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Contextualizing and Decontextualizing African Historical Photographs

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 May 2014

Carolyn Keyes Adenaike
Carolyn Keyes Adenaike*
Affiliation:
Vassar College
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Extract

In the summer of 1992 I was fortunate enough to visit two large collections of photographs for the purpose of African historical research.Muse and subject of this essay, these collections are housed in the library of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (hereafter FCO) and the library of the Royal Commonwealth Society (hereafter RCS), both in London. Although comparable in some respects, the two contrast sharply in styles of organization. It is this contrast which motivates the present writing, as it illustrates certain effects of the organization of collections on the usefulness of photographs as historical sources, and it leads as well to some reflections on the nature of historical evidence and visual images.

Both the RCS and the FCO have substantial holdings of photographic materials which should be of interest to Africanist historians generally. The size of the RCS collection has been variously estimated at between 45,000 and 70,000 photographs, while that of the FCO is approximately as large. In both cases, the researcher must make an appointment to see the collections, and neither is open to the general public. At the time of this writing, the FCO, having moved to a new location, has closed its photo collection, with no plans to reopen in the near future.

Specialists on Nigeria will find that the FCO and RCS each have over 30 albums relevant to this country's history. The FCO has somewhat larger Nigerian holdings, while the RCS collection will be of greater interest to historians of Sierra Leone and other West African countries. The Nigerian materials in the FCO are generally older, many falling roughly between ca. 1890 and ca. 1920, while the RCS holdings tend to concentrate on the mid-twentieth century. The FCO's Nigeria albums are approximately equally divided between the northern and southern portions of the country, while those of the RCS focus more heavily on northern Nigeria.

Type
Research Article
Information
History in Africa , Volume 23 , January 1996 , pp. 429 - 437
Copyright
Copyright © African Studies Association 1996

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References

Notes

1. I gratefully acknowledge permission to do research among the collections and the assistance of their staff. Thanks are also extended to Nicolette Bromberg, David Henige, John Pemberton, Stanley Schultz, and Jan Vansina for their advice and comments at various stages in the preparation of this paper. The opinions expressed in this essay, as well as any errors, are my own.

2. These collections were first brought to my attention in 1989 by John Pemberton. The Royal Commonwealth Society is located at 18 Northumberland Avenue, London WC2N 5BJ. Its library, however, is to be transferred in its entirety to Cambridge University Library (T.A. Barringer, Librarian, RCS, letter of 25 February 1993). The Foreign and Commonwealth Office moved in 1992 to its new location at King Charles Street, London SW1A 2AH (Penny Prior, Librarian, FCO, letter of 24 February 1993).

3. Estimates of 45,000, 50,000, and 70,000, respectively, in: Roberts, Andrew, ed., Photographs as Sources for African History: Papers Presented at a Workshop Held at the School of Oriental and African Studies, London, May 12-13, 1988 (London, 1988), 168Google Scholar; Falconer, John, “African Photographs in the Royal Commonwealth Society Library,” African Research and Documentation, 31 (1983), 13Google Scholar; Gemini News Service, undated press release, enclosed with letter of T.A. Barringer, 25 February 1993.

4. John Pemberton, personal communication, 27 June 1993. The FCO was in the process of moving when I was there, and the photographs were scheduled to be moved immediately after my departure. Both the RCS and the FCO permit photographic reproduction.

5. These are estimates. I have made no systematic study of the holdings, as I visited the collections to seek out materials for a specific research project only, and did not then envisage an essay such as this.

6. The Ijebu Expedition took place in 1892. Some discussion of these photographs and their context can be found in Keyes, Carolyn, “Adire: Cloth, Gender, and Social Change in Southwestern Nigeria, 1841-1991” (Ph.D., University of Wisconsin-Madison, 1993).Google Scholar Additional research based in part on these and other photographs is in progress.

7. These are but a few of the types of historical evidence available to researchers when photographs are kept in their original contexts. For discussion of these and many others, including the types of technology used to make the photographs, the thicknesses, sizes, shapes, and colors of mounts, see Pilling, Arnold R., “Dating Photographs” in Ethnohistory: A Researcher's Guide, ed. Wiedman, Dennis (Williamsburg, 1986), 167–226.Google Scholar

8. While costume may be effectively used by Americanists to assist in dating photographs (see Pilling, , “Dating Photographs,” 172–73Google Scholar), for Africanists the reverse is true, as photographs must be used to date types of dress. The interested reader will find examples and discussion of the use of photographic materials for the history of African dress in Wass, Betty, “Yoruba Dress in Five Generations of a Lagos Family” in The Fabrics of Culture: The Anthropology of Clothing and Adornment, ed. Cordwell, Justine M. and Schwarz, Ronald A. (Hague, 1979), 331–48Google Scholar; Keyes, “Adire;” and Adenaike, “The Fashioning of a Male Elite: Dress and Political Power in Southwestern Nigeria in the 19th Century,” forthcoming.

9. These were only some of the surprises yielded by photographs in my own research. Americanists have recorded similar sorts of surprises for their own areas and topics. See, e.g., Thomason, Michael, “The Magic Image Revisited: The Photograph as Historical Source,” The Alabama Review, 31 (1978), 87–88Google Scholar, who notes the presence of an African object and of African-Americans in unexpected places.

10. Neither John Pemberton nor I were able to obtain further information from the RCS. However, John Falconer was identified as the librarian who “cataloged the photographic collections of the Royal Commonwealth Society, London” by Killingray, David and Roberts, Andrew, “An Outline History of Photography in Africa to ca. 1940,” HA, 16 (1989), 206n30.Google Scholar

11. The letter is filed in the RCS with the notes for Y3043U (Sir Walter Buchanan-Smith collection on Nigeria, ca. 1909-ca. 1935) plates 40 and 42 labeled as “Ife priests, 1931.” John Pemberton wrote the letter in reference to Y3043B (Trousdell Southern Nigeria Photographs 1905-1907) plate 42, labeled as “Three men carrying terracotta Benin heads.” He showed a copy of this photograph (Y3043B, plate 42) to William Fagg (4 July 1988) and to John Picton (5 July 1988), both of whom agreed with him that the art objects it depicted were clearly not from Benin, but probably from Ife (John Pemberton, personal communication, 27 June 1993). The logic by which this letter was filed, the relationships between Y3043U plates 40 and 42 and Y3043B plate 42, and the relationships between “Benin heads,” life priests,” and Ife artworks are all open to question.

12. According to the RCS notes, the photographs in this set (Y3043II, Girl Guide activities in Nigeria, ca. 1930-1951) were identified and documented on the basis of oral history collected from a person knowledgeable about Girl Guides in Nigeria. It may be noted that the photographs are relatively recent, and Oba Falolu was still survived by a daughter in 1982, who would surely have recognized her father had she been asked. Additional photographs and information about the two Oba and the daughter can be found in Folami, Takiu, A History of Lagos, Nigeria: The Shaping of an African City (Smithtown, NY, 1982), 41-53, 59–62.Google Scholar

13. RCS, Y3043PP, Derek Holt West African Photographs, plates 4-7, notes.

14. Scherer, Joanna Cohan, “Historical Photographs as Anthropological Documents: A Retrospect,” Visual Anthropology, 3 (1990), 132-33, 136CrossRefGoogle Scholar, provides an overview of this literature. Further discussion of these concerns are in Geary, Christraud, “Impressions of the African Past: Interpreting Ethnographic Photographs from Cameroon,” Visual Anthropology, 3 (1990), 289–315.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

15. Heintze, Beatrix, “In Pursuit of a Chameleon: Early Ethnographic Photography from Angola in Context,” HA, 17 (1990), 131–56.Google Scholar Also apropos are the earlier critique and methodological discussion of Peters, Marsha and Mergen, Bernhard, “‘Doing the Rest’: The Uses of Photographs in American Studies,” American Quarterly, 29 (1977), 280–303.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

16. See Scherer's overview, “Historical Photographs,” 136, 141, for later and external written sources as “historical evidence.” Examples of the pitfalls of relying on outside or secondary sources are given in Christraud Geary, “Photographs as Materials for African History:

17. Paralleling this example in reverse, Geary, , “Photographs,” 95Google Scholar, cites a case of one individual identified as two different characters in two photographs.

18. Ibid., 103-04.

19. The conditions in which collections were left by past caretakers have been described in a few cases. Among them: Edwards, Elizabeth, “African Photographs in the Archives of the Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford” in Roberts, , Photographs as Sources for African History, 101Google Scholar, observed that materials had previously been rearranged “to break up collections;” Paul Jenkins, “The Photograph Collection in the Basel Mission Archive: Its Scope, Present State, and Plans for the Future” in ibid., 125, described a “decayed” organizational system in which photographs had been misplaced, mislabeled, and in which registration lists were incomplete; and Alessandro Triulzi, “Preliminary Report on Two Photographic Collections in Italy” in ibid., 109, found “a precarious surface order which revealed successive attempts to rearrange an indigestible mass of photographic material.” In cases where entropy has taken its toll in the past, even with the best of intentions and most assiduous of labors in the present, one must wonder about the reliability of the results. On the implications for research, see Blackman, Margaret B., “Visual Ethnohistory: Photographs in the Study of Culture History” in Wiedman, , Ethnohistory, 137-66, esp. 141–45.Google Scholar

20. Recent reorganization and cataloging projects include the photo collections of the Pitt Rivers Museum, the Basel Mission Archive, the Società Africana Italiana, and the Istituto Italo-Africano. See Edwards, “African Photographs;” Jenkins, “Photo Collection;” and Triulzi, “Preliminary Report.”

21. See Roberts, Andrew, “Photographs and African History,” JAH, 29 (1988), 301–311.CrossRefGoogle Scholar As Triulzi, “Preliminary Report,” 110, has noted regarding questions of method, “unless critical standards of evaluation and judgement are agreed upon” the result is likely to be the “devaluation” of photographs as a historical source.

22. Duval, Paul-Marie, “Archéologie antique” in L'Histoire et ses méthodes, ed. Samaran, Charles [Encyclopédie de la pléiade, XI (Paris, 1961), 266–68.Google Scholar

23. Gilbert Ouy, “Les bibliothèques” in ibid., 1086-89, on the problems of the physical integrity of medieval manuscripts.

24. See Yves Metman, “Sigillographie et marques postales” in ibid., 393-446, esp. 426-28, on the importance of seals attached to their documents.

25. Jan Vansina, personal communication, June 1993; Convents, Guido, “Des photos faites en Afrique Centrale: un inventaire des archives et de leurs dépôts en Belgique” in Roberts, , Photographs as Sources for African History, 116.Google Scholar Organization by “subject” was still being advocated as recently as 1988 at the SOAS workshop, as recorded by Rosemary Seton, “A Note on the Workshop Discussion of Archives” in ibid., 132.

26. As Peters, and Mergen, , “Doing the Rest,” 280Google Scholar, observe, photographs “contain unique information that can only be communicated and analyzed in visual terms.”

27. John Pemberton encountered such a situation during his research among photo collections (personal communication, 27 June 1993). Thomason, , “The Magic Image Revisited,” 86Google Scholar, also noted photograph collections where the researcher was obliged to view negatives, pointing out that this was not in the best interests of preservation.

28. A concern expressed in terms of a need “to prevent users riffling roughshod through unsorted and uncatalogued photographs which could cause further damage,” Seton, , “Workshop Discussion,” 132.Google Scholar

29. This differs from the recommendations of Geary, , “Photographs,” 92, 115–16.Google Scholar

30. The cataloging system used for textiles at the Museum of Mankind is instructive. Grouped by collection (donor), each entry includes a sketch, and accession data are clearly distinguished from any comments made by the museum staff.