Popular African exploration narratives cemented evolutionary-barbarism views of Africa

Evidence

Americans were probably more open to colonization in 1890 than at any time since Abraham Lincoln’s urgings during the Civil War. Caribbean-born Liberian diplomat Edward Wilmot Blyden was touring the United States proclaiming that African Americans had been schooled and preserved by slavery for their divine mission to redeem Africa. “God has a way of salting as well as purifying by fire,” Blyden wrote in the American Colonization Society’s journal in 1890. The writings of Henry Morton Stanley, the nineteenth century’s most famous English-speaking explorer of Africa, were in mass circulation. Nearly every English speaker interested in Africa read Stanley’s Through the Dark Continent (1878), and nearly everyone who read Stanley came away viewing African people as savages, including novelist Joseph Conrad, who authored the classic Heart of Darkness in 1899. The White character’s journey up the Congo River “was like traveling back to the earliest beginning of the world”—not back in chronological time, but back in evolutionary time. — Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning, 712

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and the temporal/spatial mapping of race onto evolution — echoes the ‘traveling back in time’ trope of colonial discourse.