Everyday life encapsulated? Two photographs concerning women and the Basel Mission in West Africa, c.1900

Abstract

Photographs can have a transforming effect on our thoughts about the history of everyday life in Africa since 1850, in particular offering evidence of active indigenous participation in determining contacts with locally resident Europeans, in this case on mission stations. But if they are to be used as sources, the study of the individual image needs great care. The examples discussed here show that images without the documentation which offers us a localization in time and space are virtually useless - and that the quality of documentation available can vary widely. Beyond documentation, integrating visual sources in historians' discourse challenges us to develop imaginative and open-ended trains of thought. One of the images presented here is a unique source, depicting African women performing 'Born House' for a missionary baby in inland Cameroon in 1909. It indicates that relations between women as women on and around mission stations cannot merely be subsumed under the concept of a racial hierarchy. The other - an example of a widespread genre in the Basel Mission archive - leads into a discussion of the history of girls' and women's handwork classes in what is now southern Ghana, where participation was energized by an indigenous sense of aesthetics and dress. The Ghanaian fashion industry of today (and the women's profession of dressmaker) have their origins on mission house verandas in the nineteenth century.