Legacies of the Transatlantic Legacies of the Transatlantic Slave TradeSlave Trade

MEAS 200 – October 5, 2006

Beginning PropositionsBeginning Propositions

That Africans and Africa are marginalized in western culture That marginalization reflects the contemporary global order - economically, politically and ideologicallySlavery in the Americas and the Transatlantic slave trade played a vital role in building the contemporary global order

Beginning PropositionsBeginning Propositions

Yet we – as participants in that culture –have strongly held associations with ‘Africa’

Postcard imagesPoverty, disease, war and despairViolence and savagery

These are, at best, partial truths

Beginning PropositionsBeginning Propositions

Africa and Africans– Constructed as

backwards, savage, primitive

Europe/North America– Constructed as

modern, progressive, civilised

The Invention of The Invention of ‘‘AfricaAfrica’’

‘Africa’ intertwined with ideas about race and difference as they developed in Europe Borrowing from V Y Mudimbe, Kwame Anthony Appiah and Basil DavidsonMudimbe says we must look at the development of racist thinking in Europe in:

1) directly stated ideas2) wider reflection in cultural expression3) the organisation and structuring of knowledge [from

Michel Foucault]

European Views of AfricansEuropean Views of Africans

Period 1 – before 1400Europeans present Africans as equals, as servants, traders, leaders, diplomats, pilgrims in Europe

Period 2 – after 1450Europeans portray Africans in Africa as different but not dehumanised

• Benin• ‘Deviant by distance’

A seventeenth century Dutch drawing of Benin, artist unknown

Two views of African rulers

A French engraving of the Mutapa king, circa 1630. [The artist had never been to Africa].

Dutch mission meeting the kingof the Kongo, from a Dutch engraving, 1668.

Deviant by Distance – or more?Plate from Olfert Dapper’s Beschreibung von Afrika, Amsterdam, 1670, showing people in South Africa tearing an animal apart andeating the intestines raw.

The Birth of RacismThe Birth of Racism

Period 3 – after 1650‘Deviant by nature’Religion, culture, biologyLinneaus, Blumenbach

Nineteenth Century Racist Nineteenth Century Racist Thought in EuropeThought in Europe

Binary dualismModern Europe and Primitive Africa

Structure of KnowledgeArt versus artifactsReligion versus superstition and witchcraftHistory and sociology versus anthropology

Racist Thought in EuropeRacist Thought in Europe

Growing circulation of ideas of racial hierarchy in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries

‘Scientific Racism’ – Stephen Jay Gould, The Mismeasure of ManPhrenology, Ethnology

Nott and Gliddon’s1868 scale of human evolution

Illustrations from Texts on Human Anatomy and Evolution

Virey’s 1824text on the natural history of humans

Vogt’s 1864anatomy text

Measuring Bodies

Ethnological evaluation chart from Griffith Taylor’sEnvironment, Race and Migration, University of Toronto Press, 3rd edition, 1949

Scientific Racism

Chart comparing intelligence of racial groups, from Adolphe Louis Cureau (translated by E Andrews)Savage Man in Central Africa: A Study of Primitive Racesin the French Congo, London, 1915.

Ethnological chart of human evolution, from Griffith Taylor’sEnvironment, Race and Migration, University of Toronto Press, 3rd edition, 1949. His objection to the chart was that he thought the ‘Negro’ and ‘Negrito’ were misplaced, and should be classified as offshoots of Neanderthals or earlier hominids.

Scientific Racism

Scientific Racism and the Sexual BodyChart of human breast shapesin Paul Bartel’s Woman: An Historical Gynecological and Anthropological CompendiumSt Louis, 1936. The first is described as ‘bowl-shaped’, thesecond as ‘hemispherical’; both are described as characteristic of whites and Asians, and as ‘beautiful’. The third is called‘conical’ and the fourth is describedas ‘elongated’, ‘mainly found among blacks’, and as similarto the ‘udder of a goat’.

Europeans’ Vision of, and Obsession with, Africans’ Sexuality(particularly women’s bodies)

Plate from Francois leVaillant’s Voyage de Francois le Vaillant dans l’interieurde l’Afrique, Paris 1798.

French satirical cartoon of the English obsession with the tour of the ‘Hottentot Venus’, a South African woman who was displayed in many citiesin Europe from 1810 to 1815.

Illustration from R. Shufeldt[an anthropologist]’s 1915 tract, America’s Greatest Problem.

The original caption read:“Negro Boy and Apes.On the left side of the figure thereis a young Chimpanzee, and on theright a young Orang-utang. Thisis a wonderfully interesting comparison.”

Shufeldt was also the author of Outlines for a Museum of Anatomy, 1885,The Evolution of House-Building Among the Navajo, 1892, and The Negro: A Menace to American Civilization, 1907.

Racist Thought in EuropeRacist Thought in Europe

Obvious anomalies: EgyptWest African cities

• BeninGreat Zimbabwe

The temple at Abu Simel

Popular Images of Ancient Egyptians

The great mosqueof Jenne, in modernMali, which datesback to the thirteenth century.

Details from Sixteenth Century Benin Bronzes

A panel celebrating the accomplishments of Benin’s soldiers

A panel showing the arrival of Portuguese traders.

Part of Great Zimbabwe, thecapital of a large kingdomin southern Africa from 1200 to 1450. White settlersinsisted the complex was built by outsiders – Arabs,Phonecians or another group, and made it a crime for a state employee to say Africansbuilt it.

Racist Thought in EuropeRacist Thought in Europe

Why did overtly racist ideas and hierarchies become unacceptable?

Racial Hierarchy and the Racial Hierarchy and the Concept of Concept of ‘‘CivilizationCivilization’’

However, the ideas of hierarchy that underlay racist thinking continued, and are reflected in:

Structures of knowledgeBinary opposition of the modern and the primitive otherAssumptions about knowledge and who can acquire it

• Nubia• Carl Sagan, Cosmos• Dogon• Sirius

‘Civilization’

The Civilization ScaleThe Civilization Scale

The Civilization ScalePop cultureW W Rostow, The Stages of Development

IdealisedIdealised Civilization ScaleCivilization Scale� POSTMODERN

C

I � INDUSTRIALISM

V

I � EARLY CAPITALISM

L

I

Z � FEUDALISM

A

T

I � TRIBAL GROUP

O

N � SMALL GROUP

SOCIAL COMPLEXITY

Rostow’s Model of the Stages of Development

IdealisedIdealised Civilization ScaleCivilization Scale� POSTMODERN

C

I � INDUSTRIALISM

V

I � EARLY CAPITALISM

L

I

Z � FEUDALISM

A

T

I � TRIBAL GROUP

O

N � SMALL GROUP

SOCIAL COMPLEXITY

CRAP!

ButBut……

Ideas about race and difference remain powerful, as much as our culture denounces them

Phillipe Rushton(University of Western Ontario)

The Bell Curve

In 2001, Toronto mayor Mel Lastman, said the following to a Toronto Star reporter, just beforeleaving for Kenya to attend a meeting of the Association of National Olympic Committees of Africa:“What the hell do I want to go to a placelike Mombassa ? Snakes scare the hell out of me. I’m sort of scared about going there, but the wife is really nervous. I just see myself in a pot of boiling water with all these natives dancing around me.”