Day 14 -- Race and Visions of Africa

Emmanuelle Sibeud, “’Negrophilia,’ ‘Negrology’ or ‘Africanism’? Colonial Ethnography and Racism in France around 1900” in Tony Chafer and Amanda Sackur, Promoting the Colonial Idea: Propaganda and Visions of Empire in France (Chppenham, Wiltshire: Palgrave, 2002), pp.156, 158-161

The passages below describe how racist attitudes towards Africans became an accepted part of French culture in our period

The 1900 Universal Exhibition can be considered, in view of the space allotted to the colonial pavilions, to be the first French colonial exhibition. The colonial section comprised numerous didactic items, with exhibits and erudite comments on people living under colonial domination, the burden of which was that the period of conquest was over and the time had come to move on to rational exploitation based on methodical inventory. Here we propose to look behind the scenes of this triumphant production, focusing on the particular case of Africa and Africans. The Universal Exhibition did not offer a comprehensive view but rather took a position firmly in the context of French metropolitan controversies and crystallised latent contradictions at the junction of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The fact is that colonial figures -- administrators, officers and missionaries -- had been drawing more and more precise pictures which differed greatly from the very general perspectives contributed by earlier explorers, and the period lends itself particularly well to examination of the changes in representations of Africa brought about by the colonial experience. . . .

 In 1900 the Anti-Slavery Congress was the only one that actually focused on Africa, but the representation it offered was doubly negative. It used pathos, presenting Africans as defeated populations, helpless victims of 'the leprosy of domestic slavery', if not of the slave traders; it also made use of outdated stereotypes such as cannibalism. French Catholic missionaries, for example, were asked to bring back images of Africa suitable for the edification of Christian masses in metropolitan France. They were not therefore reliable witnesses recounting what they had actually seen. Mgr Le Roy's lecture 'L'Evolution de l'esclave dans les missions Africaines ' ('The Evolution of the Slave in African Missions') was enthusiastically received because it restated all the conventional Ideas:

in less than an hour we were made to believe we were ourselves explorers in Central Africa. We could see the villages in the bush poorly protected by wooden palisades against raids and fire, the fierce countenances of man-hunters, negroes dragged in chains far from their birthplace in long processions to the slave markets. We would see the unhappy mothers when the slave trader tore the baby from their breast to dash its head against a wayside stone so as to get rid of a useless load and not hamper the march of the captives . . .

 Missionary representations were cliches only somewhat qualified by personal experience. Added to anecdotes about cannibalism, which were favourites with both speakers and audience at the Congres de Sociologie Coloniale , they finally sank to the level of caricature. These images unfortunately reinforced colonial stereotypes. Where the missionaries saw pathos, colonial sociology saw monstrosity and the impossibility of assimilation. Leopold de Saussure even asserted that the 'negro race' spontaneously refused assimilation: 

Even from an anatomical point of view, the negro race is visibly at a much lower level of development. Negro brains are more grey in colour than those of other races. The virtually simian prognathism [the relationship of the jaw to the face], the angle of the face, the section of the hair dearly differentiate it from the rest of humanity . . . in its own interest it is absurd to impose on it a civilisation it cannot assimilate and which is fatal for it . . . African blacks feel this and, at the approach of the white man, they resort to Mahometanism.

This way of confusing 'negro race' and 'African blacks' shows how little the stereotypes prevalent in 1900 had to do with the more differentiated descriptions by explorers and even less with the body of knowledge amassed by colonial savants. As the rift widened, the old opposition between negrophiles and negrophobes once more reared its head. Some philanthropists and the new specialists on Africa took up the negrophile line to combat the caricatures bandied about by colonial sociology . . .

The totally negative view of the negrophobes was part of a process of denial which appears clearly when the article 'Africa' in the first edition of the Larousse Dictionary (published between 1864 and 1876) is compared with that in the second (1896-1906). By 1900, Africa, conquered and dismembered, had become an object of contempt, even down to the very shape of the continent which inspired a value judgement other continents were spared:

There is no comparison that can help us to describe the outline of Africa ...What is to be noted above all is the thick massive nature of its shape, which contrasts strikingly with the slender elegance of the shape of Europe, the most indented of all continents.

Furthermore, the lively discussion on fetishism between an anonymous English traveler and Comoro, 'chief of a negro tribe of the White Nile', in the first edition had been replaced in the turn of the century edition by a horrifying enumeration of negative characters of the negro race borrowed from anthropology and ethnography.