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Anthropology, Colonialism, and Race in Africa

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Anthropology, Colonialism, and Race in Africa JASs forum What is race today? Scientific, legal, and Journal of Anthropological Sciences social appraisals from around the globe Vol. 96 (2018), pp. 213-219 doi 10.4436/JASS.96017 Structure, project, process: anthropology, colonialism, and race in Africa Jemima Pierre University of California, Los Angeles e-mail: [email protected] Other than apartheid South Africa, there is in contemporary Africa. Specifically, I argue that very little contemporary discussion of or engage- it is not so much that race does not matter on ment with race – as concept, ideology, identity, the African continent in places outside of South and practice – on or about the African conti- Africa. It is, instead, that research and scholar- nent. Yet, “Africa” itself is a racialized construct, ship on Africa have been unable to address the and African peoples have been the primary foil complexities of race making particulary key dis- for the modern construction of race. The emer- tinctions between race, racialization processes, gence of racial science depended on particu- and practices of racism. This essay, thus, is in two lar notions of African difference, a difference parts. In the first section, I lay the groundwork deemed inherent, absolute, and inferior. “Africa” by demonstrating the ways that early anthropo- has served as scaffolding for an entire intellectual logical writings actually depended on studies of tradition promoting the idea of European and race and Africa. Here, the work of anthropolo- “western” superiority. As anthropologist Michel- gist Charles G. Seligman evidences a particular Rolph Trouillot pointed out, it was constructed trend of the early racializing and racist scholar- as the antithesis of Europe,” the “savage-object” ship that served as justification for the violence of the so-called “west 1991”. The deployment of of the slave trade and the colonization of the the view of the African continent as the source African continent. Consequently, I briefly link of all or most that is peculiar, nonsynchronous, this early legacy of racial science to the epistemic and fantastical remains. To think and write about regimes in the production of knowledge within race in any part of Africa today is to engage with African studies that ensure that race is not con- this legacy. How is it, then, that historically and sidered a significant site of study for most of the materially, “Africa stands in for race but yet, par- continent. In the second section, I use examples adoxically, race does not exist in Africa” (Pierre, from my ongoing research in Ghana to present 2013, pp. xii-xiii)? a theory and method of studying race in Africa In this short essay, I analyze ways to examine that depend on the recognition of the long arc race about and within the African continent. I of European empire making, and on a theory of focus on Ghana to demonstrate how a local site race that exposes its complex and multiple artic- is structured through racial meanings as well as ulations – even as race continues to rely on the how such meanings are variously mapped onto presumptive superiority of whites/Europeans. individuals, communities, and national identi- The ultimate effort is to recast Africa within a ties – all the while linked to global structures modern frame so that we may see the experiences of race and power. Doing so, however, requires a and practices of its populations as part of broader broader discussion of not only the historical and ideological, political, economic, and sociocul- contemporary centrality of race in Africa, but also tural terrain established and continually updated the intellectual legacies that shape the ways that by racial legacies of European hegemony (Pierre, race is understood while remaining understudied 2013). the JASs is published by the Istituto Italiano di Antropologia www.isita-org.com 214 JASs forum: What is race today? Scientific, legal, and social appraisals from around the globe Race, “Hamites,” and the western “discovery” of Egypt by Napoleon and his scien- construction of Africa tists, and the claiming of Egypt by Europe as the foundation of western civilization, there became In 1930, physician and ethnologist Charles the need to explain its actual geographical posi- G. Seligman1 published the first edition of the tion on the African continent. The Hamitic book The Races of Africa. In introducing the Hypothesis and racial science served this func- text, Seligman states that he is adopting a “some- tion. European scholars argued not only that what mixed classification” that includes physical, there was a superior (and white) “Hamitic” race cultural, as well as linguistic criteria. He then in the northern part of Africa that was distinct posits his measures for the study of race: “col- from “Negroid” (later called “Black” or “Sub- our of skin, quality of hair, stature, headshape, Saharan”) Africa, but that this Hamitic race had character of face including prognathism, and migrated southward on the African continent, shape of nose” (1930, pp. 10-11). Seligman then mixing with the “Negroid” populations and pro- proceeds to delineate what he believes to be the viding them with civilization. existence of four distinct races on the African Samuel Morton, the foremost figure of the continent: “Hamites,” “Bushmen,” “Pygmies,” American School of Anthropology and pro- and “Negroids.” Along with these, he argues, ponent of the theory of polygenesis, used cra- is a range of race mixtures that includes a group nia gathered from the Nile Valley to argue that he names “Hottentots” (considered to be a Egyptians were not Africans but Caucasians (and “mix of Negroids, Bushmen, and Hamites.”). therefore “white”) (1844). Thus, Seligman’s eth- Recognized as one of the first detailed ethno- nographic study of Africa contributed to this graphic surveys of Africa, The Races of Africa is era of European engagement with the African where, as Howard University historian Joseph continent through racial science. He argued Harris notes, “Seligman applied the concept of that the “true Negro” race was immobile and Social Darwinism to African ethnography, which backward and needed the Hamitic influence amounted to the attribution of absolute values to to advance: “The incoming Hamites were pas- white and black physical types, with the latter at toral ‘Europeans’- arriving wave after wave – the lower rung of advancement” (1987, p. 24). better armed as well as quicker witted than the Indeed, Seligman was known as a staunch advo- dark agricultural Negroes” (Seligman quoted in cate of the “Hamitic Hypothesis.” The Hamitic Sanders, 1969, p. 521). Hypothesis was the theory that all aspects of “civi- By the time we are confronted with Seligman’s lization” – language, technology, and certain cul- work on Africa, of course, most of the African tural practices – on the African continent came continent was under European colonial rule. from a “superior” race, the so-called Hamites. Racial science (including the Eugenics move- Seligman believed that, “the Hamites – who are ment) had already taken hold in the context of ‘Europeans’ – belong to the same great branch of the expansion of the transatlantic slave trade mankind as the ‘Whites’” (1930, p. 97). in Africans, the entrenchment of slavery in the Originally deployed as a theory that evoked New World, and the struggle among European the biblical story of Ham and his presumed pun- nations for global hegemony (which eventually ishment of racial Blackness and servitude for sin- led to the Berlin Conference and the partition of ning against his father, Abraham, the Hamitic the African continent in 1885). The history of Hypothesis acquired new meaning in 19th cen- this racial science is well known. Less discussed, tury anthropology (Sanders, 1969). With the however, is the epistemic and methodological legacy of this history. Seligman is credited for 1 Seligman trained a number of notable anthropologists shifting British social anthropology to Africa. including, Bronislaw Malinowski, E. E. Pritchard, and British social anthropology, however, focused Meyer Fortes. less on race than on “tribes.” This is so because JASs forum: What is race today? Scientific, legal, and 215 social appraisals from around the globe its practitioners, seeking to make anthropology ironic exclusion from contemporary analyses of relevant to British imperialism as African cul- race and racialization processes. In other words, tural groupings were being “pacified,” stressed there is a particularist treatment of Africa “with- the interpretation of local practices and institu- out acknowledging that African distinctiveness tions (Stauder, 1993). Anthropology’s relevance is produced within a field of power relations of to British imperialism in Africa was in its vast race” (Pierre, 2013). production of monographs on a range of topics on African societies – on the politics, kinship, religion and myth, economics, and folklore. To Race and racial formation in West be sure, it is not that racialist ideas about Africans Africa: the case of Ghana retreated among the European scientific commu- nity – ideas about African primitivism and infe- In my ethnographic study of racial formation riority stayed.2 Rather, presumed African racial in Ghana, I focused on Ghanaian engagement inferiority was an apriori assumption within with histories, politics, discourses, and practices research about learning African local practices of race and racial difference and privilege. These, for the sake of empire (ibid; see also Gough, I demonstrated, occurred within a broader set of 1968). And except for the expressed fear of racial processes where local relationships expose recent conflict in settler colonies, such as South Africa histories of imperial domination and the result- and Kenya, the entire theoretical apparatus for ant global configurations of power. The goal was anthropological studies of Africa depended upon to acknowledge that, as a post-colonial space, the “tribal” model. Ghana’s contemporary relations – as all relations I detail the history and politics of this model in all modern societies – depend on the long in an earlier work (Pierre, 2013).
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