SOURCE: Brantlinger, Patrick. “The Genealogy of the Myth of the ‘Dark Continent.’” In Rule of Darkness: British Literature and Imperialism, 1830-1914, pp. 173-97. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988.

[In the following essay, Brantlinger traces the evolution of the myth of Africa as the Dark Continent in writings by British and American explorers, sociologists, anthropologists, missionaries, journalists, abolitionists, novelists, and poets in the nineteenth century.]

We are thrown back in imagination to the infancy of the world.

—David Livingstone

In Heart of Darkness, Marlow says that Africa is no longer the “blank space” on the map he had once daydreamed over. “It had got filled since my boyhood with rivers and lakes and names. … It had become a place of darkness.”¹ Marlow is right: Africa grew dark as Victorian explorers, missionaries, and scientists flooded it with light, because the light was refracted through an imperialist ideology that urged the abolition of “savage customs” in the name of civilization. As a product of that ideology, the myth of the Dark Continent developed during the transition from the British campaign against the slave trade, which culminated in the outlawing of slavery in all British territory in 1833, to the imperialist partitioning of Africa, which dominated the final quarter of the nineteenth century.

The transition from the altruism of antislavery to the cynicism of empire building involved a transvaluation of values which we can aptly describe in Michel Foucault's genealogical language. For middle- and upper-class Victorians, dominant over a vast working-class majority at home and increasing millions of “uncivilized” peoples of “inferior races” abroad, power was self-validating. The world might contain many stages of social evolution and many seemingly bizarre customs and “superstitions,” but there was only one civilization, one path of progress, one true religion. At home, culture might often seem threatened by anarchy: through Chartism, trade unionism, and socialism the alternative voices of the working class could at least be heard by anyone who cared to listen. Abroad, the culture of the “conquering race” seemed, at least to the insular and insulated sources of British public opinion, unchallenged: in imperialist discourse the voices of the dominated are represented almost entirely by their silence or their alleged acquiescence. According to Edward Said, “the critic is responsible to a degree for articulating those voices dominated, displaced, or silenced” by the authority of a dominant culture. This is one function of Foucault's genealogy, which seeks to analyze “the various systems of subjection: not the anticipatory power of meaning, but the hazardous play of dominations.”²

Paradoxically, abolitionism contained the seeds of empire. If the general outline of Eric Williams's thesis in Capitalism and Slavery is valid, abolition was not purely altruistic but as economically conditioned as Britain's later empire building in Africa. The contradiction between the ideologies of antislavery and imperialism may be more apparent than real. Although the idealism that motivated the great abolitionists is unquestionable, Williams argues that Britain could afford to legislate against the slave trade only after that trade had helped provide the surplus capital necessary for industrial takeoff. Britain had lost much of its slave-owning territory as a result of the American Revolution; as the leading industrial power in the world Britain found in abolition a way to work against the interests of rivals who were still heavily involved in colonial slavery and a plantation economy.³ There was nothing Machiavellian or even conscious about this aspect of abolition; what was conscious was the desire to right injustices and behave with a social benevolence unparalleled in history.

Nevertheless, the British abolitionist program entailed deeper and deeper involvement in Africa—the creation of Sierra Leone as a haven for freed slaves was just a start—although abolitionists before the 1840s were neither jingoists nor deliberate expansionists. Applied to Africa, however, humanitarianism did point insistently toward imperialism.⁴ By the 1860s the success of the antislavery movement, the impact of the great Victorian explorers, and the merger in the social sciences of racist and evolutionary doctrines had combined, and the public widely shared a view of Africa which demanded imperialization on moral, religious, and scientific grounds. It is this view I call the myth of the Dark Continent; by mythology I mean ideology, or modern, secularized, “depoliticized speech” (to adopt Roland Barthes's phrase)—discourse that treats its subject as universally understood, scientifically established, and therefore no longer open to criticism by a political or theoretical opposition. According to Nancy Stepan, “a fundamental question about the history of racism in the first half of the nineteenth century is why it was that, just as the battle against slavery was being won by abolitionists, the war against racism was being lost. The Negro was legally freed by the Emancipation Act of 1833, but in the British mind he was still mentally, morally and physically a slave.”⁵ It is this fundamental question which a genealogy of the myth of the Dark Continent can help answer.

I

From the 1790s to the 1840s, the most influential kind of writing about Africa was abolitionist propaganda. Most of the great Romantics wrote poems against what Wordsworth in The Prelude called “the traffickers in Negro blood.” Blake's “Little Black Boy” is perhaps the most familiar of these:

My mother bore me in the southern wild,
And I am black, but O! my soul is white;
White as an angel is the English child;
But I am black as if bereav'd of light.(6)

To Blake's poem can be added Coleridge's “Greek Prize Ode on the Slave Trade,” Wordsworth's “Sonnet to Thomas Clarkson,” and stanzas and poems by Byron and Shelley. Several of Southey's poems deal with the slave trade, including the final stanza of “To Horror”:

Horror! I call thee yet once more!
Bear me to that accursed shore,
Where on the stake the Negro writhes.(7)

We can hear the echo of Southey's “Dark Horror” in Conrad's “The horror! The horror!” a century later.

Two main points about antislavery literature stand out.⁸ First, abolitionist writing involves the revelation of atrocities. Simon Legree's beating Uncle Tom to death is only the most familiar example. Abolitionist propaganda depicted in excruciating detail the barbaric practices of slave traders and owners in Africa, during the infamous Middle Passage, and in the southern states and West Indies. The constant association of Africa with the inhuman violence of the slave trade did much to darken its landscape even before the Romantic period. The exposé style of abolitionist propaganda, moreover, influenced much British writing about Africa well after slavery had ceased to be an urgent issue. Though Heart of Darkness is not directly about slavery, an exposé style is evident there, as it is also, for example, in Olive Schreiner's fictional diatribe against Cecil Rhodes, Trooper Peter Halket of Mashonaland (1897). The frontispiece to Schreiner's tale is a photograph showing white Rhodesians with three lynched Mashona rebels—an accurate summary of much of the history of Europe's relations with Africa.

The second main point about antislavery literature is that pre-Victorian writers were often able to envisage Africans living freely and happily without European interference. Strike off the fetters European slavers had placed on them, and the result was noble savages living in pastoral freedom and innocence. In sonnet 5 of Southey's “Poems Concerning the Slave Trade,” a slave's rebelliousness is inspired by

                                                            the intolerable thought
Of every past delight; his native grove,
Friendship's best joys, and liberty and love
For ever lost.(9)

Similarly, in “Africa Delivered; or, The Slave Trade Abolished” (1809), James Grahame writes:

In that fair land of hill, and dale, and stream,
The simple tribes from age to age had heard
No hostile voice

—until the arrival of European slave traders who introduced to an Edenic Africa the characteristic products of civilization: avarice, treachery, rapine, murder, warfare, and slavery.¹⁰

Abolitionist portrayals of Africans as perhaps noble but also innocent or simple savages were patronizing and unintentionally derogatory. Nevertheless, such portrayals were both more positive and often more open-minded than those from about 1840 to World War I.¹¹ Ironically, the expansion of the slave trade had required Europeans to develop more accurate knowledge of Africans—both those Africans with whom they did business and those who became their commodities. Many factors contributed to a period of relative sympathy in writing about Africa between 1790 and 1830, among them the satiric tradition of the noble savage, turned to effective popular use in 1688 in Aphra Behn's Oroonoko; or, The Royal Slave (and later by many abolitionists); the Enlightenment belief that all people should be treated equally under the law; the growth of the abolitionist movement; and the exploration of the Niger River by Mungo Park and others, starting in the late 1700s. This relative sympathy is evident in the abolitionist poetry of Southey and Grahame and also in such works of social observation as Thomas Bowdich's Mission from Cape Coast Castle to Ashantee (1819). Bowdich condemned the Ashanti practice of ritual human sacrifice but did not treat that aspect of their culture as representative of the whole, nor allow it to interfere with his appreciation of other Ashanti customs, arts, and institutions.¹²

The abolition of slavery in all British territories did not eliminate concern about slavery elsewhere, but the British began to see themselves less as perpetrators of the slave trade and more as potential saviors of the African. The blame for slavery could now be displaced onto others, Americans, for example, and increasingly onto Africans themselves for maintaining the slave trade as a main form of economic exchange. This shifting of the burden of guilt is already evident in the Niger Expedition of 1841, which one historian calls “the first step toward a general ‘forward policy’ in West Africa.”¹³ Thomas Fowell Buxton, leader of the British antislavery movement after William Wilberforce, recognized that the emancipation legislation of 1833 would not eliminate slavery from non-British parts of the world. He therefore proposed to attack slavery at its source, planning the Niger Expedition to initiate the introduction of Christianity and “legitimate commerce” to West Africa. In The African Slave Trade and Its Remedy (1840), Buxton portrays Africa as a land “teeming with inhabitants who admire, and are desirous of possessing our manufactures.”¹⁴ In the past Africans learned to trade in human lives; in the future they must learn to produce something other than slaves. Buxton's message is close to Martineau's in Dawn Island: the British will teach Africans to be both religious and industrious, and to engage in free trade.

Although Buxton repudiated empire building, the Niger Expedition aimed to establish bases from which European values could spread throughout Africa. Buxton's portrayal of Africa is almost wholly negative: “Bound in the chains of the grossest ignorance, [Africa] is a prey to the most savage superstition. Christianity has made but feeble inroads on this kingdom of darkness” (10-11). In a chapter titled “Superstitions and Cruelties of the Africans,” Buxton extracts the most grisly descriptions of such customs as human sacrifice from the writings of Bowdich and others and offers these as the essence of African culture. Buxton's “dark catalogue of crime” combines slavery and savagery; both disrupt Africa's chances for civilization and salvation (270). “Such atrocious deeds, as have been detailed in the foregoing pages, keep the African population in a state of callous barbarity, which can only be effectually counteracted by Christian civilisation” (244).

The Niger Expedition ended in disaster: most of its European participants were laid low by malaria, forty-one of them perishing. For at least a decade the failure supported arguments that Europeans should stay out of central Africa—the harsh facts of disease and death themselves darkened the continent. In his 1848 essay on the Niger Expedition, Dickens attacked the aims of philanthropists and decried Africa as a continent not fit for civilization, best left in the dark: “The history of this Expedition is the history of the Past [rather than the future] in reference to the heated visions of philanthropists for the railroad Christianisation of Africa, and the abolition of the Slave Trade. … Between the civilized European and the barbarous African there is a great gulf set. … To change the customs even of civilised … men … is … a most difficult and slow proceeding; but to do this by ignorant and savage races, is a work which, like the progressive changes of the globe itself, requires a stretch of years that dazzles in the looking at.”¹⁵ A Buxton or a Martineau might look upon conversion of the savages as a mere matter of showing them the light, whether of religion or of the gospel of free trade, but Dickens thought savages so far beneath Europeans on the great chain of being that only fools expected to “railroad” them into civilization. In Bleak House he places Mrs. Jellyby's Borrioboola-Gha mission on the banks of the Niger to suggest its utter and absurd futility, like that of the Niger Expedition. In his occasional rantings against “natives,” “Sambos,” and “ignoble savages,” Dickens also vents his hostility toward evangelical philanthropy. He regarded missionaries as “perfect nuisances who leave every place worse than they find it.” “Believe it, African Civilisation, Church of England Missionary, and all other Missionary Societies!” he writes. “The work at home must be completed thoroughly, or there is no hope abroad.”¹⁶ This was also Carlyle's attitude in “The Nigger Question” (1849) and again in his response to the Jamaica Rebellion of 1865. Both Carlyle and Dickens held that abolitionist and missionary activities were distractions from more appropriate concerns about poverty and misgovernment at home.

As the Governor Eyre controversy showed, many Victorians sympathized with the poor at home but not with the exploited abroad, and a sizable portion of the British public sided with the South during the American Civil War. Slavery, however, remained an important issue from the 1840s to the end of the century. Slavery is central, for example, to an 1847 novel by Sarah Lee Wallis (whose first husband was Thomas Bowdich), The African Wanderers, in which “from one end of Africa to the other we find traces of that horrible traffic.” Some of Wallis's “natives” are restless and hostile because they are cannibals “who file their teeth” and lust after human flesh, but more are restless and hostile because their normally pacific lives have been disrupted by the slave trade. When Uncle Tom's Cabin appeared in 1852, moreover, it sold more copies in Britain than America.¹⁷ One of Harriet Beecher Stowe's most ardent British admirers, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, contributed to the abolitionist cause with her poems “The Runaway Slave at Pilgrim's Point” and “A Curse for a Nation,” and Harriet Martineau was also an ardent abolitionist. After 1865 slavery seemed to be largely confined to Africa; along with such staples of sensational journalism as human sacrifice and cannibalism, slavery looked more and more like a direct extension of African savagery.

After abolishing slavery on their own ground, the British turned to the seemingly humane work of abolishing slavery—and all “savage customs”—on African ground. By the time of the Berlin Conference of 1884-85, which is often identified as the start of the Scramble for Africa, the British tended to see Africa as a center of evil, a part of the world possessed by a demonic darkness or barbarism, represented above all by slavery, human sacrifice, and cannibalism, which it was their duty to exorcise. The writers most responsible for promoting this view—and for maintaining the crusade against slavery and the slave trade even after Britain and the United States had ceased to engage in them—were the explorers and missionaries, with Buxton's disciple David Livingstone in the lead.

II

The so-called opening up of Africa by the great Victorian explorers commenced in the late 1850s, facilitated by quinine as a prophylactic against malaria. Earlier explorers had excited public interest, but the search for the sources of the White Nile, initiated by Burton and Speke in 1856 and followed by the expeditions of Speke and Grant, Samuel White Baker, Livingstone, and Stanley, raised public interest to fever pitch.¹⁸ When Alec MacKenzie, hero of Somerset Maugham's The Explorer (1907), first reads “the marvellous records of African exploration,” his “blood tingled at the magic of those pages.” Inspired by those narratives, Alec becomes an explorer who struggles mightily against savagery and the internal slave trade, not to mention European villainy, and thus contributes mightily to imperial expansion. Maugham offers a fictional hagiography of all the great explorers of Africa, “men who've built up the empire piece by piece” and whose chief aim has been to add “another fair jewel to her crown.” If the connection between exploration and empire building was not always evident to MacKenzie's originals, it is paramount for Maugham: “Success rewarded [MacKenzie's] long efforts. … The slavers were driven out of a territory larger than the United Kingdom, treaties were signed with chiefs who had hitherto been independent … and only one step remained, that the government should … annex the conquered district to the empire.”¹⁹

The books the explorers wrote took the Victorian reading public by storm. In the first few months after its publication in 1857 Livingstone's Missionary Travels sold 70,000 copies and made its author wealthy and so famous that he was mobbed by admirers. A national hero in the late 1850s, by the end of his last African journey in 1872 he was a national saint. The obverse of the myth of the Dark Continent was that of the Promethean and, at least in Livingstone's case, saintly bestower of light. Even Dickens, with his dislike of evangelical types, made an exception of Livingstone, calling him one of “those who carry into desert places the water of life.”²⁰ Livingstone's apotheosis was complete in 1872 when Stanley, with his great journalistic scoop, published his first bestseller, How I Found Livingstone. Stanley's other books were also bestsellers: In Darkest Africa, for example, sold 150,000 copies in English, was frequently translated, and according to one reviewer “has been read more universally and with deeper interest than any other publication of” 1890.²¹ Still another bestseller was Samuel White Baker's The Albert N'Yanza of 1866, and many others were widely read, including Burton's Lake Regions of Central Africa (1860), John Speke's Discovery of the Sources of the Nile (1864), and Joseph Thomson's To the Central African Lakes and Back (1881). Although such accounts of African exploration do not figure in standard histories of Victorian literature, they exerted an incalculable influence on British culture and the course of modern history. It would be difficult to find a clearer example of the Foucauldian concept of discourse as power, as “a violence that we do to things.”²²

The great explorers' writings are nonfictional quest romances in which the hero-authors struggle through enchanted, bedeviled lands toward an ostensible goal: the discovery of the Nile's sources, the conversion of the cannibals. But that goal is also sheer survival and return home to the regions of light. The humble but heroic authors move from adventure to adventure against a dark, infernal backdrop where there are no other characters of equal stature, only bewitched or demonic savages. Although they sometimes individualize the Africans they encounter, explorers usually portray amusing or dangerous obstacles or objects of curiosity, whereas missionaries see weak, pitiable, inferior mortals who need to be shown the light. Center stage is occupied not by Africa or Africans but by a Livingstone or a Stanley, a Baker or a Burton, Victorian St. Georges battling the armies of the night. Kurtz's career in deviltry suggests that at least sometimes it was a losing battle.

Livingstone offers a striking example of how humanitarian aims could contribute to imperialist encroachment. Deeply influenced by Buxton, Livingstone also advocated the opening up of Africa by commerce and Christianity. He had more respect for Africans than most explorers and missionaries, though he still viewed them as “children” and “savages.” Occasionally he even expressed doubt that a European presence in Africa would be beneficial, but he also believed the African was “benighted” and the European bore the light of civilization and true religion. Just as Martineau in Dawn Island identified salvation from savagery with the gospel of free trade, so Livingstone held that Africa could not hope to “raise itself” without “contact with superior races by commerce.” Africans were “inured to bloodshed and murder, and care[d] for no god except being bewitched”; without commerce and Christianity, “the prospects for these dark regions are not bright.” Of this most humanitarian of explorers Tim Jeal writes that “with his missionary aims and his almost messianic passion for exporting British values [Livingstone] seemed to his successors to have provided the moral basis for massive imperial expansion.”²³

Economic and political motives are, of course, easier to detect in Livingstone's doppelgänger, Henry Morton Stanley. The purpose behind Stanley's work in the Congo for King Leopold II of Belgium was not far removed from the aims of the Eldorado Exploring Expedition in Heart of Darkness: “To tear treasure out of the bowels of the land was their desire, with no more moral purpose at the back of it than there is in burglars breaking into a safe.” But blatant economic motive was not what impelled Livingstone and the horde of missionaries who imitated him. The melodrama of Africa called for intervention by a higher moral power, and the Victorians increasingly saw themselves—again with Livingstone in the lead—as the highest moral power among nations. The success of the British antislavery movement, after all, seemed to prove that Britain was more virtuous than its rivals for empire. For Livingstone, as for other missionaries and abolitionists, the African was a creature to be pitied, to be saved from slavery and also from his own darkness, his savagery. At least Livingstone believed that the African could be rescued from darkness—that he could be Christianized and perhaps civilized. Such an attitude was, of course, necessary for any missionary. At the same time missionaries were strongly tempted to exaggerate savagery and darkness to rationalize their presence in Africa, to explain the frustrations they experienced in making converts, and to win support from mission societies at home.²⁴

The titles of missionary accounts express typical attitudes: Daybreak in the Dark Continent by Wilson S. Naylor, for example, and Dawn in the Dark Continent; or, Africa and Its Missions by James Stewart. Typical, too, are these assertions from By the Equator's Snowy Peak, May Crawford's 1913 autobiography about missionary life in British East Africa: “With the coming of the British,” she says, “dawned a somewhat brighter” day for Africa—only somewhat brighter because of the great backwardness of the natives, not because of any British failing. “Loving darkness rather than light,” she continues, the “natives … resent all that makes for progress.”²⁵ Perhaps what the Africans resented was British intrusion into their land, but this Crawford could not see. I have read of no instances where cannibals put missionaries into pots and cooked them, but Africans did sometimes kill, capture, or drive missionaries away, thus fueling arguments for armed intervention and imperialist annexation.²⁶ In Anthony Hope's 1895 novel The God in the Car, Lord Semingham is asked how his great scheme for investing in central Africa is faring. “Everything's going on very well,” he replies. “They've killed a missionary.” This may be “regrettable in itself,” Semingham smiles, “but [it's] the first step towards empire.”²⁷

The missionary idea that Africa could be redeemed for civilization was more than some explorers were willing to grant. Burton believed that the African was “unimprovable.” “He is inferior to the active-minded and objective … Europeans, and to the … subjective and reflective Asiatic. He partakes largely of the worst characteristics of the lower Oriental types—stagnation of mind, indolence of body, moral deficiency, superstition, and childish passion.”²⁸ Burton goes to some lengths to undermine the missionary position. He declares that “these wild African fetissists [sic] are [not] easily converted to a ‘purer creed’ … their faith is a web woven with threads of iron.” Yet he agrees with the missionaries in depicting fetishism as witchcraft and devil worship, Kurtz's unspeakable rites. “A prey to base passions and melancholy godless fears, the Fetissist … peoples with malevolent beings the invisible world, and animates material nature with evil influences. The rites of his dark and deadly superstition are” entirely nefarious, as almost all Victorian writers claimed.²⁹ In their books and essays the Victorians demote all central Africa's kings to “chiefs” and all African priests, with the exception of Muslims, to “witchdoctors.”

Even if Africans are doomed by their “negro instincts” (Burton's phrase) always to remain savage, Burton still has in mind for them a role in the work of civilization. Like Carlyle, he argues both that abolitionist philanthropy is mistaken and that primitive peoples need civilized masters. His argument is explicitly imperialist: “I unhesitatingly assert—and all unprejudiced travellers will agree with me—that the world still wants the black hand. Enormous tropical regions yet await the clearing and draining operations by the lower races, which will fit them to become the dwelling-places of civilized men.”³⁰ Other explorers agreed with Burton. Though a hero in the late stages of the antislavery crusade, Baker believed that “the African … will assuredly relapse into an idle and savage state, unless specially governed and forced by industry.”³¹

Burton was a marginal aristocrat; Baker came from a well-to-do family of shipowners and West Indian planters. Their racist view of Africans as a natural laboring class, suited only for the dirty work of civilization, expresses a nostalgia for lost authority and for a pliable, completely subordinate proletariat that is one of the central fantasies of imperialism. For opposite reasons, that fantasy also appealed to explorers from working-class backgrounds, such as Livingstone and Stanley, whose subordinate status at home was reversed in Africa. Livingstone the factory boy could be Livingstone the great white leader and teacher in Africa; Stanley the pauper orphan became the great pioneer and field marshal, blazing the trail for civilization.

That Africans were suited only for manual labor is an idea fiction often repeats. In Henry S. Merriman's With Edged Tools (1894), for example, African porters “hired themselves out like animals, and as the beasts of the field they did their work—patiently, without intelligence. … Such is the African.” The comparison with British labor is made explicit when the narrator adds: “If any hold that men are not created so dense and unambitious as has just been represented, let him look nearer home in our own merchant service. The able-bodied seaman goes to sea all his life, but he never gets any nearer navigating the ship—and he a white man.” The English protagonists are shocked to discover that the Africans whom their villainous half-breed partner has hired are his “slaves,” to whom he pays no wages—slavery by the 1890s was patently a violation of “one of Heaven's laws.”³² But when offered the choice between freedom and continuing in slavery, most of the Africans choose slavery. Africans are not suited for freedom, Merriman implies, though whether they can ever be elevated to freedom or are racially doomed to a life no higher than that of beasts of burden is an issue he leaves clouded.

Racism functions as a displaced or surrogate class system, growing more extreme as the domestic class alignments it reflects are threatened or erode. As a rationalization for the domination of “inferior” peoples, imperialist discourse is inevitably racist; it treats class and race terminology as covertly interchangeable or at least analogous. There exist both a hierarchy of classes and a hierarchy of races; both are the results of evolution or of the laws of nature; both classes and races are simpler than but similar to species; and both are developing but are also, at any given moment, fixed, inevitable, not subject to political manipulation. But class is more or less subject to political reform, and in that way the class hierarchy never seemed as absolute as the hierarchy of races. Compared to the social Darwinian rhetoric of imperialism, the socialist, liberal, and even conservative discourses of domestic reform at least acknowledged the existence of political alternatives to the status quo.

As in South Africa now, so in the Empire the conquered races were treated as a new proletariat, their status much less distinct from slavery than that of the working class at home. The desire for—indeed, the creation of—a new, subordinate underclass contradicted the abolitionist stance taken by Victorian explorers and missionaries, but it influenced all relations between Victorians and Africans. Aside from South Africa, perhaps its most virulent form was the forced labor system of King Leopold's Congo which Stanley helped establish, though it appears in so small an item as the design by Sir Harry Johnston for the first postage stamp of British Central Africa. The Africans who flank the shield and the motto “Light in Darkness” hold a spade and a pickax—the implements, no doubt, to build the future white civilization of Africa.³³

III

The racist views held by Burton and Baker were at least as close to the science of their day as the somewhat less negative views of the missionaries. Burton, as a member of the Anthropological Society, agreed with its founder James Hunt that the Negro race probably formed a distinct species.³⁴ In contrast, most Darwinians held that the races of mankind had a common origin and therefore believed the unity of human nature. But Darwinism was only relatively more advanced than Hunt's racism. The development of physical anthropology and ethnology as disciplines concerned with differences among races strengthened the stereotypes expressed by explorers and missionaries. Evolutionary anthropology often suggested that Africans, if not nonhuman or a different species, were such an inferior “breed” that they might be impervious to “higher influences.”

Concerted investigations of race and evolution were beginning at the same time as investigations of prehistory and the anthropoid apes. Some of the results can be seen in Thomas Henry Huxley's Man's Place in Nature (1863) and Darwin's Descent of Man (1872). Huxley's essay involves a refutation of the idea that Africans, Australians, and other primitive peoples are the “missing link” or evolutionary stage between the anthropoid apes and civilized (white) mankind. But Huxley repeatedly cites evidence that suggests a proximity between African, chimpanzee, and gorilla, including the story of an African tribe who believe that the great apes were once their next of kin. Into the middle of his otherwise logical argument, moreover, he inserts a wholly gratuitous account of “African cannibalism in the sixteenth century,” drawn from a Portuguese source and illustrated with a grisly woodcut depicting a “human butcher shop.”³⁵

When an astute, scientific observer indulges in fantasies about cannibalism, something more than mere caprice is at work. As Dorothy Hammond and Alta Jablow note, cannibalism was not an important theme in British writing about Africa before mid-century. But “in the imperial period writers were far more addicted to tales of cannibalism than … Africans ever were to cannibalism.”³⁶ Typical of the more sensational treatments of anthropophagy is Winwood Reade, who in Savage Africa (1863) writes that “the mob of Dahomey are man-eaters; they have cannibal minds; they have been accustomed to feed on murder.” Reade nonetheless describes his flirtations with cannibal maidens, and in a capricious chapter on “the philosophy of cannibalism” he distinguishes between ritual cannibalism, practiced by some West African societies, and another (mythical) sort that is “simply an act of gourmandise.” “A cannibal is not necessarily ferocious. He eats his fellow-creatures, not because he hates them, but because he likes them.”³⁷ The more Europeans dominated Africans, the more savage Africans came to seem; cannibalism represented the nadir of savagery, more extreme even than slavery (which, of course, a number of “civilized” nations practiced through much of the nineteenth century).

Evolutionary thought seems almost calculated to legitimize imperialism. The theory that man evolved through distinct social stages—from savagery to barbarism to civilization—led to a self-congratulatory anthropology that actively promoted belief in the inferiority, indeed the bestiality, of the African. In The Origin of Civilization (1870), Sir John Lubbock argues not just that contemporary savages represent the starting point of social evolution but that they are below that starting point. The original primitives from whom we evolved contained the seeds of progress; modern savages have not progressed, according to Lubbock, and hence must be lower on the evolutionary scale than our ancestors. All the more reason, of course, to place them under imperial guardianship and to treat them as nothing more than potential labor.³⁸ Similar is the evolutionary hierarchy of both race and social class in George Romanes's 1889 essay Mental Evolution in Man: “When we come to consider the case of the savages, and through them the case of prehistoric man, we shall find that, in the great interval which lies between such grades of mental evolution and our own, we are brought far on the way toward bridging the psychological distance which separates the gorilla from the gentleman.”³⁹ Presumably, everyone is a link somewhere in this late Victorian version of the great chain of being: if gentlemen are at the farthest remove from our anthropoid ancestors, the working class is not so far removed, and savages are even closer.

In her examination of the “scientific” codification of racist dogmas, Nancy Stepan writes: “By the 1850s, the shift from the earlier ethnographic, monogenist, historical and philosophical tradition to a more conservative, anthropological, and polygenist approach … had advanced quite far in Britain. … Races were now seen as forming a natural but static chain of excellence” (45-46). By the end of the century eugenicists and social Darwinists were offering “scientific” justifications for genocide as well as for imperialism (the two were inseparable, but while imperialism could be advocated in public, the liquidation of “inferior” races obviously could not). In Social Evolution (1894), Benjamin Kidd argued that, try as they might to be humane, the British would inevitably kill off the weaker races in “the struggle for existence”:

The Anglo-Saxon has exterminated the less developed peoples with which he has come into competition … through the operation of laws not less deadly [than war] and even more certain in their result. The weaker races disappear before the stronger through the effects of mere contact. … The Anglo-Saxon, driven by forces inherent in his own civilisation, comes to develop the natural resources of the land, and the consequences appear to be inevitable. The same history is repeating itself in South Africa. In the words [of] a leading colonist of that country, “the natives must go; or they must work as laboriously to develop the land as we are prepared to do.”⁴⁰

In National Life from the Standpoint of Science (1901), the eugenicist Karl Pearson goes beyond the vision of the black African with spade and pickax performing the groundwork for white civilization in the tropics: “No strong and permanent civilization can be built upon slave labour, [and] an inferior race doing menial labour for a superior race can give no stable community.” The solution? Whereas the abolitionists sought to liberate the slaves, Pearson's science seeks to eliminate them, or at least to push them out of the path of civilization. “We shall never have a healthy social state in South Africa until the white man replaces the dark in the fields and the mines, and the Kaffir is pushed back towards the equator. The nation organized for the struggle [of existence] must be a homogenous whole, not a mixture of superior and inferior races.”⁴¹

Darwin himself speculated about the apparently inevitable extinction of primitive races in the encounter with higher ones. Genocide decimated the American Indians, Tasmanians, Maoris, and aboriginal Australians, but Darwin believed these races would have withered on the vine anyway—the less fit vanishing as the fitter advanced. Africans did not dwindle away as Europeans encroached on their territory, despite the slave trade, which to some observers seemed proof of their hardiness, their fitness. Others, however, saw this apparent fitness as only showing inferiority in a different light—Africans were made of coarser stuff than the sensitive and poetic Maoris. Darwin is comparatively cautious in his speculations about race, but throughout The Descent of Man he emphasizes the distance between savage and civilized peoples, contrasting savages who practice infanticide to such examples of moral and intellectual excellence as John Howard and Shakespeare. In the last paragraph of the book he declares he would rather be related to a baboon than to “a savage who delights to torture his enemies, offers up bloody sacrifices without remorse, treats his wives like slaves, knows no decency, and is haunted by the grossest superstitions.”⁴² In general, Darwinism lent scientific status to the view that there were higher and lower races, progressive and nonprogressive ones, and that the lower races ought to be governed by—even completely supplanted by—civilized, progressive races like the British.

There is much irony in the merger of racist and evolutionary theories in Victorian anthropology. For the Victorians the distance between primitive and civilized peoples seemed immense and perhaps unbridgeable. In the modern era, through another sharp transvaluation, anthropology has shifted from evolutionism to cultural relativism. First in the work of Franz Boas and then more generally after World War I, the morally judgmental and racist anthropology of the Victorians gave way to a new version of “objectivity,” what might even be called scientific primitivism.⁴³ What Claude Lévi-Strauss says in Tristes tropiques about the religious attitudes of primitives is exemplary of the transvaluation that anthropology has undergone since its nineteenth-century inception as the study of racial differences and a scientific rationalization for empire. Primitive beliefs are not “superstitions,” Lévi-Strauss declares, but rather “preferences … denoting a kind of wisdom [acceptance of individual and ecological limits, reverence for nature] which savage races practised spontaneously and the rejection of which, by the modern world, is the real madness.”⁴⁴

IV

Although the antislavery crusade inspired much poetry before 1833, Victorian poets wrote little about Africa (except for patriotic verses on such topics as General Gordon's last stand at Khartoum). Tennyson's “Timbuctoo” is an apparent exception, but it was written in 1829 for a Cambridge poetry contest and offers a Romantic account of how the visionary city of Fable has been “darkened” by “keen discovery” (a paradoxical application of “darken” similar to Marlow's). More typical of Victorian attitudes is Thackeray's “Timbuctoo,” written for the same contest that Tennyson's poem won. Thackeray parodied abolitionist propaganda:

Desolate Afric! thou art lovely yet!
One heart yet beats which ne'er shall thee forget.
What though thy maidens are a blackish brown,
Does virtue dwell in whiter breasts alone?
Oh no, oh no, oh no, oh no, oh no!
It shall not, must not, cannot, e'er be so.
The day shall come when Albion's self shall feel
Stern Afric's wrath, and writhe neath Afric's steel.(45)

Other far-flung parts of the world inspired the Victorian muse—Edward FitzGerald's Rubaiyat and Edwin Arnold's The Light of Asia come to mind—but Victorian imaginative discourse about Africa tended toward discredited forms, Gothic romance and boys' adventure story. For the most part, fiction writers imitated the explorers, producing quest romances with Gothic overtones in which the heroic white penetration of the Dark Continent is the central theme. H. Rider Haggard's stories fit this pattern, and so—with ironic differences—does Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness.

Explorers themselves sometimes wrote adventure novels: Baker's Cast Up by the Sea (1866) and Stanley's My Kalulu: Prince, King, and Slave (1889) are both tales addressed to boys, and both carry abolitionist themes into Africa well after the emancipation of slaves in most other parts of the world. “I had in view,” writes Stanley, “that I might be able to describe more vividly in such a book as this than in any other way the evils of the slave trade in Africa.”⁴⁶ His story traces an Arab slaving caravan to Lake Tanganyika; when the Arabs are attacked by the blacks they have come to enslave, the only survivors—a few Arab boys—are enslaved instead. Later they are rescued from slavery by Prince Kalulu, who himself escaped from slavery in an earlier episode. But Kalulu and the Arab boys are once more captured, by slave-trading blacks, “the Wazavila assassins and midnight robbers,” whose attacks on innocent villages provide what Stanley calls “a true picture” of the horrors of the slave trade. Even the Arab slavers are morally superior to the “fiendish” Wazavila. After many scrapes, Kalulu and the Arab boys, well-experienced in the horrors of slavery and the Dark Continent, reach Zanzibar and freedom. Stanley's moral is plain: the internal slave trade will cease only when European forces quash the Wazavila and other slave-trading tribes and harness the African to the wheel of what Buxton called legitimate commerce.

In 1888 the great Scottish explorer of Kenya, Joseph Thomson, published an ostensibly adult novel. The protagonist of Ulu: An African Romance is a disgruntled Scotsman named Gilmour (partly modeled on Thomson himself) who escapes from corrupt civilization to the Kenyan highlands. Gilmour accepts as his fiancée a fourteen-year-old African girl, Ulu, whom he proceeds (inconsistently, given his rejection of civilization) to try to civilize before marrying. This African Pygmalion story seems daring for the first fifty pages—a direct assault on Victorian stereotypes of race and empire. But the hero never marries or even civilizes Ulu; instead, he realizes the terrible mistake he has made when he meets the blonde, blue-eyed daughter of the local missionary. Ulu then becomes for the white lovers an object of patronizing, cloying concern. Gilmour acknowledges “the impossibility of making Ulu other than she is, an out-and-out little savage, childlike and simple, and lovable in many ways, perhaps, but utterly incapable of assimilating any of the higher thoughts and aspirations of the civilized life.” While Gilmour's Pygmalion scheme is collapsing, the story falls into a stereotypic adventure pattern. The ferocious Masai attack and capture Ulu and the missionary's daughter. “What had [Kate] to expect from these licentious, bloodthirsty savages, the indulgence of whose brutal passions was their sole rule in life?”⁴⁷ Fortunately the Masai have never seen anything as beautiful as Kate, and they proceed to worship her. Gilmour rescues Kate, and Ulu conveniently sacrifices herself so the intrepid white couple, who were of course meant for each other all along, can live happily ever after. (It is tempting to correlate this wishful fantasy of love and extermination with scientific rationalizations of genocide: progress and fulfillment are the domain of Europeans, even on an individual level. Nevertheless, among the great explorers Thomson was one of the more liberal defenders of Africans and African rights.) Thomson's story is ludicrously inconsistent, but it is also remarkable for suggesting that the European invasion of Africa might corrupt innocent savages without civilizing them and for even broaching the possibility of intermarriage. White/black unions were not uncommon in reality, as the history of the Griqua and other racially mixed peoples in southern Africa attests, but in fiction intermarriage was unheard of.

Except for its stress on love and marriage, Thomson's adult novel contains little to distinguish it from the whole subgenre of boys' adventure tales to which Stanley's and Baker's stories belong. An adolescent quality pervades imperialist literature, as it would fascist culture in the 1920s and 1930s. Africa was a setting where British boys could become men, and British men, like Haggard's heroes, could behave like boys with impunity. Africa was a great testing (or teething) ground for moral growth and moral regression (the two processes were often indistinguishable). And because imperialism always entailed violence and exploitation and therefore could never bear much scrutiny, propagandists found it easier to leave it to boys to “play up, play up, and play the game” than to supposedly more mature audiences. Much imperialist discourse was thus directed at a specifically adolescent audience, the future rulers of the world. In the works of Marryat, Mayne Reid, G. A. Henty, W. H. G. Kingston, Dr. Gordon Stables, Stevenson, Haggard, and Kipling, Britain turned youthful as it turned outward, following a regressive path parallel to “going native.”

In Black Ivory: A Tale of Adventure among the Slaves of East Africa (1873), another boys' novelist, R. M. Ballantyne, emulated Livingstone in seeking to expose “the horrible traffic in human beings.” “Exaggeration has easily been avoided,” Ballantyne assures us, “because—as Dr. Livingstone says in regard to the slave trade—‘exaggeration is impossible.’” Ballantyne wishes to expose both the atrocities of the slave trade and anti-Negro stereotypes. His character Chief Kambira, Ballantyne writes, has “nothing of our nursery savage … [he] does not roar, or glare, or chatter, or devour his food in its blood.”⁴⁸ This is all to the good, but Ballantyne is inconsistent. His Africans are sympathetic mainly as melodrama victims, and otherwise he portrays their customs as laughably childish. He has only praise for British antislavery squadrons patrolling the coasts and for the British intruding inland in East Africa to stop the slave trade.⁴⁹

More ingenious than Black Ivory is Sir Harry Johnston's The History of a Slave (1889), which takes the form of an autobiographical slave narrative. Himself an explorer and an artist, illustrator of his own story, Johnston attacks slavery as an extension of savagery. The atrocities that his slave narrator depicts are more grisly than anything in Ballantyne; most grisly of all are the slow tortures practiced by the Executioner of Zinder under the Tree of Death. But if the slave's life under various Muslim masters is violent and cruel, his life before slavery is just as bloody and even more irrational. Thus the narrator recounts his earliest memory: “When … the men of our town killed someone and roasted his flesh for a feast … the bones … were laid round about the base of [a] tree. The first thing I remember clearly was playing with [a] skull.”⁵⁰ Johnston's exposé of the atrocities of the slave trade is preceded by an exposé of the alleged atrocities of tribal savagery—no pastoral innocence here. The solution to the slave trade entails more than persuading Muslim sheikhs to set black Africans free; it also entails the abolition of tribal savagery, which requires imperialist annexation, the fulfillment of Britain's civilizing mission.

Other fictions about Africa, even when written long after the American Civil War, also attack the slave trade as part of a larger pattern of violence and savagery. In The Congo Rovers: A Story of the Slave Squadron (1885), by the American William Lancaster, the hero is captured by slave-trading natives and narrowly escapes sacrificial murder in a chapter entitled “A Fiendish Ceremonial.” The work exhibits all of the stereotypes about the Dark Continent exploited by another popular American writer, Edgar Rice Burroughs, in the Tarzan books. Novels not about slavery also stress the violence and irrationality of tribal customs. The publication dates of Haggard's King Solomon's Mines (1885) and John Buchan's Prester John (1910) span the period of the Scramble for Africa, and in both novels civilization is juxtaposed with savagery in ways that call for the elimination of the latter. For Haggard and Buchan too, the Dark Continent must be made light.

Haggard and Buchan also give new life to the Romantic figure of the noble savage, however—Haggard through his magnificent Zulu warriors Umbopa and Umslopogaas, Buchan through his black antihero John Laputa, also from Zulu country. Haggard sees clearly the destruction of Zulu society by the encroachment of whites (King Solomon's Mines appeared six years after the Zulu War of 1879), and he contrasts primitive customs favorably with civilized ones. He nevertheless maintains a sharp division between savage and civilized; his white heroes penetrate the darkness as representatives of vastly higher levels of social evolution. Like aristocrats in Renaissance pastoral they cleave to their own kind and return to the light. Their friendship with Umbopa cannot hold them in Kukuanaland, and only one other relationship threatens to do so, the romance between Captain John Good and the beautiful Foulata, nipped in the bud when like Ulu she is killed near the end of the story. The narrator Allan Quatermain concludes: “I consider her removal was a fortunate occurrence, since, otherwise, complications would have been sure to ensue. The poor creature was no ordinary native girl, but a person of great … beauty, and of considerable refinement of mind. But no amount of beauty or refinement could have made an entanglement between Good and herself a desirable occurrence; for, as she herself put it, ‘Can the sun mate with the darkness, or the white with the black?’”⁵¹

Buchan depicts a revolutionary conspiracy led by John Laputa, the self-proclaimed heir of Prester John. To the narrator, Davie Crawfurd, Laputa is a noble but also satanic savage; Davie finds him intensely attractive, but the attraction is charged with a deeply racist and erotic dread. Buchan portrays the conspiracy in Gothic romance terms, as a nightmare from which Davie struggles to awake. “You know the [kind of] nightmare when you are pursued by some awful terror,” Davie says; and again: “Last night I … looked into the heart of darkness and the sight … terrified me.”⁵² But this heart of darkness is not within Davie's psyche, it is Africa and the murderous savagery of Laputa. Haggard can entertain the thought of a free society of noble savages as long as it is distant and mythical, and so can Buchan in A Lodge in the Wilderness. In Prester John, however, the idea of independence for Africans is a source only of terror. Laputa must be destroyed, the nightmare dispelled.

Even at its most positive the romance genre renders the hero's quest as a journey to an underworld, a harrowing of hell, and into this pattern the myth of the Dark Continent fits perfectly. Conrad dealt with these associations more consciously than other writers, producing a quest romance that foreshadows the atrocity literature of the Congo Reform Association—works such as Arthur Conan Doyle's Crime of the Congo and Mark Twain's King Leopold's Soliloquy, to name two examples by prominent novelists.⁵³ By combining romance and exposé, Conrad creates a brilliantly ironic structure in which the diabolical Kurtz demonstrates how the Dark Continent grew dark. For Conrad the ultimate atrocity is not some form of tribal savagery but Kurtz's regression. Kurtz has been “tropenkollered” or “maddened by the tropics”; he has gone native.⁵⁴ In one sense, going native was universal, because in Africa or in any foreign setting every traveler must to some extent adopt the customs of the country, eat its food, learn its language, and so on. Kurtz does something worse, of course—he betrays the ideals of the civilization he is supposedly importing from Europe. Conrad does not debunk the myth of the Dark Continent: Africa is the location of his hell on earth. But at the center of that hell is Kurtz, the would-be civilizer, the embodiment of Europe's highest and noblest values, radiating darkness.

Ian Watt identifies nine possible models for Kurtz, and the very number suggests how common it was to go native. Stanley is among these models, and so is Charles Stokes, “the renegade missionary,” who abandoned the Church Missionary Society, took a native wife, and led a wild career as a slave trader and gunrunner.⁵⁵ Stokes was not particular about his stock in trade or his customers: he sold guns to Germans working against the British in East Africa, and also to French Catholic converts in Buganda waging a miniature religious war against the Protestant converts of his former colleagues. He was finally arrested and executed without trial in the Congo for selling guns to Arab slavers, his demise adding to the scandal back in Britain about King Leopold's empire. Stokes's backsliding was extreme but not unusual. “I have been increasingly struck,” wrote Johnston in 1897, “with the rapidity with which such members of the white race as are not of the best class, can throw over the restraints of civilization and develop into savages of unbridled lust and abominable cruelty.”⁵⁶ Here is another way in which savages and the working class could seem alike. But Kurtz is of “the best class,” not a “lower” one: going native could happen to anyone, even to entire societies. The Boers in Charles Reade's novel A Simpleton (1873), for example, have “degenerated into white savages”; the British hero finds that Kaffir savages are “socially superior” to them, a typical assertion well before the Boer War of 1899-1902.⁵⁷

Perhaps missionaries were especially susceptible to going native; at least they frequently expressed fears about regressing, about being converted to heathenism instead of converting the heathen. According to J. S. Moffat, a missionary had to be “deeply imbued with God's spirit in order to have strength to stand against the deadening and corrupting influence around him. … I am like a man looking forward to getting back to the sweet air and bright sunshine after being in a coal-mine.” Another missionary, S. T. Pruen, believed that merely witnessing heathen customs could be dangerous: “Can a man touch pitch, and not be himself defiled?”⁵⁸ That Africa held strong temptations for the Victorian is evident in the frequent references to allegedly promiscuous sexual customs of Africans—in Burton's prurient anthropology, for example, or again in the sensuality that Haggard attributes to Foulata and Joseph Thomson to Ulu. Europeans found their savage impulses were never far from their civilized surfaces; the potential for being “defiled,” for going native, led them again and again to displace these impulses onto Africans, as well as onto other nonwhite peoples. Just as the social class fantasies of the Victorians (Oliver Twist, for example) often express the fear of falling into the abyss of poverty, so the myth of the Dark Continent contains the submerged fear of falling out of the light into the abyss of social and moral regression. In both cases the fear of backsliding has a powerful sexual dimension. If, as Freud argued, civilization is based on the repression of instincts, then when the demands of repression become excessive, civilization itself is liable to break down.

In Prospero and Caliban, Dominique Mannoni asks to what extent Europeans “project upon … colonial peoples the obscurities of their own unconscious—obscurities they would rather not penetrate.” In European writings about Africa, Mannoni says, “the savage … is identified with the unconscious, with a certain image of the instincts. … And civilized man is painfully divided between the desire to ‘correct’ the ‘errors’ of the savages and the desire to identify himself with them in his search for some lost paradise (a desire which at once casts doubt upon the merit of the very civilization he is trying to transmit to them).”⁵⁹ Kurtz is a product of this painful division. Yet not even Marlow sees Kurtz's going native as a step toward the recovery of a lost paradise; it is instead a fall into hell, into the darkness of self-disintegration. For modern Europeans—Lévi-Strauss again comes to mind—as for the Romantics, the association of primitive life with paradise has once more become possible.⁶⁰ For the Victorians, however, that association was taboo, so repressed that the African landscapes they explored and exploited were painted again and again with the same tarbrush image of pandemonium. Yet when they penetrated the heart of darkness, only to discover lust and depravity, cannibalism and devil worship, they always also discovered, as the central figure in the shadows, a Stanley, a Charles Stokes, a Kurtz—an astonished white face staring back.

Nothing points more uncannily to the projection and displacement of guilt for the slave trade, guilt for empire, guilt for one's own savage and shadowy impulses, than those moments when white man confronts white man in the depths of the jungle. The archetypal event is Stanley's discovery of Livingstone; the famous “Dr. Livingstone, I presume?” scene suggests a narcissistic doubling, a repetition or mirroring, and consequently a solipsistic repression of whatever is nonself or alien that characterizes all forms of cultural and political domination. In analogous fashion, in King Solomon's Mines, Haggard's Britons discover the ruins of a great white civilization, with a black race, unconscious of their significance, living among them. When Karl Mauch discovered the ruins of Zimbabwe in 1871, no European believed they had been constructed by Africans; so arose the theory that they were the ruins of King Solomon's Golden Ophir, the work of a higher, fairer race—a myth that archaeologists began to controvert only in 1906.⁶¹ Haggard repeats this myth in other stories. In She, Ayesha is a beautiful white demigoddess ruling over a brown-skinned race; and in Allan Quatermain, the white explorers discover a mysterious white race in the heart of darkness. So Dark Continent turned into mirror, reflecting on one level the heroic and saintly self-images the Victorians wanted to see, but on another casting the ghostly shadows of guilt and regression.

V

The myth of the Dark Continent was largely a Victorian invention. As part of the larger discourse about empire, it was shaped by political and economic pressures, and also by a psychology of blaming the victim through which Europeans projected onto Africans their own darkest impulses. The product of the transition or transvaluation from abolition to Scramble, the myth of the Dark Continent defined slavery as the offspring of tribal savagery and portrayed white explorers and missionaries as the leaders of a Christian crusade that would vanquish the forces of darkness. Blame for the slave trade, which the first abolitionists had placed mainly on Europeans, had by midcentury been displaced onto Africans. This displacement fused with sensational reports about cannibalism, witchcraft, and apparently shameless sexual customs to drape Victorian Africa in that pall of darkness which the Victorians themselves accepted as reality.

The invasion of preindustrial, largely preliterate societies by men with industrialized communications, weapons, and transportation meant a deluge of ruling discourse on one side and, on the other, what appeared to be total acquiescence and silence. As Frantz Fanon declares, “a man who has a language … possesses the world expressed and implied by that language. … Mastery of language affords remarkable power.”⁶² Victorian imperialism both created and was in part created by a growing monopoly on discourse. Unless they became virtually “mimic men,” in V. S. Naipaul's phrase, Africans were stripped of articulation: the Bible might be translated into numerous African languages, but the colonizers, even the few who learned Wolof or Zulu, rarely translated in the other direction. African customs and beliefs were condemned as superstitions, their social organizations despised and demolished, their land, belongings, and labor appropriated often as ruthlessly as they had been through the slave trade.

But the ethnocentric discourse of domination was not met with silence. Though the reaction has not been easy to recover, modern historians have begun piecing together how Africans responded to their Victorian savior-invaders.⁶³ The wars of resistance fought by Zulu, Ashanti, Matabele, Ethiopian, Bugandan, and Sudanese peoples offer perhaps the best evidence. The writings of literate nineteenth-century Africans such as the Liberian Edward Blyden, pioneer of the negritude movement, have also been important. Still other responses can be found in modern independence movements and the writings of nationalists—Frantz Fanon, Kwame Nkrumah, Jomo Kenyatta. But the myth of the Dark Continent and imperialism more generally left a legacy both massive and impossible to evade, as stereotypic treatments of Africa by today's mass media continue to demonstrate. The work of liberation from racism and the politics of domination is far from over. Discourse, that most subtle yet also inescapable form of power, in its imperial guise persists, for example, in the most recent assumptions about the antithesis between “primitive” or “backward” and “civilized” or “advanced” societies, about the cultural and historical differences between Afro-Americans and white Americans, and about the legitimacy of the white apartheid regime in South Africa. In this regard what Nkrumah said in 1965 about the impact especially of the American mass media on the African situation is still relevant:

The cinema stories of fabulous Hollywood are loaded. One has only to listen to the cheers of an African audience as Hollywood's heroes slaughter red Indians or Asiatics to understand the effectiveness of this weapon. For, in the developing continents, where the colonialist heritage has left a vast majority still illiterate, even the smallest child gets the message. … And along with murder and the Wild West goes an incessant barrage of anti-socialist propaganda, in which the trade union man, the revolutionary, or the man of dark skin is generally cast as the villain, while the policeman, the gum-shoe, the Federal agent—in a word, the CIA-type spy—is ever the hero. Here, truly, is the ideological under-belly of those political murders which so often use local people as their instruments.⁶⁴

The spirit of Tarzan lives on in Western culture, as in the sophisticated buffoonery of Saul Bellow's Henderson the Rain King. Criticizing recent American and European failures to imagine Africa without prejudice, Chinua Achebe notes the continuing “desire—one might indeed say the need—in Western psychology to set Africa up as a foil to Europe, a place of negations at once remote and vaguely familiar in comparison with which Europe's own state of spiritual grace will be manifest.” As Achebe points out, whether they come from Victorian or modern England, the America of Grover Cleveland or that of Ronald Reagan, “travellers with closed minds can tell us little except about themselves.”⁶⁵

Notes

1. Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness (New York: Norton, 1963), 8. In The Image of Africa: British Ideas and Action, 1780-1850 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1964), Philip D. Curtin writes that “the image of ‘darkest Africa,’ either as an expression of geographical ignorance, or as one of cultural arrogance, was a nineteenth-century invention” (9). See also Dorothy Hammond and Alta Jablow, The Africa That Never Was: Four Centuries of British Writing about Africa (New York: Twayne, 1970), especially 49-113.

2. Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage, 1979); the quotations are from Said, The World, the Text, and the Critic (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1983), 9 and 53, and Michel Foucault, Language, Counter-Memory, Practice, ed. Donald F. Bouchard (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977), 148.

3. See especially Eric Williams, Capitalism and Slavery (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1944). Williams's theory has been often criticized, but not his general thesis of some sort of correlation between abolitionism and industrialization. See Roger T. Anstey, “Capitalism and Slavery: A Critique,” Economic History Review 21 (1968), 307-20, but also David Brion Davis, The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution, 1770-1823 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1975), 346-52. Other accounts include Michael Craton, Sinews of Empire: A Short History of British Slavery (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday Anchor, 1974); Jack Gratus, The Great White Lie: Slavery, Emancipation and Changing Racial Attitudes (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1973); and Howard Temperley, British Antislavery, 1833-1870 (London: Longman, 1972).

4. See Ralph A. Austen and Woodruff D. Smith, “Images of Africa and British Slave-Trade Abolition: The Transition to an Imperialist Ideology, 1787-1807,” African Historical Studies 2:1 (1969), 69-83. The classic work on motives for expansion is Ronald Robinson, John Gallagher, and Alice Denney, Africa and the Victorians: The Climax of Imperialism in the Dark Continent (New York: St. Martin's, 1961).

5. Nancy Stepan, The Idea of Race in Science: Great Britain, 1800-1960 (Hamden, Conn.: Archon, 1982), 1. See also Christine Bolt, Victorian Attitudes to Race (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1971).

6. William Blake, “The Little Black Boy,” in The Poetry and Prose of William Blake, ed. David V. Erdman (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1970), 9.

7. Robert Southey, Poetical Works, 10 vols. (London: Longman, Orme, Brown, Green, & Longmans, 1838), 2:129.

8. See Eva Beatrice Dykes, The Negro in English Romantic Thought (Washington, D.C.: Associated Publishers, 1942), and Wylie Sypher, Guinea's Captive Kings: British Anti-Slavery Literature of the XVIIIth Century (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1942).

9. Southey, “Poems Concerning the Slave Trade,” Poetical Works, 2:57.

10. James Grahame, “Africa Delivered; or, The Slave Trade Abolished,” in James Montgomery, Grahame, and E. Benger, Poems on the Abolition of the Slave Trade (1809; Freeport, N.Y.: Books for Libraries Press, 1971), 58.

11. Katherine George, “The Civilized West Looks at Primitive Africa: 1400-1800,” ISIS 49 (1958), 62-72. Winthrop D. Jordan reaches a similar conclusion in White Over Black: American Attitudes toward the Negro, 1550-1812 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1968), 269-311. And see Curtin, Image of Africa, 9.

12. Thomas Edward Bowdich, Mission from Cape Coast Castle to Ashantee (1819; London: Frank Cass, 1966). Curtin calls Bowdich one of a group of “enlightened travellers” between 1795 and the 1820s, and his book “a glowing description of Ashanti society” (Image of Africa, 211, 169).

13. Curtin, Image of Africa, 298.

14. Thomas Fowell Buxton, The African Slave Trade and Its Remedy (1840; London: Frank Cass, 1967), 342. See also John Gallagher, “Fowell Buxton and the New African Policy, 1838-1842,” Cambridge Historical Journal 10 (1950), 36-58.

15. Charles Dickens, “The Niger Expedition,” The Examiner, 19 August 1848, reprinted in Miscellaneous Papers, National Library Edition of Dickens's Works, 20 vols. (New York: Bigelow, Brown, 1903), 18:64.

16. Dickens quoted by Donald H. Simpson, “Charles Dickens and the Empire,” Library Notes of the Royal Commonwealth Society, n.s. 162 (June 1970), 15. See also Dickens, “The Noble Savage,” Household Words 7 (11 June 1853), 337-39.

17. Mrs. R. Lee (Sarah Wallis), The African Wanderers; or, The Adventures of Carlos and Antonio (London: Grant & Griffith, 1847), 230 and 126, and Curtin, Image of Africa, 328.

18. Alan Moorehead, The White Nile, rev. ed. (New York: Harper & Row, 1971), likens the great Victorian explorers to astronauts. See also Africa and Its Explorers: Motives, Methods, and Impact, ed. Robert I. Rotberg (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1970).

19. William Somerset Maugham, The Explorer (1907; New York: Baker & Taylor, 1909), 45 and 175-76. Compare Joseph Conrad, “Geography and Some Explorers,” Last Essays (1926; Freeport, N.Y.: Books for Libraries Press, 1970), 14.

20. Dickens quoted by Simpson, “Charles Dickens and Empire,” 15.

21. Quoted by M. E. Chamberlain, The Scramble for Africa (London: Longman, 1974), 28.

22. Michel Foucault, “The Discourse on Language,” appendix to The Archaeology of Knowledge, trans. A. M: Sheridan Smith (New York: Pantheon, 1972), 229.

23. Livingstone, quoted by Tim Jeal, Livingstone (New York: Putnam's, 1973), 146, 124; Jeal, Livingstone, 4.

24. See Philip Curtin and Paul Bohannan, Africa and Africans (Garden City, N.Y.: Natural History Press, 1971), 8.

25. May Crawford, By the Equator's Snowy Peak: A Record of Medical Missionary Work and Travel in British East Africa (London: Church Missionary Society, 1913), 29, 56.

26. On Missionary attitudes see H. A. C. Cairns, Prelude to Imperialism: British Reactions to Central African Society, 1840-1890 (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1965).

27. Anthony Hope, The God in the Car (1895; New York: Appleton, 1896), 19.

28. Sir Richard Burton, The Lake Regions of Central Africa, 2 vols. (1861; New York: Horizon, 1961), 2:326.

29. Ibid., 2:347-48.

30. Sir Richard Burton, Two Trips to Gorilla Land and the Cataracts of the Congo (1876; New York: Johnson, 1967), 311.

31. Samuel White Baker, The Albert N'yanza, Great Basin of the Nile and Exploration of the Nile Sources, 2 vols. (1866; London: Sidgwick & Jackson, 1962), 1:211.

32. Henry S. Merriman [Hugh Stowell Scott], With Edged Tools (1894; London: Smith, Elder, 1909), 321-22.

33. The stamp design is reproduced in Roland Oliver, Sir Harry Johnston and the Scramble for Africa (London: Chatto & Windus, 1957). On racism and class see Racism and Colonialism: Essays on Ideology and Social Structure, ed. Robert Ross (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1982), and Douglas A. Lorimer, Colour, Class and the Victorians: English Attitudes to the Negro in the Mid-Nineteenth Century (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1978).

34. See Ronald Rainger, “Race, Politics, and Science: The Anthropological Society of London in the 1860s,” Victorian Studies 22 (Autumn 1978), 51-70.

35. Thomas Henry Huxley, Man's Place in Nature (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1959), 58, 69-70. Huxley acknowledges that the “human butcher shop” is “irrelevant” to his argument. Nancy Stepan notes that in the nineteenth century, “textbook after textbook compared the Negro to the ape” (Idea of Race, 18).

36. Hammond and Jablow, Africa That Never Was, 94.

37. Winwood Reade, Savage Africa; Being the Narrative of a Tour in Equatorial, Southwestern, and Northwestern Africa (New York: Harper, 1864), 54.

38. Sir John Lubbock, The Origin of Civilisation and the Primitive Condition of Man: Mental and Social Condition of Savages (1870; London: Longmans, Green, 1912), 1-2.

39. George Romanes, Mental Evolution in Man: Origin of Human Faculty (New York: D. Appleton, 1893), 439.

40. Benjamin Kidd, Social Evolution (New York: Macmillan, 1894), 49-50.

41. Karl Pearson, National Life from the Standpoint of Science (London: Adam & Charles Black, 1901), 47-48.

42. Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex, 2d ed. (New York and London: Merrill & Baker, 1874), 613. See especially chap. 7, “On the Races of Man,” 162-202. On racial extinction see also Sir Charles Wentworth Dilke, Greater Britain: A Record of Travel in English-Speaking Countries during 1866 and 1867 (New York: Harper, 1869), 90-100, 221, 250, and 273.

43. Cf. George Stocking, Jr., Race, Culture, and Evolution: Essays in the History of Anthropology (New York: Free Press, 1968), 229: “Once the ‘one grand scheme’ of evolutionism was rejected, the multiplicity of cultures which took the place of the cultural stages of savagery, barbarism, and civilization were no more easily brought within one standard of evaluation than they were within one system of explanation.”

44. Claude Lévi-Strauss, Tristes tropiques, trans. John and Doreen Weightman (New York: Atheneum, 1974), 123.

45. William Makepeace Thackeray, “Timbuctoo,” in Early Miscellanies (London: Oxford University Press, n.d.), 2.

46. Henry M. Stanley, My Kalulu: Prince, King, and Slave (London: Sampson, Low, Marston, Searle, & Rivington, 1889), viii.

47. Joseph Thomson and E. Harriet-Smith, Ulu: An African Romance, 3 vols. (London: Sampson, Low, Marston, Searle, & Rivington, 1888), 2:18-19.

48. R. M. Ballantyne, Black Ivory: A Tale of Adventure among the Slaves of East Africa (1873; Chicago: Afro-American Press, 1969), v.

49. Similar messages appear in Ballantyne's other novels, including The Gorilla Hunters (1861). See Eric Quayle, Ballantyne the Brave: A Victorian Writer and His Family (London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1967), 146.

50. Sir Harry H. Johnston, The History of a Slave (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, 1889), 6.

51. H. Rider Haggard, King Solomon's Mines (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1965), 241.

52. John Buchan, Prester John (New York: Doran, 1910), 211, 148.

53. See S. J. Cookey, Britain and the Congo Question, 1885-1913 (London: Longmans, 1968).

54. “Tropenkollered” was the term used by the Dutch naval captain Otto Lütken, quoted by Ian Watt, Conrad in the Nineteenth Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979), 145.

55. Watt, Conrad, 141-46.

56. Sir Harry H. Johnston, British Central Africa: An Attempt to Give Some Account of a Portion of the Territories under British Influence North of the Zambesi, 3d ed. (London: Methuen, 1906), 68.

57. Charles Reade, A Simpleton: A Story of the Day (London: Chatto & Windus, 1873), 250-51.

58. Moffat and Pruen quoted by Cairns, Prelude to Imperialism, 68.

59. Dominique O. Mannoni, Prospero and Caliban: The Psychology of Colonization (London: Methuen, 1956), 21.

60. As well as Lévi-Strauss see Stanley Diamond, In Search of the Primitive (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction, 1974).

61. Karl Peters, King Solomon's Golden Ophir: A Research into the Most Ancient Gold Production in History (1899; New York: Negro Universities Press, 1969), is an example of the speculation about the Zimbabwe ruins that underlies Haggard's stories. The first scientific work demonstrating that the ruins had been built by Africans was David Randall-MacIver, Mediaeval Rhodesia (London: Macmillan, 1906). As late as the 1960s works published in Rhodesia and South Africa were still insisting that the builders of the ruins were non-African.

62. Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, trans. Charles Markmann (New York: Grove, 1968), 18.

63. For nineteenth-century African responses to the European invasion see Africa and the West: Intellectual Responses to European Culture, ed. Philip D. Curtin (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1972); Protest and Power in Black Africa ed. Robert I. Rotberg and Ali A. Mazrui (New York: Oxford University Press, 1970); and Aspects of Central African History, ed. Terence Ranger (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1968).

64. Kwame Nkrumah, Neo-Colonialism: The Last Stage of Imperialism (London: Nelson, 1965), 246.

65. Chinua Achebe, “An Image of Africa,” Research in African Literature 9 (Spring 1978), 2 and 12. See also Ezekiel Mphahlele, The African Image (New York: Praeger, 1962) and Abdul R. JanMohamed, Manichean Aesthetics: The Politics of Literature in Colonial Africa (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1983).