One hundred years ago today, the most destructive and anti-human fantasy in English letters was published. Tarzan of the Apes and its many sequels gave Americans — and, very soon after, Europeans — a vision of Africa as a depopulated playground for an English lord and his romantic interests, swarthy antagonists, and prissy allies who constantly had to be rescued from the forces of Nature which only occasionally included native people, generally portrayed as less civilized than apes. Tarzan allowed the West to indulge its fantasy of the noble savage without having to entertain any ideas about non-Western people being, you know, people. Try imagining a Lord Greystoke who was found and raised by African people instead of apes; the result, published in a 1912 magazine, would not have been an adventure story but a horror story. The real horror, of course, is what the non-fictional equivalents of the Greystokes did in Africa.
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One hundred years ago today, the most destructive and anti-human fantasy in English letters was published. Tarzan of the Apes and its many sequels gave Americans — and, very soon after, Europeans — a vision of Africa as a depopulated playground for an English lord and his romantic interests, swarthy antagonists, and prissy allies who constantly had to be rescued from the forces of Nature which only occasionally included native people, generally portrayed as less civilized than apes. Tarzan allowed the West to indulge its fantasy of the noble savage without having to entertain any ideas about non-Western people being, you know, people. Try imagining a Lord Greystoke who was found and raised by African people instead of apes; the result, published in a 1912 magazine, would not have been an adventure story but a horror story. The real horror, of course, is what the non-fictional equivalents of the Greystokes did in Africa.