Telling Africa’s story

Inventing Africa is the title of a fascinating book by Robin Derricourt. It traces several themes of how outsiders have told the history of Africa in order to bolster their own worldview. There are terrific examples of archaeologists who have either contrived to present evidence to suit their own agendas or challenged the prevailing views of colonialism or racial theories. It is a great tale of the history of ideas which shows how the bare facts are only ever part of the writing of history. And history matters because it is used and abused by those in power to justify one power play or another.

But some “outsiders” pre-dated the European colonial projects: the ancient Egyptians had pre-conceived ideas about the rest of Africa, just as the West failed to consider the achievements and longevity of the Egyptian dynasties to be truly “African”. There was more complexity in the relationship between classical Greece or Rome and the continent to the south of the Mediterranean: a two-way traffic of trade and intellectual ideas, which is also reflected in the later emergence of Islam in North and East Africa. But as well as trade came exploitation as, for many centuries, meetings of cultures were dominated by slavery, which the early modern European adventurers tapped into and developed into the appalling industry reaching its peak in the abomination of the transatlantic slave trade.

For a long time, the outsiders’ view of Africa was a subject of almost unchecked imagination – the lack of knowledge, like the blank interior on the maps of 17^th century explorers, was filled with fantastic beasts and stories. There were myths of lost cities of the Kalahari and the persistent mediaeval legend of Prester John, each fuelled by some hints of the real histories of African kingdoms: the ruins of Great Zimbabwe and the ancient lineage of Ethiopian kings and emperors. But when the archaeology was uncovered – inevitably by Europeans – and it showed the scale and sophistication of past civilisations, then of course the interpreters could not credit the remains as African, but instead insisted that the buildings had to have been built by Egyptians or Romans or Babylonians or some other race more acceptable to the Eurocentric mindset. These versions of history propped up the racial theories of the 19^th and 20^th century which infantilised the subject peoples of Empire.

Much of Derricourt’s book looks at some larger-than-life academics and archaeologists of the 20^th century: Raymond Dart and the Leakeys (Louis, Mary & Richard) and others whose work began to piece together the emergence of early hominids in eastern Africa and established Africa as the “cradle of mankind” before groups ventured out to populate the rest of the world. But the Out of Africa theory was also contested, and only later confirmed when techniques were developed to study mitochondrial DNA.

The later chapters are very important by emphasising the voices from within Africa who have tried to wrestle back the initiative and redress the balance. This is presaged by the works of Basil Davidson whose popular books stimulated the founding of African Studies in the West, either by his presentation of the great African civilisations or the negative portrayal pf colonialism. He was controversial, but influential: we take it for granted now that Empire was a Bad Thing, but this really a very recent change of prevailing western opinions. This emboldened intellectuals of the African diaspora to counter some of the persistent views by developing afro-centric histories – part of the healthy move towards peoples telling their own stories, rather than being dictated to from outside.

Why should it be the outsider that interprets Africa’s past? Why should the outsiders (UN agencies, ex-colonial governments, well-meaning NGOs and charities) who dictate Africa’s present, whether through ill-judged aid projects or economic bullying? Inventing Africa poses questions to those of us who have visited or lived for even a short period in Africa: do I fall into the trap of loving the “exotic”, a vision of Rousseau’s romantic primitivism?

Or am I so blinded by the visible poverty (compared with western standards) not to be able to see the entrepreneurs and innovators elevating themselves and their own societies? I have walked with a Maasai warrior; I eagerly read Karen Blixen’s rose-tinted fantasy Out of Africa; I drank tea served by white-liveried servants on the balcony of a tea farm in the hills of Kenya; and I recall those lonely old voices from other cringeworthy books by the Last of the Bwanas, clinging on to the ragged end of Empire. Do I inevitably inherit the assumed superiority of the privileged white man, and does the abject failure of so many post-colonial African states suggest that the critics of Independence had a point – that they somehow “weren’t ready for freedom”? (“New states bad, old states good” as one of Derricourt’s chapters is titled.) Surely not. But I have also encountered the proud independence of the never-colonised Ethiopia: no being hurried to the front of the queue at the customs office, no ostentatious welcome to the front row there, but wait your turn patiently; sit on the grass with everyone else.

I learned a lot from this short book – the unfolding of Africa’s pre-history, the academic arm-wrestling that contested interpretations, the use and abuse of African histories by leaders past and present – but most of all it was useful to reflect on what place it is for me to have an opinion at all! As in the title of a recent issue of Granta, which focussed on the relevance of travel writing in modern times (and amidst a global pandemic): Should we have stayed at home?

Reaching for the bookshelf

• See Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds (blogpost Dec 2021)
• Colin McEvedy, The Penguin Atlas of African History (1980, Penguin) shows the ancient African empires of Carthage, Songhay, Zimbabwe (Mutapa) etc., so often invisible (or ignored) to the outside world, before the irrevocable change from Northern incursions.
• Thomas Pakenham, The Scramble for Africa: 1876-1912 (1991, Abacus) is a magnificent, bewildering, doorstop of a history; by turns compelling and horrifying, it is a definitive chronicle of Western high-handedness and exploitation.
• Margaret MacMillan, The Uses and Abuses of History (2009, Profile Books) is a more general exploration of the contests for interpretation by one of my favourite authors. Unfaltering in confronting the issues; written with clarity and energy.
• Raymond Jonas, The Battle of Adwa: African Victory in the Age of Empire (2011, Harvard University Press) tells the iconic story of the turning point when a European power was first defeated in Africa, fuelling Ethiopian patriotism to this day and inspiring independence (and religious) movements across the continent.