name of the particular hero to fit the particular text. Underneath this veneer of conformity in adventure stories, however, is a subtext that, Phillips tells us, was “motivated by a clear political agenda: broadly speaking, imperialism” (12). Indeed, the imperial rhetoric in Roosevelt's narratives can hardly even be called subtextual. The publisher's preface to the adolescent adaptation of Roosevelt's narrative begins by telling young boys that they should learn from the ex-president all the manly virtues embodied by hunting, and then goes on to say,

But our book will not only serve as an entertainment on leisure hours or an instruction for the young. … Might it not even be possible, Mr. Businessman, that you will discover in these fascinating pages new fields for your enterprising mind, new fields for American trade and industry? The old world is soon covered by competing concerns. … But Africa's virgin soil and barbarian population will for decades and perhaps centuries to come be in need of our products and our commerce.

(Everett 34)

This open invitation to the “Mr. Businessman” of early twentieth-century America to make Africa an easy commodity for consumption establishes both Roosevelt texts as stories of American imperialism. As stories of imperialism, Roosevelt's texts, like most travel writing, “affirm a particular vision of reality for a community of readers” (Kaplan 42). As Phillips says, “the world of adventure” is a space for readers to “find their world views reaffirmed in its bold images and uncomplicated terms” (89). The “particular vision of reality” found in “the world of adventure”—that America was an imperial power in Africa—fed the imagination of millions of Americans.

One particular American imagination that these Roosevelt narratives fed was that of a young Midwesterner named Ernest Hemingway. Hemingway, biographer John Raeburn tells us, was so taken with Roosevelt's tales of imperial adventure that he “modeled himself on the hero of San Juan Hill” (3). From the day Hemingway, as a young boy, met Roosevelt—“who greeted [him] with a hearty handclasp and a high squeaky voice” (3)—to the day in 1933 when he arrived in Kenya for his own African safari, recorded in his 1935 Green Hills of Africa, he longed to be like the great T. R. Raeburn writes of Hemingway's success in becoming his boyhood hero:

Both men had tremendous energy, personal magnetism, boastful self-confidence and a boyish joy in ordinary experience. Both advocated the strenuous life, and placed great emphasis on bodily fitness and physical strength. Both were pugnacious and belligerent, and became experienced boxers. Both were keen naturalists who hunted big game in the American West and in East Africa. Both were men of letters who became men of action, and heroes who generated considerable publicity.

(3-4)

As public heroes, what Hemingway and Roosevelt most had in common was that both believed the myths the public constructed around them. Raeburn continues, “If Mark Twain was the Lincoln of American literature, … then Hemingway was the Theodore Roosevelt … [People] loved them more for the legend of their lives than for their objective achievements” (11). Indeed, in one of his few poetic endeavors, Hemingway wrote a homage to Roosevelt in which he praised that “all the legends that he started in his life / Live on and prosper, / Unhampered now by his existence” (Three Stories and Ten Poems 52). One of the Rooseveltian legends that loomed largest in Hemingway's mind, both as a boy and as a man, was the image of Roosevelt as the great white hunter in Africa. Biographer Michael Reynolds concurs that “[it was] Theodore Roosevelt's epic 1909 safari, which young Hemingway followed in magazines, and in Oak Park watched the jerky moving pictures of the Colonel's expedition on the silent screen [which] more than any[thing] else … was responsible for opening East Africa to Hemingway's imagination” (Hemingway: The 1930s 156).

It was Roosevelt and the legend of the great white hunter in Africa that he had come to represent that ultimately led Hemingway to Africa from 1933 to 1934, the scene for his nonfiction novel, Green Hills of Africa. While Hemingway had ostensibly set out to write Green Hills of Africa as a new kind of nonfiction novel—“an absolutely true book to see whether the shape of a country and the pattern of a month's action can, if truly presented, compete with a work of the imagination,” as he states in the foreword of the book—his influences for writing about Africa were firmly set in the genre of the adventure story. Despite his desire to capture “the shape of a country,” Hemingway did not actually write Green Hills while in Africa; he wrote it after the trip while living in Key West (Meyers 264). What informed his writing about Africa, then, was not the continent itself, but the pages and pages he read from adventure narratives about Africa while in America. During his stay in Key West, Hemingway compiled a list of all the books in his personal library. The list is very telling in the large number of books—forty-one, to be precise—devoted to hunting and adventure in Africa. His list includes such titles as African Adventures, Hunters' Wanderings in Africa, African Hunting, African Hunter, In Wildest Africa (two volumes), Game Ranger on Safari (written by Philip Percival, the British hunting guide who accompanied first Roosevelt, then Hemingway in Africa), Big Game Hunting and Adventure, In Brightest Africa, The Man-Eaters of Tsavo, Savage Sudan, and, of course, Theodore Roosevelt's African Game Trails (Reynolds, Hemingway's Reading 46-70). Only twenty-one of these African books from the Key West catalogue were recent purchases (bought in Paris after the trip to Africa [27]); the other twenty had been in Hemingway's possession for who knows how long—since boyhood, perhaps?

Apart from the Key West list, Reynolds, the compiler of an awesome list of what Hemingway probably read between 1910 and 1940, records that Hemingway had at least an additional twenty books about Africa at his disposal (Hemingway's Reading 205). A grand total of sixty books on Africa, fully three times as many books as he had on Italy (208), and an almost equal number of the books he had on bullfighting (206). Reynolds comments on Hemingway's reading of the Africa books: “Hemingway read the books, including, I'm sure, Theodore Roosevelt's African adventures. Look at the pictures: Ernest with his Teddy mustache posed next to the trophies. His guide is Percival, the hunter who had led Roosevelt on to the Serengeti Plain thirty years earlier. Hardly a coincidence” (27). The “hardly coincidental” thread connecting Roosevelt and Hemingway's travel/hunting writing that I would like to tug on is the image of a temporally primitive and racialized Africa that offers itself up for American consumption. The continuation of this image through the writing of two such prominent Americans—both of them Nobel Prize winners whose exploits fascinated the American public—suggests more than just a similarity in style and personality. It suggests a larger national consciousness, articulated through the boldness of a Roosevelt and the brashness of a Hemingway.

In order to depict Africa as temporally primitive, Roosevelt and Hemingway first must have a sense of themselves as temporally modern. To have a sense of oneself as “modern” implies that identity is not defined with regards to physical characteristic, but to a perceived sense of time. Matei Calinescu says, “The idea of modernity could be conceived only within a framework of a specific time awareness, namely, that of historical time, linear and irreversible, flowing irresistibly onwards” (13). To be modern is to imagine oneself within what Johannes Fabian calls “a scheme in terms of which not only past cultures, but all living societies were irrevocably placed on a temporal slope, a stream of Time—some upstream, others downstream” (17). To be modern is to imagine the world in terms of linear history with “modern” people at the most recent point and “primitive” people faltering far behind. Building upon Enlightenment theories of modernity and progress as far back as Rousseau—who, incidentally, defined human perfectibility in terms of the progress one had made from “a primitive state” (Montag 290)—Roosevelt and Hemingway define themselves as “modern,” and, as such, view themselves as having traversed further along the scale of history than the Africans they encounter.

Within this context of modern temporality, then, Roosevelt and Hemingway do not experience Africa as a place but as a time, a tendency common among modern travelers, who, Caren Kaplan says, “look for an escape from modernity” (78). Because modernity, as I am using the term here, is a sense of being at the forefront of, and saturated with, time, in order for Roosevelt and Hemingway to “escape from modernity,” they have to make the earth an ontological clock with America at the forefront of time and Africa in the distant past. Africa, then, becomes not a place on the map, but a moment in time—a moment in the static, primitive past to which these modern men can travel and write about for a modern audience at home. The travel to foreign places in modern adventure stories is not an experience with geographic spaces, but with moments in premodern history. Kaplan writes, “When the past is displaced, often to another location, the modern subject must travel to it … a ‘place on a map’ can be seen to be a ‘place in history’” (35, 25). Fabian concurs, writing that, “Travel itself … is instituted as a temporalizing practice” and through this temporalizing practice, “the philosophical traveler, sailing to the ends of the earth, is in fact traveling in time; he is exploring the past; every step he makes is the passage of an age” (7). Roosevelt himself says in African Game Trails, that riding through Africa is “like retracing the steps of time” (66). At one moment in the book, when Roosevelt and fellow hunting companion, son Kermit, come across a rhinoceros, they marvel at how such a “prehistoric” creature could exist in the modern world they inhabit. Roosevelt points out the animal to his son as he sees it “deep in prehistoric thought” (214). The temporarily displaced rhinoceros, for Roosevelt, stands as “the survival from the elder world that has vanished: … he would have been out of place in the miocene; but nowadays he can only exist at all in regions that have lagged behind” (214).

From the outset of African Game Trails, Roosevelt's description of Africa—the “region that [has] lagged behind”—is in decidedly temporal terms. The name of the opening chapter of the narrative, “A Railroad through the Pleistocene,” shows Roosevelt's vision of Africa as a space better described by its relationship to history than to geography. He says in the opening paragraph that Africa is a “phase of the world's life history,” not a place on a map (1). He then goes on to say that the manner in which a place in history can become a space of modernity, without having to wade through “centuries of slow development” (1), is through the intervention of whites, the first hint he gives of temporality providing a way for Africa to become a commodity for American imperialism: “Again and again, in the continents new to peoples of European stock, we have seen … high civilization all at once thrust into and superimposed upon a wilderness of savage men and savage beasts” (1).

The continent of “savage men and savage beasts” to which Roosevelt refers in the opening paragraph of his narrative is not a place on a geographic map, but a “phase of the world's life history.” Africa, for Roosevelt, will remain a moment in time, not a place on a map, until “peoples of European stock”—not necessarily Europeans themselves, he makes sure to clarify, but “peoples of European stock,” allowing for the imperial intervention of white Americans—make it a place by “thrusting civilization” onto it. It takes a “person of European stock,” invested with modernity, to create a “high civilization” of a moment in the world's life history. The image of the railroad as an authenticating force for whites in Africa, then, is startling. Roosevelt says, “This railroad [is] the embodiment of the eager, masterful … civilization of today” (3). As such, the railroad cuts through time, not geographic space. It is “A Railroad through the Pleistocene,” not “A Railroad through Africa.” Right from the outset Roosevelt temporally codes Africa and then provides the means by which primitive Africa can become modern—namely, through white intervention. The railroad, emblematic of whiteness and modernity, injects history into timeless Africa.

In the narratives of both Roosevelt and Hemingway, whiteness and modernity are inseparably connected. This is nothing new in American discourse; as Toni Morrison asserts, white American writers have consistently used temporally coded figures of blackness to establish their identity as (white) Americans. She says that Americans use temporally coded figures of blackness as “the vehicle by which the American self knows itself as … not history-less, but historical; … not a blind accident of evolution, but a progressive fulfillment of destiny” (52). A sense of being “white” in America is intimately tied to notions of progress and history. Because, as Morrison argues, whiteness is inextricable from a presence of blackness, whiteness-as-modern can only arise within the context of blackness-as-primitive. As “an Africanist idiom is used to establish difference or … signal modernity,” she writes, images of blackness “are appropriated for the associative value they lend to modernism” (52). Thomas G. Dyer, in a comprehensive study of Roosevelt's ideas on race, found a fascinating link in Roosevelt's thought between the notion of modern progress and race, similar to what Morrison says about whiteness equating modernity and blackness equating primitivism. Roosevelt, a Lamarckian, followed the belief that evolution was the result of one generation acquiring the characteristics which would make their species more likely to survive—French evolutionist Jean Lamarck's classic example is that of the giraffes who passed on the trait of long necks to their posterity by earning those necks through the hard labor of stretching towards edible leaves. Roosevelt believed that only those “races” or “species” (terms ambiguously related for Roosevelt and other nineteenth-century race thinkers) which put forth the requisite effort would progress. Dyer writes, “Roosevelt took the general stand that evolution did not necessarily ensure steady progress … he adhered to the belief that progress was not foreordained and found it a ‘rather irritating delusion’ that ‘somehow or other we are all necessarily going to move forward in the long run.’ He admitted, however, a ‘very firm faith in this general forward movement, considering only men of our own race’” (33). Whereas Roosevelt doubts the universal progression of the entire human species, he is quite positive that whites (“men of our own race”) are progressing. In the temporally bankrupt land of Africa, that progression is through time as well as space.

Whiteness and modernity, linked in Roosevelt's narrative, move the former president to say that not only is Africa a phase in the “world's life history,” but that it is a phase in white racial history. Roosevelt says that Africa is “a region in which nature, both as regards wild man and wild beast, did not and does not differ materially from what it was in Europe in the late Pleistocene” and that the savagery of both the African animals and peoples “reproduces the conditions of life in Europe as it was led by our ancestors ages before the dawn of anything that could be called civilization. … African man, absolutely naked, and armed as our early ancestors were armed, lives … [as the prehistoric European] men to whom the cave lion was a nightmare of terror” (3). In several instances Roosevelt invokes the notion that Africans live as Europeans did centuries ago as a way to both differentiate himself (and his audience) from the primitive Africans and to be similar to them. James Clifford, paraphrasing Fabian, says, “there has been a pervasive tendency to prefigure others in a temporally distinct, but locatable, space (earlier) within an assumed progress of Western history” (101-2). In passing, Roosevelt says of a tribe of Africans he encounters, “they were living just as paleolithic man lived in Europe, ages ago” (442). When he encounters a group of Africans whom he describes as living in constant terror of being eaten by the wild animals which roam the plains, Roosevelt reflects on the relative safety of the modern world and the “intensity of terror felt by his ancestors” who, ages ago, experienced a similar time: “It is only in nightmares that the average dweller in civilized countries now undergoes the hideous horror which was the regular and frequent portion of his ages-vanished forefathers, and which is still an everyday incident in the lives of most wild creatures [and in Roosevelt's this would include Africans themselves]” (244-45). In this passage, Roosevelt makes the rhetorical double move of identifying himself with Africans who represent his past (“terror felt by his ancestors,” “hideous horror … of his ages-vanished forefathers”) while rushing to say that he is completely different from them (what is a “regular and frequent” occurrence in their lives could only possibly be a “nightmare” for him). Roosevelt's need to explain how whites and Africans are different, even though they share a similar temporal origin, is significant. It validates and reinforces his position at the forefront of human progress while at the same time claiming a historical right to own Africa. Nevertheless, he concedes, “The savage of today shows us what the … [age] of our ancestors was really like … [they are] the existing representatives of [our] ‘vigorous, primitive’ ancestors” (246). Roosevelt succeeds in highlighting his modernity while staking a claim to possessing the continent given his historical link to it. The common temporal origin of whites and Africans is balanced out by the racial differences, thus making temporality a rationale for claiming ownership of the African land and race a rationale for distancing oneself from African people.

Depicting Africa as a moment in the white racial past allows Roosevelt to create an image of Africa as primed for American consumption. This move to consume an exotic culture within a temporal and racial framework is part of what Kaplan calls “the conquering spirit of modernity” (35). Caren Kaplan writes, “Within the structure of imperialist nostalgia, then, the Euro-American past is most clearly perceived or narrativized as another country or culture” (34). Roosevelt is able to take possession of Africa after “narrativizing” it as part of his racial past. He deduces that by virtue of his modernity, which makes him possessor of the history of the world, he must also possess those global spaces stuck somewhere in the time that his race has already experienced. In other words, since he owns “primitive” time by virtue of having already experienced it in his racial past, he also owns the physical space on the globe that he defines as “primitive.” The capstone moment in this opening chapter is when Roosevelt says, “This region, this great fragment of the long-buried past of our race, is now accessible by railroad to all who care to go thither” (3-4). Here Roosevelt uses his sense of himself as white and modern to open the door for the American consumption of Africa. First, the African space is turned into a time: “This region” becomes a “fragment of the long buried past.” Second, that moment in time becomes a moment in white racial history: “the long buried past of our race.” Third, once it is established that the time which Africa represents belongs to white racial history, physical possession of Africa soon follows: “[Africa] is now accessible by railroad to all who care to go thither.” As the nineteenth century's preeminent metaphor for progress, the railroad possesses Africa for white America.

This racialized and temporalized image of Africans which Roosevelt presented to Americans was by no means new or original. What he did in African Game Trails was put his stamp of approval on it and preserve it for a future generation of readers. Hemingway, as part of that generation, continues to talk about Africa in terms of race and temporality where fellow Noble Prize winner Roosevelt leaves off. Despite their differing attitudes toward Africa, these two men use a surprisingly similar rhetoric. Whereas Roosevelt is overtly imperialistic, calling for the settlement of Africa as a “white man's country” and encouraging American businessmen to take advantage of African resources, Hemingway is less so. His desire is that Africa remain settled enough so that there would be somewhere he could stay when he came to hunt, but not so much so that all the good hunting grounds vanish. Hemingway's concern is more literary, to “see whether the shape of a country and the pattern of a month's action can, if truly presented, compete with a work of the imagination.” Though Hemingway is not overtly imperialistic, the genre he writes in is shot through with the traces of American imperialism. As Richard Phillips tells us, “some adventure writers and stories were directly and explicitly imperial, others indirectly and implicitly [imperial,]” and traces of imperial discourse are always present (68). Whereas Hemingway at moments expresses disgust at the fruits of African colonization, David Spurr locates in the language of Green Hills of Africa a longing to go back to the security of Rooseveltian, or even pre-Rooseveltian, imperial certainty: “There may be, for a man of Hemingway's sensibility, arriving late on the colonial scene, a nostalgia for the moral certainty of a Stanley” (24).

Roosevelt's picture of Africa as a primitive state is the language of imperial certainty permeating Hemingway's Green Hills of Africa. We see this, for example, when Hemingway, similar to Roosevelt, describes a rhinoceros as “prehistoric looking” (79), suggesting that the continent and its animals belong to another era in the world's history. In another instance, he notices “tracks graded down through the pleasant forest” and suggests that these are the tracks of woolly mammoths, a species which has been extinct for ages (250). It is possible to imagine, he seems to imply, that such ancient animals still exist in this primitive country. He then compares primitive Africa to modern America: “[W]e had the mammoths too, a long time ago … It was just that we were an older country” (250). America, a modern country saturated with history, differs from primitive Africa, which is still roamed by prehistoric (extinct) animals. Hemingway, like Roosevelt, articulates Africa as a temporal moment in white racial history. The entire quote, in context, is as follows:

I was thinking all the country in the world is the same country and all hunters are the same people. … Looking at the way the tracks graded down through the pleasant forest I thought that we had the mammoths too, a long time ago, and when they traveled through the hills in southern Illinois they made these same tracks. It was just that we were an older country in America and the biggest game was gone.

(249-50)

In this passage, Hemingway marks the sameness between Africa and America as continents, and the sameness between African and white American hunters. He then goes on to mark the difference between the two in terms of temporality. Africa and America may be the same (“all the country in the world is the same country”), but America is more saturated with time than Africa (“we were an older country in America”). America, an “older country,” no longer has the primitive animals (i.e., “mammoths”) of Africa. America is historical and progressive (the “biggest game was gone” possibly, though he doesn't say why specifically, because of the industrialization and progress which has taken place in modern America), but Africa is ahistorical and primitive, a place devoid of temporal substance. Fabian calls this move the tendency to “assign to the conquered populations a different Time” (30). In Hemingway's insistence that America is “an older country” than Africa he is not saying that America has been on the earth longer nor has it been inhabited by people longer than Africa has. What he insists on is that while Africa has remained primitive in the possession of Africans, America has aged in the possession of temporally saturated whites. From this perspective, then, America, as an older country, and Americans, as a people who possess history, have the right to own the past that is Africa.

Working within the modern framework where places on the globe become moments in time, the question arises, whose experience with time is made the reference point for the march of history? Who, in other words, really experiences time? Who carries with them, as an essence, almost, the experience of time? Kaplan answers this by arguing that “the tourist [or travel writer who can tell stories about the world from the vantage point of having been there] becomes the key to social structure in the modern era” (5). Hemingway marks the difference between African primitivism and modern white temporality through a bodily experience of time. On several occasions, he remarks that the continent is without history until he, a modern white man saturated with history, physically experiences it. Hemingway's modernity, then, his saturation with history, validates Africa as a geographic space. Hemingway, in viewing history and memory as essential to himself, comes to see history as an essence he carries in his body. The Africans who live there, however, do not experience time, so the ahistorical continent does not change in their presence. He writes in Green Hills, “A continent ages quickly when we come” (284), suggesting that the African country shapes itself in the presence of a modernized person just as nature shapes itself around Wallace Steven's jar. Hemingway's body, just like Roosevelt's railroad, paves the way for making Africa more than just a timeless matrix of human primitiveness.

Hemingway and his hunting party come across a “white rest house and a general store” in the little African village of Kibaya where “Dan [a friend of Hemingway's who had been in Africa years earlier] had sat on a haystack one time waiting for a kudu to feed out into the edge of a patch of mealy-corn and a lion had stalked Dan while he sat and nearly gotten him” (159). While sitting in this spot in Africa where their white friend had earlier had a hunting experience, Hemingway remarks, “this gave us a strong historical feeling for the village of Kibaya” (159). Nowhere else in the narrative does Hemingway remark on having a “historical feeling” for Africa because nowhere else (to his knowledge) had whites validated African space with their temporal presence. However, once Hemingway experiences a place in Africa which a white person has injected with temporality, he becomes “full of historical admiration” for the place (159). As soon as Hemingway leaves this temporally validated place, however, the rest of the continent reverts to blankness. In the following paragraph, right after they leave the village of Kibaya, he describes the country in less flattering terms: “[We headed out through] a million miles of bloody Africa, brush close to the road that was impenetrable, solid, scrubby-looking undergrowth” (160). Hemingway sees that part of Africa which has not been injected with history at the hand of whites, what he calls in the next paragraph “the million-mile country,” as an endless, ahistorical spot of land which looks the same for millions of miles and has been the same for millions of years.

For Hemingway, African bodies contrast with his own temporally saturated body in that they experience time in an animal-like fashion, understanding only the immediate world around them. Hemingway says of his guide M'Cola, “I believe his working estimations were only from day to day and required an unbroken series of events to have any meaning” (44). In another instance he says, “M'Cola was an old man asleep, without history and without mystery” (73). The depiction of M'Cola as a man in perpetual slumber resonates with the rhetoric of race and temporality. His sleepy state, for Hemingway, becomes a timeless state—he is “without history”—and his lack of temporality becomes ontological, when Hemingway defines the African as “without mystery,” without thoughts, without secrets, without being. The African body's lack of any internal sense of history, for Hemingway, defines African primitivism and reinforces white modernity. As Spurr says, “The body, rather than speech, law, or history, is the essential defining characteristic of primitive peoples. They live, according to this view, in their bodies and in natural space, but not in a body politic worthy of the name nor in meaningful historical time” (22). Even though the African country itself might resemble modern countries, as Hemingway remarks on certain occasions, it is the lack of history in the bodies of African people which makes the country primitive. He writes on one occasion, “The country was so much like Aragon that I could not believe that we were not in Spain until, instead of mules with saddle bags, we met a dozen natives bare-legged and bare-headed dressed in white cotton cloth they wore gathered over the shoulder like a toga; but when they were past, the high trees beside the track over those rocks was Spain” (146). Just as the white body possesses history such that “a continent ages quickly when we arrive,” so does the African body's lack of history revert the African space to a primitive time. Without Africans on it, the land begins to modernize, to look like modern Europe to white eyes (“The country was so much like Aragon that I could not believe that we were not in Spain”). When Africans come onto the scene, though, the continent reverts back to its primitive state (“until … we met a dozen natives”). When the African bodies leave, Hemingway reports that the continent modernizes (“but when they were past, the high trees beside the track over those rocks was Spain”). Note also that it is the bareness of the African body which most signals primitivism: “[W]e met a dozen natives bare-legged and bare-headed.” The African body, with nakedness as the telltale sign of primitivism, is so void of history that it has the power to extract modernity (Spain-the-place articulated as Spain-the-moment-in-modern-times from the landscape.

Roosevelt also remarks on the Africans' nakedness as an indicator of their primitive state. He writes, “They are in most ways primitive savages, with an imperfect and feeble social, and therefore military organization” (as compared to the thriving military of turn-of-the-century America); “they live in small communities under their local chiefs” (as compared to the huge metropolises of America and Europe); “they file their teeth, and though they wear blankets in the neighborhood of the whites, these blankets are often cast aside; even when the blanket is worn, it is often in such fashion as merely to accentuate the otherwise absolute nakedness of both sexes” (in the manner of animals with sharp teeth and no need for clothing) (44). Despite the “primitive” economic and social order of the Africans, it is their “absolute nakedness” which reifies their primitivism. He writes that the Kikuyu were “real savages, naked save for a dingy blanket. … [When it rained] they had to be driven to make bough shelters for themselves. Once these shelters were up, and a little fire kindled at the entrance of each, the moping, spiritless wretches would speedily become transformed into beings who had lost all remembrance of ever having been wet or cold” (330). What first defines the Kikuyu as primitive “savages” is their nakedness, but what supports that claim to primitivism is their inability to experience time (at one moment they are cold and wet, at the next, they lose “all remembrance of even having been wet or cold”). In one very telling moment in African Game Trails, Roosevelt's description of the nakedness of a group of Africans betrays his belief that nudity equals primitive savagery. He says that the Kavirondo people, “both men and women, as a rule go absolutely naked, although they are peaceable and industrious” (451). Roosevelt's “although” signals his belief that naked bodies are inherently primitive and that those Africans who walk around naked and are also “peaceable and industrious” are the exception to the rule.

Temporality and a bodily sense of history are defined by the naked baring of African skin, but more than anything else it is the color of that naked skin which signals primitivism as primitive temporality is color-coded as black. At one point in African Game Trails, Roosevelt encounters what he describes as the remnants of an “advanced” tribe of Africans, but he quickly covers their “progressive” attributes by hinting that the blackness of the continent itself dragged them back to a primitive state. He opines that this tribe must have been “in some respects more advanced than the savage tribes who now dwell in the land. … Barbarians they doubtless were; but they have been engulfed in the black oblivion of a lower barbarism” (429). The continent itself, marked as “black,” is so primitive that it can destroy any possible attempts at progress; it can literally engulf progress into a “black oblivion.” This depiction of Africa not only reinforces that the continent is a space of primitive time, but also that “blackness” is a color-coded shorthand for a primitive temporality. The primitive oblivion that this progressive race vanished into is a “black oblivion.” Blackness and temporality, Roosevelt indicates, are always interrelated. Marshall Everett, the author of the juvenile adaptation of Roosevelt's African Game Trails, writes in his preface to Roosevelt's Thrilling Experiences in the Wilds of Africa a startling depiction of the African indigenes which also links temporality with skin color:

[This book] introduces you to the primitive inhabitants of this mysterious continent, the brown and black savages, to whom civilization is a question mark and culture is as little known as snow in August. It makes you acquainted with the strange habits, superstitious rites and religious ceremonies of these darkened cousins of the apes and monkeys, whose only right to bear the human name seems to be their poor and infantile jabbering.

(Everett 36)

The Africans are “primitive,” their continent “mysterious,” their relationship with civilization “questionable,” and their progressive distance from (white) humans so distant that they are best grouped with animals. African nakedness is not so much a sign of primitivism here as is African blackness (“brown and black savages”; “darkened cousins of the apes”). The most disturbing thing about race and temporality in the adaptation of Roosevelt's narrative is that the book was aimed at children. So profound was the impress that Roosevelt's image of Africa left on America that it not only affected Hemingway, one of the major authors of the twentieth century, but it also presented to young Americans a basis for imperialism which lasted long into his and the next century.

Roosevelt and Hemingway write primitivism onto Africa for white Americans to read and feel assured that they are the people entitled to colonize the world, as imperialism becomes a mechanism not of a particular nation, but the historical march of time itself. From the perspective of Roosevelt's and Hemingway's white American modernism, images of a timeless Africa reinforce the exigence of American imperialism.

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