Africa is Not a Dark Continent: Racism in Haggard's King Solomon's Mines

in #africa6 years ago

For centuries, Africa was considered a dark continent by the imperialist Europeans who enslaved it, colonized it, and exploited it. The African culture was regarded, sadly, as barbaric and crude, needing European emancipation from the shackles of primitivity. The African skin, too, was seen as an empty shell needing European refinement. As a matter of fact, the first Europeans who set their feet on the soil of West Africa came armed with these prejudicial beliefs.

Let it be known that the Eurocentric and misleading assumptions about Africa and its people have littered the pages of popular European literatures since the beginning of the 15th century. As a way of protest, the prominent African writer, Chinua Achebe, had already dealt with Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, a famous British novel which painted a dark image of Africa.

Another version of Conrad's novel, however, was H. Rider Haggard's King Solomon's Mines set in Kukuanaland, an 'undiscovered' part of Africa and published in 1885. In the short novel, Haggard craftily tells the adventurous story of how Allan Quatermain, a white hunter based in Africa, and his white friends visit Kukuanaland in search of King Solomon's mines believed to be the richest precious stone treasure in the world.

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To sell his book(a book that was written to win a bet), Haggard ends up telling a fine story which, at best, oiled the enduring lust of an European mind for cheap superiority and dominance over the African people and culture. In several instances, Allan Quatermain, the character Haggard employs to tell the story in a first person narrative, portrays the people of Kukuanaland as barbarians who have no basic knowledge of science and technology; as a people who do not know what guns are, even though guns had already proliferated Africa at the time the novel was set.

Here is what Quatermain writes when his party enters Kukuanaland:

As I looked an old, soldierly-looking man stepped forward out of the group, and, catching the youth by the arm, said something to him. Then they advanced upon us. Sir Henry, Good, and Umbopa had by this time seized their rifles and lifted them threateningly. The party of natives still came on. It struck me that they could not know what rifles were, or they would not have treated them with such contempt.

Again, Haggard's King Solomon's Mines paints a picture which suggests that the people of Kukuanaland are savages, subhumans. To drive home his point, Haggard describes an aged African woman using the pronoun it instead of she. Consider what Haggard writes while describing Gagool, the oldest woman and witch in Kukuanaland:

As he did so I observed the wizened, monkey-like figure creeping up from the shadow of the hut. It crept on all fours, but when it reached the place where the king sat it rose upon its feet, and, throwing the furry covering off its face, revealed a most extraordinary and weird countenance. It was (apparently) that of a woman of great age, so shrunken that in size it was no larger than that of a year-old child, and was made up of a collection of deep, yellow wrinkles....

What could be more racist than the description above? It will interest you to know, nevertheless, that Haggard did not stop there. In fact, Haggard wants us to believe that it is a horrible thing for a white man to marry a black woman, regardless of the woman's beauty. Therefore, Haggard celebrates the untoward death of Foulata, a young black woman with whom Captain Good falls in love, because it will end the complications that may arose from such interracial marriage. This is how he puts it:

I am bound to say, looking at the thing from the point of view of an oldish man of the world, that I consider her removal was a fortunate occurrence, since, otherwise, complications would have been sure to ensue. The poor creature was no ordinary native girl, but a person of great, I had almost said stately, beauty, and of considerable refinement of mind. But no amount of beauty or refinement could have made an entanglement between Good and herself a desirable occurrence; for, as she herself put it, "Can the sun mate with the darkness?"

Lastly, Haggard portrays Africa as being incapable of governing themselves. For him, African government can only be successful and utilitarian when such government is installed and legitimized by the European powers. To achieve this objective, Haggard's novel intentionally set up a character named Umpoba, a black guard who accompanies Allan Quatermain and his friends into Kukuanaland. Umbopa is installed as the rightful king of Kukuanaland after Twala, the former king, is beheaded in a duel (another show of white might) by Sir Henry Curtis. In the end, the white men leave Kukuanaland with a new government headed by Umpoba, a black puppet and friend who is ready to hand them the whole of King Solomon's mines if they wished.

I will conclude this essay by reemphasizing that Africa is a great continent and the centre of human civilization. There are historical facts to prove that Africa had made significant advancement in diverse areas before the advent of the Europeans. Therefore, writings such as Haggard's King Solomon's Mines are racist and ethnocentric, merely written to justify the racial, colonial, and imperialistic climate of the time. Africa was never a dark continent and a thousand lies by Haggard would not make it be.

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