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"CIVILIZATION" ON TRIAL: THE COLONIAL AND POSTCOLONIAL STATE IN AFRICA
Journal of Third World Studies, Spring 2008 by Muiu, Mueni wa
IMAGINING AFRICA: EUROPEAN CONSTRUCTION OF AFRICA
From the 16th century onwards Europeans chose to create a new image of Africa and Africans in spite of the diplomatic/trade relations that Europe had with Africa. Africa's enormous wealth in natural and human resources-such as gold, prime agricultural land, and especially people who could be used as slave labor on European plantations-demanded that Europeans create an ideology that dehumanized Africans. Such an image allowed Europeans to exploit African labor and resources. Explorers, geographers, scientists, missionaries, and political, economic and military leaders engaged in the construction of the African as the "other".
Geographers also contributed to the characterization of Africans as "inferior". Quoting from a map of Africa published in Paris in 1761, Robin Hallett, in The Penetration of Africa, noted that Africa was characterized by burning sands and deserts where the scarcity of water forced animals and people to use the same resources. As a result, and in the heat of the moment, animals and humans engaged in intercourse which, according to Hallet, explained the monstrous creatures that were produced as a result. This image of Africans as creatures less than human reached its climax during the enlightenment. In a footnote to his essay entitled "Of National Character" that appeared in his Essay and Treatises (1768), the Scottish philosopher David Hume argued that Africans were naturally inferior to white people. Africans never produced any art, science and there was never a civilization of any other color than white. In his Philosophy of History, Georg Hegel, the German philosopher, after a short discussion of Africa (numbering 8 pages out of a total of 358), noted that Africans lacked self-control, had not contributed to culture and world history. By the late 18,h century, African images were of great interest in European middle class circles where diverse ideas on Africa were presented. Middle-class European circles also debated the role of Africa as the antimesis of Europe ("the other"). These debates influenced European missionaries, explorers, geographers, and scientists who later traveled to Africa.
Africa was also depicted as a passive object waiting to be reborn through various European forces. Reports about Africa depicted vast empty lands and wildlife ready to be taken.1 Africans' presence or claims to the resources within their communities were ignored. Africa came to represent all that Europe was not, for example, it was "uncivilized," ruled by "emotion" "eroticism" rather than "reason" and "rationalism". European construction of Africans shaped imperial policy. A popular geographer of the early 19th century, Hugh Murray, described Africa as a strange and mysterious place. The image was already forming of Africa as a place where "creatures" less than human survived in an order less than civilized. Social Darwinism added to the negation of Africans' humanity. Proponents of Social Darwinism in the academic world included William Graham Summer, a political science professor at Yale; Josiah Strong, a popular historian, lecturer, and congregational clergyman in the late 19th century; John Burgess, William Dunning, U.B Phillips, and several other prominent professors at Columbia University. Social Darwinists believed that Africans' intellectual development was at the same level as that of animals and especially monkeys. By 1885 Strong visualized an Anglo-Saxon "move down Mexico... over upon Africa and beyond. And can anyone doubt that the result of this competition of the races will be the 'survival of the fittest?' In his Our Country: Its Possible Future and Its Present Crisis, Strong answered his own question:
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