ABSTRACT
The imagined idea of Africa as old, backwards, or fallen markedly contrasts utopian visions of the New World of the Americas. Philip Curtin, V.Y. Mudimbe, and Patrick Brantlinger, among others, characterize the genealogy of the “image of Africa” throughout the “colonial library” in profoundly negative terms: as “blank darkness,” “la nullité civilisatrice,” “the dark continent.” For Christopher Miller, Africanist discourse is “an unhappy Orientalism, a discourse of desire unfulfilled and unfulfillable.”3 However, while infernal representations of the continent proliferate in Africanist literature, the paradise myth nevertheless surfaces continuously as a manifestation of the lust for material gold-lands and raw resources which the discourse of negation seeks to conceal. Throughout the medieval and early modern periods, paradise was imagined in almost every region of African geography, from the Fortunate Isles, the equator, the antipodes, the source of the Nile, Guinea, and the Ethiopian Mount Amara, to the Mountains of the Moon.4 This chapter will trace the myths about Africa crystallized by Homer, Dante, Camões, and Milton in the medieval and early modern periods, before moving to a concentrated analysis of the paradise discourse revolving around the ancient entrepôt of Zanzibar in East Africa in relation to the economies of both European and Arab mercantilism and colonialism. Titillated by the spices which traveled from Africa through Arabian traders
to the markets of the Mediterranean world, and ignorant of their origins or routes, classical writers such as Cicero and Horace imagined Africa as a source of radiant wealth, paralleling the riches of the East. Homer’s epics crystallized a series of paradisiacal topoi including the Hesperides, the Lotus Eaters, and the Fortunate Isles, for which Europeans would continue to search well into the fifteenth century. Classical discourse about the African continent reveals a central polarity between Africa as “lost paradise” versus Africa as
“void and unformed prior to its investment with shape and being by the Christian or Islamic discourse.”5 The synedochical imagination of Africa as “happy Ethiopia,” “playground of the gods,” cast the “blameless” Ethiopian as a precursor of the noble savage, innocent of sin and inhabiting an earthly paradise of abundance. The antagonistic fantasy represented Sub-Saharans as “virtueless slaves,” gibbering, sub-human savages, thus generating an “Otheras-nightmare” to counterpoint the “Other-as-dream.” The radically opposed traditions of “Homer’s lost paradise” and “Herodotus’s nightmare” coexisted as functions of the same “blankness,” constituting different ways of imagining and writing about Africa as a void.6
