‘A Fierce Race’

Africanists today are focused on conflicts in Congo and Angola, Liberia and Sierra Leone, and on the war between Ethiopia and Eritrea. To read the reportage of these conflicts is to be reminded of earlier Western accounts of African warfare. Africa, it seems, continues to fight the same largely pointless wars it did before 1900, while the African personality is predisposed toward wanton violence and driven by an admiration for brutality.

In the West warfare is crucial as an agency of change and a means of national or self-expression, but warfare in Africa has scarcely been credited with the same significance. Before the nineteenth century, Europe’s knowledge of Africa was based on rumour, half-truth and imagination; and ‘savage tribal warfare’ was one of the key themes of the reportage. The slave trade introduced a racial dimension to European perceptions, and Europeans felt it necessary to comment on Africa’s mindless warfare, bloody militarism and fighting spirit, or lack of it.