The EU needs to rethink its strategy, as many African countries are learning to survive without Europe. Europe has to overcome its ignorance of Africa, throw out the fictive construct of explorers and missionaries in the past and try to take the pulse of the continent.
Slavery and colonialism are two traumatic experiences that have defined Europe’s understanding of Africa. More recently, Africa has had to grapple with neo-colonialism, a concept broadly defined as the regeneration of colonial networks. These allow Europe to continue to exploit its economic influence on Africa without setting foot on the continent.
Unsurprisingly, cultural relations between Europe and Africa have often been filtered through those historical lenses. Meanwhile, Africa continues to grapple with the legacy of those two devastating experiences, while attempting to unravel the question of what made it possible for the mass deportation of millions of men and women in chains, before colonialism was introduced to enslave many more in their own lands.
The European mantra of Christianity, commerce and civilizing the Africans has largely been nullified as a self-serving fiction. Europe’s cultural hegemony in Africa has been shown to be an imposition grounded in a fictive narrative about the continent’s perceived backwardness – itself an affirmation of Europe’s ignorance of Africa and Africans.
Hence the question: how can Europe re-engage with Africa in the 21st century on issues of mutual interest, from culture to education, and achieve a meaningful level of success without the baggage from the past? The answer is both simple and complex:
Europe has to relearn what Africa truly is, beyond the mythical ‘out of Africa’ rhetoric driven by explorers and missionaries and their latter-day successors, the international news correspondents, who have abrogated themselves the role of reporting and explaining Africa to the world. As the continent is so firmly associated with the expression ‘out of Africa’, it might be helpful to lay it bare on order to demonstrate the route that Europe has to take in its re-education of Africa. To achieve this, a genealogy of this misleading expression is a first natural step.
In the fall of 2007, I participated in a series of lectures organized by the University of Iowa’s International Writing Programme. I was on a writing fellowship there together with two dozen other writers from all over the world. The title of my lecture, Out of Africa, fell under a structured theme: writing in an age of migration, exile and diaspora. In my lecture, I attempted to map out how Africa has been imagined and re-imaged through different lenses over the past century years. This ranged from European colonial aristocrats like Isak Dinesen (also known as Karen Blixen), who made a home in Kenya, to narratives from former slave-turned-abolitionist, Olaudah Equiano (who came from what is now Nigeria).
Migration, exile and diaspora
In the 1930s, being black was seen as a source of pride by Africa’s European diaspora. The Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s also exhorted black pride among African-Americans, invoking the dignity that had been taken away from blacks in Europe and North America by centuries of oppression and cultural subjugation.
The main aim of my analysis was to evaluate what Africa meant to those who had been displaced, either voluntarily or forcibly, as well as to those foreigners who had made a home on African soil. I can now admit that my analysis was fatally flawed because I was harking back to a dominant narrative in Western scholarship in which the continent’s history is framed within the confines of the colonial experience, when the continent was ‘discovered’ by European missionaries and explorers, the harbingers of colonialism.
Being black was seen as a source of pride by Africa’s European diaspora.
Even then, the origin of the expression ‘out of Africa’ was not Blixen’s novel, and nor was the phrase a recent phenomenon. It all started with the Greek philosopher, Aristotle, who teases out the epideictic principle of rhetoric creating character and identity. Even more perplexing, rhetoricians argue that Aristotle’s statement extolling the merits of men enslaving fellow men set the tone for what followed in Africa centuries later, while his ‘out of Africa’ rhetoric is selectively quoted to justify colonialism.
A variety of translation versions of "Out of Africa" inside the bookcase of the Karen Blixen Museum in Nairobi, Kenya, photo: Bai Lin via Xinhua News Agency/picture alliance.
As Harvey M Feinberg and Joseph Solodow write in their essay Out of Africa (2002), the phrase was “a proverb that originated in Greece no later than the fourth century BC.” But Feinberg and Solodow could not tell for sure who originated the phrase, as it has been variously attributed to Rabelais, Pliny, Aristotle and Herodotus.
They went on to explain that the phrase ‘out of Africa’ was a truncation of ‘ex Africa semper aliquid novi’ – always something new from Africa – a Latin expression popularized by Pliny the Elder, but attributed to Aristotle, who first used it in his book on natural history more than 2,300 years ago. “When so used, the sentence inevitably stands on its own as a general statement about the continent”, Feinberg and Solodow write. “It regularly signals a particular uniqueness in Africa.”
But that was not always the meaning. The first time that Aristotle used the phrase – as far as Feinberg and Solodow could confirm – was in his Historia Animalium, in which he explained the distribution of animals and their differences from one place to another. Feinberg and Solodow quote Aristotle: “A certain proverb, (paroimia) is current that Libya has wild animals that always produce something new,” adding that although Aristotle’s work cannot be securely dated, it is estimated that he was active in the late second quarter of the fourth century BC and throughout the third quarter before his death in 322.
“Let us note that the very name of the continent is itself a major problem”, contests V.Y Mudimbe in The Idea of Africa, in which he argues that the conception of Africa by Europeans is a fictive construct that prevents the world from fully accessing the continent’s pre-colonialism and pre-slavery narratives, which would engender a fuller view of the continent and its people. “The Greeks named it (Africa) Libya and used to call any black person an Aithops. The confusion begins with the Romans. They had a province in their empire known as Africa… with the European ‘discovery’ of the continent in the fifteenth century, the confusion becomes complete.”
In their book The Africa That Never Was, Dorothy Hammond and Alta Jablow reviewed four centuries of British writing about Africa and came to an astounding discovery. “An early and persistent dichotomy divides sub-Sahara Africans into noble savages and bestial savages”. The rise of a racist ideology paved the way for “the slave trade, slavery and empire”.
A persistent dichotomy
One of the early British travelers to Africa was John Lok, a ship’s captain, who not only succeeded in making good profits from his excursions – he gloats about making ten times his investment on one voyage – but who also displays rhetorical verisimilitude by using expected conventional images to describe Africa as “a people of beastly living, without a God, law, religion or common wealth…”.
If the colonial writers funnelled Africa’s history within the strictures of ignorance and prejudice, the rhetoric has been epideictic: texts produced by generations of Africans and the diaspora have tended to seek to provide the other view of Africa, usually by responding to the slander already in circulation in Western scholarship on the continent. This approach fails to excavate a basic truth: that the Africa in Western narratives is an invention, as Mudimbe elaborates in his ground-breaking study, The Invention of Africa: Gnosis, Philosophy, and the Order of Knowledge.
The EU will have to devise more culture-sensitive approaches to ensure that continued surveillance of Kenya and other African societies does not expose them to the risk of being driven out of town.
As Cynthia Brantley demonstrates in her book The Giriama and Colonial Resistance in Kenya, 1800 – 1920, indigenous African populations along the Kenyan coast had functional democracies that were organized around a system of elders representing each village on a rotation basis. British colonial agents mistook this for a power vacuum because there was no apparent figurehead. The same might be argued about Somalia, which has existed without a central government for more than two decades. The only interlude of stability for that country was around 2006, when a loose coalition of local militias built around the institution of elders took charge under the Islamic Courts Union. This system was quashed by Western-backed forces and replaced by the Transitional Federal Government.
Unsurprisingly, the prescriptive approach adopted by EU and other Western powers towards Africa, often delivered with a dose of heavy-handedness, have yielded little outcome, which is why Africa remains poor even after a disbursement of more than 400 billion dollars over the last 50 years. It can be argued that EU and other foreign powers have the right to ask how their bilateral loans and grants are utilized by the Government of Kenya. But other constituencies, like the Kenyan diaspora, have since surpassed those contributions, and they hardly make a fuss about what they give to the country.
The EU will have to devise more culture-sensitive approaches to ensure that continued surveillance of Kenya and other African societies does not expose them to the risk of being driven out of town – a threat that was recently made against some EU countries by Nairobi. This happened when EU foreign missions openly campaigned against the election of the International Criminal Court suspect Uhuru Kenyatta, which only served to galvanize support for Mr. Kenyatta, who was elected to office early last year, demonstrating the growing anti-colonial sentiment in Africa.
This is not an isolated case. EU diplomats routinely gang up to address Kenyans on every national issue. This is a reflection of sheer hubris, since one cannot countenance the very idea of African diplomats meeting in London, Paris or Bonn to dictate what Africans think is best for Europe. The EU needs to rethink this strategy, as many African countries are learning to survive without Europe. This has been intensified by changes in global geopolitics, meaning that countries such as China, Japan and India are more than capable of holding their own, and by the discovery of natural resources such as oil and gas that could potentially transform African economies. A more consultative approach by the EU could yield more dividends and bilateral support for Africa could be more attuned to local needs.
A recent report by an NGO, Development Initiatives, confirmed that while East Africa received some 9 billion dollars from the United States in 2011, the biggest chunk was channelled into health. East Africans’ priorities, however, were jobs, income and infrastructural development. Similarly, tendencies to link development aid to the promotion of social rights that may seem at variance with Africa’s cultural values – such as abortion and gay rights – are only likely to widen the schism between Europe and Africa still further. It can even occasion the enhancement of penalties, such as in Uganda, whose parliament recently endorsed life imprisonment for homosexuals. This was no doubt a protest against what it views as a meddlesome Europe.
In order to foster cultural, educational and foreign exchange with Africa, Europe has to relearn Africa by discarding the mythical Africa invented through ‘out of Africa’ rhetoric, venturing into the continent and discovering what truly goes on there.
Entebbe/Uganda, 09 August 2014: An Ugandan man during the 3rd annual LGBTQIA+ celebrations. The parade is the first public gay pride event since a Ugandan court invalidated an anti-gay law that has been strongly condemned by some Western governments and human rights organisations, photo: Rebecca Vassie via ap photo/picture alliance.
Such cultural immersion will have to go beyond European diarists and travel journalists, and cannot be driven by a European news agenda that seeks to fortify misconceptions about the continent and its people. Instead, the aim should be to discover what drives Africans and what they really care about, as well as how they intend to unravel the challenges that beset them. Once Europe is able to transcend its ignorance of Africa, it will not only find the pulse of the continent, but most probably find something of value to export back home.
The most succinct wisdom is no doubt to be found in the Swahili proverb “aibu ya maiti, aijuia ni mwosha” (only the washer knows the defects of the corpse). For only Kenyans know what troubles them the most about their country. After all, it is the only country they have and even when things go wrong, as they sometimes do, they do not have the luxury of fleeing in jets or being evacuated in armored vehicles. That remains the preserve of European expats in Africa.
About the Author
Peter Kimani
Journalist and Author
Peter Kimani is a Kenyan journalist and author. He studied in Kenya, the United Kingdom and the United States, where he received his PhD in Creative Writing and Literature from the University of Houston in 2014. His most recent publications include the novel "Dance of the Jakaranda" (2017), which reimagines the rise and fall of colonialism in Kenya at the turn of the century.
Culture Report Progress Europe
Culture has a strategic role to play in the process of European unification. What about cultural relations within Europe? How can cultural policy contribute to a European identity? In the Culture Report Progress Europe, international authors seek answers to these questions. Since 2021, the Culture Report is published exclusively online.
