Between Cultures. Jerrold Seigel

Livingstone and Henry Morton Stanley. These, however, turned out to bring greater dangers and worse suffering than the Harar trip, partly because of the difficulties of organizing enough local people to support the undertaking, the perils presented by the climate and terrain, the hostile reception given the visitors by local tribes (which ended with Burton being severely wounded and having to be carried in a litter for some weeks), and partly because of the conflict that developed between Burton and his partner Speke. The two were badly matched, Speke being an enthusiast for big-game hunting with no interest in native cultures or religions and no familiarity with local languages. But he was an intrepid if sometimes careless explorer, and it was he who succeeded in locating the source of the Nile in Lake Victoria, at a time when Burton was laid up with illness. The grounds on which he believed in his discovery were shaky and uncertain, involving what he thought he had been told by local people with whom he had no common language, but he succeeded where Burton failed. The latter, partly out of jealousy, refused to credit Speke’s claims, and the venomous and public controversy between them dragged on for years, ending only with Speke’s death in 1864, from a self-inflicted gunshot wound that may have been an accident but some believed to be suicide.

      Like the Harar episode, the Nile project presented Burton with a very different experience from those he met with in either India or Arabia, and some of what he wrote about it simply reflects the contrast. That many of his comments are bound to strike people with more modern sensibilities as vile and contemptible is testimony to an evolution in attitudes that we should cherish as an advance in both understanding and human empathy. But affirming our commitment to this gain should not close our eyes to the truth of some of Burton’s observations (a number of which, as we shall see, still applied to the life Chinua Achebe described a century later). As Fawn Brodie insists:

      There was filth, mutilation, ignorance, indolence, drunkenness and violence. The natives did live in huts populated with “a menagerie of hens, pigeons, and rats of peculiar impudence,” like the poor in Ireland, as he was careful to point out. Certain tribes did burn their witches, again, as he noted, like Europeans of a not-too-distant date. … In several tribes, if an infant cut his upper incisor teeth before the lower, he was killed or sold into slavery. If twins were born, they were often both killed. … Burton saw the disregard for life among his own bearers. One bought a slave child, who as he discovered shortly, could not keep up with the caravan because of sore feet. The owner decided to abandon her, but cut off her head lest she benefit someone else.⁵³

      The splendor of nature in Africa could not compensate Burton for the sense of alienation he felt there: “The absence of all association, the sense of loneliness and estrangement, the absurd distance from friend and family seem to diffuse an ugliness over every African river, however fair.” The continent was a “stranger-land,” at the other pole from the Arabia where he so easily felt at home, and which he described in the foreword to the Thousand and One Nights translation as “the land of my predilection … a region so familiar to my mind that even at first sight, it seemed a reminiscence of some by-gone metempsychic life in the distant Past.”⁵⁴ The antipathy Burton felt toward African life was not so complete as to blind him to features he could admire; even in the eastern regions whose conditions made him speak about “degeneration” and “bestiality,” he noted elements close to those he would later cite as evidence for intelligence and cultivation, reporting that “many negro and negroid races” possessed “an unstudied eloquence which the civilized speaker might envy, and which, like poetry, seems to flourish most in the dawn of civilization.” But such observations were mostly drowned out by the tide of revulsion.⁵⁵

      One reason why later writings such as the proverbs book could shift the balance toward the positive judgments noted above may simply have been that the impact of Burton’s first experiences in Africa was no longer so immediate and potent, receding at the same time that he acquired more experience of native languages and thinking. Curiously, however, not only did his recourse to racial categories not diminish in the face of his recognition that African tongues and speech testified to genuine intellect and creativity, the moment when Burton presented African cultural forms as evidence for black people’s unquestionable intellectual capacity was also the one when strictly biological and physical thinking became more prominent in his writing. Burton was not alone in taking this direction: he pursued it in concert with the friends and associates with whom he banded together to found the Anthropological Society of London in 1863. The group broke away from an older organization, the Ethnological Society, precisely to give greater emphasis to the physical and biological basis of racial and cultural difference (a viewpoint encouraged by the publication of Darwin’s Origin of Species in 1859); the shift was signaled by the substitution of “anthropological” for “ethnological” in the new organization’s name. Other considerations motivated the break as well, in particular a desire to speak freely in meetings and discussions about sexual behavior in “primitive” societies and about physical sexual features both male and female; such things were forbidden at the Ethnological Society because their sessions were open to women, a problem the new group dealt with by excluding them. Burton stood close to James Hunt, the Anthropological Society’s president and a leader in compiling and using data on measurable physical differences in such things as skull and brain size, and facial and bodily proportions. Burton contributed to all this by collecting skulls in Africa (beginning on the trip in search of the Nile’s source); he often spoke about the racial elements he thought he could discern in various parts of people’s faces or torsos, and like Hunt gave much attention to phrenology, that fashionable nineteenth-century “science” that traced attributes of personality to cranial shapes and bumps.⁵⁶

      How can we understand Burton’s turning in this direction just at the moment when he was praising the precision and expressive power of African languages and the high cultural level of their proverbs, declaring at the same time that the distance between “savage” and “civilized” was much less than commonly supposed? And how can a person so aware, as he was in the case of the Jews, that significant “racial” characteristics can be generated by culture and history no less than by biology, have insisted on the determining power of measurable physical features? These tangled questions stand near the center of any attempt to grasp how Burton’s preconceptions and experiences shaped his understanding of cultural relations and whether there was any consistency to his thinking. They are important in grasping broadly shared nineteenth-century attitudes as well.

      A key to unraveling them has been supplied by Dane Kennedy: behind Burton’s emphasis on the biological determination of differences between human groups was his opposition to one particular and prominent way of affirming human universality in his time, the one advanced by Christian evangelicals. For them what mattered most about human beings was the state of their souls; cultural difference was a marginal concern compared with the spiritual core common to humans everywhere and the need to bring all individuals into the fold of faith. By contrast, looking for a physical basis of differences in thinking and behavior was a way to shine a more intense light on cultural diversity too.

      Evangelical Christians played a large role in nineteenth-century culture. Much of the puritanical moralism signaled by the term Victorian, and against which Burton spoke out all through his life, arose from the evangelical campaign to shape everyday life around rigorous adherence to Christian precepts. Thus it is not surprising that Burton was anything but friendly to the missionary project of conversion pursued by evangelicals in the 1860s. Among their converts were the most prominent of the Africans who rose up against Burton’s negative pronouncements about African life and culture. Like the Sepoy whom he decried on his first trip to India, such people appeared in his eyes as ungainly hybrids, neither genuinely African nor truly European. He saw the Africans who had embraced the missionary message as coming from the same mold, dressing themselves up in “the cast-off finery of Europe” and behaving accordingly. Like some of Burton’s other reactions to Africans, this one seems to have been fed by a visceral dislike that issued in judgments both superficial and mean-spirited; later he came to recognize that people such as his chief critic, James Africanus Horton, were capable of genuine cultivation and accomplishment. All the same, I think it is wrong to see these notions as in tension with Burton’s own engagement with disguise and cultural synthesis, as some writers have. On one level, his dislike of Christianized Africans constituted his own version of the Muslim suspicion