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2 Sub-Saharan Africans: “Uncivilized Types” Western stereotypes of Africans and peoples of African descent developed out of opinions of their status expressed primarily in intellectual and business communities and disseminated widely in various forms. Because of the Atlantic slave trade, early visions of Africans focused on bondage and freedom. Europeans presented Africans as laborers on their own continent, as slaves, or as people under the control of rival African groups. They usually viewed sub-Saharan African kingdoms and their rulers as tyrannical and belligerent. The thinking of some Europeans about Africans was shaped by the idea of the “noble savage” who was untainted by the corrupt forces of advanced civilization. In the early nineteenth century, many western abolitionists supported the end of the slave trade and plantation slavery as a means of ensuring that black Africans could be properly educated in the Christian religion and elevated from their “savagery” and “ignorance” in an environment free from abuse and hypocrisy.1 Slave-owners argued just the opposite; they believed that the Caribbean plantation was an ideal setting in which to convert and civilize Africans. Neither argument won the support of the largely disinterested French population. France’s abolition of slavery in 1848 was the result of the initiative of a few inspired republicans rather than a reflection of a change in public attitudes toward Africans and blacks in the Caribbean.2 24 on the path to civilization, 1886–1913 The European “scramble” for territorial conquest in Africa in the last decades of the nineteenth century led governments to articulate racial justifications for western aggression. In the half-century before World War I, the general image the French held of sub-Saharan African peoples was of primitiveness and backwardness with regard to material culture, customs, and moral values. Many considered African nudity or near-nudity in various societies to be a reflection of savagery. This view was expressed in the press, in works by scientists, in illustrations in travel books, and in commercial advertisements and trademarks. Even when government officials, military leaders, scientists, and scholars began to recognize vast differences in regions and ethnic groups on the continent, they continued to hold to this stereotype. Anthropologists of the period argued that Africans were inferior because of their physical differences from Europeans. Often these men supported polygenism (the belief that ethnic groups or races have separate origins), rather than the monogenist view that all humans originated from one set of ancestors. French scientists such as Paul Broca ranked racial groups and claimed that there was a link between physical traits such as head shape or lip size and intellectual and moral qualities. For example, the larger lips (in comparison to those of Europeans) characteristic among West Africans allowed such scholars to posit their “proof” that blacks were morally deficient.3 Broca and others from the Société d’Anthropologie sought out racial “specimens ” to gather empirical evidence for their theories. In 1877, the Paris Jardin zoologique d’acclimatation’s popular display of Nubians—who were brought to Paris with a variety of animals from East Africa—provided such an opportunity.4 These scientists continued on a broader scale the anatomical study of exotic peoples that had been punctuated in France in 1815 with the tragic case of Saartje Baartman. Baartman, a South African Khoikhoi woman with very large buttocks, became engaged to an impresario who showcased her as the “Venus Hottentot.” She was displayed nude at venues in England and France and examined by scientists. When she died before the age of 30, she was studied and dissected by Georges Cuvier and staff at the Paris Musée d’histoire naturelle. Novelists, filmmakers, and playwrights have all been riveted by Baartman’s tragedy, which finally reached some closure in 2002 when France returned her remains to South Africa after numerous protests. Scholars such as T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting identify Baartman’s saga as central to an understanding of Europe’s obsession with sexuality and the black (female) body.5 The French public rarely had an opportunity to observe or interact with Africans other than at the rare ethnographic show or at the periodic world’s fairs, so they built their opinions mainly on characterizations in writings and circulated images. In An Empire for the Masses, William H. Schneider examines popular views of Africa in the press and describes how artists modified drawings of African scenes, vilifying their subjects and creating “sav- 25 sub-saharan africans: “uncivilized types” ages.” In the 1890s, during...

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