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The Hearts of Darkness: How European Writers Created the
Racist image of Africa
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Milton Allimadi
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The Hearts of Darkness: How European Writers Created the Racist image of Africa
By Milton Allimadi
While still a student at Columbia University School of Journalism in 1992, Milton Allimadi
gained access to the archives of The New York Times, where he "unearthed several racist
letters that had been exchanged between the newspaper's foreign editor and the reporters he sent
to cover Africa." His appetite whetted, Allimadi continued his research, ultimately resulting in
publication of this book.
Mr. Allimadi is CEO and Publisher of The Black Star News [1], based in New York City. He has
graciously given BAR permission to serialize his work.
Part One
"I know that history will have its say some day, but it will not be history as written in Brussels,
Paris or Washington, it will be our own." - From Patrice Lumumba's last letter to his wife
Pauline
Historically the predominant image of Africans and people of African descent created by the
Western media has been that of savages. These images were created from the accounts of the
early European travelers to Africa through the journals they published; in modern times the
images were perpetuated and disseminated through newspapers, magazines and Hollywood
films.
The media's racist portrayals of Africans and Black people in general, have been so effective that
many contemporary white writers still view Black people through the prism of bigotry created by
their forefathers over several centuries. For these contemporary writers even remotely to write
balanced articles about Black people, they must first re-read many of the publications that have
formed white people's perception of Blacks.
2|Page
Mau Mau freedom fighters wearing animal skins and armed with long knives in a file picture taken in Kiambu .
* Black people are morally, physically and intellectually inferior to white people.
* Blacks' contributions to world history, culture, social, artistic and scientific development are
non-existent.
The negative representations were so pervasive and effective that they diminished the self-
esteem of many Blacks and caused them to suffer greatly from inferiority complexes. Many
became convinced that indeed they were the most inferior human species.
What were the reasons for the racist representations of Africans by European writers? When the
media portray people in a particular way there are always specific reasons, generally reflecting
the political, racial, class, gender, ethnic, national, economic and religious biases of the owners
of the media and the governing class. During the era of slavery, the media owners, writers and
intellectuals - in other words, molders of public opinion and shapers of policy - represented
Black people as sub-human, in order to justify slavery.
"Europeans regarded Africa as a backward continent, inhabited by savage and abnormal human
beings."
During the period of colonial conquest and rule, Africans were represented as sub-humans at a
lesser stage of physical, mental, and social evolution, and therefore, in need of the Europeans'
civilizing governance. Then in the era after independence, some Western media represented
Africans as people incapable of governing themselves, thus justifying and exonerating slavery
and colonialism.
3|Page
As early as the 5th Century BC when Herodotus wrote The Histories [2], Europeans regarded
Africa as a backward continent, inhabited by savage and abnormal human beings - using white
people to represent the epitome of creation. These representations continued throughout history,
and in the 18th and 19th centuries, the journals of the European so-called explorers became the
main media of disseminating the stereotypical image of Africa. In the early part of the 20th
century, negative characterizations of Africa were permeating major publications such as The
New York Times, The National Geographic, Time Magazine, Newsweek Magazine, The New
Yorker, and several European newspapers and magazines.
My research has unearthed evidence of some of the Western writers' personal animus toward
Africans in their personal correspondences, including those by reporters with major international
newspapers. For example, documents from the archives of The New York Times reveal disturbing
accounts in late 1959, when one of the world's leading newspapers sent Homer William Bigart to
cover events in West Africa at the start of de-colonization from European countries. Bigart was a
renowned reporter and had already won the Pulitzer Prize - American journalism's top award -
two times while he was with his previous newspaper, The Herald Tribune.
"The Times reporter's favorite terms in Africa included ‘barbaric,' ‘macabre,' ‘grotesque,' and
‘savage.'"
After a visit to Ghana and then later to Nigeria, Bigart complained bitterly in a letter from Lagos
to the Times' foreign news editor, Emanuel Freedman, about his African assignment. "I'm afraid I
cannot work up any enthusiasm for the emerging republics," Bigart wrote. "The politicians are
either crooks or mystics. Dr. Nkrumah is a Henry Wallace in burnt cork. I vastly prefer the
primitive bush people. After all, cannibalism may be the logical antidote to this population
explosion everyone talks about."
Bigart's favorite terms in Africa included "barbaric," "macabre," "grotesque," and "savage." This
reporter's contempt toward the continent was evidently shared by his editor, Freedman, who
wrote back: "This is just a note to say hello and to tell you how much your peerless prose from
the badlands is continuing to give us and your public. By now you must be American
journalism's leading expert on sorcery, witchcraft, cannibalism and all the other exotic
phenomena indigenous to darkest Africa. All this and nationalism too! Where else but in The
New York Times can you get all this for a nickel?"
Typical of the prose that Freedman found so much to his liking was an article by Bigart
published on January 31st 1960, in the Times under the headline "Barbarian Cult Feared in
Nigeria." Focusing on a reported incident of communal violence, Bigart assumed a jaunty and
derogative tone, writing:
"A pocket of barbarism still exists in eastern Nigeria despite some success by the regional
government in extending a crust of civilization over the tribe of the pagan Izi." He added, "A
momentary lapse into cannibalism marked the closing days of 1959, when two men killed in a
tribal clash were partly consumed by enemies in the Cross River country below Obubra.
Garroting was the society's favored method of execution. None of the victims was eaten, at least
not by society members. Less lurid but equally effective ways were found to dispose of them.
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According to the police, about twenty-six were weighed with stones and timber and thrown into
flooded rivers.
"No trace has been found of these bodies. A few were buried in ant heaps. But most became
human fertilizer for the yam crops."
The article played on what was then a well-established impression of Africa as a continent
inhabited exclusively by cannibals, and it reflected the views Bigart had expressed earlier in his
famous letter to Freedman. The veracity of his journalistic production was highly questionable.
He was not above concocting scenarios to fulfill his - and Freedman's - morbid fantasies about
Africa.
"Dear Manny. It is nice to be in contact with you after the great Cameroun communications
black out," Bigart wrote, in another letter to Freedman from West Africa. "There's nothing more
demoralizing than to drop a story at a cable office manned by natives under French supervision.
I'll never criticize British Cable & Wireless again...These countries are all miserable and I cannot
operate efficiently because of the heat and cumulative fatigue. I hope I'll be able to survive the
six months and then take a vacation in Spain and England before coming home."
Later that year, as independence neared for what was then Belgian Congo, Bigart complained to
Freedman in a May 29th 1960 letter from Leopoldville, which is now Kinshasa: "I had hoped to
find pygmies voting and interview them on the meaning of independence but they were all in the
woods. I did see several lions, however, and from Usumbura I sent a long mailer about the
Watutsi giants."
The Belgian Congo had experienced the most bloody and brutal history of European colonial
rule and exploitation in Africa. During the rule of King Leopold II, an estimated 10 million or
more Africans were exterminated and countless more permanently maimed or disfigured, all in
the quest for wealth. The country was raped of its resources, primarily ivory and rubber at the
time. Under the Belgians, African slave laborers, who did not deliver their designated quota of
ivory and rubber to their European masters in the Congo, had their hands severed, in order to
motivate other slackers. There are remarkable and chilling photographs from that era, in history
books, showing African laborers holding up the fire-cured limbs of their colleagues.
Now, finally, at the dawn of the Congo's momentous liberation from Belgian oppression, a
reporter for The New York Times has the opportunity to get the reaction of the descendants of
slave amputees and perhaps even of some surviving victims. What did this day mean for them?
What hopes and aspirations did they have? What was their feeling towards the Belgians? These
were some of the questions Bigart could have asked. Instead, his perverted mind is focused on
finding Pygmies, one of the most maligned ethnic groups in all of history.
"The derisive headline of the article was ‘Magic of Freedom Enchants Congolese.'"
Having failed to find Pygmies for his news report, Bigart used the next best solution - he created
them, as evidenced by his article, published in The Times on June 5th 1960. After all, he was
confident that no Pygmy would ever see a copy of his article in The Times and challenge his
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assertions; and how could he have known that three decades later, an African-born writer would
unearth the evidence of his fraud and bigotry from The Times' archives. The derisive headline of
the article was "Magic of Freedom Enchants Congolese." The article began: "As the hour of
freedom from Belgian rule nears, ‘In-de-pen-dence' is being chanted by Congolese all over this
immense land, even by pygmies in the forest." "Independence is an abstraction not easily grasped
by Congolese and they are seeking concrete interpretations," Bigart added, before continuing to
malign the pygmies: "To the forest pygmy independence means a little more salt, a little more
beer."
The type of racism that Bigart and Freedman expressed in their correspondences toward Africans
was by no means unique to the two. Even when other Times reporters seemed eager to explore
more serious social and political developments on the continent, Freedman steered them back to
the racist themes he craved.
Another Times reporter, Leonard Ingalls, who was based in South Africa, had sought guidance
from Freedman, as his letters revealed: "You asked me before I left New York to give you after I
had been here awhile my impression," he wrote in a letter dated June 14th 1956, to Freedman:
"Perhaps the most obvious and fundamental fact to strike the newcomer is that the Negro, by
sheer weight of numbers, will take control of Sub-Saharan Africa within the next generation or
two." (A year after this seminal observation, Ghana won its independence from Britain, and six
years later, most African countries began formal de-colonization).
"As you know, white South Africans call themselves and all other white persons Europeans.
Sometimes, in trying to defend their white supremacy policies, they will argue that South Africa
has been their home for 300 years and that they must fight - and they mean that literally - to
preserve white civilization in South Africa because they have no place to go," Ingalls' letter went
on, "I was talking with an African friend about this argument recently and his observation was:
‘They call themselves Europeans, let them go to Europe.' Usually when the question of political,
social, economic or educational opportunities for Africans is raised with white persons south of
the Sahara they reply: ‘You don't expect us to give them to savages, do you?'" Ingalls continued:
"That is fair enough in a sense. There is a big ‘but' attached though, and that there doesn't seem
to be very much enthusiasm for getting on with the job of helping the savages to better
themselves."
Ingalls pointed out in his letter that the whites in South Africa seemed not to have learned
anything from the Mau Mau uprising in Kenya, where Africans were fighting against whites who
had ousted the Kikuyu people and robbed them of their fertile ancestral farmlands.
"I have talked to quite a few literate, intelligent Africans," Ingalls continued, in his letter, "My
recollection is that they have said they do not want to force the white man out of Africa. What
they do want is the help of the white man in improving the lot of their people. They do not think
they are getting that help."
Even U.S. government officials believed only more white presence in Africa could rescue the
continent, Ingalls revealed in his letter to Freedman: "A few weeks ago George V. Allen, a
United States Assistant Secretary of State, spent nineteen days touring Africa south of the
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Sahara. I was told that he gave it as his private opinion that the solution to the African dilemma
was more white immigration. I wonder where all the white people are going to come from and
what they are going to do when they get here."
Were these the kind of burning issues of the day that kept foreign editor Freedman, back in New
York, awake at night? Evidently not, judging by his letter of July 25th 1956 to Ingalls in South
Africa, "We read that in Black Africa, where the principle of the wheel was scarcely known a
generation or two ago, there is now a great demand for bicycles," he wrote, "a trend is underway
toward two-bicycle families. Is there a light economic air-mail feature in the increasing mobility
of the aborigines?"
At a time when the continent stood at the crossroads of profound changes such as de-
colonization, African leadership, and the reconstitution of the relations between whites and
Africans, Freedman, foreign editor of an influential newspaper such as The New York Times,
preferred storylines, presenting Africans as buffoons and savages to Western readers. "Where do
they buy their bikes?" Freedman continued, in his letter, "What do they cost? How long does it
take a man to earn enough money to buy one? Is his status advanced? Does he have roads or
bicycle tracks, or does he ride through the bush? What is the usual biking costume-robe, breech-
cloth, animal skin or birthday suit?" the foreign editor continued, "How is the bicycle business?
Are dealers getting rich? Are there bicycle garages in the bush? What social effects is the bicycle
having?"
Public relations firms inspired some of the articles preferred by Freedman. After Albert Fick, a
South African publicist, suggested a story idea to Freedman, he passed it on to Richard Hunt, a
correspondent in South Africa, in a letter dated September 12th 1957. "Albert Fick, who as you
know, now enjoys desk space in our wire room, sent me a note suggesting a feature that you
might find interesting," Freedman wrote. "It does sound like a good project for a time when you
have a chance to take it on." Fick's own correspondence to Freedman in part had read: "I have
long been fascinated by raw black men being flown from the bush, where some of them have
probably never used or maybe seen a wheel, straight into Johannesburg for work in the mines.
The Transvaal Chamber of Mines would probably give Hunt a ride on one of their airlift planes,
with these rookies. A good human story, from the middle ages into the 20th century, by air."
During the late 1950s as the rivalry between the West and East increased, the political struggle
for allies was also played out in Africa and Western coverage of the continent reflected this
competition. One of the publications that served as a vocal cheerleader for "Western values" and
apologist for continuance of colonial rule in Africa was Time magazine. Its co-founder and
editor, Henry Robinson Luce was an avowed Christian fundamentalist who wanted to continue
the crusade he had lost in China when Mao Xedong's Communist movement had crushed his
idol, Chiang Kai-Shek.
7|Page
In Kenya, as Luce saw it, the good guys were the British colonial
officials, the police and soldiers under their command. The bad guys
were the African "terrorists" and the "witch doctors" that commanded the
uprising. Time magazine devoted many articles to portray the guerrillas in
Kenya as godless savages with no credible objectives. Under the abusive
headline "Black & Red magic" in an article published on September 1st,
1952, Time magazine explained: "In recent years, the Black 97% of
Kenya's population has banded together in a dozen fanatic, anti-white secret societies run by
witch doctors and pledged to the slogan Africa for Africans." So, in one malicious paragraph,
Time was able to belittle a legitimate uprising, and at the same time, criminalize the entire five
million Black population of Kenya.
Whenever Black people resisted dispossession by white colonials seeking to conquer their land,
they were demonized as "anti-white" and allied with witchcraft. (This technique has not deviated
much even up to recent times, as evidenced by the 21st century Western coverage of Zimbabwe's
attempt to re-distribute land from the white minority who stole it in the 19th century to the Black
majority. Zimbabwe President Robert Mugabe was portrayed, particularly by the British media,
as "erratic," "unstable," and "racist.")
The 1952 Time magazine article perpetuated the enduring image of Africans as incapable of
fighting for just causes - they could only be inspired by irrational witchcraft and barbarism.
Another Time magazine article ridiculing the uprising was published on November 3rd 1952
under the contemptuous headline "The Meow-Meows," and it described the situation this way:
"Part land hunger, part savage revolution against the domineering white man and the bewildering
20th century, the Mau Mau's blind fury could, if left unchecked, turn the Crown Colony of Kenya
into another Malaya." The reference was to the country now called Malaysia, which at the time
was a British colony facing serious insurrection.
Luce's Time magazine set the tone for the coverage by other American publications. On
December 7th 1952, The New York Times contributed with the following news lead: "Over the
equatorial landscape of Kenya, the British Crown Colony in East Africa, lies the frightening
shadow of Mau Mau, a secret tribal society whose campaign of murder has forced the imposition
of martial law." The article conceded that much was not known about the "terrorist" but added:
"The first aim of the Mau Mau, with its voodoo apparatus of disemboweled animals for warnings
and long machete-like knives for their killings, seems to drive the 36,000 whites out of Kenya."
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"The bad guys were the African ‘terrorists' and the ‘witch doctors' that commanded the
uprising."
The article also questioned whether the insurgency was "a spontaneous native uprising" or
instigated from outside, since the organization seemed to "bear some resemblance to the cells of
a communist organization." The sentence purported to explain the communist connection read:
"Jomo Kenyatta [3], who is held for trial as the suspected leader of the Mau Mau, received part
of his education at the London School of Economics, married a white woman and thereafter
visited Moscow." The article never explained whether it was Kenyatta's education at the LSE, his
marriage to a white woman, or his trip to Moscow that confirmed his "communist connection."
The coverage of the Mau Mau uprising by American publications directly reflected British
propaganda. Even today when dealing with Africa, major U.S. publications, including The New
York Times still take their cue from and reflect the biases of British media such as The Financial
Times, The Economist and the BBC - as if the U.K. could ever be a disinterested interpreter of
events in Africa. Fifty years after Kenyatta was demonized, Zimbabwe's president Mugabe was
characterized as a devil when he instituted land re-distribution.
During the Mau Mau, American and British media were so successful in perpetuating the image
of savagery taking control over Africans in Kenya that even British officials were evidently
affected. Consider what Oliver Lyttelton, the British colonial secretary and one-time governor of
Kenya wrote in his memoirs, The Memoirs of Lord Chandos (1963). In one passage, he revealed
that he was haunted by the Mau Mau's voodoo while serving His Majesty's Government in
Kenya. "As I wrote memoranda or instructions," he recalled in his memoirs, "I would suddenly
see a shadow fall across the page - the Horned shadow of the Devil himself." The good Lord
Chandos could have benefited from some serious psychiatric counseling and treatment, even if
he was simply perpetuating British propaganda.
© Milton G. Allimadi
To purchase The Hearts of Darkness: How European Writers Created the Racist image of
Africa, contact
www.blackstarnews.com [1]
9|Page
The Hearts of Darkness: How European Writers Created the Racist image of Africa
Part Two
By Milton Allimadi
Mr. Allimadi is CEO and Publisher of The Black Star News [1], based in New York City. He has
graciously given BAR permission to serialize his work. Part One appeared in the November
24 issue [2] of BAR.
Blackness As Bestiality
"Blackness of skin was strongly associated with moral perversity and intellectual and
spiritual inferiority by whites."
10 | P a g e
In Pseudodoxia Epidemica [3], (1646), Thomas Browne, a physician, attributed blackness of
skin to "black jaundice" or "mutations" or "inward use of certain waters." More than 200 years
later, the first edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica (1866), quoting a "Dr. Barrier," explained
that "the gall of negroes is black and, being mixed with their blood is deposited between their
skin and foreskin."
The good Dr. Barrier did not to have the final word on the matter. "Dr. Mitchel of Virginia," the
Encyclopedia Britannica continued, "in the philosophical transaction No. 476, has endeavoured
by many learned arguments to prove, that the influence of the sun in hot countries, and the
manner of life of their inhabitants, are the remote causes of the colour of the Negroes,
Indians, etc."
"Besides those of colour, figure, and hair, there are other physical distinctions proving a
difference of race," he wrote, "They have less hair on the face and body. They secrete less by the
kidneys, and more by the glands of the skin, which gives them a very strong and
disagreeable odour." Had Jefferson paused to reflect upon the fact that all the Black people he
associated with worked on his plantations, he would have discerned the origin
of their profuse sweating. Even then, his reservations about the hygienic
conditions of Blacks did not prevent him from deriving sexual pleasure from an
underaged Sally Heming, one of his slaves, with whom he fathered a child.
11 | P a g e
as the 15th Century, European traders, who were the first whites to
come into contact with Africans, did not focus on value judgment. However, by the 17th
Century, when Europeans began acquiring Africans for slave labor, theories alleging the
Africans' natural inferiority and bestiality became popular, in order to justify their subjugation.
At the same time a worldwide phenomenon emerged. The more "Negroid" an African appeared,
he was portrayed as more backward, or presumed to be, by Europeans. Conversely,
the more "European," Africans looked - with "aquiline" features - they were
portrayed as, and believed to be more "civilized." This is partly why historically, and right into
the modern era, many American and European writers consistently portray the ethnic minority
Tutsis in both Rwanda and Burundi more adoringly and favorably when describing
their features relative to the Hutus, who comprise the vast majority in both
countries. The tendency to venerate Africans with alleged "European" features was found even
in the writings of white people who condemned slavery. In her novel, Oroonoko, The Royal
Slave, (1688), Aphra Behn, the early English abolitionist and first English woman to earn a
living through her writing, countered the slavers' bestial image of
Africans with one of her imagined "ideal" African.
"His face was not that brown rusty black which most of that nation are,
but a perfect ebony, or polished black," she wrote, describing the hero of
her novel who later led a slave rebellion. "His nose was rising and
Roman, instead of African and flat: his mouth the finest
shape that could be seen; far from that great turned lips, which are so
natural
to the rest of the negroes."
Behn noted that except for her hero's race, which, due to no
fault of his own was Black, "there could be nothing more beautiful, agreeable
and handsome. There was no one grace wanting that bears the standard of true
beauty. His hair came down to his shoulders, by the aids of art, which was for pulling it down,
and keeping it combed."
"The British public was eager to imbibe absurd tales from the continent."
It was the popular journals of the European travelers that widely disseminated the racist image of
Africa throughout the Western world between the 18th and the 20th centuries. Many of these
books are still consulted and quoted from by Western writers who travel to report from Africa.
In 1790, a Scotsman, James Bruce, published his Travel to Discover The Source of The Nile,
telling of his three years of wandering in Ethiopia and Tigre. Unfortunately for him, his
countrymen did not believe him when he described what he alleged was one typical occurrence
in those God forsaken places. Bruce wrote that he witnessed three Ethiopians fling a cow onto
the ground, cut two steaks off its buttocks, pin the skin back over the wound and cover it with
12 | P a g e
clay. Then the Ethiopians chased the cow off and fell upon the warm meat. The British public,
which was eager to imbibe absurd tales from the continent, still rejected Bruce's account and
laughed him into seclusion.
The explorers who followed Bruce fared much better and many
of their journals became best sellers throughout the Western world; the books
were awaited with the kind of anticipation people nowadays reserve for new film
releases. The more the explorers denigrated Africans in their accounts, the more books they were
able to sell.
The travel writers knew the public's appetite for their tales from Africa and did not hesitate to
encourage others to lace their writings with fiction to make them exciting. "It had struck me that
you could not do better than write a short description of your travels in Africa," John Hanning
Speke, author of Journal
of The Discovery of the Source of the Nile (1863), wrote in a letter
to John Petherick, a contemporary traveler, "well loaded with amusing anecdotes and fights with
the natives."
13 | P a g e
their naked nudity, is one from which no amount of familiarity can remove the strange
impression; it takes abiding hold upon the memory, and makes the traveler recall anew the
civilization he has left behind."
"Joseph Conrad's book is a catalogue of scenes portraying Africans in the most racist
manner."
There is one section in Heart of Darkness where an African character is bestowed with the power
of speech - in crude English befitting him, of course - and here's what he tells the
European: ‘"Catch ‘im,' he snapped, with a bloodshot widening of his eyes and a flash of sharp
white teeth, ‘catch ‘im. Give ‘im to us.'" When the narrator of the story asks the African what he
would do with the fellow African captive, the answer is predictable: ‘"Eat ‘im.'"
14 | P a g e
The European travelers' journals also had similar influence on American newspapers and
magazines. Most Americans first encountered Africa through a National Geographic magazine
article in its Volume II, 1889 issue. The article was written by the magazine's managing editor,
Gardiner Greene Hubbard, and based entirely on the accounts provided by Henry Morton
(H.M. as he preferred) Stanley, the brutal so-called explorer and newspaper
correspondent. He traveled extensively in Africa and wrote many lavish and concocted tales
about his journeys. During his travels he developed a reputation for shooting down unarmed
Africans who challenged him, as if they were wild game. Stanley's primary claim to fame was
his account of his search for David Livingston, the British traveler who got lost in Africa. He is
credited with the now famous - and most probably concocted - greeting: "Dr. Livingston, I
presume?"
"The negro has never developed any high degree of civilization," Hubbard lamented in his
magazine article, showing total ignorance about the great civilizations of the Zulus,
the Ashanti, Songhay, Mali, Buganda, Ethiopia, Zimbabwe and ancient Ghana, "and even if,
when brought into contact with civilization, he has made considerable progress, when that
contact ceased he has deteriorated into barbarism." Here we have a sampling of the enduring
notion that even among so-called "civilized" Africans, barbarism lurked barely underneath the
surface, waiting to be unleashed at any given moment.
"The New York Times explained that Africans were ‘arrested at a position not so much
between heaven and earth, as between earth and hell.'"
Even The New York Times relied on the image of Africa perpetuated by Stanley. In an article
published on July 1st 1877, the newspaper explained that Africans were "arrested at a position
not so much between heaven and earth, as between earth and hell." This article
went on to offer further evidence of the Africans' backwardness. "There is an old touch, a
tertiary or pre-tertiary touch about them, affiliating them with the ancient hippopotamus
and the crocodile; but there is also a touch of a sensitiveness and an
affection as keen as any to which the more civilized races have attained." As
a result of the Africans' "suspended" condition between earth and hell, the
article concluded: "This has exposed them to a torture which the crocodile and the hippopotamus
do not know; but it has been insufficient to elevate them to a
platform of order and happiness."
15 | P a g e
continent to rule his new "native" subjects. "He knows that were he to carry to Africa the
manners and the customs of a Belgian king," the article admonished, "his darky subjects would
misunderstand him and would be dissatisfied."
So, in order to familiarize himself with the continent, Leopold had commissioned Stanley to
show him how to make native beer called "pombe"; he had also learned "the banjo and the
bones," and read Daniel Bryant's Theory and Practise of Colored Conundrums. (My several
attempts to locate a copy of this book were not successful). The Times article
explained: "His skill in performing the banjo will please the people, and his knowledge of the
ancient and classical conundrums of the African race will gain for him the reputation of a
man of profound learning."
On the other hand, according to the article, the king also faced grave risks in going to Africa.
"If king Leopold is not ready to face the danger he had better not go to
Africa," the article warned. "He knows very well that no European can make rain, whatever a
native king may be able to do, and he need not expect that he can compromise with his subjects
by establishing a weather bureau." Failure to produce a downpour, the article alleged, would
lead to a revolution "to be followed by a banquet at which the dethroned monarch is the principle
dish."
One effect of the Times' article is known: Leopold was a voracious reader of publications from
all over the world, so perhaps following the Times' advice, he never set foot in Africa, instead,
ruling through his cruel functionaries and intermediaries.
© Milton G. Allimadi
The
Hearts of Darkness: How European Writers Created the Racist image of Africa
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The Hearts of Darkness: How European Writers Created the Racist Image of Africa
Part Three
By Milton Allimadi
Mr. Allimadi is CEO and Publisher of The Black Star News [1], based in
New York City. He has graciously given BAR permission to serialize his work. Part
One appeared in the January 24 issue [2] of BAR, Part Two in the January 31 issue [3].
Europeans wrote the stories that formed their own perception of Africans, without any
contribution of the Africans they described.
Baker further observed: "His narrow mind cannot embrace the feeling of pure philanthropy that
first prompted England to declare herself against slavery, and he only regards
the anti-slavery movement as a proof of his own importance. In his limited
horizon he is himself the important object, and as a consequence to his
self-conceit, imagines that the whole world is at issue concerning the black
man." Baker continued: "England, the great chief of the commercial world, possesses a power
that enforces a
grave responsibility. She has the force to civilize. She is the natural colonizer of the world. In
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the short space of three centuries, America, sprung from her loins, has become a giant offspring,
a new era in the history of the human race, a new birth whose future must be
overwhelming." England's remaining task was to "wrest from
utter savagedom those mighty tracts of the earth's surface wasted from the
creation of the world - a darkness to be enlightened by English colonization."
Baker was the perfect agent and propagandist for European commercial conquest of Africa.
Only trade with the "civilized" world could rescue the barbarian continent. "The savage must
learn to want; he must learn to be ambitious; and to covet more than the mere animal necessities
of food and drink," Baker explained. "This can only be taught by a communication with civilized
beings: the sight of men well clothed will induce the naked savage to covet clothing, and will be
the first steps towards commerce. To obtain the supply, the savage must produce some articles
in return as a medium of barter, some natural production of his country adapted to the trader's
wants."
"Baker was
infuriated whenever he encountered Black men who did not accept the natural
order of things."
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Eventually, Baker traveled further north and reached the Lutoko, who live in what's now part of
the Sudan. It was here that Baker had the remarkable conversation with Commoro, the Lutoko
chief, whom he described as "the most clever and common-sense savage that I had seen in these
countries."
Baker: "But why should you disturb the bones of those whom you have already buried, and
expose them on the outskirts of the town?"
Commoro: "It was the custom of our forefathers, therefore we continue to observe it."
Baker: "Have you no belief in a future existence after death? Is not some idea expressed in the
act
of exhuming the bones after the flesh is decayed?"
Commoro: "Existence after death! How can that be? Can a dead man get out of his grave unless
we dig him out?"
Baker: "Do you think that man is like a beast, that dies and is ended?"
Commoro: "Certainly; an ox is stronger than a man; but he dies and his bones last longer; they
are bigger. A man's bone breaks quickly - he is weak."
Baker: "Is not a man superior in sense to an ox? Has he not a mind to direct his actions?"
Commoro: "Some men are not so clever as an ox. Men must sow corn to obtain food, but the ox
and wild animals can procure it without sowing."
Baker: "Do you know that there is a spirit within you more than the flesh? Do you not dream and
wander in thought to distant places in your sleep? Nevertheless, your body rests in one spot. How
do you account for this?"
Commoro (laughing): "Well, how do you account for it? It is a thing I cannot understand; it
occurs to me every night."
Baker: "The mind is independent of the body; the actual body can be fettered, but the mind is
uncontrollable; the body will die and will become dust, or be eaten by vultures
but the spirit will exist forever."
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Baker: "Where does fire live? Cannot you produce a fire by rubbing two sticks together, yet you
see not the fire in the wood. Has not that fire that lies harmless and unseen
in the sticks, the power to consume the whole country? Which is the stronger,
the small stick that first produces the fire, or the fire itself? So is the
spirit the element within the body, as the element of fire exists in the stick,
the element being superior to the substance."
Commoro: "Ha! Can you explain what we frequently see at night when lost in the wilderness? I
have myself been lost, and wandering in the dark I have seen a distant fire; upon
approaching, the fire has vanished, and I have been unable to trace the cause - nor could I find
the spot."
Baker: "Have you no idea of the existence of spirits superior to either man or beast? Have you no
fear of evil except from bodily causes?"
Commoro: "I am afraid of elephants and other animals when in the jungle at night but of
nothing else."
Baker: "Then you believe in nothing; neither in a good nor evil spirit! And you believe that
when you die it will be the end of body and spirit; that you are like other
animals; and that there is no distinction between men and beast; both disappear, and end at
death?"
Commoro: "Yes, there are good and bad in men and beasts."
Baker: "Do you think that a good man and a bad man must share the same fate, and alike die,
and end?"
Commoro: "Yes; what else can they do? How can they help dying? Good and bad all die."
Baker: "Their bodies perish, but their spirits remain; the good in happiness, the bad in
misery. If you have no belief in a future state, why should a man be good? Why
should he not be bad, if he can prosper by wickedness?"
Commoro: "Most people are bad; if they are strong, they take from the weak. The good people
are all weak; they are good because they are not strong enough to be bad."
20 | P a g e
the dialogue. He made one final attempt, which he referred to as "the beautiful
metaphor of St. Paul as an example of a future state," to lure the chief closer
towards Christianity. Baker dug a small hole in the ground and buried a grain of corn before
continuing the conversation.
Baker: "That represents you when you die. That grain will decay, but from it will rise the
plant that will produce a reappearance of the original form."
Commoro: "Exactly so; that I understand. But the original grain does not rise again; it rots like
the dead man, and is ended; the fruit produced is not the same grain that we
buried, but the production of that grain: so it is with man - I die, and decay,
and am ended; but my children grow up like the fruit of the grain. Some men
have no children, and some grains perish without fruit; then all are ended."
One feels terribly cheated that Baker did not record any
more of this insightful dialogue and instead chose to abruptly end the
conversation with Commoro. Baker should have asked the chief about his attitude
toward Europeans such as himself - it's clear from the preceding dialogue that
Commoro would have offered some interesting perspectives. "Giving up the religious argument
as a failure, I resolved upon more practical inquiries," Baker wrote, and
described how he asked the chief to show him how to get to Luta N'zige, the great lake through
which the river Nile flowed, so he could "discover" it.
"Suppose you reach the great lake, what will you do with it?" Commoro asked Baker, and we
can almost see the wise chief mischievously scratching his chin. "What will be the
good of it? If you find that the large river does flow from it, what then?"
Chief Commoro would have been puzzled and amused had someone
informed him that the strange white man eventually reached the lake and that
upon his return to England, renamed it Lake Albert in honor of Queen Victoria's
husband; and, for his "unique" discovery in Africa, Baker was knighted by the
Crown. Commoro would have been more shocked that, nearly a century later, long
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after Uganda's formal independence in 1962 from Britain, there was a school
still named Sir Samuel Baker Secondary School in Uganda.
The Times' editors were angered and taken aback by the Zulus'
temerity, for daring to defend themselves against the British
forces intent on conquering them and occupying their land.
"Sooner or later, the powerful nation was destined to bring the
savage tribe into abject submission or demolish it utterly," the
Times article declared with finality. "The justice of the cause
had nothing to do with this foregone conclusion."
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emperor immediately rejected the agreement when he discovered the deceit,
leading to war.
The article was one of the most absurd melodramatic celebrations of European imperial assault
on Africa, declaring that Italy had "achieved triumph upon triumph in Africa," and that there was
a surrender by "all the tribes," and when the Italians occupied Adowa (or Adwa), the ancient
capital, they were welcomed "by the natives as liberators." Since not a single "native" was
quoted, we can easily dismiss this assertion as propaganda.
"Europe now marvels and perhaps scarcely credits its own eyes. Italy in Adowa!," the Times
article continued, in its hyper-melodramatic tone, "Is it true or is it a dream. Nothing in the
world has the power to drive the Italian troops from their central position."
"ITALY'S TERRIBLE DEFEAT," the Times lamented, describing the great battle of Adowa, in
an article published on March 4th 1896.
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The newspaper reported that 3,000 Italian soldiers were massacred by
Ethiopian troops in the battlefields of Adowa. Additionally, 60 heavy guns were
captured and all provisions for the Italian troops were completely destroyed.
Italian casualties included generals of the Army, the paper reported. Out of a
total original force of 10,596, those killed or missing numbered 4,133, while
2,000 were captured. In fact, Menelik called off his troops when the Italians
fled in panic; otherwise the entire army would have been annihilated.
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general and cut down his troops, with Menelik, 52, riding on horseback from one
battle to the next, exhorting his troops and leading the rout. Later, in Italy,
Baratieri was charged and court-martialed for "cowardice." The Italians had
been defeated before in combat; but never before by Black "savages." The
national psyche was unprepared; riots broke out in the streets of Rome, perhaps
in fear that the savages would pursue the Italian troops all the way back to
Italy. Eventually, the Italian government collapsed. The Ethiopians forced
Italy to pay several million pounds as compensation before releasing the
captives. With a few more generals like Menelik II, the history of Africa could
have taken a dramatically different course.
© Milton G. Allimadi
Next week, Part Four: The New York Times as Apartheid's Apologists
www.BlackStarnews.com [1]
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The Hearts of Darkness: How European Writers Created the Racist Image of Africa
Part Four
By Milton Allimadi
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social and political systems of the white man's civilization." There was not a single official or
document or any other source to which Dashwood attributed these views - not even the
ubiquitous "an official who declined to be identified," that many writers now
like to use. "Without this intermediate step," Dashwood continued, "it is held, modern European
civilization is apt to be to the semi-civilized native of much the same use as a razor in the hands
of a monkey."
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United States, the beneficiary of centuries of uncompensated labor. Dashwood
was not impressed by this reality. Instead, she preferred to document the clash
between alleged African "barbarity" and the civilizing mandate of the whites.
In her eyes the Africans were not trustworthy and could do nothing right
without white supervision. She informed her readers that when a Black worker's
contract at the mine expired, he was kept under watch and guard for five days "because of his
propensity for stealing, and is allowed to only take soft clothing away with him: even his
footwear must be left behind, for he is clever at secreting diamonds in his boot-heels."
"At Cape Town, the first landing you make, you look everywhere for the native," Dashwood
added, still elaborating on the natives' discomfort with the finer things in life, "You realize at last
that these fellows in wide trousers and straw hats are native grandees. You feel it is too bad to
see the clothes of Western civilization on them. They do not compare in interest
with the dashing young men who parade the streets of Johannesburg on Sundays in
red blankets, tinkling and jingling with metal and ivory ornaments."
So then, as of 1926, what did the future hold for this great
"white" country in Africa? Here's what Dashwood surmised: "Segregation is the first definite
policy advanced toward the solution of the South African dilemma." She added, "History keeps
ominous records of what has happened whenever the native and colonists have been brought
together - one or the other inevitably succumbing. In America it was the native, in ancient
Africa the colonist. In Asia, Europeans have never established themselves except as a small
ruling caste. In South Africa it remains to be seen."
28 | P a g e
for "borderline" cases to escape into a higher racial classification and to enjoy
the benefits and privileges it entailed.
South Africa's director of the Census at the time, J.I. Raats, told the reporter that 7,000 people of
"doubtful racial origin" had been classified and 260 of them had said they would appeal. This
system of categorization engendered inferiority complexes since Blacks had to literally
renounce their race in order to improve their lot in life. The law placed a
premium on lightness of skin; the legacy of this policy has outlasted apartheid
and even today Black people in South Africa are the highest per capita
consumers of skin-bleaching creams.
Yet, according to the Times article, there was no need for people to worry about the racial
categorization. "The classification is being done by specially selected officials," the
article in the Times reported, in a
matter-of-fact manner, "picked for their impartiality, integrity and humanity." It's unclear
whether the writer relied on a government press release or words whispered into his ears by
census director Raats to arrive at this absurd conclusion.
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The introduction of these racist laws were reported in a
detached and even sympathetic manner in the newspaper, which was not
surprising, considering how racial segregation and prejudice towards Blacks was
prevalent in the United States. The reporters and the editors surmised that
American readers could relate to and identify with racial separation in
apartheid South Africa; the racist policies mirrored the segregationism in the
United States. Moreover, the views or opinions of Africans were never
solicited, since Blacks merely formed the backdrop to social and political
events, as they often still do.
More than 1.25 million Africans were arrested every year for
violations ranging from carrying the detested passes, the internal passports
issued to Blacks, to violations of labor regulations, curfew and residency
requirements. Practically every Black man in every major South African city was arrested on
average once a year, Hunt reported in his article. "The negro walks in constant danger of arrest
for some technical offense," the Times article explained. "Thousands who have never so much as
stolen a loaf of bread have records of ‘previous convictions' that would make a hardened
criminal in any other country shudder."
30 | P a g e
opening of the Chase Manhattan bank branch office in Johannesburg by its vice-chairman, David
Rockefeller. "Mr. Rockefeller said the opening of the branch here was an indication of the
‘confidence we feel in the economic potential of South Africa,'" the article reported.
The crowd stoned the police and the armored cars around their
station, then the police, hiding behind a wire fence, opened fire into the
crowd, according to the article. Initial reports placed the dead at 25 and 50
wounded; the figure was later upgraded to 72 dead and 184 wounded. A senior
police official was quoted in the Times article stating, in a
matter-of-fact manner: "I don't know how many we've
shot. If they do these things they must learn the hard
way."
31 | P a g e
million in only one week. For a short period, the
regime was staggered by the defiance of the Africans who had confronted the police, the
enforcers of apartheid. "The racial differences that have plagued South Africa throughout its
history,"
the Times article observed, with the euphemistic reference to apartheid, and again apportioning
the blame equally between victims and oppressors, "have finally plunged the nation into a
terrible convulsion." Still, apartheid endured for more than three decades after the Sharpeville
massacre; and more blood was yet to flow.
The Times' apologetic coverage of South Africa was duplicated in Mozambique, a Portuguese
colony in Southern Africa. Consider Times reporter Albion Ross's interview with Gabriel
Teixeira, the Governor General of Mozambique, published on April 22nd, 1954, under the
headline "Portugal Accepts African Equality," with the even more promising sub-headline
"Mozambique Governor Sees no Reason to Bar Advance of Natives to Citizenship."
"Gabriel Teixeira, Governor General of Portuguese Mozambique, sees nothing wrong with a
future united Portugal in Europe and Africa in which negroes would be a majority," Albion
Ross wrote. "He does not believe there is any such thing as Negro nationalism."
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primitive peoples destroys primitive people." The governor of course made no mention of the
massacres of the "natives" when the Portuguese were securing the territory before they started
their civilizing mission, and whenever there was an uprising.
"On the other hand, if the material advance falls behind the moral advance, you have hatred and
disorder," the governor is quoted as saying. "The problem is to keep a balance between the moral
advance and the material advance. The end result which we seek is Brazil," he added, without
noting that Blacks in Brazil were at the bottom of the racial hierarchy then,
as they are now. The governor also made it clear to Ross that the Africans in
Mozambique did not have any aspirations or plans that were at odds with any of
the designs prepared by the Portuguese on their behalf. "A native vote is absurd,"
he told Ross. "These people's grandfathers were sometimes
cannibals. How do they vote? What do they vote for?"
Pro-Apartheid Press
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the apartheid regime's contention that South Africa would descend into total
mayhem once the ANC formed a predominantly Black
government.
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"Nearly three years after taking office," the writer
continued, without even appreciating the irony, "Mugabe now faces his biggest
challenge yet, one that threatens to force more whites to flee the country
while shaking international confidence in Zimbabwe's future. Says a businessman
in the capital city of Harare ‘It's tough, tough, tough here.'"
So once again, as Time magazine had found in Kenya during the Mau Mau uprising nearly 40
years earlier, the welfare and stability of an African country was to be measured by
the comfort level of the Europeans there. "The tribal rivalries stretch
back to the early 19th century, when Ndebele warriors plundered the
camps of the Shonas," Time magazine explained, "British settlers combined the hostile tribes into
one nation in 1890, but the antipathy remained." Now again we encounter a clever way of
re-writing history to make it appear as if the benevolent British had traveled
to this part of Africa to suppress "tribal" warfare and rescue the "natives."
Suddenly the lynchings, massacres, land seizures and exploitation of minerals have vanished
from history.
"Time
magazine assured readers that things had deteriorated when the 'natives' took
control."
The type of coverage of Zimbabwe in Time magazine was typical of the major Western media
since most operate with a herd mentality. Zimbabwe officials became frustrated with the
coverage and eventually issued the Kadoma Declaration, barring visiting Western
reporters from covering Zimbabwe unless the correspondent was based there. The New York
Times protested against the Kadoma restrictions in a June 11th, 1985 letter from the newspaper's
35 | P a g e
foreign editor Warren Hoge to Nathan Shamuyarira, Zimbabwe's information
minister.
Hoge argued that even though the Times' correspondent Alan Cowell was based in South Africa,
his coverage would not be distorted in any way. "The premise itself, I feel, is
tantamount to a slur on his objectivity," Hoge protested. Moreover, a
better way to combat or eliminate any distortion or perceived bias was "by
opening, not closing, the doors of Southern Africa nations to correspondents,"
he wrote. The New York Times based its correspondents in South Africa - as did other major
Western media – because of the volume of news from that country, Hoge insisted.
Next week,
Part Five: The Mahdi Defeats Gen.
Charles Gordon
www.BlackStarnews.com [1]
36 | P a g e
The Hearts of Darkness: How
European Writers Created the Racist Image of Africa
Part Five
By Milton Allimadi
Mr. Allimadi is CEO and Publisher of The Black Star News [1], based in New York City. He has
graciously given BAR permission to serialize his
work.
The death of the Victorian hero, General Charles Gordon at the hands of the Mahdists in the
Sudan was one of the most traumatic defeats for the British in Africa, or anywhere else in the
world. It has haunted the Western psyche for generations, and accounts for much of the negative
and biased coverage of Islam in Western media.
This was because in addition to being an African "savage" the Mahdi embodied the "Islamic
peril" to the West; he represented the antithesis of Christian civilization.
37 | P a g e
For centuries the West had a real and abiding fear of Islam, as Edward Said showed in his book
Orientalism [2] (1978). Islam, according to the West, was a "false religion" and many of the
writers referred to the faithful derogatively as "Mohammedans;" in other words, they were
followers of Mohammed, a mere mortal, and since Mohammed was regarded as a disseminator
of a false revelation, Said wrote, he became "the epitome of lechery, debauchery, sodomy, and a
whole battery of asserted treacheries, all of which derived ‘logically' from his
doctrinal impostures."
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After a string of victories Ahmed was declared the Mahdi -
the last prophet in a succession of 12 holy Imams beginning with the prophet
Muhammad. "The tall, broad-shouldered, majestic man with the dark face and black
beard and great eyes," Strachey wrote, "who could doubt that he was the embodiment of a
superhuman power?" In contrast with Strachey's sober evaluation, Alan Moorehead, the famous
apologist for colonialism and racism, in the White Nile (1960) claimed the Mahdi was a "mad
man."
"Gordon
began his regime by proclaiming the resumption of the Slave Trade."
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Trapped in Khartoum with Gordon were also Colonel William
Hicks and Frank Power, who became a correspondent for the English newspaper, The Times.
Power made surprisingly frank - one could even say "seditious" by the standards of those days –
observations in his journals, which were in total contrast to the adulation of British
imperialism prevalent in most of the accounts of the era. "I am not ashamed to say I feel the
greatest sympathy for the rebels," Power declared, as quoted in We
Thundered Out: 200 Years of The Times, 1785-1985 (1985), "and every race that fights against
the rule of the Pashas, backsheesm, bribery, robbery, and corruption. It is the system,
and not the Mahdi, that has brought about the rebellion. The rebels are in the
right, and God and chance seem to be fighting for them. I hope they will hunt
down every Egyptian neck and crop out of the Sudan."
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"The queen was in a terrible state about the fall of Khartoum," her private secretary, Sir Henry
Ponsonby wrote in his memoirs (as quoted in Lytton Strachey's Eminent
Victorians), "and indeed it had a great deal to do with making her ill." The newspapers
throughout Europe and the United States went wild. There was real fear that an Islamic uprising
would sweep to Egypt, throughout north
Africa and into Europe.
"El Mahdi Triumphant," The New York Times announced in a three-lined heading on February
8th 1885; the second sub-headline read, "The Peril of the British Forces on the
Nile," and a final sub-headline declared, "Gen Gordon Believed to Be Dead."
"Chinese Gordon Killed," mourned The Times of London on February 11th when the general's
death was confirmed; a sub-headline read, "Hero of Khartoum Treacherously
Stabbed," (even though he had been killed in warfare), and another sub-headline
41 | P a g e
declared: "His Fate No Longer in Doubt - The Egyptian Soldiers Massacred in the
Streets by The Mahdi's Followers."
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The October 1922 article was entitled "Transporting a Navy
Through the Jungles of Africa," and was written by a Briton, Frank J. Magee. It
was Magee's account of how he and 27 English naval volunteers journeyed from
the West Coast of the continent, with African porters, into the interior, to
assist Belgians in Belgian Congo who were then fighting German soldiers on Lake
Tanganyika in 1915 - Germany then controlled Tanganyika.
"And so early in the coolness of an African morning," Magee wrote, recalling the beginning of
the journey, "we turned our backs on civilization and all that it meant, to fade away, but for a
short time, we hoped, into the heart of the African bush."
"One old chief, I remember, was attired in an old British militia tunic and a pair of spats, his
crowning glory being an opera hat and a pink sunshade," Magee wrote. "I was aware that a big
business in out-of-date uniforms is carried on between traders and these tribes, but the
origin of the spats and the sunshade puzzled me somewhat until I remembered we
were in the land of reputed cannibals."
"They came
bounding down from the trees and the hill-tops, falling over each other in
their hurry to pay homage to the new Great White Chief."
43 | P a g e
by Belgian troops and they all started constructing a harbor using blasted
stones. By the time Christmas arrived, all their vessels were afloat - so the
team waited patiently for the German enemy.
When the German vessel was escorted to the shore, flying the
white flag of surrender, the "natives" erupted in wild celebration of the
British victory, Magee claimed. "They came bounding down from the trees and the hill-tops,
giving vent to loud whoops of delight and gesticulating wildly, simply falling over each other in
their hurry to reach the beach in order to pay their homage to the new Great White
Chief, our commander," he wrote. Magee then followed up with a scene that he plagiarized from
Joseph Conrad's Hearts of Darkness: "There they assembled in thousands, arrayed in their
brightest pigments and grandiest loin-clothes, a jigging, jogging, frenzied mass of black
humanity - a sight not to be forgotten."
Once the British commander landed ashore, Magee claimed, "The natives, with grunts of
satisfaction and approval, threw themselves flat on the ground and trickled sand on their
hair - a sign of respectful homage - as the commander passed among them. The
native women flocked around in an effort to be seen by him, regarding this as a
fetish which would protect them from evil spirits." In contrast to the
"natives" barbaric form of celebration, the Europeans, Magee wrote, "expressed their joy in the
usual demonstrative Continental fashion of embracing and kissing each other and by
singing of their national anthem."
This psychotic writer saved his best concoction for the last
part of his fairy tale. The Belgians had decided to test a Marconi wireless
44 | P a g e
equipment at the precise moment that they were also test-flying a newly
assembled plane. "Picture, therefore, the amazement of the superstitious negroes," Magee wrote,
"when, shortly after the wireless had begun sending testing messages, with the rasping, crackling
of electrical sparks, lo and behold came the answer to their prayer to Heaven, as the natives
thought, in the form of a low droning, gradually getting louder."
He continued, "Suddenly, the seaplane shot into view out of the sky, describing circles and going
through sundry evolutions over the camp. The natives stood spellbound, gaping
upward with arms extended, eyes bulging, and mouths agape. The airmen then made
a sudden dive downward and that broke the spell. The savages bounded off into
the bush, terror lending wings to their progress. Mothers snatched up
pickaninies and dived for the shelter of their kraals, shrieking at the top of
their voices, it was real pandemonium."
45 | P a g e
After British and French colonial armies clashed with
Germans in Africa, a New York Times
article published on March 20th, 1915 under the headline "African War A Blot," reported that the
Duke of Mecklenburg, who was the president of
the German Colonial Society, had complained bitterly in a letter. According to the good Duke,
"The actions of the British and French are destroying the civilizing work of Europeans in Africa
and that this procedure constitutes a ‘mockery of the law of nations and
definite international agreements.'"
"Before the eyes of natives, white men, with the aid of blacks, now
engage in the slaughter of white men," the Duke protested, in his letter, "The
effect of that unhappy racial encounter can be only fatal to the future
colonizing work of every European nation in Africa."
The Duke also complained in his letter that the French had
transported German captives from Togo and Cameroon to French Dahomey, making
them walk 300 miles in the process. The Germans were forced to suffer further
indignity during the journey. According to the Duke, the white captives were "compelled to do
manual work under the supervision of black men."
"It will be a great injustice to our great dominions," Hume is quoted as telling Parliament, "to tell
them that the colonies, which, in a large measure, they conquered by their blood and valor, are to
pass under the control of anybody but the empire to which they belong." Perhaps it had
never occurred to Hume; was it not plausible that the "natives" might have preferred to govern
themselves?
During the 1930s, Italy was once again contemplating the conquest of Ethiopia. An article
published in The New York Times on December 23rd, 1934, under the
headline "Abyssinia Encircled by Covetous Powers," reported that Italy wanted
to control Ethiopia before Germany and Japan. All these countries, the Times explained, coveted
the "vast potential sales to Abyssinia's millions" the "quantities of the cheap gimcracks which so
fascinate semi-civilized
populations."
46 | P a g e
The Italians remembered their annihilation at the
hands of Menelik's army in 1896, as the Times
article recalled. Here's how the newspaper
characterized that Italian defeat: "There was a fast
and fierce clash, the battle of Adowa, in which a
quarter of a million savage black warriors,
equipped mainly with spear and shield, slaughtered
nearly 40,000 Italians
practically in their tracks and in spite of the Italian
rifles and artillery." Here,
almost 40 years later, there is an attempt to re-write
history, to make it
appear as if the Italians had not been fairly
defeated, and had been merely
overwhelmed by superior numbers. The writer never bothered to consult the Times' own archives
to learn how his predecessors had documented Ethiopia's great victory. In fact, Menelik's army
had numbered about 70,000, not the 250,000 the Times now claimed.
"The insult of defeat has rankled in the breasts of Italian militarists these many decades," the
Times article explained, "Fully as strongly as burned the Ethiopian
conviction that, having once beaten Europe at her game of war, Abyssinia could
do so again." The article cautioned Europeans and Americans not to underestimate the
psychology of the Ethiopian, particularly the "true Abyssinian" who was Amharic and "considers
himself vastly superior to a white man."
47 | P a g e
The NewYork Times account of the conquest was written by Herbert L. Matthews,
who had traveled with the Italian convoys. The headline of a May 6th,
1936 Times article read like a press release from the Italian military: "Ethiopia is Italian, Says
Mussolini as His Troops Occupy Addis Ababa." A second sub-heading read, "Raises Italian
Tricolor," and a third stated, "Finds Miserable Scene."
The brutal occupation was punctuated by a New York Times article published on May
10th, 1936 under the headline "Conquest of Africa Completed" and
under the byline of P.W. Wilson. The Italian victory, the article reported,
completed "four centuries of a territorial transition that now embraces the
whole of the once-Dark continent of Africa with its 12,000,000 square miles and
about 150,000,000 inhabitants." With the "comparatively unimportant exception
of Liberia, a Negro republic on the Atlantic seaboard," the article added. "The
evaluation of Africa as a white man's empire is subject to emotional factors
and especially pride of possession..."
48 | P a g e
The Hearts of Darkness: How European Writers Created the
Racist image of Africa
www.BlackStarnews.com [1]
49 | P a g e
The Hearts of Darkness: How European
Writers Created the Racist Image of Africa
Part Six
By Milton Allimadi
Mr. Allimadi is CEO and Publisher of The Black Star News [1], based in
New York City. He has graciously
given BAR permission to serialize
his work.
50 | P a g e
Thomson also shared his contemporaries' preference for
Africans with so-called European features, as he revealed, in the same book
after he encountered the Masai. "These pure-blooded Masai have the finest
physical development," he wrote, "are undoubtedly superior to the others in
shape of the head, the less depressed nose, and thinner lips."
51 | P a g e
of all my world," she continued. "If a person with an inborn sympathy for
animals had come into contact with animals late in life: or if a person with an
instinctive taste for woods and forest had entered a forest for the first time
at the age of twenty; or if someone with an ear for music had happened to hear
music for the first time when he was already grown up; their cases might have
been similar to mine."
52 | P a g e
stories and write their own histories? How would the Europeans, who had
concluded that these "natives" were bereft of vision, history, and artistic capability,
react? After reading Amos Tutuola's The Palm Wine Drinkard, the European
settler, Elspeth Huxley, offered her opinion. "The Palm Wine Drinkard is
a folk tale, full of queer, distorted poetry, the deep and dreadful fears, the
cruelty, the obsession with death and spirits, the macabre humor, the grotesque
imagery of the African mind," she wrote, contemptuously, in her own book Four
Guineas (1954). "African art, if it is genuine, is never comfortable,
noble, or serene. It is possessed by spirits and the spirits are malign."
"'African
art, if it is genuine,' wrote Huxley, ‘is never comfortable, noble, or serene.
It is possessed by spirits and the spirits are malign.'"
53 | P a g e
Esage
(The Dawn) were awaiting trial on sedition charges for having printed an
article under the headline, "How Can Peace Come to the Country While Britain
Uses Robbery!"
54 | P a g e
result in denying to the West effective use of the indispensable minerals and
strategic position of an absolutely indispensable continent." A third story,
White observed, was the British "experiment in native self rule in the Gold
Coast," which, if successful, would move the 200 million Blacks a short step
"toward freedom."
Who then was the ideal candidate for such a bold and
important mission? "I should say that
any staff man we would want to send to Africa would need to be mature and long
in experience, first in politics, second in military conceptions, third in social
and economic ideas - and such men usually have families," White wrote to his
editors. "To send a family man to Africa - much of which is pestilential and
nearly all of which is without medical facilities that Americans require for
their children - would be a hard and impracticable thing."
"But it would be a
good life too," White continued, "and a good man would be welcomed in the
greatest of good comradeship by other good men who are sweating it out down
there: The man covering it would be doing not only a unique job but a job that
never could be called a boy's errand. Myself, I think he should have some
personal knowledge of the colored problem - and in that connection neither be a
Bilbo nor a reformer - and that he ought to be a tough, reasonably
hard-drinking bachelor." (White's reference to Bilbo was to Mississippi senator
Theodore Bilbo, who advocated returning all Blacks to Africa.)
55 | P a g e
"At all events," White continued, explaining that the
ideal Africa correspondent, "would not be covering luncheon clubs in Toledo. Maybe
it could be put to him as Patton put it to his pre-invasion troops in England:
‘Would you rather be in combat, or would you rather tell your children that you
spent the war shoveling shit in Louisiana?'"
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Racism and Black Inferiority Complexes
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Media stereotyping of Blacks over the centuries have conditioned many Black
people into developing inferiority complexes that often cause some to believe
the only way they can escape their affliction is by severing links with their
Blackness or any trace of their African heritage. Fanon discussed how he had
encountered Congolese who tried to pass off as if they were Antilles Blacks,
and Antilles Blacks who were enraged when they were mistaken for Senegalese.
The Antilles Black, Fanon explained, believed himself to be "more ‘civilized' than the African,
that is,
he is closer to the white man."
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movie played again, after a cartoon break, you would be able to cheer for the
British once more." Richburg's essay, and his subsequent book, could have been
summarized into the following sentence (which is mine): See, I, too, have refined
white sensibilities and upbringing and except for the misfortune of my Black
skin, I too might have been white.
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Capecia was bitterly disappointed when she saw "Green
Pastures," a movie based on a 1936 book by the same title, in which God and the
angels were portrayed as Black people. "How is it possible to imagine God with
negro characteristics?" she declared angrily. "This is not my vision of
Paradise. But, after all, it was just
an American film."
"One day St. Peter saw three men arrive at the gate of
heaven: a white man, a mulatto, and a negro."
‘Money.'
‘Fame.'
"St. Peter turned then to the negro, who said, with a wide
smile: ‘I'm just carrying these gentlemen's bags.'"
www.BlackStarnews.com [1]
60 | P a g e
The Hearts of Darkness: How European Writers
Created the Racist Image of Africa
Part Seven
By Milton Allimadi
61 | P a g e
The United States assisted Belgium when it mounted a
paratroop mission to "rescue" 1,300 Europeans reportedly trapped in
Stanleyville as a result of the fighting reported by Time magazine. After the paratroopers landed
on the outskirts of the city, the Simba rounded up 250 whites, Time
reported. Also foreshadowing the use of radio to incite violence, as occurred in Rwanda 30 years
later, Radio Stanleyville broadcast a simple message, "Ciyuga! Ciyuga! (Kill them all),"
according to Time, and the targets were presumably meant to be whites.
"Time magazine: ‘The rebels were, after all, for the most
part, only a rabble of dazed, ignorant savages.'"
Why was this? "Carlson symbolized all the white men - and
there are many - who want nothing from Africa but a chance to help," the
article stated. "He was no saint and no deliberate martyr. He was a highly
skilled physician and who, out of a strong Christian faith and a sense of
common humanity, had gone to the Congo to treat the sick." Then came the punch
line that the magazine had wanted to deliver all along: "His death did more
than prove that Black African civilization - with its trappings of half a
hundred sovereignties, governments and U.N. delegations -- is largely a
pretense. The rebels were, after all, for the most part, only a rabble of
dazed, ignorant savages, used and abused by semi-sophisticated leaders."
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more mercenary - and far less brutal - than the African soldiers on either side
of the Congolese civil war."
63 | P a g e
Thankfully for the rest of the world, concluded the article,
"Africans respect a winner and so Tshombe banked on his firm stand against the
rebels in Stanleyville. If he succeeds, the Congo could become a watershed in
the history of emerging Africa. For five years, African politicians have
indiscriminately whip lashed the Western world with such airy phrases as
‘African personality' and ‘African socialism.' Tshombe - that rarest of
Africans who seems to have no complexes about being black - recognizes the
brutal side of the African personality, and the phony side of African socialism."
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symbol of national unity. In Guinea, President Ahmed Sekou Toure's image
likewise adorned the national currency, which was called the Syli (pronounced
silly) - a frivolous sideshow to a bloody despotic rule."
On April 18th, 1993 The New York Times Magazine published an article under the
pernicious headline, "Colonialism's Back - And Not A Moment too Soon." The
article, by Paul Johnson, praised the intervention by the United States and the
United Nations to try and restore order in Somalia, a mission initially
supported by many Somalis and other Africans. Might not this intervention serve
as a model for other operations in African countries facing similar political
collapse, the writer wondered? The author lamented that British colonial rule
in Africa had ended prematurely.
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When editors believe there is a vigorous organized
constituency, they often solicit an opposing opinion when they publish
controversial, pernicious, or outright racist viewpoints. By 1993, with several
African countries engulfed in conflict, with images of starvation, death and
destruction flashed all over the world, editors felt no need to offer
counter-balancing arguments. After all, Africa was simply reverting to its natural state -
barbarism.
The Times' magazine article paved the way for the publication of similar articles. "The Coming
Anarchy," by Robert D. Kaplan, the most apocalyptic of them all, was published by The Atlantic
Monthly magazine in its March 1994 issue, and years later, it was published as a book.
66 | P a g e
Rwanda conflict the Tutsis, with their leaner frames and narrower facial
features relative to the Hutus' became "honorary" whites.
The New York Times was irresponsible and had no justification for publishing
such racist nonsense, particularly when the editors knew that Shoumatoff was
married to a Tutsi woman who was a second cousin to an RPF spokesperson.
Shoumatoff may have as well been an RPF press agent posing as an independent
journalist; he employed all the ugly words that have historically been used to
denigrate and dehumanize Africans for centuries. Shamefully, he was aided and
abetted by one of the world's most influential and powerful media companies.
Shoumatoff published a second article in another major American magazine, The New Yorker, on
June 20th, 1992. On that occasion, he wrote about how he reflected
upon the difference in physical features between Tutsis and Hutus while he was
in Burundi that year. While traveling in a taxi in Bujumbura, the capital, he
turned around and "checked out the ethnic mix" of the passengers,
he recalled. "There were three obvious Tutsis. Tall, slender, with high foreheads, prominent
cheekbones, and narrow features," Shoumatoff wrote. "They were a different physical type from
the five passengers who were short and stocky and had the flat noses and thick lips typical of
Hutus."
67 | P a g e
The Hutus were thoroughly and effectively demonized by
Shoumatoff, and many subsequent writers covering the conflict followed this
racist theme. Suddenly there was no need for Shoumatoff to explain a critical
point to his readers: How would the RPF, essentially a Tutsi insurgency, govern
effectively, were they to seize power in Rwanda where Hutus made up 85 percent
of the population? Shoumatoff had reduced the conflict to simplistic terms that
uninformed readers in the West could relate to; a contest between the
"beautiful" versus the "ugly." So many Western writers, following a similar
simplistic theme, ignored the critical role that Ugandan president Yoweri
Museveni's militarism and expansionism played in the conflict, with his
training and arming of the RPF.
www.BlackStarnews.com [1]
68 | P a g e
The Hearts of Darkness: How European Writers Created the Racist Image of Africa
By Milton Allimadi
Mr. Allimadi is CEO and Publisher of The Black Star News [1], based in New York City. He has
graciously given BAR permission to serialize his
work.
"By the time the people who make decisions in the newsroom
come out of school they know a great deal of European history and nothing about
Africa," he continued. "They couldn't care less for Africa. If I had done
nothing during my assignment, they wouldn't have cared. It's part of the
thinking. Blacks are considered inferior, here and wherever they are."
69 | P a g e
told me, "and that he responded ‘What's a Namibian?'" At the time, Namibia was
then widely referred to by its South African occupiers and the outside world as
South West Africa.
70 | P a g e
the news," he told me. "We're back where we started. Africa is relegated
to the backwater."
Bill Kovach, a former editor with The New York Times' Washington bureau was the head of the
Niemann Foundation at Harvard when we spoke in 1992. "You have to start with the
understanding that when dealing with Africa or any other country outside the
United States, international coverage by a newspaper in the U.S. is strongly
reflective of government policy and interests," he said. "If a government is
interested in a region and American investment pours into the region, then the
United States is interested. If taxpayers' money is going into the region you'd
have to be foolish not to be interested. But this means the interest is
transitory and episodic. There is coverage when there is a problem in the
region."
On the other hand, South Africa was the only country on the
continent where the Times and other major Western news organizations had sustained interest,
Kovach said. "Joe Lelyveld the managing editor of the Times, who is probably going to be
the next executive editor, built his career in South Africa," he said.
"Elsewhere, coverage focuses on civil war. A battle here, a war there."
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Kovach complained that major news organizations did not send
Black correspondents to Africa much earlier. "When the Baltimore Sun sent a
Black female reporter to South Africa, she rented a home in a predominantly
white neighborhood and wrote articles about how people
thought she was a maid.
These are the kind of stories we could have had 10 years
ago."
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exclusively to describe Africans and argued against its continued usage. "Western scholarship,"
p'Bitek wrote, "sees the world as divided into two types of human society: one, their
own, civilized, great, developed; the other the non-western peoples,
uncivilized, simple, undeveloped. One is modern, the other tribal."
To be sure, historically, and in rare instances, some reporters did care enough to express concern
about how to characterize Africans in their reports. Milton Bracker, a reporter sent to Southern
Africa by The New York Times in 1959, wanted guidance from the foreign news desk. "If it has
not been determined already," he wrote to foreign editor, Emanuel Freedman, on April 8th,
1959, "I think some style guidance should be furnished on the desired usage of a word to mean
African negro."
"When we read of ‘tribal law,' ‘tribal economics,' or ‘tribal religion,' Western scholars imply
that the law, economy or religion under review are those of primitive or barbaric peoples."
"In the Congo, such a man is a noir. In parts of French Africa, he is an indigene," Bracker's
letter continued. "In Kenya, Tanganyika and the Federation [Northern Rhodesia, Southern
Rhodesia and Nyasaland], he is an African. In the Union of South Africa, he is a Native. I
disregard the contemptuous Kaffir, or the racial collective Bantu."
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"It is curiously difficult," Bracker concluded, "for a reporter to handle
this one consistently in a paper with none of the taboos that determine the
various usages listed above. I would appreciate guidance on this point; and if
it is not already a matter of fixed style, I suggest it ought to be." Bracker was asking for guidance
from the wrong person.
Knowledgeable African and American readers of The New York Times also protested
against what they believed was distorted or biased African news coverage
through letters to the newspaper's editors.
The leaders of the two parties had failed to show up for the
unity meeting because of "tribal bickering" the Times
reported. KADU wanted "regional governments to insure the
autonomy of the tribes and to protect them from domination
by the Kikuyu, from whom the Mau Mau terrorism emerged
in 1952," Conley wrote. The Kikuyus,
Kenya's largest ethnic group were once again maligned as
"terrorists" for having fought for their stolen lands.
"He does not say that the discord that exists today in Kenya
is due to the fact that imperialist subversion has more to do with it than
tribal rivalries," Waiguchu wrote. "The imperialist-built and supported
elements with Tshombe-type mentalities is the cause of all that." His reference
to Tshombe was to the leader of the Belgian backed seccesionist in Katanga
province of what had been Belgian Congo. "I think he would do some good to his
people," Waiguchu continued, "to come back and then report to us the
rivalries of Jim Crow and K.K.K. in Georgia."
Emanuel Freedman, the infamous Times foreign editor, forwarded the letter to Conley, who then
wrote back to his editor in a letter dated October 3rd, 1962: "If
74 | P a g e
Mr. Waiguchu thinks there are no tribal difficulties in Kenya, he is
misinformed. If he denies there are, he is deluded. We did not invent the
difficulties."
75 | P a g e
How did The New York Times respond to Prof. Harris' observations and counsel? In a letter dated
December 22nd 1966, George Palmer, an assistant to the managing
editor, wrote to Fellows asking whether he wanted to respond based on their
"guidance" or for the foreign desk to write on his behalf. "Professor Harris
touches so many bases after swinging his critical bat that I feel you should
see what he has to say," Palmer wrote. "There is no urgency but I think he
deserves more than my bare acknowledgment of his letter."
The Times' editors, presumably with the approval of the notorious Freedman, had maliciously
fabricated some "tribesmen" and inserted them into Garrison's news article. "The reference to
‘small pagan tribes dressed in leaves' is slightly misleading and could, because of its startling
quality, give the reader the impression there are a lot of tribes running
around half naked," Garrison wrote, complaining about the concoction by
his editors. He protested to the numerous use of the derogative term in the
story, and added: "Tribesmen connote the grass leaves image. Plus tribes equals primitive, which
in a country like Nigeria just doesn't fit, and is
offensive to African readers who know damn
well what unwashed American and European readers
think when they stumble on the word."
76 | P a g e
adequate funding to their schools. When the articles were distorted, he fired
off angry letters to the foreign desk. In one letter, dated January 6th
, 1983, Lelyveld complained that "virtually all the original reporting"
conducted over a one month period had been omitted. In one story, the subject
of white control and racial hierarchy in the education system was deleted, he
complained. The printed version of the article was like "a salami sandwich
without the salami, just slabs of stale bread," Lelyveld wrote, or "if you
prefer a baseball image, the wind up without the pitch, in other words a balk."
Conclusion
"One is
left with a sense that the world has been governed - and is still governed - by
maniacal and clueless people."
77 | P a g e
the West were ignoramuses. One is left with a sense that the world has been
governed - and is still governed - by maniacal and clueless people, and those
who just plow ahead for profit, regardless of what they know. This is not a
happy thought - but the statement of it may do some good in chipping away at
the wall of bigotry.
With the end of the Cold War both Washington and Moscow
abandoned their African client regimes, a few dictators, including Doe and
Mobuttu were swept aside and weapons became readily available in the rural
areas as some national armies collapsed. When a number of African countries,
including Ethiopia, Somalia, Rwanda, Burundi, Zaire, Sierra Leone, Angola and
Liberia, suffered anarchic conditions, articles recalling the glorious days of
colonial rule began to appear in major Western media.
"The dissolution of the former Soviet States or war in the Balkans was not
accompanied by pejorative news reports about ‘white-on-white' violence."
78 | P a g e
During the same time period in the 1990s, similar anarchic
conditions prevailed in the Balkans, separatist Chechnya, Georgia and several
other former Soviet Republics. Yet, in contrast to the coverage of African
conflict, the dissolution of the former Soviet States or war in the Balkans was
not accompanied by pejorative news reports about "white-on-white" violence.
In these regions the news reports explored the roles of unsustainable military
spending, combined with the desire to settle old ethnic and religious scores
and agitation for democratization, as factors behind the conflicts. In African
countries the wars were presented as the natural way of life.
The Hearts of Darkness: How European Writers Created the Racist image of Africa
www.BlackStarnews.com [1]
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