University of Louisville ThinkIR: The University of Louisville's Institutional Repository Electronic Theses and Dissertations 8-2013 The rhetoric of Africa : historical turns in constructing a continent, 1780-1890. Dexter Peck Mahaffey University of Louisville Follow this and additional works at: https://ir.library.louisville.edu/etd Recommended Citation Mahaffey, Dexter Peck, "The rhetoric of Africa : historical turns in constructing a continent, 1780-1890." (2013). Electronic Theses and Dissertations. Paper 884. https://doi.org/10.18297/etd/884 This Doctoral Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by ThinkIR: The University of Louisville's Institutional Repository. It has been accepted for inclusion in Electronic Theses and Dissertations by an authorized administrator of ThinkIR: The University of Louisville's Institutional Repository. This title appears here courtesy of the author, who has retained all other copyrights. 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THE RHETORIC OF AFRICA: HISTORICAL TURNS IN CONSTRUCTING A CONTINENT, 1780-1890 By Dexter Peck Mahaffey B.A., Middlebury College, 1993 M.A., Bread Loaf School of English, 1998 A Dissertation Submitted to the Faculty of the College of Arts and Sciences of the University of Louisville in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy Department of English University of Louisville Louisville, Kentucky August 2013 Copyright 2013 by Dexter Peck Mahaffey All rights reserved THE RHETORIC OF AFRICA: HISTORICAL TURNS IN CONSTRUCTING A CONTINENT, 1780-1890 By Dexter Peck Mahaffey B.A., Middlebury College, 1993 M.A., Bread Loaf School of English, 1998 A Dissertation Approved on August 7, 2013 By the following Dissertation Committee: ___________________________________ Dr. Carol Mattingly, Dissertation Director __________________________________ Dr. Glynis Ridley, Committee Member __________________________________ Dr. Stephen Schneider, Committee Member __________________________________ Dr. Beth Willey, Committee Member __________________________________ Dr. Wyatt MacGaffey (Haverford College), Committee Member ii DEDICATION For Iain and Kai and always, for Era iii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS My utmost gratitude goes to Dr. Carol Mattingly, longtime advisor, and director of this project from its inception years ago through to the end. Her steadfast encouragement and enthusiasm, her sharp critical eye, and her vision of a field of Rhetoric inclusive of work such as this have been humbling. I am also grateful to the other members of the committee, Dr. Beth Willey, Dr. Stephen Schneider, and Dr. Glynis Ridley, whose insights and critiques at key moments have pushed the work forward to its conclusion. For his frankness, generosity with his long and extensive expertise in African Studies, and willingness to be involved, I am grateful to Dr. Wyatt MacGaffey of Haverford College, and equally so to Dr. Susan Herlan, whose encouragement was ceaseless, and whose friendship and hospitality here and in Ghana are the stuff of legend for a reason. And lastly thanks goes to my extended family whose unflinching support, sympathy and empathy, patience, and interest in the project both allowed it and made it worth the trouble: they are graciousness. iv ABSTRACT THE RHETORIC OF AFRICA: HISTORICAL TURNS IN CONSTRUCTING A CONTINENT, 1780-1890 Dexter Peck Mahaffey August 7, 2013 This dissertation examines historical rhetoric about Africa in British and American writings between the beginnings of the Abolition period and the 1884 Berlin Conference at which the continent was divided by colonial powers. Tracing rhetorical trends of travel writers and their constituents through the explorations of the continent, it demarcates two turns in the way Africans and Africa were constructed rhetorically. In the process it reveals a 19th-century evolution from depicting Africa largely in terms of its viability for commerce and reception of European culture, to an Africa fallen into darkness, to Africa as the Dark Continent, permanently fixed in a savage darkness. These rhetorical turns are examined through the theoretical frameworks of rhetorical imperialism and rhetorical sovereignty. Chapter I explores the creation of Sierra Leone for resettling freed British blacks and the varied, at times contradicting, rhetoric lacking in uniform vision of the continent or its people other than a general trend of focusing on the viability of Africa as a site for British post-slavery endeavor and an ambivalent view of African cultural inferiority. Chapter II explores the American creation of Liberia, revealing a specific rhetoric of Africa as benighted, fallen, and degraded. This chapter demonstrates the rhetorical turn v that occurred between the establishment of Sierra Leone and subsequent founding of Liberia, when the importance of Christian faith came to trump all other concerns for evaluating and characterizing Africa. Chapter III contains two case studies of the extent to which such rhetorical imperialism can be contested, one of Samuel Crowther, a Nigerian recaptive settled in Sierra Leone who then returned to Nigeria years later as an explorer, and another of Martin Delany, a free African American who traveled to Nigeria to seek an emigration site for African Americans fleeing slavery. Chapter IV juxtaposes the rhetorical work of Henry Stanley and his reports on explorations in Central Africa with the simultaneous rhetoric of the Great Zimbabwe debates. In so doing, the arc of rhetorical development since the Sierra Leone era is traced, complicating contemporary definitions of the Dark Continent and suggesting its continued limitation on African rhetorical sovereignty today. vi TABLE OF CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS………………………………………………………......iv ABSTRACT…………………………………………………………………………..v INTRODUCTION…………………………………………………………………….1 CHAPTER I: The Discovery of Sierra Leone: Britain Goes Exploring in West Africa…………………………………………………………………………33 I. Henry Smeathman, the Committee for the Black Poor, and a Plan for Sierra Leone……………………………………………………..36 II. In the Eye of the Public: the Establishment of Sierra Leone and The Times………………………………………………………..51 III. Sierra Leone as Company and the Rhetoric of the Corporate Document......................................................................................59 IV. Success in Africa: The Times’ Ongoing Relationship with Early Sierra Leone……………………………………………………..75 CHAPTER II: Liberia and the Christian Turn in the Rhetoric of Africa.……………87 I. The Founding of Liberia……………………………………………...93 II. The Lexicon of Africa: A Focus on American Writing at the Occasion of Liberia……………………………………………………….109 III. American Explorers in Africa: American Colonization Society Expeditions, 1818-1821………………………………………...116 CHAPTER III: Diasporant Rhetorical Constructions: The Limits of Rhetorical Sovereignty in the Travel Writings of Samuel Crowther and Martin Delany..136 I. Samuel Crowther’s Transnational African Experience...……………140 II. Martin Delany’s Transatlantic African Experience……………....…156 CHAPTER IV: The Second Rhetorical Turn: The Dark Continent, Inhumanity, and the Place That Never Could………………………...………………………...183 vii I. Rhetoric of Africa after Liberia: Politics, Science, and Unchecked Racism………………………………………………….………194 II. The Africa That Never Could: Dark Continent Rhetorics and Great Zimbabwe…………………………………………….….203 CONCLUSION……………………………………………………………..………...220 REFERENCES………………………………………………………………….…….228 CURRICULUM VITAE……………………………………………………....……...243 viii INTRODUCTION After visiting Africa for the first time in 2006, culinary-adventurer Anthony Bourdain introduced it to his television audience by saying it was “once known as the Dark Continent because so little was known about it.”1 In early 2013, the BBC aired a new television series entitled, “Africa: Eye to Eye with the Unknown,” in which the program presents “the world’s wildest continent as you’ve never seen it before...venturing into genuinely unexplored places and capturing never-seen-before behavior.” The New York Times review quoted in the video’s promotions proclaims that the BBC program “turns the dark continent bright.”2 The ability of contemporary media to depict Africa as a Dark Continent, wild, unknown, and unexplored assumes an audience literate with such a metaphor. That literacy did not come to be through a constant, repeated use of the term over the course of several hundred years, but rather through nuanced shifts in rhetoric taking place over the course of a century of western expeditions to Africa, between the beginnings of the Abolition movement in the 1770s and the division of the continent by colonial powers at the 1884 Berlin Conference. Over the course of that period, the rhetoric of Africa made two major rhetorical turns that 1 Anthony Bourdain, No Reservations. The Travel Channel. Season 2, Episode 10, 3 September 2006. 2 Africa: Eye to Eye with the Unknown. 2013. London: BBC Home Entertainment, 2013. DVD. 1 ended with the creation of the Dark Continent metaphor, one understood at the time to mean something quite different from its connotations today. When the Clapham Sect created Sierra Leone as a dumping ground for freed British slaves in the 1780s, British writers and explorers depicted the continent through a broad set of differing rhetorics that in general had to do with Africa’s viability for post- slavery commercial and abolitionist interests. And while British writing typically portrayed Africans as overall somewhat inferior, they did not develop a