by LANSANA GBERIE
Acclaimed writer and Nobel Laureate VS Naipaul has spent much time traveling in and writing about Africa. But his views of the continent are ignorant and bigoted, like those of most foreign visitors before him. It is disappointing that such a towering literary figure who should know better chooses to see Africa and her people through a lens of racism and colonial prejudice.
Towards the end of his magisterial Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (the final volume completed in 1776) Edward Gibbon pauses to reflect on how by the 15th century the Greeks – the creators of modern civilization – began to take serious notice of the newer nations of northern Europe, which they “could no longer presumed to brand with the name of barbarians.” Relying on their accounts, he sketches the “rude picture” of the “life and character” of Germany, France and England. Of particular interest to Gibbon, who was English, is the account of the Greek Byzantine writer, Demetrius Chalcondyles (1423-1511), of life in England during his time. What distinguished the English from other Europeans, Chalcondyles wrote, was their singular disregard for marital honour or female chastity. The English had the habit of throwing their wives and daughters on male visitors who would sleep with them as a sign of welcome; and among their friends, women are “lent and borrowed without shame.” Gibbon affects to disbelieve this account, vainly protesting that “assured of the virtue of our mothers, we may smile at the credulity, or resent the injustice, of the Greek.” Chalcondyles’ account, he wrote, “may teach an important lesson, to distrust the accounts of foreign and remote nations, and to suspend our belief of every tale that deviates from the laws of nature and the character of man.”
Pambazuka News for more