Segu / Segou
Jul. 18th, 2004 09:01 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dream_labyrinthWarning: the following entry might be considered racist, even though it is not meant that way.
I just finished Segu by Maryse Conde (Original French title: Segou: les murailles de terre).
Basically it is the story of two generations of an African family living in Segu in the nineteenth century. Segu is a real town, on the Niger river.
The thing that is so interesting about the story is the tension between the different cultures clashing in Africa at this time. There were the Christian Europeans, Spanish,French, Portuguese, English, whose religious beliefs didn't keep them from buying and selling slaves, and whose contempt of the black people didn't keep them from impregnating slave women. Then there are the Arabs and Islamic Africans, who try to win over other nations to Muslim belief by any means necessary, just as the Christians babtize anybody they get their hands on (apart from the people they want to sell as slaves, as you can't sell a Christian, of course...). And then, of course, the African nations with their own religions, languages and cultures. I had no idea there were that many different African people in a rather small area. To say the truth, I didn't know much about Africa at all. That's why I like historical novels, you learn something from them.
Anyway, some things in the story really got me thinking. I knew before that some Africans tried to profit from the slave trade, selling their prisoners of war or kidnapping people to sell them. I didn't know that slaves were no invention of the whites coming to Africa. There had been some forms of slavery even before that. I didn't know how carefully some people counted the white and the black ancestors of everybody, denying their own African roots and being just as racist as the Europeans, or even more so.
It was no surprise to me to read about how religion was used in political matters. To find an ally, you just change to their religion, and keep your old gods stored away until you can get them out again. That's similar to the Christianization of Europe. There is a story of one monk who gave a new shirt to every person who would get babtized, and only several hundred shirts later realized that people would go right back to the end of the queue after being babtized to get another shirt. For the Germanic people, being dumped into some river had no religious meaning, so it was just a nice way of getting to some new clothes.
But reading that book made me wonder what exactly was wrong in Africa, and how it could be solved. I used to think that the main problem were the borders set up by the colonisation powers, paying no heed to the real borders between different people - see Hutu and Tutsi. Now I think that a main problem is simply development. When the Europeans and the Arabs came, Africa was for the most part on a level close to Stone Age, or maybe Bronze or Iron Age. And from there, they jumped right into industrialization, skipping everything in between. So the minds of the people could not keep up with the rapid changes in their environment. The changes in the minds of the white people didn't make it easier. For a while, the English traded slaves, then they abolished slavery in Great Britain, but kept it up in the colonies. And even while slavery was abolished, it just depended on how much money a slave trader was able to pay to bribe any officer.
The French were similar, first abolishing slavery and then putting it back just when the news of the abolishment had reached the colonies.
So while Africa always seemed like on big mass of land somewhere down there on the map, I now begin to really understand how diverse the continent is. It's not that I didn't know that before. Somewhere in my brain the information did stick. But I never really thought about it until now.
I didn't know either that there were several former slaves from America who managed to get back, bringing yet another influence to that strange mass of thoughts and ideas.
So why did I put that warning in the beginning of this entr, when in truth the only thing it reveals is my complete lack of knowledge of quite a bit of world history and geography? Mainly because of that "Stone/Bronze/Iron Age" comparison. I don't see myself as racist. I don't think I really care about the color of somebody's skin. So this is just stating my perception of the situation. But it might seem like I believe that Africans are a bunch of black morons who are unable to read and write and just communicate by beating a drum. Now for one thing, I never even gt around to understand Morse alphabet, so communicating long distance with drums is pretty cool to me. Also, somebody who is able to survive in Africa must be able to adapt to weird and often bad climatic and environmental situations. Without the European influence, I guess Africa would have developed into an industrial continent, too. But as the initial situation is very different from Europe, that development would have been quite different, too. We're not going to see how it might be. Even if every single person of European origin left Africa right now, you can't just undo several hundred years of interaction and influence.
I need to learn much more about Africa before I'll be able to see the problem from all sides. I only know that there is a problem, when people run amok killing their neighbors, no matter whether one civilian kills another or one army another or an army civilians or whatever. Somehow I don't believe that the development aid from Germany and other European countries really get to the root of the problem. It's just a way to try and fight the symptoms.
But I have no real solution, so I should stop talking nonsense. I'm not sure whether anything of this makes sense, it's just what came into my mind tonight, in no particular order and most likely contradicting myself.
Bear with me, it's getting late, it's terribly sultry and I didn't have much sleep last night.
I just finished Segu by Maryse Conde (Original French title: Segou: les murailles de terre).
Basically it is the story of two generations of an African family living in Segu in the nineteenth century. Segu is a real town, on the Niger river.
The thing that is so interesting about the story is the tension between the different cultures clashing in Africa at this time. There were the Christian Europeans, Spanish,French, Portuguese, English, whose religious beliefs didn't keep them from buying and selling slaves, and whose contempt of the black people didn't keep them from impregnating slave women. Then there are the Arabs and Islamic Africans, who try to win over other nations to Muslim belief by any means necessary, just as the Christians babtize anybody they get their hands on (apart from the people they want to sell as slaves, as you can't sell a Christian, of course...). And then, of course, the African nations with their own religions, languages and cultures. I had no idea there were that many different African people in a rather small area. To say the truth, I didn't know much about Africa at all. That's why I like historical novels, you learn something from them.
Anyway, some things in the story really got me thinking. I knew before that some Africans tried to profit from the slave trade, selling their prisoners of war or kidnapping people to sell them. I didn't know that slaves were no invention of the whites coming to Africa. There had been some forms of slavery even before that. I didn't know how carefully some people counted the white and the black ancestors of everybody, denying their own African roots and being just as racist as the Europeans, or even more so.
It was no surprise to me to read about how religion was used in political matters. To find an ally, you just change to their religion, and keep your old gods stored away until you can get them out again. That's similar to the Christianization of Europe. There is a story of one monk who gave a new shirt to every person who would get babtized, and only several hundred shirts later realized that people would go right back to the end of the queue after being babtized to get another shirt. For the Germanic people, being dumped into some river had no religious meaning, so it was just a nice way of getting to some new clothes.
But reading that book made me wonder what exactly was wrong in Africa, and how it could be solved. I used to think that the main problem were the borders set up by the colonisation powers, paying no heed to the real borders between different people - see Hutu and Tutsi. Now I think that a main problem is simply development. When the Europeans and the Arabs came, Africa was for the most part on a level close to Stone Age, or maybe Bronze or Iron Age. And from there, they jumped right into industrialization, skipping everything in between. So the minds of the people could not keep up with the rapid changes in their environment. The changes in the minds of the white people didn't make it easier. For a while, the English traded slaves, then they abolished slavery in Great Britain, but kept it up in the colonies. And even while slavery was abolished, it just depended on how much money a slave trader was able to pay to bribe any officer.
The French were similar, first abolishing slavery and then putting it back just when the news of the abolishment had reached the colonies.
So while Africa always seemed like on big mass of land somewhere down there on the map, I now begin to really understand how diverse the continent is. It's not that I didn't know that before. Somewhere in my brain the information did stick. But I never really thought about it until now.
I didn't know either that there were several former slaves from America who managed to get back, bringing yet another influence to that strange mass of thoughts and ideas.
So why did I put that warning in the beginning of this entr, when in truth the only thing it reveals is my complete lack of knowledge of quite a bit of world history and geography? Mainly because of that "Stone/Bronze/Iron Age" comparison. I don't see myself as racist. I don't think I really care about the color of somebody's skin. So this is just stating my perception of the situation. But it might seem like I believe that Africans are a bunch of black morons who are unable to read and write and just communicate by beating a drum. Now for one thing, I never even gt around to understand Morse alphabet, so communicating long distance with drums is pretty cool to me. Also, somebody who is able to survive in Africa must be able to adapt to weird and often bad climatic and environmental situations. Without the European influence, I guess Africa would have developed into an industrial continent, too. But as the initial situation is very different from Europe, that development would have been quite different, too. We're not going to see how it might be. Even if every single person of European origin left Africa right now, you can't just undo several hundred years of interaction and influence.
I need to learn much more about Africa before I'll be able to see the problem from all sides. I only know that there is a problem, when people run amok killing their neighbors, no matter whether one civilian kills another or one army another or an army civilians or whatever. Somehow I don't believe that the development aid from Germany and other European countries really get to the root of the problem. It's just a way to try and fight the symptoms.
But I have no real solution, so I should stop talking nonsense. I'm not sure whether anything of this makes sense, it's just what came into my mind tonight, in no particular order and most likely contradicting myself.
Bear with me, it's getting late, it's terribly sultry and I didn't have much sleep last night.
