ABSTRACT
The story of Fin-De-Siècle Africa is a tale of numerous and shifting cultures, political formations, religious beliefs and social practices. The inventions of dynamite and the steamboat facilitated European incursions into Africa, and the Maxim gun, the recoil-operated machine gun invented in 1884, assured its conquest. In addition to new technologies that Africans directly witnessed transforming their lands, lives and bodies, other, less evident, inventions were equally powerful tools of imperialism. The conceptual conquest of Africa, assuming the right to represent Africans both rhetorically and politically, was a project at once continued and contested in the realm of art and literature. The peoples of the coast of West Africa had had contact with European merchants, slave traders and missionaries for centuries. To the south, a charismatic holy man named Muhammad Ahmad had proclaimed himself the Mahdi, the "Expected One", and advocated a return to fundamental Sufi virtues of purity, austerity and worldly renunciation.
