African Exploration Research Articles

Excavating Whiteness in the African Archive: The Story of Amandus Johnson's 1920s Expedition to Angola for the Penn Museum

AbstractAs we further seek to “decolonize” museum images of Africa, the museum archives of African Collections—the correspondence, ledgers, diaries, photographs, and other documents of White explorers working in Africa—suture the colonial practices that produced ways of seeing Africa—and Blackness more broadly—back onto the objects that museums maintain and display today. As increasing scholarly attention seeks to rectify the anti‐Black colonial violence of the archive, this research aims to situate the pedestrian colonial ethnographic practices and spectacular African explorer mythmaking found in museum archives within the foundation of museum anthropology and the museum itself. It also looks to the possibilities of contemporary museum practice to reframe and repair colonial museum constructions of Africa.

Belgium: a History of African Exploration

In the late 19th — early 20th centuries, the European states paid special attention to the African continent, which for many was then terra incognita, despite geographical discoveries and scientific information available. The rumors that spread in Europe about barbaric tribes, cannibals and wild animals frightened and repelled ordinary people. However, businessmen and merchants saw enormous benefits in the acquisition of colonies. The distant continent promised them fabulous profits from colonial goods, raw materials for new industry and cheap labor. In addition, having overseas territories was prestigious for European states and became a symbol of national pride. “At the beginning of the 20th century, white Europe was the recognized as the master of the world, and white people were almost universally considered as rulers for which the rest of the world exists” — this is how the British writer, Africanist Winston Dubois saw Europe. New approaches in the foreign policy of European states have become characteristic not only for England and France, who were the “pioneers” of colonial conquests, but also for the little Belgium. The cunning and enterprising Belgian king Leopold II, having circumvented England and France, which competed for success on the Black continent, thanks to numerous manipulations in the business and political sphere, was able to secure for himself huge “ownerless” territories in the center of Africa, which later transformed into three states. These are the modern Democratic Republic of the Congo, Rwanda and Burundi.

The Afterlife of Daniel Defoe’s Captain Singleton in the Seven Years’ War

Abstract Daniel Defoe’s pirate novel Captain Singleton (1720) was republished in 1757, during the political and military crises of the early stages of the Seven Years’ War. The fact that Singleton at this time was extensively rewritten has gone entirely unnoticed by scholars. The present article explains how this version of Defoe’s maritime picaresque fiction responded to national anxieties about naval performance, aristocratic leadership, and martial masculinity following the loss of Minorca, seeking to galvanize its readers during the privateering rush of this period and the more general appetite for a ‘blue-water’, colonial war strategy. In 1757, Bob Singleton is transformed from the stateless sea rover of Defoe’s original into a patriotic privateer who serves the British nation in an unofficial capacity, both as an African explorer in the first half and a maritime adventurer in the second. The 1757 novel shows the ways in which the rising taste for sentimental fiction, moving away from individualistic adventure stories, coalesced with imperialist and nationalist agendas in the mid-eighteenth century. This example of literary appropriation rewards the investigation of the afterlives of eighteenth-century fiction, aiding recognition of how novels endured and were revived, often in revised or remediated states, to reach different readerships and speak to new sociocultural contexts.

For an African elenchus: colonial and postcolonial misprisions and Classics in Africa

Abstract This paper reflects on the god Dionysus in the context of African explorations of the role and meaning of Classical traditions in and for Africa. The problem of decolonization entails the creative challenge to conceive an African modernity, but how we shall recognize what that is to mean remains open. Knowledge as claim and contestation are foregrounded with Dionysus and in his presence. He is a figure who is chronically misprised, so that misprision itself becomes a feature of his experience and meaning. Offering examples of two kinds of popular interpretive stances and arguing that they represent typical but weak readings, the idea is developed that Africa requires elenchus as hermeneutic ideal, an epistemic pessimism and commitment to seeking as it finds its own way. It ought not, from a peripheral position, to adopt or reject the popular and low-yielding misprisions and cultural contestations that obtain in the Western academy and offer little to a flowering African Humanities.

Unsettling the Ranks: 1930s Zulu-Language Writings on African Progress and Unity in The Bantu World

ABSTRACT While much of the extant scholarship on The Bantu World has addressed the English language content, this article shifts the focus to previously unexplored 1930s Zulu-language writings on African advancement and unity. It makes an intervention into the study of African explorations of the possibilities and limits of progress amidst the abiding challenges and paradoxes of colonial modernity, in a setting characterised by increasing segregation. The Zulu pages, the article claims, enhance our understanding of contributors’ involvement in shaping and expanding the very constituency the editor, RV Selope Thema, sought to create. In particular, Zulu-language letters to the editor, often written in response to editorials and articles, convey ideas neither fully anticipated by Thema, nor fully articulated in the more restrained English pages. Located in the rich body of work on African print cultures, the article first discusses the ideologies behind this multilingual weekly newspaper. It then foregrounds the key place of Zulu-language usage in The Bantu World, as well as the (male-dominated) networks, publics and communities of readers created through the vernacular, which flourished despite attempts to marginalise African languages. An examination of key 1930s controversies over the notions of advancement, entrepreneurship and unity shows that the Zulu pages partly destabilised prevalent elite ideas of progress as intertwined with white patronage.

CULTURAL RAMIFICATIONS OF THE FOUND OBJECT IN CONTEMPORARY AFRICAN ART

Arguably Found Object genre represents the most dominant form of contemporary artistic expression with unlimited possibilities of material exploration and conceptual ideation. However, Found Object discourse institutionalized in European art history is exclusively western and dismisses those of other cultures as mimesis and time-lag. This paper aims to prove that the dominant contemporary discourse of „Recyla Art‟ which many African sculptors have been absorbed into, problematically blurs the conceptual and ideological differences in European and African exploration of discarded objects in art creation. Using a triangulation of Formalism, Iconography and Interviews as methodologies, this paper subjects the works of El Anatsui, Delumprizulike, Nnena Okore, Bright Eke, Olu Amonda and others to formalistic and interpretative analysis to establish the postcolonial context of the found object in contemporary African art. Findings demonstrate that European and African appropriation of discarded objects in art differs according to societal context in form and content. The paper therefore concludes that found object art is culturespecific and defined by unique cultural ramifications, thus, to fully understand the dynamism of this art genre, a culture-specific or localized reading is required because the context of its emergence in Europe stands in contradiction to its conceptualism in contemporary African art-space.

A South African exploration into outdoor adventure education and adolescent psychosocial development

This study explored the psychosocial outcomes of an outdoor adventure program for adolescents. A purposive sample of 144 Grade 10 learners participated in the Journey outdoor adventure education (OAE) programme (female = 48.6%, black = 27.5%; mean age =16.5 years; SD = 3.45 years). Applying a pre- and post-test quasi-experimental design, the adolescents completed self-report measures (including the Life Effectiveness Questionnaire, Emotional Literacy Questionnaire, and Connor-Davidson Resilience Scale) at three points in time: pre- and post-Journey, and four months later. Results following ANOVA analysis indicated increases in the adolescents’ self-reports of life effectiveness and resilience (but not of emotional literacy) on completion of the programme. Findings suggest that a strength-based OAE would enhance psychosocial outcomes of adolescent school learners.

A Conversation about <i>Livingstone Online</i> and the Victorian Record of African Exploration

Livingstone Online is a digital museum and library that provides a global audience with public access to the vast written and visual legacies of David Livingstone (1813–1873), the British Victorian explorer of Africa. The site’s manuscripts span Livingstone’s adult life, ranging from family correspondence written in the 1830s to the field diaries of the 1870s composed in the Congo Basin. Additional illustrations, photographs, and other materials encompass nearly two centuries of relevant historical and contemporary sources. Over the course of Livingstone Online’s fifteen-year development, the project has made significant contributions to scholarly conversations and public knowledge about British imperial history and African history, and has become a leader in the field in developing best practices for the digitization and digital publication of manuscript material and images from the ‘global south’. In February 2020 three members of the project team gathered online to discuss the site’s latest edition — Livingstone’s Missionary Travels Manuscript (1857) — and the wider development of Livingstone Online as a nineteenth-century digital humanities project over the last decade and a half. Adrian Wisnicki (University of Nebraska-Lincoln) is the director of Livingstone Online; Kate Simpson (University of Glasgow) is an Associate Project Scholar who has contributed to each of the site’s critical editions; and Justin Livingstone (Queen’s University Belfast) is the joint director (with Wisnicki) of Livingstone’s Missionary Travels Manuscript (1857).

Bringing Africans into the British Narrative of African Exploration

Bringing Africans into the British Narrative of African Exploration

Plaided or Dusky Forms: Highland Landscape in Scotland and Kenya

Accounts of empire in postcolonial critique largely remain silent on colonial relations internal to the United Kingdom, tending to elide the work of Scots, Irish, and Welsh within a solely English imperial enterprise. This article draws on recent reevaluations of the Scottish role in empire to outline the ambivalent place of Britain’s “Celtic Fringe” in its global hegemony. Focusing on eighteenth-century cartography and Scottish accounts of African exploration, it argues that the aesthetic practice of colonial control developed in Scotland established a pattern imperial agents could repeat in overseas territories. The colonization of the “White Highlands” in Kenya, it suggests, relied on aesthetic forms that originated in the landscape of the Scottish Highlands. By focusing on landscape's influence in a constellation of fields—in aesthetics, cartography, and natural history—this article also moves toward an understanding of landscape as a form of aisthesis, a “regime of sense perception.”

Writing her in: an African Feminist Exploration into the Life Herstory Narrative of Dimakatso, a Woman Participant in the Expanded Public Works Programme (EPWP) at Leratong Hospital in Gauteng, South Africa

ABSTRACTThis article conducts an African Feminist exploration into the life herstory narrative of a one-woman beneficiary in South Africa’s Expanded Public Works Programme (EPWP) at Leratong Hospital in Kagiso, situated in Gauteng province. In South Africa, the statistics inform us that poverty has a face, she is young, black African and poorly educated, but we are reliably informed that her access to the EPWP is steadily increasing. Once you sift through the hard data little is known about this woman; she is encrypted under a veil of invisibility, her identities, her relationships, her gendered negotiations of daily life and her agency or ability or inability to grasp opportunities and influence her life course are gapingly absent from the noisy discourse—the narrative is aborted. This article addresses the divide in the literature through the study goal of visibilising woman’s life herstory back into the narrative. It begins to fill the lacuna in the literature through the chronicling of the life herstory themes and scenes which have led the participant, Dimakatso to join this EPWP intervention within the infrastructure sector. Moreover, it strives to voice her work life experiences and negotiations within the infrastructure sector of the EPWP. This study is grounded in the epistemology of African Feminism(s), which recognises that the voices of African women need to resonate throughout the globe in her own words.

Joseph Conrad by Robert Hampson

Reviewed by: Joseph Conrad by Robert Hampson G. W. Stephen Brodsky (bio) Robert Hampson. Joseph Conrad. London: Reaktion Books, 2020. 224 pp. ISBN: 9781789143071. Joseph Conrad by Robert Hampson adds lustre to a collection of ninety-eight critical works at its date of publication (2020) in Reaktion Books’ Critical Lives Series, devoted to “the work of leading cultural figures of the modern period” (pre-title page). This highly readable volume accomplishes an interpretive feat in just over two hundred pages that much larger critical biographies, such as Frederick Karl’s formidable Joseph Conrad: The Three Lives (1979), accomplish in over a thousand. This enviable gift of Hampson’s is no less than we have come to expect from his pen. From the outset, elements of Conrad’s life and literature in their historical settings are integrated in ways imparting to the reader a common-sense wholeness. Early in chapter 2, about Conrad’s maritime career, for instance, Hampson approaches Heart of Darkness by way of noting poignantly that Henry Morton Stanley returned from Africa via Marseilles in 1877, in Conrad’s [End Page 95] “murkiest period,” thus inferentially drawing a line from Conrad’s boyhood romance with Burton and Speke’s accounts of African exploration through his despondency leading to his purportedly deliberate botching of a suicide attempt the following year (Hampson 37),1 and on to his disillusion and depression in the Congo a dozen years later. We find these and other kinds of linkages—international affairs and publishing history—throughout this exceptional critical biography. THE AUTHOR The authorship of Joseph Conrad is signal enough that it is both required reading for Conrad specialists and an intriguing entry-level text for the Conradian tyro: Professor Robert Hampson, FEA, FRSA,2 Professor Emeritus, Royal Holloway, University of London, and currently Research Fellow at the University of London’s Institute of English Studies, is author of three previous works of similar merit: Joseph Conrad: Betrayal and Identity (Macmillan, 1992); Cross-Cultural Encounters in Joseph Conrad’s Malay Fiction (Palgrave, 2000); and Conrad’s Secrets (Palgrave, 2013). His work has been described in acclaimed critical sources as “striking and inventive” and “an indispensable resource for specialists and enthusiasts alike.”3 Through the 1990s until the present Robert Hampson has become, as it were, a household name among Conrad specialists. He has edited and co-edited works by Conrad, was editor of Conradiana for seven years, and in 2017 was awarded the Ian P. Watt Prize for Excellence for his lifetime’s work on Conrad. THE VISUALS Our first encounter with the paperback version of Joseph Conrad is the cover’s photo-portrait of Conrad, familiar to Conradians as originating in 1904 in his forty-seventh year, still dark-bearded and with the eyes of the sea dreamer late come from his true home afloat. Not yet a decade from the seas, he remained largely unsung and undiscovered by the popular readership.4 A frontispiece shows Conrad nine years later in 1913, the grey-bearded mature artist, posed self-assuredly at his desk as if interrupted in writing a line of Chance, the book published that year which ended his obscurity and thrust him into the forefront of British novelists with Henry James and H. G. Wells. Most of the other visuals are known to Conrad scholars, but whereas they commonly appear in glossy pages bunged into the center of biographies, Hampson has judiciously had them placed appropriately where they unobtrusively illuminate the particular subject of the moment. [End Page 96] THE STRUCTURE As to the external mechanical aspects of the book, presumably the editors of the Reaktion series impose house protocols. Thus, for instance, Joseph Conrad contains a Select Bibliography of Conrad’s works at the end (202), but no chronology and, regrettably, no index. Oddly, the Acknowledgements are at the last. But assuredly these lacunae and eccentricities are not by the author’s design. More important, though, is the internal structure of Joseph Conrad, unique among critical biographies, that imparts coherence of meaning to Conrad’s life and work.5 Hampson’s structural apparatus throughout matches Conrad’s life experience to the literature, to “make us see,” so to speak, how...

From Blaxploitalian to Black-Italiano: A South African exploration of afroitalianess with Fred Kuwornu

Abstract

Tudományágak a szakosodás és a populáris kultúra határán

Scientific associations that still exist today were founded all across Europe since the middle of the 19th century. Magyar Földrajzi Társulat (Hungarian Geographical Society; now: Magyar Földrajzi Társaság) was created in 1872, Magyarországi Néprajzi Társaság (Hungarian Ethnographical Society; now: Magyar Néprajzi Társaság) in 1889; but they were different from today’s similar organizations in their basic goals, tasks and their membership as well. These associations were “hybrids” of sorts: they possessed both a scientific side and a science-popularizing side that aimed for a large number of members for financial security. The Hungarian Geographical Society used the huge public interest surrounding the exploration of Africa better: inviting explorers returning from Africa, public readings and regular news based on foreign associations’ publications served undoubtedly the above mentioned popularizing purpose. However the geographers of the early 20th century voiced harsh critiques against the sensationalism of the Hungarian Geographical Society. At the same time Hungarian geography as a science was not lagging behind that of Western Europe at the time of the explorations. 1870-1880 were the decades of Central African exploration, and the main focus of Western European geographical publications and events as well. The official journal of the Hungarian Ethnographical Society, Ethnographia containing much fewer Africa-centric publications is partly due to the Association having been created at the end of the explorations. However, while Földrajzi Közlemények (the official journal of the Hungarian Geographical Society) followed the political movements of Europe in Africa between 1890 and 1900, even though the time of explorations was over, Ethnographia distanced itself from these in favour for more professional content. Földrajzi Közlemények and Hungarian geography in general only followed suit after 1900.

Critical Thinking Education for Enhancing the Effectiveness of Education in Vietnam

Critical Thinking Education for Enhancing the Effectiveness of Education in Vietnam

New models for geoscience higher education in West Africa

The challenges facing government-funded higher education institutions in West Africa in response to the demand for mineral resources require a spectrum of responses aligned with the multinational development programs. Efforts to meet the demands of industry and government organisations for skilled staff are undermined by the large numbers of students attracted to Earth Science courses in Africa. The African Union's African Mining Vision, the UN's Sustainable Development Goals and the New Education Model for Africa provide a framework for progress, however, there are only a few concrete examples that allow us to explore the strengths and limitations of different approaches. Two proactive initiatives based on locally-identified needs and that involve local and international collaborations are presented that allow such an analysis. The first, a public-private partnership entitled the West African Exploration Initiative (WAXI), provides graduate and professional training as a result of direct industry and partner government financial and in-kind support. The second initiative known as GEOLOOC is a new online training program supported by UNESCO and the International Mining for Development Centre that unites several West African universities in creating a common resource pool of Earth Science training materials. These activities are being carried out in collaboration with the local universities, and a new professional training centre based in Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso. In West Africa, by addressing locally-identified gaps in higher education delivery and by building local and international collaborations, the projects described here are starting to successfully implement new models to contribute to the enhancement of geoscience higher education. These new models complement existing government-funded Higher Education systems by providing them with much-needed support at a time of rapid change.

Travels in Fiction: Baker, Stanley, Cameron and the Adventure of African Exploration

AbstractSamuel White Baker, Henry Morton Stanley, and Verney Lovett Cameron are some of the most familiar names on the roster of African exploration. Together, they are associated with central and east Africa’s most important geographical questions as well as political developments in the run up to partition. While these figures are well known for their substantial expeditionary narratives, the fact that they also published works of fiction has been almost entirely overlooked. This article investigates the phenomenon, identifying the turn to fiction as an important feature of the Victorian culture of exploration. The ‘fiction of exploration’ was part of the period’s cult of celebrity, a means of reaching new audiences, and an important contribution to the adventure genre. These novels are read here as a means of reimagining the expeditionary experience, and as literary cartographies in which place and politics intersect on behalf of an imperial vision.

Risk and Reward: Bringing Light to Africa

President's column Africa was first called the “Dark Continent” in the 19th century. The term is originally credited to the famous explorer Henry Stanley from his 1878 book “Through the Dark Continent.” Back then, Africa was a mysterious and dangerous place for European explorers. Today, when I conclude most of my presentations, I use the NASA satellite photograph of the world at night. In it, Africa is mostly dark, so from an energy standpoint, it’s still a “dark continent.” According to the World Energy Outlook 2017, two-thirds of people in sub-Saharan Africa do not have access to electricity. More than half of the population uses wood and charcoal as its primary energy sources, and that is expected to continue until 2040. Lack of access to energy holds back the promise of Africa and its people. I have spent a lot of time in Africa in the past 10 years. Not only have I traveled to Angola through my position with Chevron, but I also have vacationed there. Most recently, I have traveled to Angola as SPE President. Africa is, in many ways, the final frontier. There are many exciting new developments in African exploration and production that hold tremendous potential to bring more energy and prosperity to the continent—and shine a light of affordable, abundant energy. West Africa has dominated the continent’s production for more than 50 years since Shell/BP began production in the Oloibiri field in the Niger Delta in 1958. Similarly, Gulf Oil—now Chevron—began offshore production in the Cabinda province of the Congo River basin in Angola in 1968. Angola had a long history of oil seeps dating to 1700s. The first onshore production was in the Benfica field in 1956, but the Malongo field was the first significant commercial production. Despite long enjoying control over African production, both Nigeria and Angola are now struggling to find the right split between government and commercial interests for in-vestment to continue. Estimates are that investment in deep-water Angola and Nigeria has been cut by USD 100 billion. Without new investment, production will decline by half of its current level. Nigeria is restructuring its governance and petroleum industry financing, which—if successful—should bring stability and greater investment back into the Niger Delta. Offshore Angola projects are suspended across all operators, pending fiscal reforms that reduce government share under current production-sharing contracts, which can be as high as 90%.

Balzac and the African Explorer: Cognitive Mapping of the faubourg Saint-Germain

A fresh reading of Balzac's La Duchesse de Langeais (1834) reveals that the geography of African exploration, and of Andalusia as a liminal space between Europe and Africa, are mapped onto the geography of Paris. Class boundaries make the conquest of the aristocratic faubourg Saint-Germain as problematic as the exploration of central Africa. Spatiality is crucial in understanding this novella, which can be read as secondary travel writing: it is partly a response to a travel narrative by René Caillié published in 1830. Useful here are critical approaches to travel narratives such as Mary Louise Pratt's notions of the "contact zone" and the "anti-conquest" narrative. Caillié's real-life experience sheds light on Montriveau, whose voyage is one of pathos, suffering, and epistemological failure. Balzac's novella thus explores a failed or incomplete mapping project. This reflects what Fredric Jameson calls the failed "cognitive mapping" underlying the European attempt to reach a fully global world-view.

The Newspaper and the Novel: William Morris’s News from Nowhere in Commonweal

This article reads William Morris’s News from Nowhere in its original publication context: as a serial in the socialist newspaper Commonweal. It argues that while the content of News from Nowhere might have been utopian, the experience of reading it in this context was profoundly dystopian. The articles that frame the serial, including a series of articles attacking African explorer Henry Morton Stanley, undermine Morris’s work. William Morris, as a journalist and traveler, comes to appear eerily similar to Stanley. Both News from Nowhere and Commonweal, as print commodities, are shown to be complicit with the capitalism system.