Visit our website: HTTP://WWW.STOPNATO.ORG.UK --------------------------------------------- [Compare to contemporary ethnopsychological and socio-cultural portrayals of current State Department-targeted peoples in the Balkans, the Middle East and Africa West, East and Central, and see if you can discern any progress in superceding the sort of misanthropic vulgarity described below. The purpose of this collective vilification, as the feature describes it in its genesis, remains exactly the same now.] Sydney Morning Herlad August 14, 2001 Ghost writer who invented darkest Africa London: A celebrated book of African exploration was redrafted and slanted politically by a ghost writer to promote a view of a "dark continent" in need of colonisation, a study of the manuscripts has disclosed. The rewriting drastically changed the original texts of the explorer John Hanning Speke's Journal of the Discovery of the Source of the Nile. Black people were described as urgently needing Christianity and European-style government. The 1863 bestseller helped inspire the colonial "scramble for Africa" of the next 40 years. Dr David Finkelstein, of Queen Margaret University College, Edinburgh, said yesterday that the book was "extremely influential in shaping Victorian attitudes to Africa and its people, as well as in providing political rationales for colonial expansion into the continent". The Edinburgh publisher John Blackwood commissioned the book but found the early chapters "written in such an abominable, childish, unintelligible way" that he brought in the ghost writer, historian John Hill Burton. He extensively revised Speke's introduction, which had appealed to readers "to see and understand the negroes of Africa in their natural, primitive or native state". Burton's version referred to the African male who, as a result of isolation from European civilisation, "works his wife, sells his children, enslaves all he can lay hands upon, and, unless when fighting for the property of others, contents himself with drinking, singing, and dancing like a baboon to drive dull care away. "Having no god, in the Christian sense, to fear or worship, they have no love for truth, honour, or honesty." The Guardian __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Make international calls for as low as $.04/minute with Yahoo! Messenger http://phonecard.yahoo.com/ ------------------------------------------------- This Discussion List is the follow-up for the old stopnato @listbot.com that has been shut down ==^================================================================ EASY UNSUBSCRIBE click here: http://topica.com/u/?a84x2u.a9spWA Or send an email To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] This email was sent to: [email protected] T O P I C A -- Register now to manage your mail! http://www.topica.com/partner/tag02/register ==^================================================================
