By: Melanie Kent
Over a hundred years ago, Joseph Conrad wrote a novel about life as an ivory transporter down the Congo River in Central Africa. This novel, Heart of Darkness, perpetuates racist, imperialistic views of a barbarian Africa which high school and college students across America are quick to condemn.
However, although many consider themselves more educated and open-minded than in the past, powerful hidden assumptions about the continent still exist. Most Western references to Africa are framed in homogenous terms and limited to conflict, poverty, and hunger. The main reason Africa seems dark to the West is not because of the lack of education or electricity within it, but because of basic ignorance about it.
Asking the politically incorrect question, “Why is Africa so backwards?” gives both logical and condemning answers.
Three main factors have historically limited the development of the continent.
Geology of the region prevented farming, particularly in arid regions like the Sahara, so that settled agriculture could not be sustained. Poor soils were quickly exhausted and land was difficult to clear because of rainforest growth. Development of metal tools parallel to that in other regions was blocked by a scarcity of coal for iron-smelting (making iron rare and expensive). Diseases, particularly malaria and sleeping sickness, were prevalent in the warm, moist sub-Saharan regions, and kept human and livestock populations relatively small. Despite these limitations, the continent actually experienced a renaissance during the European Dark Ages.
However, the emergence of an extensive intracontinental and then transatlantic slave trade devastated the continent. In the 400 years up to 1900, 11-13 million people were taken into captivity. Apart from the terrible loss of life associated with the trade, this phenomenon disrupted complex systems of government across the continent, cut potential economic growth and disrupted trade networks, created instability and encouraged raiding, and shattered the generational links transferring agricultural knowledge, oral history and literature, and technical skills.
Colonization (beginning with an invasion of Egypt by Napoleon in 1798) continued disruption and turmoil on the continent in new ways. European powers decided to jointly organize the carving of the continent to avoid a war among themselves, and in 1885 at the Berlin Conference, they established a plan for what would by 1900 mean colonial domination of the entire continent, minus Ethiopia.
Colonization had a powerfully negative impact, not only due to the violent administration of the continent, but also because of devaluing of cultures within Africa. The attitudes of Europeans toward Africa were formed by enlightenment philosophers. David Hume expressed the idea that “There never was any civilized nation of any other complexion than white.” Hegel stated that Africa “is no historic part of the world.” This idea is rooted in ignorance about the oral literature, history, and record-keeping which amounted to a hereditary profession in many areas. Europeans couldn’t see much in writing, so they assumed there was nothing. For the colonized, this cultural derogation has resulted in a shame in traditions and rejection of customs and norms, replacing them with a Western ideal. For Westerners, this legacy survives in a general idea that African cultures are simplistic or crude.
The third major limitation Africa has faced came about only in the last 50 years. After World War II, a successful push for independence began, so that by 1960 most African colonies had become states. However, few to none of the independent states had government officials who had been trained or prepared to lead modern states, especially those predicated on inherited Western laws and institutions with their in-built norms and value systems. This disaster is the culprit of the modern stunting of the continent. Corruption, dictatorial abuses of power, and failing or nonexistent infrastructure are only a few of the enduring consequences.
This being said, current trends are exciting and encouraging.
The population of Cairo, Egypt currently tops that of Beijing. Lagos in Nigeria outstrips Paris, and Sudan’s Khartoum is bustling with more citizens than Atlanta. Economic growth rates in Sub-Saharan Africa reached over 5 percent in the past two years, making the region one of the fastest-growing areas in the world, far exceeding the global average. Companies such as IBM and Microsoft are taking note of this growth and investing intentionally in the continent. Responsible for close to 10 percent of global internet use, the continent has over 50 million Facebook users – more in South Africa than in Australia, and more in Madagascar than in Ukraine. Cell phones sales are propelling Somalia’s economy, Nigeria’s Nollywood is the third largest producer of feature films in the world, and the hip-hop scene in Mali is powerful enough to drive political dialogue.
These advances in wealth, health, education, art, and technology are impressive given the challenges the continent has faced. But they have not bloomed out of a void. Mali, even from the age of Timbuktu, has embraced diversity and concentrated its identity on music. Somalia’s nomads have adapted creatively to a lack of conventional political infrastructure for centuries, and Madagascar has a strong history of sophisticated communications systems. It is not the Westernization of Africa which makes it cultured and worthy of respect. Add intelligence and humanity to what is termed “tribal,” “barbaric,” and “starving,” and you get a cultural heritage of millennia – one which the rest of the world overlooks to their great loss.
Developments across the continent are transcending historic damages, but Africa has never been a “Heart of Darkness.”
