The Great Tradition And The Little Tradition

The disparity between Europe and Africa lies not so much in the community cultures of each as in the civilizations of each. Although this distinction can be traced back to Sir Henry Maine and beyond, it can best be understood in the terms given it by Robert Redfield, the American anthropologist. He claimed that there was, in all the 'old civilizations of the world' - that is, civilizations grafted on earlier cultures and peoples rather than founded anew as Anglo-American and Australian civilizations were - a disparity between a 'great tradition' and a 'little tradition', Redfield was led to this formulation by his interest in peasant cultures; unlike 'primitive' societies and unlike civilizations, the social groups that exhibit peasant cultures all depends to some degree on the existence of the 'manor' - the city or the Church or some other carrier of a 'great tradition'. The peasants – the carriers of the little tradition - do not themselves participate fully in the great tradition, although in most cases at least some of their members may move into the social groups that represent the great tradition.

Africa and Europe shared a little tradition that diverged on amazingly few points. But both areas also developed great traditions, and there it was that they most tellingly grew apart. On to a more or less common village community structure came to be grafted widely divergent institutions. In Europe the institutions of the great tradition were feudalism, the Church and its various political manifestations, the heresies and the Protestant movements, and finally the Industrial Revolution and all the changes that it wrought.

In Africa, the great tradition lay in the ideas of divine kingship, associated as it was with the major technological developments of metallurgy and ultimately of everything that follows from it. With the expansion of Arab culture across North Africa and down the east coast, the situation developed in which all of North Africa and the Eastern Horn became associated with the Near East. Arab occupation .of Europe was stopped (with a few exceptions) at the Bosporus and in the mountains of the Iberian Peninsula. Marc Bloch, the eminent French historian, has pointed out that one of the reasons that medieval Europe could develop as it did is that there was no invader to destroy European culture as it developed. We are used to thinking of the Teutonic tribes destroying Rome; we are not accustomed to realising that from the eleventh century on, there were no major invaders of Europe. The medieval civilizations - the great traditions - of Europe and those in the Sudan were in some regards alike. But the Arabs destroyed the civilizations that were developing in Africa. Had the Arabs got past the Spanish or the Turks, the medieval and modern history of Europe might well resemble that of Africa much more than it in fact does.

Moreover, Arab intrusion into Africa offered an easy path for Islamic influence once the Arabs themselves were Islamised: Islamic influence was never felt extensively in Europe except as an external factor - what Toynbee has called a 'challenge'. Africa did not 'and does not combat Islam. Christendom, through missionaries and other forces, is still combating it.

Thus, the shutting out of Africa from the European consciousness began with the desiccation of the Sahara. It was reinforced when certain aspects of Egyptian civilization came to be important influencing factors of Aegean and Greek culture, while differing aspects of the same Egyptian civilization went south to Cush and the kingdoms south of the Sahara. Then throughout the era that is known in Europe as the Middle Ages, both Europe and Africa turned inward to their own affairs, but in Africa those affairs were vastly changed by the Arab influx.

Yet through all the medieval period, there was trade - sometimes extensive trade - across the Sahara via the great kingdoms of the Sudanic areas and the peoples of the northern littoral of the African continent. We know, for example, that Africa was, in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, flooded with cowrie shells which were brought by the Venetians from the Maldive Islands, and which crossed the desert. Cowries during this period became a type of currency in many parts of Africa, and ultimately became so plentiful that their value underwent serious deflation; in the most important centres they all but lost their value. We knew also that the flow of Negro slaves across the Sahara never totally ceased. Comparatively few got as far as Europe, but some did. During the period that European civilizations were largely cut off from the civilizations of Asia Minor and India, the commerce and other interrelationships of Asia Minor and India, and the commerce and other interrelationships between eastern Africa and Asia were at their height. It begins to look as if Europe were the Dark Continent.

When Europe began to rediscover Africa, along with her rediscovery of the rest of the world, a series of occurrences took place that made smooth and amicable relationships between the peoples of the two continents almost impossible. If we follow tradition and take the exploration voyages sponsored by Prince Henry the Navigator of Portugal as our starting point, we discover that the exploration of Africa can be thought of as a continuation of the movements that began when the Iberians organised to force the Arabs out of the peninsular. In the years after 1407, when Prince Henry of Portugal took part in the sacking of Ceuta, opposite Gibraltar, he formed an academy and was instrumental in letting out on contract the task of exploring the west coast of Africa. His explorers received certain rights and rewards in exchange for claiming these areas in the name of Portugal and more specifically for bringing back items that could be used in national (not to say royal) trade. Among the earliest imports into Portugal were Moorish slaves. Negro slaves were not far behind.

In the next two or three centuries the exploration of the African coastlines was tied irretrievably with the slave trade. As we shall see, slavery is an African institution which has peculiar forms that are totally unlike the institutions of servility that were found in medieval Europe. For this reason, there was an effective misunderstanding between Africans and Europeans about just what slavery consisted of, and yet Africans were able, because they had a tradition of slavery, to exist and even to prosper in a slave situation. This fact led Europeans to state that they considered Africans to be 'natural' slaves and 'born' hewers of wood and drawers of water. As we have seen in our investigation of the development of racial attitudes, this idea very quickly implanted itself and led to disdain on the part of Europeans for Africans and African culture.

The abolition of the slave trade added fuel to the fire. For all that it was a humane movement and one which the modern world of that time had to undergo in order to develop industrialism to the point that it desired, the way in which it was carried out was ultimately most uncomplimentary to Africans and destructive to the relationships existing between Africans and Europeans. As we have seen, minimal claims were made for Africans - they were, after all, 'fellow creatures' and the implication was left that they might not be much more.

The situation was certainly not improved by the explorers of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. These men, who were driven out of the European cultures which culminated in the strictures of the Victorian era, were, for the most part, either malcontents or men of overweening ambition searching for position and power. Such men were in no position to understand or even to perceive the intricacies of African civilization or the basic similarity between the 'little traditions' - the peasants - of Africa and those of Europe, although some of them - Mungo Park and David Livingstone - did see the similarities. Men like Cruickshank and Winterbottom also could see what they were dealing with and reported fully and correctly. The same could be said, however, for very few.

It was in this era that the idea of the Dark Continent – the phrase was Stanley's - came to the fore. With the exploration and with the expansion of the West which accompanied industrialisation and the vast social and cultural changes then going on, Africa was a. prime target for colonial expansion. In order for colonial expansion to take place, it became necessary to consolidate the view of African cultures as savage and barbarian in order to justify one's activities.

Europe and Africa, which had once been culturally close together, grew successively farther and farther apart. Africa, at the time the colonial empires emerged in the late nineteenth century, was thoroughly the 'Dark Continent', subject to almost all the stereotypes that remained in effect until after 1945. If one begins with Carthage, and has one's thinking dominated by events in a Europe cut off from the spread of Islam, and then by the modern colonial situation, the justification of the view becomes clear: Africa south of the Sahara is one world, and the Mediterranean is another. But the picture must be expanded at both its ends. 

(P. Bohannan: Africa and the Africans, Doubleday).