Dark History

The disagreeable fact must also be faced that in Africa life has always been cheap, that extraordinary cruelties have been all too common, and that anything even vaguely resembling notions of human rights in its traditional societies were entirely unknown. Events of the kind reported each month or so in the media, and described in the story by Damon Galgut printed in Prospect magazine, are alas not exceptional when seen in the context of African cultural history as a whole. Two examples from the 19th century are printed below as appendices. These describe what visitors saw in two different African kingdoms in widely separated parts of the continent — the Bemba of north-eastern Tanzania, and Benin in West Africa. They don’t make pleasant reading — they are horrible — but perhaps a sharp reality check may be useful.

From Out of Africa: Always the same thing by Roger Sandall.