Salon Wanderlust | Another Africa

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Learning Spanish in South America: Weigh in on the best places to study in the Wanderlust area of Table Talk

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This week in travel
Hostages at Club Med, strikes in Italy, a Paris renaissance, Mideast warnings and more news from the travel world
(11/13/98)
A fiume runs through it
By Thom Elkjer
An American on a fly-fishing pilgrimage learns that in Italy, it's who you know that counts
(11/12/98)
On the road with the Smokejumpers: Part Two
By The King Teen
Shotguns and dead bunnies, pizza and beer -- a San Francisco band explores America
(11/11/98)
Tokyo sex wars: Part Two
By Karl Taro Greenfeld
The arrival of 24 "classy ladies" to work in a fledgling nightspot convulses Japan's new demimonde
(11/10/98)
Tokyo sex wars
By Karl Taro Greenfeld
Drug demons and sex junkies in Japan's new demimonde
(11/09/98)

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------------Beyond the stereotypes and clichés, a photographer
------------and writer journey into the heart of the continent.
------photographs from Another Africa

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
E X C E R P T :
ANOTHER AFRICA | BY CHINUA ACHEBE | PHOTOGRAPHS BY ROBERT LYONS | ANCHOR BOOKS | 123 PAGES

BY CHINUA ACHEBE | It is a great irony of history and geography that Africa, whose land mass is closer than any other to the mainland of Europe, should come to occupy in European psychological disposition the farthest point of otherness, should indeed become Europe's very antithesis. The French-African poet and statesman Leopold Sedar Senghor, in full awareness of this paradox, chose to celebrate that problematic proximity in a poem, "Prayer to Masks," with the startling imagery of one of nature's most profound instances of closeness: "joined together at the navel." And why not? After all, the shores of northern Africa and southern Europe enclose, like two cupped hands, the waters of the world's most famous sea, perceived by the ancients as the very heart and center of the world. Senghor's metaphor would have been better appreciated in the days of ancient Egypt and Greece than today.
History aside, geography has its own kind of lesson in paradox for us. This lesson, which was probably lost on everyone else except those of us living in West Africa in the last days of the British Raj, was the ridiculous fact of longitudinal equality between London, mighty imperial metropolis, and Accra, rude rebel camp of colonial insurrection -- so that, their unequal stations in life notwithstanding, they were bisected by the same Greenwich meridian and thus doomed together to the same time of day!
But longitude is not all there is in life. There is also latitude, which gives London and Accra very different experiences of midday temperature, for example, and perhaps gave their inhabitants over past eons of time radically different complexions. So differences are there, if those are what one is looking for. But there is no way in which such differences as do exist could satisfactorily explain the profound perception of alienness that Africa has come to represent for Europe.
This perception problem is not in its origin a result of ignorance, as we are sometimes inclined to think. At least it is not ignorance entirely, or even primarily. It was in general a deliberate invention devised to facilitate two gigantic, historical events: the Atlantic slave trade and the colonization of Africa by Europe, the second event following closely on the heels of the first, and the two together stretching across almost half a millennium from about A.D. 1500. In an important and authoritative study of this invention, two American scholars, Dorothy Hammond and Alta Jablow, show how the content of British writing about Africa changed dramatically at the height of the slave trade in the eighteenth century and

... shifted from almost indifferent and matter-of-fact reports of what the voyagers had seen to judgmental evaluation of the Africans.... The shift to such pejorative comment was due in large measure to the effects of the slave trade. A vested interest in the slave trade produced a literature of devaluation, and since the slave trade was under attack, the most derogatory writing about Africa came from its literary defenders. Dalzel, for instance, prefaced his work with an apologia for slavery: "Whatever evils the slave trade may be attended with ... it is mercy ... to poor wretches, who ... would otherwise suffer from the butcher's knife." Numerous proslavery tracts appeared, all intent upon showing the immorality and degradation of Africans ... Enslavement of such a degraded people was thus not only justifiable but even desirable. The character of Africans could change only for the better through contact with their European masters. Slavery, in effect, became the means of the Africans' salvation, for it introduced them to Christianity and civilization.

The vast arsenal of derogatory images of Africa amassed to defend the slave trade and, later, colonization, gave the world not only a literary tradition that is now, happily, defunct, but also a particular way of looking (or rather not looking) at Africa and Africans that endures, alas, into our own day. And so, although those sensational "African" novels that were so popular in the nineteenth century and early part of the twentieth have trickled to a virtual stop, their centuries-old obsession with lurid and degrading stereotypes of Africa has been bequeathed to the cinema, to journalism, to certain varieties of anthropology, even to humanitarianism and missionary work itself.
About two years ago, I saw an extraordinary program on television about the children of the major Nazi war criminals whose lives had been devastated by the burden of the guilt of their fathers. I felt quite sorry for them. And then, out of nowhere, came the information that one of them had gone into the Church and would go as a missionary to the Congo.
"What has the Congo got to do with it?" I asked of my television screen. Then I remembered the motley parade of adventurers, of saints and sinners from Europe that had been drawn to that region since it was first discovered by Europe in 1482 -- Franciscan monks, Jesuit priests, envoys from the kings of Portugal, agents of King Leopold of the Belgians, H. M. Stanley, Roger Casement, Joseph Conrad, Albert Schweitzer, ivory hunters and rubber merchants, slave traders, explorers. They all made their visit and left their mark for good or ill. And the Congo, like the ancient tree by the much-used farm road, bears on its bark countless scars of the machete.
N E X T+P A G E | "Heart of Darkness"


	T A B L E_T A L K Learning Spanish in South America: Weigh in on the best places to study in the Wanderlust area of Table Talk R E C E N T L Y This week in travel Hostages at Club Med, strikes in Italy, a Paris renaissance, Mideast warnings and more news from the travel world (11/13/98) A fiume runs through it By Thom Elkjer An American on a fly-fishing pilgrimage learns that in Italy, it's who you know that counts (11/12/98) On the road with the Smokejumpers: Part Two By The King Teen Shotguns and dead bunnies, pizza and beer -- a San Francisco band explores America (11/11/98) Tokyo sex wars: Part Two By Karl Taro Greenfeld The arrival of 24 "classy ladies" to work in a fledgling nightspot convulses Japan's new demimonde (11/10/98) Tokyo sex wars By Karl Taro Greenfeld Drug demons and sex junkies in Japan's new demimonde (11/09/98) Browse the Wanderlust Passages archives Wanderlust's Official Travel Book Partner S A L O N E M P O R I U M FREE! 12-ounce bag of Salon Blend with a purchase of $30 or more. While supplies last.		------------Beyond the stereotypes and clichés, a photographer ------------and writer journey into the heart of the continent. ------photographs from Another Africa - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - E X C E R P T : ANOTHER AFRICA \| BY CHINUA ACHEBE \| PHOTOGRAPHS BY ROBERT LYONS \| ANCHOR BOOKS \| 123 PAGES BY CHINUA ACHEBE \| It is a great irony of history and geography that Africa, whose land mass is closer than any other to the mainland of Europe, should come to occupy in European psychological disposition the farthest point of otherness, should indeed become Europe's very antithesis. The French-African poet and statesman Leopold Sedar Senghor, in full awareness of this paradox, chose to celebrate that problematic proximity in a poem, "Prayer to Masks," with the startling imagery of one of nature's most profound instances of closeness: "joined together at the navel." And why not? After all, the shores of northern Africa and southern Europe enclose, like two cupped hands, the waters of the world's most famous sea, perceived by the ancients as the very heart and center of the world. Senghor's metaphor would have been better appreciated in the days of ancient Egypt and Greece than today. History aside, geography has its own kind of lesson in paradox for us. This lesson, which was probably lost on everyone else except those of us living in West Africa in the last days of the British Raj, was the ridiculous fact of longitudinal equality between London, mighty imperial metropolis, and Accra, rude rebel camp of colonial insurrection -- so that, their unequal stations in life notwithstanding, they were bisected by the same Greenwich meridian and thus doomed together to the same time of day! But longitude is not all there is in life. There is also latitude, which gives London and Accra very different experiences of midday temperature, for example, and perhaps gave their inhabitants over past eons of time radically different complexions. So differences are there, if those are what one is looking for. But there is no way in which such differences as do exist could satisfactorily explain the profound perception of alienness that Africa has come to represent for Europe. This perception problem is not in its origin a result of ignorance, as we are sometimes inclined to think. At least it is not ignorance entirely, or even primarily. It was in general a deliberate invention devised to facilitate two gigantic, historical events: the Atlantic slave trade and the colonization of Africa by Europe, the second event following closely on the heels of the first, and the two together stretching across almost half a millennium from about A.D. 1500. In an important and authoritative study of this invention, two American scholars, Dorothy Hammond and Alta Jablow, show how the content of British writing about Africa changed dramatically at the height of the slave trade in the eighteenth century and ... shifted from almost indifferent and matter-of-fact reports of what the voyagers had seen to judgmental evaluation of the Africans.... The shift to such pejorative comment was due in large measure to the effects of the slave trade. A vested interest in the slave trade produced a literature of devaluation, and since the slave trade was under attack, the most derogatory writing about Africa came from its literary defenders. Dalzel, for instance, prefaced his work with an apologia for slavery: "Whatever evils the slave trade may be attended with ... it is mercy ... to poor wretches, who ... would otherwise suffer from the butcher's knife." Numerous proslavery tracts appeared, all intent upon showing the immorality and degradation of Africans ... Enslavement of such a degraded people was thus not only justifiable but even desirable. The character of Africans could change only for the better through contact with their European masters. Slavery, in effect, became the means of the Africans' salvation, for it introduced them to Christianity and civilization. The vast arsenal of derogatory images of Africa amassed to defend the slave trade and, later, colonization, gave the world not only a literary tradition that is now, happily, defunct, but also a particular way of looking (or rather not looking) at Africa and Africans that endures, alas, into our own day. And so, although those sensational "African" novels that were so popular in the nineteenth century and early part of the twentieth have trickled to a virtual stop, their centuries-old obsession with lurid and degrading stereotypes of Africa has been bequeathed to the cinema, to journalism, to certain varieties of anthropology, even to humanitarianism and missionary work itself. About two years ago, I saw an extraordinary program on television about the children of the major Nazi war criminals whose lives had been devastated by the burden of the guilt of their fathers. I felt quite sorry for them. And then, out of nowhere, came the information that one of them had gone into the Church and would go as a missionary to the Congo. "What has the Congo got to do with it?" I asked of my television screen. Then I remembered the motley parade of adventurers, of saints and sinners from Europe that had been drawn to that region since it was first discovered by Europe in 1482 -- Franciscan monks, Jesuit priests, envoys from the kings of Portugal, agents of King Leopold of the Belgians, H. M. Stanley, Roger Casement, Joseph Conrad, Albert Schweitzer, ivory hunters and rubber merchants, slave traders, explorers. They all made their visit and left their mark for good or ill. And the Congo, like the ancient tree by the much-used farm road, bears on its bark countless scars of the machete. N E X T+P A G E \| "Heart of Darkness"