Malvern

van Wyk Smith

The Image of Africa and Africans

in the Early Mediterranean World
•

The First
Ethiopians
 Introduction
To us in the West, Africa is that part of the world which remains most
deeply endowed with the two central facets of the other; that is, the
mysterious and the exotic.
—Patrick Chabal, ‘The African Crisis: Context and Interpretation’,
1996, 45

I thought for some reason even then of Africa, not a particular place,
but a shape, a strangeness, a wanting to know.
—Graham Greene, Journey without Maps, 1936

This book is a history of the idea of ‘Africa’ in the consciousness of the early
Mediterranean and European world. G.M. Young once remarked that ‘the real,
central theme of history is not what happened, but what people felt about it
when it was happening’ (1952, vi), and the present study has been conceived in
these terms.
In 1979 Jean Devisse concluded the second volume of the magisterial The
Image of the Black in Western Art, produced for the Menil Foundation by a team
of scholars under the general editorship of Ladislas Bugner, with the following
thoughts:

Many see the sixteenth century as the starting point of relations between
Europe and Black Africa, and in a way this is not inexact, give or take
 fifty years. This book, however, proves that these relations had a long
prehistory. If Africa hardly dreamed of Europe before the middle of the
fifteenth century, Europe, on the other hand, had had certain images of
the black continent and its peoples for centuries before (1979, 2: 2. 258).

Despite Devisse’s optimism that the Bugner enterprise had ‘proven’ the long
antecedence of European images of Africa and Africans, these volumes also
made it clear that much further work was needed to explain the provenance
and import, rather than merely to record the persistence, of such images. In his
Preface to the first volume of The Image of the Black in Western Art, the general
editor had himself suggested one way forward: ‘What is most urgently needed
is an in-depth examination of the literary sources in relation to our theme.’ This
sentiment chimed well with my own interests at the time.
A life-long personal engagement with a particular set of perceptions of Africa,
namely those of a white South African, seemed to confer privileged insights
into the iconographic history of Africa in the European imagination even as it
challenged the very substance and legitimacy of such concepts. Unlike Patrick
Chabal, I am not one of ‘us in the West’, but have experienced Africa as both
‘mysterious and exotic’, yet also as home and intimate. Growing up in one of the
world’s most unambivalently pariah states, namely apartheid South Africa, yet
with no other country to think of remotely as home, I had to embark on an early
intellectual pilgrimage to resolve how I could relate to that vast landmass and its
people north of me, a world of which I was an unmistakable part, but that was
somehow also forbidden and (officially) irredeemably ‘other’.
An early venture into such explorations produced a study of the poetry of
the Anglo-Boer War (Van Wyk Smith, 1978), in which I attempted to place the
substantial legacy of verse that this southern African conflict of 1899–1902 had
produced within the wider history and context of the emergence of the poetry of
war. In 1988, at the time of the by-then inevitably controversial commemoration
of the rounding of the Cape of Good Hope by the Portuguese in 1488 and the
resultant colonisation of southern Africa, it seemed appropriate to compile an
anthology of poetry inspired by this theme, from the Lusiads onward, that stressed
not the celebratory and imperialist aspects, but rather the tragic endeavours and
missed opportunities of that high emprise (Van Wyk Smith, 1988).
But by the late 1980s, it had also become clear to me that the southern African
encounter between indigenous peoples and Europeans, and the conflicts among
rival imperial powers in the region, had not only rehearsed ancient European-
African disharmonies, but were the local manifestation of racial dynamics,

 The First Ethiopians

expansionist drives, and perceptual paradigms that had impacted on proto-
European responses to the continent and its people since ancient times. These
responses seemed to demand a thorough archaeology of the earliest European
ideas about Africa. If mine was an image of Africa as the product of a particular
kind of racist ancestry and upbringing in South Africa but shared by many
others, an early rudimentary truth I had to confront was that the origin of such
images was highly elusive, and lay well beyond the simple racism of my own
background.
It became clear to me that the ‘Africa’ that fascinated me was not a place but
an idea; not so much a subject for geo-historical and ethnographic investigation,
as the site and product of myth and discourse. I found, moreover, that moving
backwards through the centuries of European-African encounter persistently
produced the effect of déja vu – at each stage the evidence suggested conjunctions
and prejudices already firmly in place and stereotypically invoked. The backward
trawl through the high imperialism (and racism) of the nineteenth century, the
Enlightenment, the Renaissance, and the Christian Middle Ages repeatedly
suggested that unsympathetic European perceptions of Africa and its people
somehow always had the status of the already self-evident. Even the Greeks and
Romans seemed to be invoking ideas about black Africans and their continent
that had come from somewhere else.
In a recent substantial collection of essays, Black Africans in Renaissance
Europe, one of the editors speaks of ‘firmly held classical and medieval precon­
ceptions relating to the African continent’ (Earle and Lowe, 2005, 3), yet no
contributor explains how pejorative and racist views about Africa and Africans
could have become ‘firmly held … preconceptions’ by classical times. Not sur­
prisingly, the outcome is another series of binarist indictments without much
enlightenment.
The ‘somewhere else’ referred to above has turned out to be pharaonic Egypt.
The crucial informing paradigm for almost all subsequent Euro-Mediterranean
comprehensions of Africa derived ultimately from Egyptian conceptions of an
African hinterland, conceptions that by archaic Greek times had resolved into
the Homeric notion of ‘two Ethiopias’ invoked in both the Iliad and the Odyssey
(see Chapter 1). As the following study will show, the Homeric conceit of a
‘western’ and ‘eastern’ Ethiopia became a powerful and pervasive discriminatory
template for the earliest Mediterranean and subsequent European encounters
with inner Africa, and for the earliest assessments of its peoples. Furthermore,
the vexed question of how ‘African’ ancient Egyptians themselves were – or saw
themselves to be – resolved itself in the course of my investigations into the

Introduction 
 likelihood that while Egyptians were certainly African, they were not ‘Negroid’
or ‘broad African’ in the sense in which such terms are now understood in
African-American academic discourse. Rather, they were descended from one
or more of the several phyla of pre- or non-Negroid peoples who in the late
Holocene period inhabited the continent from north-east Africa to the Cape
of Good Hope (see Chapters 2–5). This distinction had steadily encouraged
the rulers of pharaonic Egypt to distance themselves from other Africans, and
the consequent racial typology that they developed prompted later Greek and
Roman commentators in turn to perpetuate and celebrate the notion of an elite
culture of ‘worthy Ethiopians’ based on the lands and legends of Meroitic Nubia
and, later, Aksumite Ethiopia, and to dismiss the rest of sub-Saharan Africa as
‘savage Ethiopia.’

What had also become clear by the 1970s was that an exercise in the history of
ideas such as mine could not be confined to a mere content analysis of a limited
range of texts from the colonial past. The reading of such texts, as of the whole
phenomenon of colonial and transcultural encounter, had been and were being
transformed in the aftermath of the colonial era by the rise of Third World
scholarship and anti-colonial polemics, and by a revolution in our understanding
of the discursive, cognitive and linguistic processes that condition all truth claims.
My project, it appeared, would require not only a distant reach into the very
origins of European ideas about Africa, but a broad survey of whether, why, how,
and to what extent not only European but all observers are purportedly trapped
within historically and cognitively conditioned horizons. It seemed important to
establish whether, in the language of popular neuropsychology, we are hard-wired
to see only what our conceptual grids allow us to see; for if this should indeed be
the case, no genuine cross-cultural enlightenment could ever be possible.
A seminal work in the revisionary discourse of Europe’s encounter with its
‘others’ was Edward Said’s Orientalism (1978) – to which we shall come – but that
work was itself the product of a ferment of debate and rewriting of history that
had both inspired and recorded the processes of decolonisation. Said had been
anticipated by writers and activists such as J.A. Hobson (1901, 1902), E.D. Morel

 The First Ethiopians

(1920), Frantz Fanon (1952, 1961), Oscar Mannoni (1950), C.L.R. James (1958, 1963)
and Albert Memmi (1965), but it was Said who launched that particular wave of
the discourse of postcolonialism, in the ebb of which we still find ourselves.
Before moving on to an examination of the impact of figures such as Fanon
and Said on postcolonial debates, however, we need to glance at the broader
context of these polemics in the changing dimensions of the historiography of
Africa, and as they were deployed in the dismantling of colonial empires.
Hegel had notoriously argued in 1822 that Africa was ‘the land of childhood’
(1822/1902, 111) and that its people were beyond the grasp of history: ‘The
Negro … exhibits the natural man in his completely wild and untamed state….
In Negro life the characteristic point is the fact that consciousness has not yet
attained to the realization of any substantial objective existence…. At this point
we leave Africa, not to mention it again’ (95–103). By 1850, Robert Knox would
ask: ‘What signify these dark races to us? Who cares particularly for the Negro,
or the Hottentot or the Kaffir?’ and go on to suggest that ‘it matters little how
their extinction is brought about’ (cited by Malik, 1996, 101). From here it is
not difficult, with the benefit of hindsight, to draw a genealogy of European
perceptions of Africa and Africans that leads directly to Hugh Trevor-Roper’s
equally shocking claim in the early years of the postcolonial debate:

Perhaps, in the future, there will be some African history to teach. But
at present there is none, or very little: there is only the history of the
European in Africa. The rest is largely darkness … the unrewarding
gyrations of barbarous tribes in picturesque but irrelevant corners of the
globe (1965, 9).

Such views have survived in surprising quarters. In a cult novel of the 1980s,
Milan Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being, the following sentiment
occurs: ‘We need to take no more note of it [a soul not reincarnated] than of a
war between two African kingdoms in the fourteenth century, a war that altered
nothing in the destiny of the world, even if a hundred thousand blacks perished
in excruciating torment’ (1984, 3). From Hegel to Trevor-Roper, the relationship
between Africa and Europe became that summed up by Stanley Leathes in
Volume 12 of the Cambridge Modern History: ‘Almost the whole of Africa has
thus become an annex of Europe’ (1910, 4), or, perhaps more ominously, by E.A.
Benians: ‘In Europe the occupation of Africa has increased wealth and trade,
and cheapened some of the comforts of life; what it will mean for Africa cannot
yet be judged’ (1910, 666).

Introduction 
 By the time Trevor-Roper made his pronouncement, such meanings for
Africa were being vociferously judged. It should be remembered, however, that
Trevor-Roper’s verdict was at least partly provoked by an emergent African
historiography making equally startling claims about the originary status
of Africa itself, legitimated in turn by Perham’s ‘colonial reckoning’ (1961)
that had set in after the Second World War. In South Africa in 1960, British
Prime Minister Harold Macmillan had memorably reminded the apartheid
government of the ‘winds of change’ blowing through colonial Africa, and of
which they would soon feel the cold blast. Ghana had achieved independence in
1957, a triggering event that would not only fundamentally change the political
dispensation of Africa, but that would also inspire a discourse of dismantlement
aimed not just at the institutions, but at the discursive maintenance of the
assumptions of colonialism.
Reviewing two quite contradictory early myths about Africa, that of Hobbes
and that of Rousseau, in which Africa was either a continent ‘in which there was
no account of Time; no Arts; no Letters; no Society; and, which [was] worst of all,
continued fear and danger of death’ or the site of ‘a golden age of perfect liberty,
equality and fraternity’, T. Hodgkin captured the simplistic terms in which the
discourse of Africa had traditionally been conducted, and warned that such
binaries would no longer do (1957, 174–5). Lord Elton’s Imperial Commonwealth
of 1945 was probably the last magisterial review of its subject that could sum up
British colonial activity in Africa as follows: ‘British explorers had called a new
Continent into existence, and gradually British emigrants had begun to people
it’ (1945, 363) – evidently on the assumption that the continent’s own inhabitants
did not count as ‘people’. Pervasively discriminatory assumptions about what
had transpired between colonisers and colonised still prevailed. Boies Penrose,
whose Travel and Discovery in the Renaissance 1420–1620 remains a seminal
study of its subject, nevertheless was of the opinion that ‘intermarriage with the
natives resulted in the creation of a half-caste population with the weaknesses
of both races and few of their better qualities’ (1952, 74).
Such verdicts I recognised as the absolute creeds of the world in which I had
grown up. They also suggested that all travel writing and colonial history was
irresistibly appropriative, as remarked by James Duncan and Derek Gregory:
‘All travel writing, as a process of inscription and appropriation, spins webs of
colonizing power’ (1999, 3).
But a ‘discourse switch’ was under way. In another seminal work of the time,
Margery Perham and John Simmons’s African Discovery: An Anthology of
Exploration, the compilers placed their selections from the greats of nineteenth-

 The First Ethiopians

century African exploration into a new context, despite betraying assumptions
that Africa was not in ‘the civilized world’:

The contemporaries for whom the explorers wrote were probably more
interested in the character of the continent than of its peoples. That order
is reversed today and to many the most interesting subject upon which
their evidence can be sought is that of the state of African society when
untouched by direct contact with the civilized world (1942, 16).

In 1920, E.D. Morel, appalled by his own experiences in the so-called Congo
Free State, had published one of the first major exposures of colonial atrocities,
The Black Man’s Burden: The White Man in Africa from the Fifteenth Century to
the First World War. In 1944, Alexander Campbell’s Empire in Africa, sponsored
by the Left Book Club, offered a radical Leninist analysis of such expansionism,
and by 1962 Melville J. Herskovits, whose Myth of the Negro Past had appeared
in 1941, would write:

Africa, when seen in perspective, was a full partner in the development of

the Old World, participating in a continual process of cultural give-and-
take that began long before European occupation. Neither isolation nor
stagnation tells the tale. It is as incorrect to think of Africa as having been
for centuries isolated from the rest of the world as it is to regard the vast
area south of the Sahara as ‘Darkest Africa’, whose peoples slumbered
on until awakened by the coming of the dynamic civilization of Europe
(cited by Ngũgĩ, 1972, 3–4).

As the present study will show, Herskovits’s upbeat reading of pre-colonial

African society, inspired by new visions of African historiography and quoted
affirmatively by Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o in 1972, was itself an oversimplification of
complex transcultural and historical dynamics, but for the next three to four
decades, such assumptions would be foundational in the writings of a generation
of revisionist historians of Africa, whether from the West or from Africa itself.
The disarticulation of colonial authority, both in politics and in colonial
discourse, became the widely shared project of a new African historiography.
The ‘real’ African past had to be recuperated, and the indigenous rather than the
Eurocolonial rendering of that past had to be promoted. That process, and the
new images of Africa consequently devised, are not a material part of the present
study, as my focus is precisely on those perceptions – and their sources – that

Introduction 
 promoters of a revisionary African history wished to discredit. Nevertheless,
a brief survey of some of the tenets of this polemic will help to contextualise
the key issues that concern me, and must preface a more serious interrogation
of how and to what extent the operations of discourse theory may be a help or
hindrance in our reading – at present – of the European library of Africa.
The first wave of revisionist African historiography, more or less up to the
appearance of Edward Said’s Orientalism in 1978, tended to be content-based,
concerned with providing new information, unproblematically considered as
‘correct’, about the European exploitation of Africa. Behind many such works
lay a conviction that an emergent postmodernism would soon regard as naïve,
namely that the ‘truth’ of colonialism could readily be ascertained, and that the
attitudes and perceptions of the past could be ‘corrected’ by the provision of more
information from indigenous sources in particular. Richard Gray, reviewing an
important later contribution to this enterprise, David W. Phillipson’s African
Archaeology (1985), summed up the iniquities to be addressed, yet also the
problems posed by the proposed remedies:

Africa invites stereotypes. Few Europeans and North Americans would

dare to generalise so confidently about their own continents as they have
so often done about Africa. The first modern, colonial, stereotype was that
of a barbaric continent, one without history until quickened by outside
forces. The second, which accompanied the process of decolonisation,
was of an original Arcadia, prosperous and progressive until engulfed by
the slave trade and European conquest…. Inevitably, the disillusionment
which has often accompanied the decades of independence is provoking
another reassessment (1985, 646).

Between the end of colonialism and the above comment lay a revolution, not
only in liberationist political terms, but in our understanding of how notions
of ‘truth’ and the ‘correct’ rendering of historical events, including those of
colonialism, are themselves contingent and historically determined. What we
shall see is that the sceptical and agnostic imperatives of postmodernist insights,
engaged by many a postcolonial campaigner, would have the startling effect of
rendering the optimistic hopes and convictions of a recuperative postcolonial
project highly problematic, if not downright forlorn.

 The First Ethiopians

 ¶

In the meantime, a number of new works had set about reviewing the colonial
history of Africa, and had managed to uncover much new or neglected
information. In 1950, John W. Blake, afterwards Lord Blake, read a paper to the
Royal Historical Society making a plea for ‘an integrated study of African history
from the point of view of Africans’ (69). That such a history ‘from the point
of view of Africans’ could be written by non-African outsiders we might now
regard as a contradiction in terms, but it was an enthusiastic call.
Launched at the same time and beginning publication in 1950 was the massive
Ethnographic Survey of Africa, which eventually ran to some forty parts of 100–
200 pages each, with prominent contributors such as Hilda Kuper, Daryll Forde,
Edwin Ardener and G.W.B. Huntingford. There was not a black African among
them. Titles such as Africa Emergent (Macmillan, 1949) and The Emergent
Continent (Halladay, 1972) became popular among authors who appreciated the
urgency of revision, but nevertheless regarded Africa as a distant planet – in the
words of W.M. Macmillan, former Professor of History at the University of the
Witwatersrand, ‘If in any sense there is a single “African problem” it is nothing
less than the bringing of civilization to Africa’ (1949, 9). Colin M. Turnbull’s
The Lonely African (1963) attempted to bridge the gulf by sentimentalising
its subject, but Basil Davidson, in a series of seminal and still highly readable
works starting with Old Africa Rediscovered (1959), set about opening up an
astounding but persuasive history of a continent effectively ‘lost’ to Western
readers since before the Renaissance. Davidson described here and afterwards
(1961, 1966, etc.) an Africa that by 1000 CE had developed mighty kingdoms,
iron smelting and working, and extensive trade links across the Sahara with
Mediterranean countries, and across the Indian Ocean with Arab states, India
and even China. His Black Mother (1961, revised 1968) became an inspiration for
students in South Africa, both white and black. For me, it was one of the earliest
spurs towards the present study.
In 1962, Roland Oliver and J.D. Fage published the first edition of their Short
History of Africa, which would remain over many editions a standard introduction
to its subject, its approach adumbrated by Ronald Segal in the Penguin African
Library version of 1975: ‘Much of Africa’s past has now been excavated from
ignorance and error. Yet the study of African history has hardly begun’ (1975, 10).
A similar service was rendered by Ronald Robinson, John Gallagher and Alice

Introduction 
 Denny in Africa and the Victorians: The Official Mind of Imperialism (1961/1970),
which presented ‘the paradoxical nature of late-Victorian imperial expansion in
Africa’ (1970, 25) as a process that neither matched the visions of the proconsuls
of empire nor wholly deserved the chastisements of Afrocentrist critics.
The balanced assessments characteristic of such works have not fared well.
Oliver and Fage would go on to become the doyens among English historians of
Africa, co-responsible for the editing of the eight-volume Cambridge History of
Africa that began publication in 1974. Their version of a recuperative history of
Africa would, however, fall short of the expectations and agendas of indigenous
historians of the very continent that the work was designed to promote. The rival
UNESCO General History of Africa began publication in 1981, and in Chapter 1,
I deal with its questionable representations of ancient Egypt’s relationships with
the rest of Africa. When in 1985 Roland Oliver felt obliged to write a sharply
dissident review of such fanciful historiography (867–8), this time as exhibited
in Volume 7, Africa under Colonial Domination 1880–1935, he was savaged by
the Nigerian historian, Chinweizu, as a lackey of ‘colonialist ideology’ and as
now redundant: ‘Oliver’s review is the sort of attack which a jaded orthodoxy is
liable to make on its supplanters as it is being pushed off the stage’ (1985, 1062).
The impulses of reaction and rejection that marked the emergence of an
indigenous African historiography between the 1950s and the 1980s, and inspired
such hostile responses to its Western counterpart (however sympathetic), will
remain a theme of the present study. As we shall see, such dissent was rendered
increasingly inevitable in the wake of broader controversies and contradictions
generated by the uneasy league between postcolonial and postmodernist
onslaughts on the ‘master narratives’ of Western colonialism and imperialism.
More orthodox literary, historical and ethnographic research continued to
open up new stopes of information on the Euro-African past. The first volume of
Robin Hallett’s The Penetration of Africa: European Enterprise and Exploration
Principally in Northern and Western Africa up to 1830 appeared in 1965 and
revealed the vast number of relevant works on northern and western Africa
that had been published by 1815 – indeed, so vast that the second volume was
never published.
Part of the problem of reinterpretation that this new wave of scholarship
had to confront was the sheer abundance of low-grade information that had
stacked up over the centuries, as Anthony J. Barker found in 1978. His work, The
African Link, which attempted to review ‘British Atitudes to the Negro in the
Era of the African Slave Trade 1550–1807’, revealed that a mass of descriptive
literature on Africa was available in Britain by the eighteenth century, but that

10 The First Ethiopians

most of it was derivative or merely compendious in the repetitive accumulation
of indiscriminate and uncomprehended detail. The material was there, but the
keys were lost.
Nevertheless, these Renaissance and Enlightenment compendia – one thinks
of the great collections of travel accounts from Ramusio (1550), De Bry (1597–
1628), Hakluyt (1598–1600), and Purchas (1625) to the Churchills (1704), Harris
(1705), Astley (1745), and Osborne (1745) – although often soulless in their
limited comprehension of African societies, would, for my purpose and for that
very reason, prove invaluable in their revelation and confirmation of the popular
images of Africa and its peoples at the time. Poor history can still make good
stories, and it was the European ‘story’ of Africa that increasingly concerned me.
Furthermore, the sheer descriptive and anecdotal density of these compendia
does at times reflect a substantive, despite inadequate, ethnographic impulse
that must caution against sweeping dismissal. A recent verdict such as that of
Kate Lowe, that ‘to the majority of Europeans, the defining feature was African
skin colour, and nothing else [my emphasis] … mattered, and consequently
nothing else was recorded’ (Lowe, 2005, 6), is simply not true, ignoring as it
does libraries full of earnest, albeit amateurish, ethnographic record.
Histories of ‘the image of Africa’ rather than of the continent itself soon began to
emerge as popular narrative sources became academically respectable, the discourse
of revision unfolded, and African Studies programmes proliferated, especially in
the United States of America. Philip D. Curtin’s The Image of Africa: British Ideas
and Action 1780–1850 appeared in 1964, and remained for decades an important
survey of the colonialist assumptions that continued to rile revisionists. By 1966,
Robin Winks could assemble an impressive cohort of Africanists to contribute the
African chapters to his Historiography of the British Empire-Commonwealth, even
if, despite his opening comment that ‘societies not yet nations are using the anvil
of their history to beat out their claims to a separate identity’ (1966, 3), none of the
authors of the African chapters were black Africans. He also had to confront an
awkward truth: ‘The problems represented by nationalism, racial antagonisms, oral
traditions, and illiterate or semi-literate societies are not readily reducible to the
historian’s traditional tools and attitudes’ (1966, 21). Yet, despite such difficulties,
the Nigerian scholar K.O. Dike (1956), as well as Michael Crowder (1968), L.H.
Gann and Peter Duignan (1968), and Monica Wilson and Leonard Thompson
(1969) succeeded in producing seminal new histories of West, sub-Saharan and
Southern Africa, and would soon be joined by several others.
By 1975, Theodore Besterman could produce a voluminous World Bibliography
of African Bibliographies, a further witness to the rapid expansion of African

Introduction 11
 Studies programmes. Five years earlier, John N. Paden and Edward J. Soja had
opened their three-volume collection of essays, The African Experience (1970),
with a report on the ‘phenomenal growth’ of African Studies in the United
States as, in the words of Gwendolen Carter in the Preface, ‘the sheer drama
of the process [of African independence had] captured world-wide attention’
(1: viii). The drama had also, of course, captured the attention and inspired the
polemics of an emergent black scholarship committed to exposing the roots
and course of colonial discrimination and slavery, projects that demanded
the further rewriting of African history. As one contributor to the Paden-Soja
volumes, John A. Rowe, put it: ‘It seems hardly a coincidence that 1957 saw
both the independence of Ghana … and the introduction of African history into
American classrooms’ (1970, 1. 154).
A slate of doctoral dissertations on the Eurocolonial encounter with Africa,
all revisionist and all offering strictly binarist and minatory readings of that
encounter, soon emerged. Some of these theses and the articles or monographs
they inspired confronted the relatively straightforward histories of explorers,
settlers and colonial administrators (Rogers, 1970; Casada, 1972; Smith, 1972;
Gallup, 1973; Luther, 1979), but others turned to the more indirect production
and proliferation of images of Africa in literary sources (Knipp, 1969; Rose, 1970;
Miller, 1972; Linnemann, 1972; Steins, 1972; Jacobs, 1975; Schneider, 1976; Harris-
Schenz, 1977; James, 1977; McDorman, 1977; Taube, 1979; Milbury-Steen, 1980).
Some were the workmanship of an early wave of African scholars studying
at American and European universities, although their findings could also not
proceed much further along the binarist tracks evidently sanctioned by their
supervisors (Opoku, 1967; Wali, 1967; Fanoudh-Seifer, 1968; Okoye, 1969/1971;
Adewumi, 1977). The argument of one of the earliest of these is typical: ‘The
dominant image of the Negro … is one of hopelessness, passivity and innocent
naivety, and the relation envisaged between the white and black races is one of
teacher and taught, the ward and the novice’ (Wali, 1967, 62). Several articles
and monographs of these years duplicated the findings of such dissertations
(Randles, 1956, 1959; McCullough, 1962; Bolt, 1971; Frederickson, 1971; Johnson,
1971; Walvin, 1972; Mark, 1974; Parry, 1974; Barnett, 1975; Street, 1975; Berghahn,
1977; Mahood, 1977; Lorimer, 1978).
In a response to one of these, Christine Bolt’s Victorian Attitudes to Race
(1971), Janet Robertson lamented an approach that was a common limiting
feature of several: ‘History is a dialogue with the past, not a diatribe against it’
(1975, 2). All aimed to illuminate the bleak racial polarities of a past from which
these modern observers deemed themselves to have become immune.

12 The First Ethiopians

 A few of the studies in question detected some redemptive qualities in an
atavistic approach to Africa that would now be associated with high modernism,
notably the art of Picasso, the psychology of Jung, the fiction of Conrad, Celine
and Loti, and the African adventures of Blixen, Greene, Hemingway and Van
der Post. In such works, Africa becomes the primal stage for the European’s
confrontation with his (almost never her) primitive nodal self, and for engagement
with psychic depths and verities not accessible in the modern ‘developed’ world.
This line of exploration seemed, however, to have been exhausted and to hold
little further promise for my own investigation into the furthest origins of the
West’s images of Africa.
Most of the scholarship in question proceeded from an assumption that had
also been mine, namely that European images of Africa could be definitively
sourced and substantiated in the Victorian age, or the Enlightenment, or the
Renaissance, with the result that such scholars could only treat racism as a given,
a malicious conceptual aberration that should and could have been avoided,
and not as the intimate correlative of cognitive processes that had anticipated
racist thinking long before it had achieved any specific identity in Western
discourse. Much of this discourse of blame was inspired by a conviction that
the ‘truth’ of the colonial encounter and its ravages could be readily ascertained
and condemned.
The discussion thus unfolded as cumulative content analysis, on the
assumption that the deplorable behaviour of European colonialists and their
literary spokespersons was the result of ignorance and perfidy that could have
been avoided (or could still be corrected) by better information, compunction,
and what Thomas Kuhn has called a ‘gestalt switch’ (cited by Hacking, 1981,
3), a fundamental but willed change in the European conception of its ‘Others’
(Anderson, 1995, 190). In other words, inspiring most of the studies reviewed
was a conviction that the colonial authors in question had had a Cartesian
independence of cognition and will that should have been more honestly and
humanely exercised. It still dominates the arguments of recent studies in the
field (Hood, 1994; Byron, 2002; Kidd, 2006).
An additional problem was that, insofar as this descriptive-analytical reading
of the Eurocolonial library of Africa could yield any illumination, its main
findings had all been secured by a few of the earliest studies in the field, notably
those of Wylie Sypher (1942), Harold Reeves Collins (1951), Katherine George
(1958), W.G.L. Randles (1959), Alta Jablow (1963) and Dorothy B. Hammond
(1963). Collins’s Columbia thesis of 1951, ‘British Fiction during the Age of
Imperialism’, exposed most of the stereotypes of African subjects, while Randles

Introduction 13
 plotted out very persuasively the mytheme of Monomotapa in the imagination
and literature of Renaissance Europe. Katherine George, in a brilliant ten-page
paper published in Isis, identified the consistent tendency in European literature
from Herodotus to Haggard ‘to emphasize the strange, the shocking, and the
degrading qualities of the peoples and cultures they deal with, and thus to
emphasize the gulf between the civilized and the primitive worlds’ (1958, 63).
Complementary insights emerged from Wylie Sypher’s examination of British
anti-slavery literature of the eighteenth century, which summed up its findings
as follows: ‘The African appears … as a thoroughly noble figure, idealized out
of all semblance to reality, and living in a pastoral Africa – a pseudo-African
in a pseudo-Africa’ (1942, 9). These remained the signatory themes of the
discourse, and were most comprehensively canvassed in two theses submitted
by Hammond and Jablow, also at Columbia, in the early 1960s and subsequently
developed into their book, The Africa That Never Was: Four Centuries of British
Writing About Africa (1970), republished in 1977 as The Myth of Africa.
The popularity of the Hammond and Jablow volume confirmed that there
was little left to add to a minatory, binarist discourse of dismantlement that
condemned all British – and by extension all Western – writing about Africa from
at least the Renaissance to the nineteenth century as bigoted, insulting, ignorant
and racist, and as exposing European prejudice while saying nothing worthwhile
about Africa. The gist of such discourse was captured many years later by Alberto
Manguel: ‘The West recognizes the Other only to better despise it, and is then
astonished at the answer reflected back’ (2006, 70). Jablow’s verdict summed up
and anticipated those of a generation of like-minded commentators:

The ‘beastly savage’ and the ‘noble savage’ are conventions equally lacking
in realism. Both represent opposite poles on the single scale of English
values…. All the virtues of character esteemed by the British – courage,
a sense of honour, truthfulness, refinement, intelligence – are embodied
in the one; the other epitomizes the non-valued opposites – cravenness,
dishonesty, gluttony, and stupidity (1963, 44).

As the present study will show, Jablow’s invocation of the eighteenth-century

trope of ‘beastly’ and ‘noble savage’ pointed in the right direction, but failed to
discern the true sources and implications of a conceit of ‘two Ethiopias’ as old
as Homer. But the stark and punitive alterity, a manichaean binarism, deployed
in almost all of the works identified above, inevitably led to a dead end. In
1978, G.D. Killam, who had himself produced such a work of thematic content

14 The First Ethiopians

analysis and categorisation, Africa in English Fiction 1874–1939 (1968), and who
could thus recognise the looming impasse, summed up common misgivings in
a review of Brian Street’s The Savage in Literature: Representations of ‘Primitive
Society’ in English Fiction 1858–1920 (1975):

There is a pattern in such books as Street’s that is dictated by the body

of literature they set out to scrutinize. And the pattern in the literature
is dictated by a typicality in the assumptions made by the authors who
write the books (1978, 483).

And, one had to add, in the assumptions of scholars who continued to produce
critiques such as Street’s.
The tendency towards an accusatory and manichaean reading of the Euro­
colonial record of African encounter was encouraged by an increasing number
of black African writers entering the discourse (Dike, 1956; Mphahlele, 1962/1974;
Akinjogbin, 1967; Dathorne, 1974; Echeruo, 1978). They would lay the founda­
tions of a substantial black revisionary enterprise, even as they often still failed to
move beyond the binarist confines of prevailing models and the demands of an
adversarial agenda. In these years Chinua Achebe notoriously called the Conrad
of Heart of Darkness a ‘bloody racist’ (1978, 9), and Ezekiel (Es’kia) Mphahlele,
embittered by exile from South Africa, expressed the rage subsumed in such
scholarship, and which had also sharpened my own quest for the sources of
white racism: ‘Whites have launched a barbarous onslaught on the blacks and
after long long [sic] centuries of hurt, pillage and plunder by whites, the blacks
are faced with unequivocal fascism’ (1974, 56). Behind such indictments one
could detect the cadences and anger of Frantz Fanon, and he would increasingly
come to occupy my field of vision.

By the mid-1970s, the stark binarisms of an emerging Africanist and revisionist

historiography had become a major characteristic of and inspiration for African-
American scholarship; an enterprise also set on drawing an empowering
legitimacy from the uncompromising discourse of alterity just reviewed, and

Introduction 15
 perpetuating its more aggressive claims. From such beginnings emerged the
militant aims and tenets of academic Afrocentrism.
In Chapter 1, I deal more specifically with Afrocentrist speculations about
ancient Egypt’s relations with Africa and the entanglement of these ideas
with those of Martin Bernal’s Black Athena (1987), but some observations are
pertinent here. Former South African President Thabo Mbeki once invoked
as a scholarly commonplace ‘the irrefutable fact that the Egyptians who built
that great civilization were “black with kinky hair” as the great Greek historian,
Herodotus, said’ (2006, 26). The reference is to the Histories (2, 104), where it is
not the Egyptians but the Colchians of the Black Sea, perhaps settler descendants
of the numerous Nubian troops drafted into Egyptian armies, that are described
as ‘black-skinned and [with] woolly hair’. Yet Herodotus immediately goes on to
qualify his surmises as ‘amount[ing] to but little, since several other nations are
so too.’ Elsewhere, writing about Egyptian funeral customs, Herodotus makes
it clear that when Egyptians ‘lose a relative, [they] let their beards and the hair
on their heads grow long’ (2: 36; my emphasis). While remarking that Egyptians
were darker than Greeks, nowhere in the Histories does Herodotus regard them
as either Negroid or ‘kinky-haired’.
Yet President Mbeki’s ‘irrefutable facts’ are now also the gospel truths of a
militant Afrocentrist academic enterprise that has established its own ortho­
doxies, despite the fact that such tenets have been comprehensively discredited
by scholarly research (Howe, 1998; Shavit, 2001), as well as by informed African
opinion – Kwame Anthony Appiah speaks of ‘a cultural brew as noxious as any
currently available in popular culture’ (1993, 24). When in June 2005 National
Geographic published the reconstructed face of Tutankhamun on its front
cover, as well as an article detailing the scientific care and forensic expertise
that had yielded an image of a pharaoh who was quite obviously not Negroid
African (Williams, 2005), the response was immediate. ‘This misrepresentation
of King Tutankhamun as pale skinned and ski nosed is once again an effort to
Europeanize Egypt’, fumed one correspondent (Oct. 2005: Forum). Behind such
reactions lie several decades of a revanchist Africanist discourse that is relevant
here as a further indication of how controversies over the possession of African
history and culture have unfolded; and how they continue to make the attempt
to source Western conceptions of Africa and Africans ever more controversial.
As early as the 1950s, the Senegalese scholar Cheikh Anta Diop averred as
an article of faith that ‘Ancient Egypt was a Negro civilization…. The ancient
Egyptians were Negroes’ (1954, xiv), and such claims have become the received
wisdom of the African-American academy (Noguera, 1976; Asante, 1988). Such

16 The First Ethiopians

ideologies did not arise in a vacuum. They are contingent on the recuperative zeal
that came to inspire Africanist historiography as it emerged from the colonial
era. In the United States in particular, such convictions have been an inevitable
and burgeoning product of the revisionary zeal inherent in African-American
biblical discourse ever since the early nineteenth century. Colin Kidd speaks of
‘a Black vindicationist hermeneutic which reject[s] out of hand the corrupting
whiteness of white Christianity’ (2006, 248), and therefore, what is regarded as
its endemically biased historiography. We shall return to Afrocentrism.
Such views have also been the inevitable outcome of both the isolation
in which African history has customarily been pursued, and the binarist
manichaean drive that has imbued its Africanist narratives from the start.
Indeed, the isolation of the history of Africa from that of the rest of the world
seems at times to have been fostered by authors from both outside and inside
the continent, producing startling conundrums. So, for instance, S. Davis’s Race-
relations in Ancient Egypt (1951) is silent about relations between Egyptians
and other Africans, concentrating instead on Greeks, Romans and Hebrews.
Jonathan M. Hall’s Ethnic Identity in Greek Antiquity (1997) is solely concerned
with the Greeks’ sense of their own identity. Books with inviting titles such
as Ethnicity in Ptolemaic Egypt (Goudriaan, 1988), The Invention of Racism in
Classical Antiquity (Isaac, 2004) or Memories of Odysseus: Frontier Tales from
Ancient Greece (Hartog, 1996) typically make no or minimal reference to Africa,
Ethiopians, or black people. Leading surveys such as Charles Freeman’s Egypt,
Greece and Rome: Civilizations of the Ancient Mediterranean (1996) habitually
fail to list Ethiopia, Nubia or Meroë in their indices. Benjamin Isaac, purporting
to write on the origins of Mediterranean racism, side-steps the crucial theme of
black-white relations in the period with the excuse that black Africans ‘did not
form much of an actual presence in the Greek and Roman worlds’ (2004, 49),
and in any case had had a largely ‘mythical’ status in the classical mind (50). The
modern mind boggles.
Yet Africanist historiography has also habitually fostered isolationist agendas.
In 1948, Jean-Paul Sartre published his essay ‘Black Orpheus’, which called
upon French-African writers to let themselves be heard. As the introduction
to Leopold Senghor’s influential Anthologie de la nouvelle poésie nègre (1948),
it served as a rallying call for a new generation of African (and Africanist)
writers. Authors such as Camara Laye, Ferdinand Oyono and Aimé Césaire
would promote negritude as a ‘Black Aesthetic’ in opposition to and indeed as a
denial of the European intellectual world, now disqualified, in their view, by its
scandalous burden of colonialist and ethnocentric legacies (Mudimbe, 1988).

Introduction 17
 Such a stark division came to be regarded as the only legitimate response to
the ‘experience [of slavery] that has defined and appears to continue to shape
our [i.e., black people’s] relationship with the rest of the world. It is the one
single experience that binds all Black people together’; thus the ‘sense in which
every Black writer is an exile’ (Ogude, 1981, 21–22).
The full dimensions of this ‘Black Aesthetic’ and the evolution of its exclusionist
aspects over the last half-century cannot be explored here, but we may note that
an African-American academic as prominent as Henry Louis Gates Jr, while
claiming to reject binarist notions of a ‘Black Aesthetic’ or negritude, in 1987 still
espoused the legacy of exclusivist thinking in arguing for ‘our own [aesthetic]
theories …, black, text-specific theories’, and in insisting that black people learn
‘to read a black text within a black formal cultural matrix’ (1987, xxi). Such
sentiments continue to yield astonishing claims of an Africanist essentialism
that would hardly be tolerated if applied to a Western postmodernist world
now. Thus Abiola Irele, expounding ‘The African Imagination’, claims for it ‘a
special dimension’ that has ‘imparted to black expression a particular tonality’
that conveys ‘an African belonging that commands the vision of an entire people
regarding their place in the world’ (1990, 53).
Lurking behind such beliefs is a racial essentialism and ethnocentric logic
that, ironically, simply reverses the manifestations of white European racism that
for so many centuries discounted African people. At a graphic level, it ‘posits the
existence of a basic divisional line across the Southern Sahara: to the north of
this line, one finds white peoples and non-African ways of thinking; to the south,
one finds the Black race and African ways of thinking’ (Lewis and Wigen, 1997,
118). We shall witness the blight of such perceptions in the chapters to come.
These have become the orthodoxies of a dialectic initiated by Senghor and
Sartre – even though Sartre is also on record as having come out with the
extraordinary statement that ‘there is always some way of understanding an
idiot, a child, a primitive man or a foreigner if one has sufficient information’
(1948, 47). The truth is that Sartre was not fundamentally interested in an
emancipatory ‘Black Aesthetic’ or an emergent African liberationist militancy.
One of his inspirations, however, was Frantz Fanon, and in Fanon we come
to a figure and a way of looking at Africa and Africans that continue to have
far-reaching implications, not only for any study of European images of Africa
(such as mine), but also for any understanding of the ways in which both
the revisionist Western discourse of Africa, as well as an Africanist counter-
discourse, have unfolded (Young, 1995; Read, 1996; Irele, 2001; Loomba, 2002).
Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s tribute of 1991 captures the intensity of the impact as well as

18 The First Ethiopians

the evolving objectives of what might be called the Fanonist enterprise: ‘Frantz
Fanon became the prophet of the struggle to move the centre [of the universe
from Europe to Africa], and his book, The Wretched of the Earth [1961, trans.
1964], became a kind of Bible among the African students from East, West and
South Africa’ (1991, 198).
Fanon’s version of Africa and the colonial encounter was, of course, no less
dependent on an image of Africa than any other, and not necessarily closer to
the ‘truth’ of colonialism than were the biases it sought to displace. Yet Fanonist
pronouncements such as ‘the black man is the white man’s fear of himself ’
or ‘the real Other for the white man is and will continue to be the black man’
(1952/1959, 161) have reverberated down the decades of postcolonialist critique
in credos such as R.S. Khare’s: ‘The Other, like the self, is an irreducible cognitive
template of human culture’ (1992, 4); or V.Y. Mudimbe’s that ‘Europe … invented
the savage as a representation of its own negated double’ (1994, xii). They have
inspired Henry Louis Gates Jr to conclude: ‘As a psychoanalyst of culture, as a
champion of the wretched of the earth, [Fanon] is an almost irresistible figure
for a criticism that sees itself as both oppositional and postmodern’ (1991, 458).
The ready enlistment of postmodernism here in the recuperative programme
of postcolonialism is diagnostic and will occupy us later. That the Manichaean
heresy of the fourth century (which posited an absolute dichotomy between
equal forces of good and evil in the cosmos) was itself hugely popular in the
early Christianity of the Maghreb Africa from which Fanon would eventually
speak, has not been noticed by many; but Fanon spoke in accents resonant of
that ancient debate: ‘The primary Manichaeism which governed colonial society
[has been] preserved intact during the period of decolonization; that is to say,
the settler never ceases to be the enemy, the opponent, the foe that must be
overthrown’ (1961/1964, 40).
Yet a current inspection of Fanon’s two major texts, Peau noir, masques
blancs (1952, translated as Black Skin, White Masks, 1959) and Les damnés de
la terre (1961, translated as The Wretched of the Earth, 1964), reveals a febrile,
emotive and naïve dramaturgy of racial conflict that can only have derived its
potency from the harrowing Algerian struggle that had inspired these works
and which had been carried over to the heroic early phases of the postcolonial
era. Fanon’s major thesis, that colonial occupation destroys not just the political
and socio-economic independence of black people, but the very essence of their
being, their sense of self-hood, a thesis corroborated by the works of Mannoni
(1950) and Memmi (1965), is an important one. It has understandably remained
an inspirational tenet of liberationist discourse.

Introduction 19
 Less inspired and more problematic was Fanon’s insistence that the colonial
struggle was an utterly manichaean contest between dire enemies that had to be
carried into all aspects of existence and could be invoked to sanction violence:
‘Violence was cathartic and unifying, transforming disempowered and atomised
colonial subjects into a powerful political force’ (Vaughan, 2001, 18). For the rest,
the intellectual substance and persuasive rhetoric of Fanon’s polemics could be thin
and even preposterous, as in the following playlet from Black Skin, White Masks:

I put the white man back into his place; growing bolder, I jostled him
and told him point-blank: ‘Get used to me, I am not getting used to
anyone.’ I shouted my laughter to the stars. The white man, I could see,
was resentful. His reaction time lagged interminably…. I had won. I was
jubilant (Fanon in Goldberg 1990, 119).

Nevertheless, Fanon’s morality-play version of racial contestation constituted

and enlisted a powerful body of images of Africa, the foundational status and
potency of which continued to become clearer in the unfolding genealogy of
the imagined Africa of my project. When in 1979, in the course of the annual
BBC Reith Lectures, East African academic Ali Mazrui recommended that
African states should set up ‘a continental nuclear consortium’ (808) to protect
themselves from South Africa and Israel – one correspondent had already
charged that ‘a more frightening concoction of Nazi-style cant I have not had
the privilege to hear in years’ (781) – it was still Fanon speaking.

If Fanon provided the moral passion and aggressive energy of the first generation
of postcolonial polemicists, Edward Said was to furnish the intellectual ordnance
of the second generation. Sharing Fanon’s manichaean, contestational view of
the colonial and Third World struggle against Western imperialism, Said infused
into this paradigm the epistemological tenets of Foucault that knowledge,
language and power are intimately related, and that a given culture’s language
acts as both a conceptual armature and a straitjacket from which escape is well-
nigh impossible: ‘Each society has its regime of truth, its “general politics” of

20 The First Ethiopians

truth, that is, the types of discourse which it accepts and makes function as
true’ (Foucault, 1972, in Cahoone, 1996, 379). The absolute distinctions and
imbalances between those with and those without power (the fundamental
colonial situation) are enhanced by and expressive of the fact that, cognitively,
each culture is trapped within the paradigms of experience and visions of power
made possible, even dictated, by its language.
In addition, in The Order of Things (1966, translated 1970), Foucault proposed
the notion of the episteme, or time-bound habit of mind, which ensures that
human understanding and empathy is not only difficult and imperfect across
different languages and cultures, but also across the centuries. Beyond the
perceptual horizons allowed by our languages and temporality, we cannot ‘see’
the worlds of other cultures and times. Hayden White speaks of ‘ruptures in
Western consciousness, disjunctions or discontinuities so extreme that they
effectively isolate the epochs from one another’ (1978, 235).
The stark denial of any transcultural understanding or negotiation implied by
such arguments of course renders a postcolonialist critique itself untenable and
would, if true, have made the present study impossible. With Louis Montrose,
one wants to say: ‘I find this aspect of Foucault’s social vision – his apparent
exclusion of a space for human agency – to be extreme. In other words, my
intellectual response is that his argument is unconvincing, and my visceral
response is that it is intolerable’ (cited by Cheney, 2007, 265).
Nevertheless, the intellectual pedigree that Said could invoke in support
of a Foucauldian revamp of Fanon, enlisting linguists and philosophers from
Saussure to Derrida, ensured that Third World proponents of postcolonialism
(and notably those from the Indian subcontinent) now had an elite theory to
bolster Fanonist indignation on the one hand, and to expose the delinquency of
Eurocentric colonialism on the other. Though Said made many attempts over
the quarter of a century that followed the publication of Orientalism in 1978 to
soften the rigour of its charges (1983, 1985, 1986, 1989, 1998), its essentialising
and totalising condemnation of Western transcultural discourse speaks from
every page. ‘Orientalism’ as ‘a Western style for dominating, restructuring and
having authority over the Orient’ (1985, 3) ‘assumed an unchanging Orient
absolutely different … from the West’ (96). Said’s conclusions were blunt and,
after 200 pages of argument and indictment, uncompromising: ‘It is therefore
correct that every European, in what he could say about the Orient, was … a
racist, an imperialist, and almost totally ethnocentric’ (204).
Said seemed to revel in the harsh simplicity of his claims, and in this
anticipated the mood of many followers:

Introduction 21
 The argument, when reduced to its simplest form, [is] clear, it [is] precise,
it [is] easy to grasp. There are Westerners, and there are Orientals. The
former dominate; the latter must be dominated (36).

According to Said, the ‘ruthless cultural and racial essences’ of the West had
been elevated and manipulated into a ‘streamlined and effective’ mechanism
for confronting and subjugating the non-European world. Little wonder that
as recently as 2005, David Parker has been driven to the conclusion that such
arguments ‘are better understood as the elaboration of a gigantic conspiracy
theory than as constructive thinking’ (3). More pointedly for my own project,
if Said’s claims were to be conceded for the West’s annihilating discourse of the
East, how could the Eurocolonial library of Africa, far more blatantly racist and
dismissive than that of the East, warrant any attention at all? The margins within
which a Western discourse of Africa might be thought to have anything useful
or ‘true’ to contribute about its subject were dwindling to invisibility.
The ongoing debate about ‘Orientalism’ and its implications for the scholarly
study of the East in the Western academy need not detain us here (see Ahmad,
1992; Behdad, 1994; Mackenzie, 1995; Teltscher, 1995; Young, 1995; Moore-Gilbert,
1997; Cannadine, 2001; Buruma and Margalit, 2004; Irwin, 2006; Jasanoff, 2006),
but some of its tenets and African inflections warrant attention.
Crucially for me, Said inadvertently suggested a way forward from the
moribund thesis industry of content analysis and blame-mongering inspired
by simplistic assumptions that European observers could have written more
empathetically about Africa if only they had been more honest and less racist.
For if Foucault and Said were right about an absolute cultural and linguistic
determinism, namely that ‘Europeans were ontologically incapable of producing
any true knowledge about non-Europe’ (Ahmad, 1992, 178), then the authors of
the centuries-old Eurocolonial library of Africa could not be accused of perfidy,
but had instead to be understood (and exonerated?) as the victims of conceptual
determinants beyond their control. Better still – those writers from Homer and
Herodotus onward who, despite such glacial forces of conceptual arrest stacked
against them, had nevertheless steadily reported that African cultures could be
complex, varied, different, yet comprehensible, now not only deserved more
respect and serious attention, but might yet be recruited into a discourse of
reclamation that seemed ever more urgent.
Several Saidean acolytes drew attention to further directions that could
be pursued, some even when denying such options. So, for instance, Gayatri
Chakravorty Spivak in a much-cited essay, ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’ (1985a),

22 The First Ethiopians

held that the colonial subject could only ever speak as a ventriloquist’s dummy
in colonial discourse, even when sympathetically and authentically presented in
a first-person voice, since, as she put it elsewhere, ‘the project of imperialism has
always already historically refracted what might have been absolutely Other into
a domesticated Other that consolidates the imperialist self ’ (1985b, 253). Some
of Kipling’s first-person Indian tales are pertinent here – their narrators appear
authentically Indian, yet are comprehensively manipulated. This ‘process more
insidious than naked repression’ would also occupy Abdul R. JanMohamed,
for whom ‘any evident “ambivalence” is in fact a product of deliberate, if at
times subconscious, imperialist duplicity, operating very efficiently through the
economy of its central trope, the Manichaean allegory’ (1985, 61). How such
a ploy could be at once ‘deliberate’ and ‘subconscious’, JanMohamed does not
explain, but the uncompromising manichaeism evident here was diagnostic of
a first cohort of postcolonialists inspired by Fanon and Said. It was propagated
assiduously as a timeless and cosmic absolute by writers such as JanMohamed:

Fanon’s definition of colonial society as a Manichaean organization is

by no means exaggerated. In fact, the colonial mentality is dominated
by a Manichaean allegory of white and black, good and evil, salvation
and damnation, civilization and savagery, superiority and inferiority,
intelligence and emotion, self and other, subject and object (1983, 4).

Yet such pronouncements ineluctably drew me to the dissident recognition

that they simply did not match the evidence of my everyday experience as a
bilingual speaker in a multicultural African country, and even less the testimony
of many texts in the discourse of Africa that I had come across. With Benita
Parry, I felt that Said had fostered ‘readings that are indifferent to textual gaps,
indeterminacies and contradictions’ (1992, 26), and that Spivak’s anxieties did
not express either the sentiments or the performance of generations of colonised
speakers who could speak clearly from their host texts.
Nevertheless, the stark and punitive manichaeism inherent in Said’s
thesis continued to supply former-colonial and Third World critics and their
sympathisers in the West with a new arsenal of theoretical weaponry that could
be deployed against all Western (univocally read as ‘imperialist’) scholarship.
JanMohamed’s contributions (1983, 1985), and Hugh Ridley’s (1983 – see below),
were among the earliest, but they were joined by many others dedicated not only
to the dismantling of the Eurocolonial archive, but also to the disparagement
of much Western cultural and intellectual achievement deemed to underlie it

Introduction 23
 (Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o 1972, 1981; Mudimbe, 1988, 1994; Salami, 1998; Afzal-Khan
and Seshadri-Crooks, 2000). ‘Institutional colonialism was maintained by
language as much as by guns,’ declared Chris Tiffin and Alan Lawson (1994, i),
and a large echelon of postcolonialist scholarship has come into being to explore
the ‘linguistic turn’ and a consequent cognitive determinism in the colonial
project. Mahmoud Salami has argued that all European authors are ‘politicized
and ideologized whether [they] like it or not’ (1998, 151), hence their work
merely encodes ‘accumulated Western guilt’ (155). Evidently, such ‘accumulated
Western guilt’ is akin to Calvin’s notion of Original Sin – it might be forgiven,
but must remain a crippling moral and cognitive curse from which no Western
mind can escape.
By 1982, Peter Marshall and Glyndwr Williams felt obliged to complain
that ‘Europe’s reaction to the blackness of the Negro has been exhaustively
examined by recent scholars’ (228). By then, this discourse of exhaustion,
focusing relentlessly on a perceived inability of European commentators to say
anything ‘true’ or worthwhile about Africa and its people had led to totalising
and exasperated conclusions such as those of Hugh Ridley:

Colonial literature [is] an exclusively European phenomenon with next

to nothing worthwhile to say about other races and cultures. No more
than anti-Semitic literature can be used as a handbook to Jewish culture
should colonial literature be treated as a source-book on the Third World
(1983, 3).

There did not seem much left to say after this. The postcolonial project of
disparagement, energised by the scandals of slavery, colonialism, racism and
the Holocaust, constantly revivified by contemporary liberation struggles, the
Civil Rights movement in the United States, and the universal abhorrence of the
apartheid policies for which my own country had become notorious, seemed set
to derail any serious attempt to rehabilitate the textual record of the centuries of
encounter between Africa and the Western world.

24 The First Ethiopians

Yet the sheer vehemence of this discourse, paradoxically, continued to suggest
other lines of approach. A seminal contribution to the debate, at one level
indicative of the mounting impediments with which my own project had to
contend, came from Australia – Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths and Helen
Tiffin’s The Empire Writes Back (1989). The work’s title and informing impulse
derived from Salman Rushdie, although its central assumptions shared little of
the playful iconoclasm of Rushdie’s novels. For its authors, the English language
was itself an endocultural racialised code, deeply implicated in the cognitive
ravages of imperialism. It was the bearer of a ‘cultural conspiracy’, appropriating
the non-imperial world and enforcing a ‘violent hierarchy’ of knowledge and
power. According to this view, ‘Europe and its others’ are locked in a permanent
binary opposition, a conceptual grid of violation in which language with its own
coercive dynamic towards enforcing difference plays the major constitutive role.
Thus ‘the nexus of power involving literature, language, and a dominant British
culture’ (4) meant that the very process of encrypting the ‘other’ into a text was
already a violation, an imposition and a disempowerment of the subject. All
writing – and most especially all transcultural writing – was in a sense illicit,
and, in the colonial context, expropriative. It would appear that none of the
European texts about Africa that I had been studying should even have been
written. If I seem to be lampooning The Empire Writes Back – its insights were
widely respected and are still cited – it is not to discredit its scholarship, but to
indicate how a punitive discourse of postcolonial rectitude was itself heading
for a speechless abyss even as it increasingly refined and redefined the kinds of
question one had to ask of Eurocolonial texts.
The unease generated by the uncompromising stance of The Empire Writes
Back is codified in its style. A lexis of violence articulates its thesis – language,
we are told, intrudes, invades, subverts, intervenes, seizes, demands, asserts,
disfigures, oppresses, dislocates, denigrates and violates everything it used to
be thought of as merely imparting. In this, the work echoed its Fanonist and
Foucauldian inspirations and anticipated other critiques of a manichaean cut. So,
for instance, Sara Suleri’s The Rhetoric of English India (1992), despite promising
a more nuanced reading of Eurocolonial discourse, is marked by a discursive
pathology of such vehemence – ‘anxiety of empire’ (13), ‘epistemological
terror’ (15), ‘cultural terror’ (17), ‘discursive terror’ (18), etcetera, all the way
to ‘imperial horror’ (112) – that it could only confirm what it had set out to
challenge. ‘The astounding specificity of each colonial encounter’ (13) that it
promises to celebrate reveals only ‘a binary rigidity … which is an inherently
Eurocentric strategy’ (4).

Introduction 25
 For several decades, the bleak binarism displayed by works such as these
echoed through the discourse. Jan Nederveen Pieterse assembled an exhibition
in the Tropical Museum, Amsterdam, and wrote an accompanying text to
demonstrate ‘how much of Western culture is made up of prejudices about
other cultures, how much of Western identity is constructed upon the negative
identity of others’ (1992, 9). Benita Parry has devoted several studies (1987,
1992, 1997) to an apparent critique of the relentless construction of ‘a model
of colonial discourse overwhelmingly concerned with processes of othering’
(1987, 33), yet has been unable to free herself from talking about ‘imperialism’s
epistemic violence’, its ‘agonistic space’ (29) and its ‘valorizing gladiatorial skills’
(54). Indeed, her call to arms is uncompromising: ‘The common pursuit of all
who engage in the study of colonial discourse [must be] to reveal the limits of
a Western modernity which had accommodated slavery and colonial genocide
and was complicit with the imperial project’ (1997, 10).
Yet some champions of Said’s Manichaean model of colonialism nevertheless
managed to open up spaces in the binarist severity of his thesis. Homi Bhabha
(1982, 1994), once referred to by Robert Young as forming with Said and Spivak
the Holy Trinity of postcolonialism, posed important challenges to Saidean
doctrine, notably in his notion that the colonial subject, despite always being
mediated through the lenses and pages of the coloniser, could frequently disrupt
colonialist assurance through parody, mime and unguarded reportage. In my
own reading, I had come across many instances of such delightful one-up-
manship on the part of reported African subjects. One example comes from
Guy Tachard’s account of a Khoi servant from the governor’s household at the
Cape of Good Hope who in the 1680s had deserted,

saying that he would not submit to the rack of a regular life, that the
Dutch and such other nations were slaves to the earth, and that the
Hottentots [Khoikhoi] were the masters of it, that they were not forced to
stand with the hat continually under the arm, and to observe a hundred
uneasy customs; that they ate when they were hungry, and followed no
other rules but what nature had taught them (1688, 72).

An even more striking spoof of colonialist presumptions occurs in an early

seventeenth-century Dutch source that records a local response on the Gold
Coast to European traders’ complaints about theft: ‘[They said] we are rich and
have great stores of wares, and brought ships full unto them, and took great
pains and labours to sell it, and were so long before we sold it, that they thought

26 The First Ethiopians

it fit to help us therein, that we might the sooner be rid thereof ’ (Artus, 1600, in
Purchas, 1625, 6: 318). A sharper local response was recorded by Charles Wheeler,
who in the early eighteenth century had spent ten years in West Africa:

The discerning natives account it their greatest unhappiness that they were
ever visited by the Europeans. They say that we Christians introduced the
traffic of slaves, and that before our coming they [had] lived in peace; but,
say they, it is observable that wherever Christianity comes, there come
with it a sword, a gun, powder and ball (Smith, 1744, 266).

Although these utterances are all of the ‘they say’ variety, and Gareth Griffiths
has warned that there is always ‘a real concern as to whether what we are
listening to is really a subaltern voice’ (1994, 75), there can be little doubt about
the immediacy and authenticity of the voices just behind these reports. They
once again confirmed for me that the Orientalist paradigm was wide of the mark
regarding a significant sector of the Western discourse of Africa.

If supporters and exponents of Said’s views have at times contributed provocative

possibilities for my own project, so of course have an array of critics who
from the outset had taken issue with Orientalism. One of the earliest, Dennis
Porter, spotted two major flaws in Said’s argument that would at first hardly
be commented on – his achronicity and his fundamental essentialism: ‘Said
asserts the unified character of Western discourse on the Orient over some two
millennia’, and ‘he ignores in both Western scholarly and creative writing all
manifestations of counter-hegemonic thought’ (1983/1993, 152).
These shortcomings failed to register with most of the scores of British and
American reviewers who welcomed the book – ‘Said’s Orientalism appears
to be a monolithic and uncontested discourse’ marvelled Lata Mani and Ruth
Frankenberg in 1985 (191) – but they became ever clearer. By 1994, Ali Behdad
charged that ‘in denouncing the essentialist and generalizing tendencies of
Orientalism, Said’s critical approach repeats these very faults’ (11). A few years
later, a sustained critique came from Bart Moore-Gilbert (1997), who argued that

Introduction 27
 ‘Said falls back on discredited kinds of essentialism and displays a determinism
which reduces the entire Western cultural canon to an archive of bad faith and
Orientalist defamation’ (154). Such criticism has reverberated and intensified
down the years. Recently Robert Irwin described Orientalism as ‘a work of
malignant charlatanry in which it is hard to distinguish honest mistakes from
wilful misrepresentations’ (cited in De Bellaigue 2006, 6–7).
Yet, while the Occam’s Razor effect of Orientalism has continued to be cited
as a major weakness, Said had himself long since pointed the way out:

Against this static system of ‘synchronic essentialism’… [which] presumes

that the whole Orient can be seen panoptically, there is a constant
pressure. The source of such pressure is narrative…. What seemed stable
… now appears unstable…. Narrative asserts the power of men to be born,
develop, and die, the tendency of institutions and actualities to change….
Narrative, in short, introduces an opposing point of view, perspective,
consciousness to the unitary web of vision (1978/1985, 240).

This optimistic insight not only undermines much of the main thesis of
Orientalism, but in its privileging of the transformative, even subversive, powers
of narrative, it has matched my own experience of the Eurocolonial discourse
of Africa. Seamus Heaney has remarked that ‘poetry is a symbolic resolution of
conflicts insoluble in experience’ (1989, 1412), and this is true also of narrative,
especially romance. Mark Currie has explored this notion – ‘Sometimes it is
exactly the imprecision of narrative fiction that appeals’ (1998, 51) – and has
demonstrated that all narrative encodes ‘values which often subvert what might
be called the conscious intention of the narrative’ (5; see also Bruner, 1991 and
Van Wyk Smith, 1997a).
Such reconciliatory and potentially subversive functions of narrative are also
implied in Jean François Lyotard’s seminal exposition of postmodernism, La
condition postmoderne (1978), as a persuasion sceptical of the ‘grand’ or ‘master
narratives’ of imperialism, world faiths, racism and other ‘great metanarratives
of legitimation’, and as preferring instead the multivocal and multivalent
ensembles of ‘little narratives’ of humanity (Lyotard in Cahoone 1996, 482–483).
My reading of the library of Africa had yielded many such by-ways, and they
seemed worth exploring.
Furthermore, Said’s promotion of narrative pointed to another approach that
was to prove most valuable in my own investigations, namely Mikhail Bakhtin’s
notion of the dialogic imagination (1981). Bakhtin’s proposal that all discourse

28 The First Ethiopians

(even the apparently univocally racist) is in fact polyphonic and based on the
reciprocity or at least dialogic nature of all utterance, while at the same time no
utterance can ever be wholly inclusive or fully in control of its intentions, would
open up new vistas on the Eurocolonial discourse of Africa. I shall return to this
thesis in due course.
Despite Said’s championing of the power of narrative, his own evident
neglect of the ‘little narratives’ of colonial encounter continued to draw fire.
Aijaz Ahmad, though regarding Orientalism as ‘undoubtedly in the entire
career of literary theory the grandest of all narratives of the connection between
Western knowledge and Western power’ (1992, 13), nevertheless launched a
comprehensive critique of Said’s thesis as being itself Westernised and dismissive
of actual Oriental resistance. For Ahmad, Said was concerned mainly ‘to displace
an activist culture with a textual culture’ (1992, 1), and was evidently ignorant of
a ‘vast tradition, virtually as old as colonialism itself ’ (174), of a Western counter-
discourse critical of its own colonialism.
The fear that a theorised postcolonialism born from Said’s endeavours
would merely textualise the real agonies of ‘the wretched of the earth’ began
to emerge, too. Ato Quayson wrote: ‘From the publication of Edward W. Said’s
Orientalism … postcolonial studies have been dominated by a shift from the
material specificities of colonialism to the detailing of the discourses and ideas
produced by the colonial encounter’ (1997, 137). Indeed, we shall see that the
baleful reliance of postcolonial polemicists on the ‘hermeneutics of suspicion’
proposed by postmodernism would aggravate such preoccupation with the
textuality rather than the materiality of the past, and would precipitate a crisis
in the activist agenda of postcolonialism. Along similar lines, Nicholas Thomas
has deplored the ‘fatal impact’ paradigm implicit in Orientalism, whereby the
import of settler cultures is exaggerated and ‘the capacities of colonized peoples
to respond to intrusions are denied and ignored’ (1992, 279). We have already
seen evidence of such ‘subaltern’ African responses, and they can be duplicated
throughout the record.
But the heady mixture of Fanon, Foucault and Said, mustering the energies
of two dominant discourses of the late twentieth century – postcolonialism
and postmodernism – continued to develop a recriminatory and dismantling
critique aimed at indicting not only Western authors who had explicitly written
about empire (Kipling, Conrad and Forster come to mind), but all those who may
never, or hardly ever, have written about the Eurocolonial world, yet were deemed
to have unconsciously promoted or at least to have benefited from its existence,
such as Jane Austen, the Brontës, Dickens and George Eliot (Said, 1993).

Introduction 29
 Robert Young would later suggest that, like Martin Bernal’s Black Athena,
Said’s work ‘holds out the much more disturbing possibility that all Western
knowledge is, directly or indirectly, a form of colonial discourse’ (1995, 160).
Phrases such as ‘hermeneutics of suspicion’, ‘epidemiology of representations’,
‘devices of doubt’, ‘violence of comprehension’ and ‘discourses of dismantlement’,
deriving from postmodernist discourse, energised the debate, indicating a
combative stance that suited the recuperative project of postcolonialism nicely.
‘Postcolonial theory and colonial discourse analysis have spread like an antibody
through the disciplines of history, anthropology, literature, and cultural studies’,
complained Rod Edmond (1997, 24). ‘Soon the postmodern category will include
Homer’, quipped Umberto Eco (1983, ‘Postscript’). The combined forces of
postmodernism and postcolonialism seemed set to rout the remaining outposts
of imperialist confidence.
The main burden of these polemics is not material to the present study, but
some of its import is, notably as exhibited in the persistent but self-contradictory
assumption that Eurocolonial authors were both guilty of imperialist and racist
perfidy, yet also (because of the perceptual grids deemed to confine such writers)
cognitively incapacitated and so unable ever to perceive the ‘truth’ of their errors.
Several critics also pointed out that even where Saidean acolytes would
attempt to refine and diversify his thesis, its underlying manichaeism remained
unimpaired. Stephen Howe, reviewing works by Bhabha and Spivak, summed
up how virtually all contributions to this minatory discourse continued to work:
‘First, monolithic, ahistorical, collective subjects are set up – the colonizer and
the colonized – and then their relations are argued to be shifting and equivocal,
through the deployment of deconstructive techniques and psychoanalytical
procedures’ (1994, 40). The insights yielded by such procedures were always the
same: ‘Imperialism is what light skins do exclusively to black skins’ (Sutherland,
1988, 996). Terry Eagleton delineated a critical industry that had become ‘a set
of footnotes to Foucault…. [T]he theory is all in place, and all that remains to be
done is to run yet more texts through it’ (1993, 8).
By now it was clear that while many authors might repeat the criticism that
Said’s monolithic and ahistorical image of the imperial enterprise was ‘guilty
of creating the very monolith [it] purported to condemn’ (Youngs, 1994, 6),
few were able to resist the mesmeric attractions of Said’s neatly punitive model
– as Tim Youngs, just quoted, himself fails to do in his 1994 book, Travellers in
Africa: British Travelogues 1850–1910 (Van Wyk Smith, 1999b).

30 The First Ethiopians

 ¶

To me it became ever clearer that at the heart of this impasse or ‘crisis of

representation’ (Adam and Tiffin, 1991), there lurked an unresolved disjunction
between the crusading ambitions and idealism of postcolonialist critiques
to reveal the ‘truth’ of, and thus to disarticulate, all imperial authority; and,
conversely, the fundamentally agnostic, iconoclastic import of postmodernist
ideology, according to which ‘truth’ is a chimaera, infinitely deferred, always only
partially captured in language which in turn, and despite all its lesions, erasures
and contingencies, holds our cognitive powers in thrall. While the discourse
and project of postcolonialism is inspired by the conviction that grossly biased
Eurocolonial representations of the colonial encounter and the exploitation of
colonised subjects can and must be replaced by ‘true’ accounts of these nefarious
processes, postmodernism proposes an equally substantive but sceptical precept
that no representation is necessarily superior to another, that no subjective
insight is inevitably more ‘true’ or ‘correct’ than another, and that all truth beyond
the arithmetically self-evident or the fundamentals of the natural sciences is
contingent on context. ‘The postmodern sensibility sees the human condition
as ephemeral, discontinuous and plural,’ writes Zygmunt Bauman (1990, 501), or,
more forcefully, Joel Schwartz: ‘we are mired in indeterminacy’ (1990, 35). Behind
such views lies Nietzsche’s foundational insight that truth is a construction,
perspectival and contingent (1887/1968), and the disruptive effect of such thinking
on the idealism of postcolonialism has been much debated (Hutcheon, 1987, 1988;
Harvey, 1989; Elam, 1992; Lash and Friedman, 1992; McHale, 1992; Bauman, 1993;
Cahoone, 1996; Eagleton, 1996; Jenkins, 1997; Moore-Gilbert, 1997).
The scepticism and iconoclasm endemic to postmodernism may, it is assumed,
be usefully recruited by a crusading postcolonialism to undermine Eurocentric
and Eurocolonial confidence, and to bring to an end the Enlightenment project
with its presumption that ‘the world could be controlled and rationally ordered’
(Anderson, 1995, 4). Thus the Enlightenment, with its rationalising and categoris-
ing zeal to define ‘races’ and rank them according to some hierarchy of progress
or excellence, is frequently cited in postcolonial discourse as the major inspira-
tion underlying Eurocentric racism, with the further inference that what was so
opportunistically invented may just as readily be demolished. ‘Race is no more
than a social construct’ is the accepted wisdom (Pagliaro, 1973; Augstein, 1996;
Fredrickson, 2002); or, more bluntly, race ‘is a bogus scientific category rather

Introduction 31
 than a fact of nature’ (Kidd, 2006, 18). Yet, as Lawrence Blum warns: ‘Racialized
thinking is deeply imbedded in our social existence; its constructedness notwith-
standing, we may not be able to change these social forms without far-ranging
and currently barely imaginable changes in familiar structures’ (2002,159).
In such a context, what hopes does postmodernist scepticism hold out for
a postcolonial project of recuperating lost ‘truths’? The bear-baiting apostasy
of a postmodernist ‘hermeneutics of suspicion’ might prove invaluable in the
demolition of the bastions of Enlightenment imperialist thinking, but how can
these same tenets be reconciled with assumptions that the ‘truth’ of the colonial
past is wholly recoverable and may be readily ascertained?
Authors, including colonialist writers, either have a Cartesian capacity to
understand and judge or condemn freely and justly the observed world, in which
case they may in turn be judged by their critics, or they have no such freedom,
are the victims of an imperfect human perceptual apparatus, and thus cannot
be condemned. In other words, if the linguistic and cultural determinants of
our conceptual world are as fixed and uncompromising as Foucault and Said
would seem to maintain, certain individuals, and indeed entire cultures, are
condemned by their cognitive and cultural grammars to be racist. Racism, then,
would not be an unfortunate ideological aberration or delinquency that from
time to time afflicts some people because of remediable socio-cultural and
other negotiable factors, but would have to be conceded to be a primordial and
inescapable feature of at least some, if not all, people’s conceptual worlds.
The alarming implications for a society such as mine, a country attempting
to recover from centuries of racial disharmony and rampant racism, and now
dedicated to the construction of a non-racist world, are obvious. Are the hopes
of the ‘rainbow nation’ forlorn, and is such forlornness always already fully
inscribed in the Eurocolonial discourse of Africa that I have been pursuing?
For there can be no question that if Western representations of the Orient
have to be regarded as fundamentally and inevitably biased, the European
discourse of Africa would by the same token have to be regarded as utterly
irredeemable. By contrast with the treatment of Africa and Africans in much
Eurocolonial writing, the rendition of the East in a parallel Orientalist discourse
can only be described as verging on the admiring or utopian, as in the following
passage from Thomas Astley’s compendium of travels of 1745:

Such is the difference between Africa and Asia…. [In Asia] the scene at
once changes from sandy deserts to well-cultivated plains; from poverty
and want to wealth and plenty; from miserable villages and huts, to

32 The First Ethiopians

 magnificent cities and buildings; from people dwelling in a kind of savage
state, to nations improved by all the refinements of policy and arts (3: vi).

Contrary to Said’s claims, it is not the Orient but Africa that has in the minds
of most commentators over the ages figured as the utter ‘Other’ of the civilised
world. This realisation raised new challenges for my project even as it also
clarified lines of approach and opened up new possibilities.
The Foucauldian challenge to the independent status of human cognitive
processes rendered the unproblematic and judgemental assumptions of earlier
academic studies of ‘the image of Africa’ ever more questionable, even as it
suggested new approaches. One extreme position was taken up by Christopher
L. Miller in Blank Darkness: Africanist Discourse in French (1985), where the ‘real’
geo-historical Africa simply disappears in a discourse of utter disempowerment.
Miller’s ‘Africa’ is no more than a blank, an emptiness, a function of language:
‘an allegory of inauthenticity …, conceived of as a void and unformed prior to its
investment with shape and being by the Christian or Islamic outside’ (13).
Such extreme positions became paradigmatic as the awkward embrace of
postmodern relativism and postcolonial idealism spiralled into incoherence.
‘Language is a self-referring system of signs that does not indicate meaning out-
side itself, and does not refer to or have any correspondence to reality…. [Hence]
one cannot expect a literary text to relay information about … “the South African
situation”’, wrote Paul Williams (1988, 33). If such tenets were true, there could of
course be no ‘real’ or ‘true’ pre-colonial Africa to redeem or recuperate, just as
no one image of Africa could be declared superior to another, and the idealist en-
deavours of postcolonialism would be pointless. Ultra-postmodernist approach-
es such as those of Miller and Williams erased Africa along with the postcolonial
recuperative project that their anti-colonialist critique appeared to support.
By contrast, Peter J. Marshall and Glyndwr Williams, historians of a realist
school, were in 1982 still committed to archetypal verities and an unquestioning
assumption that Africa and its peoples were solid entities that had been
shockingly confronted:

There is no need to labour the point: when white Englishmen first

encountered black Africans preconceptions of distaste, even repulsion,
already existed. The Negro – black, naked or semi-naked – was deviant
in appearance, and there would be no great surprise if he should turn out
to be deviant in behaviour and custom…. The fact was that the African
instead of being white and clothed, was black and naked (1982, 34–36).

Introduction 33
 Such stark views are still very much with us. Writing in 2005, Arnu Korhonen,
arguing from a Finnish perspective, is of the opinion that ‘the enigmatic nature
of black skin [has been] central to the construction of black “otherness” … to
define the borders of civility and barbarism’ (95), and to serve as the central
metaphor that has ‘allowed the various meanings ascribed to Africa and Africans
to be gathered together’ (110). For Europeans, ‘dark skin was both comic and
horrifying: it embodied vice, sin and terror’ (106).
Such disabling caricatures of cross-cultural encounter, and their implications
for any redemptive re-examination of the Eurocolonial discourse of Africa,
would have been bleak were it not for the fact that such verdicts once again
did not match my own experience of many pertinent texts as pluralist, dense,
multivalent and culturally interactive. Clearly, some compromise had to be found
between the nihilism of Miller and the reductive phenomenalism of Marshall
and Williams, and Korhonen.

That the essentialist and evangelical convictions of a postcolonialism wedded

to the view that Eurocentrists of the imperial era were either plain evil or
irremediably cognitively handicapped, could not be reconciled with the
disruptive scepticism of a postmodernist discourse of suspicion, eventually
dawned on both parties, but not without difficulty. By 1995 the editors of a
special issue of ARIEL dedicated to ‘Postcolonialism and its Discontents’ would
speak of their subject as ‘a suitcase blown open on the baggage belt’ (McCallum
et al., 1995, 7). However, none of their contributors seemed able to identify the
incendiary device.
At the crudest level, misgivings about the affiliation of the two ‘posts-’ emerged
in the shape of resentment at the domicile of many theoretical postcolonialists
not in the Third World for which they presumed to speak, but at prestigious
institutions in the West: ‘Their [Said, Spivak and Bhabha’s] inspiration comes
perhaps more from nicely subtle readings of fashionable European theorists,
Foucault or De Man and Derrida or Bakhtin and Lacan, than it does from …
current local knowledge of the cultural politics of everyday life in postcolonial
hinterlands’ (Young, 1995, 160). Aijaz Ahmad spoke darkly of ‘this relationship

34 The First Ethiopians

between the immigrant intellectual, literary Third-Worldism [and] avant-garde
literary theory’ (1992, 91) that had the disempowering effect of displacing ‘an
activist culture with a textual culture’ (1) and of turning the crises of the wretched
of the earth into academic accolades.
The harshest censure came from an African intellectual, albeit one also based
at an American university. Asking whether ‘the Post- in Postmodernism [is] the
Post- in Postcolonial’, Kwame Anthony Appiah concluded: ‘Postcoloniality is
the condition of what we might ungenerously call a comprador intelligentsia: a
relatively small, Western-style, Western-trained group of [Third World] writers
and thinkers who mediate the trade in cultural commodities of world capitalism
at the periphery’ (1991, 348). Clearly the naïveties of postcolonialism hold few
charms for at least some of the beneficiaries of both a postmodernist discourse
of dismantlement emanating from the Western academy, and a consequent
postcolonial programme of affirmative action at Western universities.
Other scholars, investigating specific periods or localities of colonial discourse,
have been able to show that Saidean postcolonialists have at times simply had their
facts wrong. John David Ragan, in a chapter entitled ‘French Women Travellers
in Egypt’, concludes that ‘Orientalist discourse was not hermetically closed but
rather permeable and porous, and under constant challenge and discussion’, and
that there were always ‘plenty of people around who were “thinking otherwise”,
who were speaking “ungrammatically”’ (1998, 227).
Such views are duplicated in many other studies of ‘Orientalist’ writing (Lowe,
1992; Melman, 1992; Donnell, 1995; Carolyn Shaw, 1995; Codell and Macleod,
1998; Irwin, 2006). In her study of nineteenth-century French treatments of
North Africa, Lisa Lowe proposes an Orientalist discourse ‘through which
the management and production of many Others take place … [and] in which
we trace not only the desires for mastery, but the critiques of these desires as
well’ (1991, 217). Carolyn Shaw, writing about colonial Kenya, reveals a colonial
encounter ineluctably ‘temporal, unstable, contingent, fragmentary, localized,
multi-vocal, the process and product of decentred selves’ (1995, cited by Ranger,
1996, 277). ‘If postcoloniality has been defined as the transcendence of imperial
structures and their histories, such a definition is obviously contradicted by the
everyday experiences and memories of the people in the ex-colonies’, writes
Simon Gikandi (1996, 15) as he goes on to show how postcolonial African
nationalist governments have internalised only too thoroughly some of the very
worst features of the colonialism they claimed to repudiate and replace.
Most pertinently for my purpose, more authors have come to explore the
overall destabilising and disempowering impact on meaningful action and

Introduction 35
 intervention when a postcolonial critique attempts to accommodate the
disruptive and dissentient aperçus of a postmodernist discourse of suspicion
(Slemon and Tiffin, 1989; Mason, 1990; Adam and Tiffin, 1991; Carusi, 1991;
Mishra and Hodge, 1991; Appleby et al., 1994; Bahri, 1995; Werbner and
Ranger, 1996).
As early as 1983, Dennis Porter asked about Orientalism, if ‘as Said sometimes
implies, truth in representation may be achieved, how can it be justified on the
basis of a radical discourse theory [i.e. postmodernism] which presupposes the
impossibility of stepping outside of a given discursive formulation by an act of
will or consciousness’ (1993, 151)? If Said were right, Porter added later, there
could be ‘no way out of cultural solipsism’ (1991, 4) – no culture could hope to
understand another. Aijaz Ahmad took this depressing prospect further, argu­
ing that the logic behind Foucault’s and Said’s arguments bestowed ‘upon the
world a profound cage-like quality, with a bleak sense of human entrapment in
Discourses of Power [sic]’ (1992, 130). Such propositions ‘depict human beings
as caught in a prison of language’ (Appleby et al., 1994, 213). Billy Pilgrim, the
character from Kurt Vonnegut’s novel Slaughterhouse Five (1969), strapped to a
flat-car and peering through a fixed tube, comes to mind.
Ahmad lamented the crippling of a postcolonialism predicated on post­
modernist scepticism: ‘Any attempt to know the world as a whole, or to hold
that it is open to rational comprehension, let alone the desire to change it, [is]
to be dismissed as a contemptible attempt to construct “grand narratives” and
“totalizing (totalitarian?) knowledges”’ (1992, 69). Speaking at a conference in
1991, the Ghanaian novelist Ama Ata Aidoo quipped: ‘Colonialism has not been
“posted” anywhere’, and warned that as celebrated in the Western agnostic
academy, the ‘postcolonial’ was ‘a pernicious fiction’ (cited by Gikandi, 1996, 14).
More recently, Vijay Mishra and Bob Hodge, revisiting an article they had written
in 1991, have charged that ‘postcolonial theory … has aestheticized the struggle’
instead of confronting it, and they have called for the postcolonial project to
‘re-establish vital links with Marxism’ in order to re-enhance its credentials as ‘a
proactive and radically anticolonial theory’ (2005, 389–395). I shall return below
to South African anxieties along the same lines.
Numerous further discomfiting insights have followed in the wake of the
recognition of the misalliance of postcolonialist idealism and postmodernist
incredulity. Helen Tiffin has observed that ‘certain tendencies within Euro-
American post-structuralism and post-modernism have in practice operated
… to appropriate and control the “other” while ostensibly performing some
sort of major cultural redemption’ (1988, 70). Confronting ‘The Problems of

36 The First Ethiopians

Cultural Paralysis in Postcolonial Criticism’, Alison Donnell has deplored ‘the
propensity to deal in perpetual marginality and voicelessness [that] not only
condemns writers to dismal and oppressed self-denying narratives but burdens
readers with a baggage of unresolved cultural sensitivities’, when in fact the
colonial record is full of ‘writings that often rest uncomfortably on the cusp of
coloniality, and writings that select to work with rather than against European
models’ (1995, 102).
Such views are echoed by other critics weary of the Billy Pilgrim flat-car
orthodoxies of postcolonial critiques: ‘The contemporary reification of otherness
reproduces the sharp “us and them” opposition of colonial discourse itself, and
simplifies the complex transactions and migrations of the history of colonialism’
(Edmond, 1997, 21). Deepika Bahri speaks of ‘the comfortable umbrella of
essential binarism that characterizes much postcolonial discourse’ (1995, 61),
which effectively blurs any insights it might have to offer.
On the other hand, Salman Rushdie’s postmodernist playfulness in contexts
properly deemed to demand a postcolonial solemnity has frequently been
targeted as ‘an exercise in self-reflexive literary game-playing’ and as writing
that ‘allows us to evade the necessity of concrete political and ethical choices’
(Baker, 2000, 43).
A local version of such anxieties occupied South African academics and
authors in the 1980s and 1990s in the shape of controversial polemics about
‘Writing in a State of Emergency’ (Chapman, 1992). Behind this preoccupation
lay the heavy weight of centuries of apartheid and an already long history of
agonised confrontation with South Africa’s racialised society that had occupied
local writers – Alan Paton’s Cry, the Beloved Country (1948) is perhaps still the
most famous instance. As apartheid ran its final desperate course and state
repression increased, South African writers increasingly had to ponder Seamus
Heaney’s question: ‘What is my apology for poetry?’ (1979, 41).
Their most obvious response was the argument that South Africa’s crisis
demanded a literature of socio-economic conscientising and exposure, a
mirror-like recreation of the conditions, repressions and agonies that affected
especially black people’s lives. Postmodernist ‘game-playing’, such as that
deemed to occupy much of the early fiction of J.M. Coetzee was considered
irrelevant, even abhorrent. Magic realism, metafiction, irony and satire were
branded the irresponsible distractions of the neo-bourgeois author. Students of
Marxist literary theory will recognise the debate, as ‘committed’ South African
academics rehearsed the pro-historicist, pro-activist arguments of Lukács (1971),
Adorno (1977) and Fredric Jameson (1984). The temptation to expect the poem

Introduction 37
 or novel to be a petrol bomb, or, again as Heaney puts it, ‘a slingstone / Whirled
for the desperate’ (1975, 72), is always a strong one in such contexts.
The relevance of the controversy here is that the ‘Writing in a State of
Emergency’ polemic not only demonstrated for me once again the problems
created by a postcolonialist critique in confused alliance with the ‘hermeneutics
of suspicion’ encouraged by postmodernist scepticism and irreverence, but also
continued to sharpen the focus and caveats of my own enquiries. There simply
was no such thing as a monolithic, monovalent Eurocolonial discourse of Africa,
nor a single ‘master narrative’ of the fraught European-African encounter.
Instead, there were many different stories, attitudes, interactions and surprises.
Postcolonialism still remains high on the international conference agenda,
even if the stark binarisms of earlier decades have now been flushed out (Gurr,
1997; Cannadine, 2001; Hall, 2002; King, 2004). As for postmodernism, Raymond
Tallis has trenchantly identified the ultimate nihilism embedded in its central
tenets: ‘All attempts to demonstrate that the truth about truth is that it is not
really true fall foul of the Cretan Paradox’, for if ‘the critique of truth were true,
then it would be false’ (2001, 4). Put more simply and with specific relevance to
my project, authors who have tried to expose the ‘truth’ about colonialism have
generally fatally impaired their project by seeking an alliance with postmodernist
iconoclasm. Richard Rorty puts it well: ‘People who wave the banners of
multiculturalism typically pride themselves on their postmodernism, but revert
to old-fashioned essentialism when they start describing the incommensurable
identities of members of diverse cultures’ (1994, 13).
Similarly, many others, arguing that it is impossible for the European (or
Eurocolonial) observer ever to have fathomed the ‘truth’ about the colonial
subject while nevertheless holding forth confidently on the ‘truth’ of the
colonial encounter from some privileged position already denied, have to be
guilty, at the very least, of gross self-deception. By 1995, Robert J.C. Young
would remark: ‘We have reached something of an impasse with regard to the
theoretical questions raised in the study of colonial discourse’ (164), and the
ghosts have not yet departed – see Mishra and Hodge (2005), quoted earlier, or
Richard Gott’s scathing review of the new Oxford History of the British Empire
(2001) in the London Review of Books (Gott, 2002, 26–28). The untenability of
the postmodernist postcolonialism of a sometime doyenne of the discourse,
Gayatri Spivak, has been laid bare: ‘Spivak wants to discern politically expedient
ideological falsehoods where there can allegedly be no truth; she wants to help
reconstruct the history of female literary marginalization whilst denying the
possibility of authentic histories’ (Freadman and Miller, 1991, 39). Edward Said

38 The First Ethiopians

eventually had to confess: ‘[The] crucial difference between the urgent historical
and political imperatives of postcolonialism, and postmodernism’s relative
detachment, makes for altogether different approaches and results’ (1995, 6).

Other recuperative debates of our time have drawn on postcolonialist discourse

and have displayed the same symptoms of unease when allied to or utilising the
disruptive and apostate tenets of postmodernism’s ‘posture of suspicion’. One
such is feminism. As Annette Kolodny had demonstrated earlier (1975), Helen
Carr argues that

colonialist, racist and sexist discourse have continually reinforced,

naturalized and legitimized each other during the process of European
colonization…. [In the New World] and in other colonized territories the
difference man/woman provided a fund of images and topoi by which the
difference European/non-European could be politically accommodated
(1985, 46).

Yet here, too, the passing years would reveal a growing threat of disempowerment,
until Laura Lee Downs would ask: ‘If “Woman” is just an empty category, then
why am I afraid to walk alone at night?’ She warned that ‘the politics of identity,
feminist and otherwise, rests on a disturbing epistemological ground’ where
‘the group’s fragile unity’ – and, indeed, its powers of advocacy – are under
threat (1993, 416). Susan Stanford Friedman agonises over ‘a pressing urgency
to reclaim and hold on to a newly reconstituted history of women’ aided by the
insights of both postcolonialism and postmodernism, against ‘the subjectivist
epistemology [also of postmodernist making] that can lead toward the paralysis
of complete relativism’ (1997, 231–235).
These are the same fears voiced by proponents of a crusading postcolonialism.
Thus Nancy Hartsock finds ‘it curious that the postmodern claim that verbal
constructs do not correspond in a direct way to reality has arisen precisely
when women and non-Western peoples have begun to speak for themselves
and, indeed, to speak about global systems of power differentials’ (1987, cited by

Introduction 39
 Mascia-Lees, 1993, 230). Dark surmises that postmodernist scepticism is a secret
weapon of a re-mastering imperialism have emerged (Krupat, 1992; hooks, 1995),
while Anne McClintock has worried over the dismissive implications of the term
‘postcolonial’ itself when it is supposed to articulate a rallying cry: ‘The word
“post” … reduces the cultures of peoples beyond colonialism to prepositional time.
The term confers on colonialism the prestige of history proper; colonialism is the
determining marker of history’ (1992, 86). We have come full circle back to Hugh
Trevor-Roper’s notorious verdict that precolonial Africa had no proper history.
Out of such anxieties have emerged various proposals for a truce between
postcolonialist idealism and postmodernist scepticism, expressed in calls for
a moratorium on the use of radical postmodernist insights in postcolonialist
critiques, so as not to undermine the latter’s essentialist agenda of re-
empowerment. Gayatri Spivak has made a plea for a ‘strategic essentialism’, that
is, ‘the construction of essentialist forms of “native” identity [as] a legitimate,
indeed necessary, stage in the emergence … [of ] a fully decolonized national
culture’ (cited by Moore-Gilbert, 1997, 179). Linda Hutcheon elaborates:

The current poststructuralist/postmodern challenges to the coherent,

autonomous subject have to be put on hold in feminist and postcolonial
discourses, for both must work first to assert and affirm a denied or
alienated subjectivity; those radical postmodern challenges are in many
ways the luxury of the dominant order which can afford to challenge that
which it securely possesses (1989, 151).

This is, of course, nonsense. If the tenets of postmodernism regarding the

constructedness and contingency of all cognition, identity, ‘truth’ and cultural
values are correct and not merely rhetorical postures, we are being asked here
to accept a logical charade for the purposes of well-meant but nevertheless
fraudulent expediency. Yet such shaky options have attracted other promoters.
Despite regarding postmodernism as ‘a discursive practice dominated primarily
by the voices of white male intellectuals’ (1995, 118), bell hooks wants to retain
its disruptive usefulness for the ‘renewed black liberation struggle’ as long as it
is stripped of its ‘critique of essentialism’, since ‘we cannot cavalierly dismiss a
concern with identity politics’ (120; my italics – the term sounds suspiciously like
a euphemism for racialism, if not racism). That such a stance could no longer
qualify as postmodern seems to escape the writer.
Altogether then, crusading postcolonialists have major problems with the
ahistoricity of postmodernism, its clamant decentredness, its inherent scepticism,

40 The First Ethiopians

and its agnosticism about the imperatives of historical materialism and the idealist
liberationist programmes of postcolonialism. The political agenda for a better
world, free of imperial domination and capitalist exploitation, that lies at the heart
of the classical Fanonist enterprise is by definition questioned, destabilised and
relativised by a postmodernist verdict – which in its most agnostic manifestations
argues that all is verbiage, all is construct, nothing matters.
On the other hand, if it were to be accepted that ‘time-out’ has to be allowed
for the reconstruction or re-affirmation of the essential identities of peoples and
cultures ravaged by colonialism and imperialism, it must be conceded that the
same privilege should be extended to at least those ‘colonisers’ and Western
commentators who had resisted the mastering drive of their own cultures and
had tried to meet African societies on their own terms, or at least on terms
that recognised reciprocity and mutuality. In other words, if the discourse of
postcolonialism is to be interpreted as condemning all Eurocolonial writing
about Africa and its people as simply prejudicial and worthless, the insights of
postmodernism invite a resurrection of such texts for the operations of quite
different investigations and conclusions.

Lurking behind the unease and unequal encounter between postcolonialist

ambition and postmodernist doubt have always been larger issues concerning
the nature of human cognition itself. Both postcolonialists and postmodernists
have been in the habit of making large and often unexamined assumptions
about how we know what we know, and what we can do about changing our
minds and thus the world. Cognitive philosophy is a huge discipline, but for
my purposes, we may start with an anthropologist’s observation that ‘in each
culture … reality is distinctively conceptualized in implicit and explicit premises
and derivative generalizations’ (Albert, 1970, 99). Yet such distinctiveness is not
a conceptual trap, but a cultural diversity worth celebrating. It may be true that
‘accurate and systematic knowledge about the world’ (Hartsock, 1987, 205) is
hard to attain and even harder to convey across cultural divides, but that does
not disqualify the effort or the results. When Linda Hutcheon concludes her
examination of postmodernism with the thought that ‘There is not so much

Introduction 41
 “a loss of belief in a significant external reality” as there is a loss of faith in our
ability to (unproblematically) know that reality, and therefore to be able to
represent it in language’ (1987, 299), she is not counselling despair, but informed
awareness of the difficulties entailed in making sense of the world, particularly
across cultural boundaries.
In anthropology, as in history, fierce debates surged between the 1970s and
the 1990s around issues of representation, cultural translation, narrativisation
and the so-called linguistic turn in a number of disciplines, all deemed to
deprive the subject under investigation of its intrinsic identity (White, 1973,
1978, 1980; Geertz, 1973; Marcus and Cushman, 1982; Fabian, 1983; Clifford and
Marcus, 1986; Himmelfarb, 1987; Spencer, 1989; Schwartz, 1994). One polarity
in the debate is represented by Peter Mason: ‘To understand the other by
comprehension is to reduce the other to self…. All ethnography is an experience
of the confrontation with the Other set down in writing, an act by which that
Other is deprived of its specificity’ (1990, 2–13).
Obviously such an elision in which knowledge becomes synonymous with
theft or erasure must once again lead to cognitive anomy, a helpless confrontation
with a world in which an exchange of minds and cultures is impossible. If we are
indeed ‘prisoners of the conceptual system that we are enabled by’ (Battersby,
1992, 55), the outlook would be bleak. Terry Eagleton, reviewing Stanley Fish’s
The Trouble with Principle (1999), which effectively proposes just such a
cognitive strait-jacket, expresses the intuitive dismay elicited by such an assault
on cognitive flexibility: ‘To imagine that we are either the helpless prisoners of
our beliefs or their supremely disinterested critics is to pose the problem in an
absurdly polarised way’ (2000, 11).
Eagleton was responding to Fish’s exposition of a Billy Pilgrim-style logic
that, as we saw earlier, inevitably follows on the awkward alliance between
postcolonialism and postmodernism in the indictment of European imperialism:
‘A historically conditioned consciousness’, Fish had argued earlier,

cannot … scrutinize its own beliefs [or] conduct a rational examination

of its own convictions … for in order to begin such scrutiny, it would first
have to escape the grounds of its own possibility, and it could do that only
if it were not historically conditioned and were instead an acontextual
and unsituated entity (1985, 10).

Such a deterministic conception of a ‘hard-wired’ human mentality obviously

leaves no room for either change or progress in human understanding. Barbara

42 The First Ethiopians

J. King, reviewing Steven Pinker’s The Stuff of Thought (2008), calls it a ‘reductive
abyss’ that takes no account of ‘the great plasticity of the human brain’ and its
infinite mutability: ‘Our brain circuits are sculpted and resculpted’ constantly
(2008, 5). In the words of Susan Haack, challenging the ‘Higher Dismissiveness’
of cognitive sceptics such as Fish, ‘it doesn’t follow from the fact that people
disagree about what is true, that truth is relative to perspective’ (1999, 12). Truths
can be both foundational and negotiable, and we see such truths in operation
around us every day.
It became clear from views such as these that my own attempts to assess
what Europeans over the millennia had known about Africa, what they had thus
regarded as ‘true,’ and how they had processed and expressed such knowledge
would demand further investigations into how human ‘knowing’ actually works.
Megan Vaughan nicely pointed up the dilemma for my own researches:

If Orientalism is more than a set of misrepresentations, but is rather a

system of academic knowledge outside of which it is impossible for any
(western) scholar to stand; and if this system of knowledge constituted
an active force in the operation of colonial power, then the possibility
of writing histories which are in some sense ‘better’ reflections of lived
experience seems to be denied us (1994, 3).

Simply put, the question is whether we are all helplessly strapped to Billy Pilgrim’s
cognitive flat-car, or whether cognition is a fluid, interactive and revisionary
process whereby we constantly adjust our ‘take’ on the world. Martin Kreiswirth
offers one useful approach, distinguishing between a ‘mimetic epistemology’
and a ‘poetic epistemology’ (1992, 636), and suggesting that at different times
we employ different ways of knowing. ‘Mimetic epistemology’ is Cartesian and
definitive, based on recognition, in which the mind matches things, perceptions,
events and so on with concepts already known, including language. ‘Poetic
epistemology’ turns on cognition as an inventive, narrative process creating its
reality out of an experiential and linguistic repertoire. Paul Ricouer (1971), Paul
Feyerabend (1975), Hayden White (1978, 1987), Jean François Lyotard (1979), and
Richard Rorty (1979) may be said to espouse versions of a poetic epistemology,
which underlies much of postmodernist thinking. Versions of a mimetic
epistemology, on the other hand, may well inspire much of the binarist thinking
imbedded in Western thought and values; for example, the Judaeo-Christian
tradition of Good and Evil, God and Satan, Abel and Cain, and eventually, white
and black as reified in Western racism. This has also been called the ‘spectator

Introduction 43
 theory of knowledge’, presupposing ‘a naïve relationship between a body of
objective facts and the individual consciousness of the observer who records
them’ (Washington, 1989, 61). It clearly also underlies much of the postcolonialist
discourse we reviewed earlier.
Yet, if the historic pressures favouring a Cartesian judgemental and binarist
mimetic epistemology may be immense, to the point of coming to seem
foundational and archetypal, the very fact that human beings have an imagination
constantly invites the invocation of a poetic epistemology as well. We can and do
change our minds. Our reception of the world is not a one-way, predetermined
process, but a conversation, a revisionary loop, an ongoing dialogic encounter
such as made famous in Mikhail Bakhtin’s notion of the ‘dialogic imagination’
(1981). Norman Mailer remarked that we live in ‘a universe based upon metaphor
rather than measure’ (cited by Harris, 1996, 27), an insight in line with the
notions of both a ‘dialogic imagination’ and a ‘poetic epistemology’. That we may
at any given time and in any given place be conditioned as to what we regard
as ‘knowledge’, true or false, and that seeing beyond ‘a horizon of expectation’
(Jauss, 1982, in Selden, 1989, 127) requires effort and application, does not mean
that we are hopelessly trapped in historical prejudice.
The ‘Gestalt switch’ or rapid change in conceptual paradigms proposed by
Thomas Kuhn (1962) and implied in Foucault’s notion of radical shifts in the
dominant episteme (1966) does indeed occur, and is for my purposes most
dramatically instanced in the way Third World postcolonialists now have little
hesitation in excoriating the efforts of nineteenth-century missionaries or
colonial educators and philanthropists who in their own time were universally
taken to be selfless (even misguided) humanitarian idealists.
Theories and revelations about how the human mind works have in recent
decades greatly advanced the case for the capacities and reach of a poetic
epistemology (Dennett, 1991; Rorty, 1991). Cognitive neuroscience has revealed
(or at least speculates persuasively) that while the mind may exploit complex
computer-simulating features such as ‘multiple drafts models’ (Dennett,
1991), ‘reactivity cascades’ and ‘feedback loops’ (Damasio, 1995), and ‘parallel
distributed processors’ (Churchland, 1996), our brains are still immeasurably
more complex, unpredictable and inventive than any computer simulation
(Bloch, 1990; Dennett, 1995; Fodor, 1995; Sperber, 1996; Hacking, 2007).
This is not the place to pursue such arguments, but they make it clear that
the sheer inventiveness of the human mind renders naïve many of the cognitive
assumptions dear to postcolonialist doctrine. For instance, the once widely
held opinion that we cannot hold concepts for which we do not have words,

44 The First Ethiopians

basic to the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis (see below) and essential to proponents
of cultural singularity, is now countermanded by the ‘well-established fact that
concepts can and do exist independently of language’ and ‘that much knowledge
is fundamentally non-linguistic’ (Bloch, 1990, 185–186).
Most particularly, essentialist assumptions – some fundamental to Said’s
Orientalism and much of the discourse reviewed earlier – that some cultures
are intrinsically doomed to be racist by irreversible mind constructs and
linguistic paradigms are unsupportable in light of the ever more complex and
extraordinary features of human mentality that are revealed. The Derridean,
almost Calvinist, mantra that our cognitive architecture is ‘always already
constructed’, rendering us merely responsive to the triggers of socio-cultural
preconditioning, is not supported by contemporary models of the mind. Indeed,
Derrida has himself at times contradicted the deterministic implications of
his work. In Positions (1981), for instance, he proposes that all epistemologies
depend on systems of difference that operate within networks of indeterminacy
or ‘unstable disequilibriums’ (Selden, 1989, 89). Our minds do not think us – we
think with our minds.
Stephen Greenblatt, urging that we resist ‘à priori ideological determinism,
that is, the notion that particular modes of representation are inherently and
necessarily bound to a given culture or class or belief system’, also explains
why: ‘Individuals and cultures tend to have fantastically powerful assimilative
mechanisms, mechanisms that work like enzymes to change the ideological
composition of foreign bodies’ (1991, 4). What all this adds up to is that ‘the
process of cultural contact and reporting [is] often “messy” and undirected’ and
that ‘power by itself is too crude an instrument for measuring all the subtleties
that make up cultural interaction’ (Schwartz, 1994, 7).

Fundamental to most of the cognitive and cultural models considered above

is the nature and function of language, not only in so far as language has the
foundational role in our cultural and cognitive being, but also in that language
may constitute a model or metaphor for the actual workings of both mind and
culture. Culture itself is structured like a language – it is a semiology that may

Introduction 45
 be acquired, read and interpreted like a grammar or a text. This is the essential
insight of Jacques Derrida’s Of Grammatology (1967, translated 1974), which
conceives of all cultural practices as versions of écriture.
Language is not merely a means to describe reality but actually constitutes our
version of reality, and does so differently in different languages with potentially
alarming implications for cross-cultural endeavours (Grace, 1987; Green and
Hoggart, 1987). Different cultures, contingent upon different languages, cut up
reality in different ways, making some ‘grammars’ perhaps more amenable to
negotiating transcultural encounters and conceptualisations than others. Such
were the implications of the so-called Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, the proposition
of Edward Sapir and Benjamin Lee Whorf, who in the early twentieth century
argued that discrete forms of language ‘predetermine for us certain models of
observation and interpretation’ (Handler, 1990, 891). The notion was further
developed in Claude Levi-Strauss’s argument that given conceptual systems are
linguistically orientated, and will thus always lie beyond the comprehension of
other linguistic systems.
Such thinking encouraged the widespread introduction into cultural studies
of the notion of the ‘linguistic turn’, not only to explore the ‘grammars’ of
culture, but to raise questions (indeed, misgivings) about how accessible the
intricacies of one culture can ever be to ‘speakers’ or practitioners of another
(Geertz, 1973). The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis may no longer be accepted (Albert,
1970; Cohen, 1993), but its anxieties are still with us, as suggested by the claim
in The Empire Writes Back that ‘the power structures of English grammar …
[are] themselves metonymic of the hegemonic controls exercised by the British
on Black peoples throughout Caribbean and African history’ (1989, 48). Once
again, so it would appear, some people are doomed by their linguistic, as by their
cognitive, apparatus to be imperialists. In the field of postcolonial studies, such
debates have fuelled the larger contention between cultural monodists for whom
insuperable barriers between cultures would always exist, and cultural pluralists
optimistic about the human capacity to acquire other ‘grammars’, whether in
language or in culture. My own experiences as a bilingual South African have
urged the latter position, but the ‘linguistic turn’ in cultural, cognitive and
ethnographic discourse has suggested yet further useful possibilities.
For Stephen A. Tyler, the ideal ethnographic encounter is a ‘hermeneutic
process’ of ‘textualization’, leading to the outcome of a ‘negotiated text’ between
observer and observed (1986, 127). Clifford Geertz (1973) has promoted the
concept of ‘thick description’ inspired by and dedicated to the ideal of faithfully
capturing an observed culture in the fullest possible linguistic and semiotic

46 The First Ethiopians

detail. In this way, ethnography might resist its almost irresistible bias towards
repeating the appropriative dynamics of colonialism itself, as has been noted
(Mason, 1990; Schwartz, 1994). John and Jean Comaroff, examining nineteenth-
century missionary encounters in the Northern Cape of South Africa, propose
‘a complex dialectic of challenge and riposte, domination and defiance’, in which
‘the very act of conceptualizing, inscribing and interacting with the Other implies
discourse as much as domination’ (1991, 1: 15). David Theo Goldberg has invoked
the operations of grammatical parsing to indicate how not just the functions
but the very fibres of racism might be exposed by ‘cutting up the body of racist
discursive practices and expressions, stripping them to reveal the underlying
presuppositions, embodiments of interests, aims and projections of exclusion
and subjection’ (1990, xiii).
On a lighter note, Malcolm Bradbury’s novel, Rates of Exchange (1983),
speculates on a reality (ostensibly Heathrow Airport, but in fact the text under
the reader’s eye) that is entirely a tissue of texts: ‘Here are subtle grammars,
cases, declensions, and inflexions, an entire constructed universe that in turn
constructs and orders the universe itself ’ (1990, 31). Obviously, such insistence
that reality is not only textually constituted but may, like a text, yield multiple
readings has suggested yet more ways of engaging with the centuries-old library
of Africa, itself the record of many attempts to decode the continent.
Furthermore, if anxieties about our linguistic bondage have contributed to
the various ‘crises of representation’ reviewed earlier, other aspects of language
– its infinite inventiveness, its metaphoric reach, its cognitive repertoire, its
transformative genius – suggest that it is precisely language that may be our
most liberating ally in transcultural comprehension and expression. This is
well understood in Africa. ‘Spoken words are living things like cocoa-beans
packed with life’, writes Gabriel Okara in The Voice (1964, 110), a novel about
just such power.
That language is ‘arbitrary’ in a sense made famous by Ferdinand de Saussure
(1915, translated 1959), in that the signifying function of language depends on
an ultimately arbitrarily established relationship between sounds, signs and
meanings, does not mean that we are the victims of a mindless system that
speaks us, but rather that we have the power (and responsibility) to deploy
language so as to achieve understanding. That ‘the outside world is always
mediated by language and narrative, however much it is naturalized by the
[assumed] transparency of realistic language’ (Currie, 1998, 62), is not a prison
sentence but a challenge that may enhance insight. Mark Currie argues that
Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1902) ‘is about the failure of language to

Introduction 47
 reveal the truth’ and does not capture something called ‘Africa’ at all (1998,
142). However, while it is clear that the treacherousness of language is indeed
thematised in the novel so that the text’s convolutions and revisions act as a
gigantic metaphor of uncertainty, it is also precisely this element that alerts the
reader to the multivocality, the many meanings, the semantic challenges that
constitute not only this novel’s ‘Africa’ but many other ‘Africas’.
James Clifford and George E. Marcus, in a seminal collection of essays
surveying culture as a form of ‘writing’, suggest that we muster cultural
understanding or exegesis in ways similar to our apprehension of a literary text:
‘Literary processes – metaphor, figuration, narrative – affect the ways cultural
phenomena are registered’ (1986, 4). But if both culture and its representations
work like a poem or a novel, the analogy must also benefit from the essentially
dialogic, interactive, imaginative processes that the reading of a poem or novel
entails. ‘Culture is contested, temporal and emergent,’ state Clifford and Marcus
(19), while ‘a cultural poetics … is an interplay of voices, of positional utterances’
(12). Most sensitive ‘readers’ of other cultures have always understood this. If it
is true that a gap always ‘opens between the experience of place and the language
available to describe it’ (Ashcroft, 1989, 9), it is equally true that in many colonial
contexts, alert authors (such as Thomas Pringle and Olive Schreiner in the
South Africa of the early- and mid-nineteenth century) have drawn attention
to precisely this hazard in their confrontation with colonial realities (Van Wyk
Smith, 1999a, 2000b, 2003).
While both James Clifford and Christopher L. Miller, with different objectives
in mind, have argued that ‘ethnographic texts are inescapably allegorical’ (Clifford,
1986, 99) and ‘all [colonial] Africanist utterances are allegorical’ (Miller, 1985,
136) in the sense that such texts are always about something else (the observer’s
own generalised notions of societal processes and values, for example) rather
than primarily about the culture observed, the invocation of ‘allegory’ also
opens up a vast repertoire of human meaning-making procedures, including the
innovative, surprising and non-linear ways in which we make sense of the world.
‘The world is emblematic’, said Ralph Waldo Emerson, and our apprehension of
this is a challenge, not a bondage.

48 The First Ethiopians

Several of the commentators on the ‘linguistic turn’ in recent investigations of
cognition in general and of ethnography in particular (reviewed above) have
also more specifically invoked a ‘narrative turn’ in cultural discourse (Barthes,
1957; Eliade, 1957; White, 1973, 1978, 1980; Bruner, 1991; Kreiswirth, 1992). Not
only do we interpret cultures and existence itself in terms of ‘grammars’ or sets
of syntactical rules, but we may also construct such knowledge as ‘narratives’,
semantic sequences that are deemed to have coherence, meaning and even an
informing teleology on the intuitive assumption that life is supposed to make
sense. Thus Louis O. Mink speaks of narrative as a sense-making procedure,
‘a form of human comprehension’ (cited in White, 1981, 2). Human cognitive
encounters may be largely based on setting ourselves in storied relationships to
the world, whether at a personal level or at the level of the ‘grand narratives’ of
nation, religion and race. We experience the world sequentially, through space
and time, and we assemble our knowledge and experience in narrative strands,
almost like chromosomes in the genes. These narratives may be networked into
larger units, complex systems of knowledge and belief, but they never lose their
narrative or even dramaturgic thrust. They become the story of us in – and
against – the world. ‘We organize our experience and our memory of human
happenings mainly in the form of narrative – stories, excuses, myths, reasons
for doing and not doing, and so on,’ according to Bruner (1991, 4).
Speaking of historiography, Robert Berkhofer sketches procedures that are
just as common in general epistemology: ‘Historians apply plot and narrative
logic … not only to their synthetic expository efforts, but also … to the past
itself as history …[,] postulating the past as a complex but unified flow of events
organized narratively’ (1988, cited by Jenkins, 1997, 144). The dangers of such
constructivism are apparent: ‘[Such] narrative organization … (re-)presents
its subject matter … as the natural order of things, which is the illusion of
realism’ (147). Numerous analysts of ethnographic discourse have pursued
these hallucinatory compulsions of story-telling, the imperative of narrative
to impose order and comprehensibility on its subject matter and thus to
encourage comforting illusions of meaning and control. ‘Narrativity as such
tends to support orthodox and politically conservative social conditions, and
… the revolt against narrativity in modern historiography and literature is a
revolt against the authority of the social system’, argues Hayden White (cited by
Mitchell, 1980, 2).
Yet it is also possible that there is a fundamental competitiveness built into
human cognition that may manifest itself through these very same narrative
urges, emerging as an aggressive dramaturgy of story-telling, usually configured

Introduction 49
 in favour of the teller or his or her culture. That we may never fully master this
narrative of self and may thus create but never fully control our own ‘story’
probably accentuates its urgency (Sprinker, 1980).
Much racial and cultural prejudice is obviously fuelled by such a solipsistic
narrative drive, whether on the individual or societal level. It is possible, too,
that in different epochs (Foucault’s epistemes), the human narrative may be
configured in radically different ways – for instance as redemptive romance in
the Christian Middle Ages, or as triumphal epic in the nineteenth century, or as
existential tragedy or even farce in our own time. François Lyotard’s notion of
the ‘grand narratives’ that inspire epochs and civilisations is the most obvious
development of such an epistemology of narrative. Similarly, the narrative and
dramaturgic urgencies of Fanon’s binarist rendering of the colonial experience
have accounted for much of its appeal.
The concern of Hayden White and others that narrative may be inherently
conservative and compliant may be challenged further. Earlier, we saw Edward
Said coming close to undermining the stark impeachments of Orientalism by
conceding that ‘[n]arrative, in short, introduces an opposing point of view,
perspective, consciousness to the unitary web of vision’ (1978/1985, 240); and
these concessions may be taken further.
More particularly, the explosion of narrative modes and manners over the last
few decades has shown just what disruptive and subversive functions narrative
can have. Magic realism, achronological structures, self-reflecting metanarratives,
deeply disturbed or suspect narrative voices, and crossed genres (such as the so-
called novelistic documentary) are among the numerous devices now commanded
by writers to explode narrative from the inside, so to speak. Yet the transgressive
mechanisms of such manoeuvres have been with us ever since the appearance
of Laurence Sterne’s episodic novel Tristram Shandy (the first volumes of which
were published in 1759). Like language itself, narrative can configure the world
in infinite ways, and from Herodotus to Haggard, the architects of Euro-African
narratives have exploited such polyphony and diversity.
Many Western writers about Africa devised their narratives so as to express
perceptions that we must now regard as prejudices, but a significant number also
used narrative to critique such presumptions. When Charles Wheeler’s West
African wife mounted a scathing attack on European duplicity and presumption
in the early 1700s, recorded by William Smith (1744), or the Prince Naimbana
from the area that was to become Sierra Leone uttered a passionate speech of
despair and anger occasioned by the slave trade, transcribed by agents of the
Sierra Leone Company (1795), or William Snelgrave confessed himself repeatedly

50 The First Ethiopians

checkmated in debates with the ruler of Dahomey (1734), or an anonymous
account of the ‘Young Prince of Annamaboe’ concluded ‘that good sense is the
companion of all complexions, and … the brain in black heads [is] made for the
same purpose as in white, whatever some people may imagine’ (1750, 20)– all
were exhibiting the disruptive power of ‘little narratives’ embedded in the larger
and admittedly discriminatory European ‘grand narrative’ of Africa.
Not only have some narratives of Africa always been as dissident in theme
and intention as others may have been conformative, but the generic decisions
they embody may at times have had their own discordant effect. A narrative
cast as romance or epic will clearly function differently to one proffered as first-
hand reportage.
Relatively few texts produced up to the Enlightenment that present themselves
as chronicles or travelogues can be treated as realistic records, and the declared
or implied intentions of such texts must constantly be correlated against
the conventions of the genre employed. So, for instance, many of the earliest
Portuguese chronicles of African discovery (Azurara, 1453; Cadamosto, 1455/1507),
or of the first century of Portuguese encounter with Ethiopia (Castanhoso, 1564;
Bermudes, 1565), are cast as chivalric romances, hence the African actors in them
are often not seen as social beings but as the local avatars of cosmic moral forces
against whom the champions of Catholic Christianity must contend.
Thus a simple judgemental response on a modern reader’s part to Portuguese
‘racism’ in such a context may be problematic. Columbus took texts such as
Mandeville’s and Marco Polo’s Travels with him on his voyages not because
he was foolish or gullible, but because the distinction between empirical
experience, scientific knowledge, and ‘romance’ did not exist at that time. This
was so both because of what Foucault would have regarded as a major epistemic
difference between Columbus’s and our understanding of what constitutes
‘true knowledge’, and an equally fundamental difference in conceptions of
which genres are appropriate for the conveyance of ‘truth’ as against ‘fantasy’. In
Chapter 9, we shall see how Diodorus Siculus’s account of the ethnic groups and
cultures of north-east Africa in the late pre-Christian centuries (now often cited
as evidence of Hellenistic attitudes to Africa) was not meant as either history
or ethnography, but is merely incidental to a fabular account of the origins of
the Greek pantheon. It thus renders a select society of ‘Ethiopians’ as ‘sacred’
or ‘worthy’, while dismissing the rest of the continent as ‘savage’. This is not
ethnography so much as mythography.
If narrative can be as disruptive as it can be coercive, romance in particular
can exploit these Janus-like effects. Umberto Eco has argued that romance is

Introduction 51
 the most slippery and subversive of all genres, juxtaposing events, points of
view, values and ideologies not readily commensurable in reality, but creating
interesting synergies in the realm of ideas. ‘Romance has no continuing city as
its final resting place’, argues Northrop Frye (1976, 172) as he goes on to develop
the anarchic potential of the genre, as Umberto Eco has also done: ‘Romance
must always have as its base a misconception … and from that fundamental
misconception … must arise developments, digressions and, finally, unexpected
and pleasant recognitions’ (Eco, 1983/1995, 81).
Seamus Heaney proposes that ‘Poetry is a symbolic resolution of conflicts
insoluble in experience’ (1989, 1412), and much the same may be claimed for
romance. I have shown elsewhere that romance was regularly and suggestively
invoked in the literature of the early South African frontier to develop resolutions
to racial conflict that would not have been countenanced in reality (Van Wyk
Smith, 1999a). The counter-realist nature and contrivance of romance, often
invoked in European attempts to render the ‘difference’ of African realities, is
not necessarily and only productive of ‘othering’. Techniques of defamiliarisation
typical of romance can be manipulative and misrepresentative, but they can
also suggest new ways of seeing, of generating different insights and disturbing
possibilities, and of relaying the significance of challenging encounters.

Several other developments over the last few decades in our understanding of
how the mind works, how knowledge is constituted, and how ‘hidden texts’
(in cartography, for example) function have proven illuminating for my own
researches. Chief of these is the emergence of the concept of memetics, the
brainchild of Richard Dawkins (1976), but extensively promoted elsewhere
(Dennett, 1996; Lynch, 1996; Blackmore, 1999; Aunger, 2000). The huge
popularity of Dawkins’s idea of the meme, defined as a ‘gene analogue’ and ‘a
self-replicating element of culture, passed on by imitation’ (Dawkins, 2003, 120),
has slotted neatly into the rapid development of the science of genetics over the
last few decades, encouraging the argument that, like genes, memes or packages
of ideas (racism or religion, for example) have a self-replicating and tenacious
power of their own in the human mind. ‘Cultural transmission is analogous to

52 The First Ethiopians

genetic transmission’, argues Dawkins (1976, 189). He goes on to suggest that
cognate memes combine to form memeplexes, ‘gangs of mutually compatible
memes’ (117) that in turn combine to shape the major cultural and ideological
programmes that inform human behaviour and define cultural norms and belief
systems. Such memeplexes can be ‘viruses of the mind’ (as in racism and other
cultural prejudices) or they can benefit human existence (as in humanitarianism
or convictions of fundamental human liberties).
There has been much resistance to the notion of the memeplex, notably from
sociologists and Marxists alarmed that Dawkins’s arguments might confer on
cultural prejudices and practices such as racism and capitalism an archetypal
or foundational identity inaccessible to human intervention. However, Dawkins
has provided the answer to this anxiety right from the start: ‘We are built as
gene machines and cultured as meme machines, but we have the power to turn
against our creators. We, alone on earth, can rebel against the tyranny of the
selfish replicators’ (1976, 201).
Once again, as a white South African who had grown up in a society that could
be described as a classic example of a polity wholly infested with the memeplex of
racism but now re-inventing itself as a ‘rainbow nation’, I could learn much from
Dawkins’s ideas. Even as his theory made it clear that facile notions of racism
as a social aberration that could merely be legislated away were unrealistic, it
confirmed that we are masters of our own ideas and can change them, however
tough such transformation might be. Memeplexes, narrative packages, cultural
chromosomes – all have become useful terms in the assessment of the subtlety
and perdurance of human mindsets. Said’s ‘Orientalism’ could be regarded as
a memeplex, a set of replicable cultural prejudices, and as such it may also be
confronted and remedied like any other stubborn cultural shibboleth. Likewise,
racism is not a ‘primordial maladaptive practice’ (Blackmore, 1999, 35) inherent
to the Eurocolonial ideological make-up, but rather an intellectual fungus that
can be eradicated, albeit with difficulty. As Susan Blackmore has shown, ‘one of
the consequences of memetic evolution is that humans can be more altruistic
than their genes alone would dictate’ (1999, 146).
Dawkins’s notions of meme and memeplex have generated or are paralleled
by other concepts of the same kind, all suggesting that cultural habits such as
racism are coherent (albeit reprehensible) assemblies of ideas that create the
illusion of the primordial or self-evident. Thus Ian Stewart and Jack Cohen speak
of ‘extelligence’ as ‘the contextual and cultural analogue of internal personal
intelligence’ (1997, 10) or as ‘all of the “cultural capital” that is available to us’
(243) and that has ‘its own characteristic structure and behaviour’ (x). Like the

Introduction 53
 memeplex, such ‘extelligence’ can over time build up its own coercive logic, and
can be both boon and curse; but it is not mandatory.
Fredric Jameson has proposed the term ideologeme for similar purposes, and
I am indebted to my colleague, Dan Wylie, for the invention of another, the
narreme. Narremes are strands of narrative structure that seem to have their
own replicatory logic and seem to support, ‘naturally’, the ideologemes that
they convey, the ideologeme being defined as ‘a conceptual or belief system, an
absolute value, an opinion or a prejudice’ that readily takes on a ‘protonarrative’
quality (Jameson, 1981, 87–88). Myths, faiths, folklore and prejudice can thus
all present themselves as self-evident and self-validating cultural ‘stories’ that
are hard to resist. Jameson stresses ‘the fundamentally narrative character of
such ideologemes’ (88), thus underscoring again the dangerously but illusively
coercive power of narrative.
Finally, Claude Levi-Strauss’s notion of the mytheme (which may originally have
inspired Dawkins) as an irreducible motif that enters into many stories and has a
symbolic-cultural origin and explanatory function beyond the individual story in
which it occurs, is clearly pertinent as well. All of these foster what Jerome Bruner
has called ‘hermeneutic composability’ or the illusion that ‘a story “is as it is” and
needs no interpretation’ (1991, 9). The cultural force or leverage of such stories is
self-evident, but not irremediable, and the Eurocolonial library of Africa can offer
many pertinent records of dissent and resistance to such ‘grand narratives’.
The notion of the perdurable memeplex would in due course clarify for me
the nature and force of the theme of ‘two Ethiopias’, the one ‘worthy’, the other
‘savage’, that over more than two millennia became habitual in the European
discourse of Africa. As I explain in this volume, notably in Chapter 8, by late-
dynastic and early classical times, Homer’s suggestion in both the Iliad and the
Odyssey that the ‘Ethiopians’ were ‘sundered in twain’ and lived ‘some where
Hyperion sets and some where he rises’ (Odyssey 1: 22–24) would furnish the
inspiration for the Mediterranean world’s earliest ethnographies of Africa.
Homer’s rudimentary distinction, elaborated by Herodotus, Agatharchides and
Diodorus Siculus, would have profound implications for Europe’s subsequent
encounters with Africa and its peoples. The concept of ‘two Ethiopias’ became
an early discriminatory memeplex in Mediteranean discourse, and would exhibit
all the tenacity and prejudice-generating propensities of its kind.

54 The First Ethiopians

In Ethics, Theory and the Novel, after examining various critical discourses
pertinent to how we read and benefit from texts, some reviewed in this
Introduction and all inspired by ‘the moral scepticism that post-structuralism
derives largely from Nietzsche…[and] the Enlightenment’ (1994, 12), David
Parker settles for a dialogic model of literary-ethical evaluation:

The various theories of culture or existence that the best imaginative

literature comprehends tend to be set in dialogical interrelationship with
each other, in a searching, mutually revealing exploration in which there
is no final vocabulary or master-narrative ( 5).

It must be clear to the reader that the concept of ‘dialogical interrelationship’

had over the years come to direct my own reading of the European discourse
of Africa. ‘World is incorrigibly plural’, announces Louis Macniece in ‘Snow’,
and this has seemed good advice. Mikhail Bakhtin’s notion of the ‘dialogic
imagination’ (1981), with its implication that all discourse is essentially interactive
and always subsumes a conversation, a speaker and listener, coupled to his
further elaboration of heteroglossia and the carnivalesque provocativeness of all
utterance, whereby signification is rarely monologic but mostly contestational,
not definitive but propositional, has increasingly opened up possibilities of
reading Euro-African texts differently and provisionally as dense and often
contradictory semantic structures.
If the construction of Africa is discursive, it has also been inherently dialogic.
Writers who set out to publicise their views about Africa normally did so not
merely to repeat what everyone before them had said, but to offer what they
took to be new, corrective and even dissenting material. That with the benefit
of hindsight, we can now see that often they produced no more than a litany
of conformity does not mean that they intended to chant in unison. The mere
fact that many authors wrote as if they expected dissent, as if they were aware
that they were entering a highly contested field regarding the continent and its
people, must at least be grounds for caution and revison in the modern reader.
‘The attempt to describe another culture is never simply an act of appropriation,
nor are images of the other merely versions of the self-image of the observer’,
suggests Rod Edmond (1997, 21). The texts of such encounters, riven by anxiety
and contradiction, are not monologic but contestational.
In the discourse of race, a field notably marked by essentialist claims, it is
particularly important to observe such caveats. In his seminal examination
of the deep contradictions that persist in our discourses of race – ‘Western

Introduction 55
 society seems to be repelled by the consequences of racial thinking yet forced
to accept its importance’ (1996, 2) – Kenan Malik concludes that the only viable
way of resolving the dilemmas of ‘inequality as a practical reality’ is an ongoing
dialectic, Bakhtinian in essence: ‘The dialectical approach to humanity sees the
universal and the particular in a state of constant tension and dialogue’ (267).
Furthermore, hard as it may be, we can choose: ‘Human beings [are] conscious
active subjects constantly making and remaking the world around them’ (268).
Nor are such insights new. In 1670, summing up the African section of his
English rendering of D’Abbeville Sanson’s Geographical Description of the
Four Parts of the World (1656), Richard Blome clearly saw just such diversity in
Africa:

If we would have believed certain authors among the ancients, this Africa
had been represented to us with unsupportable heats, unsufferable
droughts, fierce and cruel beasts, perfidious men, horrible and affrightful
monsters; whereas time, which daily discovers things unknown to the
ancients, hath made us see that the greatest heats of Africa hath some
refreshments; that the driest sands have some wells, some waters; that
the vastest solitudes have some green fields, some fruits; that the beasts
are not so dangerous but that men may defend themselves from their
fury; nor the men so faithless, but that they have commerce and society
among themselves, as also with strangers; [and] that their dragons,
serpents, griffons, etc. are for the most part imaginary (82).

Like many before and after him, Blome insists that the visitor to Africa should
read the continent between the lines and listen to the edges of conversations to
understand the many meanings that ‘Africa’ and its people had come to acquire
over the ages.
Lawrence Cahoone argues that ‘every text is built on some kind of exclusion
or repression, hence it belies itself and, when read carefully, undermines its own
message’ (1996, 17). As we have seen, in much postcolonialist critical discourse
‘the return of the repressed’ is usually taken to confirm in all such writing the
repetitive Eurocolonial record of perfidy and oppression, but Cahoone’s verdict
(inspired by postmodernist insights) alerts us to the more exciting possibility
that all such texts also contain other stories, stories that may countermand,
complicate or even discredit their avowed themes of racial superiority and
imperial mastery. As Pierre Macherey has argued, there can be no text ‘which
is completely self-conscious, aware of the means of its own realization, aware of

56 The First Ethiopians

what it is doing’ (1966/1978, 27). Arnold Krupat (1992) and E.M. Beekman (1996)
have used such insights to show how the colonial archive may be explored to
yield readings very different from those of a conventional postcolonialism.
In the present study, which attempts to identify the sources of the very earliest
European images of Africa in Egyptian, North African, classical Mediterranean
and early Christian cultures, such countervailing dynamics will emerge constantly
as the discourse of that encounter reveals itself to be unstable and contradictory.
It will, for instance, transpire that concepts we may presently regard as typical
indicators of prejudices generated by Eurocolonial misconceptions of Africa and
as firmly diagnostic of Western racism and imperialism, actually had their origin
not in the colonial record but in Africa itself, specifically in Egyptian, Nubian and
Mediterranean-African conceptions of the rest of the continent. That the grossly
caricatured image of Negroid facial features that we would now associate with
the worst phases of European racism was devised not in Mediterranean Europe,
but was an Egyptian and, indeed, Nubian creation (see Chapter 8) formulated
precisely so as to distinguish the African ‘other’ from the superior world of Nile
Valley civilisations, is just one demonstration of the pervasive presence of the
dissident subtext in the discourse of Africa.
If, as proposed by Bakhtin, all discourse is dialogic and expressive of the
fundamental situation that a speaker is persuading a listener, it is also true that
all texts tend to be both energised and scarred by anxieties concerning their
own rhetorical and appropriative procedures. Conrad’s Heart of Darkness is
probably the most teasing and spectacular instance of such textual neurasthenia
in the library of African encounter, but traces of similar self-subverting or at
least doubt-generating procedures may be found in Africanist texts from
Herodotus to Hemingway. In these texts, the authorial voice is always in
dialogue, promotionally or defensively, addressing a (non-African) audience
that may consent or dissent, but is always prone to register responses different
from those the author may have intended. We also have to accept that there may
be a ‘profound silence between cultures which finally cannot be traversed by
understanding’ (Ashcroft et al., 1989, 86).
Yet none of this necessarily leads to cognitive paralysis; on the contrary, these
inevitable hazards of making and reading texts challenge the imagination and
prompt our interpretive skills. In the words of Linda Colley, speaking of a much
later period, ‘read scrupulously [such texts] usefully disrupt the notion that
there was ever a single, identifiably British, still less “European”, perspective on
the non-European world’ (2003, 15). Similar insights prompted Roland Barthes’s
seminal formulation of textual polyphony:

Introduction 57
 We know now that a text is not a line of words releasing a single ‘theological’
meaning (the ‘message’ of the Author-God) but a multidimensional space
in which a variety of writings, none of them original, blend and clash.
The text is a tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centres of
culture (1966/1977, 170).

The verdict on the extent to which users of a particular language are trapped
by its terms to the exclusion of other cognitive systems must remain open. In
the meantime, practitioners of cross-cultural studies must continue to explore
the nature and possibilities of the zones of interaction available to them and
suggested by the texts themselves. Some will continue to court logically untenable
but politically seductive panaceas, as Dana D. Nelson (1992) does in assuring us
that race is ‘a socially constructed idea, a fiction maintained through language,
imagery and imagination’, while she nevertheless upholds a cognitive paradigm
that discounts the power of the imagination and human discretion, and keeps us
trapped in hard-wired racial alterities (cited by Elliot, 1994, 463). Similarly, Gustav
Jahoda admits that ‘scant attention is given to minorities who held relatively more
positive images of savages, or at least repudiated the extreme negative ones’ (1999,
xvi), but then adopts an Occam’s Razor approach in which all cross-cultural records
are reduced to starkly binarist chronicles of the absolute Other. Critics now hasten
to join in the universal rejection of ‘race’ as an archetypal or essential entity – ‘the
concept of race is socially created and thus historically variable’ (West, 1996, 3;
see also Gates, 1985 and Sollors, 1989) – but continue to write as if this must not
then mean that, over the ages, numerous commentators have been able to elude
or oppose the ready simplicities of racism, and that many surprising, ironic and
counter-hegemonic instances of cultural encounter will have occurred.

To complicate matters further, the comforting belief that race is merely a

social construct is facing uncomfortable new challenges. The startling genetic
discoveries that have been made in the last few years regarding the human
genome and the distribution of genetically defined ‘families’ around the globe
may well have to lead to further revisions of our concepts of ‘race’ and genetic

58 The First Ethiopians

socio-biology. Tom Wolfe has suggested that ‘an uncompromising determinism’,
of which our ‘racial’ demographics may be an expression, may well be more
firmly ‘genetically hard-wired’ in our ancestry than our political sensitivities are
now willing to accept (1997, 6–10).
Precisely such ‘genetic hard-wiring’ is being traced by several major research
projects currently in progress, notably the National Geographic’s Genographic
Project (Wells, 2006). The objective of this and similar investigations (see
Sykes, 2001) is to plot such connections among human groups (some formerly
defined as ‘races’) as are indicated by genetic mutations in our mitochondrial
and chromosomal profiles ‘that occur in a random manner [but] accumulate in a
stepwise fashion over time’ (Barkhan and Soodyall, 2006, 139) so as to lay down a
retraceable record of our ancestry. These genetic lineages confirm that all living
human beings indeed descend from ‘a common female and male ancestor’ (op.
cit.) – a genetic Eve and Adam – but have raised other alarms.
Marek Kohn, author of The Race Gallery: The Return of Racial Science (1996),
has warned that ‘we are ill-prepared to respond to the complex challenges posed
by the racial arguments bobbing up in the unstoppable tide of genetic research’
(2006, 9), while Henry Gee is concerned that the fear of confronting the
demographic implications of genetic research ‘has emasculated anthropology’
and ‘has denied physical anthropologists access to human variation’ (1994, 19).
Kohn concludes The Race Gallery with a thought provocatively out of tune with
contemporary non-racial ecumenicalism: ‘It is true that the only certain race is
the human race. Perhaps, however, the time has come to explore how biological
variation and social constructions are related…. Denial no longer appears to be
an option’ (1996, 285).
Included in the undeniable genetic verities that are now emerging is the
evidence that while all extant human beings may indeed descend from a single
‘mitochondrial Eve’ who lived about 200 000 years ago, the major migration
out of Africa that peopled the rest of the world took place only 60 000 to
80 000 years ago. Before and since that emigration, which stemmed from a
fairly confined African source, many other African human groups must have
continued to evolve independently, some (such as the Khoisanoid peoples of
southern Africa) in deep isolation from the rest of the continent’s peoples (not
to mention the world’s), as the ‘text’ contained in human mitochondrial-DNA
and Y-chromosome haplogroups is making increasingly clear (Stringer, 2006;
Soodyall, 2006; Wells, 2006).
Simply put, the majority of Africans cannot have descended from migrations
that left Africa between 80 000 and 60 000 years ago, but have to be the progeny

Introduction 59
 of various (and very varied) human groups that remained in the continent. Chris
Stringer speaks of ‘evidence from genetic data of the maintenance of deep and
separate lineages during African human evolution’ (2006, 19). If the confident
but unexamined mantra of a liberal academy that ‘race is quite literally no more
than skin deep’ (Kidd, 2006, 3) should – in the light of such findings – come
under renewed scrutiny, we must expect that the popular mind will once again
be confirmed in racial ideologies that seek to exaggerate difference. This is not
a comforting prospect.
While I return to some of the implications of these revelations in Chapters
2 and 3, the present study cannot hope to resolve the dilemmas glimpsed
above. Yet the likelihood of their growing urgency may make my attempt to
unpick the beginnings and course of a two-millennia-old discourse of race ever
more pertinent. For mine is really a cultural genome project: the tracking of
the memetic genealogy of the Western world’s earliest images of Africa and
Africans, and of both the tenacity, yet also the great variability, of the resultant
icons of race and culture.
When I started this project some thirty years ago, postcolonial Africa was
celebrating its achievement of independence from Europe; three decades later,
Africa still has to free itself from the bonds of Western corporate and global
imperialism, as well as the depredations of venal and dictatorial rulers who simply
appropriated the resources, mindsets and exploitative structures surrendered
by departing colonialists. My study may help to explain why it is taking such a
bitterly long time for Africa to recover from its Eurocolonial past.

The work now before the reader concentrates on the images of Africa and
Africans that evolved in ancient Egypt, in classical Greece, Rome and the wider
Mediterranean world, and in the early Christian era. Large time scales are
involved, and one must resist the temptation to see the human relationships,
conflicts and demographic dispensations of north-east Africa in ancient times
in terms of information and attitudes that have emerged since. In the words of
Henry Ansgar Kelly: ‘The bane of all historical writing is the impulse to retro-fit
past events with present-day theories – that is, to interpret past events in the

60 The First Ethiopians

light of later knowledge’ (2006, 2). I confess, however, that my ‘Ethiopia’ is very
much an imagined world, despite also being a real (though peripatetic) place; it
is a metaphor or iconic node for a range of perceptions about Africa that were
held by different observers at different times over many centuries, but that also
steadily confirmed views of Africa held by many current observers.
Not only must the earliest Mediterranean and proto-European conceptions
of Africa have been mediated primarily through Egypt, but Dynastic Egypt
must itself have had both ancient African roots and affinities, yet also evolving
perceptions of that African hinterland as ‘different’. The African ancestry and
identity of Egypt is nowadays a controversial subject, and in Chapter 1, I survey
some of the parameters and implications of a revisionary discourse associated
in some minds with Martin Bernal’s Black Athena (1987), concluding that while
the Nile Valley ancestors of Dynastic Egyptians were not ‘Negroid’ or ‘Broad
African’, they were certainly African.
Chapters 2 and 3 attempt to provide more specific answers to the question
‘Who were the Egyptians?’ by surveying the history of Nile Valley occupation
since Holocene times, the emergence of Africa’s four major language families,
and the proposition that proto-Egyptians must have belonged to one of the great
phyla of pre-Bantu-speaking peoples who once populated the eastern parts of
Africa from the Red Sea hinterland to the Cape of Good Hope, and of whom the
Khoisanoid populations of southern Africa may be regarded as prototypical.
Arguing that African rock art from much of the continent is redolent with
themes, iconographic styles, belief systems, cultural preoccupations and
shamanist inflections that in due course would find their echoes in Egyptian
tomb and temple art, Chapter 4 confronts the relevant evidence. Chapter
5 explores the ways in which pre- and proto-Dynastic culture adapted the
repertoire of eastern-desert rock art, especially as evidenced in artefacts such as
ceremonial palettes, mace-heads and funeral vases, to develop an iconography
of distinctiveness from and mastery over the very African world from which it
had derived. Chapters 6 and 7 explore vestigial elements of African origin in the
cosmology, therianthropic divinities, totemic artefacts and symbolic worldview
of Dynastic Egyptians that nevertheless eventually resulted in an Egyptian self-
image construed in terms that discriminated sharply against other Africans.
A major African encounter that preoccupied Dynastic Egypt over some
two-and-a-half millennia was that with the successive civilisations of Nubia,
from Kerma on the Third Cataract to Meroë between the Fifth and Sixth.
Chapter 8 considers the identity, image, cultural status and legacy of these ‘First
Ethiopians’ in the Egyptian and then the early classical symbolic world. Here

Introduction 61
 I argue that by the late pre-Christian centuries, the ruling elites of both Egypt
and Meroitic Nubia had adopted a highly discriminatory repertoire of images
of ‘other Ethiopians’ (non-Egyptian and non-Nubian Africans, in other words)
that would result in stereotypically derogatory depictions of Africans in the
Mediterranean world.
Chapters 9 and 10 examine the evidence for such claims in Greek, Ptolemaic
and Roman literature and art, from Herodotus to Heliodorus, developing
Homer’s conceit that there were two kinds of ‘Ethiopian’, an eastern and a
western. Chapter 11 pursues these investigations into the early Christian era,
exploring how the contestational development of the early church along the
northern littoral of the Sahara from Alexandria to Carthage generated, both
doctrinally and socio-politically, a Mediterranean Christian conception of sub-
littoral Africa as primarily savage and diabolical.
Yet throughout these later centuries there survived some conception of
a ‘worthy’ or near-paradisal Ethiopia somewhere deep in Africa and near the
headwaters of the Nile, identified variously with Meroitic Nubia, and later,
with Christian Aksum in what would become Abyssinia. Strong rumours and
some contact maintained the requisite power and enigmatic symbolism to
challenge repeatedly the growing derogatory image of Africa and Africans that
a Mediterranean-orientated discourse increasingly encouraged. Chapter 12
briefly reviews the early history, and the iconic status in Mediterranean minds,
of Aksumite or Abyssinian Ethiopa. Throughout these chapters, I try to show
that images of Africa and Africans have not always been cultural absolutes,
prejudices without foundation, but were dialectically established, negotiated
and interrogated along lines suggested by the trope of ‘two Ethiopias’: ‘worthy’
and ‘noble’ or ‘other’ and ‘savage’, with many surprises in between.

62 The First Ethiopians