When does knowledge become expertise? The study of the production of colonial knowledge does not explain why some producers of knowledge become recognised experts, and others do not. In an attempt to answer this question, this panel invites contributors to explore the ways in which expertise was disseminated and received in colonial Africa.
The functioning of African colonial societies depended on the availability and mediation of useful information and knowledge. Scholars have explored the extent to which colonial states depended on various forms of colonial knowledge about their subjects, including census data, intelligence reports and ethnographies. The extent to which all other actors – including Western-educated Africans, traditional leaders, African businesses, and European commercial companies – equally depended on mediated knowledge is well known, although less explored. In this context, many different individuals – including colonial officers, African clerks and interpreters, schoolteachers, chiefs, missionaries, and ethnographers – are potential mediators, as they know, or have observed, things, which, if expressed in an appropriate form and language, constitute knowledge. Earlier studies have explored the investigative modalities, interpretative frameworks and discourses that help to turn data into knowledge. It has also been shown that knowledge in the colonial context is often the result of negotiation between different interpretative frameworks, and therefore may be regarded as a ‘pidgin’ language. However, what is less clear, is how and when ‘knowing something’ is turned into expertise? How is knowledge disseminated, and when and why is it acknowledged as such? In other words, this panel invites papers that shift focus from how knowledge is produced in the colonial context, to the history of the reception of such knowledge.
In the late 1920s the Gold Coast businessman Charles Francis Hutchison published the first volume of his book titled The Pen-Pictures of Modern Africans and African Celebrities. The book contains 162 biographical sketches of Ghanaians that were important in business, in society and the church, in government, and in (nationalist) politics, both from Hutchison’s own time and from the nineteenth century. The text of the biographies is in blank verse, and portrait photographs accompany most sketches. Additional photographs of houses and special events, and added biographical information in the form of lists of famous deceased people complete the book.
The Pen-Pictures is a well-known source for the history of the Gold Coast, modern Ghana, cited and quoted by both professional historians and interested lay-people. In effect, The Pen-Pictures is an important socio-historical document. The format, the style of presentation, the intimacy of many of the life histories, the overview offered of non-European Gold Coast society in the 1920s, they all allow for multiple analyses by historians, sociologists, social anthropologists and scholars of language and literature.
Recently, I prepared a new, annotated edition of this book, which sheds new light on the way in which the socio-economic and political elite of the Gold Coast perceived themselves and their position in the colonial state. This paper researches up to what point Hutchison produced a received view of the elite he was part of and where he deviated from the trodden paths of his biographical predecessors. Questions are asked about the type of discourse Hutchison engaged in and its relation to the discourse of the colonial state on the one hand and that of the praise-singing and story-telling indigenous oral literatures on the other. Also, we will look at the impact of the book on contemporary and modern audiences both in terms of its literary and historical values.
From the very beginning of missionary enterprise in Africa, the missionary production of knowledge about African peoples was part of the project of conversion. The logic of this knowledge production has been analysed in the works of Mudimbe, Meyer, Van den Bersselaar, and others. Critical studies assessing the ethnographic value of such missionary knowledge also exist. However, what has not been examined in detail is how knowledge production turned out to be one of the ways in which missionary enterprise became implied in the colonial project. While the relationship between colonial administrations and missionaries was often fraught with tensions, some missionaries became experts for the colonial administration, acquiring the role of adviser about the people they were working amongst.
This paper examines the case of one missionary, G. T. Basden, to explore not so much how knowledge is constructed, but rather how missionary knowledge was received and turned into expertise of relevance in the colonial context. G. T. Basden was an Anglican missionary with the Church Missionary Society. He was active in Southeast Nigeria during the first half of the twentieth century, and published several influential ethnographies, the most well known of which was Among the Ibos of Nigeria (1921). He also published in several journals, was appointed member of the colonial legislative council, and was an expert whose opinion on a range of matters of relevance to the government of the Igbo people was frequently sought by the Nigerian colonial administration. However, Basden was also controversial within his own CMS organisation, partly because of his personal style, but also because he was perceived as being a partisan to one specific group within the larger Igbo people. At the same time, Igbo migrants in West African urban centres used his publications as a source of information on Igbo traditional law and custom.
The analysis in this paper centres on the process through which Basden emerged as an expert straddling the spheres of missionary enterprise, colonial administration, and Igbo civic groups. Sources include: Basden’s published work, records from the CMS archives, records from the colonial administration in British and Nigerian archives, and surviving documentation of Igbo civic organisations.
In an effort to explore how colonial missionary expertise was produced, disseminated, and received, the present paper looks comparatively at the ethnographic writings of two missionaries, the American Presbyterian, Robert Hamill Nassau, and the French Spiritan, Henri Trilles. Both Nassau and Trilles served in Equatorial Africa in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. They claimed expert understanding of Africans, learned African languages, travelled in the interior of present-day Gabon and Equatorial Guinea, clashed with fellow missionaries, and wrote prolifically. To what extent were their own experiences and writings shaped by already circulating discourses and the conventions of the day (colonial, Christian, anthropological) and how have their own ethnographic productions contributed to colonial social science? Moreover, how has their ethnographic knowledge been used over the years? In his own day Nassau greatly influenced the British traveller, Mary Kingsley, who in turn urged Nassau to write treatises that are still consulted by Anglophone scholars. With the exception of his folk tales, much of Trilles’s work has been dismissed or ignored by professional scholars but has been immensely influential in shaping the Gabonese historical and cultural imagination. This paper argues that Trilles has played a key role in shaping Fang ethnic consciousness. Later in his career he unleashed a scandal by claiming falsely expertise on Gabonese 'pygmies'.
Since the 1850s the exploration of Eastern Africa increasingly became a race for spectacular discoveries. But as Europeans did not discover something that was previously unknown to mankind, theu also did not invent the art of travelling through Africa. European expeditions relied heavily on the infrastructure and knowledge of the 19th-century caravan trade. This paper describes how the knowledge of the caravan traders found their way into European discourses and practices and formed what can be called a ‘practical knowledge’.
The European adaption of the caravan traders' knowledge was accompanied by a discourse about what kind of knowledge was sufficient for colonial rule. As I have found in some sources it was exactly this "practical knowledge" which was favoured by the first generation of German colonial officials and it was often thought as to be the opposite of bureaucratic modes of knowledge production. Wissmann, a German traveller who later became the first Governor of German East Africa, was convinced that the unique experience only to be made in Africa by a traveller formed the right basis for successful colonial politics. Interestingly, he became famous for his neglect of bureaucratic worlds. My very argument is therefore that such a practical knowledge, although in some labyrinthine ways, became part of colonial knowledge and colonial politics.
During the1950s, British administrators in the Machakos District of Kenya employed categories of Wakamba occult 'experts' – 'witchdoctors' and 'cleansers' – to cleanse local 'witches' and migrants from Nairobi who were believed to have taken the Mau Mau oath. This paper examines how and why the socio-historical context of Mau Mau-era Machakos drove the colonial administration to break with its longstanding policy of not combating supernatural challenges to state authority with supernatural means and instead to identify and employ Wakamba 'experts' to cleanse Mau Mau adherents and witches.
From the beginning of the twentieth century, the colonial state in Kenya had been drawn upon the expertise of colonial administrators-cum-anthropologists to produce knowledge and use knowledge about African supernatural beliefs. Within this anthro-administrative complex, witchcraft emerged as a 'catch-all' colonial category used to explain disorder and underdevelopment. Various types of 'oathing,' particularly trial-through-ordeal, carried a similar cache. Nevertheless, despite a series of heated debates in Kenya and the metropole, the colonial state resisted drawing upon the expertise of supernatural practitioners such as 'witchdoctors' or 'cleansers' to combat supernatural challenges to order and development.
During the Mau Mau period, the state broke with its de facto policy regarding the employment of supernatural practitioners. This paper argues that the widespread, virulent and politicized nature of the violence during Mau Mau and its perceived linkages to the supernatural precipitated the state’s shift to the employment of supernatural experts to combat 'witchcraft' and Mau Mau oathing. Colonial authorities believed Mau Mau philosophy and membership was being introduced into non-Kikuyu areas such as Machakos District via 'witchcraft' and that Mau Mau adherents had enlisted Wakamba 'witches' to curse British and African members of the colonial administration. Based on their knowledge of Wakamba oathing practices and the testimony of Wakamba informants, colonial officials in Machakos also believed that the sway of the Mau Mau oath over local minds was so pronounced that it could only be combated with a cleansing through counter-oath.
During Mau Mau, the state shifted from producing knowledge about the 'supernatural,' and instead drew upon and implemented the knowledge of local 'experts' in 'witchcraft' and 'oathing' to manage supernatural challenges to state authority. This paper details the selection of such experts and the 'supernatural' methods that they employed in the service of the state. Finally, this paper traces how this knowledge was received and is remembered by Wakamba people throughout Machakos District.
This paper is based on interviews with J.C. Nottingham, the District Officer in charge of the cleansings, and Wakamba men and women who participated in the cleansings. It also incorporates colonial district and provincial reports deposited in the Public Record Office in London and in the Kenya National Archives in Nairobi as well as contemporary secondary sources on witchcraft and Mau Mau in the Ukamba Province.