A Humane Gaze: Historicizing the West’s Construction of Humanitarian Need in Africa

Laura J. Mitchell

In response to the prompt at the heart of the “Humanitarian Interventions in Africa” conference, I decided to focus on European ideologies of humanity and how specific challenges to notions of shared humanity were embedded in early colonial interactions.  I wanted particularly to think about whether or not one can identify the portrayal of humanity in European drawings of Africans, specifically a set of anonymous seventeenth-century drawings of Khoe helped by the South African Library in Cape Town.[1]

I was informed generally by some of Edward Said’s insights in Orientalism: my inquiry was not—in this instance—about seeing Africa, but rather about how Europeans created and deployed ideas about Africa in pursuit of “European” interests.[2] It is perhaps heresy for an Africanist to admit to exploring a facet of Africa not for its own sake, or in search of African voice, but rather because of how Africa functioned as a foil for European desires, as a mirror in European self-fashioning.[3]

My conference paper started from a modest premise: in order for the mobilization of humanitarian intervention to happen, the bestower of such assistance must first presume that the intended recipients are, in fact, human. Such a presumption of shared humanity cannot be taken for granted in the outlook of Europeans who proactively engaged in imperial expansion in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

Khoe peoples of Southern Africa, labeled “Hottentots” by their early European interlocutors, were subjects of interest, objects of scrutiny, and mired without their knowledge or consent in heated debates about the limits of humanity (as were the Batwa of central Africa and many other indigenous communities). Such abject classifications, followed by generations of adjustments, reiterations, and critiques have since occupied philosophers, theologians and (more recently) critical theorists of race and empire. These questions continue to fascinate, as evidenced by Clifton Crais and Pamela Scully’s recent book on Sara Baartman, The Hottentot Venus. [4] But rather than pursuing questions about the longevity or persistence of racialized ideas, instead I wanted to examine a specific instance where Europeans successfully made a case for the humanity of Khoe pastoralists in order to justify the creation of a Christian mission to offer both material and spiritual assistance to people in crisis.

The historical contours are familiar, even when the details are not. The claims of permanent European settlement begun in 1652 at the Cape of Good Hope displaced pastoralist Khoe and foraging San communities, who responded variously with cooperation, cohabitation, violent resistance, flight, and unwilling subordination in colonial households.[5] Although some European justifications of land claims and labor bondage relied on the blurry distinction between heathen and inhuman in attempts to legitimize the appropriation of African land and de facto enslavement of African peoples, other colonial approaches were more sympathetic, acknowledging the humanity of the Khoe and their original claims to land. In fact, the Dutch East India Company entered into commercial contracts and territorial treaties with Khoe whom the Dutch recognized as legitimate political leaders. This recognition of humanity is evident in the official journal entries of the first Dutch commander of the Cape garrison (Jan van Riebeeck), the set of anonymous drawings I mentioned previously, and the published accounts (1713) of German traveler Peter Kolb.[6] These sources stand in stark contrast to other sources, both text and image, that continued to portray Khoe as monstrous until well into the nineteenth century.

Colonists and visitors alike commented on the increasingly dire material circumstances of the Khoe living near colonial settlements in the first third of the eighteenth century. Proposals for specific assistance hinged on the acknowledgement of shared humanity that was vested in the presumption of possible conversion at the heart of Christian theology. Local objections to establishing a mission were twofold: while some argued that a mission would absorb land and labor that might otherwise be allocated to settlers, others challenged the humanity of Khoe by questioning whether or not they were capable of Grace, and thus conversion.

Despite the early success of the first mission in South Africa, established at Baviaan’s Kloof (now called Genadendal) in 1738, settlers continued to make both material and spiritual objections to the Moravian Church’s efforts. Settler objections succeeded in closing the mission seven years later, but not before a number of Khoe Christian converts further complicated European-centered debates about Khoe humanity.

Establishing the presence of a contested, uneven “humane gaze” on the part of Europeans engaged in trade, settlement, conquest, or missionary work in Africa in the eighteenth century was straightforward, interesting work. Initially, I had thought perhaps it was a stretch to connect specific historical circumstances of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century to our contemporary geopolitical and moral models of development and humanitarian assistance. However, I came away from this conference convinced—in this case—of a historian’s utility. I was also convinced of the frightening degrees of continuity across centuries that help to explain the West’s categorization of Africa as poor, and its own interventions as benevolent.

Missing from the historical sources I consulted, as it is missing from so much contemporary debate about humanitarian relief in Africa, is a specific acknowledgement of the role in creating crisis played by the very actors who then feel compelled to take moral action and provide partial remedies.

The roots of the West’s view of Africa as a place in need of assistance, and of the West’s ability to help in ways that would actually be beneficial to Africa are much older than the post-World War II framework that is the conventional frame of reference for development studies. Likewise, the justification for such a view runs much deeper in western epistemology than modern international relations theory typically acknowledges. My seemingly “simple” historian’s exercise of re-examining textual sources with a view of better understanding period drawings has, instead, created in my mind a haunting image of erasure.

The scholarly work of showing documentable connections across time and space that would unequivocally establish the eighteenth-century Moravian mission in Baviaans’ Kloof as an origin point for the West’s self-congratulatory offer of assistance in a crisis of its own making remains to be done. For now, the circumstantial parallels in evidence ought to be enough to prompt serious reflection on the part of NGOs and government agencies that wonder why their well-intentioned offers of assistance are rebuffed by Africans so clearly in need when seen through the West’s “humane gaze.”