"Americans in Africa"

   The Preface calls Americans in Africa, 1865-1900 a "monograph," one of a series “designed as building blocks for the use of scholars in many disciplines concerned with many different parts of the world.” It was read in manuscript by seven professors from six universities and is companion to an earlier "monograph" which expounded the history of the American slave-trade, 1519-1862, in seventy-two pages. This volume, by three authors for 109 pages, has a pretentious bibliography of seven pages, including fourteen items of "Unpublished Materials," which contributed nothing significant to the text.

   Within this framework of academic scholarship is a skimpy and superficial survey of the subject on the level of a sophomore term paper. The organization is geographic, although this is concealed from the reader by romantic, and unspecific, chapter titles worthy of a nineteenth-century novel; these include: (1) “The Vanishing Flag”; (2) "The Lamb and the Wolves"; (5) "Traders and Soldiers of Misfortune"; (6) "Miners and Adventurers"; and (7) "Capitalists and Men of God."

   The text has little to offer to any reader. It is not even consistent within itself. On page 19 we read, "Americans remained conspicuous in Zanzibar and the commerce of East Africa until after the Civil War, which, for a variety of reasons, initiated the decline of direct American foreign commerce and the virtual end of the American merchant marine." But on page 43 we are told, "arriving at Zanzibar on an American whaler in January 1871, Stanley noted that the greater part of the vessels in port were American, principally from New York and Salem." In this book there is no reference to contacts with Africa by American whalers nor to the role played by the traders observed by Stanley. The authors seem unaware of the rich materials available on both of these groups, in Salem and elsewhere in New England. We are told (p. 50), "Stanley's immediate staff of assistants included an American named Sparhawk, an 'old Africa hand' upon whom he came to rely heavily," but that is the only mention of Sparhawk. There were a surprising number of Sparhawks and Trader Horns in Africa before 1900, and something should have been done with them, in a "monograph" with this title, just as much more should have been done with American missionary efforts.

   Having avoided the real subject, it is, perhaps, not surprising to find that the authors have padded their few pages with nonrelevant material, of which the worst example is a chapter of thirteen pages on Stanley in the Congo. Although Stanley was born and died a British subject, this jejune account, in a book on "Americans in Africa," is justified on the legalistic grounds that he was an American citizen in his middle years.

   Even on the …. they were writing, these authors could have produced a more valuable hook if they had abandoned their unhelpful geographic organization and provided a succession of chapters on traders, missionaries, Negro missionaries, Negro recolonization, and miners, with, perhaps, separate chapters on men like H. S. Sanford and R. D. Mohun.


   CARROLL QUIGLEY

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