Stories of the ‘dark’ continent: Crude constructions,diasporic identity,and international aid to Africa

Abstract

Africa’s emergence into the geography of the known world has not been without controversies and the contradictions of crudity and underdevelopment in spite of the continent’s rich history as well as its natural and human resources. The crude conceptions of black Africa (as opposed to North Africa) are appositely captured in the literature and records of early Greek and Roman superpowers, European medieval explorers and Crusaders, Arab travelers and conquerors, and colonial anthropologists, archeologists, and historians. The ‘stories’ of Africa in modern times have remained that of despair and underdevelopment leading to emigration and the deployment of international aid. This review essay captures the reality and context of crude constructions of Africa by non-Africans and Africans; migrants’ appeal to religious identity in an attempt to relive and reconstruct their ‘Africanness’ for the purpose of survival; and Japanese aid to Africa.

Keywords

Africa archeology foreign aid Ghana Japan migration

Among the comity of continents, Africa exists as the most vilified, backward, and underdeveloped (Amin, 1972; Kunnie, 2013). Over the centuries, the conceptions and constructions of crudity and underdevelopment have somewhat defined the approach of strategists, policy makers, and scholars in other continents regarding Africa. Africa has therefore often been placed in the position of subservience and dependence (Kapoor, 2002; Martin, 1986), presented as savage (Henderson, 2001; Simpson, 2007), in need of ‘enduring’ civilizing intervention and colonization (Brown, 2000; Johnson, 1988; Lüthy, 1961), and post-political independence economic aid (Bräutigam and Knack, 2004; Goldsmith, 2001). Still, for many Africans, the solution to problems experienced in Africa can only be found through migration to the developed world (Akanle, 2013; Omobowale, 2013), where they are faced with the realities of integration, survival, success, and possible despondency (Dodoo, 1997; Freeman, 2002; Kwok-bun and Plüss, 2013; Waldinger, 1999). Irrespective of diverse explanations, it is important to note that Africa’s underdevelopment discourse and process cannot be dissociated from its peripheral positioning in the international political economy (Haque, 2002; Munford, 1978).

The three books that this review essay discusses present what I will call the ‘stories of Africa.’ These books focus on distinct, though in another sense overlapping, aspects of African social reality. Robin Derricourt’s Inventing Africa reconstructs historical, archeological, and contemporary conceptions about Africa’s origin, culture, and development. It emphasizes Africa’s originality and early civilization, which were spurned by early European philosophers, explorers, historians, theorists, and colonial archeologists and anthropologists. It also discusses the corruption and development challenges in postcolonial Africa. Moses O Biney’s From Africa to America details the experience of mostly economic migrants of Ghanaian origin in the United States. The subjects of Biney’s research take solace in indigenous Ghanaian Christian congregational identity by joining the Presbyterian Church of Ghana in New York (PCGNY) in the process of adapting and integrating into the highly individualistic, success-oriented US society. Finally, Howard Lehman’s edited volume, Japan and Africa, discusses Japan’s development assistance to Africa, which is hardly discussed in the international development assistance literature. The connection between these three books is the affirmation of an underdeveloped state of Africa, which has attracted a foreign quest to ‘civilize,’ provide aid, and also drive Africans to migrate to other continents in search of better opportunities.

In spite of the historical and archeological discoveries of Africa’s glorious past (Connor, 2004; Lane, 2011), the continent remains in development doldrums, ravaged by corruption, official maladministration, ethnic and religious violence and warfare, inflation, and poverty in spite of the region’s wealth of resources. Africa’s seemingly unique situation seems incontrovertible and has failed to respond to past and present interventions. Most of the time, Africa and Africans receive the blame, however it is important to note that the economic, political, and social reality of Africa’s development and underdevelopment is also a function of its positioning in pre- and post-18th century global politics and economic relations among the political, economic, and military powers (Amoore et al., 2000; Hall, 1998). Across the different epochs, Africa took the peripheral position in political and economic calculation to the advantage of the global powers. Hence, the political economy of global relations affected the constructions of development and civilization in Africa, colonial and postcolonial international migration, and the deployment of aid. This essay therefore reviews Robin Derricourt’s, Moses Biney’s, and Howard Lehman’s books by emphasizing the role of international political economy in the construction of contemporary reality in Africa, which the authors excluded from their very scholarly texts. The next section focuses on the contexts of crude constructions as a factor in the positioning of Africa in global political-economic relations.

Crude constructions and diffusionist conceptions

Conceptions of African crudity date back to the early phase of European philosophy and historiography. Territories outside the known world, off trade routes and military conquest, were largely deemed inferior. Derricourt affirmed that Greek and Roman geographers and philosophers distinguished between ‘white’ Africa, with which they traded, warred, and colonized, and Africa, which was south of the ‘white’ territory, and outside their influence (pp. 3–9). At an early stage, ‘white’ Africa was identified along its Mediterranean corridor and it later became part of the Mediterranean axis of the Roman Empire. The Greek and Romans had some knowledge of Africans outside the Mediterranean sphere. The Greek called black Africans Aethiopia, a derivative of the Greek word Aithiops (‘burnt face’; Derricourt, p. 9). The Greek description of black Africa as a ‘burnt face’ was one example of a classic pattern of differentiating blackness from the supposedly more refined whiteness. The Greek also distinguished between the ‘civilized’ black African kingdoms of Meroe and Axum and the rest (largely unknown territory), which was classified ‘savage Ethiopia’ (see Bekerie, 2004). Early Arabian writers, explorers, and traders also distinguished between the Islamic states of the Maghreb and kingdoms south of the Sahara, which were called Bilad al-Sudan (p. 12).

Derricourt posits that the accounts of the Greek, Romans, and Arabs formed the medieval European knowledge of Africa. Reports of a certain Prester John caught the fancy and curiosity of the crusaders of medieval Europe. Prester John was believed to be a powerful non-European king who defeated Muslim soldiers around the time of the Crusades. A Portuguese mission to Africa in 1520 discovered that Prester John was actually Emperor Lebna Dengel Dawit of Ethiopia, a powerful king who harbored and settled Catalans, Greeks, Germans, Spaniards, and Italians who had escaped from Muslim captivity. Nevertheless, the conceptions of the ‘subhuman’ nature of Africans influenced the mass capture and shipment of Africans to Europe and the Americas as slaves (Derricourt, pp. 16–17).

The advent of European explorers and missionaries into the African hinterland starting in the 18th and 19th centuries exposed them to the reality of advanced civilization in Africa. In southern Africa, European explorers marveled at the sophistication of the stone walls of the Kingdom of Mwene Mutapa, which was called Zimbabwe (‘Zunbanhy,’ ‘Symbaoe’) and the stone-walled communities in the Transvaal. The explorers also discovered active and abandoned gold mines that native Africans had explored with their primitive tools (Derricourt, pp. 23–24). Consequent fictional reports describe the affluence of the African hinterland, but, of course, also attributed the development to Arab, Egyptian, and Phoenician invaders, rulers, conquerors, and traders, who supposedly diffused superior civilization into the African interior. The conclusions of European explorers were not different from accounts presented in fiction. They concluded that Africans could not have had the capability to develop such advanced civilizations; it must have been diffused.

Professor Raymond Dart’s discovery, naming, and publication of his findings in Nature of Australopithecus africanus as the origin of humankind in 1925 challenged popular convictions about Africa at that time. Dart’s position was initially rejected and described as ‘preposterous’ (Derricourt, p. 48) by other scientists. By the 1940s, Dart’s position had become generally accepted, with many scholars describing the migration of early human species from Africa to other continents (see Connor, 2004; Lahr and Foley, 1994; Laitman, 1986; Lane, 2011; Reed, 1997). This view notwithstanding, Dart posits the inferiority of early Africans and suggests the sophisticated civilization and culture found in southern Africa might have been diffused by Egyptian, Mesopotamian, and Phoenician conquerors and/or explorers who traveled along the coastline and brought their sophisticated tools to explore mines using African labor. Dart claimed that: ‘either the metal-gatherers instructed the local inhabitants in that technique, or brought with them followers expert in that technique . . . they founded their metallic enterprise amidst the old palaeolithic culture’ (Derricourt, p. 63).

Despite the wide acceptance of Dart’s ideas, the Hamitic hypothesis emerged in the 1930s to retrace black Africa’s civilization away from Egypt. The Hamitic hypothesis is based on the biblical story of Lot and his children. Lot cursed Ham, who had seen his nakedness and made jest of him. Building on this account, the anthropologist CG Seligman, in Races of Africa, claimed Hamites were Europeans who migrated to Africa and brought along their civilization. Derricourt notes that Seligman categorized the African groups that were considered civilized such as ancient Egyptians, Nubians, Somalis, Ethiopians, Berbers, Tuareg, and Fulbe as Hamites (Derricourt, p. 106). This position is similar to that of colonial officials in Nigeria who described the Fulani (Fulbe) as superior to their Negro neighbors, and traced their (Fulani) origin to Caucasoid groups of Asia and the southern European regions (Law, 2009; Ugbem et al., 2012; Zachernuk, 1994).

Finally, Derricourt presents the works of Basil Davidson, an optimist Africanist. Davidson rejects the popular presentations of Africa’s crudity in Western colonial and postcolonial literature. He researched Africa’s past and its glory. Davidson’s works can be separated into two phases. The first phase was influenced by his experience as a senior British military officer working undercover as a journalist in many territories in Europe and Africa during the Second World War. Following his discharge from the army, Davidson worked as a journalist for some major European tabloids and pursued anticolonial activism. From the 1940s to the late 1980s, Davidson published many books that emphasized Africa’s glorious past and its postcolonial potential. The second phase of Davidson’s writings was in the 1990s. Davidson retained his convictions about Africa’s glorious past but he was appalled by the corrupt military and civilian leaderships that had failed Africa and thrown the black subcontinent into an economic abyss, political turbulence, and civil war. Derricourt (p. 135) notes that, in a collection of essays published in 1994, Davidson pessimistically wrote:

Thirty years or so earlier there had seemed, for Africans, to be time and opportunity for everything while the beckoning threshold of anticolonial independence opened out, as it appeared, upon endless possibilities of progress. By the outset of the 1990s, in one of history’s reversals, these possibilities could appear all too completely to have vanished from the scene . . . [African governments] had lost or thrown away the legitimacy that comes from people’s recognition and acceptance. (pp. 247–248)

At independence, nationalists and Africa’s new rulers tried to build on the glory of the African past. They adopted the names of old African success states such as Ghana, Mali, and Zimbabwe (Derricourt, pp. 137–140, see also McCall and Stewart, 1974; Schmidt and Walz, 2007) for nationalistic appeals and Africanist identity. The glorious stories of the past, however, did not translate to glorious realities in the postcolonial period. Africa remains a peripheral location in the world capitalist system and has produced corrupt leaders under whom the welfare of Africans has worsened. Again, for many Africans and non-Africans alike, the story of contemporary Africa is couched in the reality of ‘brutish crudity and underdevelopment,’ which have presented many Africans with a poor environment for survival, and the need to emigrate.

Migrations, religio-economics of diasporic identity, and aid

Statistics confirm the northward migration of Africans to the developed world (Bakewell, 2008; United Nations, 2013). The degree of desperation to migrate is evidenced by visa scams and travel through the dangerous trans-Sahara routes and subsequent crossings to Europe on rickety rafts and boats despite the risks. Still, many Africans migrate legally for education, employment, and through the various country-specific migration schemes (e.g., the USA Diversity Visa Lottery; Law, 2002). Irrespective of the means of migration, integration – and making progress – is difficult for most African migrants in host countries. Biney captures this succinctly: ‘Generally, immigrants leave their home country with high hopes of improving their lives and fulfilling their dreams and aspirations. Upon arrival in the United States, however, they are immediately confronted with the hard realities of living in a foreign land’ (p. 12).

The United States is a country of immense opportunities and wealth. The US economy places it at the epicenter of the world capitalist system, and the United States is unquestionably a powerful player in global economy and politics. As the country of migrants, the United States has welcomed people from around the world, and they have attained high levels of success, prestige, and privileges. Biney’s research, however, argues that African migrants do not have the same opportunities as other migrants. African migrants are singled out by their ‘crude’ accent and dark skin (pp. 25–26). African migrants are also faced with a reality of rejection and harassment by state agencies and the larger society, nor are they accepted by America’s black population (pp. 26–27). African immigrants seek hope in the American philosophy of equality, equity, and success, but they are unable to fit easily into America’s ‘corporate’ society. Biney writes:

While many Ghanaian immigrants have lived in European and other so called ‘first world’ countries before migrating to the United States, many more have come directly from small towns and villages in Ghana. For many of them, life in New York City is both fascinating and frustrating. Upon arrival in New York City, they are immediately confronted with the dominant corporate culture, a culture Giddens and others say, places a high premium on ‘expertise’ and ‘precision.’ This culture requires the Ghanaians to change their sense of time, business, and personal relationships. The high academic qualifications and skills they acquired in Ghana and elsewhere are often considered insufficient for employment. Many have to study for accreditations and certifications from schools in the United States in order to secure jobs. (p. 27)

Biney further writes:

The Ghanaian immigrant also taste the ‘excellence’ and excesses of capitalism as reflected in the daily life in the city. They find food items and many other household commodities and services accessible and affordable. But they are confounded by all the rules and restrictions related to residential accommodations, transportation, and others; the ‘shylock’ business attitudes; and the paucity of personal relationships in the city. They soon come to learn that corporations rather than community dictate life in the city, and that, within the large buildings that dominate the city’s landscape and skyline, decisions are made which affect the global economy and their day-to-day lives as well. (p. 27)

In the United States, Ghanaian migrants (as well as other Africans) are faced with the reality of the seeming crudity of the cultural values within which they have been raised in Africa, the ‘crudity’ of the accent that accompanies their English, and finally, the ‘crudity’ of their skills and certifications. All of these can only be redressed by the reorientation of their values, accents, and skills in order to fit the American corporate system. A few are able to surmount these challenges. Many others succumb to despair, and they retreat into the religious socialization they received back in Africa (see Biney, Ch. 3). For these migrants, religious congregations such as the Presbyterian Church of Ghana in New York (PCGNY) provide the needed succor.

The PCGNY started as a fellowship in 1983 and was officially consecrated as a church on 24 November 1985. It attracts members from among Ghanaians and other African nationals who either come independently or have Ghanaian spouses. The establishment of the church is consequence of causal explanations, that is, of its founding Ghanaian members attributing their plight in the United States to supernatural causes (p. 69). In remembrance of home, and assuming the efficacy of the Ghanaian cultural and religious values that are missing in their immediate environments and communities in the United States, the ‘church was formed mainly to offer its members the opportunity to worship in a manner to that in Ghana’ (p. 65). In practice, the PCGNY presents a Ghanaian home in the diaspora. The Sunday service is replete with robust expressions of Ghanaian culture. The congregation communicates and ministers in local Ghanaian languages as well as English, members wear local Ghanaian fabrics, and, above all, congregants express a degree of the indigenous kinship/brotherhood which brings back – at least for a moment – a social reality of the identity supposedly left back in Africa and/or lost as ‘ “invisible sojourners” about whom very little is known’ (p. 1). They may have been lost in the US corporate culture, but they rediscover themselves by leaning on elements of their culture that they had left at home in search of modernity and success. Thus, the seemingly crude culture, captured in Ghanaian Presbyterian denominational values, translates into an efficacious salvage in the rationalist world of capitalism, profit making, and survival of the fittest. The relevance of the PCGNY is not limited to how it sustains and helps integrate the worshipers in the United States. The PCGNY also plays an important role in the acceptance of the parishioner back home in local churches, especially after death. Ownership of a PCGNY membership card and a reference letter from the PCGNY assembly pastor assure the deceased’s body a ‘journey home’ and a proper burial (pp. 74–75). The PCGNY therefore plays vital roles of integration, identity, and brotherhood for members in both life and death.

Finally, Biney notes the seeming preference for American culture among the second generation of PCGNY members. These are the children of members who have internalized American culture, and are wary of the spirituality, hospitality, unity, kin, and brotherhood that are at the foundation of the PCGNY (pp. 105, 121). For this generation, the values that form the core of PCGNY’s Africanness are emblazoned in the constructs of crudity, and are in urgent need of rational transformative change. Biney points out that ‘The irony of the relationship between the two generations and the church is that the very things that the first generation cherished and which drew them to the church were the things that the second generation disliked, and which have caused them to stay away from it’ (p. 135). As the first generation exits and the second generation grows into adulthood, the continued survival of the PCGNY may be threatened. Time and changing realities will determine the fate of the PCGNY as it struggles to survive in the US rationalist and dynamic social structure and cultural space.

Derricourt’s and Biney’s works have captured some dimensions of African problems. The continent remains a peripheral partner in the world capitalist system, and is ever dependent on developed nations for aid and assistance. The literature has mostly discussed development aid and assistance from Western countries (Gatune, 2010; Goldsmith, 2001), as well as the competitive nature of capitalist and socialist aid to Africa, especially during the Cold War (Leffler, 2005; Stephens, 2012; Widmaier, 2007). Lehman’s edited volume examines Japan’s aid to Africa, an important issue that has been largely neglected. Japan emerged as a major military and economic power at the beginning of the 20th century. Its influence, however, was largely limited to Southeast Asia, most of which was under Japanese colonial rule. Takahashi notes (in Lehman, p. 41) that unlike during the First World War, when Japan sided with the eventual victors, during the Second World War Japan was on the wrong side and emerged from its surrender with a commitment to pay reparations to Southeast Asian countries that had been pillaged under its rule (see Lawson and Tannaka, 2011). In the immediate postwar period, Japan had no aid commitment to Africa, because Japan’s primary focus was on Southeast Asia, where its reparations were also a sort of development aid (Lehman, p. 27). Japan’s experience during and after the war made it retreat into what Sato (Lehman, p. 9) calls a ‘reactive state,’ which is capable of initiating its economic and foreign policies, but succumbs to gaiatsu (foreign pressure, especially from the United States; see also Adem, 2010). Thus, it is not surprising that Japan decided to extend aid to Africa following pressure from the US government (Sato, in Lehman, p. 14).

Japan’s aid to Africa is encapsulated in the Tokyo International Conference on African Development (TICAD), which was created in 1993 (Lehman, p. 2). Between 1993 and 2008, Japan held four TICAD gatherings where issues concerning Africa’s development and Japan’s aid to Africa were discussed (see also Burgschweiger, 2008). The TICAD is supposedly ‘Japan’s way of high-lighting Africa’s developmental problems, and of reminding the international community that the continent’s problems did not melt away with the end of the Cold War. It is said to emanate from the conception that the developmental problems of Africa are genuinely global issues that should be addressed collectively by the international community’ (Ampiah, 2005: 97–98). Japan was initially the most important donor to many African countries. China has recently emerged as a major Asian contender to Japan’s influence in Africa (French, 2007).

Japan’s aid to Africa is different from that provided by most developed nations. For most of the developed world, the conditions attached to aid allow the giving countries a degree of influence in the administration of the aid (and other policy issues) in the recipient countries. For Japan, the concepts of ‘ownership’ and ‘self-help’ are central to aid giving. Contrary to the Washington Consensus, which sees poverty reduction as a consequence of economic growth, Japan sees poverty reduction as the primary objective of foreign aid (Lehman, p. 32). Thus, whereas the Washington Consensus emphasizes trade liberalization for growth, Japan’s emphasis is on local industrial development and production for growth and poverty reduction (Lehman, p. 33; see also Burgschweiger, 2008). This explains why Japan’s development aid emphasizes ownership and self-help, which allows recipient countries control over the aid received. Japan adopted this policy because of the existence of institutions and values that allow for productive and beneficial use of aid by recipient countries (Lehman, p. 32). Lehman notes that this approach has often been described as the ‘post-Washington Consensus framework’ (p. 3), but Washington Consensus partners have demanded that Japan revert to the dictates of the Consensus. Japan might succumb to Western pressures due to its ‘reactive’ nature. Japan once reduced its aid commitment to Africa in the early 1990s. It has, however, been forced to revitalize its aid policy to Africa due to China’s increasing influence on the continent. Thus, Sato argues that ‘the historical development of Japan’s Africa policy can be properly understood only when located in the complex web of relationships between Japan, Africa and the third parties’ (in Lehman, p. 22).

Conclusion

Africa’s weak peripheral position in international political economy and the world capitalist system situates it within the context and discourse of ‘crudity’ in international relations. Battling underdevelopment, poverty, and the problems of corrupt governance and maladministration, many Africans migrate to the developed world only to be faced with the challenges of integration. Diaspora sociocultural and religious groups may provide some redress for the ‘culturally shocked’ immigrants, but this does not fully integrate them into the host community, where they have to live by the rationalist expectations of a corporate society at the very center of the world capitalist system. And, back in Africa, governments still depend on international aid. Japanese aid holds the potential for economic transformation due to its policy of ownership and self-help. This gives recipient countries the right to apply aid to the most critical areas. This may not last long because Japan may succumb to pressures from Western countries. Africa remains a ‘dark’ and weak player in international political economy due to its peripheral position in the world capitalist system. How Africa is described, how Africans react, and why Africa remains a field open for foreign intervention, are all rooted in policies and actions implemented in and by the developed countries at the center of the international political economy and the world capitalist system.

Footnotes

Author biography

Ayokunle Olumuyiwa Omobowale holds a PhD in sociology from the University of Ibadan. His work focuses on development and society. He has won the University of Ibadan Postgraduate School award for scholarly publication (2007); the IFRA (French Institute for Research in Africa) research fellowship (2009); and the American Council of Learned Societies-African Humanities Program (ACLS-AHP) postdoctoral fellowship (2010). Before joining the University of Ibadan in 2008, Dr Omobowale taught sociology at the University of Lagos, Nigeria, in 2007–2008, and served as Assistant Editor of the International Encyclopedia of Revolution and Protest (2009). He is the author of The Tokunbo Phenomenon and the Second-hand Economy in Nigeria.

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