The End Of Colonialism In Africa

THE 1950's The 1950's was a time of accelerated political change. At the end of the Second World War there were only three independent countries in Africa:

• Liberia, which had been founded by freed slaves and declared itself independent in 1847.
• Ethiopia, which was an ancient territory, had never been colonized by a European power despite the attempts of the Italians in the 1880's and 1930's
• and Egypt, which had achieved independence in 1922.In 1951

Libya was granted independence from Hitler's former ally, war-weary Italy. Egypt renounced its historic control over Sudan. Britain had little choice then but to grant full independence to Sudan in 1956. In the same year, Morocco and Tunisia became independent of France.

Leaders of Indian Nationalism, Ghandi and Nehru, 1948.

INFLUENCES: INDIA: The country which made the biggest impact on African nationalists was India which was led to independence by Mahatma Gandhi in 1947. His confident doctrine of nonviolence, and his track record battling racial prejudice in South Africa made him a hugely influential model among African nationalists. He was assassinated in January 1948.

1945 Pan-African Congress , Chorlton Town Hall in Manchester England.

PAN-AFRICANS: Already in 1945 at the 5th Pan African Congress in Manchester, UK, there were a number of delegates who were later to bring their countries to independence. These included Hastings Banda (later President of Malawi), Kwame Nkrumah (later President of Ghana), Obafemi Awolowo (later Premier of the South West Region Nigeria) and Jomo Kenyatta (later President of Kenya).

But nobody could have predicted that within fifteen years of the meeting in Manchester, the vast majority of African countries would be independent. In the early 1950's, Julius Nyerere estimated that complete independence would not happen until the 1980's.

AFRICA & USA & SOVIET UNION: On the world stage America wanted an end to colonialism for reasons of free trade (easy access to African markets which had previously bought from Europe) and political influence. The Soviet Union wanted an end to colonialism and capitalism for reasons of ideology and to increase its sphere of influence.

While African nationalists took a pragmatic view of soviet style communism, the British government was concerned about the Soviet influence on Africa. And where African nationalists met with resistance or persecution from Europe, many welcomed the support and interest of the Soviet Union.

AFRICA & USA & SOVIET UNION: "…generally speaking, it is the detribalised native who responds best to communism, as he misses the narrow confines of tribal life and a leader on whom to bestow loyalty. This gives the Rand, with its inflow of immigrant labour, its special importance in the diffusion of communism in Africa…

Communism has made the least progress where the influence of Islam is strongest. Though in the past year the communist picture has been one of retrogression on some fronts, there are signs of increased interest in anti-colonialism from Moscow." --British Foreign and Colonial Office, Notes on the Aims, Strategy and Procedure of the Communists in Africa, 1 May 1950.

(source: BBC)

THE WIND OF CHANGE (the end of colonialism in africa) 1

An Exhibition Has Uncomfortable Echoes Of The French Colonial 'Human Zoos'

On Monday 2 May 2011, Charles Forsdick and David Murphy reported in the UK Guardian, "France must acknowledge its colonial past: An exhibition of the cultures of France's overseas territories has uncomfortable echoes of colonial 'human zoos": In 1931, the surrealists declared "Do not go to the Colonial Exhibition", and called on the French to boycott that vast display of imperialist propaganda in the east of Paris. The Exposition coloniale of 1931 placed the various peoples of France's empire on display in one of the final and perhaps the most significant examples of "human zoos", those ethnic exhibitions that accompanied the imperial projects of the mid-to-late 19th century.

Eighty years later, a year-long celebration of France's overseas territories (la France d'outre-mer) includes a month-long Jardin en outre-mer – which opened on 8 April – at which spectators can "visit" the cultures of these far-flung corners of the republic. Inexplicably, this garden is located in the Jardin d'Acclimatation , a site inextricably connected to the phenomenon of the human zoo, which has led scholars and activists to declare "We will not go to the Jardin d'Acclimatation".

The lack of sensitivity on the part of the organisers is remarkable, for the Jardin d'acclimatation was the major French site for the exhibition of "savages", starting in 1877 with a group of Nubians. In 1892, an exhibition of Amerindians from Guyana resulted in the death of many of the "exhibited". In total, 34 groups of "savages" or "freaks" were shown in these ethnic exhibitions. The last such exhibit was from New Caledonia in 1931, and among those exhibited were members of the family of the World Cup-winning footballer Christian Karembeu, who relates the story in his recent book, Kanak.

The decision to make 2011 the "year of the outre-mers" was taken by Nicolas Sarkozy in response to the 2009 crisis which saw widespread social protests in Guadeloupe and other overseas territories. Some of the events planned as part of the celebrations indicate a sensitive and informed approach to the culture of overseas France. Unfortunately, though, the scandal surrounding the exhibition at the Jardin d'acclimatation constitutes yet another reminder of the spectral and often undetected presence of the colonial past in France.

In the many articles spawned by the recent introduction of legislation in France outlawing the wearing of the burqa or niqab, for instance, many commentators failed to recognise that the forcible removal of the veil inevitably triggers other historical precedents and associated memories, not least those of women violently unveiled during the Algerian war of independence in the name of a "civilising mission" that deployed the promise of emancipation as an alibi for the retention of colonial rule. To borrow Henry Rousso's term describing the Vichy period, colonialism truly is "a past that has not passed".

Controversial legislation in 2005 attempted state intervention in memorial practices, imposing most notably an obligation on educators to teach the "positive role of the French presence overseas". The "year of the outre-mers" provides further evidence of these history wars regarding the colonial past. Christiane Taubira, MP for French Guyana and sponsor of the 2001 Taubira law recognising the slave trade and slavery as "crimes against humanity", has protested against the exhibition, but in response the minister for overseas territories, Marie-Luce Penchard, answered that "2011 must not serve as an occasion to reinterpret history."

The collective that has come together to declare "We will not go to the Jardin d'acclimatation" argues, on the contrary, that it is dangerous to ignore the past. We are not asking for repentance or refusing to imagine the future. Rather we are convinced that the valorisation of the cultural diversity of the overseas territories must include the knowledge of this past. It is possible for the problematic past of the Jardin d'acclimatation to be transcended by the events planned by the organisers, but only if that past is first acknowledged and not simply ignored.

Pressure from the "We will not go" collective has led the minister, on the very eve of the opening of the Jardin en outre-mer, to invite members of the collective to produce a report on the phenomenon of the human zoo in order to foster greater public awareness of this dark phase of French history. This may be a victory of sorts, but the memory wars show no sign of abating. In France, there is still no museum of colonisation, nor of the worlds born of slavery and colonisation. All that Sarkozy promises as his cultural legacy is the first national museum of French history, due to open in 2015. To reassert national narratives of the past at a time when there is increasing recognition of the transnational nature of history and memory seems profoundly retrograde. It is evident that colonialism and its afterlives will play little, if any, role in Sarkozy's plans. (source: UK Guardian)

1931 - Visit to the Exposition Coloniale

The Real Life of the Hottentot Venus

From Salon Magazine on 9 January 2007, "Venus abused: In the early 1800s, Westerners leered at Saartjie Bartmaan's curvy body and exotic skin. But do we gawk any less today?" by Marisa Meltzer:

The life story of Saartjie Baartman, the African slave who was displayed in Europe in the early 19th century, contains so many layers of oppression to sort through that author Rachel Holmes begins by trying to untangle her name. In “African Queen: the Real Life of the Hottentot Venus,” Holmes concedes that Saartjie (pronounced “Saar-key,” meaning “little Sara”) might not even be the name she was born with, calling the -tjie diminutive suffix a “racist speech act.” Colonialist roots and all, it “was her name in life as she lived it.”

Baartman was born into the Eastern Cape Khoisan, the indigenous herding tribe that once populated part of South Africa. As a teenager, she was orphaned after her father and fianci were both murdered in a colonial war, and sold to a trader, Pieter Willem Cesars. He took her to Cape Town, where she worked for his brother as a nursemaid. Around 1810, once the family started experiencing economic difficulties, they looked to Baartman as their next source of income, figuring that in Europe, where curiosity about the Dark Continent ran rampant, “a pretty maidservant with notable buttocks and a spotty giraffe skin were a winning combination on which to stake their future.”

They settled in late Georgian London, where freak shows touting “the ne plus ultra of hideousness” or “the greatest deformity in the world” lined Piccadilly. As Holmes points out, England was transitioning from a sentimental primitivism — the noble savage — to the popular Victorian notion of ethnology. With the slave trade being abolished just a few years before and the black population of London at about 20,000, their challenge was to make the investment — Baartman — conform to stereotypes and yet also seem like a novelty. They marketed her as a kind of “scantily clad totem goddess,” the Hottentot Venus, sex incarnate. Hottentots, what European traders called the native Khoisan for the clicking sound of their language, “signified all that was strange, disturbing, alien, and possibly, sexually deviant.”

She was objectified in the most literal sense, put on display in front of gaping crowds six days a week, doing suggestive “native” dancing and playing African instruments. Her costume was a flesh-colored silk sheath deliberately cut like a second skin, with copious jewelry at the seams to conceal the fact that she wasn’t technically naked. They also fashioned her a kind of female codpiece, “the effect of its soft folds, fur fringes, and pendulous extensions was to imply that its purpose was to modestly conceal the supposedly elongated labia of a Hottentot woman” — a subject of great interest and speculation among the gawking masses. She became an instant sensation, a subject of countless life drawings (many of which are included in the book), editorials and political cartoons. The London Morning Post wrote, of her body, that “her contour and formation certainly surpass any thing [sic] of the kind ever seen in Europe, or perhaps ever produced on Earth.”

Holmes is so clearly besotted with her subject that her writing can tend toward the florid when describing her (“to behold the figure of Venus, or to hear her name was to be prompted to think about lust, or love”). Baartman physically exists in the story — the narrative is entirely devoted to her — and yet, since she was unable to read or write, very little exists in her own voice. As her story progresses, that absence becomes more and more notable. But perhaps that’s Holmes’ point: As a slave and as a woman, Baartman never did have any kind of agency in her own life. “Economically, sexually, and racially,” Holmes writes, “she was unfree.”

Her supposed liberation at the hands of abolitionists, who initiated a lawsuit to win her freedom, feels like further commodification from a party interested not in her ultimate well-being, but in drumming up publicity for their own cause. It did earn her a contract, read to her twice in Afrikaans, that covered standard demands like medical treatment, warmer clothes, profit sharing and the promise that she would eventually be sent home. “She was not seen as a sympathetic victim,” writes Holmes, who tries unsuccessfully at this point to sell Baartman as a cunning businesswoman who had “outmaneuvered her managers and made herself attractive to eligible bachelors as a woman of means.”

And while there are a few years in England where she managed to escape the probing public — she was rumored to have gotten married or had a baby, though there is no record of either — the arguably most grim period of her life came after this so-called freedom. In 1814, she and Cesars moved to Paris at the end of the Napoleonic era, where she was examined for three days by scientists at the Museum of Natural History, developed an addiction to alcohol, and, at some point, became a prostitute. She died in Paris of either a respiratory disease or syphilis — the records aren’t clear — at the age of 26. Her death didn’t bring her any dignity, either; her body was cast and dissected and became the property of the Museum of Natural History. Her brain and genitals were kept in bell jars just outside one creepy scientist’s private chambers.

Holmes devotes the last chapter to Nelson Mandela’s campaign to have Baartman’s remains returned to South Africa. It’s a reverent coda to the book, but Holmes’ own take on Baartman’s legacy might have made a more compelling end to her story. Holmes never deviates from narrating the story, which she does capably, but her reluctance to write about why she’s so moved by Baartman’s life is ultimately our loss. It never moves beyond a hagiography, and therefore doesn’t really add anything new or particularly timely. We’re left to speculate about Holmes’ motives — her bio says she divides her time between London and Cape Town, and the book is steeped in feminist theory, take your pick — but we’re left with no explanation of why she felt so drawn to this project.

She does hint at a post-Baartman world, briefly quoting Josephine Baker — “When it comes to blacks, the imagination of white folks is something else” — and she mentions the popularity of the bustle among fashionable Victorians. Holmes imagines Baartman would have laughed at buttock augmentation, the fastest-growing cosmetic surgery in the U.S. and U.K. But what does she have to say about Queen’s “Fat Bottom Girls” or Destiny’s Child’s “Bootylicious”? Now we can scoff at the clueless Valley Girls in the intro to Sir Mix-A-Lot’s asstastic “Baby Got Back” (“I mean, her butt, is just so big. I can’t believe it’s just so round, it’s like, out there, I mean — gross. Look! She’s just so … black!”), but does it mean that we’ve come a long way? In the simultaneous lasciviousness and curiosity we’ve lavished on Jennifer Lopez’s posterior, have we never stopped searching for that scantily clad totem goddess after all? We can pat ourselves on the back and feel disgusted by the story, and yet what made people leer at Baartman has the same effect on us today. (source: Salon Magazine )

HOTTENTOT VENUS (the story of Saartjie Baartman) by Monica Clarke, Storyteller

Tintin: Sinister Racist Propaganda

Time Magazine reports, "Tintin: Heroic Boy Reporter or Sinister Racist?" by Leo Cendrowicz / Brussels:

As an explorer, crime fighter and all-around hero, comic-strip icon Tintin has been an inspiration for generations. But his status as a paragon of wholesome adventure is under threat, thanks to a court bid to ban one of his books, Tintin in the Congo, for its racist portrayal of Africans.

The trial, which will begin on Wednesday in Brussels, the city where Tintin's creator, Hergé, lived, is reviving memories of an era that Belgium would rather forget: its brutal colonial empire in the Democratic Republic of Congo. The case was lodged by a Brussels-based Congolese former accountant, Bienvenu Mbutu Mondondo, 42, who says the book — first published in 1930 — is racist, colonial propaganda. "It shows the Africans as childish imbeciles," he tells TIME. "It suggests blacks have not evolved." Indeed, to today's reader, many of the scenes range from politically incorrect to hideously offensive, including one in which a black woman bows before Tintin exclaiming, "White man very great. White mister is big juju man!"

A white man's fantasy of Congo women worshiping at their white feet.

Congolese women reality: Shackled together, enslaved in their own homeland, held as hostages until their men returned with enough rubber to make King Leopold and the Belgium people rich beyond their wildest dreams. While impoverishing and enslaving the native people.

Hergé, who had never visited Congo, was just 23 when he wrote the book, which he was persuaded to do as part of a government-led initiative to encourage Belgians to take up commissions in Congo. But Mbutu Mondondo says it served — and still serves — to prop up a sanitized account of Belgium's colonialism. "It twists history to suggest that everything was happy and fun," he says. "In reality, it was a tragic, hurtful time."

Belgian Congo was one of the most bloody and cruel colonial regimes in Africa. The original inspiration for Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, it was claimed for King Leopold II in 1885 by the explorer Henry Morton Stanley.

For 23 years, the area — the size of France, Germany, Norway, Spain and Sweden combined — was the King's personal possession. Leopold's agents pioneered a ruthless forced-labor system for gathering wild rubber: villages that failed to meet the rubber-collection quotas were required to pay the remaining amount in amputated hands. Some estimates say Congo's population fell by 10 million during that time.

The colony was handed over to the Belgian state in 1908, but there was no thought of granting Congo independence until the late 1950s, and then it happened very suddenly in 1960.

"All countries prefer to see any conquests they took part in as something noble, whether [it be] manifest destiny, bringing civilization and Christianity to the savages or whatever," says Adam Hochschild, author of King Leopold's Ghost, the 1998 best seller that explores Belgium's savage colonial history in Congo.

"For decades, the Belgians who lived in Congo have been a powerful lobby for maintaining a very rosy view of the colonial era — in the Africa Museum outside Brussels, in school textbooks and elsewhere — and for shunning scholars, many of them Belgians, who portray something darker."In some ways, Tintin in the Congo was mild for its time. Hergé's ideas about the colony were entirely in tune with the age, when Africans were considered to be primitives

. Until 1960, Belgian schoolbooks would contain phrases like "The intellectual development of the black child stops very early" and "Negroes are indolent, lazy by nature, lacking in foresight." As odious as it sounds today, Africans were considered eternal children who needed to be groomed for adulthood.

In June, the former colony celebrates 50 years of independence, and Belgium's King Albert II will attend the festivities in Kinshasa. But feelings between the two countries are still raw, with Belgium regularly grumbling about Congo's human-rights record, and Congo accusing the Belgians of paternalism. During a diplomatic spat in 2004,Congolese Information Minister Henri Mova Sakanyi charged the Belgian government with "racism and nostalgia for colonialism," adding, "It's Tintin in the Congo all over again."

But should Tintin pay for the sins of Belgium's past? Hergé himself later expressed remorse over the book. "I was fed on the prejudices of the bourgeois society in which I moved," he said in the 1970s, and he made many changes for the color version of Tintin in the Congo, which was published in 1946. For example, a scene in which Tintin teaches a class of Congolese people about Belgian geography — saying, "Let's talk about your country, Belgium!" — was later changed to a math class.

Nonetheless, the book remains controversial, even outside Belgium. In 2007, Britain's Commission for Racial Equality said the book contains imagery and words of "hideous racial prejudice." The book's British editions carry a foreword explaining that Hergé's depiction reflected the colonial attitudes of the time, and Mbutu Mondondo says he would be satisfied with a similar measure in Belgium.

Moulinsart, the organization that runs Hergé's estate, accepts that the book reflects colonial clichés but warns against moves to censor Tintin. "Obviously, if someone showed Tintin in the Congo to an editor now, it would not get published," says Moulinsart communications director Alain de Kuyssche. "But you can't judge Tintin or Hergé solely by today's standards and attitudes. If you don't take account of the historical context, you would have to put a warning on every book over 50 years old."

Chinese Neo-Imperialism in Africa

After King Leopold's Belgium exploitation of the Congo. The Chinese are rapidly replacing the Europeans overexploitation of African land, labor, and natural resources.

The Financial Times writes: The Beijing Consensus: How China’s Authoritarian Model will Dominate the Twenty-First Century, by Stefan Halper, Basic Books £16.99, 312 pages

On his first visit to China late last year, Barack Obama stuck closely to the script mapped out by his predecessors George W Bush and Bill Clinton. He asserted that America welcomed China’s growing wealth and power. Relations between the US and China were not, he insisted, a “zero-sum game”. America was comfortable with a rising China.

Stefan Halper, a senior research fellow at Magdalene College, Cambridge and a former official in the Nixon, Ford and Reagan administrations, is having none of it. He believes that the coming decades will see an increasingly overt competition between the two nations. China, he asserts, “poses the most serious challenge to the United States since the half-century cold war struggle with the Soviets”. What is more, Halper is not particularly optimistic about America’s chances in this new struggle. His book is subtitled “How China’s Authoritarian Model will Dominate the Twenty-First Century”.

Halper says he has been on a voyage of intellectual discovery. His initial intention was to “produce a book on the rise of the new consumer class [in China] and how the process was eating away at the power of the ruling party”. The notion that capitalism will eventually bring democracy to China has been a crucial part of the west’s approach to the country, ever since the opening of the Chinese economy in 1978. The collapse of communism in eastern Europe in 1989 strengthened the mainstream American belief in the onward march of economic and political liberalism, otherwise known as the “end of history”. (source: The UK Financial Times)

Watch the youtube video below as Serge Michel and Michel Beuret, tell the dramatic -- and largely unknown-- story of the rise of China's economic empire in Africa and how it stands to transform geopolitics.

Over the course of nearly two years, Michel and Beuret traveled thousands of miles between China and Africa to report the story of this collaboration. Supplemented by the work of award-winning photojournalist Paolo Woods, China Safari establishes why the world is coming to realize Africa's potential and what role China is playing in the transformation.

Authors@Google: Serge Michel & Paolo Woods

The Diamond Empire: Oppenheimer family's cartel

The Diamond Empire: Oppenheimer family's cartel, Artificial scarcity (1994)

Apology for a colonial brute

MAKAU MUTUA of the Daily Nation reviewed Tim Jeal's book Stanley: The Impossible Life of Africa’s Greatest Explorer, writes I am surprised that I managed to complete reading the biography Stanley: The Impossible Life of Africa’s Greatest Explorer without decomposing from revulsion.

Anyone who knows anything about African colonial history cannot fail to be provoked by one of the most relentless and carefully researched works on Henry Morton Stanley, the 19th century journalist-adventurer whose early claim to fame was locating David Livingstone, perhaps the most famous European adventurer, in the belly of Africa.

But if there is any consolation in my labour, it is that the book says more about the West and Tim Jeal than it does of Africa. It is a work that will be despised by many Africans but almost certainly lauded in the West.For a work from a writer who claims objectivity, the book is a concerted, even emotional, defense of the chilling life of a man many Africans would rather forget.

RECAST HISTORY

From the outset, Jeal embarks on a journey of redemption and salvation in which the writer seeks to recast history through the interpretation of a life lived in blood, racial hatred and ignominy. It is all about the white European conquest of Africa. Africans are themselves only accoutrements in this large European narrative of history.A typical example of this obsession with the feats of the so-called discoverers of Africa is the uninterrogated assertion that Stanley was the “first man in history to have followed that great river [the Congo River] 1,800 miles from the heart of the continent.” One finds it inconceivable that Africans themselves had never attempted and accomplished such a feat.

But perhaps to Jeal and his fellow Westerners, Africans do not count as “men.” To Jeal, before Stanley and Livingstone, “apart from the apparently inaccessible central and sub-Saharan Africa, the only significant parts of the planet left unexplored were the equally daunting polar regions, along with northern Greenland and the north-east and north-west passages.”

The allusion is clear: only beasts – or sub-humans – can live in such remote and inhospitable regions.

Even in his narration of Stanley’s early life, Jeal makes implausible apologies for a sad and unforgiving childhood. From his illegitimate, abusive and abandoned childhood, it should be clear that Stanley suffered life-long traumas that shaped his identity for the rest of his life.

Several of these include his proclivity for brutality and sadism, his penchant for outright misrepresentations and impossible exaggerations about his identity, paternity and achievements.

Not to mention his obvious racial self-hatred and desire to be classified as either English and later as an American rather than the Welshman that he was.

But rather than use the inhumanity of British society to explain why Stanley later became a pathological brute – including his racial animus toward American blacks during the Civil War – Jeal instead excuses and minimises these distortions of character.

STRUGGLES MIGHTILY

Henry Morton Stanley was gay?

Jeal struggles mightily to explain away or diminish Stanley’s every perceived character flaw or failure. One curious instance is Jeal’s attempt to swat away arguments that Stanley may have been gay or at least bisexual.

He perceives homosexuality as a problem that must be explained away or discounted. Elsewhere, Jeal states, rather incredulously, that Stanley was not a racist.

This despite the fact that Stanley had murdered in cold blood or flogged mercilessly many Africans who were in servitude to him on his expeditions. What Jeal misses over and over again is the permission that Europeans like Stanley gave themselves as the arbiters over the life and death of many an African.

Particularly troubling in Stanley is Jeal’s failure to situate Stanley, Livingstone and other early European explorers as the pathways to the colonisation and exploitation of Africa by Europe.

In Stanley’s case, apart from his connivance with Arab and European enslavers of Africans, it is impossible to separate him from the brutal fate of the Congo.

It was his work that led King Leopold II of Belgium to the Congo and the utter devastation of the region and its people. It was Stanley who set the example, stage and tone for the brutalities and pogroms of the Belgians in the Congo.

Any attempt that sidesteps or apologises for this inescapable connection between Stanley and colonialism is an inexcusable nod at crimes against humanity.

Jeal makes passing references to what he calls the predicament of Stanley and other early colonialists in Africa. He fails to situate the Stanley expeditions in their right historical context.

Here were hordes of uninvited and invading Europeans on the African continent.

If anything, Jeal proceeds as though the Europeans have a more superior moral claim to Africa than Africans themselves. That is why he tells the story of Stanley from the colonialist’s viewpoint, and treats Africans as fodder in the larger European mission of civilisation of the native.

LITTLE REFLECTION

There is surprisingly little reflection in Jeal’s Stanley about the fate of Africa and the role that the early European adventurists played in its construction.

At the very least, this is either an attempt at amnesia or simply bad scholarship on the part of a supposedly respected author. Since Stanley represents the point of cultural contact – and civilisational clash – between Africa and the West, it behoves the author to deliberate on the meaning of that encounter and its historical meaning.

Rather than lament that some writers now unfairly demonise Stanley – whom Jeal would have us believe was a saintly explorer – the author should have set aside any personal agendas and let history speak for itself. Instead, Jeal writes a political book in defence of a historical monster.

I do not deny that there is a place in scholarship for the reinterpretation of history, particularly of notable figures and their roles. But authors have to be careful that they are not so possessed with the desire to defend their icons that they lose sight of the moral purpose of scholarship.

The evidence of history, including in Stanley’s own words, is so overwhelming that a complete rewrite of the narrative – which is what Jeal attempts – is not convincing. Nothing is served – except the agenda of European exceptionalism – when a writer of repute resorts to such an untenable project.

Nor can racists, particularly of the harsh imperial hue of the brutal 19th century, be easily humanised. If Jeal’s attempt was the resurrection of a humane Stanley, then I must judge him a complete failure.

Makau Mutua is SUNY Distinguished Professor at the State University of New York at Buffalo and Chair of the Kenya Human Rights Commission