Ethnographic Collecting and African Agency in Early Colonial West Africa

A Study of Trans-Imperial Cultural Flows

Zachary Kingdon

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Visual Arts
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781501337932
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Arte
• Subtopic: Museología

The early collections from Africa in Liverpool's World Museum reflect the city's longstanding shipping and commercial links with Africa's Atlantic coast. A principal component of these collections is an assemblage of several thousand artefacts from western Africa that were transported to institutions in northwest England between 1894 and 1916 by the Liverpool steam ship engineer Arnold Ridyard. While Ridyard's collecting efforts can be seen to have been shaped by the steamers' dynamic capacity to connect widely separated people and places, his Methodist credentials were fundamental in determining the profile of his African networks, because they meant that he was not part of official colonial authority in West Africa. Kingdon's study uncovers the identities of many of Ridyard's numerous West African collaborators and discusses their interests and predicaments under the colonial dispensation. Against this background account, their agendas are examined with reference to surviving narratives that accompanied their donations and within the context of broader processes of trans-imperial exchange, through which they forged new identities and statuses for themselves and attempted to counter expressions of British cultural imperialism in the region. The study concludes with a discussion of the competing meanings assigned to the Ridyard assemblage by the Liverpool Museum and examines the ways in which its re-contextualization in museum contexts helped to efface signs of the energies and narratives behind its creation.

1

Introduction

This book is concerned with the flow of hundreds of objects from coastal West Africa to museums in northwest England during a roughly sixty-five-year span of the early colonial era, from the 1850s to 1916. While this flow is seen to have been fundamentally the product of imperial infrastructures, ideas and processes, most of it cannot be understood as having constituted spoils of colonial conquest, nor can it be seen simply as the result of coercion, or unequal power relationships. Instead, it holds evidence of a two-way process of cultural collaboration. This is because one of the book’s key protagonists was marine engineer Arnold Ridyard, who not only orchestrated much of the flow during the last two decades of the period, but also conducted a return flow of British cultural materials to West Africa. Ridyard was an energetic figure who served as chief engineer on the steamers of Elder, Dempster & Co.’s West Africa service from about 1880 to his retirement in 1916. Chapter 3 describes how Ridyard transported more than 6,500 African things to the museum in Liverpool (see Figure 1) and other institutions in northwest England, from numerous voyages along the coast of western Africa between 1894 and 1916. Ridyard transported artefacts and natural history ‘specimens’ to institutions in northwest England from the entire length of the western African coast from Senegal to Angola, and from British-controlled territories as well as those claimed by Spain, Portugal, France and King Leopold II of Belgium. So, this was a distribution that mapped directly onto late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century British trading geographies and shipping routes, rather than simply mirroring the spread of British colonial control in West Africa. Museum records show that Ridyard built up an astonishing network of about 222 contacts and collaborators on Africa’s Atlantic coast who contributed to his collecting operation. These collaborators included many Europeans, the majority of whom were traders. But the records of Liverpool’s World Museum also indicate that about one hundred West Africans contributed at least 775 artefacts as gifts to the original collection of the present-day World Museum through Ridyard. Consequently, no other museum collection of African artefacts in Britain from the late nineteenth and early twentieth century can match the World Museum in the proportion of artefacts in its holdings that are known to have been presented by West Africans.

As well as considering Ridyard’s own agendas and motivations as a European in the acquisition of West African artefacts for British museums, this study is primarily concerned with addressing the role of African agency in the creation of the assemblage. But the role that Ridyard’s West African collaborators played in the creation of his assemblage is acknowledged and explored, not simply to assert that Africans ‘had (and continue to have) agency’ (Harrison 2013: 3), nor to assert a ‘naïve democracy’ of plural perspectives (Clifford 1997: 23). Rather, it is done to help reinsert Africans, all too often largely written out of collecting histories, as principal actors in the account, and as real people actively responding in complex ways to the particular historical and political forces of their day. Museum collecting in this context, then, must be understood, not only as the product of European imperialism and projects of acquisition, but, also, as the consequence of West Africans’ active and selective responses to the encounter with Europe, and with particular Europeans, against the backdrop of the European colonization of West Africa.

Figure 1 Photograph of the Liverpool Museums and William Brown Library in 1895. Photographer: Thomas Burke. Courtesy of Liverpool Record Office, Liverpool Libraries.

Various critical texts have been published on museum collecting during the colonial era, especially with regard to collections defined as ‘ethnographic’. However, much of this critical work has focused on the way that such collections were ordered within institutions to express asymmetrical colonial power relations. Its concerns lay primarily with the politics of cultural removal and misrepresentation (e.g. Clifford 1988, 1997; Karp and Lavine 1991; Coombes 1994; Barringer and Flynn 1998; O’Hanlon 2000), although the ‘entangled’ nature of colonial relationships expressed through objects was also explored (see Thomas 1991). While this study aims to build on such texts, it also attempts to problematize and go beyond the politics representation (Macdonald 2006: 3), as well as commonly held assumptions of removal.

The idea that all, or most, museum objects have been forcibly, or otherwise, ‘removed’ from their original and ‘intended’ places and times of manufacture, use, valuation and ownership, evokes the kind of essentialist trope of cultural boundedness that Bravmann convincingly overturned in his 1973 publication Open Frontiers: The Mobility of Art in Black Africa. Bravmann not only argued that international trade networks had ‘a direct effect upon the material culture and arts’ of African societies, he insisted that the ‘dynamics of market systems’ helped explain ‘much of the vitality of art’ in Africa (Bravmann 1973: 13). Of course, there is no denying that significant numbers of objects in museums were looted or stolen by Europeans. Such cases must be explored, explained and criticized. But, these instances notwithstanding, cultural materials travelled in both directions between Africa and Europe, with unpredictable effects.

While a museum’s claim to legitimately own and authentically value various African objects may be contested, other issues are also at stake. The need to problematize the assumption of ‘removal’ derives from the fact that it tends to reinforce the perception that the peoples who first made, used and owned artefacts that are now in museum ‘ethnography’ collections exercised no agency or agendas of their own in determining what items ended up in museum collections and why. The default assumption of ‘removal’ also suggests that colonized peoples were unable to envisage a context in which their own cultural productions or acts of donation could speak to sectors of the colonizing nation in ways that might serve their own cultural or political interests. Moreover, such assumptions about colonial relations which effectively leave ‘all agency at one end’ have not meant that European agency at that end was analysed, so that it has frequently remained ‘undifferentiated, assumed and unexplored’ (Stoler and Cooper 1997). Perspectives underpinned by such assumptions would seem to preclude a sociology of museum donation by elite West Africans, through strategic cultural collaboration with atypical European figures like Arnold Ridyard, as is elaborated in this book.

Nineteenth-century tropes generally cast museums as neutral spaces where static things embodying fixed meanings were intended to accumulate over time, to be shuffled into hierarchical and temporal strata, as the products of natural systems. Twentieth-century critical reassessments recognized that while the constituent objects in collections may have been acquired and deposited in stores over many decades, successions of curators have intervened in employing selected items from collections in carefully constructed viewing spaces, according to institutional formats that visually articulate knowledge for particular audiences (Ames 1992: 47, 127, 141; Bennett 1995; Hooper-Greenhill 1992; Moser 2006). Such reassessments destabilized museum objects and granted them the possibility of taking on a multiplicity of meanings, depending on their shifting institutional contexts of categorization, valuation, interpretation and display (Macdonald 2006: 6). Recent texts have increasingly addressed the unhelpful perception that colonized peoples had little agency in the creation of museum ‘ethnography’ collections, nor any significant impact on the nature and affordances of such assemblages (e.g. see Phillips and Steiner 1999; Harrison, Byrne and Clarke 2013; Jacobs, Knowles and Wingfield 2016). Such studies have begun to engage with a full range of processes through which museum collections are created, and to trace complex networks of human and material interaction that were implicated in their acquisition and which extend over time and space.

British imperialism and the institutions it bequeathed have left problematic, ongoing, consequences in Britain and Africa today. As Coombes demonstrated in her seminal 1994 monograph Reinventing Africa, collections of African ‘ethnology’ were used in museums and other institutions to construct and disseminate imaginary representations of Africa and Africans. These invented representations, disseminated in various ways, principally served to deny Africans their full humanity as complex historical subjects in their own right and helped situate them within static ‘primitive’ worlds in need of redemptive ‘development’ by colonizing nations with a superior destiny (see Chapter 8). These ideas have also left multiple traces in museums, most of which still tend to structure access to their collections through outdated objectifying systems that slot artefacts into predetermined ethnic, geographical and aesthetic categories. Such systems tend to separate connected objects. They help to obscure the original meanings and biographies of certain objects, as well as the personalities and relationships of the collectors who created the collections in the first place (Shelton 2001: 19).

The important realization that museum collections ‘necessarily tell us more about the nexus of European interests in African affairs and about the colonizer, than they do about Africa and the African’ (Coombes 1994: 3) was won largely through a focus on institutional practices in British cultural bodies and on collectors who served as colonial functionaries in some way, or who had clear imperialist agendas. While existing studies that focus on museum practices and the ‘official’ cadre of collectors have certainly helped provide insights into the development of European epistemological paradigms and academic disciplines like anthropology (e.g. see Mudimbe 1988; Kuklick 1991; Coombes 1994; Schildkrout and Keim 1998; Henare 2005), they do not provide a full picture of the range of interactions, negotiations and cultural transactions that took place ‘alongside and beyond’ (Newell 2002: 44) the official colonial presence, so that further questions can be raised about the way in which the general paradigms developed.

The transactions, interactions and discourses that shaped Africa’s pre- and early colonial history were multifarious and not infrequently discordant. European collectors were cast from a variety of moulds and the ‘official’ cadre of collectors was not invariably the most significant one. African ‘suppliers’ of artefacts to European collectors also had diverse social and cultural interests. Indeed, colonial institutions and functionaries often helped to create or accentuate ethnic distinctions among Africans through various forms of categorization, discrimination, compartmentalization and exclusion (e.g. Coleman 1958: 194; Ochonu 2014: 7).

Studies of the ‘official’ cadre of European collectors, and the metropolitan institutions they supplied, have been crucial in helping to illuminate the ways in which colonial collecting and museums contributed to the imagining and definition of Africa in Britain, but in making this important argument scholars inevitably underplayed the role of African agency as a prime factor in the make-up of museum collections of African artefacts. Elsewhere, this author has argued that the interests and strategies of Africans who provided Europeans with artefacts for their collections have constituted an under-examined aspect of the contexts in which museum collections are usually understood to have been acquired (Kingdon 2008: 32; see also Phillips and Steiner 1999, where other regions and periods are concerned). One reason for this neglect lies with the fact that African interests and strategies were habitually written out of collecting histories, something that had to do with dominant Western ideologies and attitudes towards Africans. The Western collectors or curators who articulated these discourses, generally ignored or misrepresented African cultural narratives in their assumption of a ‘primitive’ African world in need of ‘redemption’, ‘representation’ and, latterly, ‘preservation’ (Clifford 1988: 200). Western collectors often sought to maintain the perception of being active agents in relation to their African counterparts, who, in line with representations of Africans more generally, were regarded as more passive. But this was far from the actuality. In the precolonial period and into the early colonial era, many Africans still had authority to assert their interests, in most places, and to manage their relationships with Europeans, whose movements they either restricted to the coasts, or monitored and controlled during inland expeditions (Fabian 1986: 2000). Ironically, European collectors often found themselves in the ‘patient’ rather than the ‘agent’ role (Gell 1998: 29) with respect to the Africans who satisfied their ‘knowledge-gathering’ obsessions, sometimes by actively creating new genres of artefact especially intended for European collectors (see Chapter 2). European conquest of African territories from the late nineteenth century did not result in a simple equation of rulers on one hand and ruled on the other, because ostensible European control was imposed ‘with no clear idea of how particular areas should be governed nor any substantive knowledge of many subject cultures’ (McCaskie 2004: 182; see also Ochonu 2014). In order to realize hegemonic colonial projects, colonizers had to enter into entangled relations with indigenous elites, ‘and at each step along the way’, these groups ‘reshaped each other’ (Cooper 1997: 407).

Approach

The account that unfolds in the following chapters adopts a perspective on museum collecting partly inspired by the work of scholars like James Clifford and Nicholas Thomas that emphasizes ‘contact’ and ‘entangled’ relations in colonial encounters. Clifford claims to view ‘all culture-collecting strategies as responses to particular histories of dominance, hierarchy, resistance, and mobilization’ (Clifford 1997: 213), and this work shares his insistence on situating instances of collecting within their specific social contexts. This is obviously vital in order to be able to understand why particular things were collected at particular times and what personal and political messages might have been negotiated through the process, both by the receiving and relinquishing parties in the interactions. However, this is hardly an easy task, given the deficiencies of collectors’ narratives and way that African experiences are generally written out of them. Significantly, museum collections are increasingly being recognized as the product of entangled material and social interactions of objects, people and institutions, from a perspective that views museums as ‘meshworks’ of intricately entwined ‘material and social assemblages’ (e.g. see Thomas 1991; Harrison 2013: 4). In stressing the need for an effective stimulus to new knowledge about the complex nature of collections, Harrison and others advocate drawing on an ‘archaeological sensibility’ that conceptualizes collections as ‘assemblages’ in order to pose questions regarding their ‘composition, structure, and function’ (Harrison 2013: 20; Harrison, Byrne and Clarke 2013). This study makes use of this approach, while equally attempting to apply anthropological, historiographical and art historical ‘sensibilities’ alongside the ‘archaeological sensibility’ wherever possible.

The contact perspective adopted in this study focuses largely on the ‘collector’/‘supplier’ relationships between, for example, Ridyard and his contacts on Africa’s Atlantic coasts, as well as the ‘transcultural’ and trans-imperial infrastructures through which the parties interacted. This approach owes much to Clifford’s articulation of the ‘ethnographic encounter’, and thus to the notion that collecting interactions are always pre-enmeshed in ‘the wider global world of intercultural import-export’ (Clifford 1997: 23). In this view the African ‘supplier’ of museum artefacts emerges as a complex historical subject in his or her own right, whose collaborative cultural interests and practices must be brought into more concerted and detailed focus. Given the general lack of reliable narratives for the early colonial period, a ‘contact and encounter’ perspective on collecting in western Africa that gives due emphasis to West Africans’ collaborative cultural interests would appear to be a difficult one to achieve. However, the Ridyard assemblage provides a unique vantage point for such a perspective, because it is relatively well documented for its time.

Ridyard was neither trader, colonial officer nor soldier. He did not directly acquire artefacts as loot through military conquest (see Chapter 2 section three) and he was not in a position to directly receive diplomatic gifts from indigenous rulers in the course of his engineer’s duties. Nor was he in a position to coerce indigenous Africans into parting with artefacts that he coveted through the exercise of any religious authority. It would probably have been while travelling on his ship that many of the West Africans who subsequently went on to contribute to Ridyard’s collecting operation first became acquainted with him. As a marine engineer and a Methodist, who paid fleeting visits to western African ports, Ridyard did not belong to the ‘official’ cadre of Western collectors. Ridyard’s Methodism should be seen as significant here, because it was the Anglican Church that constituted the official church in British colonies. Moreover, many of the West African ports at which Ridyard called had long-established Methodist congregations, with which he evidently established affinities, because Methodists made up the majority of his West African collaborators. Crucially, a few of Ridyard’s West African collaborators wrote notes to accompany their gifts, which contain vital narratives that shed light on their personal motivations and cultural interests. Also important are the surviving letters and letter books associated with the Ridyard assemblage held by the Salford Museum and the Manchester Museum. These documents record details of the British cultural resources, such as illustrated magazines, that Ridyard took back to West Africa to present to his West African collaborators in return for museum donations (see Chapter 3). They therefore help ill...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title Page
• Dedication
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• List of Colour Plates
• Acknowledgements
• List of Abbreviations
• Preface
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Prologue: Western Africa, Africans and Liverpool’s Municipal Museum
• 3 Arnold Ridyard and his Assemblage
• 4 Diasporic Dialogues: The Sierra Leonean Donors I
• 5 Trans-imperial Identities: The Sierra Leonean Donors II
• 6 Coastal ‘Kings’: The Gold Coast Donors I
• 7 Coastal Cosmopolitans: The Gold Coast Donors II
• 8 Museum Meanings: Regimes of Classification, Representation and Display
• Epilogue
• References
• Index
• Plates
• Copyright