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