30 - The Modern Context

Summary

AFRICANS HAD BEEN GOING TO EUROPE SINCE DISTANT TIMES OF European contact. Soon after 1500 the king of Portugal welcomed an ambassador from the king of Benin, and found him ‘a man of good speech and natural wisdom’. A son of the king of Kongo, studying at Rome, was made a bishop in 1518. There are two black princes of Anamabu here/ Horace Walpole was noting in his London diary for 1749, ‘who are in fashion at all assemblies’, being received at Covent Garden with ‘a loud clap of applause’. At about the same moment another young man from the Gold Coast, Anthony William Amo, was awarded a doctorate of laws by the University of Wittenberg, and appointed counsellor of state by the Court of Berlin.

These were exceptions. Until late in the nineteenth century few Africans were able to travel abroad except as slaves, and only a handful acquired a modern education. By the 1870s, however, the potentially positive aspect of European presence—the opening of channels to new learning—had begun to take effect in a few places, especially in British-influenced West Africa and in French-influenced Senegal.

On the Gold Coast, moreover, the British acquired their supremacy in no small part thanks to an alliance with coastal peoples, notably the Fanti, against the Asante empire. Long before that empire was finally defeated, Fanti leaders had begun to think about a qualified independence within the British sphere. They made some small progress towards this. As early as 1870 one of their spokesmen could claim that ‘the whole of the Fanti race, numbering some 400,000 souls, can now, for the first time, boast of a national assembly’. Although the ultimate history of the Fanti Confederation, duly formed in 1871, became little more than a diary of unavailing protest against British hegemony, there remained some encouragement for independent thought about the future.

A majority of the educated few tended to see themselves as Europeans by adoption and, as such, to reject and even despise the cultures from which they sprang. The same reaction was for a long while common to black thought in the United States after the Civil War. Yet others saw their position differently, and began to preach the regeneration of Africa's civilisation. They turned their energies to a revaluation of traditional cultures. They applied the judgments of history, and found invigorating answers.