An Enchanting Darkness: The American Vision of Africa in the Twentieth Century.

Several scholars who have in recent years investigated the formation of our current conception of realities have, for obvious reasons, devoted special attention to the West's various inventions of identifies for other peoples it has interacted with around the globe. In each case the nature of the interaction has inevitably determined the nature and quality of the invention. With regard to Africa, that invention has been colored by the need to rationalize and charter Europeans' destruction of civilizations, their enslavement and subjugation of African peoples, and the expropriation of their resources - all in the name of humanizing, christianizing, and "civilizing" the African.

Because of its difference, Africa has remained endlessly fascinating to Europeans, and its representation an attractive pastime for them. The continent and its peoples have also provided the West with much needed antipodal, manichean "other" figures.

In Orientalism Edward Said addresses the West's disciplinary definition of the Orient as the obverse of all that is good about the Occident. In The Invention of Africa and Blank Darkness, respectively, Valentin Yves Mudimbe and Christopher Miller follow suit with regard to the West's objectification of Africa. White on Black and An Enchanting Darkness are two of the most recent works to explore the same topic from two different perspectives. White on Black maps the post-World War II stance of non-black authors toward what Christopher Miller (following Said's Orientalism) has characterized as "Africanist discourse," a discourse, in Gruesser's words, "at odds with itself, projecting the West's desires on the perceived blank slate of Africa and depicting the continent alternately as a dream or a nightmare."

The two works have certain aspects in common: Both take as their points of departure Winston Churchill's nineteenth-century accounts of his African travels, Henry Morton Stanley's description of his mission to rescue David Livingston, Joseph Conrad's fictional narrative about a European regressing to primitiveness in the Congo, and Edgar Rice Burroughs's spectacularly successful whole-cloth fictionalization of Africa in his Tarzan stories. Both books also testify to Western writers' persistent perception of the African as the "other" of the European, and to Europeans' consistent conception of the continent as always excluded from historical processes. They indicate that only as we approach the end of the twentieth century have Western writers in any significant number begun to challenge these popular mythologies.

They differ in their selection of the beholding eyes - Gruesser focusing on non-black writers in general, while Hickey and Wylie scrutinize works by American authors. The White in Gruesser's title is less precise than the "non-black" in his preface, for his subjects include the brothers Naipaul. On the other hand, Hickey and Wylie's American, in contrast to common usage, properly encompasses territories outside the United States, specifically Walter Rodney's Guyana.

Enchanting Darkness is also broader in temporal scope, reaching back to the African's reign during the Enlightenment as a "noble savage" and tracing his/her later relegation to the status of a subhuman "primitive" in need of Western nurturing, partial rehabilitation as an appealing alternative to the product of Western "progress," and, finally, his/her more recent image as a ludicrous product of both failed colonialism and residual primitivism.

In his book Gruesser identifies three early twentieth-century manners of depicting Africa, all of them bearing traces of the Africanist discourse - "binary oppositions, image projection, and evolutionary language." Churchill's My African Journey epitomizes the first of these, while Conrad's Heart of Darkness exemplifies the second. Tarzan of the Apes, the brain child of Burroughs, who never set foot on the continent, represents the third. Together they established a pattern of misrepresentation that would prove irresistible to successive generations of Western writers, and proof against political changes or the availability of more reliable information about Africa and Africans.

This "Africanist discourse," Greusser demonstrates, informs the works of first-generation post-war writers (from 1945 to the early 1960s) like Evelyn Waugh (A Tourist in Africa), Graham Greene (The Heart of the Matter), and Saul Bellow (Henderson the Rain King), who, apart from ignoring the political changes in Africa, consciously chose to exploit the Africanist discourse for their literary ends. Exemptions are works inspired by the Mau Mau uprising, but they too, unfortunately, advertised the continent's barbarity and its peoples' superstitiousness and proneness to Communism, all of which they suggest argue for continued European rule. Greusser's second generation of writers (mainly from the 1970s) - including V. S. Naipaul (A Bend in the River) and his brother Shiva (North of South), Paul Theroux (Fong and the Indians; Girls at Play), Martha Gellhorn (The Weather in Africa), and William Boyd (A Good Man in Africa) - displays an awareness of the Africanist discourse and how language can objectify people; but while these authors sometimes parody Westerners in Africa, they also utilize language to perpetuate the conventional misrepresentation of the continent.

Greusser judges the third-generation writers of the 1980s to be sensitive to the characteristic literary cliches about Africa, which they make it their duty to explode. Writers in this group - including Helen Winternitz (East Along the Equator), Jonathan Raban (Foreign Land), Maria Thomas (Antonia Saw the Oryx First), and J. G. Ballard (The Day of Creation) - reverse the image of Africa as corrupting, and show that Europe could be the "foreign" land, and "going native" could be regenerative.

The fourth and last category of writers transcends the dominant traditions and revises the history of the relationship between Africans and Europeans, thus engaging "in Foucauldian genealogy, seeking to reverse Africanist discourse by focusing on events that belie its continuity." Works in this group include William Boyd's An Ice-Cream War, T. Coraghessan Boyle's Water Music, Peter Dickinson's Tefuga, and William Duggan's The Great Thirst and Lovers of the African Night.

Hickey and Wylie devote attention to some of the developments in America that tended to ameliorate the exploitation of a negative image of Africa - the Harlem Renaissance, for example - but especially the efforts of the anthropologist Franz Boas and his students. In covering the terrain Gruesser covers in his book, Hickey and Wylie display an evenhandedness evident, for example, in their discussion of Ernest Hemingway. Despite his inability to transcend the symbolic conventions about Africa completely, they note, Hemingway had deep affection for the continent, evident in such works as Green Hills of Africa and The Garden of Eden, and he depicted the Africans he came in contact with affectionately. Similarly, they note Robert Ruark's castigation of British atrocities against the native population of Kenya in dealing with the Mau Mau uprising, while at the same time describing the British presence there as "an island of civilization amid a savage sea."

Reluctant to pinpoint a watershed, they nonetheless see the 1960s (John Kennedy and the Peace Corps, the Civil Rights Movement, Vietnam) as occasioning a thematic shift in American writing about Africa. They discuss the extent to which the shift informs the writings of such authors as Theroux (whose generally anti-African tone they see as an expression of a misanthropic sensibility).

Of particular interest is their coverage of African American "response" to Western (white) misconstruction of Africa, its paucity and ambivalence. They cite, for instance, the nineteenth-century black clergyman Alexander Crummell, for whom Africa was the stronghold of the devil, and the African a "man-child" who lived in a "rude, crude, half-animal condition" before the slave trade first and later the missionary rescued him. He and others like him saw it as the duty of free black men in America to take up the task of civilizing the African. They detect similar sentiments in Marcus Garvey's U.N.I.A and its abortive project aimed at colonizing Africa. They reveal that even W. E. B. Du Bois, Richard Wright, and Alice Walker, to name a few, have evinced some degree of ambivalence toward the continent.

Offsetting these have been the positive reappraisal that accompanied the Harlem Renaissance and, more recently, Walter Rodney's Marxist-oriented expose of how Europe underdeveloped Africa and Molefi Kete Asante's Afrocentric cultural nationalism. Sticklers for objectivity and historicity that they are, though, Hickey and Wylie fault Rodney and Asante on grounds similar to those on which they challenge adherence to the old symbolic conventions - the confusion of fantasy with reality, polemic with scholarship, and mythology with history.

Hickey and Wylie in their impressive work avoid the few and minor errors of detail in Gruesser's book (reference to the infamous Zairean rebel as Pierre Mlule, and to the nineteenth-century demographic upheaval in southern Africa as the Mfecene), but in their pursuit of objectivity they often come close to sounding like apologists for past European adventurism, especially in their insistence that Europeans did not introduce Africa to slavery and that indigenous forms of servitude were not always any less inhuman than the notorious peculiar institution, and also in their denial of any suggestion that the West engaged in a "conscious and continuous conspiracy" against Africa. That denial should be comforting to Africans.

Indicative of the spirit of their enterprise, however, is their observation that instances of barbarism exist (or have existed) in other societies - cannibalism among Native Americans, human sacrifice among the Druids of ancient Britain, ritual murder as a rite of passage among certain American street gangs, the murder of female newborns in contemporary China - but that few would take any of these as typical of the culture or continent in question. Yet any such instance anywhere in Africa is taken as evidence of African savagery.

Gruesser suggests that non-black writers have some work to do in correcting their portrayal of Africa, thus inadvertently hinting at an assumption of a continued heavy involvement of non-blacks, or Westerners, in the business (the word used advisedly) of defining Africa, Africans, and Africanity. There is a strong temptation for one to counter that relief for Africa will come only through African self-representation, but much of recent African writing makes one leery even of that hope.