The British in Africa

BOOK REVIEWS The British in Africa Tim Youngs. Travellers in Africa: British Travelogues, 1850-1900. Manchester and New York: University of Manchester Press, 1995. xi + 235 pp. $69.95 TIM YOUNGS notes that Gerald Portal's My Mission toAbyssinm was published in 1892, the year that Tennyson died and four years before Alfred Austin became the new Poet Laureate. "While not wanting to suggest any link between these two [or three?] events, I do find significant the body of ideas about nation and community into which they circulate" (42). This "body of ideas" consists partly of the "myth" of medievalism. Youngs quotes John Lucas on the "'kind of myth of an "ideal" England of feudal relations'" that Austin and Tennyson both expressed in their poetry. The quotation continues: "'the myth-making proportions of this dream are as large as they are difficult to take seriously. Yet they affected many people'" (42). While Youngs himself takes seriously the significance of the "myth of an 'ideal' England of feudal relations" for late-Victorian culture, he is strangely resistant to my (and others') argument that over the course of the nineteenth century there emerged a similar, in some ways correlative "myth" (or stereotype) of Africa as "the Dark Continent"—a myth both racist and imperialist, elaborated in the writings of British explorers, soldiers, missionaries, and journalists. This myth, both expressed and critiqued from David Livingstone through Joseph Conrad, was also "large" and "difficult to take seriously," and yet it, too, "affected many people," including millions of Africans. Youngs rightly emphasizes the diversity of the regions and cultures of Africa represented in the travelogues he discusses, and also the diversity of motivations and attitudes expressed by their British authors. But he supports the very thesis he resists: Travellers in Africa demonstrates that Victorian culture bred a powerful myth of Africa as "the Dark Continent." Though he does not deal with abolitionist discourse , Youngs assumes that a "romantic" idea of the "noble savage" could still inform a mid-century text like Mansfield Parkyns's Life in Abyssinm (1853), but that the romantic notion was yielding to beliefs at once more "scientific," more racist, and more imperialist: "This is not to claim that the romantic view of the savage... was free from racism, but it may be that there was greater scope for flexibility and therefore for strategies of questioning than later science and professionalisation, with their encoding of hierarchies, permitted" (21). 247 ELT 39:2 1996 But how is this different from Douglas Lorimer's argument that Youngs quotes, says is "correct," and then dismisses as "insufficient," "narrow," and "mechanical" (25)? According to Lorimer: "Ίη the midnineteenth century, a new vigorous racist ideology challenged the humanitarian traditions of the anti-slavery movement, and preached a new doctrine of racial supremacy'" (qtd. 25). Youngs says that Lorimer's notion of ideology involves "athletic indoctrination" (25), but this is only sniping at someone whose authority Youngs simultaneously invokes and rejects: he clearly agrees that what Robert Knox, James Hunt, and other "race scientists" began to push from roughly 1850 (date of Knox's Races of Men) forward was "a new vigorous racist ideology." Not just Lorimer, but also Christine Bolt, Philip Curtin, Nancy Stepan, George Stocking, and many others have made this point about Victorian "scientific racism" partly in relation to Africa. And since Youngs quotes Bolt and Stocking approvingly elsewhere in his study on related points, why does he treat Lorimer as "correct" but mistaken? Similar sniping occurs throughout Youngs's study. In a minor yet representative instance, Youngs quotes Stanley's description of a panorama where Stanley is perched on high, "'secure on my lofty throne.'" Youngs says that Stanley "likens himself to God in his unobserved watchfulness" (108). But, footnoting this reasonable interpretation, Youngs cites Mary Louise Pratt on "similar passages" in explorers' journals as involving a "monarch-of-all-I-survey" trope. Pratt's "misleading suggestion of regality might better be replaced with something that more accurately reflects the surveyor's hopes for commercial activity, perhaps 'entrepreneur-in-all-I-espy'" (112 n. 55; my italics). As Pratt makes clear in Imperial Eyes, however, all of these metaphors can be found in texts like...