Continent for the Taking: The Tragedy and Hope of Africa

by Howard W. French

  I had been haunted throughout the trip by the affinity between the plaintively shouted choruses in the early, pre-electric Muddy Waters I listened to every day on my tinny little tape player and the wailing kora music of Mali, tinged with woe, that we had heard in every car we had ridden in. The blues had their roots in American slavery, and huge numbers of those slaves had come from West Africa. Surely the resemblance was more than a coincidence.

  At Jamie’s urging I asked the driver to play my tape, and as we thudded along on the dusty washboard road, he popped it in, setting off a Muddy Waters shout about “rolling and tumbling, and crying the whole night long.” But after the driver had heard a minute or two of this, he turned his head quickly to pronounce a dismissive verdict. “Ça c’est la musique des toubabs,” he said with a derisive snort, using one of West Africa’s few universally understood words, a term that literally means “outsiders” but is typically reserved for whites.

  So much for my theories, I concluded a bit dejectedly. But the tape remained in the player and as Muddy continued his rousing calls, the twelve-bar Mississippi blues, with its gut-stirring, soulful repetition, gradually lulled the driver and passengers into mellowed acceptance, just as the Malian kora had slowly hypnotized me.

  When we reached Bandiagara, there was no station, not even a dusty parking lot. The road simply came to an end. A narrow footpath was the only way forward, so Jamie and I gathered our things and walked down the gentle incline toward the town. Actually, Bandiagara resembled a settlement: a rocky, unpaved street lined with simple, blocky buildings. We had no idea where we would be staying, or indeed if there was a hotel to be found. But our problem was soon resolved when we were approached by a passel of scuff-kneed boys dressed in plastic sandals and tee shirts. The eldest among them quickly suggested that they act as our guides, offering to take us to see what every foreigner comes to see: the Bandiagara cliff dwellers.

  We had long since developed a practiced equanimity in such situations, which was aimed at deflecting the overeager merchants, touts or street urchins who clamorously proposed their services, usually several of the boys at once. Our show of indifference didn’t seem to discourage them at all, though. In fact, we soon found ourselves being offered a place to sleep for the night, on the rooftop of the home belonging to one boy’s family, who turned out to be town notables, or dignitaries.

  Over the years, Jamie and I have often marveled at this gesture of hospitality, if that is the right thing to call it. Just imagine, my brother once said, the kind of reception two young African adventurers might receive if they arrived by bus, scruffy and unannounced, in some mountain village in West Virginia.

  It was already late in the afternoon, and if the sun’s radiation had eased a few notches from the spectral levels of midday, the heat still left us feeling heavy and listless, and drained of all ambition for what remained of the day. After a quick walk around the town, the boys took us to our rooftop sleeping quarters. It was atop a sturdy, two-story affair made of sandy cement, rather than the cheaper banco that most people built with, and its little touches—ironwork railings and wood trimmings—set it apart even further. The view from above was of the vast and desolate Bandiagara plain, and under a hazy sky we could just make out the Dogon cliffs in the distance.

  We had become instant celebrities, in the sense that our presence had drawn a small crowd of teenage boys, and they were endlessly curious about us. Why did we speak French if we were Americans? How much did my tape player cost, and why didn’t we bring several of them, to trade, or better yet, to give away? Why did people as light-skinned as we insist that we were black Americans every time they called us blancs?

  All in all, there was nothing to give offense. Indeed, the tone was friendly, and eventually we were offered mint tea. The younger boys were then invited to leave, signaling that a more serious discussion would now begin. As our hosts took turns pouring the thick, sweet tea from a beautifully engraved brass pot, artfully hoisting and lowering its swan’s-neck spout as the tiny ceramic cups filled, the older boys took a last swipe at convincing us to hire them as our guides, and then settled into a startling discussion of their own history.

  Above all, I wanted to know why they had settled in such inhospitable territory. Outside of the land we had driven through in the south of the country, where greenery abounded and water was plentiful, almost every other people in Mali had clung near to the banks of the Niger River. In times of frequent drought, the river was far more than a mere waterway; it was truly a lifeline.

  “From here we could see the enemy coming from far away,” one of the youths said immediately, pointing to the black clouds massing in the distance and the swirling dust storms kicking up beneath them. “In this way, we were able to defend ourselves from attack. That worked for a long while, but when it was no longer enough, our people moved onto the cliffs.”

  This was, of course, essentially the same story I had read in my travel books, only now it was no longer potted history. Here was a seventeen-year-old boy explaining to me with unshakable confidence the cultural will to survive that had preserved both his people’s lives and their unique identity. In his own simple but straightforward way, he had answered the dilemma posed by the Nigerian novelist Chinua Achebe in his masterpiece about the destruction of his own Igbo culture by Christian missionaries. “How do you think we can fight when our brothers have turned against us? The white man is very clever. He came quietly and peaceably with his religion. We were amused at his foolishness and allowed him to stay. Now he has won our brothers, and our clan can no longer act like one. He has put a knife to the things that held us together and we have fallen apart.”

  Jamie and I were determined to discover things for ourselves, so we set out the next morning armed with a bit of water and food, and our sturdy straw-peaked Malian hats. But before long we were lost in the rocky, blistering hot plains of Dogon-land, hungry and thirsty and more than a little concerned that we wouldn’t be able to find our way back to the settlement. Our stubbornness thus proved to be costly, for we never made it to the cliffs. I have longed to visit them ever since, regretting that we didn’t do the simple thing and go with our eager and friendly guides. But the conversation with the boys has proved more important to me over the years than a sight-seeing excursion alone could ever be, because the discourse prompted some what-if questions about Africa that I have pondered one way or the other ever since.

  If the Dogon, a smallish ethnic group with modest lands, could win the struggle to keep their culture and identity intact in the midst of persistent encroachment by outsiders, what might Africa have become if larger, even better-organized ethnic groups had been afforded the geographical space or other means to resist foreign domination? I have in mind ancient kingdoms like Kongo in Central Africa, or Dahomey and Ashanti in West Africa, just three out of numerous examples of African peoples who created large, well-structured states, with codified legal systems, diplomats and many other kinds of bureaucrats, and a range of public services from customs to mail delivery. One can easily imagine proto-states like these taking their places among today’s modern nation-states, if only they had been given the opportunity to develop. Instead, as we will see, they were willfully and utterly destroyed, as were invaluable cultural resources and much of Africa’s self-confidence.

  This question that haunts me has also been posed by Basil Davidson, the pioneering British historian of Africa, in The Black Man’s Burden, a brilliant summing-up of his life’s work. Davidson writes that Ashanti, the kingdom that once controlled most of present-day Ghana, was manifestly a national state on its way toward becoming a nation-state with every attribute ascribed to a West European state, even if some of these attributes had yet to reach maturity. It possessed known boundaries, a central government with police and army, consequent law and order, and accepted national language. . . . What might have happened if indigenous development could have continued, and pre-colonial structures had remained free to mature into modern stru
ctures, can indeed be anyone’s guess. Suppose the sovereignty of Asante [a widely used alternate spelling for Ashanti] had not been hijacked. . . . Could the resultant Asante nation-state have answered to the needs of the twentieth century? Would it have acted as a magnet of progress for its neighbors? Or would it have become a curse and a burden?

  Regrettably, history provides no answer. We are left, instead, with a humiliating picture of Africa and Africans, such as the images that endure in popular fiction like Tarzan. How many Westerners today realize, or are even capable of imagining, that it took most of the nineteenth century for the mighty British to overcome the Ashanti, after a series of bitter and closely contested wars? Ultimately, the West African kingdom was undone by superior technology, in particular the Enfield rifle, which was accurate at nearly eight hundred yards, and later, machine guns such as the Maxim, which allowed the British to mow down their opponents. But it is important to recall, especially since such things are not taught in schools, that the British-Ashanti wars were struggles between two proud civilizations that shared similar concepts of nobility, courage and duty to the sovereign, but were separated by radically different notions of fair play and ethics.

  These differences eerily echo the complaints of the British a century earlier during the American Revolution, when it was they who decried the irregular tactics of George Washington’s men as unsporting. The Ashanti, who outdid even the British in gallantry, thought it proper to allow their enemy to beat an orderly retreat after defeating them in battle. And when mounting sieges of British-controlled forts, the Ashanti armies even allowed their mortal enemies to resupply themselves with drinking water.

  Britain, on the other hand, unilaterally abrogated its treaties and other diplomatic agreements with the Ashanti, who at several points in the century-long conflict made plain their desire for a peaceful modus vivendi that could accommodate their enemy’s commercial interests. When the British army captured the Ashanti capital, Kumase, for the first time, in 1874, its treasures were painstakingly looted, including large stores of gold, sculpture, ivory and royal furniture. Then the city was deliberately burned to the ground.

  Henry Morton Stanley wrote at the time that “King Coffee is too rich a neighbor to be left alone with his riches, with his tons of gold dust and accumulations of wealth to himself.” But even this humiliation was not enough. When the British came back to Kumase in 1895, it was to declare that Ashanti independence was an “intolerable nuisance,” and to force the new king, Prempeh, and the Queen Mother to publicly prostrate themselves, embrace the boots of the colonial governor and two colonels, and swear allegiance to the queen of England.

  One pretext for the British action was the practice of human sacrifice by the Ashanti in their religious rituals. The British played up this example of “barbarism” while doing their utmost to annihilate West Africa’s most powerful, sophisticated and accomplished political culture. For anyone in possession of these facts, looking back today it is anything but clear that the British conducted themselves in the more “civilized” manner.

  In the end, in its inimitably cavalier way, Britain smashed an African state that Basil Davidson said deserved comparison with the contemporaneous, pre-Meiji Japan of the mid-nineteenth century. Amid Europe’s great, late-nineteenth-century wave of conquest and colonization in Africa, London chose to govern its new possessions directly, and in the process not only obliterated native memories of indigenous political culture and accomplishment, but also deprived the locals of any significant hand in the new forms of administration. Under direct rule in Africa, a heavy emphasis was placed on doing things cheaply, even by comparison with other colonial territories. The notion that Britain was nobly bearing the white man’s burden, doing good works and bringing civilization to a supposedly dark continent, is belied by a simple statistic. At the end of World War II, Britain had a mere 1,200 senior colonial service officials in all of its African possessions combined, meaning that London had assigned a skeleton crew to run more than a dozen colonies covering nearly 2 million square miles, with a population of 43 million.

  Then, in 1957, barely a half century after wiping out the Ashanti proto-state and imposing colonial rule, an astoundingly fickle Britain changed its mind and granted Ghana independence under state structures it copied directly from European blueprints. The question that goes unasked in Western news coverage of Africa, and in most of the other ritualized hand-wringing over the continent’s plight, is why should anyone be surprised that violent European hijacking of Africa’s political development resulted in misery and chaos?

  How could it be that in America, a country where 12 percent of the population traces its ancestry to African slaves, the vast majority of the population remains totally unaware of this derailment, except by a deliberate and long-term burial of the truth? Chinua Achebe offers one possible answer when he speaks of “the desire—one might indeed say the need—in Western psychology to set Africa up as a foil to Europe, as a place of negations at once remote and vaguely familiar, in comparison with which Europe’s own state of spiritual grace will be manifest.” “White racism against Africa,” he adds, “is such a normal way of thinking that its manifestations go completely unremarked.” Hollywood, however belatedly, has slowly come around to accepting the dignity of Indians and drawing sympathetic pictures for us of what existed in the so-called New World before its conquest and colonization. But where Africa is concerned the great forgetting continues.

  What is even worse, people who are ignorant of Africa, or merely hostile to the idea of black achievement, are quick to ridicule anyone who finds anything of merit in the continent’s past. In a lucid critique of the nearly identical way in which Western historians have systematically downplayed black Haiti’s early-nineteenth-century revolutionary victory over Napoleon’s armies, the University of Chicago anthropologist Michel-Rolph Trouillot writes: “The world of the West basks in what François Furet calls the second illusion of truth: what happened is what must have happened. How many of us can think of any non-European population without the background of a global domination that now looks preordained? And how can Haiti, or slavery, or racism be more than distracting footnotes within that narrative order?”

  A favorite prop in this endeavor has been to focus on the wildest theories of the so-called Afrocentrics, a mostly black group of scholars who have often painted ludicrously idealized pictures of the African past. At heart, what this ridicule amounts to is a clever game of concealment, whose aim is the erasure or covering up of what should be Europe’s own great shame.

  From Hegel to Conrad, we have been told time and again that Africa has little history worth recalling, or to believe the late Oxford scholar Hugh Trevor-Roper, no history at all, “only the history of Europe in Africa.” “The prehistoric man was cursing us, praying to us, welcoming us—who could tell?” says Marlow, hero of Heart of Darkness, as he makes his way up the Congo River. “The earth seemed unearthly. We are accustomed to look upon the shackled form of a conquered monster, but there—there you could look at a thing monstrous and free.” Africa was a nearly blank slate when the white man arrived, a dark continent. And yet, since we know that Europeans have been almost obsessive about recording their own history, we would do well to ask, Why does so much amnesia surround Europe’s collision with its neighbors to the south?

  The first extended contact between Europeans and a major state in sub-Saharan Africa most likely began in 1491, when Portuguese missionaries visited the Central African kingdom of Kongo, a three-hundred-square-mile proto-state comprised of half a dozen provinces. Its capital, Mbanza-Kongo, was situated just on the Angolan side of what is now that country’s border with the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

  By all accounts, the people of the kingdom were warmly hospitable to the Portuguese, who were the first Europeans they had ever laid eyes upon. Indeed, although no actual event of the sort is recorded, one easily imagines a reception akin to the first American Thanksgiving. As missionaries are
wont to do, they set about trying to make converts, and because the Kongolese king, or Mani Kongo, was interested in obtaining European goods—including firearms—in exchange for allowing them to do so, he gave the proselytizers a free hand.

  Kongo struggled valiantly with the unanticipated consequences of this fateful decision over the coming decades and, for a supposedly savage culture, fought with extraordinary honor to keep its head above water against what quickly became a Portuguese deluge. But the kingdom would have none of the success of the Dogon, and when the Portuguese embrace became suffocating, there was no way to escape it.

  Looking back, one can point to a mere accident of history that sealed Kongo’s fate. Portugal’s great age of exploration, conquest and finally colonization was launched by the invention of the caravel in the 1440s. And when some of these swift new ships, which were capable of sailing into the wind, were blown off course in 1500, the leader of the expedition, Pedro Alvares Cabral, inadvertently chanced upon the land, previously unknown to Europeans, that we now know as Brazil. The exploitation of Brazil, initially for the cultivation of sugar, created such powerfully compelling economic opportunities for the Portuguese that just nine years after the first missionaries had arrived in Mbanza-Kongo, the soul-saving rationale for the Portuguese presence in Central Africa mutated almost overnight into something quite different: a rush to sell as many Africans as possible into slavery.

  Soon, many of those same missionaries were mounting expeditions hundreds of miles from the coast, sowing panic and chaos among the inland peoples who were thrust into deadly competition against one another, and indeed against Kongo, in the capture of slaves for shipment to the New World.

  It has become fashionable in discussions of the European slave trade to object that Africans were themselves great slavers long before the white man ever set foot on the continent. But seen against the failure of Western education to give generation after generation of students a clear picture of the horrors of Europe’s imperial conquest, this insistence strikes one as little more than an attempt to change the subject. The prior existence of slavery in Africa is undeniable fact, but there can be little comparison between the age-old institution of African slavery, in which captives were typically absorbed and assimilated into the culture that captured them, and the industrial scale of Europe’s triangular slave trade, and even less with its dehumanizing impact and brutality.