G. Pascal Zachary

Since 2000, I’ve spent a good deal of time traveling, reporting and studying in Africa. In 2002 and 2003, I lived in Accra, Ghana on a hill overlooking the city's Independence Square. More recently, I've spent considerable time in Uganda. In addition to working as a journalist in Africa, I also consult for non-profit organizations and for foundations. In 2003, I cofounded the Africa operations of Journalists for Human Rights, a media training organization. Since 2007, I've consulted for the Gates foundation on challenges in African agriculture, health and media.

I write and edit the Africa Works blog: http:/​/​africaworksgpz.com/​

My work on Africa ranges widely over politics, social issues, business and technology and culture. I have avoided following the media herd, and reporting on the sorts of disaster, disease and mayhem articles that reinforce the image of Africa as hopeless and Africans as brutal, stupid or both. The picture I present of Africa is partial, biased in favor of hopefulness, positive action and constructive role models. I am ever aware of the disappointments, inequalities and sheer misery in many parts of Africa, but I have not yet chosen to allow these realities to fully define my view of this fascinating region.

Admittedly, I'm a critic of Western media representations of Africa. My own relationships with individual Africans inform my critique of the mainstream "narrative" of the role of Africa and Africans in world civilization.

Below is an excerpt from an unpublished essay on the Africa "meta-narrative," or the stories we tell about Africa and those we don't.



INTRODUCTION:

“Africa is where we come from”

Thousands of stories have been told and re-told in English about Africa and the people of the sub-Saharan since British and American travelers – and the mass media of the entire Anglophone world – first encountered the “dark continent” some 150 years ago. These “narratives” of Africa are diverse, sometimes contradictory and often compelling, They continue to exert an enormous influence on storytelling about Africa today. Narrative is not merely of artistic or literary importance, but rather shapes the very essence of how people comprehend reality. Heroes and villains, right and wrong, hope and despair – all these central polarities of human existence are most effectively conveyed through stories. While every story about Africa is unique, most share a structure, and even many specific details, with a “cluster” of other stories. This report identifies the most significant “narrative clusters,” or storytelling patterns, arising from the experience of outsiders confronting sub-Saharan Africa and its people.
Even insiders – Africans themselves – have been influenced by the “narratives clusters” consciously and unconsciously promoted by outsiders. These paradigmatic ways of telling the African story exert an enduring hold on the American imagination. In short, these African stories are sticky.
Often these sticky narratives tell less about Africa – and more about the storytellers themselves. Perhaps more than any other part of world, outsiders have tended to treat Africa as a blank canvas. Historically, outsiders tended to tell negative stories about Africa and Africans. During the Atlantic slave trade and the subsequent plunder of Africa through European colonial rule – in short, from the 1600s to the 1950s, a span of 350 years – these storytellers tended to portray Africans badly for a complex set of reasons which included using stories about Africans as a means of justifying their own behaviors and values.
Since the wave of African independence a half-century ago, stories about Africa have changed. Yet negative stories continue to influence the global “conversation” about Africa.
Often, storytellers intentionally tell negative stories as part of what they view as a legitimate “campaign” to help liberate Africans from various maladies – from disease, bad leaders, environmental hazards, wars and other negativities. These “progressive,” or developmental, storytellers have even gone so far as to willfully ignore or distort African realities in order to tell the worst stories possible – and thus attract the greatest possible support – financial or moral or otherwise – for “saving” Africans. Such stories that diminish or degrade Africans have been justified (though rarely publicly) as necessary; for without such stories -- true or not, exaggerated or strictly accurate – it is believed that people around the world would not express sympathy for the plight of needy Africans.
This survey of storytelling in English about Africa and Africans is meant to explain and describe more than assess and criticize. My approach is animated by a certain premise: Because we choose the stories we tell, we can choose to tell new stories. We are not condemned to continue in the existing traditions of storytelling, however powerful a hold they may have on our language and imaginations. Even if we choose to follow in the tropes of history, we can display a greater awareness of how other writers, artists and film-makers have told stories about Africa in the past – and the influence of these “legacy narratives” on the tales told today.
This survey makes dozens of references to historical works, highlighting (albeit briefly) their continuing relevance. In Part One, I have grouped these many stories into “narrative types, or modes or clusters, that hold a “canonical” grip over storytellers and their audiences. This grip can lend to these narrative clusters the force and durability of myths – ways of interpreting reality that don’t actually serve the interests of Africans and the many people round the world rooting for them to succeed. We may not, of course, be able to always avoid invoking these contested “narratives” about Africa; at times, despite their shortcomings, they may provide the most appropriate “frame” for a specific situation.
While we can not always avoid these narrative styles, we can be more aware of their strengths and weaknesses.
The second part of this report suggests, in rough form, emerging narrative clusters that promise to deliver more positive, inspirational and even factually accurate stories about Africa and Africans.

PART ONE:

THE STICKY STORIES


1. the root of all African stories is the story of the name “Africa”

What do storytellers mean when they invoke the name “Africa?” Do they refer to a race of people? A specific geography? A destination? A brand-name? Does the term “Africa” obscure more than reveal? Does the label itself carry an embedded narrative that shapes the way stories about “Africa” are received, repeated, deconstructed and reconstructed?
In their excellent Very Short Introduction to African History (2007), John Parker and Richard Rathbone begin with questions about how storytellers, mythmakers and indeed fellow historians “constructed” the very idea of Africa. While they concede that Africa is “a physical reality – a diverse range of environments and landscapes,” Parker and Rathbone also allow that “’Africa’ may well be an invented idea.” They ask pertinently:

“How was Africa invented? And by whom? The short answer, Congolese philosopher V. Y. Mudimbe, is that the idea of Africa was initially fashioned not by Africans but by non-Africans, as a ‘paradigm of difference.’ Africa, in other words, has served as an exotic prism through which outsiders, mainly Europeans, refracted images of ‘the other’ and of themselves.”

Parker and Rathbone conclude that “there is much evidence to support this view.” Indeed, for many European and American storytellers in the 19th and 20th centuries, this idea of Africa allowed them to present the physical reality of Africa a single, monolithic place – timeless and uniform, without history or variety.
“I had a farm in Africa,” writes Isak Dinesen in her memoir, Out of Africa. First published in 1938, Dinesen’s book presents the essence of Africa through prism of her coffee farm, which was located in the Kenyan highlands. Rather than pretend to tell the story of European plantations and the white settler community in the Great Rift Valley, Dinesen insists that her farm embodies all of Africa. She erases all the many differences among the people and places in this vast continent in order to present a pure, unadulterated core. Her farm, she writes, “was Africa distilled up through 6,000 feet, like the strong and refined essence of a continent.” Repeatedly, throughout her memoir, Dinesen generalizes about the entire continent, even down to the psychology of its inhabitants. “It is not easy to know the Natives,” she observes (and the capitalization is hers). Yet knowing them is crucial because, “The Natives were Africa in flesh and blood.”
Dinesen should not be viewed as anachronistic; her writings continue to provide an introduction for some to rural Africa. Out of Africa saw an enormous revival in the late 1980s on the strength of the Hollywood movie by the same name. Trading on the “Africa” brand name is a commonplace. In my own memoir, I invoke “Africa” in similar, if perhaps less crudely universalistic terms by telling readers that I am “married to Africa,” though actually I am only married to a single African who is at once Igbo, Nigerian, West African, and (only) finally African. The Africa “brand” appeals to Africans themselves. In his new album, the Senegalese musician, Yousssou N’Dour, sings, “This is Africa calling” in a song dedicated to the importance of listening to people of the region.
How to generalize about Africa, or even whether to do so, is contested. Anthony Appiah, the Ghanaian-born philosophy professor at Princeton, has argued that the whole concept of Africa is “an invention.” Africa and African-ness were socially and historically constructed concepts, he explains in the opening essay, “The Invention of Africa,” in In My Father’s House: Africa in the Philosophy of Culture (1992). Because it is a construction, the idea of Africa can be de-constructed and re-engineered in order to adapt to changing times. In Appiah’s considered view, “Africa” as a unitary concept is suspect – and has always been so. He quotes Edward Blyden, an African American who moved and live in West Africa in the 19th century, as emphasizing the importance of diversity among Africans – so much diversity, indeed, that no single category seemed to contain them. In 1887, Blyden wrote:

The numerous tribes inhabiting the vast continent of Africa can no longer be regarded as in every respect equal than the numerous peoples of Asia or Europe can be so regarded. There are the same tribal or family varieties among Africans as among Europeans. There are the same tribal or family varieties among Africans as among Europeans …. Now it should be evident that no short description can include all these people, no single definition, however comprehensive, can embrace them all.

In the past fifty years, a new appreciation for diversity within Africa has transformed approaches to the continent. Yet the recognition of this diversity even now need not preclude gross generalizations. Granta, the British literary magazine, in 2005, entitled a special issue, “the View from Africa,” as if the various writings collected under this rubric came from the same place. Indeed, the issue editor, John Ryle, entitled his introduction to a wonderful collection of writings, “the many voices of Africa.” Yet though affirming the notion of diversity, Ryle insists on the unity of Africa:

“Africa is part of everyone’s life, whether they know it or not. Along with ivory, slaves, diamonds, gold and oil, it has given us the soundtrack of modernity. And – here is one generalization it is safe to make – Africa is where we come from. Our ancestral home is in the Rift Valley, somewhere between Nairobi and the Red Sea. This is worth remembering: if it were not for Africa we would not be here at all.”

Ryle’s words are a worthy introduction to a brief survey of the most important “narrative clusters” invoked by storytellers about Africa over the centuries. The name “Africa” is itself a narrative, a device used by storytellers to simplify and make sense of dizzying complexity, diversity and even contradictions. The Rift Valley of which Ryle writes is today part of Kenya. It is inhabited such ethnic groups as the Luo and the Kalenjin. Yet few Americans or Europeans would readily declare that Kenya is the mother of us all. Or that we hail from the Luo and the Kalenjin.
The term “Africa” is the ultimate “sticky” concept, and people hold it dear. But the persistence of “Africa” -- its durability, its pervasiveness, its popularity – sometimes obscures more than it reveals. The term can best viewed as co-existing and co-evolving with a deepening awareness that “Africa” is a certain kind of fiction – a story that is only worth telling so long as it helps us achieve our aims.


2. the Scramble for Africa: a flexible trope shaped by diverse intentions

The pillage of resources – from human beings to minerals to other natural resources – is synonymous with African history. The Atlantic slave trade draws continuing attention from scholars and ordinary people around the world. The scale of the theft of African resources over the centuries continues to have the power to shock. When in the late 19th century European countries shifted their strategy to political control over African resources through colonial partition, the British coined the term (in 1884) “the Scramble for Africa.” The classic story of this scramble centers on King Leopold of Belgium, who personally controlled the resource-rich Congo. Adam Hochschild’s beautifully-written and acclaimed 1998 history, “King Leopold’s Ghost,” about the Belgian ruler’s treatment of the Congo a reminder of how history informs storytelling today – and how fresh old wounds can seem. The recent rise in commodity prices – and especially the value of “exotic” metals and gold – has ignited talk of a new scramble for Africa. The movie, “Blood Diamonds,” about civil wars in Sierra Leone fueled by diamond mining and trading, demonstrated the continuing hold of this narrative on storytelling. So did John Le Carre’s 2000 novel, “The Constant Gardner,” about pharmaceutical testing and marketing in East Africa (also made into a movie).
The scramble narrative has a structure: a foreigner, usually a white European, extracts wealth from African soil, usually in a brutal, self-serving and unreflective way. In the updated version, the white foreigner feels guilty about profiting from African suffering and takes action against the very “scramble” system. But the altruist is invariably doomed; the heroic character in Blood Diamonds can save a black friend but not stop the exploitation of resources. The white whistleblower in The Constant Gardner is murdered.
After African independence some 50 years ago, the scramble narrative required updating, since Africans were now nominally controlled their resources. But in one of the most influential stories about Africa ever told, the Afro-Guyanese historian Walter Rodney described (in a 1972 book, “How Europe Underdeveloped Africa”) an Africa ruined by foreign meddlers. The legacy of exploitation gave rise to a militant story of self-reliance that still informs the thinking of some African leaders today. The central notion is that too much outside influence will ruin Africa and that “authentic” (ie, black and indigenous) Africans are best left alone to “find their own way” without the soul-killing interference of Westerners. As Rodney succinctly wrote,

“Mistaken interpretations of the causes of underdevelopment usually stem either from prejudiced thinking or from the error of believing that one can learn the answers by looking inside the underdeveloped economy. The true explanation [for African underdevelopment] lies in seeking out the relationship between Africa and certain developed countries and in recognizing that it is a relationship of exploitation.”

To be sure, Rodney’s variant of the scramble narrative is today a minor note, but a persistent one. In the realm of political economy, the narrative gives shape to resistance to genetically-modified crops and even to vaccines and other Western medicines that remain, on the African street, subject to a great many suspicions. Rodney’s stories of African victimization are “sticky” because there contain elements of truth. His narrative is also circular and self-contained. He argues that even those Africans who benefit from interactions with outsiders and (support expanded interpenetration between Africans and the rest of the world, including aid flows) are simply deluded:

“An even bigger problem is that the people of Africa and other parts of the colonized world have gone through a cultural and psychological crisis … That means that the African himself has doubts about his capacity to transform and develop his natural environment. With such doubts, he even challenges those of his brothers who say that Africa can and will develop through the efforts of its own people.”

Rodney’s politicized, ideological and moralistic retelling of the “scramble” story is overshadowed by a more influential and artistic and culturally-satisfying work, the novel Things Fall Apart, published in 1958 by Chinua Achebe. Considered the greatest novel ever written by a black African (and among the best-selling) Things Fall Apart is essential reading for anyone who tries to understand African society – and the way European colonization, and the scramble for African resources, influenced it.
Realistic in style and clearly written in spare straight-forward English, Things Fall Apart charts the life and times of Okonkwo, a doomed hero who cannot adapt to the changes brought to his land by British colonial rule. Okonkwo’s elaborate sense of honor, dignity and place collide with the presumed pragmatic of the foreign occupier. In the end, Okonkwo disgraces himself with his fellow Igbo and contravenes the rules imposed by outsiders by committing murder. Achebe’s “take” on the familiar scramble story is complex, many-faceted; in short, great art. He once described his motive for telling stories about Africa as an attempt to correct the historical record by showing “that African people did not hear of culture for the first time from Europeans; that their societies were not mindless but frequently had a philosophy of great depth and value and beauty; that they had poetry and, above all, they had dignity.”
Things Fall Apart is thus an important corrective, and even today the novel has the power to open new vistas and shatter conventional ways of thinking. Achebe’s story of a ruined Africa has been re-told in different ways many times in the 50 years since publication. Yet perhaps no other writer has brought together as many facets of African tragedy and triumph as he has in a single work. Consider Achebe’s closing scene of Things Fall Apart:

“There was a small bush behind Okonkwo’s compound. The only opening into this bush from the compound was a little round hole in the red-earth wall through which fowls went in and out in their endless search for food. The hole would not let a man through. It was to this bush that Obierika led the [British] Commissioner and his men. They skirted round the compound, keeping close to the wall. The only sound they made was with their feet as they crushed dry leaves.”
Then they came to the tree from which Onkonkwo’s body was dangling, and they stopped dead.
‘Perhaps your men can help us bring him down and bury him,’ said Obierika. ‘We have sent for strangers from another village to do it for us, but they may be a long time coming.’
The District Commissioner changed instantaneously. The resolute administrator in him gave way to the student of primitive customs.
‘Why can’t you take him down yourselves?’ he asked.
‘It is against our customs,’ said one of the men. ‘It is an abomination for a man to take his own life … His body is evil, and only strangers may touch it. That is why we ask your people to bring him down, because you are strangers.’
‘Will you bury him like any other man?’ asked the Commissioner.
‘We cannot bury him. Only strangers can. We shall pay your men to do it….’

Achebe’s evocative fiction eerily prefigures the “scramble” among foreign-aid groups to find Africans to assist and African institutions to partner with. And as with the task of burying Okonkwo, often Africans cede the messy jobs to outsiders. In Things Fall Apart, Africans even offer to pay the Europeans for doing the dirty work. As Achebe’s counter-narrative suggests: having broken Africa, outsiders must now fix it.
The “scramble” imagery is so entrenched that it animates many stories today about trade and development with Africa. The Economist magazine has declared with certainty that a “second scramble for Africa” is well underway, contrasting the current intense pursuit of African oil and mineral resources with the original 19th century pursuit of colonies. While many people insist this “second scramble” will benefit Africans much more than the first, media imagery taps into traditional concerns of pillage and victimization and of an Africa prostrate before powerful outsiders.
Nowhere is the scramble narrative more seemingly altruistic than in tales about wildlife protection, which are a staple of American entertainment. In the early years of television, Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom brought images of Africa’s exotic animals into American living rooms. The program first aired on NBC in January 1963 and continued in a prime-time Sunday slot until 1971. Jane Goodall, through her writings and appearances in National Geographic documentaries, endowed chimpanzees with distinct personalities while at the same time feminizing the African quest narrative. She became a global celebrity on the strength of her wildlife studies in East Africa and her passion for animal protection.
The reification of wildlife fit nicely with Western images of a romantic, virginal Africa, where denizens acquired nobility through an association with indigenous animals. In her descriptions of Africans, Isak Dinesen, for instance, presents them “oddly dehumanized in ways both pejorative and admiring,” observes one critic. Dinesen compares African men and women to elephants, herds of sheep, even old mules. In one of her final days in Kenya, Dinesen characteristically notices an African woman “staring at me in the exact manner of a Giraffe in a herd.”

3. Africa germinates threats, evil, the unexplained and destructive; in the Heart of Darkness, rational and civilized men turn primal, mad and animalistic.


Joseph Conrad coined by the term, Heart of Darkness, bestowing the phrase on a haunting novella, first published in 1902 and drawn from a brief visit he made to the Belgian Congo in 1890. In Heart of Darkness, a European sailor, Marlow, leads an expedition into “a place of darkness” in order to discover the fate of a mysterious ivory trader. Kurtz falls prey to (inner and/​or outer) demons and degenerates into corruption, rapacity, greed and ultimately self-destruction. In describing his situation to Marlow (Conrad’s astonished narrator), Kurtz famously cries out, “The horror! The horror!” This defining moment in the narrative refers as much to the damaged psyches of Europeans as their encounter with the perceived unsettling realities of African life.
Conrad’s depiction of Kurtz been subject to conflicting interpretations. Conrad defenders insist Heart of Darkness indicts the European colonial project and exposes the moral failures of the men who carried it out. Critics of Conrad, notably Achebe, say Conrad shared many of the invidious attitudes towards Africans that animated the European exploration and exploitation of Africa. Achebe accuses Conrad of presenting:

“Africa as setting and backdrop which eliminates the African as human factor. Africa as a metaphorical battlefield devoid of all recognizable humanity, into which the wandering European enters at his peril. Of course there is a preposterous and perverse kind of arrogance in thus reducing Africa to the role of props for the breakup of one petty European mind. But that is not even the point. The real question is the dehumanization of Africa and Africans ….”

Students of Conrad agree that at least, in part, he was telling a familiar “quest” story – a template employed by the popular adventure writers, such as Henry Stanley and Richard Burton, who regaled 19th century audiences in British and America with fantastic tales of exploration in Africa. Recounting their own enterprise, persistence and durability, these storytellers – and Conrad too -- presented “Africa as the testing ground of character,” in the words of Dorothy Hammond and Alta Jablow, authors of the neglected classic, The Africa That Never Was: four centuries of British writing about Africa (1970). In the 20th century, many accounts of African safaris – most notably, Hemingway’s Green Hills of Africa (1935) – present hunting wild animals as a similar test of character carried out on African land.
The African encounter as a test of character is the benign side of the Heart of Darkness narrative. Many stories about contemporary Africa are essentially “quest” tales, where a white person embarks on a difficult challenge on African terrain. In these stories, Africa becomes a mere backdrop to an outsider working out his own inner aspirations. Dian Fossey’s life story, Gorillas in the Midst, neatly follows this pattern. Obsessed with protecting Great Apes, she treats the people of Rwanda’s picturesque mountains as a nuisance, or worse. In the end, she chooses solidarity with gorillas over people and pays a heavy price. The natives –who never appear to share her appreciation for wildlife -- kill her favorite animals. Fossey herself is murdered, and while her killer is never clearly identified, the very malign core of the African jungle is ultimately to blame.
These stories comprise a distinct narrative sub-cluster (“we should help them”), but they also contribute to the persistence of the “darkness” form. Despite surface differences of method and goals, outsiders on a quest in Africa are linked in a shared attempt at repudiating Kurtz. They wish to return from the heart of Africa with a bundle of good works (not Kurtz’s skulls or Leopold’s stolen treasures). By doing good works on African soil, outsiders on a quest can reaffirm their personal virtues by proving it is possible to enter the African darkness and return with their values and reputation intact.
Yet even the well-meaning Americans, of the sort who people Barbara Kingsolver’s The Poisonwood Bible (1999), find the things they carry to the heart of Africa get transformed beyond recognition. Kingsolver could not be further from Conrad in racial-awareness and cultural-sensitivity, yet she sets her novel in a post-independence Congo drenched in mystery and irrationality. In Kingsolver’s Africa, as in the Africa of so many earlier people on quests, coherence is elusive and the landscape is the color of night. Her characters find themselves in “the darkest Africa,” Kingsolver writes, “where life roars by you like a flood and you grab whatever looks like it will hold you up.”
At least Kingslover identifies provisional forms of redemption and meaning – and in doing so – in repudiating Kurtz -- she illustrates an important counter-narrative in the Heart of Darkness mold. Other storytellers still keep alive the core Heart of Darkness motif, which remains perhaps the most popular way of shape African stories about disaster, disease and mayhem. The story of HIV-AIDS of course is sometimes set in these terms (though less and less). In The Hot Zone, the classic 1994 account of a deadly (Ebola) virus arising out of the central African jungle, Richard Preston skillfully renovates the Conradian nightmare vision of a dark Africa spawning unimaginable perils. While Preston pointedly insists his “story is true,” he evokes, consciously or not, the image of Africa as the ultimate menace – lethal, protean, incomprehensible and only controllable through highly sophisticated, powerful Western technology.
Another new cluster of stories in the “darkness” mode equates Africa with disorder, chaos, anarchy. In The Coming Anarchy, a 1994 article in The Atlantic Monthly, journalist Robert Kaplan argued that while that ethnic violence occurs everywhere in the world, the worst cases could be found in West Africa. In Sierra Leone especially, Kaplan saw ancient, tribal enmities fueling contemporary violence. There was, in short, little or nothing outsiders could do to prevent (or cause) these violent outpourings which stemmed from somewhere deep inside the African past. Later investigators found much evidence to contradict Kaplan’s explanations. It turns out that so-called tribal affiliations are often constructed, and of recent origin, and hardly the proximate cause of fresh violence. In nearly all of the so-called “tribal wars” in Africa, starting with the Biafran secession in the late 1960s and continuing into the 1990s with the Hutu-Tutsi wars in Rwanda and Burundi, the opposing ethnic groups had long happily co-existed and even heavily inter-married. Ethnic violence, far from reflecting old strife, often seemed to ignite rapidly and then burn out quickly. The very complexity of communal violence in Africa paradoxically pushed storytellers to embrace the simplicity of the “darkness” narrative.
Finally, in the new narratives carrying forward the “darkness” tradition, the role of Kurtz – the alien white -- is sometimes assumed by tyrannical African men, such as Idi Amin, Robert Mugabe and Joseph Kony. Indeed, the list of African bad guys is very long. Like Kurtz, these bad guys are driven by inner demons that storytellers need not explain. In Last King of Scotland, the Idi Amin character is witty, fun-loving and brutal, a power-mad dictator who’s immorality neither receives nor appears to require any explanation. In The Wizard of the Nile, a new book of stories about Kony, an indicted international war criminal, author Mathew Green unabashedly applies “darkness” imagery to its main character, even as he frets repeatedly that demonizing a single African man obscures more than it explains and ultimately diminishes his subject.
Africans themselves are not immune to leveraging the Darkness narrative. Two recent novels by young West Africans rely chiefly on the durable notion of Africa as a spawning ground for bestiality. In a short debut novel published in 2005, “Beasts of No Nation,” Uzodinma Iweala trades on the image of African child soldiers as youth with little to lose and easily transformed from innocent villagers into cold killers. Iweala, a Nigerian from an elite family who attended Harvard University, describes the inner life of one child soldier. Reviewers praised his writing and insights into depraved African personalities, even though he apparently never met any African youth of this ilk. Indeed, his melodrama pointedly avoids providing any clues as to where these child soldiers might live. Readers saw the work as echoing Conrad; the headline for the review in The New York Times explicitly referenced the main character’s “heart of darkness.” Similar, the best-selling recent book in the U.S. written by an African, Ishmael Beah’s sensational memoir of his purported life as a child soldier in Sierra Leone, “A Long Way Gone” also evokes Conradian themes.
However paradoxical, the notion that Africa breeds a special kind of threat and, yet at the same time, presents a special opportunity for good words and redemption is a literary cliché firmly rooted in the past and still clearly visible today. Toni Morrison, one of America’s great storytellers and winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, is among the most perceptive observers of the conflicting meanings embedded in African narratives. As she concluded after her own survey of Western novels about Africa during the 100 years leading into the 1950s:

Literary Africa – outside, notably, of the work of some white South African writers – was an exhaustible playground for tourists and foreigners. In the novels and stories of Joseph Conrad, Isak Dinesen, Saul Bellow, Ernest Hemingway, whether imbued with or struggling against conventional Western views of benighted Africa, their protagonists found the continent as empty as the collection plate – a vessel waiting for whatever copper and silver imagination was pleased to place there. Accommodatingly mute, conveniently blank, Africa could be made to serve a wide variety of literary and/​or ideological requirements; it could stand back as scenery for any exploit, or leap forward and obsess itself with the woes of any foreigner; it could contort itself into frightening malignant shapes in which Westerners could contemplate evil, or it could kneel and accept elementary lessons from its betters….Imaginary Africa was a cornucopia of imponderables that resisted explanation; riddles that defied solution; conflicts that not only did not need to be resolved, but needed to exist if the process of self-discovery was to have the widest range of play. Thus the literature resounded with a clash of metaphors. As the original locus of the human race, Africa was ancient; yet, being under colonial control, it was also infantile. Thus it became a kind of old fetus always waiting to be born but confounding midwives. In novel after novel, short story after short story, Africa was simultaneously innocent and corrupting, savage and pure, irrational and wise. It was raw matter out of which the writer was free to forge a template to examine desire and improve character. But what Africa never was, was its own subject, as America had been for European writers, or England, France, or Spain for their American counterparts.

Morrison is concerned with legacy: the history of storytelling about Africa, for her is no academic curiosity but exerts an enormous influence today on American storytellers – and their audiences. Indeed, the temptation to invoke “darkness” images and themes is tempting because the market seems to eagerly consume such tales. In the late 1980s, for instance, Alex Shoumatoff gained a wide audience for a series of stories for Vanity Fair magazine that emphatically evoked the Conrad tradition. He found an Africa filled with “horror … a culture on the edge of collapse.” He wrote about the man-eating president of the Central African Republic, and the mysterious source of HIV-AIDS which he finds in a “living nightmare of the Apocalypse.” For lighter fare, he serves up Dian Fossey, the late gorilla protector, as kind of Col. Kurtz. Fossey is filled with contempt for the local population; it is her outrage at the brutishness of the locals that provokes Fossey into a series of self-destructive acts that lay the seeds for her own murder.
A rich sub-genre of the “darkness” pattern is “the white guy in trouble.” Mukiwa: A White Boy in Africa (1996) established Peter Godwin, its author, as a foremost practitioner of this storytelling trope. Despite writing what he calls “a tribute to Africa – the home I never knew I had” – he quickly descends into sensationalism, drawing on overwrought assertions about Africa’s persistent dangers. After he was expelled from his native Zimbabwe for dissenting against the government, Godwin wrote:

“I tried hard to forget about Africa after that. I tried to dismiss it from my head as a brutal, violent place. A place of death. And when people asked me what nationality I was, I replied, ‘English, of course.’ And if my [Zimbabwean] accent betrayed me, I might concede vaguely, ‘I did spend a bit of time in Africa, as a boy,’
The Sunday Times appointed me East Europe correspondent, and I trawled around Poland, Czechoslovakia, Romania, Bulgaria and Hungary, becoming increasingly depressed at the greyness of the oppression there. After a couple of years they posted me to South Africa, where the black townships were now in flames on a daily basis.

Godwin is hardly alone in contrasting white Europeans norms of rule-based decency with the unpredictable, logic-defying mayhem of Africa. Ryzard Kapucinski, the celebrated Polish journalist, made a career out of reporting from trouble spots in the “dark continent,” collecting the work in a thick volume, Shadow of the Sun (2001). Giani Celati, an Italian writer, mined a similar vein in Adventures in Africa (2000). The critically-acclaimed Facing the Congo (2000), a well written adventure story by travel writer Jeffrey Tayler, recounts an attempt to re-create the legendary British explorer Henry Stanley’s 19th century trip down the Congo River in a dugout canoe. Tayler’s choice of subtitle – A Modern-Day Journey Into The Heart of Darkness -- says much about how old views of Africa continue to shape stories Americans choose to tell. So does the writing of Paul Theroux, whose Dark Star Safari (2003) is probable the fullest recent example of the “darkness” tradition freshly recycled.
All of these writers continue an earlier tradition epitomized by Anglophone storytellers Graham Green (The Heart of the Matter) and Joyce Cary (Mister Johnson) and the Francophone literary immortal, Andre Gide, who wrote Travels in the Congo based on his 1920s journeys in central Africa.
The trope of Africa as a slippery stage where white men are easy prey for primitive warriors persists to this day. Two of the most attention-grabbing stories about Africa in the first half of 2008 involved American journalists jailed by African governments. Barry Berak of the New York Times wrote a long account in the spring of 2008 of his jailing by Zimbabwe’s government; the article, about how his experience behind bars, was longer and more detailed than any published by the newspaper about the social and economic crises in Zimbabwe. In an similar way, National Geographic magazine devoted a cover story in its April 2008 issue to the African escapades of Paul Salopek who was arrested and imprisoned by the government of Sudan during the course of his reporting on environmental stresses of the ecologically-fragile Sahel region. While gamely trying to write about an important issue, Salopek kept getting drawn back to a story structure that serves Americans when they came to expect from African tales: white men in distress, grappling with frightening forces that neither they, nor their African tormentors, can adequately explain. Ultimately, Salopek resorts to gloomy Conradian language, falsely describing the Sahel – almost devoid of wars over the past few thousand years – as “the oldest killing field in human history.” Salopek even invokes a hoary Biblical image transplanted from another place and time, concluding the Sahel is so horrible that “Cain is still trading blows with Abel.”
Yet Salopek, an Africa correspondent for the Chicago Tribune, casualy lets slip out an astonishing image that contradicts the entire sensationalistic premise of his National Geographic cover story. Buried in the minutiae of his long tale of mistreatment at the hands of African is men is the curious revelation that the Sahel is undergoing a phenomenal revival. In Niger, for instance, he reports that French researchers have documented an area of savanna of 19,000 square miles that is healthier – more lush and vegetated -- today than 30 years ago. He finds similar examples throughout the vast Sahel, the result in part of active efforts by farmers to treat the land more wisely. “Today,,” he concludes, “without fanfare or mercy concerts, some of the world’s poorest farmers are stitching huge tracts of the Sahel back together again.”
The Sahel’s revival is but a mere throwaway paragraph in a popular article that trades on “heart of darkness” imagery and intimations of impending doom. Once more, when storytellers take up Africa, hopelessness trumps hope.


4. “We should help them.”

Some of the most compelling stories about Africa today are about Americans or Europeans expending a great deal of time and money helping Africans. These stories are partly compelling because they feature celebrities (Bono, Angelina Jolie, Oprah, Bill Clinton) or the very successful (Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, Pierre Omidyar). They also possess appeal because they show the redemptive side of people and implicitly carry a universal message: we are all in this together.
Stories about Americans and Europeans helping Africans inevitably carry echoes of the 19th century notion of “the white man’s burden.” One of the justifications for colonialism and the carving up of African territory by European powers was that Africans would benefit from what Andrew Mwenda, a Uganda writer, sneeringly calls “the saving hand of the West.” Indeed, efforts to save Africans – whether to save their souls through religious conversion, or their minds through education or their bodies through medical and famine relief – were often based on a belief in African inferiority and Western superiority. Colonialism would bring improvements and thus, as Rudyard Kipling wrote famously in 1898, represented “the white man’s burden” to assist the less fortunate.
Kipling’s poem is worth reading. He wrote it in 1899, following the American annexation of the Philippines – and then sent it to President Theodore Roosevelt. The poem, which was published in the influential McClure’s magazine, frankly urges America’s best and brightest to embrace the “burden” of assisting needy peoples in faraway places:


Take up the White Man's burden--
Send forth the best ye breed--
Go bind your sons to exile
To serve your captives' need;
To wait in heavy harness,
On fluttered folk and wild--
Your new-caught, sullen peoples,
Half-devil and half-child.

….

Take up the White Man's burden--
Ye dare not stoop to less--
Nor call too loud on Freedom
To cloke your weariness;
By all ye cry or whisper,
By all ye leave or do,
The silent, sullen peoples
Shall weigh your gods and you.

Kipling’s poem views the recipients of Western assistance – whether Africans or Asians -- as inferior to those giving the assistance. Today’s stories about Americans helping people around the world aren’t premised on any sense of their inferiority (or American superiority for that matter). But the notion that the well-off have an obligation to help the less fortunate remains a powerful aspect of storytelling about international assistance, especially about Africans.
In the “help them” narrative, two main rationales are presented for providing assistance. The first is that help is easy to give. The second is that problems in Africa are so glaring – brutality, disease, famine, neglect of children, the persistence of slavery – that not offering assistance seems inconceivable to those with the means of providing it.
Perhaps the most compelling storytelling idiom in the “help me” narrative is slavery. Many storytellers about historic Africa put slavery at the center of their narrative. Contemporary yarn spinners do the same. In writing tales of Africa, they invoke the “S-“ word in order to rouse distant outsiders to confront the “heart of darkness” with powerful Western medicine. These observers weave tales about child slaves, sex slaves, even adult-male slaves. Slaves work as fishermen, cocoa farmers and housekeepers to wealthy families. The rhetoric of slavery is so incendiary that a dramatic response is guaranteed. The mere headline, “I Was Born A Slave” [from the National Geographic, September 2003] unleashes a flood of powerful emotions sure to overwhelm even the most nuanced situations and contested explanations. Worse, some claims about the persistence of slavery are distorted, exaggerated or false. Kevin Bates, a relentless advocate for view that slavery remains widespread in Africa, has repeatedly exaggerated his evidence. In 2002, after The New York Times magazine wrote a florid profile of a “child slave” in the cocoa farms of Ivory Coast, editors were forced to concede that the writer, a free-lancer, had fabricated the child’s existence – and lied about the essentials of the story. In 2007, a flurry of stories came out of Ghana about small boys enslaved to fishing boats on the Volta Lake. The International Organization for Migration labeled the children as slaves and claimed to have rescued hundreds of them. Ghanaians asked the agency to use the more neutral term, “forced labor,” to describe the children’s conditions. The IOM continues to use the term in these situations, partly because of the media attention that ensues.
In their unguarded moments, campaigners against “slavery” in Africa privately admit that their real enemy is forced labor. Yet the term lacks emotive power, so the slave stories persist.

*

One of the cornerstones of stories about helping Africans is that help is easy to give. The story of an American physician who gives up his lucrative practice to live and work in Africa is a staple of humanitarian mythmaking. Scores, if nor hundreds, of “bush doctors” are spending part or all of the year in Africa. Paul Farmer, immortalized by Tracy Kidder in Mountains Beyond Mountains (2003), is only the best known of a new generation of humanitarian workers whose passions echo those of the colonial era physician Albert Schweitzer, who gained celebrity status for his altruism.
The ease with which money can presumably be directed toward alleviating African poverty creates a powerful incentive to do so. The rage for combining consumption with assisting the needy is a prominent part of Bono’s Red story or the widening campaign to get grade-school children in Middle America to forgo a meal at a fast-food restaurant and instead spend $10 on a bed-net for an African living in a malaria zone.
The willingness of the well-off to share their wealth with distant Africans, however, gives rise to a powerful counter-narrative of good intentions gone awry. William Easterly, an economist, examines unexpected outcomes – or what some call “market distortions” -- from aid in his book, “The White Man’s Burden.” A critique of Western assistance to poor countries, Easterly accuses aid proponents of being utopian and haphazardly doing more harm than good.
The “help me” counter-narrative risks turning African self-reliance into a destructive an article of faith. Fifty years ago, independence-era leaders in Africa glorified self-reliance. “Africa for the Africans?” Ghana’s first president, Kwame Nkrumah, declared in 1957. “We want to govern ourselves in this country of ours without outside interference.” Such noble sentiments, however, led Africans to shun for a time even legitimate outside help. In choosing a complete break with the French government, Sekou Toure, the first president of Guinea, declared in 1958 that his people “prefer freedom in poverty to riches in chains.”
The story of self-reliance, however appealing, can provide an excuse for the persistence of poverty – and a convenient cover for the ill effects of authoritarian rule. In Nkrumah’s case, within five years of assuming complete control of Ghana, he grew power-mad, paranoid and abusive. His ethos of self-reliance – insistence on driving away well-meaning non-Africans -- became a tool for consolidating his repressive state. In a similar way, at present Robert Mugabe, Zimbabwe’s dictator, tries to justify his mis-rule by invoking the powerful myth of “Africa for the Africans,” heaping contempt on any appeal for aid to outsiders.
The truth of course lies somewhere between the extremes of strict self-reliance and complete dependence on others. Experience shows that help can be difficult to give, but clearly assistance can help tremendously. Yet despite the obviousness of this middle-way conclusion, the debate between these two sides persists because narrative and the counter-narrative appeal to simplistic, yet attractive, ways of making sense of complicated situations. People hold fast to stories that support their cast of mind about how to address global problems. Stories, indeed, often trump facts. Because of the “stickiness” of these stories about donors and recipients – good intentions and unwelcome outcomes -- can benefit from being more aware of the wider currents that shape their stories and what are the persistent expectations of their audiences.


5. Roots, or the special claim that African Americans have on Africa as motherland and as a source of identity:

If the narrative, “we should help them” permits all manner of people to engage in a universal project of helping Africa, then the “roots” or “motherland” narrative achieves the opposite effect, by dramatically narrowing the number of people who possess an authentic claims on caring about and engaging Africa deeply. For hundreds of years, Americans of African descent were condemned to think deeply about their region of origin because of skin color alone. In the 19th century, African Americans were the first “to perceive the contours of the entire [African] continent” and to conceive “the idea of a singular African people … as a tool of redemption,” historians John Parker and Richard Rathbone have observed. By the early 20th century, W.E.B. Dubois positively depicted African civilization and history in The Negro (1915), which became the key text in the first history class in the U.S. ever devoted to Africa (offered at Howard University, beginning in 1922). More recently, in an era of racial equality, African Americans have actively constructed a special relationship with Africa that continues to nourish an important storytelling tradition.
Roots: the Saga of an American Family, the 1976 novel by Alex Haley, is the single most important example of this tradition. Haley’s book, which was made into a wildly popular television series, became both blueprint and metaphor for varied efforts by African Americans to reconnect with their African roots in the post-civil rights era. In the long period of racial prejudice and legal segregation, African Americans were often made to feel ashamed of their African heritage. With African independence and the civil rights movement (arising simultaneously in the late 1950s and early 1960s) came an outpouring of new stories about Africa, many organized around the “roots” structure. Celebration and black pride inform most of these stories, such as Maya Angelou’s intelligent memoir, All God’s Children Need Traveling Shoes, of her sojourn in Ghana in the 1960s. While inspired by the warmth, energy and self-confidence of Ghana’s people, Angelou also knew that a mere visit to Africa could not erase her own sense of alienation from an ancestral homeland. Walking the streets of Accra at the start of her journey, she wondered:

“Were those laughing people who moved in the streets with such equanimity today descendants of slave-trading families? Did that one’s ancestor sell mine …?

The longer Angelou spent in Africa, the more grounded she felt. She ultimately accepted that every African touched by the slave trade had been brutalized by it. The realization saddened her, but also gave her hope – and made her willing to forgive those African ancestors who sold her own into bondage. “I had not consciously come to Ghana to find the roots of my beginnings, but I had continually and accidentally tripped over them in my everyday life,” she writes. In departing from Ghana, she was not sad:

“for now I knew my people had never completely left Africa. We had sung it in our blues, shouted it in our gospel and danced the continent in our breakdowns. As we carried it to Philadelphia, Boston and Birmingham we had changed its color, modified its rhythms, yet it was Africa which rode in the bulges of our high calves, shook in our protruding behinds and crackled in our wide laughter.”

Not all the new African American storytelling about the “motherland” was so jubilant. In Out of America A Black Man Confronts Africa (1997), Keith Richburg, a reporter for the Washington Post stationed in Nairobi, complains bitterly about his experience in Africa. His shame and frustration over the mayhem, disease and disorder he finds in Africa overwhelms the good he witnesses; early in his memoir he even shockingly asserts that he was glad his ancestors were sold into slavery:

“I’ve also seen heroism, honor and dignity in Africa, particularly in the stories of ordinary, anonymous people – brave Africans battering insurmountable odds to publish an independent newspaper, to organize a political party, to teach kids in some rural bush school, and usually just to survive. But even with all the good I’ve found here, my perceptions have been hopelessly skewed by the bad…. I’m beaten down, and I’ll admit it. And it’s Africa that has made me this way. I feel for her suffering, I empathize with her pain, and now, from afar, I still recoil in horror whenever I see yet another television picture of another tribal slaughter, another refugee crisis. But most of all I think: Thank God my ancestor got out, because, now, I am not one of them.


The most important revival of Haley’s Roots narrative comes from Barack Obama. In his memoir, Dreams of My Father, Obama returns to Kenya to discover his own father’s roots. His journey also serves to establish more clearly his own American identity. In adapting his African encounter to fit his needs, Obama is partaking of a long tradition. “As paradoxical as it may sound, Africa has served historically as one of the chief terrains on which African Americans have negotiated their relationship to American society,” observes James T. Campbell, an historian at Brown University. “To put the matter more poetically, when an African American asks, ‘What is Africa to me?’ he or she is also asking, ‘What is America to me?’”
Campbell expands on these themes in Middle Passages: African American Journeys to Africa, 1787-2005. The book chronicles the fascinating, rich relationship between Americans of African descent and their ancestral homeland. Many significant African Americans in the 20th century, from poet Langston Hughes to novelist Richard Wright to political leader Malcolm X, journeyed to Africa in order to discover something about their heritage – and themselves. Hughes was so excited about traveling to Africa that he tossed overboard his books after boarding his vessel, believing there would be no need for reading where he was going. Africa would be, Hughes believed, the “real thing, to be touched and seen, not merely read about in a book.” He was wrong. Recounting the voyage and the visit in his autobiography, The Big Sea, he was dismayed to find Africans regarding him as “a white man.” In short, Africans failed to meet his expectations. The same thing happened to Richard Wright, whose visit to Ghana in the mid-1950s also proved disappointing. Unlike Hughes, who remained sanguine about Africa, Wright’s visit left him sounding almost as rancorous about Africa as Keith Richburg later felt. Wright called Ghana “a vast purgatorial kingdom;” he concluded that Africans were a “shattered” people.
The stories African Americans tell about Africa remain vitally important, because their engagement with the region has been more vital, long-lasting and complex than any relationships sustained by white Americans or Europeans. African American narratives about Africa have much to teach in an era when more people than ever are engaging African affairs – and, implicitly or explicitly asking the very question that animated Harlem writer Countee Cullen in his 1925 poem, “Heritage”:



What is Africa to me:
Copper sun or scarlet sea,
Jungle star or jungle track,
Strong bronzed men, or regal black
Women from whose loins I sprang
When the birds of Eden sang?
One three centuries removed
From the scenes his father loved,
Spicy grove, cinnamon tree,
What is Africa to me?




***