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Travel and the Pan-African Imagination the Father of Anglo Chapter I Introduction: Travel and the Pan-African Imagination The father of Anglo-Saxon racial ideology, Count Arthur de Gobineau, inscribed pan-Aryanism into the European intellectual landscape during the nineteenth century. His classical books entitled An Essay on the Inequality of Human Races (1853-1855) and The Moral and Intellectual Diversity of Races with Particular Reference to their Respective Influences in the Civil and Political History of Mankind (1856)1 constructed a racialized and hierarchical conception of the world that dominated scientific and popular thought for over a hundred years. Partially vanquished with the defeat of fascism during the Second World War, as the legitimating discourse for South African apartheid they extended their influence until the closing years of the twentieth century. As Gobineau famously stated: … the racial question overshadows all other problems of history …. [I]t holds the key to them all, and … the inequality of the races from whose fusion a people is formed is enough to explain the whole course of its destiny …. Recognizing that both strong and weak races exist, I preferred to examine the former, to analyse [sic] their qualities, and especially to follow them back to their origins …. [E]verything great, noble, and fruitful in the works of man on this earth, in 1 Arthur comte de Gobineau, The Inequality of Human Races, Translated by Adrian Collins, Introduction by Oscar Levy (New York: G.P. Putnam‘s Sons, 1915; Arthur comte de Gobineau, The Moral and Intellectual Diversity of Races with Particular Reference to their Respective Influences in the Civil and Political History of Mankind (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1856). According to Levy, ―This book, written as early as 1853, is no doubt a youthful and somewhat bewildering performance, but it gives us the basis of Gobineau‘s creed, his belief in Race and Aristocracy as the first condition of civilization, his disbelief in the influence of environment, his distrust in the efficacy of religion and morality. The latter kind of scepticism [sic] brings him into relationship with [Friedrich] Nietzsche, who has even accentuated Count Gobineau‘s suspicions and who has branded our morality as Slave-Morality, and consequently as harmful to good government. What a Europe without Masters, but with plenty of Half-masters and Slaves, was driving at, Gobineau foresaw as well as Nietzsche.‖ Levy, ―Introduction to Gobineau‘s ‗Inequality of Human Races,‖ in Gobineau, The Inequality of Human Races, viii. 1 science, art, and civilization, derives from a single starting-point, is the development of a single germ and the result of a single thought; it belongs to one family alone, the different branches of which have reigned in all the civilized countries of the universe.2 He goes on to note that ―[t]he negroid variety is the lowest, and stands at the foot of the ladder‖ of hierarchical human taxonomy while ―[t]he yellow race is the exact opposite of this type‖ and ―commits none of the strange excesses so common among negroes.‖ ―White peoples,‖ according to Gobineau, ―are gifted with reflective energy, or rather with an energetic intelligence.‖3His concluding inscription is classic racial ideology: Almost the whole of the Continent of Europe is inhabited at the present by groups of which the basis is white, but in which the non-Aryan elements are the most numerous. There is no true civilization, among the European peoples, where the Aryan branch is not predominant …. [N]o negro race is seen as the initiator of a civilization. Only when it is mixed with some other can it even be initiated into one …. Similarly, no spontaneous civilization is to be found among the yellow races; and when the Aryan blood is exhausted stagnation supervenes.4 Throughout the nineteenth and much of the twentieth centuries, divergent members of the African diaspora, from British, American, and Caribbean anti-racists to early pan-Africanists, had to confront Gobineau's dehumanizing arguments – and repudiate them. To understand the origins of both pan-Africanism and black nationalism, therefore, we must go back to their origins in the mid-nineteenth century Victorian Era and its interweaving of racism and evangelical Christianity. 2 Gobineau, The Inequality of Human Races, xiv-xv. 3 Gobineau, Ibid, 205-207. 4 Gobineau, Ibid, 212. Gobineau noted, ―Such are the three constituent elements of the human race. I call them secondary types, as I think myself obliged to omit all discussion of the Adamite man. From the combination, by intermarriage, of the varieties of these types come the tertiary groups. The quaternary formations are produced by the union of one of these tertiary types, or the pure-blooded tribe, with another group taken from one of the two foreign species …. It would be unjust to assert that every mixture is bad and harmful. If the three great types had remained as strictly separate, the supremacy would no doubt have always been in the hands of the finest of the white races, and the yellow and black varieties would have crawled for ever at the feet of the lowest of the whites. Such a state is so far ideal, since it has never been beheld in history; and we can imagine it only by recognizing the undisputed superiority of those groups of the white races which have remained the purest.‖ Gobineau, Ibid, 207-208. 2 Creatures of the Atlantic The historic origins of black nationalism and pan-Africanism were inextricably bound to conservative religious notions of racial ideology at the same time that they were in conversation with scientific racism and white supremacist doctrines. The central argument of this study revolves around the centrality of Islam and Christianity in the making of a conservative, racialized black nationalism. It examines the origins of black nationalism and pan-Africanism in the black Atlantic world with a particular focus on the role gender played in the construction of black subjectivity and the pan-African imagination during the nineteenth century. ―Negro: Travel and the Pan-African Imagination during the Nineteenth Century‖ engages the ongoing conversation about the role of religious resources in the formation of the black Atlantic intellectual landscape. It examines the use of these resources by three Atlantic figures that travelled the overlapping circuits of the Atlantic world and how each responded to the dynamics of the Atlantic slave trade. Denmark Vesey, Alexander Crummell, and Edward Blyden played radically different roles upon the Atlantic's revolving stage. Vesey conservatively utilized religious resources to clandestinely plot a violent uprising against slavery in the United States while Crummell and Blyden engaged in conservative religious engagements with the colonial library both in the United States and Africa. At the same time, this dissertation also engages critically with African American historiography and the Pan- African movement and especially twentieth-century black intellectuals‘ engagement with black nationalism and pan-Africanism. ―Negro: Travel and the Pan-African Imagination during the Nineteenth Century‖ focuses on the writings of an African Caribbean, Edward Blyden. Blyden, a native of 3 Saint Thomas (Virgin Islands) and considered one of the first, or founding, ―fathers‖ of both pan-Africanism and African nationalism5, was a particularly complex diasporic intellectual. Traveling first to the United States in the pre-Civil War period, then to Africa and Britain at the height of the European imperial venture – and Christian missionary efforts – Blyden served as a conduit between the West (the United States and Britain) and both a traditional religious and a Muslim Africa. He saw his role as one of mediating (critiquing/translating) these divergent voices and ideologies with the object of constituting a ―modern,‖ pan-African subject. Clearly gender played a key role in his vision – as it did in the varied voices and ideologies he sought to weave into a new pan- African whole. Blyden‘s relation to traditional Christianity and its hierarchical visions of both gender and race was complex and often sorely vexed. Both traditional African concepts of an ―authentic‖ masculinity and Muslim constructions of masculinity intrigued him, and he worked to integrate them into a new vision of a progressive Christian African, one that differed dramatically from visions of masculinity advanced by conventional Christian missionary and colonial administrators. His extensive travels through Africa convinced Blyden that Christian missionaries' belief systems and modes of conversion often had a deleterious effect on Africans' character and sense of self. He was particularly critical of the effect conversion to Christianity had upon Africans‘ self- image and identity. Conversion to Islam, he felt, had a far less deleterious effect, Muslim Africans being far more manly than Christian converts. Nevertheless Blyden viewed Islam as an intermediary stage in the African Christian‘s redemption of the continent for Africans. We will explore Blyden‘s vexed relation to Islam and Christianity by examining 5 Benjamin Quarles, Review of Blyden of Africa: An Account of the Life and Labors of Edward Wilmot Blyden, LL.D., as Recorded in Letters and in Print by Edith Holden, The Journal of Negro History, Vol. 52, No. 4 (October 1967), 308. 4 his concept of ―Africa for the Africans,‖6 the keystone of an emerging pan-African vision, a vision which marked Blyden, in Robert W. July's words, ―a leading early African nationalist and the most articulate exponent of the philosophy of African nationalism.‖7 Blyden traveled across a great expanse of the English-speaking world. He was a self-taught linguist and social critic. He lived most of his professional life in Liberia, Sierra Leone, and other regions of the West African hinterland. He taught himself the Arabic language during his travels to Muslim communities in West, Central, and North Africa. Blyden had a notable career.8 Several honorary academic degrees were conferred upon him during his lifetime, including the Doctor of Laws (LL.D.) degree.
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