Between Cultures. Jerrold Seigel
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traits wherever he found them and liked to attribute them to himself; recall the comment about desert bandits quoted above from the Personal Narrative: “Who so revolts against society requires an iron mind and an iron body, and these mankind instinctively admires, however misdirected be their energies.”
Clearly, Burton had moved far from this identification by the time he wrote “The Jew”; all the same, even that essay offered a ground for admiring its subjects, namely that the same culture that hardened Jews as a people also fostered in them a moral attitude Burton found worthy of deep respect, the determination to serve God out of pure devotion and not for any personal advantage. Although the ancient Hebrews already interpreted their special relationship to Jehovah as justifying hostility and violence toward other peoples, the same sense of special communal solidarity
inculcated a rare humanity amongst its own members unknown to all other peoples of antiquity: for instance, it allowed the coward to retire from the field before battle, and, strange to say, it inculcated the very highest of moral dogmas. In 250 B.C. Sochaeus, and after him the Pharisees, according to Josephus, taught that God should be served, not for gain, but for love and gratitude: hence his follower Sadik forbade the looking forward to futurity, even as Moses had neglected the doctrine with studious care. Even in the present age of the world such denegation of egotism would be a higher law.50
It may be impossible to decide whether the approval Burton here expressed for allowing cowards to escape battle was genuine or ironic, and similarly whether his association of high moral purity with Jews was at work also in his earlier profession of kinship with them. But finding these ideas in the later essay adds more substance to the evident ambivalence at the core of his dealings with Jews, visible and active even in the moment of his most hostile stance toward them.
Although more difficult to see, a similar complexity can be discerned in his attitude toward black Africans. Burton seems never to have felt any sense of special kinship toward them, but here too the antipathy he often voiced in racial categories needs to be considered alongside some very different judgments. It is worth recalling that Burton appears never to have been bothered by being called a “white Nigger” on account of the relations he sought out with darker-skinned people in India, and it may be that the best path toward understanding his overall relationship to Africa and Africans lies in reversing the usual approach to the question and considering his positive pronouncements before taking up the negative ones. The latter must not be either ignored or underplayed, but the former help to provide a framework within which to see how they fit into his larger mindset.
Burton’s most extensive discussion of black African culture came in the preface he wrote for a collection of West African proverbs and sayings he published in 1865. That he troubled to do the book at all is evidence that he took African culture seriously, and his comments about it are remarkable enough to deserve quotation at length. Invoking the question often (and regrettably) posed in his time, whether “the Negroes are a genuine portion of mankind or not,” Burton went on:
If it is mind that distinguishes men from animals, the question cannot be decided without consulting the languages of the Negroes, for language gives the expression and the manifestation of the mind. Now, as the grammar proves that Negro languages are capable of expressing human thoughts—some of them, through their rich formal development, even with astonishing precision—so specimens of their “Native Literature” [the proverbs] show that the Negroes actually have thoughts to express; that they reflect and reason about things, just as other men. Considered in such a point of view, such specimens may go a long way towards refuting the old-fashioned doctrine of an essential inequality of the Negroes with the rest of mankind, which now and then shows itself, not only in America, but also in Europe.
Such negative judgments had been developed by people who had never heard, or been unable to understand, the speech of black people in their own languages:
But when I was amongst them in their native land, on the soil which the feet of their fathers have trod, and heard them deliver in their own native tongue stirring extempore speeches, adorned with beautiful imagery, and of half an hour’s duration; or when I was writing from their dictation, sometimes two hours in succession, without having to correct a word or alter a construction in twenty or thirty pages; or when in Sierra Leone, I attended examinations of the sons of liberated slaves in Algebra, Geometry, Latin, Greek, Hebrew, etc.—then, I confess, any other idea never entered my mind but that I had to do with real men.
Burton followed this with similar testimonies from others who had been in like situations, and concluded: “The fact is, civilization takes too much upon herself. There is more of equality between the savage and the civilized—the difference being one of quantity, not of quality—than the latter will admit. For man is everywhere commensurate with man. Hence, whilst the average Englishman despises the Yoruba, the Yoruba ‘reciprocates’ with hate and fear.” Burton made a similar observation in a letter to his friend Monckton Milnes: “Those who talk of the benighted African should have seen the envoy who conveyed to the Governor the ultimatum of the Ashanti King. There was not a European on the coast to compare with him in dignity, self-possession and perfect savoir-faire touching the object of his mission.”51
Faced with such declarations as these, it is hard not to be astonished, as well as appalled, by the very different things Burton wrote on other occasions. Here he gave vent to all the standard tropes of anti-black prejudice and polemic: Africans were dirty, smelly, lazy, drunken, violent, bestial, stupid, oversexed, and undisciplined. About East Africans in particular, he wrote that their “stagnation of mind, indolence of body, moral deficiency, superstition, and childish passion” betray an “apparent incapacity for improvement,” and that their inability to take a distance from the concerns of each passing moment kept them from developing either memory or any productive kind of imagination. Burton was particularly critical of Africans who attempted to take on European ideas, clothing, or behavior (especially under the influence of Christian missionaries), and his outpourings in this line received enough public notice for them to be attacked by African writers, including the then well-known black physician, scientist, and banker James Africanus Horton, who castigated Burton for advancing false and insulting racial theories.52
A number of things help to account for the sharp differences between what almost seem to be two different Richard Burtons speaking in these voices. One is that in some degree his views changed over time. The negative comments mostly reflect his experiences at the end of the 1850s, when he had his first encounters with Africa and Africans in the continent’s eastern regions, starting with the journey he undertook to the third major Muslim pilgrimage site, Harar in Somaliland, and followed by his attempt to find the source of the Nile in the central African lake regions in the company of another British army officer, John Hauning Speke. Although each trip achieved its aim in some ways, both were painful failures in others, especially for Burton. He undertook the Harar trip as a continuation of his earlier visit to Medina and Mecca, and expected to do it, too, in disguise, as a Muslim merchant. The plan seemed to go well at first but had to he abandoned when Burton was convinced along the way that his light complexion (he neglected to bring along the nut oil he had used to darken his skin in Arabia) would put his life in danger in Harar itself—not because he would be suspected of being a Western European, but because people were likely to take him as a Turk, an identity no less hated in East Africa than that of “Frank.” Thus he made his entrance into Harar in uniform as a British officer and not as a Muslim pilgrim. Even so, he was effectively imprisoned for ten days by the Amir, who ruled the place with a strong and often violent hand. Burton’s life seems to have been in real danger, the Amir fearing that his presence would fulfill an old prophecy about the kingdom losing its independence should any European succeed in entering it. In the end, however, Burton was allowed to go free, chiefly because the ruler feared that the British might retaliate if he harmed one of their officers, curtailing his profitable participation in the slave trade.
While in Harar, Burton pursued his longstanding interest in local cultures and histories (he believed that his ties to local people from whom he sought information on this score may have aided in preserving his life), but one lesson of the visit was that he would not be able to pursue his cultivation of an “Oriental” identity on African soil, and his next African projects chiefly