White Men's Country: The Image of Africa in the American Century

185 Pages·2013·1.34 MB·English

UC Berkeley
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Title
White Men's Country: The Image of Africa in the American Century
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https://escholarship.org/uc/item/2r23s9fk
Author
Bady, Aaron
Publication Date
2013

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White Man’s Country: The Image of Africa in the American Century

By

Aaron John Bady

A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the

requirements for the degree of

Doctor of Philosophy

in

English

in the

Graduate Division

of the

University of California, Berkeley

Committee in charge:
Professor Bryan Wagner, Chair
Professor Donna Jones
Professor Scott Saul
Professor Michael Watts

Fall 2013

Abstract

White Men’s Country: The Image of Africa in the American Century

By

Aaron John Bady

Doctor of Philosophy in English

University of California, Berkeley

Professor Bryan Wagner, Chair

It is often taken for granted that “the West’s image of Africa” is a dark and savage jungle, the
“white man’s grave” which formed the backdrop for Joseph Conrad’s hyper-canonical Heart of
Darkness. In the wake of decolonization and independence, African writers like Chinua Achebe
and Ngugi wa Thiong’o provided alternate accounts of the continent, at a moment when doing so
was rightly seen to be “The Empire Writes Back.” Yet in the years since then, “going beyond the
clichés” has itself become a kind of cliché. In the last decade in particular, the global investment
class has taken up the appeal to “Re-brand Africa” with a vengeance. Providing positive images
of Africa is not necessarily a radical critique of empire’s enduring legacies, in other words; it can
also be an effort to brand and market “Africa” as a product for capital speculation.

In White Men’s Country: The Image of Africa in the American Century, I describe how American
literary investments in Africa grew, alongside the slow decline of European cultural imperialism.
If European writers and artists worked to legitimize violent conquest by represent the continent
as “darkest Africa,” the informal American empire of capital created an American
counter-narrative, showing Africa to be a brilliant frontier of unbounded future possibility. When
this self-consciously American tradition pictured “Africa,” I argue, they turned their gaze away
from the equatorial rain forests of West and Central Africa that Joseph Conrad had made famous
and instead focused on the Great Rift Valley of present day Kenya and Tanzania. There, they
looked for and found a renewed vision of the closing American frontier, a “brightest Africa” of
rebirth, redemption, and recovery.

My first chapter locates the beginning of this tradition in the United States’ emergence from the
Civil War, and in Henry Morton Stanley’s world famous 1872 exploration narrative, How I
Found Livingstone. Stanley was born a Welsh orphan—and in his later years, he returned to this
identity as a British gentleman—but when he “found” Livingstone, he was pretending to be an
American and his narrative pictures Africa by explicit analogy to the American Southwest.
Stanley employs the same narratives and images he had used to describe General Hancock’s war
on the plains Indians, when he first made his name as a journalist. By omitting the American
chapter in Stanley’s career, historians have allowed the British author of Through the Dark
Continent and In Darkest Africa to represent the entirety of the Anglo-American exploration
tradition. In this chapter, by contrast, I recover how Stanley’s most famous and influential text
1
explored and exploited the fracture between British and American, asserting the imperial destiny
of the rising American state as it symbolically rescued the ailing and elderly British.

In my second and third chapters, I show how Theodore Roosevelt invented himself, on the
American frontier, and then repeated the gesture in Africa, popularizing (if not inventing)
inventing the big game safari. Before his 1910 bestseller African Game Trails, the word “safari”
had signified the dependence of European explorers on their Arab-African guides and
interpreters, but Roosevelt introduced the word into global English by transforming the safari
into a globally comprehensible practice of seeing, as well as popularizing the sense of Africa
which it presumes: an “Africa” which is open and available to be seen and shot. By focusing on
the tourist’s power to see and comprehend, he made the visibility of skin-color the
epistemological dividing line between those who actively see and shoot and those who are
passively seen and shot. And by adapting the frontier persona he had created in his “Western”
memoirs—Hunting Trips of a Ranchman, Ranch Life and the Hunting-Trail, and The Wilderness
Hunter—he made Africa a site where Americans could still experience the pleasures of the
now-closed Western frontier.

In the 1930’s, the safari tradition was divided between the campy fantasy of the Tarzan
cinematic franchise—which sought to domesticate, rehabilitate, or render invisible the racialized
violence of the Rooseveltian safari—and Ernest Hemingway’s nostalgic “realism,” which sought
to mourn the impossibility of Roosevelt in the modern era. In my final chapter, I stage Tarzan
against Hemingway as two sides of the same coin, the fantasy which could not find grounding in
fact and the reality which had no room for romance. For both, the problem was the non-existence
of what Roosevelt took to be his primary aesthetic problem: transforming racialized violence into
paternalistic (and patriarchal) love.

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Acknowledgements

It is conventional to use this space to acknowledge those whose assistance, friendship, and love
made the work of scholarship possible. In my case, such acknowledgement is necessary: this
work would never have been done without the people around me, without the friends, colleagues,
and family who I too often neglected in order to finish my dissertation. It has been my great good
fortune to have so many people willing to put up with me; I aspire to be a better friend to them in
the future, to be worthy of their friendship. And I list these names and express my humble
gratitude because to remind myself, now, that friends and loved ones are not the means of doing
one’s scholarly work—of getting through the crisis of the moment—but are the end and outcome
of the much more important work of being a human being.

This project began in Tanzania, when I first felt as Ernest Hemingway did, that “it always seemed
stupid to be white in Africa.” Through the measured warmth of my hosts—who treated me simply as a
person among people—I began to think about different ways to be a white person in Africa, or at least
aspiring to try. To the students, parents, and teachers of Shinda Basic School, to Manasi, and to my fellow
wazungu, Noel, Monica, and Anton, may your habari always be mzuri. To Pasian Kimaro, shikamoo one
last time, mwalimu. At American University, Chuck Larson took me under his wing, told me I was going
to be an Africanist, and made it come true. Dan, Drew, Rika, Angda, Antonio, Kim, Adam, Linzey, Sarah,
Richard, David, Roberta, Keith, Jeff, and Marianne made Washington, DC a city I look back to with more
fondness than I can sometimes bear to recall. At Berkeley and in Oakland, too many people made the Bay
Area a home for me to name, but I’d like to thank Eric for buying the round, Ian, David, Namwali, and
Oliver for their valiant efforts in the doomed campaign to get us all jobs, Sam for knowing what my
dissertation was about before I did, Scott for making me rise to his expectations, Donna for talking with
me about things much more interesting than my dissertation, Bryan, who always reminded me that there
are more important things to be than a professor, and kept it all in perspective, and to Gautam, whose
care, kindness, and sharp reading made this a dissertation that was worth finishing.

Thanks to the unnamed computer thief who helpfully forced me to do a radical re-think of some
of my dissertation’s core assumptions, thanks to Sharon and Dan, whose Chromebook got me
through the computer-less stretch, and to the many friendly strangers and strange friends who
helped put the means of dissertation production back in my hands. To Rachel, Malcolm, and the
rest of the wunderkinder at the New Inquiry, for not quite convincing me to quit academia. To Shailja for
the hat. Thanks to Zach, Laura, Catherine, Jonathan, Alek, Chris, Amy, and Eliot for making Oakland a
sad place to leave, and to Matt, Natalia, Cody, Dan, Ben, Ashley, Monica, Alex, and Ruth for leading the
way into the post-graduate world. Thanks to Rohit and Keguro for all the support and good cheer, and to
all of you people on twitter—you know who you are—for having an enormous amount of good advice,
random knowledge, and welcome distraction. To Liz for the care and belief. To Irene, Gina, and Michelle.
To my parents, for putting up with me, and for helping me keep body and soul together. To Lili, my love.

i
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Introduction: Darkest Africa, Brightest Africa 1
Chapter 1: Remembering Stanley by Forgetting 27
Chapter 2: Theodore Roosevelt’s Country 79
Chapter 3: Indian Country 122
Chapter 4: After the Safari: Flights into Fantasy 162

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Introduction: Darkest Africa, Brightest Africa

From the vantage point of many in the West, Africa remains a continent of woe – a place
stalked by ethnic conflict, corrupt dictatorships, religious strife, war and famine. But today,
at last, the flawed mythology that treats Africa as a homogeneous disaster area is being
challenged by investors, economists, fund managers, and academics.
—Charles Robertson, The Fastest Billion1

In 1975, when Chinua Achebe called Joseph Conrad a “bloody racist” and argued that
“the dominant image of Africa in the Western imagination” was the “dark continent” or the
“darkest Africa” which was to be found in a novel like Heart of Darkness, his remarks were
provocative, controversial, and productive.2 Conrad has hardly been expunged from the canon,
of course, hyperbolic comments from cultural conservatives notwithstanding. But Achebe’s
polemic irrevocably changed the terms through which Conrad could be read; ever since, even
Conrad’s defenders have had to account for the “Conrad” who Achebe had rendered visible, a
“Conrad” who carried the burden and the guilt of the West’s ideological vision (or blindness) of
Africa.
Of course, as a great many critics have pointed out, Achebe’s essay is a rather incomplete
reading of Conrad’s novella. Achebe explicitly refuses to attend to the narrative mediation
through which Heart of Darkness stages Africa’s illegibility, the layering of point of view and
perspective by which the original of Conrad’s narrator’s Marlow’s Kurtz’s “The horror, the
horror” is either made unavailable to the reader or staged through this deferral, a cumulative
accretion of de-contextualization. Instead, Achebe presents the novella as a work of mimetic
realism, and a rather naive reflection of Conrad’s unprocessed consciousness, interchangeable
with Conrad’s Congo diary—and Marlow a thinly veiled stand-in for the author—and on the
basis of this staging, condemns Conrad for his failure to portray Africa realistically. Yet by
discounting the very narrative techniques for which the book was canonized and celebrated, the
stage was set for Conrad’s defenders to rediscover the text’s ambivalence and ambiguity, using
those qualities to make Conrad the exception that proved the more generally racist rule. As this
reading goes—which we find in critics like Ngugi wa Thiong’o and Edward Said, for
example—the West’s image of Africa might be racist, ignorant, and ideologically motivated, but
Conrad himself was both conscious of this fact and critical of it.3 This fact could even be what

1 Charles Robertson, The Fastest Billion: The Story Behind Africa's Economic Revolution (New
York: Renaissance Capital Securities Limited, 2012).
2 Chinua Achebe, “An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad's ‘Heart of Darkness,’”
Massachusetts Review, 18, no. 4 (1977): 782-794. Especially after the essay was reprinted in the
Norton Edition of Heart of Darkness, it has become a central part of Conrad criticism. For a
useful contextualization of the context in which Achebe delivered his lecture—both the status of
“Conrad” in Anglo-American criticism and the effect of Achebe's intervention—see Robert
Hampson, “Joseph Conrad—Postcolonialism and Imperialism” Euroamerica 41, no. 1 (March
2011), 1-46.
3 See, for example, Edward W. Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Knopf, 1993), 19-31,
and Ngugi wa Thiong’o Moving the Centre: the Struggle for Cultural Freedoms (London: James
Currey, 1993), 5-6.
1
his novel was about: instead of a realistic depiction of Africa, the novel can be read as critiquing
the very possibility of mimetic representation, presenting “Africa” as a function of its own
ideological mystification. By placing the modernist artist in conflict with the realist fiction,
Conrad can even become a secret sharer in the postcolonial project, with Heart of Darkness a
“postcolonialist” text in its own right.
Both these readings presume the primary work of textual representation; if a critical text
critiques a mimetic claim, then that claim remains primary: after Achebe, Heart of Darkness
cannot represent the truth of human psychology, for example, nor portray the beast at the heart of
humanity, or any of the other claims which had been made on its behalf in the 20th century. It
must either sink or swim on the basis of whether it represents Africa or whether it critiques the
possibility of doing so.
This debate is African literature’s primal scene: just as Achebe’s Things Fall Apart was
the foundational African novel of the 20th century, this critical framework sets the terms through
which the function and use of African literature have been theorized, particularly in Western
academe. By establishing that Conrad was not really writing about Africa, for example, and
establishing the origin of his fiction in the blinding psychology of racism and ideology of
empire, Achebe not only created a powerful sense of “Conrad” against which African writers
like himself could define themselves, but Conrad’s failures of representation overdetermine the
work of realist responses like Things Fall Apart. If Conrad had showed Africa as a primal
negation and an absent humanity, in other words, Achebe’s work must be to affirm Africa’s
human presence. “I would be quite satisfied,” Achebe has been many times quoted as saying:

if my novels (especially the ones I set in the past) did no more than teach my readers that
their past – with all its imperfections – was not one long night of savagery from which
the first Europeans acting on God’s behalf delivered them.4

This was not all that Achebe’s novels did, of course. But as a critical perspective—and
one which has come to be institutionalized—it has described and circumscribed the work of
African literature and culture in very specific terms, as the negation of the primal negation that
Heart of Darkness represented. This is both a double negative and a kind of negative tautology:
since Conrad describes Africa as an absolute negation, Achebe must negate Conrad by declaring
Africa to be an absolute affirmation: if Conrad said Africa was not, then Achebe must argue it to
be. But since what Africa wasn’t invariably turns out to be some variation on the “one long night
of savagery” which Achebe describes in his essay and associates with Conrad, the field of what
Africa is, just as invariably, turns out to be its inverse, pure (and therefore blank) affirmation.
For example, Achille Mbembe’s On the Postcolony—probably the most widely-read and
contemporary effort at a generalist African theory of cultural politics—not only opens with an
epigraph from Heart of Darkness, but uses it to ground the sweeping observation that “Africa as
an idea, a concept, has historically served, and continues to serve, as a polemical argument for
the West’s desperate desire to assert its difference from the rest of the world.”5 Given such a
framing, can “Africa” be recovered as a useful concept? If alterity, negation, and difference have
been its once and future meaning, one what epistemological foundation could it ever be used?

4 Chinua Achebe, “The Novelist as Teacher” (1965), in Achebe, Hopes and Impediments:
Selected Essays, 1965–87 (London: Heinemann, 1988), 45.
5 Achille Mbembe, On the Postcolony (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 1.
2
The easy answer, of course, is that it cannot be, and academic discussions of “Africa”—in a
variety of fields—tend either to compulsively disavow the term itself or to foreground their
deconstructive disavowal of its possibility. In this way, as a structure of negation, “Africa” can
frame the work of affirmation which is to be done, but it cannot, as such, be trusted to describe a
real thing. “Africa” is always under suspicion. There is something almost ritualistic, in fact, in
the way (especially non-African) scholars absolve themselves of the necessity to describe the
African continent, declaring it to be such a vastly diverse landmass, inhabited by such a
heterogeneous aggregation of populations, that any single representation or claim for or about
“Africa” must fall short, fail as paradigm, or actively mis-describe its object.
Within anthropology, for example, as James Ferguson observes, a disciplinary
commitment to local fieldwork produced an almost compulsive disavowal of the problem of
Africa as such; as he paraphrases the manner in which Africanists talk about Africa:

Africa…is, after all, an enormous and diverse continent. Conditions are really very
different from country to country, and from locality to locality. So, I don't know about
‘Africa,’ but let me tell you about where I worked……6

The result for Anthropology, as Ferguson observes, is that by “[r]efusing the very
category of ‘Africa’ as empirically problematic, anthropologists and other scholars devoted to
particularity have thus allowed themselves to remain bystanders in the wider arena of
discussions about ‘Africa.’”7 But this problem is not confined to practical field work, with its
hyper-attentiveness to local specificity. Africanist philosophy and critical theory has been at least
as determined to place the assertion of an empirical “Africa” as fundamentally problematic.
Observe, for example, how V.Y. Mudimbe describes what his The Idea of Africa—like his earlier
The Invention of Africa—will be about, only by carefully naming what it will not be about:

The Idea of Africa, like The Invention of Africa, is not about the history of Africa's
landscapes or her civilizations…The Invention of Africa was not a presentation of the
history of African anthropology, nor even that of the colonial conversion of the continent.
And The Idea of Africa is certainly not concerned with such perspectives. At any rate, it
does not analyze what one could call African achievements.8

Every one of Mudimbe’s sentences are phrased in the negative, positioning what he will
actually study—the discursive production of “Africa” as an idea and invention—as the negation
of the empirical Africa which he will invoke and gesture towards, precisely by not addressing it,
but by negating its negation. Indeed, by framing even non-discursive elements of the continent in
discursive terms (speaking of “what one could call African achievements,” for example, or
framing the history, anthropology, and colonial conversion of the continent as simply
“perspectives”), it becomes difficult to see the two as having anything to do with each other;
Africa’s objectivity and the subjectivity which observes it are radically distinct, and apparently
for good reason.

6 James Ferguson, Global Shadows: Africa in the Neoliberal World Order (Durham: Duke
University Press, 2006), 1.
7 Ferguson (2006), 3.
8 V.Y. Mudimbe, The Idea of Africa (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1994), xii.
3