by Rick Gekoski
Thus we have Marlow’s patronising respect for an African who has been trained to do a simple repetitive job:
And between whiles I had to look after the savage who was fireman. He was an improved specimen; he could fire up a vertical boiler. He was there below me and, upon my word, to look at him was as edifying as seeing a dog in a parody of breeches and a feather hat walking on his hind legs. A few months of training had done for that really fine chap. He squinted at the steam-gauge and at the watergauge with an evident effort of intrepidity – and he had filed his teeth too, the poor devil, and the wool of his pate shaved into queer patterns, and three ornamental scars on each of his cheeks. He ought to have been clapping his hands and stamping his feet on the bank, instead of which he was hard at work, a thrall to strange witchcraft, full of improving knowledge.
If you are not embarrassed reading his passage, you should be. In the old days – when I was writing that D.Phil. – Con-radians were not, though many are now, as a succeeding generation of post-colonial critics has taken up Achebe’s challenge: ‘His obvious racism has, however, not been addressed. And it is high time it was!’
For Conrad, the choice for an African was simple: either learn the fireman’s trade or remain a savage, unrestrained and virtually unrestrainable. Presumably unlike Europeans, who are capable of slaughter on a scale undreamt of by the hungriest cannibal or most acquisitive collector of heads. Perhaps we need to recall Gulliver’s enthusiastic account, to his Houyhnhnm friend, of the European ‘art of war’:
I gave him a description of cannons, culverins, muskets, carbines, pistols, bullets, powder, swords, bayonets, battles, sieges, retreats, attacks, undermines, countermines, bombardments, sea fights, ships sunk with a thousand men, twenty thousand killed on each side, dying groans, limbs flying in the air, smoke, noise, confusion, trampling to death under horses’ feet, flight, pursuit, victory; fields strewed with carcases, left for food to dogs and wolves and birds of prey; plundering, stripping, ravishing, burning, and destroying. And to set forth the valour of my own dear countrymen, I assured him, that I had seen them blow up a hundred enemies at once in a siege, and as many in a ship, and beheld the dead bodies drop down in pieces from the clouds, to the great diversion of the spectators.
Entranced by this glorious spectacle, Gulliver is eventually hushed by his master’s horrified response that ‘whoever understood the nature of Yahoos, might easily believe it possible for so vile an animal to be capable of every action I had named.’ That is – surely it is clear enough by now? – there are plenty of savages about. They are called humans.
It should have been no great surprise, then, that those who came from without to impose such restraint might well have lacked it themselves, like Conrad’s Mister Kurtz. The benefits of civilisation are tenuous, and the atavistic appeal of ‘savage’ regression needed constantly to be resisted. Africa was, for Conrad’s generation, a testing place for the strength of one’s moral fibre. It was the ‘dark’ continent, the blackness of its peoples a manifestation of lack. This was a useful belief if you were intent on plunder, whether under the guise of benevolent colonial development or simply for individual self-enrichment.
A belief in the innate savagery of the African, and his pressing need for betterment, was also held by the ostensibly benevolent, indeed often relatively enlightened, group of missionaries, explorers, adventurers and colonialists who were compulsive and numerous visitors in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. These ‘friends’ of Africa often shared Albert Schweitzer’s patronising dictum: ‘The African is indeed my brother but my junior brother.’ Not younger, but junior, which is to say no brother at all.
It takes little thought or investigation to see that this attitude to Africa is, still, common enough, and that many prevailing contemporary images of that continent continue to partake of such dismissiveness. References to Africans as ‘Third-World’ often carry implicit claims of primitivism; condemnations of bloodthirsty dictators and potentates replace claims of tribal savagery. Though a generation of post-colonial scholarship has effectively placed and dismissed such stereotypes, they are curiously adhesive in the public imagination.
What intrigues and embarrasses me, in retrospect, is how two of the dominant strains of my life in Oxford working on my D.Phil. should have had so little contact with each other. I hugely admired, and was moved both by Tommie Smith’s Black Power salute and by Conrad’s enlightened belief in the kinship, if you were ‘man enough’ to acknowledge it, between the light and the dark, the civilised and the savage, the European and the African. That the implications of the Black Power and black pride movement were damaging to Conrad’s view never occurred to me, and when I now reread my commentary on Heart of Darkness, I see that I never mentioned, because I did not recognise, the dehumanising effect of its treatment of its Africans.
I was hardly alone in this blindness and ignorance, for if you consult the available commentaries on Conrad produced in the ‘60s and ‘70s, none mentions what now seems obvious: that there is something blankly Eurocentric and worse than patronising about Conrad’s view of the dark continent and its peoples. For Conrad, Africa was as it ever has been. Where, after all, was the evidence to the contrary? If Africans were to be accorded the rights and respect offered from the peoples of one civilisation to another, what could you point to by way of their achievements?
Picasso’s appropriation of ‘primitive’ art had suggested that, if you had a sufficiently creative eye, you might see beauty where others saw only crude fetish objects. Yes, seen through the right pair of eyes, Africans could carve objects of considerable power and beauty. The art historian Frank Willett notes that it was
in 1904-5 that African art began to make its distinctive impact. One piece is still identifiable; it is a mask that had been given to Maurice Vlaminck in 1905. He records that Derain was ‘speechless’ and ‘stunned’ when he saw it, bought it from Vlaminck and in turn showed it to Picasso and Matisse, who were also greatly affected by it. Ambroise Vollard then borrowed it and had it cast in bronze … The revolution of twentieth-century art was under way!
It is particularly pleasing that the mask was Congolese, from the Fang people whom Marlow – and Conrad! – might have encountered, without pausing to look, on that trip down the river.
The revolutionary effect of Picasso’s Demoiselles d’Avignon in 1907 was based in large part not on its fragmented pre-Cubist perspective but on the tribal mask-like faces with which the femmes de nuit were adorned, bringing with them not merely a reminder of the ostensibly savage and unrestrained but also – shockingly – the implicit suggestion that such artefacts might be assimilated into the regions of European high art.
It didn’t take long for the European artistic respect for the newly discovered art of sub-Saharan Africa to reach the conservative shores of England. In D. H. Lawrence’s Women in Love (1921) Rupert Birkin and Gerald Crich are studying an African ‘fetish’ sculpture of a woman in labour.
‘Why is it art?’ Gerald asked, shocked, resentful.
‘It conveys a complete truth,’ said Birkin. ‘It contains the whole truth of that state, whatever you feel about it.’
‘But you can’t call it high art,’ said Gerald.
‘High! There are centuries and hundreds of centuries of development in a straight line, behind that carving; it is an awful pitch of culture, of a definite sort.’
This sounds good, a genuinely fresh act of perception on Birkin’s part – that is, until he takes it all back.
‘What culture?’ Gerald asked, in opposition. He hated the sheer African thing.
‘Pure culture in sensation, culture in the physical consciousness, really ultimate physical consciousness, mindless, utterly sensual. It is so sensual as to be final, supreme.’
The fetish is art of a primitive kind, mindless, sunk in the experience of the body and (even worse) ‘the blood’. If it is not inferior to the art of civilised societies, which represents the life of the mind, it is radic
ally different from it. If art at all, it is the art of savages.
Are objects like this ‘fetish’ merely recovered cultural artefacts, giving us a window into a foreign form of life, or are they – also – rightly to be regarded as works of art? There is, clearly, a category problem here, and the curators of the British Museum had had it as well. The present-day explanatory note to the Benin exhibition acknowledges the problem, and multiplies it: if the objects were worthy of the label ‘art’, then how was it possible that the ancient Beninese had created them? Benin brasswork, we are reminded, ‘so confounded current ideas about Africa that some refused to believe that it could be of exclusively Benin origin’.
In any case, if you scanned the African landscapes for further examples of artistic achievement, what would you find? The literary heritage, such as it was, was largely oral. There were no obvious instances of sophisticated architecture, painting or sculpture, or of striking social integration across tribes rather than within them. There was nothing to compare with the great achievements of North Africa. No civilisation.
To the conventional nineteenth-century European mind – indeed, to many minds today – there was a clear discrimination between the cultures of North Africa (Egypt, Libya, Morocco, Tunisia), in which the residue of Graeco-Roman antiquity still echoed, and the great vitality of high Islamic culture and architecture was still visible. But, south of the Sahara – in the ‘real’ Africa – what might one say about that? What was there to see?
Quite a lot, in fact, but it largely goes unsaid and unseen. The British Museum, that great repository of the art and architecture of the rest of the world, has a significant holding of objects, many of them on display for generations, which testify to a quality of art and culture in sub-Saharan Africa which men of the stature of David Livingstone and Conrad had either failed to notice, or to appreciate. Evidence aplenty that ‘Africa’ had always been a land of ‘civilisation’ in exactly the sense that Conrad had denied. Why didn’t he know this? Or – more appropriately – why don’t most of us?
Here is a nice bit of synchronicity: at much the same time that Conrad was beginning to write Heart of Darkness, an unauthorised British expeditionary force entered the kingdom of Benin, ostensibly to enforce an 1892 ‘treaty of friendship’ (known as the Gallwey Treaty) that King Omo n’Oba Ovonramwen had rightly refused to sign. He recognised that, beneath the usual rhetoric, it would have made his lands into a British ‘Protectorate’, as such were often, and ironically, labelled. Rightly alarmed, the king banned British visitors to his kingdom, rightly fearing their intentions, for the unreciprocated offer of ‘friendship’ had become, in British eyes, an excuse for an invasion of Benin.
Late in 1896 an invading force led by Lieutenant James Phillips, which consisted of six British officers and some 250 African soldiers, set out to capture the city of Benin, depose its king and lay hold of its many assets. On learning that the force was on its way, the king was inclined to let them into the city to declare their intentions, but was overruled by the commander of his army, whose pre-emptive strike against the would-be invaders killed most of the soldiers and all but two of the British officers. It was a terrible slaughter – the so-called force was totally unprepared for the attack – and feelings in London were incendiary. Benin must be taught a lesson.
What the British reprisal soon did, aside from killing a great many Beninese, was not merely to destroy the remnants of a great and ancient culture but to strip its artistic assets – (in order to ‘defray the cost of the war’) – including over 900 of those magnificent bronzes that were for centuries produced there, and which are now the property of museums throughout the world, particularly in Germany and at the University of Pennsylvania, with a few left for the British Museum.
The British had had their eye on the kingdom of Benin for some time. It was a stable and complex civilisation dating back to the tenth century, with records of some thirty-one kings, itself a crisp rejoinder to Oxford Professor Hugh Trevor-Roper’s assertion that there was ‘no such thing’ as African history. Indeed, Europeans had been visiting Benin for centuries, and came back mightily impressed by the culture that they encountered. Olfert Dapper, a seventeenth-century Dutch traveller, gave an enthusiastic account of his travels:
The King’s court is certainly as large as the town of Haarlem, and is entirely surrounded by a special wall … It is divided into many magnificent palaces, houses, and apartments of the courtiers. Fine galleries, about as large as those on the Exchange at Amsterdam, are supported by wooden pillars, from top to bottom covered with cast copper on which are engraved the pictures of their war exploits and battles, and they are kept very clean.
Benin City continued to thrive, and its earthwork fortifications were the second-largest man-made structure in the world, after the Great Wall of China. With streets 130 feet wide, it had been a major centre of trade and craft for many centuries. It was a relatively safe compound, protected by some nine ornate gates, themselves works of art comparable in quality to those of the city of the goddess Ishtar. The palace, the major building within the city, was an enormous structure of some 2 million square feet. Very little of this remains. The British force of 1897 destroyed most of the city walls, though some remnants can still be seen today.
The Benin bronzes taken after the 1897 raid were (finally) acknowledged as ‘booty’ in an in-house British Museum report of 1972, which nevertheless insisted there was nothing illegal about their acquisition. It was just a little unseemly, perhaps? The history of the bronzes since the Museum acquired 203 plaques from the Home Office in 1898 is an object lesson in how complex the problem of ‘acquiring’ other cultures’ works of art can be, and how difficult it is to frame consistent and morally justifiable policies with regard to their display, storage and possible de-accessioning.
In 1950, some thirty of the plaques were described as ‘duplicate specimens’ by the Keeper of Ethnography, who proposed that they be sold back to Nigeria, which was contemplating establishing a museum in Lagos, and was naturally anxious to acquire some examples of its own treasures. A sale of ten plaques for £150 was agreed.
The Nigerians were keen to buy more examples, but two problems now arose. First, it was hard to tell how much the bronzes were worth, since few had been sold on the open market. (The solution was to appoint a dealer, operating on commission, to see what prices could be obtained.) But the second problem made a solution to the first increasingly unnecessary. What counts, other curators and officials began to demand, as a ‘duplicate specimen’? The answer was shocking. A ‘duplicate’ showed the same sort of figures, but not necessarily in the same configuration. Thus an image of a king was held to duplicate any other image of a king. (Why not sell off ‘duplicate’ Rembrandt portraits of men, because, after all, he did lots of them?) It was a remarkably stupid policy, made even more astonishing when it was acknowledged that identical wall plaques were often hung in pairs, on either side of the entrance to the King’s Palace. In selling one, their original purpose was lost.
Throughout the 1950s the British Museum continued to sell off occasional plaques, many of them to the Nigerians, in a series of transactions that, viewed in retrospect, seem haphazard and unaccompanied by any clear set of policy goals. The British Museum Act of 1963 attempted to impose some sort of order on these chaotic procedures, but an occasional sale of the bronzes was made until 1972. But if the policy was lax, the aims of the de-accessioning were frequently benign, being an attempt to bolster the holdings in Nigeria, which had become independent in 1960. Prices were set at reasonable levels, but none was simply repatriated in acknowledgment of its questionable status. It would have been hard to justify doing so, because if one plaque is returned without charge, why not all of them?
Anyway, one thing was clear: even with occasional de-accessioning, the Benin bronzes were a lot safer, and more accessible, in their home in London than they were in Lagos.
If you wish to study the civilisation and art of Benin, there is l
ittle sense going there. Go to a museum, a Western museum, instead. Go, perhaps, to the University of Pennsylvania, where Richard Hodges, the Director of the Penn Museum, notes proudly that some 20,000 important African objects may be found, including what is undoubtedly one of the finest collections of Benin art in the world. Writing about the ‘Imagine Africa at the Penn Museum’ exhibition, he observed: ‘The question is – how do we make that collection, and our presentation of it, relevant to today’s visitors, and particularly to the African and African American communities we serve in the region today?’
It is impossible not to observe, in response to this, that you only need to ‘imagine Africa’ because places like the Penn Museum house artefacts appropriated from that continent. If they were still there – and those hundreds of thousands of other such objects distributed round the world – could Conrad and his like have really maintained that Africans were ‘savages?’ We only need to ‘imagine’ Africa, the civilisations of Africa, because so many of the original sites have been rendered unimaginable, because it has been stripped of its cultural and artistic heritage so efficiently that it might never have been there at all. Indeed, to explorers, missionaries, colonialists, ivory hunters and traders – and the occasional novelist – it was not. No, it was one of the ‘dark’ places of the earth.
Consider how different it would be, to be a contemporary Nigerian, if there was a national museum of magnificent national objects in Lagos. (There is such a holding, but it is relatively modest in scope and presentation, and its administrators are constantly requesting the repatriation of their looted objects.) Heritage is not merely history, nor can it be located in some simple way in objects. A culture, its values and beliefs, is introjected. It becomes a formative part of who we are. Perhaps young Nigerians might define themselves and their culture that little bit differently, were such splendours available to admire and to study. Hardly the descendants of savages, but the inheritors of a once sophisticated and artistically literate civilisation. If you want to confirm this, go to Philadelphia, New York, London or Berlin. Most of what you will find in Nigeria is tacky airport art, based roughly on the original artefacts.
