Once, when I was about 13 and desperate for books about my mother’s country, Ghana, I stumbled upon a Victorian novel about the Ashanti kingdom. The fact it was written by a journalist, a profession I aspired to, only made the book more appealing.
The foreign correspondent GA Henty’s By Sheer Pluck was about an audacious lad from Deal on the English Channel, who wound up in the ultimate adventure – sailing to what was then the Gold Coast of west Africa. I won’t repeat the racist and colonial language of the book here, but suffice to say its hero sized up the backward and idiotic natives – some of my ancestors, probably – before thrashing them gallantly in Kumasi.
It was an early introduction to my naive, hitherto sheltered younger self, of the fact that journalists could not be relied on to produce fair representations of supposedly exotic cultures. I learned, not without a sense of betrayal, that stories about African countries in the English literary canon were likely to be about brave, white adventurers pushing deep into dark continents and savage lands. Many such stories were accompanied by images of these men surrounded by bare-chested and dangerous-looking dark-skinned people. These stories were not created for people like me.
Having learned more about the colonial history, I can at least understand the context in which these stories were written. But that cannot explain why, in November 2017, almost identical images are still deemed acceptable in Britain’s major newspapers.
That’s exactly what happened when the adventurer Benedict Allen temporarily went missing last week “in a remote jungle in Papua New Guinea while searching for a lost tribe”, as the Telegraph put it. The newspaper saw fit to illustrate the story with a remarkable photo of Allen, and the BBC security correspondent Frank Gardner, surrounded by four men with black skin, eyes glowering, wearing traditional costumes, including head and face gear.
To remove any doubt that this was meant to be interpreted as a threatening scene, the Yaifo people of Papua New Guinea were described in the story as “quite a scary bunch” and their vocation as “headhunters”.
I’m no expert on Yaifo culture, but I suspect there is more to it than scaring white people. The fact that what attracted Allen to them is their lack of contact with other communities suggests they were most likely minding their own business until BBC explorers saw fit to come along and track them down.
I’m not suggesting there is no merit in seeking people who have hitherto avoided contact with British documentary makers. But there seems to be little understanding that this narrative has a history. As Robert Baden-Powell – a keen propagator of the adventure narrative – put it, the history of the empire is the history of adventurers and explorers. “Captain Cook in Australia, Lord Clive in India, opened up new countries. Speke, Baker, and Livingstone pushed their way through the savage deserts and forests of Africa,” he wrote.
Allen has cited some of these men as the inspiration for his own adventures. I wonder if he, or those who wrote him up so admiringly, realise that their version of empire’s legacy was one of trying to convince people like the Yaifo, the Ashanti, and other “tribes” the British encountered, of their racial inferiority. The media’s role in all this – as Frantz Fanon explained so powerfully in his book Black Skin, White Masks – is to ensure the success of that message, whether through novels such as Tarzan, By Sheer Pluck, news stories, or whatever other medium could reach the British – and especially young white men – and bolster their masculine, conquering ambitions.
Fanon was concerned with the effect literature and the media were having on young black boys who grew up reading it. Not surprisingly, his thesis was that it was traumatic. “The Bad Man, the Savage are always symbolised by Negroes or Indians; since there is always identification with the victor, the little Negro, quite as easily as the little white boy, becomes an explorer, an adventurer, a missionary who faces the danger of being eaten by the wicked Negroes.”
I don’t begrudge men like Allen for their adventures, but I do wonder if they have ever contemplated the imagery and messages they are creating from the perspective of someone like me. It’s a giant act of “othering”, of placing people like the Yaifo as scary savages under a white gaze, and promoting raw colonial era ideology.
And as for the press – which played such a huge role in creating colonial narratives of backward black people in savage lands – it shows no signs of stopping now. This is 21st-century, diverse Britain. Surely our journalists can do better than
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