europe, europeans and africa in the 19th century · 2014-01-13 · america’s greatest problem.]...

Europe, Europeans and Africa

in the 19th century

Maps in the Making of Africa

European ‘Imaginings’ of Africa:

Western map-making reinforced growing

belief in Europe:

- rest of world should be situated

(and understood) relative to Europe

and its peoples.

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 Mappa Mundi (c.1485-1500)

[Mappa – ‘chart’; Mundi – ‘of the world’]

Genoa Chart of North Africa (c.1490)

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

The Peters’ Projection Map (1974)

Outline of US superimposed across central Africa

[see also discussion in “Where is Africa?” in Readings]

‘The True Size of Africa’

http://www.economist.com/blogs/dailychart/2010/11/cartography

Europe’s Africa c.1808

Brookes, R., The General Gazetteer; or Compendious Geographical Dictionary. 8th Edition. Dublin, 1808.

Africa Conceptualized by Religion c.1900

“Mohammedans”:

Muslims who followed

the Islamic Faith.

“Heathens”:

Animists who followed

range of polytheistic

belief systems.

By end of 19th century,

many had absorbed both

[European] Christian

and Islamic beliefs into

their own cultures.

Missionaries

Attractions of Saving Civilizations for Christianity:

- Large populations of ‘Heathens’ main targets

- Missionary activity West, Southern Africa since 1500s-1600s

- Abolitionists (1700s): Africa-centered Evangelism

- 1800s Slave Trade from Africa ended: escalated missionary activity

Missionaries

Post-Abolition ‘Projects’ (West Africa):

Sierra Leone: - newly liberated slaves joined communities of Christian farmers

Liberia:

- Capital-- ‘Freetown’: Christian Missionary Society established Fourah Bay College 1827

-1876 affiliated with British university (British degrees conferred in Liberia)

Missionaries

Creation of ‘black’ , indigenous missionaries from: - returning slaves (many ‘Christianized’ while in captivity) - newly educated freed slaves (eg. Samuel Crowther) Samuel Crowther,

Southern Nigeria

Missionaries

‘Missionaries were at the moral frontiers

of empire in the 19th century – but they were difficult and lonely ones’

(paraphrased from Reid, Modern History, p.119)

Missionaries

Video Excerpt from:

‘The Bible and the Gun’ (Basil Davidson Africa)

(Accessible in ‘Readings’)

Missionaries

Challenges to Christianity: Competing ‘powers’: - local chiefs, healers, spirit mediums… How to undermine and/or replace them?

Conflicting Values:

- polygamy, polytheism

How to replace them with monogamy, monotheism?

Missionaries

Alternative Questions: What did Christianity Offer? Why Convert?

- access to literacy (education) - access to protection/sanctuary (poor, women, marginalized, former slaves) - access to freedom (mission stations gave sanctuary to fleeing slaves)

Missionaries

Interest in Christianity not always easy to

access (for historian):

- to what degree genuinely ‘spiritual’ ?

-to what degree socially ‘helpful’?

Both challenges and ‘ambiguities’ of

Christian conversion continued to characterize

Colonial Experience.

Missionaries

On the ground: missionaries drawn into local problems/politics

Vulnerable position -- - friend of the new Christian? Or… - agent of the European power?

Two-edged sword : returns us to Reid’s ‘Moral Frontier’

Missionaries

Christianity (Missionaries) also tied to Commerce (Merchants):

- Missionaries/mission stations places of trade, market activity

-Provided access to European commerce and commodities - also constituted ‘social context’ in which commodities used

Missionaries

“The Imperial Project”:

- in addition to commerce, Imperialism was about ‘civilization’ and European beliefs about race

- who was capable of being civilized? - answer determined by race!

- as being ‘civilized’ was associated with being Christian (European), Missionaries unavoidably entered service of Imperial interests!!

Imperial Project & Racism

Fascination with ‘the other’:

- accelerated by Napoleon in Egypt (c.1800): learning or looting?

- exoticism attractive: general public, scientific community, ‘world fairs’, museum exhibits, art & culture of ‘the Orient’

Plate from Francois le Vaillant’s Voyage de Francois le Vaillant dans l’interieur de l’Afrique, Paris 1798.

French satirical cartoon of the English obsession with the tour of the ‘Hottentot Venus’, a South African woman who was displayed in many cities in Europe from 1810 to 1815.

In 1906, the Bronx Zoo put Ota Benga, a (Belgian)

Congolese pygmy, on display in a cage in its Monkey

House. Protests by a group of African-American ministers

soon put an end to the exhibit.

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5787947

“African Woman” (above)

“Zulu Warrior” (right)

‘Scientific Racism’

1824 Virey’s 1824 text on the natural history of humans

1864 Vogt’s anatomy text

1868 Nott and Gliddon’s scale of human evolution

‘Scientific Racism’

Chart comparing intelligence of racial groups, from Adolphe Louis Cureau (translated by E Andrews)

Savage Man in Central Africa: A Study of Primitive Races in the French Congo, London, 1915.

‘Scientific Racism’

Illustration: R. Shufeldt [an anthropologist’s 1915 tract, America’s Greatest Problem.]

The original caption read:

“Negro Boy and Apes. On the left side of the figure there is a young Chimpanzee, and on the right a young Orang-utang. This is a wonderfully interesting comparison.”

Exploration and Enlightenment

The “Dark Continent” beckoned others:

- state-sponsored explorers: some had largely

‘scientific’ motives

- others more overtly political or commercial

- when necessary to accomplish these goals -- even

military in their aims…

Exploring Africa

Exploration 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_Living

stone.jpg]

Victorian Images

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

Mapping Human Culture

Accumulation of knowledge = ‘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]

[Consider in light of Mazrui’s “Where is Africa? “, ‘Readings’]

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

“Africa” is Born

The essential point: - growing 19th century interest in Africa by artists, poets, politicians

- and especially merchants, missionaries and explorers – was producing a European ‘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.

Europe’s ‘Real Foot’ in Africa

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