On Caroline Lee Hentz's "The Planter's Northern Bride"

Throughout Caroline Lee Hentz’s The Planter’s Northern Bride, nothing is more misunderstood and grossly misrepresented than the history of Africa. “For thousands of years past,” writes Hentz, “the Africans have existed in their own country as a separate people, free, as they came from the hands of God; yet what one solitary step have they taken in the great march of civilisation, beneath whose majestic tramp the universe is resounding?” Here, and elsewhere, Hentz fails to communicate the single most important fact which the history of Africa holds dearest: human civilisation and human existence began there. Archaeological discoveries throughout the Sahara and other parts of Africa predate anywhere else on Earth by thousands of years.

In addition to this, the biggest change Africa ever witnessed was what we might call ‘the coming of the white man.’ True, the European trader did not bring the concept of slavery with him: it had been a common practice throughout Africa for thousands of years, as it had throughout the Arab world. The Arab slave traders were trading in African flesh before the white man had barely conceived of a world beyond the Mediterranean. Quite how Hentz can call Africa “separate” when they traded flesh and other goods with Arab peoples is frankly bewildering.

The earliest Portuguese missionaries and explorers took Christianity with them to what was then the Kingdom of the Kongo. This imperial federation of the fifteenth century had approximately two to three million people, and surprised the white evangelists by how similar its social structure was to social stratification back in Europe. There was a monarch; the monarch was chosen by an assembly of clan leaders; the king had in his possession symbols of royal authority; he reviewed his troops; he sat on a throne; away from the king, distances were measured by marching days; and for longer periods of time the lunar month was used. The Portuguese grudgingly recognised in the kingdom a sophisticated and well-developed state.[1] Since then, “the great march of civilisation” as Hentz uses it has left a scar from east to west and from north to south on the breast of Africa, carved there not by native African implements, but by European revolvers and pistols, and by the financial greed and material desire of ‘men’. If Hentz is unwilling to recognise the sophistication and progress of chiefdoms such as the Kingdom of the Kongo, then her blindness to historical fact renders her manuscript void.

1 Adam Hochschild. King Leopold’s Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror and Heroism in Colonial Africa. London: Macmillan, 1998.