Savage Beasts and Beastly Savages

North America. Savage Beasts and Beastly Savages Michael McCarthy in his book Dark Continent: Africa As Seen by Americans' says the explorers' images of Africa were widely From the stories of the African travels of Dr. Doolittle - where the accepted by blacks as well as whites. "During-the monkeys are more intelligent late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, especially," McCarthy than the people - to the modem myths of commercial advertising says, "a majority of black Americans subscribed either consciously Americans are exposed to images of Africa that are almost entirely or unconsciously to the dangerous and fallacious idea of African negative. inferiority." Beyond shaping our impressions of a distant continent, says C. Yet the observations of the popular writers were often ill- Payne Lucas, those images have domestic consequences. As director informed and misleading. African societies appeared to Europeans to of African Africare, an-American-run development organization be "stateless." Africans seemed to have no religions. based in Washington, DC, Lucas tries to rouse public interest in Even their fields looked uncultivated. Scholars now know that many African affairs. 'How can you expect young African-Americans to African cultures built powerful empires, that African theologies were have any self respect,' Lucas asks, "when everything they hear about complex and intricate, and that crop rows that their ancestry and their heritage is negative?' looked ' jumbled or untended were often scientifically sound Black community leaders, dating back at least half a century to examples of productive intercropping or of shifting cultivation that Marcus Garvey, have tried to organize effective protests against a let marginal tropical soils recover by lying fallow. view that equates Africa with primitivism. And in recent years, But the Africa seen by explorers was used to explain and ' justify the scholars in a number of disciplines have explored the roots of racial subordination of people of African descent. "The case against black attitudes - and the links between those attitudes and public policies. people in America," says McCarthy, "was advanced by showing that Some of the studies have focused on the media, arguing that there their African ancestors had failed to develop a fully civilized way of is a persistent pattern that assumes African barbarity and that life. If Africans could not do it in their homeland, then how could overlooks black sufferings or portrays them less vividly than those of their progeny possibly do any better in America?" whites. Beverly Hawk, who now teaches at Maine's Colby College, The inaugural issue of National Geographic magazine in 1889 was at Howard University when she analyzed U.S. newspaper featured an article by the geographic society's founder, Gardiner reporting on Zimbabwe during the 1970s - a time when coverage of Hubbard, asserting that Africans had developed a degree of the war in what was then Rhodesia was the main focus of American civilization only after coming into contact with Western culture. reporting on Africa. When that contact was cut, Hubbard wrote, Africans -deteriorated Hawk found that in a war where 16-20 Africans died for every into barbarism." white person who was killed, only white deaths provoked empathetic The single most important source of reporting on Africa in the descriptions. Major newspapers like the Washington Post, New York nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, says Michael McCarthy, Times and Los Angeles Times, Hawk says ' routinely referred to the was an African American paper called the Freeman, published in killings of whites as "murders," 'massacres" and 'slaughters." Indiana. Articles by explorers and other African travelers were Evocative words such as "atrocity," "butchered" and"savage' were supplemented by cartoon caricatures depicting Africans with bones used to describe attacks on whites, while accounts of through their noses and necklaces of teeth. The comic savages spoke black deaths were reported most often as anonymous numbers in crude dialects, often about their next human meal. relayed School textbooks, travel writings and children's literature by the Rhodesian government's information service. Of the major reinforced the media images. national newspapers, Hawk says, only the Christian Science Monitor chose not to carry emotional accounts But it wasn't always that way. In fourteenth and fifteenth century of white deaths and funerals. An example of the reporting of the Europe, pictorial art was the mass media of the era. A study of the period was the heavy press coverage of the shooting down of a period by the Menil Foundation's Image of the Black in Western Art civilian government airliner by Zimbabwe project has unearthed and catalogued thousands of images from guerrillas in 1978, in which 48 people died. artworks and published several large volumes of its on-going "Please Don't Kill Us" was the title Newsweek gave to a two- research. page spread In the stunning reproductions, blacks appear as royalty, saints that detailed the downing of the plane, the subsequent shooting of and sages as well as in more diverse roles as servants, pages and several passengers and the terror of the survivors. Accompanying the musicians. Imperial Europe gave Africans a large place in its story was a photograph of guerrilla leaders Joshua Nkomo and veneration of saints, its heraldry and its art. Robert Mugabe - now Zimbabwe's president - raising their glasses in The institution of slavery changed all that. a toast, as The large-scale contacts between Europeans and Africans though celebrating the deaths. The photo was captioned "We Shot It coincided with the development of the slave trade in the sixteenth Down," with no acknowledgement that the picture pre-dated the century Explorers found that, despite its fabled wealth, Africa did not crash. readily yield its riches to European entrepreneurs. "From an By contrast, four months earlier, a South African raid on a economic point of view," says Volume 2 of the Menil study, "Africa Namibian refugee came, in AnL-ola got barely a mention in the U.S. had only one thing to offer: manpower." The establishment of media, although more than 600 people, mostly women and children, colonies in the Americas, built on labor-intensive crops like cotton, were killed and buried in mass graves. intensified the demand for chattel slavery - and the need to justify it. Such unconscious value judgements are deeply rooted, White Over Black, Winthrop Jordan's classic 1968 study of racial Africanist scholars say, in a distorted historic view of Africa and attitudes, says that from the early 1700s in many parts of the Africans. Americas, "one of the major daily concerns of responsible men was From its earliest days as a republic, Americans saw Africa as a the effective control of masses of slaves." With slavery viewed as an continent of wild beasts and savage people. The reading public was economic necessity says McCarthy, "theories about the origins of alternately fascinated and repelled by accounts like those of reporter races were developed in order to classify Africans as subordinate." Henry Morton Stanley. Sent by the New York HeraId in 1886 to find The shift is clearly discernable in art. Within a period of a few the British missionary Dr. Livingstone, Stanley regaled audiences years, says Volume 2 of the Menil books, new, more negative with front page accounts of portrayals had "eclipsed an image of the black that.... his journeys. His later books about his African travels the most popular were Through the Dark Continent in 1879 and In Darkest Africa in 1890 -shaped opinions in both Europe and Cover of a Menil Foundation book shows a thirteenth-century But the "dream of an authentic cooperation between Europe and Africa, of a sharing of ideals and knowledge," she says, -was was the fruit of a centuries-old evolution." shattered by crimes so atrocious that they left no images. Christian doctrine, which had taught that all people were part of the human family and equal before God, was transformed into the dogma of polygenesis, which held that races had been created as distinct and unequal. Twelfth century enamels of apostles addressing a white man and a black man, symbolizing the variety and unity of humanity, were made obsolete by the evolving theory that Africans had been divinely fitted for servitude. (Jordan points to the anomaly that the "curse of Ham," cited even today as a Biblical explanation of black inferiority, says "absolutely nothing about skin color.") Even the abolitionist art of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries helped erase the diverse, often positive, earlier perceptions of blacks, says art historian Hugh Honour in the latest of the Menil volumes. SO potent were the images of blacks as victims, he says, "that they reduced the possibilities of representing blacks in the former roles of saint or devil, proud Magus, regal personification of Africa, or even richly dressed and petted page boy." The legacy of that history persists in modem popular images of the continent. The 1981 movie "First Family," starring Bob Newhart and Gilda Radner featured an African ambassador who threw his diplomats out of airplanes to appease the gods. A Citicorp ad of the previous year showed a white traveler in a safari suit surrounded by scantily-clad, spear-wielding Africans - but still miraculously within the reach of the bank's financial services. "Lose Citicorp Travelers Checks in Maputo," said the ad - whose geography was as fuzzy as its ethnography - "and You're Not Up the Zambezi Without a Paddle." A study by James Larson of the University of Washington found that, between 1972 and 1982, African stories although less likely to make the network television news shows than stories from elsewhere - were 11% more likely to be about crisis. The crisis orientation, says University, of California historian Sylvester Whitaker, misses one of the most compelling African stories - "the survivability of African communities.” "If you read that the GNP is disastrous,- Whitaker says, "that investment is in decline, that health problems are growing - how are Africans making,- out at all? When vou ask yourself that question and actually begin to look for some experience to answer your question, it turns out that there's an awful lot of creativity that grows out of the dilemmas of African states." Those are stories, Whitaker says, that Americans never hear. Yet major African crises can go unremarked, too. In 1973, Robert Maynard, now editor of the Oakland Tribune, chastised the U.S. news media for ignoring the genocidal civil war in Burundi that killed as many as 2,50,000 people, including half the' country's primary school teachers. Stories that conveyed the horror of events in Burundi-, Maynard argued, could have pressured the U. S., as the principle outside economic force in the country, to take action that would have saved lives. Even the Ethiopian famine of 1984 that seared its i@ages into public consciousness 'was all but ignored by the networks for two years after it had been documented,- wrote Joannarie Kalter in T V Guide, and it became a "crisis of unprecedented proportions" partly because it was ignored. But like the abolitionist's crusade that solidified an image of blacks as victims rather than actors, the fly-encrusted, stick-thin children of the anti-hunger campaign have the unintended result. What is being called "compassion fatigue" has fused with a contemporary view of Africans as either brutal and corrupt or passive and exploited. The "dark continent has come to be seen as the lost continent. Things could have been different, says Dominique de Menil, who launched the Image of the Black project in 1960. "There was a time hen the West adopted a black - knight as its patron saint," she says, 'a time when artists did not neglect to include an African among the resurrected, a time when a white King Solomon embraced a black Queen of Sheba.” "Inventing and Conquering a Continent" A Failure to Communicate Inn one of his dramatic accounts of African travels, Henry V.Y. MUDIMBE, The invention of Africa: Gnosis, Philosophy and Morton Stanley describes a trip up the Congo River in the 1870s. the Order of Knowledge Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988.$14.95 (paper) $39.95 At 2 p.m. we emerged out of the shelter of the deeply wooded (hardback). 241 PP. banks and came into a vast stream, nearly 2,000 yards across at the mouth.... looking upstream, we saw a sight that sent the blood Anyone who doubts that scholarship can be culturally biased has tingling through every nerve and fiber of our bodies: a flotilla of only to read Valentin Mudimbe. giant canoes bearing down on us.... I gave the order to drop anchor. After citing such examples as a comment in the 1965 reissue of We had sufficient time to take a view of the mighty force bearing Mary Kingsley's nineteenth century book Travels in West Africa that down on us and to count the number of war vessels. There were 52 the "African has never made an even fourteenth-rate piece of cloth or of them! A monster canoe led the way, with two rows of upstanding pottery," Mudimbe muses on the convoluted formulas that paddles, 40 men on a side, their bodies bending and swaying in Westerners have devised to avoid challenges to their belief n African unison as with a swelling barbarous chorus they drove her down inferiority. Since sub-Saharan Africans could produce nothing of towards us.... value, he says, "the technique of Yoruba statuary must have come The crashing sound of large drums, a hundred blasts from ivory from the Egyptians; Benin art must be a Portuguese creation; the horns, and a thrilling chant from 2,000 human throats did not tend to architectural achievement of Zimbabwe was due to Arab technicians; sooth our nerves or to increase our confidence. We had no time to and Hausa and Buganda statecraft were inventions of white pray or to take sentimental looks at the savage world, or even to invaders." breath a sad farewell to it. So many other things had to be done Bringing his examples up-to-date, Mudimbe uses the case of speedily and well.... Every sound was soon lost in the rippling, popular astronomer Carl Sagan. The Cornell professor has expressed crackling musketry. For five minutes we were so absorbed in firing his astonishment at the sophisticated cosmology of the Dogon people that we took no note of anything else. Our blood was up now. We of Mali, whose traditional views of the universe include a belief in therefore lifted our anchors and pursued them upstream along the planets that rotate upon their axes, a Saturn encircled by a ring, and right bank until, rounding a point, we saw their villages. We made elliptical, rather than circular, planetary orbits - in contrast, Sagan straight says, "to almost all prescientific societies."Sagan notes that the for the bank and continued the fight in the village streets with those Dogon also postulate an invisible, metallic companion that orbits the who had landed, hunting them out into the woods, and there sounded star Sirius once every fifty years. Unable to credit that the first the retreat, having returned the daring cannibals the compliment of a 'white dwarf star discovered by modem astrophysics," Sirius B, could visit. have been known already to Africans, Sagan theorizes that a European visitor carried news of the discovery to the Dogon, sometime after a 1928 book on white dwarfs was published. Mudimbe persuasively debunks that hypothesis with a survey of historical Dogon rituals that incorporate the Sirius beliefs. "In brief," Mudimbe summarizes, "although presented in the second part of the twentieth century, Carl Sagan's hypothesis belongs to nineteenth-century reasoning about 'primitives'. - . namely, the belief that scientifically there is nothing to be learned from 'them' unless it is already 'ours' or comes from 'us.'" Mudimbe, a Duke University professor, challenges the foundations of much Western scholarship, arguing that all too often, what purports to be about Africa is, instead, a justification of 'the process of inventing and conquering a continent."

In a world culture series book, Through African Eyes, published by the Center for International Training and Education, editor Leon Clark reprints a description of the same event by an African chief called Mojimba, as told to Catholic missionary, Father Joseph Fraessle.

When we heard that the man with the white flesh was journeying down the Lualaba [Congo] we were openmouthed with astonishment. We stood still. All night long the drums announced the strange news - a man with white flesh.... We will prepare a feast, I ordered, we will go to meet our brother and escort him into the village with rejoicing! We donned our ceremonial garb. We assembled the great canoes.... We swept forward, my canoe leading, the others following, to meet the first white man our eyes had beheld and to do him honor. But as we drew near his canoes there were loud reports, bang! bang! and fire-staves spat bits of iron at us. We were paralyzed with fright; our mouths hung wide open and we could not shut them. Some screamed dreadfully, other were silent - they were dead and blood flowed from little holes in their bodies. "War! that is war!" I yelled. "Go back!" The canoes sped back to our village with all the strength our spirits could impart to our arms. That was no brother! That was the worst enemy our country had ever seen.... They came after us. We flung ourselves into the forest and flung ourselves on the ground. When we returned that evening our eyes beheld fearful things: our village plundered and burned and the water full of dead bodies.