Short Essay 3

During the first half of the period discussed here, 1800-1960, the gap between Europe and Africa widened considerably in terms of modernizing advancements.  This caused Europeans in large part to consider themselves vastly superior to all other peoples of the world, particularly those deemed to be less evolved, and to find a scientific basis for this essentially bigoted position.  Over the course of time, Africans responded by becoming more politically conscious and organized against colonial rule.

As Halett demonstrates, the period of 1790 to 1875 presented a major change in attitude and relations between Europeans and Africa.  At the beginning of this period, the two continents were relatively similar in terms of technological advancements, and mutually aware of one another’s strengths.  Up until this period Africa turned away any hostile European expeditions beyond their coastlines.  By the late nineteenth century, however, Europe had experienced a boon with the Industrial Revolution, and now possessed advanced means of transportation, weaponry, and communications with railway trains, quicker firing, more accurate guns, and the telegraph.[1]

            This widening of the gap encouraged a changing European view of Africa as an inferior continent, populated by inferior inhabitants (though possibly more of an indictment of the self-aggrandizing nature of colonial Europe than a matter of specific degradation of Africa).  Pseudo scientific works based on anthropometric investigation became more widely accepted by the British public by the end of the nineteenth century, when scholarship began including polygenesis theories, like the textbooks produced by Augustus Keane that stated the superiority of the Anglo Saxons.[2]  Here is an example of self-justification to explain why the English had achieved their dominant place in the world.  Scientific credibility is lent to affirm the British notion that they were the rightful global hegemon.  As they were “always just,” they were naturally fit to be rulers of men.[3]

            This fed into a belief in social Darwinism in which Africans, and other non-Europeans similarly holding subservient positions in the evolutionary hierarchy, were inferior beings and, as such, were acceptable to be overrun by advanced European cultures.[4]  By treating it as a matter of survival of the fittest in which inferior peoples would be extinct over a brief matter of time, regardless of external forces, Europeans lost the guilty burden of having to make such a weighty decision.  Their intervention would merely be a cause of expediting nature’s course.  In their view, they were making the world a better, more advanced place.

            The First World War marked the culmination of this period of European self-aggrandizing.  To many, the unprecedented carnage and destruction wrought by European powers, which had previously been presumed to be above such uncivilized behavior, delegitimized the righteousness of the European “civilizing mission.”[5]  For the French who had experienced first hand the destruction of humanity on the Western Front, the end of the war brought about a need for catharsis.  Seeking to “reembrace life,” many French soldiers returning from the Great War found an escape in the forbidden pleasure of African culture (as presented through European and American theatrical programs),[6] having gotten a glimpse of the Harlem Hellfighters and Tim Brymn’s Seventy Black Devils during the war.[7]  Parisian society thus entered les années folles (“the crazy years”).[8]

            Here it is clear that any changes in European perceptions of African or African descendants happened over a gradual period.  Though the performances marked an increase in exposure of Parisians to black people, it was through the lens of a highly racist medium that portrayed Africans as primitive ape-like beings.  Though Josephine Baker would become a French star and, as the article by Dalton and Gates states, prove “that black was beautiful,”[9] this was achieved by feeding into the racial prejudices held by much of Europe at the time, with performances having her at times walking on all fours and slapping the ground, and others dancing cross-eyed or wearing a phallic belt made out of bananas.

            Similarly, as the article by Barbara Bush relates, Paul Robeson gained success and prestige like he could never have expected had he stayed in America by moving to London.[10]  However, we can see here the conflict among black Europeans and the difficulties faced in responding to European perceptions.  Bush points out that acceptance was granted by whites in England based on the level of assimilation and adherence to white culture,[11] which Marcus Garvey criticized Robeson for doing – coming out against him for “discrediting his race” with roles like the African chief in Sanders of the River.[12]  As Robeson distanced himself from this acquiescence he lost the cultured support he had grown to adore in England.

            In the differing of opinions on how to respond to European colonialism and racial prejudice, Bush states that the significant outcome produced by this was an increase in black consciousness and the resulting Pan-African and nationalist movements.[13]  Adi’s article demonstrates that this consciousness had been building since the nineteenth century, when West African students from wealthy families were sent to schools in England to instill a positive view of the colonizers.[14]  Again, we see that inclusion of Africans in British society was dependent upon wealth and the hopes that such inclusion would produce favorable results for the British ruling class.  The actual result, however, was political organization in response to the European scramble for Africa and colonial rule.

In short, from the end of the eighteenth century to the period following World War II, Europeans sentiment seems to have been increasingly characterized by a sense self-entitlement.  While pseudo scientific works created the notion of Anglo Saxon supremacy in England and a cure for later in life loss of male virility by way of human-monkey gonad transplants in France, Africans and African descendants were fighting an uphill battle against European colonialism which, in its moments of crisis, grasped at racial purity and the otherness of nonwhites.  By the 1960s, it reached its end.[15]

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[1] Robin Halett, “Changing European Attitudes to Africa,” The Cambridge History of Africa 5 (Cambridge Histories Online): 461.

[2] Douglas Lorimer, “Theoretical Racism in Late-Victorian Anthropology, 1870-1900,” Victorian Studies 31, no. 3 (Spring 1998): 426.

[3] Lorimer, 426.

[4] Michael Adas, “Contested Hegemony: The Great War and the Afro-Asian Assault on the Civilizing Mission Ideology,” Journal of World History 15, no. 1 (2004): 33-34.

[5] Adas, 41.

[6] Karen C.C. Dalton and Henry Louis Gates, Jr., “Josephine Baker and Paul Colin: African American Dance Seen Through Parisian Eyes,” Critical Inquiry 24, no. 4 (Summer 1998): 907.

[7] Dalton and Gates, 907.

[8] Dalton and Gates, 903.

[9] Dalton and Gates, 914.

[10] Barbara Bush, Imperialism, Race, and Resistance: Africa and Britain, 1919-1945 (London: Routledge, 1999): 214.

[11] Bush, 214.

[12] Bush, 216.

[13] Bush, 226.

[14] Hakim Adi, "Pan-Africanism and West African Nationalism in Britain," African Studies Review 43, no. 1, Special Issue on the Diaspora, (April 2000): 72.

[15] J. M. McKenzie, Partition of Africa, 1880-1900: And European Imperialism in the Nineteenth Century, (London: Routledge): 43.