Nature, space and distances in an imperial boundary network: The delimitation of the Nyasa-Tanganyika plateau boundary

Abstract

This article discusses an episode of boundary delimitation/demarcation conducted between British and German imperial powers on the central African Nyasa-Tanganyika plateau in the late 1890s. I situate vignettes on the boundary's delimitation in 1897-98 within broader processes of imperial territorialisation to note that the boundary eventually produced on the plateau represented a fabrication resolving tensions between its ‘natural’ and textual sources. Specifically, I argue the boundary was produced to mediate between a diplomatic nature, written in metropolitan worlds by diplomats and cartographers, and a colonial nature, a zone of phenomenal experiences, inhuman encounters and ‘sensation’ (Wark, 2016). I emphasise the experience of technical practice to suggest that this itself represented a form of imperial power, capable of challenging or ‘deferring’ (Bhabha, 2012) metropolitan circuits of governance and knowledge production, not least by revealing the liveliness of the material world undergoing imperial territorialisation. Sensation produced the form of the writings and archives of survey-exploration: often confounded by problems of their data and surroundings, commissioners made the epistemological and subjective manoeuvrings through which they appeared to rise above their inert surroundings to master them. But this does not characterise the experience of fieldwork on the plateau, which was constituted by a panoply of technical situations wherein delineations between objects, observers and their material settings were indeterminable.