History 247: Africa – Colonialism to Self-Rule

What is Africa?

“The mistake is to generalize. The very word Africa—that sonorous trisyllable—seems to invite grandiloquence. Because the continent has a clear geographical unity it is tempting to hold forth about it. Cecil Rhodes wanted to colour everything imperial red from the Cape to Cairo; since then the tendency has been for Westerners—and often Africans too—to seek to impose a single reality, a general explanation, on the whole place. “

John Ryle, Granta 92: The View from Africa

What Is Africa?

•Listen to Binyavanga Wainaina interviewed on CBC

•Read his article: “How to Write about Africa”

[additional readings]

Contemporary Rendering of The African Continent: But whose “Africa”?

Introduction: In Search of Africa

Maps in the Making of Africa

•Maps – Geographical Representations – are one way of conceptualizing space: they reveal much about the ‘creators’ and very little about the region or peoples ‘mapped’.

•The mapping of Africa belongs to the larger historical process by which ‘mapping’ came to be understood and developed in the West. [reference Mazrui, additional readings for this discussion]

12th Century World Map (Book of Kells)

‘T’ and ‘O’ map with Jerusalem at the center.

This reflected the Church’s view of God’s World.

Note ‘Africa’ on the right, ‘Chaos’ written Underneath

Maps in the Making of Africa

•Western map-making reinforced the growing belief in Europe that the rest of the world was to be situated (and by implication, understood) relative to Europe and its peoples.

•Map making by the 19th century served European Imperialism well. In this sense even the so-called scientific representation of the continent ‘Africa’ was a construction.

North Africa, (Spanish) Catalan Atlas 1375

For other views of Africa in relation to Europe, Near East, Arabia and Asia, see “A Medieval Atlas: maps of Africa”: http://historymedren.about.com/library/atlas/blatafridex.htm

Medieval Mapamundi (c.1485-1500)

Genoa Chart of North Africa (c.1490) The Work of Christopher Columbus?

Mercator’s Atlas 1595

In the famous Mercator's Atlas (1595), Atlas plays with the Earth like a basketball.

The globe has become manageable, controllable, a resource to be exploited, no longer the realm of the unknown.

Gerardus Mercator Atlas sive cosmographicae meditationes... Denuo auctus Amsterodami: sumpt. et typ. E.J. Hondii, 1616. [18], 365, [32] p., [145] map l.

The Mercator Projection (originated with Mercator’s Atlas, 1595)

The Peters’ Projection Map (1974)

Manuscripts, Books, and Maps: Printing Press and a Changing World

•Maps

- The final aspect of print and its effects on European life has as much or more to do with economics than it does with culture

- maps and geographical information were printed for European expansion.

[reference http://communication.ucsd.edu/bjones/Books/maps.html]

Europe’s Africa c.1808

Brookes, R., The General Gazetteer; or Compendious Geographical Dictionary. Eighth Edition. Dublin, 1808.

Europe’s Africa, c. 1880

Africa Conceptualized by Religion c.1900

“Mohammedans”are Muslims, those who follow the Islamic Faith.

“Heathens” are animists, those who follow a wide range of polytheistic belief systems; by the end of the 19th century, many had absorbed considerable Christian and Islamic beliefs into their own cultures.

Exploration and Enlightenment

By the 19th Century, the “Dark Continent” beckoned state-sponsored explorers, some with largely scientific motives, others more overtly political and military in their aims.

Exploration and Enlightenment

Joined merchants:

- less and less satisfied to remain in ocean-side trading forts

-wanted to ‘penetrate’ continent and consumer markets

Vied with Christian Missionaries:- establish influence in the interior,

over the peoples who lived there

Mapping Human Culture

New ‘scientific’ , ‘first-hand’ information had impact on Europe’s Maps of Africa.

Europeans began to create images of Africa:

- people- landscape- culture

Mapping Human Culture

Accumulation of knowledge form of assumed ‘power’ over Africans:

“control over their [Africans’] destinies could be eroded as surely by map co-ordinates and museum specimens as by steamships, bullets and treaties of concession [and commerce…]’[Reid, Modern Africa, p.132]

Mapping Human Culture

Victorian ‘Human Africa’ superimposed on geographic:

-barbaric

-uncivilized

-‘heathen’

- enslaved Africa

Awaiting awakening!!

Mapping Human Culture

‘Human Africa’ also represented:- mystery

- enigma

- exoticism

Romantic replacement of once ‘dark’ geographical continent.

Exploring AfricaExploration from the Cape to the Nile http://www.sc.edu/library/spcoll/sccoll/africa/africa3.html

West Africa, the Niger, and the Quest for Timbuktu http://www.sc.edu/library/spcoll/sccoll/africa/africa4.html

Central and East Africa, and the Legacy of Exploration http://www.sc.edu/library/spcoll/sccoll/africa/africa5.html

Dr. Livingstone. I presume?Stanley finds Livingstone, 1871

[http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Image:Stanley_and_Livingstone.jpg]

“Timbuctoo” the Romantic

1828-29, set topic of Cambridge University poetry prize -- Timbuctoo.

Winner : future poet laureate Alfred Tennyson, undergraduate at Trinity College

As the conclusion of poem shows, he was not sure he wanted ‘accurate’ knowledge because mystery and glamour would be dispelled!

Tennyson’s CHILD of MAN

See'st thou yon river, whose translucent wave,

Forth issuing from the darkness, windeth through

The argent streets o' th' City, imaging

The soft inversion of her tremulous Domes,

Her gardens frequent with the stately Palm,

Her Pagods hung with music of sweet bells,

Her obelisks of rangéd Chrysolite, Minarets and towers?

Lo! how he passeth by,

And gulphs himself in sands, as not enduring

To carry through the world those waves, which bore

The reflex of my City in their depths.

Oh City! oh latest Throne! where I was rais'd

CHILD of MAN (cont’d.)

To be a mystery of loveliness Unto all eyes, the time is well-nigh come When I must render up this glorious homeTo keen Discovery: soon yon brilliant towers Shall darken with the waving of her wand: Darken, and shrink and shiver into huts, Black specks amid a waste of dreary sand, Low-built, mud-wall'd, Barbarian settlements.

How chang'd this fair City! Alfred Tennyson, 1809-1892. Timbuctoo, a poem which obtained the

Chancellor's Medal . . . in Prolusiones Academicae praemiis annuis

dignatae Cambridge: John Smith, 1829.

“Timbuctoo” the Real

This is the picture, impressive though it may seem, that finally disillusioned Europeans about the long-fabled wonders of this West African city. (from Rene Caillie)

Victorian Images

http://www.pbs.org/empires/victoria/history/scramble.html

Africa in Architecture

Allegorical figure of Africa on the façade of the Colonial Office, Whitehall, London.

The White Man’s Burden

Take up the White Man's burden—Send forth the best ye breed–

Go, bind your sons to exile To serve your captives' need;

To wait, in heavy harness, On fluttered folk and wild–

Your new-caught sullen peoples, Half devil and half child.

By Rudyard Kipling

McClure's Magazine 12 (Feb.1899).(Full Text):http://www.boondocksnet.com/ai/kipling/kipling.html

Lightening the White Man's Burden Pears' Soap Advertisement

Victorian England also home to Industrial Revolution

Africa conceptualized as almost Infinite market: ‘civilizing’ could also mean ‘advertising’

The ‘white man’s burden’ could be Profitable!

This advertisement, showing Admiral George Dewey washing his hands with Pears' Soap surrounded by illustrations symbolizing "progress and civilization."Pears' Soap advertisement, "The White Man's Burden" (1899). First appeared in McClure's Magazine (October 1899). http://www.wwnorton.com/nto/victorian/topic_4/illustrations/imburden.htm

“Africa” is Born

The essential point:

growing 19th century interest in Africa

- by artists, poets, politicians, merchants, missionaries and explorers –

was producing an ‘entity’ called Africa.

“Africa” is Born

This “Africa” conjured up images of romance and mystery, of infinite natural resources, of an ‘other’ who might one day be civilized and christianized, and of uncountable labourers who would exploit the resources and ultimately consume the manufactured goods Europe’s industries would produce.

From Capetown to Cairo: the Rhodes’ Dream

“… it was in the colonial context that for the first time ‘Africa’ as an entity, from the Cape to Cairo, from the Coastal lagoons of the West to the Horn of the East, could be conceived.”

Bill Freund The Making of Contemporary Africa, p.2

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Rhodes.Africa.jpg

“The Scramble” to Partition Africa

Having conceptualized, drawn the physical ‘Africa’…Having imbued it with a humanity of ‘Africans’…

European powers overlaid entity once more: with articulation of their own power and economic struggles.

“The Scramble” to Partition Africa

Africa would now be divided up according to European national influences.

“The Scramble” to Partition Africa

Leopold II of Belgium: initiated ‘the scramble’ with desire to rule the Congo.

The Berlin Conference of 1884 provided forum to carve out spheres of influence - to ‘colour Africa’.

“The Mad Scramble” Begins

The ‘Colouring’ of Africa

Colonialism: creating reality from image

"Imperialist domination marked more than a phase in the history of Africa. It was the precondition of the emergence of African society as it now exists. Indeed, Africa as a meaningful concept owes itself primarily to the predatory instincts of the new conquerors and then, with time, to opposition to them.” [WilliamFreund, The Making of Contemporary Africa. p.95]

Colonialism: creating reality from image

Partition:- not only drawing maps - illustrating explorers’ accounts

-selling soap

Partition about remaking Africans and Africa. Colonialism had impact on Continent that outlasted brevity of its existence.

The Role of the ‘Africanist’

Project of ‘constructing Africa’ not only belonged to - politicians- Merchants- missionaries- explorers

Taken up by ‘scientific academy’.

The Role of the ‘Africanist’

W. Freund argues: “with the general acceptance of the concept of ‘Africa’ as it stood at the end of the 19th century came the equally general acceptance of the academic ‘specialist’ who had or acquired ‘expert’ knowledge of Africa: “The Africanist”.

[The Making of Contemporary Africa, p.2),

Whose Africa? The search continues…

The essential point:

contemporary academics

play key roles in creating images of Africa -- they thereby influence its reality –Present and Future.[brings us back to Wainana, ‘additional readings’]