Points of Arrival
WALLERSTEIN, IMMANUEL
Points of Arrival THE AFRICAN PAST By Basil Davidson Atlantic-Little, Brown 390 pp. $7.95. AFRICA Edited by Philip W. Quigg Praeger. 364 pp. $6.95. Reviewed by IMMANUEL...
...But what very different pasts...
...Will anything change this...
...Hermann von Wissmann, "I do not fall at your feet, for you are God's creature just as I am," we discover an Africa for which we are unprepared...
...The exhortations of the seven African statesmen, virtuous as they are, which end the Quigg volume, will probably have little effect...
...If we were not so convinced we should have no justification for being in Africa...
...We are far more prepared for the Africa of Foreign Affairs, filled with the dubious and myopic paternalism of the men of good will of yesteryear...
...One scarcely knows whether to prefer outright hostility or the condescension of the friends...
...Starting with ancient Egypt and moving rapidly, and with great charm, through early West, East and Inland Africa, the book traverses the centuries of contact with Europe down to the 20th, which is represented by eight authors (only one of whom, curiously, is an African...
...to Macemba, the Yao chieftain who in 1890 said to the German commander...
...to the King of Portugal's civilities to the Monomotapa Manura in 1631 ("whom I love and esteem as a brother...
...Lord Lugard, one of the great names of the imperial era, asks in 1926 "whether the primitive African, dancing in the moonlight through the livelong night, careless and improvident for the morrow, will be the happier for [change], who shall say...
...Reviewed by IMMANUEL WALLERSTEIN Author, "Africa: The Politics of Independence" Books on contemporary Africa appear so regularly now that it is well for the general reader, who may by this time be presumed to have some acquaintance with current developments on that continent, to take an occasional look at the African past...
...We believe that, if emancipation jeopardized the existence of Western civilization in Africa, that would not represent progress but the reverse...
...Here are two books that do so...
...Father Tempels, who says to his fellow Europeans that "we feel the ground slipping from beneath our feet," and Dr...
...Grottanelli, the Italian ethnographer, who argues that works of African art "are not points of departure, but points of arrival," may have a little more influence...
...Lord Lugard could only see that "the very standards of right and wrong will often need to be created...
...History is what we make it...
...If Ibn Battuta in the 14th century could admire the standards of justice of the Africans he visited...
...And there is that of her "sympathetic and informed" opponent, Margery Perham, who thinks that, "The Western nations have grave reason to know what the Romans' failure to impose their civilization over the whole of Europe has meant to that continent: within the next 50 years, or even less, it may be decided whether Negro Africa will be won or lost to the religion and society of the West...
...The present book is a compilation of "chronicles from antiquity to modern times...
...And as late as 1955, Pierre Ryckmans could write an article entitled "Belgian 'Colonialism,'" in which he put colonialism in quotation marks: "We believe in the civilizing mission of the West...
...The editors then present us with two views, each of which is "at odds with the other...
...We think our Western Christian culture is superior to the native culture of Africa and that to have planted it there was good in itself and for it to disappear would be bad in itself...
...His "Foreign Affairs Reader" draws upon material published in that distinguished journal over the past 38 years, and thus represents what the diplomatic Establishment has been reading and thinking about Africa since World War I. Davidson has already written two very good books on African history as well as several works on contemporary politics...
...For those who have never done so, it can be an adventure to read ancient Chinese authors on East Africa...
...From Ibn Battuta, who admired the inhabitants of Mali for "the small number of acts of injustice that one finds there...
...We have forgotten, if we ever knew it, what Davidson reminds us of...
...We shall forget, or revise our memory of, what Quigg assembles for us...
...He is a man of the Left...
...First there is Elspeth Huxley's, which informs us that: "The danger is that quick self-government will lead to chaos and perhaps Communist influence, and thence to the wiping out of economic gains, to the loss of invested capital and possibly even to the strategic encirclement of the West...
...Philip Quigg affords us a very different perspective...
...Basil Davidson, a journalist turned historian, is committed to a view of Africa, both past and present, more or less as it is seen by sophisticated Africans today...
Vol. 47 • May 1964 • No. 11
