Finding a ‘Black Arendt' in Africa

It is therefore useful to begin this chapter by situating Arendt's Origins with respect to African historiography, a task that is especially urgent because few have undertaken it.

Africanist historians understand imperialism and colonialism very differently from Arendt. The German philosopher saw Europeans imposing themselves on closed and unchanging African societies; history proper begins in her mind only when Europeans arrive. By contrast, African studies first constituted itself as a field (at about the same time that Arendt was writing Origins) precisely in response to these sorts of views ‘which saw Africans as the passive backdrop to the deeds of white proconsuls and missionaries’.^{^[412]} ^{^[413] ^[414]} It did not take long for Africanists to dispense with these stereotypes, even writing histories of the imperial and colonial era where Europeans are largely absent. In the early 1980s eminent first-generation Africanist Roland Oliver could write confidently that ‘African history throughout this period pursued paths still largely separate from those of the European colonisers... Even by the end of the period, only a small minority of Africans had seen a white face or had any idea that their countries were subject to foreign rule.’11 Rather than the celebrated European ‘scramble for Africa’ of the textbooks, Africanists found a more important internal African scramble led by expanding African states which defined the continent’s nineteenth-century history. ‘Thus, some African leaders viewed Europeans as allies and partners in essentially local struggles of some antiquity: Europeans, essentially, were co-opted into African wars, using African 12

troops.’

Thus, Africanists’ priorities have diverged substantially from Arendt’s interests. They have explored the interdependence of Europeans and Africans and even the dependence of the colonisers on the colonised.

This included various systems of indirect rule deployed by Europeans wherein colonised people ruled themselves, with the colonisers using local networks reworked to their interests. Africans also played the essential role of intermediaries and proxies of imperialism, as tax collectors, translators, schoolteachers, clerks, interpreters, even as ‘violent intermediaries’ as was the case for the askari forces in German East Africa studied by historian Michelle Moyd.1^{^[415]} In the early case of Algeria, where France had made major commitments of treasure and blood by the 1840s and where many found genocide an attractive solution to the so-called ‘Indigenous question’, generals and ministers recognised that they needed Algerian labour if European settlers were to have a chance in the rough-hewn, former Ottoman province.^{^[416]} Thus nearly everywhere across colonial era Africa, the infamous command

‘exterminate all the brutes' from Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness had to reconcile itself to the fact that European successes depended as much upon mobilising Africa's human resources as it did on exploiting raw materials, farmlands and ports.^{^[417]}

Ultimately, Africanists have shown that colonialism and imperialism mutually transformed Africans and Europeans. In the case of European missionaries, for example, ‘a protracted dialogue based in part on misrecognition, in part on shared interests, in part on alliances across the very lines that divided them', constituted social relations with Africans.^{^[418]} This went beyond social and political relations to transform understandings of something as fundamental as race. Historian Bruce Hall writes that African and European notions of race emerged in a dialogic process: ‘Africans brought rich vocabularies and developed concepts about the social world in which they lived into their relationships with Europeans, just as colonial officials carried a late-nineteenth century conceptual vocabulary of race, nation, and tribe...

it would be a big mistake not to recognize that this was a two-way process.'^{^[419]}

It might be, however, that these historiographical insights produce their own forms of blindness. Notably the violence of the European conquests can fade or even disappear from the historian's attention. Today, there are few Africanist or Middle Easternist historians in the Anglo-American world who focus on the colonial era's episodes of mass violence. Fears of neo-orientalism influence in part this reticence to focus on violence. For example, historian of Algeria James McDougall has pointed to the dangers of violence studies in an influential 2005 article that warns how this research risks reproducing colonial stereotypes. He writes, ‘However many savage wars Algeria may have suffered, Algerians have not thereby been collectively brutalized into thinking with savage minds.'^{^[420]} It is hard to disagree with a statement like this, but it leads to my concern that important parts of history might be foreclosed to research if this sort of historiographical gatekeeping becomes predominant. Exceptions to this trend are Africanist scholars trained at continental European universities such as Jan-Bart Gewald, and African scholars who

Genealogies of Modern Violence maintain a sharpened postcolonial consciousness, like Toyin Falola, Mahmood Mamdani and Achille Mbembe.^{^[421]} For scholars of Africa working in African universities, Algeria for example, colonial violence is a mainstay of the field in spite of the censure their work faces in Europe and the United States.

What then to make of Arendt? Even as she brings Africa into the origins of European totalitarianism, and she places the question of violence at the centre of colonial-era African history, she fails to recognise the role of Africans. Ultimately the problem hinges on the fact that Arendt sees imperialism and its violence as a problem for Europeans, not for Africans.

Karuna Mantena puts this in strong terms: ‘Arendt's interest in imperialism is limited to how imperialism impinges upon, and indeed radically disrupts, the moral and political coordinates of Europe, and has very little to say in terms of its specific and catastrophic legacy for the ex-colonial world.'^{^[422]} While Mantena does not fully contextualise Origins, which was written when the world was hardly yet ‘ex-colonial', she does nicely point out Arendt's inability to see non-Europeans as significant historical actors. Africans do appear in Origins but hardly in ways that advance our understanding of colonial violence. They play a central role in the book's sections concerning full-blown modern racism, which she argues had only punctuated European thought in the nineteenth century until imperialism made it a principle of politics and a permanent feature of social thought. Africans triggered what Arendt called the ‘shattering experiences' felt by Europeans who encountered Africans, somehow shocking in their physical appearance, and race served these Europeans as an ‘emergency explanation' for all of this. Arendt's understanding of ‘shattering' has little to do with the actual force of African resistance, for example the victories won by the Amir ‘Abd al-Qadir (d. 1883) in northern Africa or Samori Toure (d. 1900) in western Africa, who are not mentioned in Origins. Quite the opposite: the racial shock experienced by Europeans is associated with

her view that to Europeans, Africans ‘were as incomprehensible as the inmates of a madhouse’.^{^[423]} Thus Arendt fails to understand that whatever shattering occurred was a result of the Europeans’ own pre-existing racism towards people of colour. The sort of ‘Africans’ who Arendt has in mind come from the slanted sources available to her and her entirely un- nuanced, uncritical reading of them. Working from accounts penned by journalists like Selwyn James’s South of the Congo (1943), Arendt conveys a vision of the ‘Dark Continent’ as a primeval land inhabited by ‘savages’ (both terms used by Arendt without irony).^{^[424]} Thus she writes:

Whether these [Africans] represent ‘prehistoric man’, the accidentally surviving specimens of the first forms of human life on earth, or whether they are the ‘posthistoric' survivors of some unknown disaster which ended a civilization we do not know.

They certainly appeared rather like the survivors of one great catastrophe which might have been followed by smaller disasters until catastrophic monotony seemed to be a natural condition of human life.^{^[425]}

The reader will recognise echoes between Arendt's post-apocalyptic representation of Africans and Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. The novel is a key source for her, so influential that she occasionally mixes her own voice with Conrad’s words, producing the sort of ventriloquism apparent in this passage above.^{^[426]} Conrad knew a good deal about Africa, but Heart of Darkness is a novel, not a history. Although Arendt was a sophisticated analyst of texts, she subjected Conrad’s complex novel to a straight reading, using it as a source of empirical information.^{^[427]} She can then be accused of being a ‘bloody racist’, an accusation that writer and critic Chinua Achebe levelled in 1977 against Conrad, having himself, it would seem, also read Conrad straight.^{^[428]}

What then to do with Arendt in Africa? Certainly, one can say that Arendt’s dated Origins fits with enormous difficulty into African studies. Thus, recent scholars who contend that Arendt merits consideration as a postcolonial thinker need to seriously account for her Eurocentrism, prejudices towards people of colour and antipathy towards decolonisation.^{^[429]} My point is not to find a place for her in African historiography but to highlight points from which a fruitful framing of questions relating to violence and Africa might occur. In this respect, if Martin Bernal was correct to look for a Black Athena to counter the racism of European ‘Hellenomaniacs', and if Susan Buck- Morss showed similar vision in seeking a better understanding of Hegel in Haiti (where the deeply prejudiced philosopher found inspiration for his master-slave dialectic in the real struggles of black slaves), then I too suggest that Arendt can be critically appropriated in ways useful to students of the conquest of Africa.^{^[430]} As flawed and dated as they are, Arendt's writings provide a useful point for making sense of modern violence, revealing in particular the importance of areas outside of Europe as fertile grounds for research.

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Source: Edwards Louise, Penn Nigel, Winter Jay (eds.). The Cambridge World History of Violence. Volume 4: 1800 to the Present. Cambridge University Press,2020. — 676 p.. 2020

Finding a ‘Black Arendt' in Africa

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