ABSTRACT
In analysing the European images of savages, the notion of ‘inversion’ is a useful one. It refers to a process whereby an imaginary ethnography is generated by inverting something close and familiar, so that the outcome may be likened to a photographic negative; and these inverted features are then attributed to the savages. This was the kind of interpretation used by Mason when discussing the European image of the Other in antiquity, the Middle Ages and the 16th to 17th centuries (e.g. Mason 1990, pp. 124–7). The same interpretation fits the European images of savages in the 19th century, and Hegel provides a prototypical example. He saw Africa very much as a kind of inversion of Europe, painting it in the most lurid colours. For Hegel the values of humans lay in their connection with ‘the Absolute’, and, since Africans do not recognize that entity, he inferred, in a convoluted argument, that they attach no value to human life. Hence they slaughter their fellows, drink their blood and eat them, practise polygamy and are apt to suddenly explode in blind destructive fury (Hegel [1832] 1992, Vol. 12, pp. 120–9). These fearsome images were not dreamed up by the philosopher in his armchair, but originated from a stream of colourful reports by travellers and explorers, a stream which barely abated in the course of the 19th century. It shaped the image of Africa in particular, and rendered not only public but also scientific opinion credulously receptive to the most fantastic claims. Even if some of the reports of cannibalism were accurate, these were almost certainly greatly outnumbered by cases where the travellers and explorers were either led astray by their preconceptions or, one suspects, wanted to increase the impact of their reports by sensationalizing them in the expected direction (see Figure 9.1).
