Curtis A Keim Mistaking Africa, Curiosities and Inventions of the American Mind (2008)

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.His goal was to find the famous missionary DavidLivingstone, who had not been heard from in several years, and create one ofthe biggest news stories of the century.Stanley found Livingstone, of course,but more important, he became attached to Africa and spent the rest of hislife involved with the continent.From 1875 to 1877 he crossed the continentfrom east to west, and he later described the harrowing journey down theCongo River in his book Through the Dark Continent.25 In the late 1870s andthroughout the 1880s, Stanley participated in the conquest of the Congo byKing Leopold of Belgium.In both Britain and the United States, Stanley was easily the most influen-tial explorer of nineteenth-century Africa.Stanley s reputation was made as abold adventurer who conquered every obstacle, both natural and human.Al-though some believe that he was not a racist because he did not use the racistjargon of the day, he was nonetheless quick to judge Africans as inferior andquick to turn to violence against those Africans who stood in his way.Through-out the white world, red-blooded men and boys read and talked about Stan-ley well into the twentieth century.Anyone interested in Africa certainly readStanley, and a direct line of influence extends from his books to nearly everyone of the white adventurers who followed him to Africa.Stanley also inspiredthe stories of Edgar Rice Burroughs (who created Tarzan) and H.Rider Hag-gard, authors read widely by Americans.0813343860-Keim 5/27/08 11:23 AM Page 4848 Chapter 3: The Origins of Darkest AfricaTheodore Roosevelt also read Stanley and developed a remarkably similar out-look on colonialism.Although Roosevelt belonged to the American upper-middleclass and was not known as a violent man, he was nonetheless a conqueror.Hewas an enthusiastic proponent of American colonies, including Puerto Rico andthe Philippines, and as president he supervised the construction of the PanamaCanal.Like Stanley, Roosevelt saw a similar wildness in the American Westand in Africa.After his presidency, Roosevelt spent a year on safari in Africa (de-scribed in Chapter 9).In a 1909 dispatch from Africa to American newspapers,he commented that, like all savages and most children, [Africans] have theirlimitations, and in dealing with them firmness is even more necessary than kind-ness; but the man is a poor creature who does not treat them with kindnessalso, and I am rather sorry for him if he does not grow to feel for them, and tomake them in return feel for him, a real and friendly liking. 26 This is, of course,a restatement of the sentiment of The White Man s Burden. Roosevelt s pa-ternalistic and racist views, encapsulated in the adventure of his safari, werewidely read and appreciated in the United States.For most Americans whether missionary, scientist, or ordinary citizenRoosevelt s Dark Continent perspective was unquestioned in the first part ofthe twentieth century.Indeed, this view has been so widely and firmly heldthat it still persists in various forms and will likely survive well into the twenty-first century.0813343860-Keim 5/27/08 11:23 AM Page 494 OUR LIVING ANCESTORSTwentieth-Century EvolutionismHeart of Darkness, by Joseph Conrad, is widely considered to be one of the finestworks of prose fiction in the English language.In the story, the character Mar-low describes his 1891 trip up the newly explored Congo River in a small,wheezing steamboat.His mission is to find the ivory in the hands of Kurtz, awhite trader who has gone native in the deep interior of the vast Congo rainforest.Conrad s story is gripping because it uses entry into Africa as a metaphorfor entry into the dark heart of the human subconscious.As Marlow ascendsthe river, he experiences ever deeper human depravity until he finally reachesKurtz, who lives among his own tribe of shouting cannibals with his sensuousAfrican mistress. Going up that river, says Marlow, was like travelling back tothe earliest beginnings of the world, when vegetation rioted on the earth andthe big trees were kings. We were wanderers, he recalls, on a prehistoricearth. 1It is a superbly written story, but many consider it racist.Indeed, the Niger-ian novelist Chinua Achebe argues that Heart of Darkness cannot be consideredgreat literature, no matter what its aesthetic merits, because it rests on racistpremises.2 One might hope that in a future era the story will not make sensewithout an extensive introduction to the way people in the nineteenth centuryconnected Africa with the primitive.For the present, however, the story isquite comprehensible because we are still not sure that Africa is not the DarkContinent or that Africans are not primitives.We can see similar thinking, for490813343860-Keim 5/27/08 11:23 AM Page 5050 Chapter 4: Our Living Ancestorsexample, in a 1990 National Geographic article about a trip up the Congo River.The author specifically compares the Congo today with the river as portrayedby Conrad: As the days passed, the river appeared just as it had to Conrad ahundred years ago: Going up that river was like traveling back to the earliestbeginnings of the world. 3Knowing little of African languages or African thought, the National Geo-graphic author jumps from noting that in the Lingala language the concepts foryesterday and tomorrow are expressed by the same word, to concluding that forCongolese, time seemed to stand still.There is now, and there is all othertime in both directions. 4 Although this makes for intriguing reading, it is badscience, bad linguistics, and bad reporting.National Geographic can do better.Biological EvolutionismThe key to our thinking about Africa as primitive is our idea of evolution.Primitive means less evolved.Therefore, if we are going to untangle ourselvesfrom Dark Continent myths, we need to deal with evolutionary theory.Theproblem is not the modern scientific understanding of evolution but an old-fashioned view that still has some currency in American popular culture.Thisview features three articles of faith relevant to this discussion: the ideas thatevolution takes place along a single line that leads to progress, that some speciesand subspecies are more evolved than others, and that species claw their wayto the top.In this older version of evolutionary theory, change occurs along a line thatstretches from the simplest living forms to the most complex, from microbesto mammals.As each successive species evolves, a new and higher rung isadded to the evolutionary ladder.Humans, who have climbed to the top, arethe most advanced of the species.But all humans are not equal.White humanmales of the upper socioeconomic classes are at the very top of the human seg-ment of the ladder.Others trail in a biological hierarchy constructed accord-ing to class, sex, and race.The mechanism by which evolution worked according to this nineteenth-century theory was survival of the fittest.Those species and subspecies thatcould dominate others would rise to the top.The exact way this would happenwas not clear, because scientists did not have a firm grasp of genetics until wellinto the twentieth century.What did appear clear was that species were in0813343860-Keim 5/27/08 11:23 AM Page 51Evolutionism 51competition with each other for survival.The law of the jungle was eat or beeaten.When Conrad wrote in Heart of Darkness that he was going back in time ashe went into Africa, he did not just mean that he was going back in historicaltime [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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