That Bible Has Misrepresented Africa

When the late but living Chinua Achebe picked his pen and started writing the classic, Things Fall Apart, he certainly must have had several desires running through his creative mind. Foremost among such desire, as it was later revealed in his masterpiece essay 'An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad's Heart of Darkness', was the desire to remould the distorted image of Africa by the Europeans. The Europeans, claiming to have 'discovered' Africa, enslaved it, colonized it, christianized it, and wrote several Eurocentric literature about Africa.

In Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness for instance, Conrad's painted Africa as a continent of calamity, which is inhabited by sub-humans, who have neither history nor culture. As a matter of fact here is a shocking except from Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness:

"And between whiles I had to look after the savage who was fireman. He was an improved specimen; he could fire up a vertical boiler. He was there below me and, upon my word, to look at him was as edifying as seeing a dog in a parody of breeches and a feather hat walking on his hind legs. A few months of training had done for that really fine chap.

He squinted at the steam-gauge and at the water-gauge with an evident effort of intrepidity -- and he had filed his teeth too, the poor devil, and the wool of his pate shaved into queer patterns, and three ornamental scars on each of his cheeks. He ought to have been clapping his hands and stamping his feet on the bank, instead of which he was hard at work, a thrall to strange witchcraft, full of improving knowledge."

As if Conrad's enthnocentric writings weren't enough, Sir H. Rider Haggard, another British novelist, who wrote quite a number of famous adventurous novels about Africa, also added salt to the injury of
Africa.

In Rider's classic, King Solomon's Mines, Rider painted the people of Kukuanaland, a black race, as a people without scientific knowledge nor an 'advanced' culture, and who are ruled, perhaps due to their barbarism, by a tyrant, Tuala, and his heartless adviser, Gogool. For instance, here is what Rider writes when his party first enter Kukuanaland:

"Sir Henry and Good seized their guns. The party of natives still came on: it seemed to me that they did not know what guns were." p.30

Again, Rider, employing a ludicrous simile tinged with flagrant racism, reduced an old African woman to an inanimate object, describing her with the pronoun "it" instead of "her."

"Just then I saw the monkey-like figure creeping out from the shadow of the hut. When it reached the place where the King sat, it rose upon its feet and threw the covering from its face. It was the face of a woman of great age, covered with deep yellow wrinkles. Set in the wrinkles was a mouth.

There was no nose. Indeed the face might have been taken for that of a sun-dried dead body, had it not been for a pair of large black eyes still full of fire and understanding.

The head was perfectly bare and hairless, and yellow in colour. This was Gagool, the witch, so old that knew how old she was." p.42

The excepts from the above European novels clearly show the extent to which Africa had been misrepresented by the Europeans. This, arguably, may be the reason why Achebe's Things Fall Apart, a novel written to challenge and correct the misrepresentation of Africa by the Europeans, had become Africa's all time most circulated literature.

One may be lured to assume that, since the publication of Things Fall Apart, Europeans had stopped misrepresenting Africa. But this assumption, as the reader would soon find out, is entirely untrue.

European writers, journalists, photojournalists, politicians, doctors, economists, and historians have continued to tarnish the image of Africa in the eyes of the world.

These European intellectuals exploit every available opportunity to run Africa down. Europeans economists, many of whom had not spent nine nights in Africa, sit down in armchairs, cross-legged, pick up a pen, and begin to give false data about the people and economy of Africa.

These false facts, regardless of its incredibility, have helped to project Africa as a doomed continent, that is inhabited by numberless HIV victims, starving children, dying babies, illiterates, criminals,

terrorists, child traffickers, etc.
The Europeans, knowing that the bible rank among the best-selling books in the world, in the quest of misrepresenting Africa, has customized and circulated an annoying version of the bible, which

carries the distorted image of Africa. This brand of Bible, named the Revised Standard Version and published by CollinsBible, a division of Harper Collins Publishers, has a racist front cover. The front cover, predominantly reddish or greenish, carries four photographs, which commonsensically represent different continents of the world.

The four rectangular photographs are arranged in such a way that, two beautiful pictures, placed side by side, sit above another two ugly-looking pictures, which are also placed side by side. The first of the two beautiful pictures, has a wonderful tower with a radiant clock, which obviously represent Europe.

The second, a beautiful picture of a queue of sprawling storey buildings, sitting at the fringe of a body of glassy water, represents America. However, directly below the picture which represent Europe, is a photograph of bamboo houses with rusty roofs, built on a brownish body of river, with traders in canoes.

Judging from the complexion of the traders, one need not be told that the bucolic photograph represents Asia. The last picture, a malicious misrepresentation of Africa, is the picture of a wretched, godforsaken, thatched hut, located in the midst of an arid land, with black women sitting at a disappearing distance.

It is not difficult to point out that the designer of the said front cover of the version of the bible is blatantly biased. If not, the graphic designer would not have displayed the photograph of one of the

best places in Europe and America, while the worst places in Asia and Africa are displayed. Such act is clearly a calculated attempt to present Africa as an underdeveloped continent, inhabited by a suffering and frustrated people.

Although it is not quite untrue that less than 50% of Africa's live in cities, Africa is not a jungle nor a
hell on earth. Africa is a land of hope, a land of great men and women, a land of the most optimistic race in the world.

On a final note, I hereby call on the African Union to outlaw the sales and circulation of the said version of the bible in Africa, to rescue, like the novel Things Fall Apart, the distorted image of Africa.

Specifically, I call on the Nigerian government to scrap the said version of the bible from the S.S.C.E list of recommended texts, until its publisher is ready to redesign the front page of the said

version of the bible. Africa is a blessed continent and we, being responsible people and government, must defend the image of Africa at all cost, because, in the eyes of the world, every black man is called an African.

Ademule David Oluwashina, a social critic,
write from Ebonyi State
08166299046
[email protected]