Africa in Perspective

...Early travelers who were far from sympathetic to Africans often mentioned their "docility...

...In the public mind, Africa seems to stand for our own unacceptable impulses, particularly the aggressive ones...

...Thus it is a mistake to think of contemporary violence as an obvious outgrowth of a traditional lack of public order...

...Nor are African leaders implicitly condoning the inhumanity of the Congo rebels by protesting the Belgian-American rescue operation...

...has in independent Africa, it is important to consider not only the type of information made available to Americans but also the motives and needs which the information serves...

...IN PREPARING to cope with any outcry against moderate policies designed to hold the support the U.S...

...Like European history, African history is full of bloody battles, con-quests, peace treaties, and peaceful trade...

...An East African politician named his child Lumumba...

...The conclusion of some that Black Africa lies in the grip of a menacing, irrational savagery from which only Moise Tshombe is exempt, follows naturally from the flood of detailed information about current violence there...

...moral condemnation and horrified fascination found among Westerners, and tended to attribute it to malevolent supernatural beings and remote foreigners...

...My own experiences and those of countless others who have lived in Africa attest to the low level of open hostility to visitors characteristic of African community life...

...and where there is disorder, they loot...

...But now that public sentiment concerning Africa is relevant to crucial actions in the United Nations and overseas, these unrelieved factual horror stories may return to haunt us in the form of confirmed anti-African prejudice...

...traditionally had orderly political systems of two kinds: monarchies, in which internal peace was maintained, and uncentralized ethnic groups, in which feuding of a limited sort was permitted between autonomous local units...

...The European slave-trade in West Africa and Arab slave-raiding in East Africa not only exacerbated indigenous warfare in those areas but caused more widespread disruption than any single series of inter-tribal wars...

...Both systems enforced strict rules concerning acts of violence and sexual behavior: Offenders against public order and traditional morality were severely punished...

...In the early '50s, apartheid and Mau Mau were the only notions most Americans had about con-temporary Africa...

...But it is as incorrect to say that they condone these deeds as it would be to say that the United States condones the sadistic racism of the white mercenaries reported in these pages by Edouard Bustin ("Alternatives in the Congo," NL, December 21, 1964...

...it is a result of the uncontrolled unleashing of forces produced by social change...

...Other African groups, including the least Westernized groups I have worked with, viewed cannibalism with the same deep revulsion...

...and a political leader who obtains sufficient money to attract a following...

...Whether this capitulation was motivated by fear, awe of European power, the desire to profit through European contact or whatever, the fact is that the resistance of Africans, despite the small numbers of their oppressors, was ordinarily slight, and their rebellions in the ensuing colonial period were relatively short-lived, In the nationalist period after World War II, violence was practically non-existent...

...Where jobs are abundant, they work...

...The present violence in the Congo is not atavism or a regression to traditional "savagery...

...especially juxtaposed with "Africa" or "Congo,' even the least thrill-seeking reader would find him-self drawn by the prospect of gory details...

...The absence of a competent administrative class and the collapse of a formerly prosperous industnal economy let loose forces in the Congo which are held in check else-where in Africa: antagonistic ethnic groups attempting to form a nation while struggling for power, and rest-less, normless, angry young men...

...This love of the extraordinary was partly the reflection of a much older European interest in the exotic-an interest blending genuine intellectual curiosity with a libidinous fascination for descriptions of other people who break with impunity the taboos of one's own society...

...And while villagers feel freer to be hostile to one another, the information we have on African homicide rates shows them to be somewhat lower than that of the United States...

...This unhappy crew is to be found in most parts of developing Africa...

...Their presence is most keenly felt in politics in those countries where there is: no educated elite to run a stable government...

...They are responding instead to act issue which for them is older, more salient, and no less infused with moral indignation: Western backing of Moise Tshombe as head of the Congo government...

...It was by no means universal even within that belt, and was often confined to secret societies...

...In contrast with Polynesia and New Guinea...

...A high-ranking Nigerian legislator published a poem on it in a Lagos newspaper...

...Warfare was conducted between these politically organized societies or tribes, as it was between nations in other parts of the world...

...By so doing, they are carrying on a hoary Western tradition of using true tales of African behavior as the moral equivalent of a horror story...

...where agriculture is prosperous, they sponge off relatives...

...Past and present observers of Africa have been independently struck by the peacefulness and friendliness of its people...

...The story of the Belgians' reckless abandonment of the unprepared Congo to its own devices is well known, as is the inevitable political and economic crisis which followed...

...For the Africans, the political ascendancy of the symbol of black treachery and his inevitable use of European military personnel was a prior moral is-sue of such emotive force that they could not consider the horrible deeds committed on the other side...

...The price of this act was the intensity of African objection to the November rescue operation...

...In 1960, the big year of African independence, the establishment of so many new nations was all but obliterated in the public eye by the Congo crisis...

...where it was a highly developed custom, cannibalism was found in only a small fraction of Africa's 700 tribal societies, and most of those tribes were concentrated in the Central African rain forest belt stretching from the eastern Congo to the westward bend of the Atlantic coast...

...It is not surprising that the members of a society in which open violence is feared and prohibited should derive some private satisfaction from reading about the wild goings-on of savages thousands of miles away...

...After working for a year in Ibadan, the largest and least modern of sizeable towns in West Africa, containing thousands of unemployed youth, I would state without hesitation that there is less danger of meeting physical violence there than in most parts of New York or Chicago...

...Comprised of fact, apocrypha, and figments of the imagination (e.g., Lumumba reciting lengthy poems by James Russell Lowell), these plays typify the mythology which rapidly developed from the incident...

...In our own era, having been raised on Tarzan and Hollywood Africana, the educated reader can reinforce his stereotype by reading Conrad's Heart of Darkness, in which the equation of hot, humid climate and dense tropical vegetation with moral decay and darkness is dramatic and unforgettable...

...VIOLENCE is not common in IF Africa generally, why does it occur at particular times and places...

...When European penetration of the interior began, African fear of the invaders in several disparate areas actually was based on the belief that Europeans were cannibals...

...The martyrdom of Lumumba has become an article of faith in the pan-African nationalist ideology...

...In Eastern Nigeria no less than three dramas on the life and death of Patrice Lumumba were published in English...

...Although a number of these elements are present elsewhere, the description best fits the Congo...

...They are literate and have enough awareness of the outside world to repudiate their traditional leaders, but do not have enough Western education to discard their magical beliefs, They have sufficient knowledge of Western technology to desire its products yet rarely enough skill to get good jobs in industry, if jobs are available...

...Indignation over the death of Lumumba was shared by all liter-ate Africans and took many forms...

...And it is not surprising that journalists do their best to provide this satisfaction...

...But this almost universal fascination with horrifying violence, so well known to the journalists who exploit it, poses a threat to the formation of sane opinions about the Dark Continent's politics for the troublesome period ahead...

...2. Cannibalism was widely practiced in Africa...

...African cities in general are considerably safer at night than many cities of the United States...

...This takes us back to 1961, when Patrice Lumumba was killed in Tshombe's secessionist Katanga Province, It is difficult for Americans to appreciate the importance of that event for Africans of every political stripe, It occurred when self-determination had recently been ex-tended to millions of Africans in many parts of the Continent...

...In fact, Africans ROBERT A. LEVINE, associate professor of anthropology and chairman of the Committee on African Studies at the University of Chicago, has done extensive field work in Africa...

...widespread unemployment among men who once had jobs as well as widespread rural poverty...

...The appointment of Tshombe as Congolese Premier was bound to antagonize all of Africa as no other single act could, and this was so obvious that one would think the United States would have sought an alternative solution at any cost last July...

...They are astounded when I tell them that the Mau Mau revolt was limited to one area in central Kenya, that fewer than 40 Europeans were killed in it, and that I spent a peaceful and productive year-and-a-half working in an African community in western Kenya during the state of emergency...

...Among my colleagues in anthropology, who conduct their studies in remote villages all over the Continent where they could be attacked or harassed with impunity, I have hardly ever heard a story of serious threat or personal danger...

...Many people even now vividly recall the Mau Mau uprising, which they believe to have been a major upheaval on the African Continent...

...Those neutralist and pro-Western African leaders who do not deify him at very least believe that his character and behavior were irrelevant to the main point, which is that he was the victim of an imperialism that showed its true colors in Tshombe's Katanga...

...1. Disorder was the rule in precolonial Africa...

...This phenomenon mirrors the traditional use which Westerners have made of selective reporting from Africa...

...The only cities in Africa which approach (or surpass) American ones in violence are in the areas of European settle-mentsuch as Johannesburg and Nairobi, where racial inequities and the disorganized state of African life have created a setting which fosters violent crime...

...In those nations, such as Nigeria, which have a substantial elite of highly educated men, the semi-educated floaters are less visible and potent on the political scene, even when they have been organized into militant political party gangs...

...Philip Curtin in his perceptive book, The Image of Africa (University of Wisconsin Press, 1964), refers to this when he speaks of the African accounts by late 18th-century European travelers: "The reporting often stressed precisely those aspects of African life that were most repellent to the West and tended to submerge the indications of a common humanity...

...The latter, though a small minority everywhere, constitute a reservoir of undirected aggressive energy in African nations which can be harnessed by leaders for productive or destructive ends and which, in the absence of responsible leader-ship, will be released in disorderly violence...

...In-deed, the African disinclination to violence did much to facilitate the European takeover of the interior between 1880-1914...

...where there is political demagoguery, they follow...

...To begin with, particularly during the past 15 years modernization has produced a group of young men, who have been shaken loose from traditional moral constraints but have not been integrated into new ones...

...It could be argued that if the Africans, with their vastly larger populations, had attempted the kind of determined resistance that the American Plains Indians offered, even without guns they might have slowed colonial domination to the point where it would have proved economically unfeasible to conquer large areas in the interior...

...These facts permitted the transformation of Lumumba in-to the first genuine African martyr of oppressive white colonialism and gave Africa its symbol of black treachery in the person of Tshombe...

...Nevertheless, African societies entered the colonial period 80 years ago with effective systems of social control that are still intact in many parts of the Continent...

...In one of them Lumumba is portrayed as a Black Christ, with Tshombe as Judas...

...FACT AND FICTION Africa In Perspective By Robert A. LeVine THE TITLE of this article had IF the words "savagery," "cannibalism," "massacre,' or "rape" in it...

...3. Contemporary African populations are inclined to violence...

...Late in the '50s, Kwame Nkrumah, Tom Mboya and Julius Nyerere broke into the news as leaders of the new Africa...

...Perhaps the best way to put the Congo situation in some sort of rational perspective, therefore, is to dispel several dangerously invalid notions about Africa's 200 million inhabit-ants which I have found to be held by intelligent and otherwise well-in-formed Americans...

...Talking to Americans about Africa, I am impressed by the good memories they have for the violent events, even allowing for the inordinate coverage such events get in the press...

...Currently, those who sneer at blood-and-guts thrillers can get their kicks while becoming well-informed by acquainting themselves with the ex-tended descriptions of Congolese atrocities...

...Amid this moral ambiguity, the death of Lumumba provided a clear-cut incident: A suavely Europeanized African, strongly sup-ported by the European mining companies, by Right-wing opinion in Europe and the United States, and by white mercenaries in his defiance of the legitimate African government, allowed Lumumba to be killed...

...De-spite the sloganeering about "freedom from colonialism,' the spirit of triumphant revolution was lacking in many quarters-because in-dependence was achieved without much of a struggle, because internal divisiveness was prominent in many places, and most importantly be-cause latter-day colonialism, having been obviously beneficial as well as exploitative, was not sufficiently villainous for the nationalist melodramas with which newly independent states inspire patriotism...