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I T Is Now Half a Century Since Melville J. Herskovits, Father of Modern

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I T Is Now Half a Century Since Melville J. Herskovits, Father of Modern STATE OF THE DISCIPLINES African Historiography: New Myths for Old Stanley B. Alpern t is now half a century since Melville J. Herskovits, father of modern I African studies in the United States, published his landmark work of historical rectification, TheMyth of the Negro Past) This myth, he noted, formed one of the main supports of white racism by validating the concept of black inferiority. He reduced it to five basic, interrelated points: blacks were naturally childlike and adjusted easily even to slavery; only the least clever Africans were enslaved; the slaves came from all over Africa, were culturally very diverse, and deliberately separated from their cotribesmen in the New World, so that no common traditions could survive; even if tribesmen could stay together, African cultures were "so savage and relatively so low in the scale of human civilization" that they would have been totally abandoned in the face of superior white customs; and "the Negro is thus a man without a past. "~ Herskovits observed that the myth overlooked available evidence and relied heavily on misinformation. African resistance to enslavement was so well documented, for example, that he wondered how the idea of the compliant black ever got started. Contemporary testimony about who was enslaved and who was not indicated that the former were in no way inferior to the latter. Slaves did not come from all over Africa; the great majority came from the western coast, and relatively few of those from far inland. Traditions of some heavily represented tribes could and did survive in the Americas. The prevailing myth held that in every domain-economic, social, political, religious, esthetic-African life was deficient; crude, simple, rudimentary, naive, barbarous, fear-ridden were among the adjectives commonly employed. And yet, by the time Herskovits wrote his book, enough scholarly research had been done to prove the contrary, that African institutions were highly complex and often sophisticated, particularly in the core slaving region. American blacks had a rich African past. In the period since Herskovits wrote, African studies have reinforced his findings, sweeping away the old racist canards, Can we congratulate ourselves, Stanley B. Alperu is a retired U.S. Information Agency foreign service officer who served in West Africa from 1969 to 1973. Please address correspondence to Academic Questions, 575 Ewing Street, Princeton, NJ 08540. A different version of this article appeared in the Summer 1992 Bostonia. 52 Academic Questions/Fall 1992 then, on having established an African historiography that is at least as objective and unbiased as other areas of historical inquiry? Unfortunately, the emotional element in modern African studies has too often led to the replacement of derogatory old myths by patronizing new ones. It is as important to expose these new myths as it was to debunk the old. The Meeting as Equals Myth When, in December 1990, President Ibrahim Babangida of Nigeria called on Western nations to pay compensation to Africa for the damage done by the slave trade, he argued that before the trade began, Africa and Europe were almost equal in levels of development, and that the huge loss of young manpower had greatly contributed to "marginalizing" the continent, s His statement went unchallenged--though no Western government reached for its checkbook--but even the seemingly unassailable proposition that African development was retarded by the slave trade is debatable. The human hemorrhage was counterbalanced and perhaps overbalanced in eco- nomic terms by the effects of certain European trade goods Africans received in exchange for the humans they sold and of the European introduction of new food crops. European iron bars enabled African smiths to turn out considerably more farm and craft tools than before; steel-bladed machetes made it easier to clear living areas and paths and to start and maintain farm plots and kitchen gardens; smaller knives facilitated myriad economic tasks; firearms helped farmers protect crops from wild animals and hunters bag more game; fish- hooks boosted ocean, lagoon, and river catches. Europeans introduced at least seventy new crops into Africa during the slave trade period--including such staples as maize, cassava, Asian rice, pea- nuts, sweet potatoes, and tannia (yautia)--plus several new species of livestock, improving diets immeasurably and accelerating population growth, to the point, some specialists would contend, that human losses through the trade were more than offset by the enhanced ability to feed people. President Babangida's proposition that Africa and Europe were almost at equal levels of development before the trade began is simply preposterous, yet it is one of the major new myths of African historiography, one of the romantic, patronizing refrains that have succeeded the old pejorative canards. I call it the Meeting as Equals myth. Like most of the ideological wares hawked by politically correct Africanists, the Meeting as Equals myth has been around a while. As long ago as 1915, W.E.B. Du Bois claimed that in the fifteenth century, when Portuguese explorers reached sub-Saharan Africa, "there was no great disparity between the civilization of Negroland and that of Europe. "4 Three decades ago Basil Davidson, the foremost modern popularizer of African history, wrote that "the Alpern 53 'cultural gap' between the European discoverers and the Africans they found was narrow and often felt to be non-existent....Africa and Europe, at the beginning of their connection, traded and met as equals .... [T]his acceptance of equality...long continued to govern relations" between them. 5 Thus, not only were Africans and Europeans more or less equal in development, but they were perceived as such by both sides. Other authors have embraced and embroidered this notion. Historical anthologists Clark D. Moore and Ann Dunbar assert that when the Portuguese reached West Africa "they found a culture...which they felt they could under- stand and appreciate .... [T]hey accepted the idea that native African states were on an equal footing with European ones. "6 Another historical anthologist, Melvin Drimmer, writes that the Africans' "high level of culture" made them "attractive to Europeans as a source of skilled labor." He adds that Africans met Europeans as equals "until the advent of the industrial revolution in Europe," that "powerful African nations" restricted Europeans to coastal areas, and that "a well developed state structure" kept Europeans from controlling Africa until late in the nineteenth century. 7 E. Jefferson Murphy tells us unequivocally that "in the first century or two of European-African contact, the relationship between African and European was between equals. "s The view is even advanced by Claudia Zaslavsky that "in the fifteenth century, the level of culture among the masses of black people in West Africa was higher than that of northern Europe during the same period. "g To support such assertions, these and other writers point to striking parallels between European and African feudalism; to some positive remarks (but not to the negative ones) made by medieval Arab visitors about Islamized or Muslim-influenced black kingdoms just below the Sahara; to the complexity of African political and legal institutions; to the well-developed African market and trading systems that Europeans found; to African houses of wattle, daub, and thatch that were not much different from many European peasant homes; to the (unique) city of Benin, whose size, broad avenues, and rows of attractive buildings led visitors to compare it favorably with contemporary European cities; to African habits of personal hygiene and delicacy of manners that made most Europeans look like barbarians by comparison; to the nearly comparable state of illiteracy in Europe and Africa; to the Europeans' continued use of bow and arrow and lance; and to the slavery that was still common in Southern Europe in the fifteenth century. But the idea of cultural equivalence does not withstand scrutiny. The development gap between Western Europe and sub-Saharan Africa in the fifteenth century was already very wide and growing fast. Europe had inherited an immense catalogue of material and intellectual advances from all the ancient civilizations of the Middle East and the Mediterranean Basin, advances whose outermost ripples had apparently never reached the Guinea Coast. 54 Academic Questions / Fall 1992 Some of these innovations dated back more than five thousand years, to before Sumer and dynastic Egypt: the land sledge, for instance, and the sailboat. From Sumer alone came the potter's wheel and vehicular wheel (both based on the rotating-shaft principle used previously only in the fire drill), draft and pack animals, the plow, irrigation, kiln-fired bricks. Above all, the Sumerians invented writing, which permitted progress in many directions: standardization of length, area, volume, weight, and time, as well as a calendar, mathematics, astronomy, cartography, natural history, grammars and diction- aries, the preservation of myths, epic tales, hymns, proverbs, fables and essays, libraries to accumulate and store knowledge, and schools to diffuse it. From Phoenicia came the alphabet, which put literacy within everyone's reach. The Hittites contributed the horse-drawn chariot and an economic method for smelting iron on an industrial scale, the Lydians coinage that simplified all commercial transactions, the Persians the post road and pontoon bridge, the Assyrians the aqueduct. Egypt developed glass, and its pyramid builders used plumb lines, wedges, copper saws, chisels, wooden mallets, and apparently a try square. They hauled huge blocks of stone by means of sledge, roller, lever, rope, and ramp. (There is no evidence that any of these Egyptian contributions derived from Black Africa.) The possibilities of the rotating shaft were developed further by the ancient Greeks, who produced the rotary mill, the toothed or geared wheel, the screw, and probably the water wheel. Rome invented concrete and made better bricks.
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