Encounter Images in the Meetings between Africa and Europe

Through a variety of critical and disciplinary approaches, the contributors to this book examine precolonial, colonial, and postcolonial occidental representations of African cultures in music, show business, law, art, literary texts, popular literature, missionary letters and reports, historical documents, and development brochures. The articles focus mostly on northern European encounters with Sub-Saharan Africa.

The foreword by Lennart Wohlgemuth informs the reader that the book tries to "encourage alternatives to stereotypes and generalizations, which portrayed Africans as helpless victims, but also to try to understand how and why, and to what extent these images have developed" (5). In the introduction, Mai Palmberg summarizes the theoretical methods used in analyzing the texts, and posits that the binary and racialized ideas of "we" and "they" be re-examined and continuously discussed as the "constant reproduction of images and stereotypes, and also stereotypes about images" (19) flood the western media.

In "Questioning the Origins of the Negative Image of Africa in Medieval Europe," Annemette Kirkegaard explores the influence of "African peoples in the cultural history of the medieval world" (20) and "the contribution of musicological research on the images of Africa as it must have appeared in medieval Europe" (20). She shows that there are definite connections and common threads among the music of the Muslim, Christian, and African worlds.

Selena Axelrod Winsnes's "An Eye-Witness, Hearsay, Hands-On Report from the Gold Coast: Ludewig F. Rømer's Tilforladelig Efterretning om Kysten Guinea" [translated as A Reliable Account about the Guinea Coast], Copenhagen, 1760, treats the experience of a Danish slave-trader for Denmark-Norway. She shows how three types of reports (eye-witness, hearsay and hands-on) about close contacts with Africans "contributed to the construction of an African image" in the minds of Rømer's readers; however, Rømer represented some of the Africans "as equals in friendship and business," (51) which was a step outside the stereotype of that time that presented Africans as "lazy, thieving and inhuman" (51).

Bernth Lindfors, in "Hottentot, Bushman, Kaffir: The Making of Racist Stereotypes in nineteenth-century Britain" examines visual images (including information about stage performances) of the "Hottentot Venus," the "Bushmen," the "Earthmen," and the "Zulu Kaffirs" in the context of the history of racism. Of these groups, only the Earthmen "escaped a kind of inexorable reductionism" (73) and "were treated so humanely and given a far friendlier reception than any of the other African people in the British Isles in the nineteenth century" (73). Lindfors stipulates that "their ability to speak directly to their audiences in English" (73) set them apart from the other performers, thus concluding that at the time language might have held the key to a better understanding of the colonized.

Zine Magubane, in "Labor Laws and Stereotypes: Images of the Khoikhoi in the Cape in the Age of Abolition" (i.e., between 1880-1850), states that the abolition of the slave trade and emancipation worsened the labor shortage in the Cape colony. Labor legislation (the Caledon Code of 1809) forced the Khoikhoi "into service of the colonists" (78); however, in 1828, Ordinance 50 granted freedom and protection to all British subjects, including the Khoikhoi. The Dutch and British settlers of the time described and represented the Khoikhoi as "hopelessly idle, drunken, and addicted to thieving" (81); in contrast, the missionaries' "greatest hope was to transform the Khoikhoi into cheerful and obedient wage laborers" (84). The missionaries considered their move to the Cape as upwardly mobile; but for the settlers, it was the opposite. However, "the discourse surrounding the Khoikoi was not so very different from the discourse that had surrounded white labor for centuries" (87). The Khoikoi refused to remain into the stereotypical representations by Europeans and "seized on the extant narratives as vehicles for their self-representation" (94).

Mai Palmberg, in "'A Gentleman Went to Zanzibar': Racism and Humanism Revisited," examines the letters of Guss Mattson, a Swedish-speaking Finn who was a humanist, natural scientist, chemist, and musician of the latenineteenth and earlytwentieth century. He traveled to Africa for health reasons and made copious commentaries on his travels. She concludes that he "was influenced by the ideas of the time that people could be divided into races, and that the races could be judged in terms of superior to inferior. But there is no proof that he was an advocate of violence or the extermination of the 'lower races'" (113). She also expounds on racism as a theory, and states that "it is the society not the individual which needs racism, but it is through individuals that it is verbally expressed" (113).

Yvone Vera, in "A Voyeur's Paradise... Images of Africa," reflects on essentialist images of Africa in the works of Karen Blixen, Joseph Conrad, Doris Lessing, and in the film "The Bridges of Madison County," where Africa is used as a way for Clint Eastwood's character to seduce Meryl Streeps' character as he whispers that "Africa is a voyeur's paradise" (116). She concludes that "Africa must restore its symbols and identity" (120), away from the colonial voyeur's paradise.

Björn Lundgren, in "Representing the Past in the Present: Memory-texts and Ndebele Identity" examines the linguistic categorization of the Ndebele, who were "writing against the colonial library" (126). The conflicting memory-texts (a term coined by V. Y. Mudimbe) of Ndebele and European representations of historical events suggest that Ndbele identity can be constructed or deconstructed, strengthened or weakened. As Pathisa Nyathi claims, Ndebeles struggle "to present themselves to the world" (133).

I. Bolarinwa Udegbe, in "Gender Dimensions in the Images of Africans in Commercial Works of Art" conducted a study of approximately 600 contemporary commercial works of African art from West Africa (mainly wood carvings and paintings from Nigeria, Benin, Ghana and Mali). Using tables, she summarizes the general themes and images and ranks their representations by gender and percentage. "The findings revealed that the three most dominant themes in all the works studied were traditional occupations, domestic activities, and animals" (142). And "while females were predominantly presented as symbols of fertility, beauty and subservience, men were depicted as symbols of power, strength and industry" (143). It seems that stereotypical representations of African women are clear in this art. This analysis documents "trends in the "distribution and relative importance of the themes and images portrayed in contemporary works" (145) and contributes to an area where little research has been done.

Johannes Brusila, in "Jungle Drums Striking the World Beat: Africa as an Image Factor in Popular Music" examines how African and Afro-American musical influences were (and still are) deemed exotic, primitive, spontaneous, and as "something sexual, corporeal and ecstatic" (249). According to Brusila, these viewpoints have no analytical basis. They posit these influences as "Other" to keep them in the background, and as an antithesis to the "Western intellectual and controlled world" (146) pushed by "European folklorist ideals" (159). Unfortunately, the invention of the "world music" label has "greatly helped in spreading this image" and "has not changed the situation" (159).

Karina Hestad Skeie, in "Beyond Black and White: Reinterpreting the 'Norwegian Missionary Image of the Malagasy'" examines two types of published material: the Norwegian Mission Magazine 1866-1895, and books by missionary author Johannes Einrem. Although images of darkness and light are present, there is not a one-dimensional representation of the natives that can be found in these texts. Instead of "merely confirming existing stereotypical images in Europe," the missionaries' accounts succeed in "moving beyond black and white" (181).

Hanna Mellemsether, in "Gendered Images of Africa? The Writings of Male and Female Missionaries" concentrates on the writings of Martha Sanne, one of the "few Norwegian missionaries in Africa at the time [1889-1923], and one of the rare female voices in the public discourse on missionary work" (184). Although her private writings (letters and journals) "contain specific female markers of marginality, subordination and compassion" (184), and she relates exclusively to white people, "we find representation of or interaction with Africans" (184) in her public texts, where she shows "more solidarity and compassion with the Africans" (189), and the lack of gender markers is clearly evident. Texts by missionary men seem "ungendered" "when found looking at ideological aspects of the mission discourse" (191). There is a certain language of equality, and again, as Skeie claims, there is not one image of the Africans that can be singled out. Representations of Africans as spiritually equal brothers and sisters are at the forefront of missionary narratives, while other types of equality (political, economic, and cultural) seem to be left out.

Raisa Simola, in "Encounter Images in the Meetings between Finland and South-West Africa/Namibia" examines a strip-cartoon booklet about Finnish missionaries at the beginning of thetwentieth century, Kotimaata kohden, written by Martti Pentti and published by the Finnish Missionary Society in 1993. Simola examines the overtly Manichean aspects of the work and compares them to Achebe's Things Fall Apart, a much more complex work dealing with European missionaries and Africans.

Nicolas Margin-Granel, in Monkey Business in the Congo, analyzes the persistence of what he calls the "monkey syndrome" in contemporary popular literature, such as Au Congo jusqu'au cou, by Patrice Franceschi, Congo by Michael Crichton, and Brazzaville Beach by William Boyd. These novels present anthropomorphic apes as symbolic representations of racism and contribute to popular discourses about "desperate and de-civilised westerners in the 'heart of darkness'" (219).

Hanne Løngreen, in "The Development Gaze: Visual Representation of Development in Information Material from Danida," examines visual representations of a Zambian village as they are reproduced in pamphlets from the Danish national development agency (Danida). Drawing on John Urry's theories from The Tourist Gaze (1990), Løngreen concludes that the people and places are homogenized, without specific names, and represented as living in a collective, pre-modern society - in contrast with the intended reader of the pamphlet, who supposedly lives in a Western, individualistic society.

Anna Wieslander, in "I Often Tell People I Have Been to Africa... Swedish-African Encounters through the Aid Relationship," interviewed Africans from Tunisia, Tanzania, Zambia and Ethiopia in 1990 regarding Swedish aid. In 1981, she interviewed Swedes working with aid agencies in Mozambique, Tanzania, Zambia, and Ethiopia "about their work, motives and attitudes" (233). She poses the question "Is true exchange possible?" (244), and concludes that these North-South encounters are "a means to change attitudes and prejudice" (246).

The last two texts are interviews by Mai Palmberg with Valentin Y. Mudimbe and Terence Ranger. In the Mudimbe interview, Palmberg asks questions about the "invention of Africa" and about regression towards more primitive images of Africa in Western representations. Mudimbe states that "new consciousness of belonging to a continent was directly [and indirectly] created" (251); however, the question remains, "to which invention are they [both Africans and Europeans] referring; to the tradition, the culture to which they belong?" (251). In the interview with Ranger, Palmberg discusses his research on "deconstructing African and European images of Africa and African history" (252), although he did not originally "set out to deconstruct" (252). While there is no index, a sixteen-page selected bibliography annotated by Petra Smitmanis along with information about the authors is included.

The fifteen articles, two interviews, and bibliography can be useful to scholars in a wide variety of fields, such as history, political science, art, music, literature, and philosophy. They could also be helpful and thought-provoking to readers outside academe, who might want to re-think the way they portray Africans in their discourse and images, and question Africa as it is presented to them in various media. Aside from a dozen typos that appear throughout the book, the articles maintain the reader's interest. Encounter Images is a strong contribution to multi-disciplinary, multi-faceted approaches to postcolonial analyses of the way Western consciousness represents Africans and Africa, and as the foreword so aptly states, "This book gives a topical input to the debate through the questions it raises and the simplifications it rejects" (5).