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The Rediscovery of Africa By Basil Davidson A LITTLE OVER A HUNDRED AND FIFTY YEARS AGO A YOUNG SCOTS surgeon named Mungo Park, more dead than alive from months of quenching travel, rode through Saharan sand and thorn into the remote city of Segu on the upper reaches of the river Niger. "Looking forwards," he would write, "I saw with infinite pleasure the great object of my mission -- the long sought-for majestic Niger, glittering to the morning sun, as broad as the Thames at Westminster, and flowing slowly to the eastward." The italics were his own, and they were understandably triumphant. Ever since Ptolemy, sixteen centuries before, men had written on maps that the Niger flowed to the westward. Arabs of the Middle Ages, true enough, had known the middle course of the Niger for what it really was; but Europe, newly considering Africa in times of mercantile expansion, could be sure of nothing of its geography but the outline of the coast, and a little, here and there, of the obscure lands beyond. "The course of the Niger, the places of its rise and termination, and even its existence as a separate stream are still undetermined," declared the prospectus of the African Association, founded in London in 1790 for "Promoting the Discovery of the Interior Parts of Africa," and it resolved that one of its explorers "should ascertain the course, and if possible, the rise and termination of that river." Mungo Park perished on the Niger before he could plot its course to the sea, but others followed. Within seventy years or so the main geographical facts were fixed and clear upon the continental map, and one misconception after another was corrected, one zone of ignorance after another filled with detail. African discovery took its place among the triumphs of the nineteenth century. The geographical myths and legends disappeared; in place of these, mapmakers could record the knowledge of sand and swamp, forest and savannah, snow-capped mountain range and bracing highland that the discoverers had won. A similar process of discovery is now occurring, about a hundred years later, in the field of African history. Historians and archeologists -- British, French, African, Italian, Belgian, American -- have embarked on journeys of historical discovery that parallel the geographical ventures of Park and Clapperton, Caillié and Barth, Livingstone, Stanley, and so many more. What the nineteenth century achieved for the geography of Africa the twentieth is well towards achieving for its history; and once again the truth these pioneers are finding has proved, often enough, the reverse of what the outside world had generally believed. Thus the chart of African history, so lately bare and empty and misleading as the maps once were, begins to glow with illuminating detail. Bearded monsters and "men whose heads do grow beneath their shoulders" begin to disappear; and humanity, in all its smallness and its greatness, begins to emerge. And it begins to be seen, if fleetingly and partially as yet, that the writing of African history is not only possible and useful, but will be as well a work of rediscovery -- the rediscovery of African humanity. The Negro, many have believed, is a man without a past. Black Africa -- Africa south of the Sahara desert -- is on this view a continent where men by their own efforts have never raised themselves much above the level of the beasts. "No ingenious manufactures among them, no arts, no sciences," commented David Hume. "No approach to the civilisation of his white fellow creatures whom he imitates as a monkey does a man," added Trollope. Even within the last ten years a former Governor of Nigeria could write that "for countless centuries, while all the pageant of history  swept by, the African remained unmoved -- in primitive savagery." Even in 1958 Sir Arthur Kirby, Commissioner for British East Africa in London, could tell the Torquay Branch of the Overseas League that "in the last sixty years -- little more than the lifetime of some people in this room -- East Africa has developed from a completely primitive country, in many ways more backward than the Stone Age . . ." Africans, on this view, had never evolved civilizations of their own; if they possessed a history, it could be scarcely worth the telling. And this belief that Africans had lived in universal chaos or stagnation until the coming of Europeans seemed not only to find its justification in a thousand tales of savage misery and benighted ignorance; it was also, of course, exceedingly convenient in high imperial times. For it could be argued (and it was; indeed, it still is) that these peoples, history-less, were naturally inferior or else they were "children who had still to grow up"; in either case they were manifestly in need of government by others who had grown up. This view of African achievement, or lack of achievement, is now with increasing knowledge seen to rest on no more solid a foundation in truth than that earlier belief about the Niger's flowing to the westward. Geographical discovery has proved that the Niger really flows to the eastward. Historical discovery is now proving that the development and growth of society and civilization in Africa really contradict this stereotype of "centuries-long stagnation." The world is changing its mind about the past of Africa. What can be said about this past -- about the formative fifteen or twenty centuries, that is, before European discovery and conquest? What can be said and what, where present knowledge fails, is it reasonable to believe? This book is an attempt -- necessarily tentative, summarized, and selective -- to answer these questions against a background of the whole of Africa south of the Saara. It relies, of course, on the work of many specialists in many fields; and those who are curious to pursue the subject further, or to check its references, will find a list of principal sources at the end. Though I have tried to be faithful to the evidence, the ambiguous nature of some of this evidence May have involved, here and there, mistakes of fact and emphasis. My belief is that these are few enough to leave the general picture both clear and reasonable. The outline of African growth over the past fifteen hundred years or so is still unsure at many points. Much remains unknown; much may yet prove unknowable. Neat generalizations about a continent so wide and various will usually be wrong. Yet the central fact which stands forth from the work of many historians and archeologists over the past ten or twenty years is that much more is known, and much more can be said with a fair assurance of being right, than was generally suspected or thought possible. These last few years, in short, have uncovered much African history; and this book may be regarded, I hope, as a useful "situation report" on many and exciting finds. I have tried to steer between the rock of prejudice and the whirlpool of romance. Inquiries into the African past have suffered from both; and of many writers who have tried to go safely between them, discouragingly few have managed to succeed. Those who have gone down in the whirlpool of romance are of two kinds. Some have thought it wise and necessary to fill their charts of the African past with tales of Sheba and Opbir, of strange Phoenicians building cities in Rhodesia, and mysterious peoples "from the north" who came and stayed but altogether vanished. These are the modern versions of bearded monsters and of men "whose heads do grow beneath their shoulders"; and a better understanding of the subject is gently but firmly erasing them from the map. Other romantics, moved by a sentiment that may be more generous but is no more scientific, have come to grief through writing "high civilizations" into the continental African past where evidence for them is entirely lacking. Africa south of the Sahara contributed in no small measure to the great civilizations of the Nile Valley; but south of the Nile Valley it no more enjoyed in antiquity what modern convention has agreed to call a high civilization than did northern Europe or northern America, and for reasons, perhaps, which may not be altogether different from one another. To say this is not to diminish the human achievement in continental Africa, but to place it in its true perspective; for that achievement, when seen against its formative background and measured by its civilizing growth, was great and noble in its own right, and needs no romanticizing gilt to make it seem so. On the opposite side there are those who have shipwrecked themselves on the rock of prejudice: the rock, in this case, of an unremitting skepticism. It is an old and hoary rock, mute and menacing, and covered with the debris of sad reputations. Exactly a hundred years ago, on returning from long travels in northern and western Africa, Heinrich Barth, who was surely the most intelligent of all the nineteenth century travelers in Africa, and sailed these historical narrows with a mastery and brilliance that none has yet repeated, gave it a passing word. "Any writer," he warily remarked, "who attempts to recall from obscurity and oblivion the past ages of an illiterate nation, and to lay before the public even the most elementary sketch of its history, will probably have to contend against the strong prejudice of numerous critics, who are accustomed to refuse belief to whatever is incapable of strictest enquiry." Sensible and farseeing when they were written, these words retain their application to the writing of African history in our own day, although skeptics are less numerous and self-assured than they were a hundred years ago. Let me carefully assert, therefore, that much has still to be learned of the African past. No definitive outline will be possible for a long time. "We are discovering new things," Mathew could tell the second London conference on African history and archeology in 1957, "every six months." Wide gaps persist. Whole territories remain to be explored. Many findings are in hot debate. The word "probably" should be read into these pages more often than it is actually written there. Yet when all such reservations are made -- and they ought to be made, even when for readability's sake I have omitted to repeat them -- there remains the stuff and substance of a solid and reliable beginning. Though not definitive, the outline is tolerably firm and clear. And what this new outline suggests is something neither "inferior" nor "mysterious" but a story of success and failure, disaster and resurgence and fulfillment, which is no different in its essence from the story of any of the major families of man. This rediscovery of Africa goes indeed toward the recognition of the essential unity of the peoples of Africa with the peoples of the rest of the world. The "lost islands" of African humanity are joined to the main. Source: The Lost Cities of Africa Home