The Image of Africa : British Ideas and Action, 1780-1850

Front Matter....Pages i-xvii Front Matter....Pages 1-1 West Africa: The Known and The Unknown....Pages 3-27 The Africans’ “Place in Nature”....Pages 28-57 The Promise and The Terror of a Tropical Environment....Pages 58-87 New Jerusalems....Pages 88-119 Front Matter....Pages 121-121 Sierra Leone: The Lessons of Experience....Pages 123-139 West Africa in the New Century: a Pattern of Discovery....Pages 140-176 The Problem of Survival....Pages 177-197 Towns and Elephants....Pages 198-226 Barbarism: Its Physical Causes....Pages 227-243 Barbarism: Its Moral Causes....Pages 244-258 Techniques for Culture Change....Pages 259-286 Front Matter....Pages 287-287 The Era of the Niger Expedition....Pages 289-317 Reporting West Africa: Sources and Uses of Information....Pages 318-342 Tropical Medicine and the Victory of Empiricism....Pages 343-362 The Racists and their Opponents....Pages 363-387 Language, Culture, and History....Pages 388-413 Culture Contact and Conversion....Pages 414-431 West Africa in the South Atlantic Economy....Pages 432-456 The Theory and Practice of Informal Empire....Pages 457-478 Postscript....Pages 479-480 Back Matter....Pages 483-526 It was apparent during the 1950's that the West in general, and the colonial powers in particular, were unprepared for the emergence of Africa. The popular mental image of the "dark continent" lived on, in spite of the decades of government over Africans, stretching back to the 1880'S and sometimes beyond. This image owed something to the superiority feelings of the conquerors over the conquered, the administrators over those whom they administered. Its roots, however, lie much further back in the history of Western ideas. An image began to emerge out of the haze of the unknown with the first voyages down the West African coast in the fifteenth century. It was strengthened by more frequent contact during the sixteenth century, strengthened still more by intensive commercial contact through the slave trade in the centuries from the seventeenth to the middle of the nineteenth. The crucial period, however, was the early nineteenth century. Beginning in the 1780's, Europeans began to take a new look at Africa. Now that the slave trade was under sharp attack in England, France, and America alike, a new prospect appeared in Afro-European relav viii of thought, from the theory of history at one end to explicit provisions for African education at the other. In short, the body of knowledge about Africa which influenced African history was much broader than mere "colonial policy." It was also interrelated in curious ways, which carry the investigator across many of the usual divisions of knowledge. By concentrating on the study of what one country thought about one part of Africa, investigation is drawn into many of the nooks and crannies of the history of British ideas themselves. It is hoped that this study, with its first concern for the role of British ideas in African history, will also add something to our knowledge of the way in which ideas originated in Western society, the ways they changed through time, and some of the uses to which they were put by those who tried to carry them into action. Even more, it is hoped that this study of the early origins of the image of Africa will help to illuminate present relations between Africa and the West, and through this example, will say something useful about the role of ideas in the confrontation of differing civilizations. The trail of debt I have left in the preparation of this book is even more diverse than the material that has found its way into it. The library of the British Museum and the Memorial Library of the University of Wisconsin have been far more than ordinarily helpful. I am especially grateful to Miss Margarite Christensen of the Wisconsin library for searching out and procuring through inter-library loan the books which neither library held. In London, The Institute of Commonwealth Studies of the University of London was extremely generous in making its facilities available, and I am grateful for the intellectual stimulus of its staff and my fellow-visitors during several prolonged visits. In West Africa, I am especially indebted to Mr. Peter Kup, the archivist of Sierra Leone at the time of my visit, to