Empire_ What Ruling the World Did to the British - Jeremy Paxman [64]
For every clergyman who denounced Darwin, a crank or polemicist embraced him. But The Descent of Man offered a philosophy which comforted the imperially minded. Within a decade or so, Darwin’s conjecture had been reconciled with the practice of planting the flag in other parts of the world. In 1876, a writer in the Melbourne Review put it succinctly: ‘Survival of the fittest means that might – wisely used – is right.’ From this beginning he went on to assert that ‘the inexorable law of natural selection’ led to ‘exterminating the inferior Australian and Maori races … The world is better for it.’ Indeed, the whole world would be much improved if the same theory was applied everywhere, preserving the better specimens of humanity, instead of ‘actually promoting the non-survival of the fittest, protecting the propagation of the imprudent, the diseased, the defective, and the criminal’. In a country initially settled as a penal colony this was pretty rich.
The question of the relationship between colonizer and colonized was most acute in Africa, which Europeans were busy appropriating for different foreign flags. Explorers like Richard Burton returned from their travels to tell the Royal Geographical Society of strange places where the women tilled the ground while the menfolk sat and span cotton; of cannibals and concubines; of chiefs who were ready to offer travellers the enjoyment of their wives, sisters and daughters; of a king who for amusement had chopped off the hands of an irritating wife and then commanded her to use her stumps to search his head for lice; of enemies enslaved and flogged; of children murdered. Burton understood the appetite for exotic stories, shrugged his shoulders and concluded that the only way to govern in Africa was by ‘an iron-handed and lion-hearted despotism’. Africans were examined, anatomized, weighed and measured. The existence of human beings so visibly different from Europeans both worried and intrigued them. Anthropologists and scientists from the colonial powers set about answering the question ‘What are they?’
The anti-slavery campaign had run on the slogan ‘Am I Not a Man and Brother?’, which might perhaps have been answer enough in itself. But the slogan had been intended to change the behaviour of the perpetrators – other Europeans, African tribes which sold their victims into slavery, and the Arabs who used religion to justify the practice. Any suggestion that Africans really were brothers and sisters would have raised all sorts of issues about the legitimacy of the whole imperial exercise, so the question of defining an African amounted to a definition of a European. Scientists and pseudo-scientists tried to tackle the issue. In 1863, for example, a speech-therapist and amateur anthropologist, James Hunt, presented a paper – On the Negro’s Place in Nature – to promote his belief in polygenesis, the theory that different human races had had different origins. He dedicated his paper to Richard Burton, then serving as British consul at Fernando Po, a pestilential island off the west African coast (‘the very abomination of desolation’, Burton called it), because the ‘outer barbarians’ of the general public lacked the explorer’s understanding of the continent. Hunt’s theory ruled out any possibility of a brotherhood of man. He proposed instead a