The Image of Africa

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Since World War II, Westerners have become increasingly self-critical regarding their images of the world. Factors such as the Holocaust, the independence of countries in Africa and Asia, the American civil rights movement, the rise of modern anthropology, and new understandings of evolution and human biology have prompted examinations of how the West imagined other countries to be. For Africa, from ancient times on, Western images of Africa have reflected more the cultures of the West than those of Africa. Thus, for example, as the West became more interested in exploiting Africa through the slave trade and colonialism, Africa’s image in the West deteriorated. Moreover, as the West shifted from biblical to scientific understandings of the world, the West’s images of Africa also shifted, with increasingly biological and evolutionary (and thus racist) explanations for an African difference. Critical studies of the history of images of Africa continue to find new examples of ways images of Africa have shaped and justified Western self-perceptions. An increasing number of studies have also investigated the images of Africa that have emerged in popular culture in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. Many such images overemphasize what are considered to be African problems and are thus defined as culturalist, because they focus on cultural differences and attempt to explain those differences in terms of Africa’s supposedly less-evolved cultures. By contrast, the images that have emerged in modern Afrocentrism, a movement among African Americans, tend to overemphasize and romanticize the achievements of Africa’s societies and their cultural contributions.

General Overviews

Overviews often emphasize images of Africa in specific periods rather than in the whole of Western history; thus, studies in this section are divided chronologically into four broad periods: Antiquity, Antiquity to the Enlightenment, the Enlightenment, and the 19th and 20th Centuries. In general, Western images of Africa were similar throughout Europe and North America after African colonization. However, individual Western countries developed unique interpretations of Africa especially during the 18th century and since. Sources that focus on four individual countries—Great Britain, France, Germany, and the United States—are listed under the section Country-Specific Studies.

Antiquity

Bindman and Gates 2010 largely substantiates the conclusion in Snowden 1970 that race was not a category in the ancient Mediterranean even though there were ethnocentric prejudices related to color and culture. Mudimbe 1994 disagrees to the extent that the author finds the roots of the Western domination of other races in Greco-Roman ideas. Bernal 1987 and Lefkowitz 1996 debate whether modern European scholars have ignored the black African roots of Egyptian and Mediterranean civilizations. Goldenberg 2003 and Yamauchi 2004 correct Western misinterpretations of blacks in the Bible, especially those related to Noah’s curse of his son Ham.

Bernal, Martin. Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization. Vol. 1, The Fabrication of Ancient Greece, 1785–1985. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1987.
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Argues that 19th- and 20th-century Aryan-oriented racists and other anti-Semites consciously hid the accomplishments of ancient Egyptians, who were Semitic and black. Egyptians and Phoenicians made contributions that were fundamental to the rise of Greek and Roman civilizations and by extension European civilization.
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Bindman, David, and Henry Louis Gates Jr., eds. The Image of the Black in Western Art. Vol. 1, From the Pharaohs to the Fall of the Roman Empire. New ed. Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 2010.
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The scholarly essays that accompany the many images of Africans provide nuanced views of how Africans represented both sameness and difference in this era.
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Goldenberg, David M. The Curse of Ham: Race and Slavery in Early Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Jews, Christians, and Muslims from the Ancient to the Modern World. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003.
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Argues that a preference for lighter-skinned women and for people having one’s own complexion and features was mild ethnocentrism but not racism. Skin color began to be a marker of ethnicity and not just complexion for the Arabs in the 7th century and for the English in the 16th century.
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Lefkowitz, Mary R., and Guy MacLean Rogers, eds. Black Athena Revisited. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996.
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The twenty scholarly essays of this volume critique and largely dispute the claim made in Bernal 1987 that the roots of Greek civilization were in Egypt and Phoenicia.
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Mudimbe, Valentin Y. The Idea of Africa. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994.
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Investigates the Western “will to power,” connecting Greco-Roman ideas about otherness and the West’s “three major monstrosities”: the slave trade, colonialism, and Nazism. Emphasis on theoretical issues and on less well-known sources makes this study both difficult to read and useful.
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Snowden, Frank M., Jr. Blacks in Antiquity: Ethiopians in the Greco-Roman Experience. Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 1970.
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Provides textual and archaeological evidence that race was not a consideration in the Greek or Roman worlds.
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Yamauchi, Edwin M. Africa and the Bible. Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2004.
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Offers a scholarly and readable consideration of the myths about blacks in the Bible, including discussions of the curse of Ham, Moses’s Cushite wife, Solomon and the Queen of Sheba, the Ethiopian eunuch, and Afrocentric interpretations.
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Antiquity to the Enlightenment

Westerners tend to think that Europeans had little contact with Africa from the Muslim conquest of North Africa in the 7th century until the African slave trade was well established in the 17th century. This is correct in a relative sense, but Bindman and Gates 2010–2011 and Earle and Lowe 2005 show that many Africans were in Europe during this period. Groebner 2007 and Launay 2010 demonstrate that Europeans had definite and evolving views of Africa, and Salvadore 2010 indicates that there were at least some direct contacts with Africans during this era. Itandala 2001 provides a general introduction to the period.

Bindman, David, and Henry Louis Gates Jr., eds. The Image of the Black in Western Art. Vols. 2–3. New ed. Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 2010–2011.
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The essays and images in the five parts of these two volumes show how Africans represented otherness from the early Christian era until Europe’s abolition of slavery in the 19th century. Although many early images were positive, Europeans portrayed Africans more negatively as contact increased after “discovery” and throughout the slave-trade period.
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Earle, Thomas Foster, and Kate J. P. Lowe, eds. Black Africans in Renaissance Europe. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2005.
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Case studies from England, Spain, Portugal, Italy, France, and Austria. Includes a useful introductory essay by Lowe summarizing the generally negative images of Africans in this era.
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Groebner, Valentin. “Mit dem Feind schlafen: Nachdenken über Hautfarben, Sex un ‘Rasse’ im spätmittelalterlichen Europa.” Historische Anthropologie 15.3 (2007): 327–338.
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In German and Italian sources from the 13th to the 15th centuries, Asians and Africans are idealized and eroticized. In 15th- and 16th-century Florence, however, the arrival of growing numbers of African slaves produced anxieties that resulted in fear of sexual contact and depictions of Africans as lustful and ugly.
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Itandala, A. Buluda. “European Images of Africa from Earliest Times to the Eighteenth Century.” In Images of Africa: Stereotypes and Realities. Edited by Daniel M. Mengara, 61–81. Trenton, NJ: Africa World, 2001.
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A readable general introduction that emphasizes the negative stereotypes that shaped Western images of Africa during the Enlightenment.
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Launay, Robert. “Cardinal Directions: Africa’s Shifting Place in Early Modern European Conceptions of the World.” Cahiers d’Études Africaines 50.2–4 (2010): 455–470.
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Early modern Europeans categorized the world according to the theory of humors and climates with a north-south/cold-hot axis, and Africans were viewed like other southern peoples—that is, not as large, mechanically gifted, strong, or able to hold their liquor as those from the North. Later, an 18th-century theory allowed Africans to be categorized either as quasi-Asians or Native Americans, thus producing ambivalence.
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Salvadore, Matteo. “The Ethiopian Age of Exploration: Prester John’s Discovery of Europe, 1306–1458.” Journal of World History 21.4 (December 2010): 593–627.
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Ethiopian pilgrims and official delegations in the early modern period sought European allies, technology, and Christian connections. This contradicts those who say Europe was more or less ignorant of Africa during this period. Available online by subscription.
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Enlightenment

Although the origins of modern racism are often located in 19th-century scientific thought, many modern categories were developed in the 18th century and earlier. The images and essays in Bindman and Gates 2011 show that derogatory images of Africa were common in this era. Although Curtin 1964 argues that most Europeans did not yet connect race with culture, the collection of readings from Enlightenment thinkers in Eze 1997 shows that race thinking, at least among elites, was well advanced. Curtin 1990 also argues that Western environmental myths developed during this period and persisted until scientists dispelled them in the 20th century. McGrane 1989 shows that even modern ideas about sameness and difference emerged in the late Enlightenment. Additional resources can be found in the country-specific lists for Great Britain and the United States and under Literature and Theater.

Bindman, David, and Henry Louis Gates Jr., eds. The Image of the Black in Western Art. Vol. 3, From the “Age of Discovery” to the Age of Abolition; Part 3: The Eighteenth Century. Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 2011.
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The essays and images chronicle the transition in depictions of blacks from contented slaves during the plantation era to individuals and victims during the era of abolition.
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Curtin, Philip D. The Image of Africa: British Ideas and Action, 1780–1850. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1964.
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In the 18th century Europeans in general “knew more and cared more about Africa than they did at any later period up to the 1950s” (p. 10). Their racism was moderate, because the links between race and culture were still largely unconscious and because Africans were still considered fully human.
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Curtin, Philip D. “The Environment beyond Europe and the European Theory of Empire.” Journal of World History 1.2 (Fall 1990): 131–150.
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The myth of resource abundance justified slavery and colonization before the British Emancipation Act of 1833 and regressive taxation after, because Africans were thought to have life too easy to need to work. Another myth was that race accounted for non-Europeans dying faster (Native Americans) or slower (Africans) than Europeans in the tropics. Available online by subscription.
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Eze, Emmanuel Chukwudi, ed. Race and the Enlightenment: A Reader. Oxford: Blackwell, 1977.
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A helpful introduction demonstrates that the Enlightenment developed categories (e.g., race, progress, civilization, savagery, and nature) and worldviews that shaped how the West later dealt with difference.
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McGrane, Bernard. Beyond Anthropology: Society and the Other. New York: Columbia University Press, 1989.
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Argues that our modern understanding of others as “merely different” or “not inferior but different” emerged in the late Enlightenment and is a trivialization of others. To say that our modern ideas of others are more progressive only supports another myth—that modern Western culture has actually progressed.
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19th and 20th Centuries

From the mid-19th century to the mid-20th century, the most usual metaphor for Africans was that they were children. Evidence of primitivism and a less evolved biology was seen in every aspect of African cultural life, including politics, economies, thought systems, technologies, and aesthetics. All of the sources in this section address how Westerners viewed Africans (and others) during this century of virulent racism. Adas 1989 sees the practical concerns of modern Europeans as responsible for many of the ideas that allowed colonial exploitation of Africa. Arens 1979, Mudimbe 1988, Pettitt 2007, Torgovnick 1990, and the essays in Mengara 2001 provide specific examples of Western views of Africa during the colonial era. Biology-based (racist) views declined after the mid-20th century (see Race and Culture), but Fabian 1983, Mayer 2002, Mudimbe 1988, and Torgovnick 1990 also argue that the idea of the backwardness of non-Westerners is still commonly accepted through the belief that their cultures are inferior.

Adas, Michael. Machines as the Measure of Men: Science, Technology, and Ideologies of Western Dominance. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1989.
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Argues that in the 18th and 19th centuries Western interpreters of the non-West increasingly were traders, scientists, technicians, soldiers, and bureaucrats rather than missionaries and philosophers. The pragmatic interests of these new interpreters shaped Western views of Africa.
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Arens, William W. The Man-Eating Myth: Anthropology and Anthropophagy. New York: Oxford University Press, 1979.
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This often-cited work shows in a lively way that no solid evidence exists for cannibalism as a prevalent custom in any historical culture. Western obsession with reports of cannibalism comes from the fact that “our culture, like many others, finds comfort in the idea of the barbarian just beyond the gates” (p. 184).
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Fabian, Johannes. Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object. New York: Columbia University Press, 1983.
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Critiques modern anthropology’s tendency to conceive of others as living in another time, which Fabian refers to as “allochronism.” Describes how in the modern era the Judeo-Christian concept of time was applied to all human history and secularized, allowing the concepts of evolution and evolutionism.
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Mayer, Ruth. Artificial Africas: Colonial Images in the Times of Globalization. Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 2002.
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Looks at various colonial images of Africa in Western narratives and the persistence of those images in late-20th-century European and American culture. Includes questions about nature, masculinity, femininity, cultural exchange, translation and trickery, and contamination.
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Mengara, Daniel M., ed. Images of Africa: Stereotypes and Realities. Trenton, NJ: Africa World, 2001.
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Accessible essays cover a variety of Western images of Africa, including those related to maps, the Italo-Ethiopian war, Albert Schweitzer, genital cutting in American television news, films, museums, African women and feminism, and Afrocentrism.
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Mudimbe, Valentin Y. The Invention of Africa: Gnosis, Philosophy, and the Order of Knowledge. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988.
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A philosophical analysis of the “primitivist strategies” of Europeans who have commented on Africa. Although important, this work will be difficult to read for those unfamiliar with philosophy and anthropology.
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Pettitt, Clare. Dr. Livingstone, I Presume? Missionaries, Journalists, Explorers, and Empire. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007.
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Investigates the meanings of Henry Morton Stanley’s famous phrase in the context of post–Civil War rapprochement between the United States and Britain, growing 19th-century Anglo-American imperialism, and 20th-century ideas about modernism. Includes popular culture sources, such as children’s books, films, cartoons, and television shows.
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Torgovnick, Marianna. Gone Primitive: Savage Intellects, Modern Lives. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990.
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In this often-cited work the primitive is understood as a flexible concept used by the West to define and critique itself and others. Although the West appears to have taken others seriously in the 20th century, the otherness of so-called primitives endured in modernism and postmodernism.
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Primary Sources

All Westerners and many Africans who have ever written about Africa or produced images of Africa qualify as primary sources for this topic. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, for example, hundreds of Europeans and Americans wrote accounts of their experiences in Africa. However, only a handful of those works are critiqued and quoted frequently. Among these are the sources in this section. Stanley 1872, Haggard 2004 (first published in 1885), Conrad 2006 (first published in 1902), and Burroughs 1912 are classic accounts of real and fictional adventures in various primitive Africas read by millions of Europeans and Americans. Roosevelt 1910 is similar but most widely read by Americans. Freud 1950 illustrates the influence of thoughts about race on a specific Western discipline—psychology. Similar influences are found in many other disciplines. Lewis 1995 and Wright 1954 are examples of progressive African American views about Africa from their respective periods.

Burroughs, Edgar Rice. Tarzan of the Apes. New York: Grosset and Dunlap, 1912.
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A popular novel telling the story of an English nobleman orphaned in Africa and raised by apes. Widely read, Burroughs’s novel is full of early-20th-century stereotypes about race and nature.
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Conrad, Joseph. Heart of Darkness. In Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad: Authoritative Text, Backgrounds and Contexts, Criticism. 4th ed. Edited by Paul B. Armstrong, 3–77. New York: Norton, 2006.
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Serialized in 1899 and appearing as a book in 1902, this novella tells the story of a trip up the Congo River and into the “heart of darkness” that is at once Africa, colonialism, and the unconscious mind.
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Freud, Sigmund. Totem and Taboo: Some Points of Agreement between the Mental Lives of Savages and Neurotics. Translated by James Strachey. New York: Norton, 1950.
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First published in 1913 as Totem und Tabu: Einige Übereinstimmungen im seelenleben der Wilden und der Neurotiker, this work provides a taste of Freud’s understanding that nonwhites, including Africans, were biologically inferior.
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Haggard, H. Rider. King Solomon’s Mines. New York: Barnes and Noble Classics, 2004.
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First published in 1885. Set in Africa, this first “lost world” novel displays many of the stereotypes of its era and has been adapted for film several times.
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Lewis, David Levering, ed. W. E. B. Du Bois: A Reader. New York: Holt, 1995.
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The leading African American intellectual in the first half of the 20th century, Du Bois thought deeply about the problem of race in America and the world. He was a leader in the Pan-African movement but always understood culture to be acquired rather than biological.
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Roosevelt, Theodore. African Game Trails: An Account of the African Wanderings of an American Hunter-Naturalist. New York: Scribner, 1910.
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Ex-president Roosevelt led a massive safari to British East Africa in search of adventure and specimens for the Smithsonian Natural History Museum. His attitudes toward Africans, colonization, and nature are illustrations of the paternalist and racist perspectives of early-20th-century America.
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Stanley, Henry Morton. How I Found Livingstone: Travels, Adventures, and Discoveries in Central Africa, Including an Account of Four Months’ Residence with Dr. Livingstone. New York: Scribner, Armstrong, 1872.
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Stanley was read by practically everyone who thought about Africa in the late 19th century and in the first half of the 20th century. This book is his most famous, with Through the Dark Continent (New York: Harper, 1878) a close second.
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Wright, Richard. Black Power: A Record of Reactions in a Land of Pathos. New York: Harper, 1954.
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On the eve of Ghanaian independence, Wright observed that Britons and Ghanaians saw each other as irrational, because they did not understand each other’s assumptions. Although critical of colonialism, he also believed that “the African’s mentality has too much cloudiness” (p. 343). Wright encouraged Ghana’s leader, Kwame Nkrumah, to impose modernization.
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Country-Specific Studies

The sources in this section reveal that individual country differences influenced how Westerners viewed Africa. Readers interested in specific countries should consult both this section and General Overviews for information on Western images discussed by historical period. The four countries—Great Britain, France, Germany, and the United States—have attracted multiple studies, especially for topics in the 19th and 20th centuries. Other countries that had significant contact with Africa, such as Spain, Portugal, and Italy, are comparatively understudied.

Great Britain

The British were leaders in trade with and colonization of Africa, and in Western interpretations of Africa. Thus most of the studies that concern the modern West (see Enlightenment and 19th and 20th Centuries) and many of the topical studies (for example, Literature and Theater) include discussions of British images of Africa. In this section Brantlinger 1985 provides a short, readable introduction to British colonial myths about Africa. Coombes 1994 investigates what and how the British learned about Africa. Lyons 1975 shows how British education was limited to an African elite and thus illustrates British concepts of race and class.

Brantlinger, Patrick. “Victorians and Africans: The Genealogy of the Myth of the Dark Continent.” In “Race,” Writing, and Difference. Edited by Henry Louis Gates Jr., 185–222. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985.
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A short, general introduction to late-19th-century British images of Africa.
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Coombes, Annie E. Reinventing Africa: Museums, Material Culture, and Popular Imagination in Late Victorian and Edwardian England. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1994.
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Museum exhibitions, which celebrated colonialism and portrayed Africans as primitives, served as the English public’s primary source of information about Africa during the period between the Benin punitive expedition of 1897 and 1913.
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Lyons, Charles H. To Wash an Aethiop White: British Ideas about Black African Educability, 1530–1960. New York: Teachers College Press, 1975.
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Race thinking was already present in the 16th century and became a justification in the colonial period for educating an African elite to be British rather than educating African masses to be educated Africans.
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France

As with the British, the French interest in and involvement with Africa is old and deep. In general, French images of Africa parallel those of other Europeans and Americans, but the republican universalism that emerged in the French Revolution and afterward has uniquely shaped French attitudes. Conklin 1997, Ginio 2010, Lunn 2002, Miller 1985, and Ruscio 2011 address the French effort to cope with contradictions between racism and universalism that produced a variety of ambiguities, anxieties, and stratagems of self-deception regarding Africa. Cohen 1980 and Gallouët, et al. 2009 show that the French reputation for having believed in racial equality before colonialism is mistaken.

Cohen, William B. The French Encounter with Africans: White Responses to Blacks, 1530–1880. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1980.
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Shows that the widely accepted view that the French believed in racial equality up to the late 19th century was wrong.
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Conklin, Alice L. A Mission to Civilize: The Republican Idea of Empire in France and West Africa, 1895–1930. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997.
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Highlighting the contradiction between French universalism at home and colonialism abroad, this study examines France’s mission civilisatrice (mission to civilize) ideology. By framing the goal of French colonialism as bringing civilization to Africans, the French were able to be racist while also appearing republican and modern.
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Gallouët, Catherine, David Diop, Michèle Bocquillon, and Gérard Lahouati, eds. L’Afrique du siècle des lumières: Savoirs et représentations. Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 2009.
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Contributors focus on French views of Africa during the 18th century. The essays are divided into four sections: methodological approaches, history and anthropology, fiction, and aesthetics.
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Ginio, Ruth. “French Officers, African Officers, and the Violent Image of African Colonial Soldiers.” Historical Reflections 36.2 (Summer 2010): 59–75.
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French officers who commanded African troops quickly learned that Africans were not savages. They found, however, that the myth of African savagery served them well to frighten enemies and shift the blame for French violence onto Africans. Available online for purchase or by subscription.
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Lunn, Joe H. “‘Bons soldats’ and ‘sales nègres’: Changing French Perceptions of West African Soldiers during the First World War.” French Colonial History 1 (2002): 1–16.
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The French public image of Africans as lascivious savages complicated the arrival of 140,000 West African soldiers in France. French authorities assured the public that Africans were good soldiers if racially inferior and attempted to keep the French and Africans apart. Contacts did occur, and perceptions of Africans changed favorably. Available online by subscription.
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Miller, Christopher L. Blank Darkness: Africanist Discourse in French. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985.
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Western authors have never developed a language in which others can be both equal and different. Thus images of Africans are necessarily artificial, and Africanist discourse is necessarily ambiguous.
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Ruscio, Alain. Y’a bon les colonies? La France sarkozyste face à l’histoire coloniale à l’identité nationale et à l’immigration. Paris: Le Temps des Cerises, 2011.
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More than fifty contemporary French authors reflect on France’s relationship with its former and current colonies and with immigrants. This book reveals continued paternalism and also deep-seated anxiety about foreigners, immigration, and France’s geopolitical future.
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Germany

German images of Africa are not well studied, but they appear to be generally similar to those in the rest of Europe. Most striking, however, are German attitudes toward Africans after the unification of Germany in the last third of the 19th century. These attitudes seem to be significantly more exploitative and stridently racist than those of the British and French. Scholars find clear links between the racist brutality of German colonialism in Africa before 1918 and the Holocaust. Some of the essays in Association des Germanistes de l’enseignement supérieur 1983 help in understanding the origins and nature of these attitudes. The studies in Grimm and Hermand 1986 provide further background for the slave trade era and for the early 20th century. Warmbold 1989 is particularly helpful in describing German popular culture during the colonial era and after.

Association des Germanistes de l’Enseignement supérieur, ed. Négritude et Germanité: L’Afrique noire dans la littérature d’expression allemande; Douzième Congrès de l’Association des germanistes de l’enseignement supérieur, A.G.E.S., Dakar, 12–15 avril 1979. Dakar, Senegal: Nouvelles Éditions Africaines, 1983.
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Short academic essays on Africa in German literature. Contributions (all in French or German) include studies of luminaries, such as Johann Gottfried Herder, Rainer Maria Rilke, and Leo Frobenius; legends; dictionaries and encyclopedias; children’s literature; and illustrated novels.
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Grimm, Reinhold, and Jost Hermand, eds. Blacks and German Culture: Essays. Papers from the Fifteenth Wisconsin Workshop, University of Wisconsin, Madison, 5–6 October 1984. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1986.
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Essays discuss 20th-century German ideas about Africans plus includes a chapter on German literary justifications of slavery.
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Warmbold, Joachim. Germania in Africa: Germany’s Colonial Literature. Translated by Joachim Warmbold. New York: Lang, 1989.
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English translation of Ein Stückchen neudeutsche Erd, first published in 1982 (Frankfurt: Haag und Herchen). Argues that German literature about colonial Africa was trivial, cliché-ridden mass propaganda. This literature also supported the National Socialist ideology, and similar clichés are present in early-21st-century German popular literature regarding Africa.
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United States

In general, white American views of Africa parallel those of the British and other Europeans, but American images of Africa are especially complex because of the large influence of African Americans. Studies in this section deal primarily with images of mainstream, white Americans, yet these works also include discussions of African American images, which were less racial but often negative. Studies dealing specifically with African American images of Africa are in African American Images and the Modern Afrocentric Movement. Keim 2008 gives a historical overview of American images of Africa and discusses ways myths about Africa persist in American popular culture. Hickey and Wylie 1993 and Staniland 1991 provide many specific examples of how 20th-century Americans have conceived Africa. Many studies in General Overviews and Various Western Images of Africa include discussions of white Americans’ views of Africa.

Hickey, Dennis Van Vranken, and Kenneth C. Wylie. An Enchanting Darkness: The American Vision of Africa in the Twentieth Century. East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1993.
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This analysis of American ethnography, travelers’ accounts, and fiction finds both negative stereotypes and a more recent movement toward “balanced appreciation.” Concludes with an extended critique of Afrocentrism, “a biased overreaction” to American images of Africa.
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Keim, Curtis A. Mistaking Africa: Curiosities and Inventions of the American Mind. 2d ed. Boulder, CO: Westview, 2008.
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A general study suitable for university students that investigates images of Africa in popular American culture and how they developed. Topics include the history of racism and evolutionism; concepts of tribes, development, cannibalism, race, and safaris; and perceptions about the similarities and differences between African and American cultures.
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Staniland, Martin. American Intellectuals and African Nationalists, 1955–1970. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1991.
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Investigates the “dilemmas bred by commitment” of a variety of liberal, radical, conservative, and African American intellectuals for whom Africa made “a temptingly vulnerable patient, customer, or would-be convert” (p. 266).
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African American Images

Africa-oriented debates among African Americans include questions regarding the importance of race versus culture, the wisdom of a return to Africa, the obligations of African Americans to spread Christianity in Africa, connections between Africa and African Americans in the struggle against oppression, and the proper role of African culture in African American life. Marable 1996 provides a short, general introduction to the thinking of W. E. B Du Bois on a number of these issues. Farajajé-Jones 1990 and Jacobs 1982 explore the importance of black churches and the biblical idea of a Christian Ethiopia/Africa in African American images of Africa. Gruesser 2000 shows that African American Christian ideas about Africa suffuse much of 20th-century African American creative writing, even when that writing is not overtly Christian. McCarthy 1983 looks at images and ideas that appeared in nonchurch publications. Magubane 1987, Meriwether 2001, and Scott 1993 investigate African American views of Africa in relation to American interactions with Africa from the 1935 Italian invasion of Ethiopia through the 1980s antiapartheid movement. The bibliography on African American views of Africa is much larger than the sample provided here and includes many studies of specific individuals, such as Du Bois (see Lewis 1995, cited under Primary Sources) and Marcus Garvey. Additional works on African Americans in Africa are cited under Westerners in Africa.

Farajajé-Jones, Elias. In Search of Zion: The Spiritual Significance of Africa in Black Religious Movements. Bern, Switzerland: Lang, 1990.
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Discusses late-18th- and 19th-century African American views of Africa but concentrates on three 20th-century religious movements that perceived Ethiopia and Africa as the promised land: the African Orthodox and African Greek Orthodox Churches, the Ethiopian Hebrews, and Rastafarianism.
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Gruesser, John Cullen. Black on Black: Twentieth-Century African American Writing about Africa. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2000.
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African American writers dealing with Africa must be seen in the context of Ethiopianism, the Psalms 68:31 prophesy that Ethiopia/Africa will “stretch forth her hands unto God” (p. 1). In the second half of the 20th century, Richard Wright, Alice Walker, and others moved away from Ethiopianist teleology, monumentalism, and exceptionalism (see p. 135).
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Jacobs, Sylvia M., ed. Black Americans and the Missionary Movement in Africa. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1982.
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Includes fourteen scholarly essays on African American missionaries and mission movements. Jacobs writes that “the idea of African missions provided a skeleton upon which to flesh out a view of Africa as homeland, rather than as ‘Dark Continent’” (p. 37).
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Magubane, Bernard Makhosezwe. The Ties That Bind: African-American Consciousness of Africa. Trenton, NJ: Africa World, 1987.
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Magubane, a South African, wrote this history of the relationships between African Americans and Africans at the height of the struggle against apartheid. He emphasizes the importance of African American Pan-Africanism, internationalism, and black nationalism as part of the global struggle for emancipation of peoples under colonial domination.
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Marable, Manning. “The Pan-Africanism of W. E. B. Du Bois.” In W. E. B. Du Bois on Race and Culture. Edited by Bernard W. Bell, Emily R. Grosholz, and James B. Stewart, 193–218. New York: Routledge, 1996.
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A short introduction to W. E. B. Du Bois’s views on Africa. Du Bois, an enormous American intellectual presence in the first half of the 20th-century, saw the lives of Africans and African Americans as shaped more by culture and history than by race, and he advocated mutual support in the struggle against oppression.
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McCarthy, Michael. Dark Continent: Africa as Seen by Americans. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1983.
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Examines the writings of Americans who traveled to Africa largely in the period up to 1920 and the contemporaneous images of Africa found in textbooks, children’s literature, and the black press. Searches especially for influences that shaped the African American self-image.
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Meriwether, James H. Proudly We Can Be Africans: Black Americans and Africa, 1935–1961. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001.
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Considers African American views of Africa from the Italian invasion of Ethiopia through the death of Patrice Lumumba and includes discussions of World War II, the Cold War, South Africa, the Mau Mau, and Ghanaian independence. Focuses on opinions expressed in the American black press.
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Scott, William R. The Sons of Sheba’s Race: African-Americans and the Italo-Ethiopian War, 1935–1941. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993.
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Although African Americans long idealized Ethiopia as representing African redemption, their actual experience of contact with Ethiopians raised many issues of race for African Americans (e.g., were Ethiopians black?) and also for Ethiopians, who did not consider themselves black.
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The Modern Afrocentric Movement

Afrocentrism has many definitions but in general is the idea that African history and culture can be used to critique Western racism and imperialism as well as modernism. Afrocentrism emphasizes African achievements in government, philosophy, religion, science, and technology and their suppression by Western civilizations from Antiquity onward. With deep roots in 19th- and early-20th-century America, Afrocentrism became especially important during the civil rights movement and the growth of African American studies programs beginning in the 1970s. Academic research and statements of Afrocentric principles have been produced prominently by Molefi Kete Asante (Asante 1998, Asante 2007), among many others. Criticism of Afrocentrism, such as Adeleke 2009, Lefkowitz 1996, Moses 1998, Shavit 2001, and Walker 2001, claim that the movement is based on romantic essentialism rather than objective scholarship. Many believe that the Afrocentric movement must be considered a logical African American reaction to centuries of oppression. Given its importance, it is surprising that there is little research into the impact of Afrocentrism on education and popular culture.

Adeleke, Tunde. The Case Against Afrocentrism. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2009.
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A sophisticated argument by a Nigerian-born scholar states that, although Afrocentrism was appropriate as a weapon against slavery and colonialism, it is dysfunctional in the early 21st century, when African and African diaspora experiences are more complex than race and imperialism, so Afrocentrism “subverts critical intraracial discourse.”
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Asante, Molefi Kete. The Afrocentric Idea. Rev. and exp. ed. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1998.
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The first edition published in 1987 sets out Afrocentrism as a system of thought opposed to Eurocentrism. In this edition Asante also responds to critics, such as Mary R. Lefkowitz, Paul Gilroy, and Cornel West.
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Asante, Molefi Kete. An Afrocentric Manifesto: Toward an African Renaissance. Malden, MA: Polity, 2007.
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Afrocentrism is an intellectual enterprise that takes a moral stance against Eurocentrism and exploitation. “Blackness,” says Asante, “has been posited as the post-Western trope best qualified to serve as an ethical measure of our social universe” (p. 166).
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Lefkowitz, Mary R. Not Out of Africa: How Afrocentrism Became an Excuse to Teach Myth as History. New York: BasicBooks, 1996.
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Lefkowitz, a classicist, critiques Afrocentrism and the work of the Guyanese historian George G. M. James, whose Stolen Legacy: Greek Philosophy Is Stolen Egyptian Philosophy (New York: Philosophical Library, 1954) she designates as “perhaps the most influential Afrocentrist text” (p. 124).
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Moses, Wilson Jeremiah. Afrotopia: The Roots of African American Popular History. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1998.
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Describes “sentimental Afrocentrism and romantic Egyptocentrism” (p. 17) as traditions originating in 19th-century popular culture. Concludes that the modern Afrocentrism movement sometimes displays a paradoxical mix of the first, which critiques civilization through “primitivism,” and the second, which praises civilization.
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Shavit, Jacob. History in Black: African-Americans in Search of an Ancient Past. London: Frank Cass, 2001.
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A critical discussion of Afrocentric histories by an Israeli historian. The author includes discussions of what he terms the Afrocentric myths about Egypt, Greece, Canaan, and Jews.
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Walker, Clarence E. Why We Can’t Go Home Again: An Argument about Afrocentrism. New York: Oxford University Press, 2001.
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This carefully argued book describes Afrocentrism as a “therapeutic mythology” that is reactionary “racial romanticism” rather than African history.
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Various Western Images of Africa

Western images of Africa can be found in every aspect of Western life, because Westerners believed every aspect of African life was different and usually primitive. The sources in this section demonstrate and analyze various manifestations of Western conceptions of African difference and primitiveness, primarily in the 19th and 20th centuries. A number of studies show that Western images of Africa are becoming more sympathetic and accurate but continue to overemphasize African differences.

Public Displays of Africans

During the colonial period in Africa, it was relatively common to display Africans in public expositions and traveling shows in the West. Africans were most often considered curiosities (like ethnographic objects) and part of nature (like animals) rather than part of civilization and culture. The study of Ota Benga in Bradford and Blume 1992 is often cited as an example of such displays. Bergougniou, et al. 2001 documents the scope of such displays but argues that to some extent they played a positive role in informing the West about Africa. Lindfors 1999 provides interesting case studies of displays.

Bergougniou, Jean-Michel, Rémi Clignet, and Philippe David. “Villages noirs” et autres visiteurs Africains et Malgaches en France et en Europe: 1870–1940. Paris: Karthala, 2001.
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Although focusing on French encounters with Africans, this work lists nearly two hundred European “expositions, villages, and spectacles” that took place in this era. Concludes that not all public displays of Africans were demeaning and that overall the encounters fostered dialogue between the French and Africans.
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Bradford, Phillips Verner, and Harvey Blume. Ota Benga: The Pygmy in the Zoo. New York: St. Martin’s, 1992.
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Presents a case study in American perceptions of Africa in the early 1900s. Emphasizes the role of the African American missionary Samuel Phillips Verner and includes many verbatim newspaper reports regarding Ota Benga at the St. Louis World’s Fair (1904) and in the Bronx Zoo (1906).
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Lindfors, Bernth. Africans on Stage: Studies in Ethnological Show Business. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999.
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Analyzes the appearances of Africans in British and American public spaces from the 1850s to the 1940s. Advertised as ethnographically accurate, the shows emphasized physical, intellectual, and cultural differences, which promoted racism.
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Literature and Theater

Western literature is often critiqued in works throughout this article. In this section the citations specifically analyze literature or theater. Berglund 2006 and Hammond and Jablow 1977 find that Western literature employs negative images of Africa to portray the West in a positive light. The often-cited essay Achebe 2006 raises the question of whether meaning outweighs aesthetics in determining the value of Western literature about Africa. Mangum 2002 and Cooper 2002 highlight the social and personal difficulties for writers when they try to confront negative myths about Africa.

Achebe, Chinua. “An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness.” In Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad: Authoritative Text, Backgrounds and Contexts, Criticism. 4th ed. Edited by Paul B. Armstrong, 336–349. New York: Norton, 2006.
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Argues that Heart of Darkness cannot be considered great literature, no matter what its aesthetic merits, because it rests on racist premises.
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Berglund, Jeff. Cannibal Fictions: American Explorations of Colonialism, Race, Gender, and Sexuality. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2006.
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Finds that Americans used fictive cannibalism as a trope for otherness. Although many of the examples are not about Africa, the analysis applies to popular ideas about African cannibalism.
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Cooper, Brenda. Weary Sons of Conrad: White Fiction against the Grain of Africa’s Dark Heart. New York: Lang, 2002.
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Asks how Africa is portrayed in late-20th-century fiction written by Western males. Breaking from the binary oppositions of unequal power found in colonial discourse requires enormous psychological effort, pain, and penitence, but the process reveals “new and different words, concepts and methods” (p. 32).
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Hammond, Dorothy, and Alta Jablow. The Myth of Africa. New York: Library of Social Science, 1977.
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This often-cited work argues that British literature about Africa is mostly a morality tale about British civilization and African savagery. An older edition is The Africa That Never Was: Four Centuries of British Writing about Africa (New York: Twayne, 1970).
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Mangum, Anne B. Reflection of Africa in Elizabethan and Jacobean Drama and Poetry. Lewiston, NY: Mellen, 2002.
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Argues that early modern British dramatists (such as William Shakespeare) and poets challenged British ideas of African and Native American inferiority but did so with difficulty, especially considering English royal propaganda against otherness and English linguistic tropes of blackness as negative.
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Film

Given the importance of film in Western culture, it is surprising that cinematic portrayals of Africa do not receive more scholarly attention. Bickford-Smith and Mendelsohn 2007 analyzes a variety of classic and more recent films about Africa, Cameron 1994 considers classic films set in Africa, and Davis 1995 analyzes films about South Africa. Stereotypes still abound in Western films set in Africa, but such films increasingly include Africans as real characters rather than as props to confirm Western misconceptions.

Bickford-Smith, Vivian, and Richard Mendelsohn, eds. Black and White in Colour: African History on Screen. Oxford: James Currey, 2007.
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The essays in this collection analyze American, European, and African films about the precolonial era, slave trade, European conquest, colonial life and African resistance, independence struggle, apartheid, and Rwanda genocide.
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Cameron, Kenneth M. Africa on Film: Beyond Black and White. New York: Continuum, 1994.
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Categorizes whites in films as white hunter, jungle lord, imperial man, white queen, mercenary, and helper, with the first four being the most common. Africans are categorized as good, educated, or dangerous. Argues that race is always a theme, because “Africa cannot be separated from American guilt and fear” (p. 200).
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Davis, Peter. In Darkest Hollywood: Exploring the Jungles of Cinema’s South Africa. Johannesburg: Ravan, 1995.
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Examines ninety-one films about South Africa and finds two primary stereotypes: savage other and faithful servant. In three exceptions produced in the last years of apartheid—Shaka Zulu (1986), The Gods Must Be Crazy (1980), and Mapantsula (1988)—the African protagonists have real personalities and reject the choices given by white colonizers.
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Popular Print Images

Until the mid-20th century the images in print advertising, comics, and illustrations (for newspapers, popular magazines, and books) were the most common pictorial depictions of Africa in the West. Nederveen Pieterse 1992 provides many such images from Europe and the United States. The cartoon Hergé 2010 illustrates the stereotypes of Europeans in about 1930, whereas Met 1996 critiques those negative images. Assouline 2009 provides personal and cultural contexts for the production of Hergé’s cartoons. Rothenberg 2007 looks at the enormous influence of images of Africans and others in National Geographic before the advent of television. Even after the introduction of films and television, print media played an important role in shaping Western attitudes toward Africa. Keim 2008 includes discussions of early-21st-century images of Africa in National Geographic and in American advertisements.

Assouline, Pierre. Hergé: The Man Who Created Tintin. Translated by Charles Ruas. New York: Oxford University Press, 2009.
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Shows the influence of a conservative, anticommunist, procolonial priest on Hergé (Georges Remi), the twenty-four-year-old author of Tintin au Congo (1931), a cartoon renowned for its stereotypical depictions of Africans in the Belgian Congo. Argues that Tintin au Congo was paternalist but not racist.
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Hergé. Tintin in the Congo. Translated by Leslie Lonsdale-Cooper and Michael Turner. London: Egmont, 2010.
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One of the many English editions of Tintin au Congo (1931), the cartoon adventure of a fictional boy character in the Belgian Congo. Reveals many Western stereotypes of colonial Africa and is often critiqued by scholars. The story appeared in many languages worldwide well after 1960, the end of the colonial era in Congo.
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Keim, Curtis A. Africa: Curiosities and Inventions of the American Mind. 2d ed. Boulder, CO: Westview, 2008.
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An analysis of National Geographic that notes a continuing emphasis on exotic images of Africa. A chapter on print advertising shows how images foster tropes of colonial nostalgia, wild Africa, and “problems in Africa.”
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Met, Philippe. “Of Men and Animals: Hergé’s Tintin au Congo, a Study in Primitivism.” Romanic Review 87.1 (January 1996): 131–143.
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A critique of the primitivist stereotypes in the widely read cartoon depiction of the 1930s Belgian Congo.
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Nederveen Pieterse, Jan. White on Black: Images of Africa and Blacks in Western Popular Culture. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992.
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Analysis of Western stereotypes of Africans and blacks in Europe and the United States mostly from the late 19th century onward. Particularly useful for its many images from popular culture. Published first in Dutch as Wit over zwart (Amsterdam: Tropemuseum, 1990).
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Rothenberg, Tamar Y. Presenting America’s World: Strategies of Innocence in National Geographic Magazine, 1888–1945. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2007.
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National Geographic portrayed American geographic interest as purely scientific and thus innocent of imperialism (as well as racism, sexual voyeurism, and other negative attitudes). The legacy of this strategy has lived on in the millions who grew up reading this magazine.
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News Media

Western newspapers are critiqued for their lack of attention to Africa and for their shallow and stereotype-laden analysis. Allimadi 2003, Janis 2007, and Schraeder and Endless 1998 look at the New York Times because of its importance in American life. They frequently find Western stereotypes in analyses of African conflicts. Janis 2007 argues that it is indeed possible for a knowledgeable and sensitive reporter to portray Africa accurately. The role of the media in reporting on Rwanda is particularly important, because the 1994 genocide took the West by surprise and because the idea of genocide seems to substantiate a number of Western stereotypes. Two studies that analyze genocide reporting—Myers, et al. 1996 and Thompson 2007—show lack of attention, lack of information, and stereotyping. Western reporting on African conflicts is particularly prone to the stereotypes of “tribal analysis,” making the section Social Organization also relevant here. Rothmyer 2011 and Windrich 1992 show that few Western journalists in Africa understand the many different situations in Africa and thus rely on stereotypes and the biased perspectives of international organizations and their own governments. Scott 2009 argues that contemporary British newspapers give broad and often favorable coverage to Africa; it does not, however, analyze whether that coverage employs Western stereotypes.

Allimadi, Milton. The Hearts of Darkness: How White Writers Created the Racist Image of Africa. New York: Black Star, 2003.
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This short book considers the reports of early explorers and travelers but is included here because of its analyses of the New York Times coverage of apartheid and the Time magazine coverage of Congo independence.
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Janis, Michael. “Postmodern Primitivism: Images of Africa in the Western Media.” In Africa after Modernism: Transitions in Literature, Media, and Philosophy. Edited by Michael Janis, 105–134. New York: Routledge, 2007.
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Focuses on Howard French’s reporting for the New York Times and his book, A Continent for the Taking: The Tragedy and Hope of Africa (New York: Knopf, 2004). Finds French to have a historically accurate, sophisticated understanding of Africa and to have begun “a new era in reporting on Africa in the New York Times” (p. 123).
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Myers, Garth, Thomas Klak, and Timothy Koehl. “The Inscription of Difference: News Coverage of the Conflicts in Rwanda and Bosnia.” Political Geography 15.1 (January 1996): 21–46.
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Despite the similarities between these conflicts in the 1990s, the situation in Rwanda is portrayed differently from that in Bosnia. Reporters knew little about the Rwanda conflict and “defamed” the country and its people by framing the conflict as savage, tribal, timeless, placeless, and deserving of US fear in the post–Cold War era.
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Rothmyer, Karen. “Hiding the Real Africa: Why NGOs Prefer Bad News.” Columbia Journalism Review 49.6 (March–April 2011): 18–19.
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Journalists get much of their information and perspective from Western-based aid groups and United Nations agencies, which have an interest in exaggerating both African troubles and the Western role in solving Africa’s problems.
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Schraeder, Peter J., and Brian Endless. “The Media and Africa: The Portrayal of Africa in the New York Times (1955–1995).” Issue: A Journal of Opinion 26.2 (1998): 29–35.
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New York Times coverage shifted the focus from foreign influences on Africa toward internal African tensions related to race, ethnicity, and religion. This fostered Afro-pessimism, which resulted in media-driven disengagement with Africa (the failure to stop the Rwanda genocide is a salient example) and a sense that African problems were intractable. Available online by subscription.
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Scott, Martin. “Marginalized, Negative, or Trivial? Coverage of Africa in the UK Press.” Media, Culture, and Society 31.4 (July 2009): 533–557.
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Although articles on Africa were often small and buried beyond the third page of the newspaper, more positive subjects (such as culture, religion, and tourism) were published than negative ones (such as war, disease, human rights, etc.), and many countries were represented. Only 14.3 percent of articles had negative framing. Includes a helpful literature review and bibliography. Available online for purchase or by subscription.
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Thompson, Allan, ed. The Media and the Rwanda Genocide. London: Pluto, 2007.
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The numerous contributors analyze the role of the Rwandan media in fostering the terrible events of 1994 and the role of the international media in reporting, at least at the beginning, that the massacre was irrational tribal warfare.
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Windrich, Elaine. “Media Coverage of the Angolan War.” Africa Today 39.1–2 (Spring 1992): 89–99.
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American journalists tended to accept their government’s agenda and relied on information provided by lobbyists for rebels. Reporting on the war tended to be superficial, sensationalist, and infrequent, and it contained propaganda and disinformation favoring an often-brutal US ally. Available online by subscription.
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Nature and Safaris

A common Western myth has been that in Africa one can see the world as it was before the rise of civilization. Thus Joseph Conrad wrote in Heart of Darkness that going into Africa was like “travelling back to the earliest beginnings of the world.” Hickey and Wylie 1991 and Jones 2010 show that Western ideas about the timelessness of African nature allowed Westerners to exploit nature and disregard African expertise and land use patterns. Bull 1988 and Cameron 1990 provide histories of the safari, a commercialization of the myth of wild Africa. Adams and McShane 1992 argues that in the early 21st century the myth of wild Africa threatens African wildness, hunting and habitat destruction must be curtailed, and African expertise must be harnessed to save African animals from extinction.

Adams, Jonathan S., and Thomas O. McShane. The Myth of Wild Africa: Conservation without Illusion. New York: Norton, 1992.
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The wild Africa myth was born in the first half of the 19th century and perpetuated by explorers and colonial hunters. Economic development and population growth have become a threat to African wildlife, so the myth distorts necessary conservation measures.
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Bull, Bartle. Safari: A Chronicle of Adventure. London: Viking, 1988.
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A popular history of the African safari, including studies of Frederick Selous, Theodore Roosevelt, Ernest Hemingway, women, and feature films. Although not particularly critical, the volume includes many photographs and examples.
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Cameron, Kenneth M. Into Africa: The Story of the East African Safari. London: Constable, 1990.
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A history of the safari experience and its importance in shaping Western understanding of Africa. Theodore Roosevelt’s 1909–1910 safari features prominently. Although managed and commercialized, a safari is an experience that shows the real Africa, whereas a zoo is merely amusement.
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Hickey, Dennis, and Kenneth Wylie. “‘Heart of Darkness’ or ‘Mother of Light’? American Perceptions of the African Rainforest, 1920–1980.” Centennial Review 35.2 (1991): 249–263.
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Americans have seen the African rainforest as either a place to be exploited or as one to be preserved for the enjoyment of tourists and sports people. In either case, Africa’s wilderness was seen as “outside of history” and thus necessarily in the realm of Western scientific and commercial experts rather than Africans.
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Jones, Jeannette Eileen. In Search of Brightest Africa: Reimagining the Dark Continent in American Culture, 1884–1936. Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 2010.
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Early black Pan-Africanists and white naturalists saw themselves as saviors of Africa. Pan-Africanists believed Africans should define their own models of government and cooperate, whereas naturalists believed that the African wildness should be saved.
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Tarzan

The fantastic story of Tarzan—a white, aristocratic, male European raised in Africa by apes—reveals and promotes many Western myths about Africa. Included here are introductory examples of Tarzan myth analyses. Galloway 2010 provides a rare sympathetic view of Tarzan’s creator, Edgar Rice Burroughs, and shows some of the complexities of literary analyses. Vernon 2008 uses Tarzan to consider Western myths about the nature of the world and provides many examples of Tarzan in 20th-century popular culture.

Galloway, Stan. The Teenage Tarzan: A Literary Analysis of Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Jungle Tales of Tarzan. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2010.
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Argues that Burroughs was a product of his times and less racist than most of his contemporaries, thus critics should judge him less harshly than they have.
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Vernon, Alex. On Tarzan. Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 2008.
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A study of 20th-century American popular culture through the various incarnations of the Tarzan myth. American fantasies about Tarzan reveal American fantasies about civilization, nature, colonialism, ethnicity, race, gender, sexuality, violence, and Africa.
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Westerners in Africa

The narratives of visitors and settlers often clearly reveal attitudes toward Africa and the West. For example, Campbell 2006, Gaines 2006, and Jenkins 1975 show that African American visitors highlight American images of Africa, because they have often struggled with the meaning of being American and the meaning and importance of Africa. Pratt 1991 focuses on travel narratives by white Western males, whereas Stevenson 1982 looks at the accounts of white Western females. Narratives of Western visitors to Africa are excellent primary sources for analysis of Western images of Africa. There are many hundreds of travel accounts, autobiographies, and biographies of Westerners in Africa. These sources date from the 15th century on and become more numerous after the 1870s.

Campbell, James T. Middle Passages: African American Journeys to Africa, 1787–2005. New York: Penguin, 2006.
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An academic study of the numerous African Americans who traveled to Africa as settlers, missionaries, scholars, tourists, and journalists. More readable than most scholarly works, the book also contains an extensive bibliographic essay.
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Gaines, Kevin K. American Africans in Ghana: Black Expatriates and the Civil Rights Era. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006.
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Discusses the many prominent African Americans who visited Ghana in the 1950s, 1960s, and on. Concludes that although African Americans were sometimes critical of Ghanaians, they were much more aware than most Americans of the negative implications of American power and the unequal distribution of global wealth.
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Jenkins, David. Black Zion: Africa, Imagined and Real, as Seen by Today’s Blacks. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1975.
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Jenkins interviewed African Americans who were living or traveling in Liberia, Sierra Leone, and Ghana. Their reactions to Africa ranged from relief to shock.
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Pratt, Mary Louise. Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation. London: Routledge, 1991.
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This often-cited work argues that imperial narratives were generally about either conquest or anticonquest, the former certain of the rightness of imperialism (using “master-of-all-I-survey” rhetoric), and the latter eager to assert both innocence and European hegemony.
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Stevenson, Catherine Barnes. Victorian Women Travel Writers in Africa. Boston: Twayne, 1982.
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A discussion of late-19th-century British women who were in Africa as missionaries, travelers, or wives. Two chapters provide a general analysis and conclude that these women generally believed in British superiority, although they could be critical of specific situations. Includes chapter-length studies of Florence Dixie and Mary Kingsley.
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Africa in Western Art

Western art depicting Africans provides an excellent window on Western views of Africa. John and Dominique Schlumberger de Menil began collecting such art after World War II, and their inspiration and funding are largely responsible for the extraordinary multivolume work Bindman and Gates 2010–.

Bindman, David, and Henry Louis Gates Jr., eds. The Image of the Black in Western Art. 3 vols. Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 2010–.
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Volumes 1 and 2 were previously published with other editors (Volume 1, Ladislas Bugner and Jean Vercoutter, 1976; Volume 2, Jean Devisse and Michel Mollat, 1979). This edition adds new introductions and essays plus the three parts of Volume 3. The numerous images and scholarly interpretations illustrate what is known from written sources and add nuances that would otherwise be unavailable.
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African Art and Artifact

In the early 20th century Western artists and collectors began to see African art as “art” rather than as craft or ethnographic artifact. Only in the last half of the 20th century, however, did the label “primitive art” begin to disappear in museums of art and natural history and in the work of art historians. Jewsiewicki 1991 shows how African art became ethnographic artifact in the 19th century. The contributors to Danto, et al. 1988 explore how museums have treated African objects as artifact or art. Jules-Rosette 1984 and Steiner 1993 provide case studies describing the continuing search by Western collectors for “real” African art, meaning art that has been produced and used in nonmodern contexts.

Danto, Arthur C., Susan Vogel, and Jerry L. Thompson. Art/Artifact: African Art in Anthropology Collections. New York: Center for African Art, 1988.
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Six essays analyzing when and why Americans have considered African objects as either art or artifact. Includes case studies of three anthropological collections: the Buffalo Museum of Science, the Hampton University Museum, and the American Museum of Natural History.
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Jewsiewicki, Bogumil. “Le primitivism, le postcolonialisme, les antiquités ‘nègres’ et la question nationale.” Cahiers d’Études Africaines 31.121–122 (1991): 191–213.
DOI: 10.3406/cea.1991.2114Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Analysis of the late-19th-century reclassification of African objects from antiquities to ethnographic types (title translates as Primitivism, postcolonialism, black-African antiquities, and the national question), a change that encouraged African art (and Africans) to be seen as primitive. Available online by subscription.
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Jules-Rosette, Bennetta. The Messages of Tourist Art: An African Semiotic System in Comparative Perspective. New York: Plenum, 1984.
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Contrasts tourist art that favors experimentation and variety with the collector’s search for African art that emphasizes tradition and use.
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Steiner, Christopher B. African Art in Transit. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1993.
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An ethnography that emphasizes the roles of African traders in the context of African artists and Western connoisseurs, both of whom see objects as enchanted. Producers and connoisseurs attempt to deny the logic of capitalism, but the traders fully embrace commoditization and exchange.
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Education in the United States

Materials for elementary and secondary students have gradually improved with major revisions of textbooks in the early 1980s and increasingly sensitive authors. Despite the goodwill of most authors, however, scholars find that stereotypical Africa is still subtly present in much literature for children and young adults. Maddy and MacCann 1996 and Maddy and MacCann 2009 are the best general sources on this topic. Yenika-Agbaw 2008 provides further perspectives on and examples of the often-subtle stereotypes in children’s literature on Africa. Osunde, et al. 1996 documents that teachers are not well prepared to teach about Africa. Sankofa: A Journal of African Children’s and Young Adult Literature is a journal dedicated to critical analysis and promotion of excellence for children’s literature on Africa.

Maddy, Yulisa Amadu, and Donnarae MacCann. African Images in Juvenile Literature: Commentaries on Neocolonialist Fiction. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 1996.
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Africans tend to be portrayed as violence prone and lacking in self-initiative in 1990s children’s literature by American, British, and South African writers. Wild animals and characterizations of Africans as childish are also common.
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Maddy, Yulisa Amadu, and Donnarae MacCann. Neo-Imperialism in Children’s Literature about Africa: A Study of Contemporary Fiction. London: Routledge, 2009.
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“Cultural racism” persists despite the professed universalism of most of the selected authors. This study of late-20th- and early-21st-century children’s books finds many darkest Africa and neocolonial myths and calls for more accuracy and cultural sensitivity in depicting African history and contemporary life.
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Osunde, Egerton O., Josiah Tlou, and Neil L. Brown. “Persisting and Common Stereotypes in U.S. Students’ Knowledge of Africa: A Study of Preservice Social Studies Teachers.” Social Studies 87.3 (May–June 1996): 119–124.
DOI: 10.1080/00377996.1996.9958425Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Beginning teachers lack knowledge and hold many Dark Continent stereotypes. Available online for purchase or by subscription.
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Sankofa: A Journal of African Children’s and Young Adult Literature. 2002–.
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A peer-reviewed journal published annually analyzing children’s literature from the United States, Europe, and Africa.
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Yenika-Agbaw, Vivian S. Representing Africa in Children’s Literature: Old and New Ways of Seeing. New York: Routledge, 2008.
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Written primarily to encourage African writers to produce “authentic” and attractive children’s literature, this analysis highlights many of the problems Western authors have had in writing about Africa for children.
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Social Organization

Scholars since the 1960s have argued that Western conceptualizations of African social organization are inaccurate. Fried 1966 and Southall 1970 provided early histories of Western myths about nonmodern social organization and showed how the concept of tribe became useful in constructing colonial systems of control and in labeling Africans and others as primitives. More recent studies, such as Lowe, et al. 2011, argue that continuing “tribal analysis” of African society and African conflict is shallow and a result of ignorance, culturalism, and/or a desire to be excused for not helping Africans. Lentz 1995 believes that tribal analysis is being replaced by ethnic analysis, resulting in an equally shallow understanding of African historical situations.

Fried, Morton H. “On the Concepts of ‘Tribe’ and ‘Tribal Society.’” Transactions of the New York Academy of Sciences, 2d ser., 28.4 (February 1966): 527–540.
DOI: 10.1111/j.2164-0947.1966.tb02369.xSave Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
There is no agreed-upon definition of the word “tribe.” Most so-called tribes are probably reactions of less well-organized societies to confrontations with “relatively highly organized societies.” This essay helped frame the debate on the origins of so-called tribalism in modern Africa. Available online for purchase or by subscription.
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Lentz, Carola. “‘Tribalism’ and Ethnicity in Africa: A Review of Four Decades of Anglophone Research.” Cahiers des Sciences Humaines 31.2 (1995): 303–328.
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The belief that all premodern humans belonged to a tribe is now often replaced by a belief that ethnic identity is natural to all individuals. This gives legitimacy to “ethno-nationalist ideologies.” In reality ethnic identities arise in specific historical contexts of insecurity and are ambiguous, multifaceted, and open to change.
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Lowe, Chris, Tunde Brimah, Pearl-Alice Marsh, William Minter, and Monde Muyangwa. Talking about “Tribe”: Moving from Stereotypes to Analysis. Washington, DC: Africa Action, 2011.
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Updated and expanded, the original version of this accessible paper was written by Chris Lowe in 1997 and intended for journalists, government officials, and others who deal with Africa.
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Southall, Aidan. “The Illusion of Tribe.” In The Passing of Tribal Man in Africa. Edited by Peter C. W. Gutkind, 28–50. Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill, 1970.
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This often-cited essay highlights difficulties with tribal analysis in Africa. In colonial Africa tribes were created by colonial governments or by Africans themselves in reaction to the colonial situation. In the modern era tribalism is always a result of modern influences and of modern reinterpretations of precolonial and colonial identities.
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Race and Culture

From the mid-19th until the mid-20th century, the majority of white Westerners believed in social Darwinism and understood race as the cause of culture, with lighter-skinned races developing civilizations, while darker-skinned peoples remained primitives. Dain 2002, Fredrickson 2002, and Gilman 1993 provide examples of the many studies investigating the origins of such beliefs. Fredrickson 2002, however, includes culturalism as part of racism and thus sets race in the broader post-15th-century Western context of growing power and declining ideals of universalism and ascription. In the West and across the whole world, however, the conditions for extreme racism were only present in Germany, the United States, and South Africa. In the last half of the 20th century, for a variety of reasons, Westerners became increasingly less certain that race caused culture. Degler 1991 chronicles the decline of social Darwinism and the emergence in the 1970s of sociobiology, the idea that biology causes social behavior but not according to race. Morris 1967 is an example of post–World War II scientific efforts to conceptualize humans as belonging to only one race. However, Jensen 1969 illustrates that the debate about the relative influence of race versus culture continued until the emergence of molecular genetics beginning in the 1970s. The debate between biology and culture is still important, but now it does not tend to be racialized in most contexts. It is impossible, however, to say that race thinking has been eradicated from the West. Indeed, pockets of extreme race thinking still persist, as illustrated in Burnham 1993 and Lynn and Vanhanen 2006.

Burnham, Stanley. America’s Bimodal Crisis: Black Intelligence in White Society. 3d ed. Athens, GA: Foundation for Human Understanding, 1993.
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As an example of the continuing influence of overt racism in American thought, Burnham repeats all the Dark Continent myths and blames “cognitive deficiency” for Africa’s perceived backwardness. Quotes psychologists of the 1930s and 1950s as documentation. First edition published in 1985.
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Dain, Bruce R. A Hideous Monster of the Mind: American Race Theory in the Early Republic. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002.
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From 1800 to 1840 American race theory evolved toward the biological theories that became standard among most whites in the latter part of the century. At the same time various counter theories emerged that emphasized biological equality, cultural origins of difference, and the importance of considering persons individually rather than as part of racial groups.
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Degler, Carl N. In Search of Human Nature: The Decline and Revival of Darwinism in American Social Thought. New York: Oxford University Press, 1991.
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Describes the decline of Darwinist racism and the rise of sociobiology in the last half of the 20th century.
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Fredrickson, George M. Racism: A Short History. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002.
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The essence of racism is assertions of difference and power rather than biological differences. The roots of modern biological racism can be found in the “culturalism” of European explorers from the 15th century on. However, modern racism required a rejection of Christian universalism and a radical break with ascription-based social hierarchy.
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Gilman, Sander L. Freud, Race, and Gender. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993.
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Freud attempted to resolve his anxieties about race and gender by including Jews among the superior white races and projecting his anxiety onto women. Freud’s personality thus deeply shaped the development of psychoanalysis as well as race and gender consciousness.
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Jensen, Arthur R. “How Much Can We Boost I.Q. and Scholastic Achievement?” Harvard Educational Review 39.1 (Winter 1969): 1–123.
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In this often-cited early essay a noted educational psychologist argues against those who stress the importance of environment rather than heredity in education.
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Lynn, Richard, and Tatu Vanhanen. IQ and Global Inequality. Augusta, GA: Washington Summit, 2006.
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Argues that low average national intelligence correlates so strongly with lack of material wealth that it must be seen as a major cause of lack of economic development. Critics of this work question our ability to measure IQ cross-culturally and challenge the authors’ understanding of alternate causes of poverty.
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Morris, Desmond. The Naked Ape: A Zoologist’s Study of the Human Animal. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1967.
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Written for a popular audience, this study emphasizes common human biological traits. Appearing at a time when most Westerners were shifting from a biological to a cultural understanding of human difference, it thus reinforced that new perspective.
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Development Studies

Western ideas about African development frequently compare Africa unfavorably to the West, and thus Africa is always striving to “catch up” to the West. Such catch-up thinking reflects and fosters the beliefs that Africans in the early 21st century live in the West’s past (see Nature and Safaris) and that the West embodies the most advanced forms of progress. The literature on economic development is vast and inconclusive and often includes images of helpless and ignorant Africans. The causes advanced for Africa’s lack of economic development have included climate and physical geography, neocolonial dependency on Europe and the United States, Cold War rivalries, failures to adopt Western liberal values and systems, too much aid, and too little aid. Moss 2007 provides a general history of postindependence development ideas and efforts. Rodney 1981 is the classic statement of dependency theory, the idea that outsiders have caused Africa’s lack of economic development. Grubbs 2009 describes the failure of 1960s modernization theory through externally initiated, top-down, large-scale economic development projects. Calderisi 2006 asks the international community to hold African leaders accountable for establishing the modernist conditions necessary for economic development. Easterly 2006 advocates more accountability for those who attempt to help Africa. Sachs 2005 says that myths about African backwardness have meant that Africa has not had the same opportunities as other economically developing parts of the world. Overall, development efforts have shifted since the early 1980s toward an emphasis on local, bottom-up, small-scale human development and environmental sustainability.

Calderisi, Robert. The Trouble with Africa: Why Foreign Aid Isn’t Working. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006.
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Although the slave trade, colonialism, the Cold War, and neocolonialism are factors in Africa’s early-21st-century condition, Africans are in charge now and must be held accountable for their actions. Western guilt keeps aid flowing, but international supervision and pressure are necessary.
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Easterly, William. The White Man’s Burden: Why the West’s Efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done So Much Ill and So Little Good. New York: Penguin, 2006.
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So-called top-down planners have prescribed development solutions for Africa but with neither success nor accountability. Advocates that so-called seekers be given the opportunity to experiment, those who fail be removed, and success be rewarded and repeated.
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Grubbs, Larry. Secular Missionaries: Americans and African Development in the 1960s. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2009.
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A study of the failed 1960s attempt of American modernization theorists to bring top-down economic development to Africa. The efforts, supported by institutions such as the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) and the Peace Corps, were believed at the time to be “the moral equivalent of anti-colonialism” (p. 77).
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Moss, Todd J. African Development: Making Sense of the Issues and Actors. Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 2007.
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As an accessible survey of Western ideas about development, this study is refreshingly honest but not pessimistic: “In short, we simply do not know how to make Chad more like South Korea” (p. 243).
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Rodney, Walter. How Europe Underdeveloped Africa. Washington, DC: Howard University Press, 1981.
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This slightly revised version of the 1972 classic (London: Bogle-L’Ouverture) argues that Africa’s lack of economic development was not a result of Africa’s nature but rather of five hundred years of European exploitation. The solution to economic development is seen as a complete break from the international capitalist system.
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Sachs, Jeffrey D. The End of Poverty: Economic Possibilities for Our Time. New York: Penguin, 2005.
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Sachs, one of the major influences behind the United Nations’ Millennium Development Goals, counters what he terms the Western myths about aid to Africa, including those that argue that aid is “money down the drain,” Africa has a “democracy deficit,” and African cultures and morality prevent economic development.
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