A Brief History of Europeans in Africa

By John Miller

Sub-saharan africa is the cradle of humanity, and its oldest history in the world. This little book, which is intended for a curious but non-specialist audience, is nourished by half a century of fundamental work on the question. Not only does it take stock of a story that is at least as varied and fascinating as the others, but it strives to deconstruct one by one the great clichés that continue to feed western imaginations; those who make africa a subaltern continent, apart, irretrievably lagging behind. But africa has always had an influence on the rest of the world; it provided it with labour, gold and raw materials, which played an essential role, which is still little known today, in economic globalization. It has developed, over the centuries, knowledge perfectly adapted to its environmental conditions, knowledge that was cut to pieces by the extreme brutality of colonization, yet so brief in the light of long history. But, if much has been taken from it, africa has also given, with tremendous vitality. This work is not intended to recount african history in detail, but it identifies the crucial stages, highlighting, for each of them, some fundamental and often new ideas. The objective of this book is also, and above all, to help to understand the present and to identify perspectives for action for the future. Yet so brief in view of the long history. But, if much has been taken from it, africa has also given, with tremendous vitality. This work is not intended to recount african history in detail, but it identifies the crucial stages, highlighting, for each of them, some fundamental and often new ideas. The objective of this book is also, and above all, to help to understand the present and to identify perspectives for action for the future. Yet so brief in view of the long history. But, if much has been taken from it, africa has also given, with tremendous vitality. This work is not intended to recount african history in detail, but it identifies the crucial stages, highlighting, for each of them, some fundamental and often new ideas. The objective of this book is also, and above all, to help to understand the present and to identify perspectives for action for the future. Some fundamental and often new ideas. The objective of this book is also, and above all, to help to understand the present and to identify perspectives for action for the future. Some fundamental and often new ideas. The objective of this book is also, and above all, to help to understand the present and to identify perspectives for action for the future.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Gaman Khan
• Release date: Oct 29, 2022
• ISBN: 9798215749029

Book preview

Introduction

The idea for this book came to me when, a few months ago, an Afro-descendant friend, as we say today on the other side of the Atlantic, asked me which book to recommend his daughter, a young Frenchwoman who wanted to know the history of the continent from which her ancestors had come, without knowing anything or very little, and without ever having encountered the theme, neither during her schooling nor outside. It is true that, if we no longer lack scholarly works, and even master's books on the question, there is hardly any really accessible synthesis in French. However, I had previously taught an introduction to African history course at the University of Paris 7, which I then stubbornly refined, for about twenty years, to American students ( undergraduates , most of them in 2nd or 2nd grade) . 3 rd year) of the university in which I used to teach periodically, the State University of New York. They were very motivated especially the young African-Americans , but very ignorant of the question. Their minds were full of clichés. It was therefore a question of setting the record straight in a clear, methodical but non-dogmatic way, in order to understand the place of Africa in the history of the world since... its origins. This represents a lot of reading, work, reflection, a lot of corrections or amendments... to arrive, over the years, at an affordable synthesis. It is the last stage of this adventure which is today transmitted to the French reader who is not necessarily a specialist ¹ .

The ideas of our compatriots about Africa are very different from those of African-Americans , but often just as unconvincing. How many times have I heard in my career: Are you studying African history? But what do we know before the arrival of the Europeans? So there are sources? The summit was reached when, in July 2007, in a speech given at the University of Dakar before a gathering of Senegalese academics and researchers, President Sarkozy thought he could affirm (like, alas!, a number of his contemporaries) that Africans had not yet really entered history. His ignorance is partially excusable: in the 1960s, when French research began to take an interest in African history, historians themselves, and not least, what am I saying, almost all academics were convinced that Africa had no history...because it was not written. The few originals who intended to demonstrate the contrary were considered as gentle marginal dreamers who, moreover, did not have to compete with ethnologists and anthropologists, whose reserved domain was, precisely, both that of other societies and that of peoples said to be without history".

This little book is therefore intended to take stock of all this. After half a century of fundamental work on the question, it is finally a matter of making a non-specialist French and French-speaking public understand that not only does Africa have a history, but that this one, the longest of all, is neither less varied nor less engaging than the others. Specialized researchers will no doubt be able, for their part, to criticize this essay for abusive generalizations, even errors, which are inevitable over such a period of time; but how else to proceed? It is out of the question, in some 200 pages, to tell this story in detail. This would be as tedious as it would be infeasible. The challenge is therefore not to omit any phase of this story, but to do so thematically, systematically favoring the ideas that seem fundamental to me, and sometimes new. The objective is in short to help understand the present: how to measure the current situation in the light of the different strata of the cumulative past, how to draw hypotheses on the situation today and, as always when one thinks of Africa and its current problems, what are the prospects for action and for the future.

This is the purpose of this little book, the first chapter of which addresses some key questions, including the question of which Africa we are talking about, and why. It also addresses the pitfalls to avoid and, of course, the question of sources, which now allow us to move forward with relative certainty.

Introductory Note

1 . This is the reason why some may sometimes find ideas or fragments disseminated in another form in previous articles or works.

1

Methods And Sources

Why Africa South of the Sahara? Firstly because the denomination Black Africa is a colonial heritage which implies defining all the inhabitants of the subcontinent by their physical appearance, their skin color, which is far from being as uniform as this adjective suggests. This simple remark makes it possible to relativize the Eurocentric view linked to color with regard to the African continent. Because being black or beur (Arab in verlan, that is to say of North African descent) is only noticeable if the majority of the others are not. The term black is shocking when it is used by a (white) majority against a discriminated minority. However, for a Frenchman who goes to Africa south of the Sahara, all Africans look alike at first sight because the color is obvious and erases the rest. For an African who arrives in France, it's exactly the same thing in reverse. The black condition, according to the title of the book by Pap Ndiaye (2008), raises questions for French people of color, in France and even more in the DOM (overseas departments), but certainly not in Africa. The Africans of Africa are much more relaxed than the African-Americans on negritude, of which they draw on the contrary a certain pride.

The expression precolonial Africa must also be avoided in history. It prejudges and projects into the past a state and processes that occurred late in the history of the continent, and of which the Africans of old had no idea. Almost all of the African regions were not, until very recently , colonized by powers outside the continent (apart from Egypt, conquered by the Greeks and colonized by the Romans, and the eastern coast of Africa, colonized in the 19th century by the sultanate of Oman and then of Zanzibar) . Some of them, on the other hand, were colonized by other African peoples (this is also what happened on other continents). However, the vast majority of these regions remained independent from the Europeans until the end of the 19th century, including during the period of the Atlantic slave trade (there are however exceptions, such as the port of Luanda, continuously occupied by the Portuguese since the 16th century) . Finally, independence (in 1956 in Sudan, in 1957 in Ghana, but only in 1963 in Kenya or in 1990 in Namibia) was not a novelty for a small number of old Africans born before colonization (it being understood that the process thus qualified has little to do with the independence of yesteryear).

The European Construction Of Africa

Africa has the oldest history in the world and the Europeans did not discover it: what they discovered (later than the others), and what they constructed the idea of, is their Africa. On the other hand, the African history linked to the Muslim Mediterranean-Asian world and that of the Indian Ocean (whose development took place between the 5th and 15th centuries ) remained unknown to them for a long time. But it was very important. Europeans did not begin to penetrate the continent until 1795, when the Scotsman Mungo Park reached the Niger River, whereas the Arabs of the Maghreb had reached it as early as the 9th century, and those of Arabia had arrived on the eastern coast of Africa before Roman times.

But it was the Europeans, on the occasion of the Great Discoveries, who made geographical Africa an object of study; and the knowledge accumulated, then refined from the period from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century , was transmitted practically unchanged until recently. In Antiquity, the Mediterranean world did not know Africa as a continent: the unknown or poorly known areas to the south of Egypt or the Maghreb were called Nubia, Ethiopia or Libya, depending on the case. Africa appeared among the Romans, but to designate only the immediate hinterland of their great enemy, Carthage of the Punics (hence the nickname given to its conqueror, Scipio Africanus). As for Africa, its name will be taken up by the Arabs of South Africa. North under the name of Ifriqiya. But it was only with the circumnavigation of the continent by the Portuguese, at the very end of the 15th century – when the Cape of Storms was crossed, then renamed Good Hope (1498) – that it was thus designated. Africa was born from cartography . From the 16th century, European writings described it and constituted it from their point of view: merchants, missionaries, explorers, travelers of all kinds and slave traders elaborated their own idea of Africa . The Congolese philosopher Valentin Mudimbe inventoried and deconstructed its manufacture in two works: The Invention , then The Idea of Africa , in the 1980s ¹ , works not translated into French to date, unlike the analogous work of Edward Said on the European Construction of Orientalism (1978), translated from 1980.

From Racism To Racism

Why is the history of Africa today so misunderstood, marginalized, forgotten, and even rejected? At the origin of this contempt is the eloquently called slave trade. However, this trade in black slaves, which intensified in the ¹⁷th century on the European side, was added to much older trades - directed towards the Mediterranean world or the ocean. Indian — led by Arab-Muslims from the 9th century . The big difference is that until then the slaves, always foreigners, had also been whites (the word slave comes from Slavic or Slavonia). The originality of the Atlantic slave trade was to determine once and for all the color of the slaves: from the 17th century, and especially in the 18th century , an Atlantic slave could only be black, and all Blacks were in fact destined by nature to become a slave, so much so that the word negro became synonymous with slave. Thus, paradoxically, the negative construction of the continent was confirmed during the Age of Enlightenment. We know the root cause: Eurocentrism, which has dominated the genesis of science since the beginning of modern times, in the 18th century and even more so in the ¹⁹th century . Unfortunately for Africa, history and ethnology took shape precisely at that time, when European supremacy was violently asserting itself over the rest of the world. The latter suffered from it, because the point of view of the observer was transformed for a long, too long a period, into universal truth.

If the philosophers of the XVIII E century were hostile to slavery, their attitude was more ambiguous when it was a question of the mental and intellectual capacities of the Blacks. Theories have varied. Thus, Tsar Peter I of Russia, a great admirer of the Enlightenment, wanted to demonstrate that intelligence was an aristocratic gift, whatever the original race; he raised at the Russian court a young slave supposed to be the son of a Cameroonian prince, who became one of its main generals and was the great-grandfather of the poet Pushkin. However, this openness gradually disappeared in the ¹⁹th century as the principles of what may be called racialism (different from racism in that it was based on what was then considered scientific evidence ). The first to differentiate between three races (white, yellow and black) was the naturalist Buffon at the end of the ¹⁸th century . This corresponded to the discovery of the interior of the continent by Europeans. The apprehension of geography and African societies was therefore accompanied by the systematization of the idea of inequality between races. The distinction between superior races - white of course - and inferior races - the most denigrated being the black - was finally scientified by the specialists, doctors, biologists and physical anthropologists of the last third of the ¹⁹th century . The whole thing stemmed almost directly from the opprobrium born, during the previous centuries, of the so-called slave trade (the word itself insists on the color). By the end of the 19th century, the Atlantic slave trade had almost completely disappeared, but the conviction of racial inequality and the inability of blacks to ensure their own development was anchored in Western consciousness. As for the first half of the 20th century , it was characterized by the rise of racism , which became pure prejudice from the moment when progress in genetics, in the 1920s, had shown that the human species was unique ² . The conviction of a difference between races, alas, will not be less solidly maintained beyond that, since the geography program of the sixth year still invited in 1960, and in addition with regard to Africa, to the study of the three great races, a mention which does not will disappear from the instructions of the National Education only in 1971 ³ .

This lack of knowledge and this contempt for blacks therefore has a long history. We can follow its accentuation in specialized literature throughout the 19th century. The curiosity or even the enthusiasm of the first discoverers gave way to increasingly critical accounts, calling for the colonial conquest of these barbarian peoples subjected to the yoke of bloodthirsty despots and slaveholders – and who therefore remained to be civilized. These ideas will be taken up in another form during colonization. This, in turn, established a legal, statutory difference between the citizen (a few hundred assimilated) and the mass of natives ( natives in English), that is to say individuals subject to a special legal system, that of the so-called indigénat codes. This unequal regime, invented in Kabylie in 1874 following the 1871 insurrection, was then extended to the rest of Algeria and then adapted to the other French colonies. It was in Black Africa, where he did not disappear until 1946, that he lasted the longest. The heritage bequeathed by the West is therefore heavy; the contemporary Western imagination is nourished by this cumulative past of contempt for the Black or the African, passed from pagan to slave, then from slave to native. Today, this results in the opposition between the supposedly native Frenchman (white and Christian) and the immigrant (implied black or North African Muslim). This exacerbated nationalist tendency finally gave birth, in metropolitan France, to a final aberration: the non-institutional concept of national identity. This entity limited to an