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The Earliest Generation of Missionary Photographers in West Africa and the Portrayal of Indigenous People and Culture*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 May 2014

Paul Jenkins
Paul Jenkins*
Affiliation:
Basel Mission and University of Basel
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Extract

That photographs have been neglected in the study of African history has become, in recent years, a well-established truism. To take one point of entry into the literature which has set out to correct this deficiency: a Seminar held in SOAS in 1988 on “Photographs as Sources for African History” amply confirmed this point (Roberts 1988). The papers and discussions indicated the scope—and the problems—of some of the well-known and less well-known, holdings in this field. They also showed, however, that a number of scholars had already devoted considerable thought to the implications of historic photographic holdings for the pursuit of historical and anthropological studies not only in colonial history but also in African history per se. A similar point of entry for the German-speaking world is provided by the literature accompanying an important exhibition which toured a number of West German museums in 1989. “Der geraubte Schatten” concerned itself with the history of photography in the whole non-European world (Theye 1989; Ueber die Wichtigkeit 1990; see especially the essays by Wagner and Corbey for reflections on missionary photography).

Type
Research Article
Information
History in Africa , Volume 20 , 1993 , pp. 89 - 118
Copyright
Copyright © African Studies Association 1993

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Footnotes

*

I would like to dedicate this essay to the memory of Hans Ott, a Swiss protestant pastor who died in 1991 at the age of 49. For almost 20 years he was the General Secretary of one of the two major Swiss protestant development aid organizations, Brot für Brüder/Brot für Alle. He was committed to working for a new international economic order in which the efforts of traditional rural populations and the poor in the towns to keep body and soul together would add up to a viable economic basis for their lives. In this capacity he helped to bring about some important changes in language and action in Swiss public life in relation to the Third World. He also recognized very early on the potential importance of the photographic collection in the Basel Mission Archive, not least to present-day discussions about development and international mutual responsibility. The scope of our current work on this collection, both technical and historical, owes a lot to his interest.

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