Fernando Po Research Articles

Transimperial Internment: Wartime Mobility between German Cameroon and Neutral Spain, 1915–1920

ABSTRACT During the First World War, Spain engaged in humanitarian activities, including caring for internees, to substantiate its neutrality. On the African front, Spain’s small Central African territory became a refuge for German troops as the French and British seized control of Cameroon. By bringing together voices from Germany, Britain, and Spain, as well as some Cameroonian perspectives, the article offers a fresh narrative about the transcontinental and transimperial experience of internment. The retreating German army collectively became the first European ‘refugees’ in Africa. This article surveys the multiple stages of their internment journey: the retreat from Cameroon into Spanish Guinea, internment on the island of Fernando Po and then in mainland Spain, and their eventual return to Germany or Cameroon, with some choosing to stay in Spain.Their experiences were transimperial not simply because they crossed imperial borders, but also because the infrastructure and conditions of internment conformed to a shared imperial ‘archive’ for the treatment of Europeans in captivity on African soil. The article also examines the lingering echoes of internment in the post-war period. By contributing to an overlooked case, this study aligns with broader efforts to globalise scholarship on the First World War, showcasing internment as a key example of the war’s global effects.

Regional Intrusive Signature from the Cameroon Coastal Basins to Bioko Island in Equatorial Guinea (Gulf of Guinea) Using Gravity Studies

The Gulf of Guinea constitutes an area of great petroleum potential yet with very limited geophysical research information. Consequently in this study, a Bouguer anomaly map has been computed from gravity data covering regions stretching from the Cameroon coastal basins to Bioko island (formerly Fernando Po) which is part of Equatorial Guinea. The data were further processed for Source Edge Detection (SED), Euler 3D deconvolution, 3D surface oriented models and 3D voxel solutions. The results confirmed the presence of previously identified intrusive bodies around the Douala and Kribi/Campo sedimentary sub-basins and went ahead to suggest a probable continuity between these two. A possible extension of this body offshore the Gulf of Guinea right up to Bioko island with very striking similarities was also highlighted and it shows characteristic variations in the depth to the surface of the body at different locations.

The Challenges of 190 Years of the Spanish versus British Pre-Colonial and Colonial Manipulations of Equatorial Guinea/ Fernando Po / the Bight of Biafra 1778-1968

The main focus of this paper is to illustrate how the Spanish gained control of Equatorial Guinea during the late 18th and what prompted the British to mark their presence briefly for the continuation of Spanish lucrative imperialistic ambitions in the African Gulf of Guinea. That those European challenges in the zone lasted till the Second half of the 20th Century brings out the main pre-colonial and colonial agents which were appointed by the Spanish and British Monarchical and Republican Governments with a total of 110 appointed in different portfolios to manipulate the destiny of the Africans and looted resources for their home countries in their mission of the so-called civilization of the Black Africans in the forested zones. This is because the young generation of African historians who are shortsighted and thinking of demanding colonial crimes from their main Western European actors of the time have to know which of their agents were appointed and more research can been done on periodical considerations in order to rate the degree of atrocities and colonial crimes committed coupled with the looting of African extracted natural resources for the construction of Europe to the detriment of the African countries and Kingdoms they subdue even larger than their homeland. In 1778, the Spanish gained control of Equatorial Guinea via the Treaty of El Pardo which was an agreement between the Spain Empire and the Kingdom of Portugal. From 1778 to 1810 Spain directed Spanish Guinea through the Viceroyalty of the Río de la Plata, based in present-day Argentina. This marked the effective beginning of Spanish strength in the African territory and the British once more passed through Fernando Po, linking to the Bight of Biafra to show their presence in this part of the Gulf of Guinea in the name of British suzerainty. The scrutinized of diverse specialized sources and documents enable us to engage on historical method in our analyses using clear statistical table to censor

“Wives Wishing to Join Their Husbands”: Colonial Forgery, Gender Legibility, and Labor Migration in West Africa

AbstractEuropean mobilizations of Africans for labor relied on the forgery that Africans can be harnessed into modern units of capitalist production only when organized into households led by wage-earning men supported by domesticated women. Between the 1930s and 1950s, Nigerian male labor migrants to Fernando Po and Gabon, as well as their wives, advanced diverse forgeries in response to the legibility protocols that European states used to control African migrants. Nigerian men used colonial documentation of their status as husbands to claim women’s bodies. Nigerian women used colonial documentation as wives and mothers to mask autonomy, illicit mobility, child trafficking, and sex work. This article develops a historical theory of forgery to explain how colonial legibility protocols and African manipulations of colonial documents constituted gendering practices. It focuses on the diverse documentary strategies women developed to evade colonial surveillance, including photographs to manufacture kinship and colonial court records to generate identities as temporary wives and fictive mothers. As European agents and African men strove to exploit women’s economic and sexual capacities, women used documentary and social forgeries to exploit fissures in colonial rule and create autonomous spaces of mobility and economic opportunity.

Features of the Party System of the Republic of Equatorial Guinea

The foundations of political activity were laid in Equatorial Guinea during the colonial era. At that time, several ethnic-based parties were active, advocating the complete separation of the island of Fernando Po from the continental province of Rio Muni. After decolonization in 1968, power was effectively monopolized by the Fang people. The country was faced with the need to solve problems that could be solved by joint efforts of representatives of various political parties and social movements: improving the living standards of the population, creating health and education systems, economic and infrastructural development. However, in the political system of Equatorial Guinea, one-party rule in the form of the Democratic Party is firmly entrenched. In 1975, the population faced mass repressions, and the state administration as a system almost disappeared. Not only oppositionists were physically destroyed, but also people who were far from politics. In 1991, under pressure from the United Nations, Spain, and the United States, and under threat of suspension of economic aid, several opposition movements were allowed to operate in Equatorial Guinea. But the most active oppositionists ended up in prison. Currently, the role of the opposition in the political life of the country is small, the Democratic Party has dominated the country’s parliament for many years. The political system of Equatorial Guinea does not provide for the existence of an independent State structure whose function is to organize elections. The head of the National Election Commission is the country’s interior minister and one of the main figures in the ruling Democratic Party. For decades, the opposition’s discontent with the policies of the ruling party has been based not only on restrictions on the activities of the opposition itself, but also on the low standard of living of the population. In addition, the regime of one-party rule creates a negative image of the country in the international arena. Foreign donors often cite this former Spanish colony as a glaring example of social inequality.

Antislavery and Imperialism: The British Suppression of the Slave Trade and the Opening of Fernando Po, 1827–1829

AbstractThis article chronicles the construction of the first permanent foreign settlement on the West African island of Fernando Po (today called Bioko) as part of the British effort to suppress the slave trade in the 1820s. The settlement ended centuries of relative isolation by the indigenous Bubi who hitherto had successfully navigated between occasional trade with outsiders and repelling slave traders. Although British plans ultimately failed, the settlement remained, as did a large portion of the settlers. This article argues that the disruptive power of suppression created the conditions for a colonial shift toward integration of the island into the larger Euro–West African world. While the settlement's influence grew in the short term through its successful leveraging of economic and military resources, it was the landing of liberated slaves that would have the greatest long-term significance, and highlights the (often unintentional) connection between antislavery and imperialism.

Problems of Agricultural Sector in Oil-Producing Countries of Africa: Equatorial Guinea

The Republic of Equatorial Guinea (REG) is one of the least populated countries in Africa. Prior to the discovery of large oil and gas reserves on its shelf, it was one of the poorest countries in the world in terms of income. Being a typical backward agricultural country with a monocultural export structure, the REG provided the bulk of its foreign exchange earnings through the supply of cocoa beans to foreign markets, the cultivation of which was established on the island of Fernando Po (now Bioco) during the Spanish rule. With the onset of the oil boom, the REG has a new income item, and the economic importance of agriculture in creating GDP fell sharply. With an increase of the inflow of petrodollars, the bulk of the budget funds intended for the development of the economy was spent on the realization and maintenance of expensive infrastructure projects. Stagnant agriculture, unable to meet the needs of the population not engaged in agricultural production, remained outside the scope of the state’s financial and economic policy. Together with the rapidly increasing rural-urban migration this inevitably exacerbated the problem of food security. It was accompanied by a fall in export agricultural production. Since the beginning of the 2000s, the unfavorable global situation in the hydrocarbon market has led to the cessation of the inflow of new foreign investments and a reduction in oil production. The REG authorities have developed a program to diversify the sources of economic growth through the development of industries not related to the exploitation of irreplaceable natural raw materials. First of all, this applies to agriculture, which has a large and underexploited resource potential.

The Deportation of Political Prisoners to Fernando Po and the Spanish State (1866–68)

The Deportation of Political Prisoners to Fernando Po and the Spanish State (1866–68) Dan Royle In the summer of 1866, nineteen radical leaders were sentenced to deportation to Fernando Po—now Bioko in Equatorial Guinea, then a Spanish imperial possession—for fomenting popular revolution. In February 1867, two of these men managed to escape but, by the time they returned to the Peninsula, a competing elite revolution had already been set in motion. Their deportation ensured that the nineteen played no part in organising the popular response to the initial coup d'état in September 1868, although some did participate in the extemporaneous barricade fighting that followed. The character of this popular response meant that the elites were able to impose a postrevolutionary settlement which excluded more radical elements. Those deported in the years before 1868—including the nineteen—came to have prominent roles in local and national government in the years that followed. Had they remained in Spain and continued to organise, the balance of power immediately after revolution might have been different. As it was, the nineteen men and their experience have largely been forgotten in favour of the military leaders of the coup d'état and the elite government that was installed thereafter. Deportation had long been a feature of the Spanish imperial experience, but relatively few political prisoners were ever sent from the metropolis: several thousand before 1868, primarily to North Africa and the Philippines. Only 1,600 political prisoners were sent to Fernando Po in the entire period between 1861 and 1895.1 The majority of Spanish deportations were between two colonies, often for non-political reasons.2 Nevertheless, it had formed an important part of the government's reaction to unsuccessful popular revolutionary attempts in both 1848 and 1861. And in the years before 1868, the tool was wielded with unprecedented reach and frequency in an attempt to remove the threat of popular revolution altogether. The deportation of the nineteen to Fernando Po in 1866 was a continuation of this tradition, but also a radical departure. Transporting deportees to an isolated, tropical island required a more sophisticated state apparatus than previous waves, a challenge that was not only practical but also conceptual. It demonstrated the aspirations of the state not just in terms of counter-revolutionary politics, but also its colonial project and its justice system. These aspirations proved largely irreconcilable. Deportation is an amorphous form of punishment, the reality of which depends on the individual experience of the deportee and the way his or her story is told.3 Yet it is inherently violent, dually so, both in process and result. In the Spanish case, it was also a reflection of the structural violence of the state in this period. Consistently powerless to broaden citizenship beyond a narrow elite, its only recourse was to violence. The deportation of the nineteen to Fernando Po was an example of its failure to convert victory over political opponents into hegemonic legitimacy.4 Weber's theory that the state has the monopoly on the legitimate use of violence has limits in the imperial context, but it remains true that state violence need not be callous and indiscriminate.5 Indeed it could even have been legitimated; the nineteen deportees, for example, were convicted as part of a constitutional judicial process and sentenced to a legal punishment by state functionaries. Nevertheless, this relied on a legitimacy which the Spanish state lacked; "only a legitimate entity can punish, all others abuse."6 A Precarious Colonisation Approached as the sun sets over the Bight of Biafra, Fernando Po could appear to be a tropical island paradise; the first European to visit called it Formosa Flora (beautiful flower). But such first impressions belie the difficulties the early colonists faced. Richard Burton, the British consul in the 1860s, recalled feeling "uncommonly suicidal" through his first night on the island.7 Around the same time, the captain of a US anti-slaving ship wrote that it possessed "as many of the requisites for forming an uncomfortable disagreeable place, as any other locality in the world."8 And yet, to many Spaniards, who increasingly mythologised the lost American colonies, Fernando Po represented something of...

Cameroonian Schutztruppe Soldiers in Spanish-Ruled Fernando Po during the First World War: A ‘Menace to the Peace’?

When the German forces were ousted from Cameroon in early 1916, they fled south to neutral Spanish Guinea. Tens of thousands of Cameroonians joined them. Over 20,000 African soldiers and hangers-on were eventually accommodated by the Spanish authorities on the island Fernando Po, off the Cameroonian coast. Despite mounting Allied pressure on Spain to disband and repatriate the troops, they remained on the island until after armistice. They were largely under German control, and received military training during their internment. The delayed repatriation of Cameroonian soldiers, in 1919, had a pronounced effect on their communities at home.

Transported Identities: Global Trafficking and Late-Imperial Subjectivity in Cuban Narratives on African Penal Colonies

AbstractThis article studies the reformulation of Black Legend, Middle Passage andconvivenciadiscourses in nineteenth-century narratives published by Cubans sent to Spain's de facto penal colony on Fernando Po. Contextualised with archival sources, this reading highlights how deportees condemned Spain's perpetuation of the slave trade while struggling to negotiate their own positioning within the racially-stratified practices of late-imperial space. Those negotiations often exacerbated traditional divisions between different communities within the Spanish colonial system. In some instances, however, the deportees’ encounters with citizens and colonised subjects from distant territories may have bolstered and expanded intra-imperial identification and solidarity.

Uma bicoca na costa da África: a política espanhola para o tráfico de escravos, o <em>Reglamento de Comercio Libre</em> e as fronteiras ibéricas na América do Sul (1776-1778)

El Tratado de San Ildefonso, suscrito por España y Portugal en 1777, establecía la demarcación de límites entre los imperios ibéricos en el Nuevo Mundo. Algunas de sus cláusulas también determinaban la cesión a España de las islas portuguesas de Fernando Poo y Annobón, situadas en el Golfo de Guinea. Carlos III y su secretario de estado, Floridablanca, deseaban obtener un territorio en la costa de África con el fin de nacionalizar la trata de esclavos en el imperio español. Este artículo examina los intereses y las condiciones que suscitaron el acuerdo para traspaso de la soberanía de las islas africanas y analiza las razones que impidieron a España consolidar su participación en el comercio negrero. Se argumenta que para comprender la política española con respecto a la trata de esclavos en las décadas de 1770 y 1780 es necesario examinarla a la luz del proceso de elaboración del «Reglamento de Comercio Libre» y de los conflictos territoriales hispano-portugueses en la América del Sur.
 
 [pt] O Tratado de Santo Ildefonso, firmado entre Espanha e Portugal em 1777, previa a demarcação de limites entre os impérios ibéricos no Novo Mundo. Algumas de suas cláusulas também determinavam que Portugal cedesse à Espanha as ilhas de Fernando Pó e Ano Bom, no Golfo da Guiné. Carlos III e Floridablanca, seu secretário de estado, desejavam obter um território na costa africana para permitir a atuação direta de comerciantes espanhóis no tráfico transatlântico de escravos. Este artigo examina os interesses e as condições que suscitaram o acordo para transferência da soberania das ilhas africanas e analisa os motivos que impediram a Espanha de firmar sua presença no comércio negreiro. Argumenta que para compreender a política espanhola para o tráfico de escravos nas décadas de 1770 e 1780 é preciso examiná-la à luz do processo de elaboração do «Reglamento de Comercio Libre» e dos conflitos territoriais hispano-portugueses na América do Sul.

African diaspora and the circulation of language: Cuban and Afro-Cuban loanwords in Equatorial Guinea

AbstractWhen in 1861 nearly 200 emancipated black Cubans settled in the “Barrio Congo” of Fernando Po to work in public construction, a process of language contact initiated. Four years later, a few hundred political activists were deported from Cuba to Fernando Po because of their potential influence in the Cuban revolution. This historical episode might have triggered Cubans’ and Afro-Cubans’ lexical transfers to the Spanish spoken in Fernando Po as a result of the two-way connection of the transatlantic slave trade. Based on royal decrees, archival material and the memoirs of Cuban exiles (Balmaseda, Francisco Javier. [1869] 1874.

Tracing the Itineraries of Working Concepts across African History

This essay takes as its starting point a question: do historians of Africa's early and more recent pasts need each other's histories when studying the relationship between work and mobility?1 A response in the negative foregrounds the differences between the economic and political worlds of Africans living before the fifteenth century and the economic and political worlds of merchant capitalism, industrial capitalism, colonialism, independence, and neoliberalism.2 This answer suggests that as people moved for the purpose of work from the early modern period, the ties forged (and severed) between people and with objects were dramatically changed from the strategies of earlier communities. We may well ask whether labor is even an applicable concept for periods before interactions between Africans and Europeans.It is easy to agree that there are great differences in the histories of movement and work across the chronological divides that structure African historiography. But we might also imagine these divides as thresholds through which we peer, gaining a rich but necessarily partial view of each other's knowledge about the common problems and questions that animate our scholarship in different ways. When we survey each other's fields to (at the very least) keep abreast of trends that impact our teaching, we recognize change and continuity differently: what is foreign on one side of the threshold is often well-known and well-studied on the other side. Practices that appear novel in the early modern and modern periods might look like an iteration of a durable strategy from the perspective of the medieval and early African pasts, not the least because specialists in these periods tend to write about much longer periods of time.Some of the articles in this issue already straddle such chronological thresholds, looking both forward and back to draw out continuities and changes. Martino, for example, recognizes parallels between the colonial regimes of the plantations of Spanish Fernando Po and earlier regimes of slavery. These similarities have inspired some scholars, Martino explains, to suggest the emergence of neo-slavery in West Africa in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Yet, Martino also insists that the legal framework of the contract changed significantly the strategies of touts, recruiters, who would have been responsible for enslavement in an economy based on neo-slavery. The efforts of touts were, Martino argues, a unique, non-violent form of banditry that was entirely dependent on the skill and savoir-faire of trickster-recruiters. In contrast, Keese looks forward in time. He describes the complex history of forced in the French Congo and compares the strategies of the colonial state to those of the post-colonial state. Keese uses Jean-Francois Bayart's argument that political control and control depended on corporeal punishment in independent Africa, seeing in Bayart's thesis great continuity with the colonial period, even while keeping open the possible influence of Soviet regimes on post-colonial practices.3Like Martino and Keese, this essay seeks to peer across chronological thresholds, albeit from the perspective of a student of earlier periods. The insistence that precolonial pasts matter is by no means a new perspective. For well over a decade historians have called for (and demonstrated the significance of) greater attention to histories that predate colonialism in efforts to understand the twentieth century.4 The success of the earliest such calls have, themselves, been called into question, as historians increasingly focus on writing postcolonial histories and as fewer train in the methods of recovering earlier, undocumented pasts.5 But it is possible to perceive in recent scholarship a (perhaps growing) interest in connecting the recent past to much older histories. New work tracks across centuries and sometimes millennia how earlier ideas about race and ethnicity, perceptions of the environment, and changing practices of faith, motherhood, and politics inform the histories of colonialism and even the decades after Independence. …

Antonio Maura y el papel del II Reich en las negociaciones hispano-francesas sobre Marruecos de 1903-1904

The first part of the article tackles the problem that Antonio Maura came up against when he became head of the Spanish government, in late 1903, consisting in concluding the negotiation process on Morocco, under way with France since 1901. It stresses the way that Maura’s colonial ideology followed on in the footsteps of the former con servative leader, Silvela’s approach, as well as the preponderance of issues such as national security in motivating these ideas. The second part explains the appeal made by Maura’s government for aid from Germany, in line with earlier movements of German diplomacy, which had become interested in controlling part of Spanish Morocco, or in gaining compensations in Fernando Po. There is finally an analysis of Berlin’s attempt to exploit Maura’s government in the course of the Spanish-French conversations on the Jerife Empire.

Structure of the crust beneath Cameroon, West Africa, from the joint inversion of Rayleigh wave group velocities and receiver functions

The Cameroon Volcanic Line (CVL) is a major geologic feature that cuts across Cameroon from the south west to the north east. It is a unique volcanic lineament which has both an oceanic and a continental sector and consists of a chain of Tertiary to Recent, generally alkaline volcanoes stretching from the Atlantic island of Pagalu to the interior of the African continent. The oceanic sector includes the islands of Bioko (formerly Fernando Po) and Sao Tome and Principe while the continental sector includes the Etinde, Cameroon, Manengouba, Bamboutos, Oku and Mandara mountains, as well as the Adamawa and Biu Plateaus. In addition to the CVL, three other major tectonic features characterize the region: the Benue Trough located northwest of the CVL, the Central African Shear Zone (CASZ), trending N70 degrees E, roughly parallel to the CVL, and the Congo Craton in southern Cameroon. The origin of the CVL is still the subject of considerable debate, with both plume and non-plume models invoked by many authors (e.g., Deruelle et al., 2007; Ngako et al, 2006; Ritsema and Allen, 2003; Burke, 2001; Ebinger and Sleep, 1998; Lee et al, 1994; Dorbath et al., 1986; Fairhead and Binks, 1991; King and Ritsema,more » 2000; Reusch et al., 2010). Crustal structure beneath Cameroon has been investigated previously using active (Stuart et al, 1985) and passive (Dorbath et al., 1986; Tabod, 1991; Tabod et al, 1992; Plomerova et al, 1993) source seismic data, revealing a crust about 33 km thick at the south-western end of the continental portion of the CVL (Tabod, 1991) and the Adamawa Plateau, and thinner crust (23 km thick) beneath the Garoua Rift in the north (Stuart et al, 1985) (Figure 1). Estimates of crustal thickness obtained using gravity data show similar variations between the Garoua rift, Adamawa Plateau, and southern part of the CVL (Poudjom et al., 1995; Nnange et al., 2000). In this study, we investigate further crustal structure beneath the CVL and the adjacent regions in Cameroon using 1-D shear wave velocity models obtained from the joint inversion of Rayleigh wave group velocities and P-receiver functions for 32 broadband seismic stations. From the 1-D shear wave velocity models, we obtain new insights into the composition and structure of the crust and upper mantle across Cameroon. After briefly reviewing the geological framework of Cameroon, we describe the data and the joint inversion method, and then interpret variations in crustal structure found beneath Cameroon in terms of the tectonic history of the region.« less

The Topography of the Early History of African Photography

African historians' interest in photographic sources is still rather recent and can be traced back to the mid-1980s. Today, after more than twenty years of research, we know the general outlines of the history of African photography, but have yet to move beyond the larger picture. In having a close look at some centres of the early history of West and Central African photography such as Sierra Leone, Fernando Po and Gabon, as well as at the professional careers of African photographers such as Francis W. Joaque, this paper will contribute to a better and deeper understanding of the early history of West African and Central African photography. Research using and comparing photographs and textual sources from the archive of the Atlantic Visualscape displays a world and a time between 1850 and 1900 when African photographers moved beyond cultural, political and linguistic boundaries to explore potentials in an increasingly competitive market.

8. Missing Ancestors and Missing Narratives

8. Missing Ancestors and Missing Narratives Andrew Lyons This paper evaluates Sir Richard Burton's claim to be an intellectual progenitor of a discipline which abhors his values and ignores his work. Burton's reputation recently underwent a paradoxical revival, particularly in some gay circles, although he was overtly homophobic, racist, sexist and anti-Semitic. His links to critics of Victorian censorship and sexual orthodoxy (as well as to the pornographic imaginary) are examined along with his writings on African, European, Indian, Mormon, and Semitic sexuality and marriage. His career may be compared with that of other, rarely acknowledged disciplinary ancestors such as Verrier Elwin, Edward Carpenter, and Havelock Ellis, all of whom discussed sexuality (see below; see also Lyons and Lyons 2004:100–130, 231–238). In general terms we ask why some names, careers, and narratives are included in or excluded from histories of anthropology. These processes obviously influence our choices as to which books we shall read and which messages we shall heed, whether we are anthropologists, historians of anthropology, ethnohistorians, students or lay people. A decision to omit someone from a historical survey may be overdetermined by many disciplinary and political traditions. Sir Richard Burton (1821–90) was vice president of the Anthropological Society of London—one of the two parents of the Royal Anthropological Institute—and briefly president of the London Anthropological Society, although he took part in few meetings because he was continually abroad. He served as a soldier in India in the 1840s and took part briefly in the Crimean War. He served as a somewhat undiplomatic diplomat in Fernando Po, Brazil, Damascus, and Trieste. He explored Arabia, Somalia, Ethiopia, and the area near Lake Tanganyika. His acrid dispute with John Hanning Speke over the source of the Nile led to the latter's (presumed) suicide. Burton spent three months in Dahomey and visited the Yoruba. He traveled through the North American Plains and visited Utah. Most notably, he visited Mecca disguised as a pilgrim. He [End Page 148] translated the Kama Sutra, The Perfumed Garden, the erotic poetry of Catullus, and produced a multi-volume edited translation of The Arabian Nights. He spoke twenty-five languages or dialects. He was a pioneer in the anthropological study of sex and a savage critic of Victorian sexual orthodoxy ("Mrs. Grundy"). He developed the first anthropological theory of homosexuality. He also edited a collection of West African proverbs, and wrote about Plains Indian sign language. We shall document many reasons why he should be included in histories of anthropology. Burton has been the subject of many major biographies. These include the works of Byron Farwell (1963), Fawn Brodie (1967), Edward Rice (1990), Frank McLynn (1990), Mary Lovell (2000) and Dane Kennedy (2005). McLynn and Kennedy (particularly) have quite a bit to say about Burton's anthropology. Other scholars who have written about Burton include Stephen O. Murray (1997), Patrick Brantlinger (1988) and Mary Louise Pratt (1992). To the late Edward Said (1979:194–197) Burton was the least intolerable of the major nineteenth-century Orientalist scholars: "He was preternaturally knowledgeable about the degree to which human life in society was governed by rules and codes" (1979:195). Because of his reputation as a swashbuckling explorer Burton is the subject of TV documentaries from time to time and he was also the subject of a popular film, Mountains of the Moon. Because of his terminal essay (in volume 10 of The Thousand Nights and a Night) and his unpublished (and perhaps nonexistent) report to Napier about male brothels in Karachi, the ostensibly homophobic Burton has become an avatar of gay liberation. He was revived from the dead in order to reappear in 1990s Toronto as a curator of an exhibit about AIDS who is dissuaded from his homophobic obsession with Patient Zero when he falls in love with another male protagonist in the film musical Zero Patience. However, he was not revived in the pages of Robert Lowie, T. Penniman, Marvin Harris, John Honigmann, or Alan Barnard. He makes a brief and derisory appearance in Stocking's Victorian Anthropology (1987:253) and in After Tylor (1995:28)—significantly enough in a footnote in which the author...

The Dove

In the mid 1840s the Baptist Missionary Society decided that, rather than pay for the passage of missionaries and materials to Fernando Po, an island in the Bight of Biafra off the West Coast of Africa, they would commission a ship of their own to be built, The Dove.

From Slavery to Neoslavery: The Bight of Biafra and Fernando Po in the Era of Abolition, 1827-1930

From Slavery to Neoslavery: The Bight of Biafra and Fernando Po in the Era of Abolition, 1827-1930

From slavery to neoslavery: the bight of Biafra and Fernando Po in the era of abolition, 1827-1930

From slavery to neoslavery: the bight of Biafra and Fernando Po in the era of abolition, 1827-1930