History 247: Africa – Colonialism to Self-Rule

What is Africa?

“The mistake is to generalize. The very word Africa—that sonorous trisyllable—seems to invite grandiloquence. Because the continent has a clear geographical unity it is tempting to hold forth about it. Cecil Rhodes wanted to colour everything imperial red from the Cape to Cairo; since then the tendency has been for Westerners—and often Africans too—to seek to impose a single reality, a general explanation, on the whole place. “

John Ryle, Granta 92: The View from Africa

What Is Africa?

•Listen to Binyavanga Wainaina interviewed on CBC

http://www.cbc.ca/thecurrent/2007/200711/20071109.html

•Read his article: “How to Write about Africa”

http://www.granta.com/extracts/2615

Contemporary Rendering of The African Continent: But whose “Africa”?

Introduction: In Search of Africa

Maps in the Making of Africa

•Maps – Geographical Representations – are one way of conceptualizing space: they reveal much about the ‘creators’ and very little about the region or peoples ‘mapped’.

•The mapping of Africa belongs to the larger historical process by which ‘mapping’ came to be understood and developed in the West.

12th Century World Map (Book of Kells)

‘T’ and ‘O’ map with Jerusalem at the center.

This reflected the Church’s view of God’s World.

Note ‘Africa’ on the right, ‘Chaos’ written Underneath

Maps in the Making of Africa

•Western map-making reinforced the growing belief in Europe that the rest of the world was to be situated (and by implication, understood) relative to Europe and its peoples.

•Map making by the 19th century served European Imperialism well. In this sense even the so-called scientific representation of the continent ‘Africa’ was a construction.

North Africa, (Spanish) Catalan Atlas 1375

For other views of Africa in relation to Europe, Near East, Arabia and Asia, see “A Medieval Atlas: maps of Africa”: http://historymedren.about.com/library/atlas/blatafridex.htm

Medieval Mapamundi (c.1485-1500)

Genoa Chart of North Africa (c.1490) The Work of Christopher Columbus?

Mercator’s Atlas 1595

In the famous Mercator's Atlas (1595), Atlas plays with the Earth like a basketball.

The globe has become manageable, controllable, a resource to be exploited, no longer the realm of the unknown.

Gerardus Mercator Atlas sive cosmographicae meditationes... Denuo auctus Amsterodami: sumpt. et typ. E.J. Hondii, 1616. [18], 365, [32] p., [145] map l.

The Mercator Projection (originated with Mercator’s Atlas, 1595)

The Peters’ Projection Map (1974)

Manuscripts, Books, and Maps: Printing Press and a Changing World

•Maps

The final aspect of print and its effects on European life has as much or more to do with economics than it does with culture: maps and geographical information were printed for European expansion.

http://communication.ucsd.edu/bjones/Books/maps.html

Europe’s Africa c.1808

Brookes, R., The General Gazetteer; or Compendious Geographical Dictionary. Eighth Edition. Dublin, 1808.

Europe’s Africa, c. 1880

Africa Conceptualized by Religion c.1900

“Mohammedans”are Muslims, those who follow the Islamic Faith.

“Heathens” are animists, those who follow a wide range of polytheistic belief systems; by the end of the 19th century, many had absorbed considerable Christian and Islamic beliefs into their own cultures.

Exploration and Enlightenment

By the 19th Century, the “Dark Continent” beckoned state-sponsored explorers, some with largely scientific motives, others more overtly political and military in their aims.

Exploration and Enlightenment

They joined an increasing number of merchants who were less and less satisfied to remain in ocean-side trading forts and wanted to ‘penetrate’ the continental resource and consumer market for themselves.

And they, in turn, vied with the competition of Christian Missionaries to establish influence in the interior, over the peoples who lived there.

Mapping Human Culture

This new ‘scientific’ and ‘first-hand’ information certainly had an impact on Europe’s Maps of Africa.

More importantly, it began in earnest to create images of Africa as people, as landscape, as culture.

Mapping Human Culture

This accumulation of knowledge was also a form of assumed ‘power’ over Africans:

“control over their [Africans’] destinies could be eroded as surely by map co-ordinates and museum specimens as by steamships, bullets and treaties of concession [and commerce…]’

[Reid, Modern Africa, p.132]

Mapping Human Culture

A Victorian ‘Human Africa’ was superimposed on the geographic one: a barbaric, uncivilized, ‘heathen’, enslaved Africa, awaiting awakening.

Yet at the same time, this ‘Human Africa’ also represented a mystery, an enigma, an exoticism -- the Romantic replacement of the once ‘dark’ geographical continent.

Exploring AfricaExploration from the Cape to the Nile http://www.sc.edu/library/spcoll/sccoll/africa/africa3.html

West Africa, the Niger, and the Quest for Timbuktu http://www.sc.edu/library/spcoll/sccoll/africa/africa4.html

Central and East Africa, and the Legacy of Exploration http://www.sc.edu/library/spcoll/sccoll/africa/africa5.html

Dr. Livingstone. I presume?Stanley finds Livingstone, 1871http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Image:Stanley_and_Livingstone.jpg

“Timbuctoo” the Romantic

In 1828-29, interest in West Africa was such that even the set topic of the Cambridge University poetry prize was Timbuctoo.

The winner was the future poet laureate Alfred Tennyson, then an undergraduate at Trinity College, and, as the conclusion to his poem shows, he was not sure that he really wanted accurate knowledge of Timbuctoo, because then the mystery and glamour would be dispersed.

Tennyson’s CHILD of MAN

See'st thou yon river, whose translucent wave,

Forth issuing from the darkness, windeth through

The argent streets o' th' City, imaging

The soft inversion of her tremulous Domes,

Her gardens frequent with the stately Palm,

Her Pagods hung with music of sweet bells,

Her obelisks of rangéd Chrysolite, Minarets and towers?

Lo! how he passeth by,

And gulphs himself in sands, as not enduring

To carry through the world those waves, which bore

The reflex of my City in their depths.

Oh City! oh latest Throne! where I was rais'd

CHILD of MAN (cont’d.)

To be a mystery of loveliness Unto all eyes, the time is well-nigh come When I must render up this glorious homeTo keen Discovery: soon yon brilliant towers Shall darken with the waving of her wand: Darken, and shrink and shiver into huts, Black specks amid a waste of dreary sand, Low-built, mud-wall'd, Barbarian settlements.

How chang'd this fair City! Alfred Tennyson, 1809-1892. Timbuctoo, a poem which obtained the

Chancellor's Medal . . . in Prolusiones Academicae praemiis annuis

dignatae Cambridge: John Smith, 1829.

“Timbuctoo” the Real

This is the picture, impressive though it may seem, that finally disillusioned Europeans about the long-fabled wonders of this West African city. (from Rene Caillie)

Victorian Images

http://fresno.k12.ca.us/schools/s090/lloyd/imperialism.htm http://www.pbs.org/empires/victoria/history/scramble.html

[See Reading: Chamberlain, “The Victorian Image of Africa” From The Scramble for Africa, 2nd ed.]

Africa in Architecture

Allegorical figure of Africa on the façade of the Colonial Office, Whitehall, London.

The White Man’s Burden

Take up the White Man's burden—Send forth the best ye breed–

Go, bind your sons to exile To serve your captives' need;

To wait, in heavy harness, On fluttered folk and wild–

Your new-caught sullen peoples, Half devil and half child.

By Rudyard Kipling

McClure's Magazine 12 (Feb.1899).(Full Text):http://www.boondocksnet.com/ai/kipling/kipling.html

Lightening the White Man's Burden Pears' Soap Advertisement

Victorian England was also home to the Industrial Revolution; Africa was conceptualized as an almost Infinite potential market – ‘civilizing’ could also mean ‘advertising’. The ‘white man’s burden’ could be Profitable!

This advertisement, showing Admiral George Dewey washing his hands with Pears' Soap surrounded by illustrations symbolizing "progress and civilization."Pears' Soap advertisement, "The White Man's Burden" (1899). First appeared in McClure's Magazine (October 1899). http://www.wwnorton.com/nto/victorian/topic_4/illustrations/imburden.htm

“Africa” is Born

The essential point to grasp here is that growing 19th century interest in Africa – whether expressed by artists, poets, politicians, merchants, missionaries or explorers – was producing in its wake an ‘entity’ called Africa.

“Africa” is Born

This “Africa” conjured up images of romance and mystery, of infinite natural resources, of an ‘other’ who might one day be civilized and christianized, and of uncountable labourers who would exploit the resources and ultimately consume the manufactured goods Europe’s industries would produce.

From Capetown to Cairo: the Rhodes’ Dream

“… it was in the colonial context that for the first time ‘Africa’ as an entity, from the Cape to Cairo, from the Coastal lagoons of the West to the Horn of the East, could be conceived.”

Bill Freund The Making of Contemporary Africa, p.2

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Rhodes.Africa.jpg

“The Scramble” to Partition Africa

Having conceptualized and drawn the physical ‘Africa’, then having imbued it with a humanity of ‘Africans’, European powers now overlaid this entity once more, this time with the articulation of their own power and economic struggles.

“The Scramble” to Partition Africa

Africa the entity could now be divided up not according to topographical features or to tribal cultures or even to recognized ‘African’ political spheres, but rather according to European national influences.

“The Scramble” to Partition Africa

Leopold II of Belgium initiated the ‘scramble’ with his desire to occupy and rule the Congo. The Berlin Conference of 1884 provided the forum for everyone to carve out specific spheres of influence, to ‘colour Africa’.

“The Mad Scramble” Begins

The ‘Colouring’ of Africa

Colonialism: creating reality from image

"Imperialist domination marked more than a phase in the history of Africa. It was the precondition of the emergence of African society as it now exists. Indeed, Africa as a meaningful concept owes itself primarily to the predatory instincts of the new conquerors and then, with time, to opposition to them.” [Freund, The Making of Contemporary Africa. p.95]

Colonialism: creating reality from image

Partition was not simply about drawing maps or illustrating explorers’ accounts or even selling soap: it was about remaking Africans and thereby, Africa. Colonialism was to have an impact on the Continent which far outlasted the brevity of its existence.

The Role of the ‘Africanist’

The project of ‘constructing Africa’ did not only belong to politicians, merchants, missionaries and explorers – it was also taken up by those of the ‘scientific academy’.

The Role of the ‘Africanist’

As Freund argues (The Making of Contemporary Africa, p.2), with the general acceptance of the concept of ‘Africa’ as it stood at the end of the 19th century came the equally general acceptance of the academic ‘specialist’ who had or acquired ‘expert’ knowledge of Africa: “The Africanist.

Whose Africa? The search continues…

The essential point:

contemporary academics, like more Generalist forefathers,

play key roles in creating images of Africa, and thereby influence its reality –

Present and Future.