Empires of the Visual Photography and Colonial Administration in Africa - Management Assignment Help

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There were two interfaces for Westerners’ contacts with Africans during the colonial era. The first was actual: trading, working, having sex, sharing a joke or a beer; policing, killing, and negotiating; requesting, releasing or denying consents and licenses, paying taxes; prevaricating, appealing, judging, and so on. The second was virtual: the paper-thin barrier composed of photographs, words on stationery, and images projected onto screens. Both interfaces supported a kind of two-way traffic, as the essays in this book show. Nonetheless the second one most often positioned Europeans as observers of Africans. In fact, it was only by way of the written word and of the printed image that most Europeans knew anything at all about the places their countrymen were busy ruling. No one doubts that writing became an indispensable tool in European empires. Consider, for example, the subject of real estate. Sub-Saharan Africans fully understood that various kinds of rights in land could be granted and denied. What was foreign to most of them was the embodiment of rights in paper representations of the landscape: maps, title deeds, morgen counts, written laws, and so forth. A constant appeal to the treaties signed by agents of mercantile companies and nineteenth-century chiefs was novel. Ultimately Europeans’ familiarity with and enforcement of the conventions governing the use of all these signs gave them an insurmountable advantage. After the establishment of European overrule, carbon copies, telegraphy, typewriters, and printing continued to be critical to the everyday functioning of colonial institutions. Mimeographed directives depersonalized demands. Pamphlets of “native law” and court reports legitimized jurisprudence. Triplicate forms validated transactions, secured funding, and sta141 bilized institutional memories. Back in the Colonial Office in London, the printed signs that administrators shuffled around on their desks served them more surely than living people for conveying their wishes. One dispatched them and went to lunch. The other medium for colonialism’s representational encounter was the image. Unlike the published and printed word, the mechanically reproduced image relied on contemporary developments in technology: cameras, celluloid film, half-tone screens. Daniel Headrick’s widely read book The Tools of Empire discusses various inventions in the nineteenth century that permitted Europeans to extend their imperial power; he describes breech-loading rifles, Gatling guns, steamships, and quinine as indispensable colonizing tools. In much the same way, it might be argued, the technologies for producing images were tools of empire too. Headrick discusses the great changes brought about by the laying of submarine cables. Between Africa and various Western metropoles those lines transmitted not only written words (and later, speech), but also “wire-service” pictures.1 Other images traveled more slowly, by ship or by airplane, but chromolithographs, lantern slides, stereoscopy, private photographs, cinema, and thousands of postcards all crossed great distances. All of them bore images of the new imperialism that were otherwise inaccessible to various Western publics.2 What exactly all those images displayed is, of course, something else. The way Africans were pictured and the selection of which pictures circulated—and where— were the results of many individual decisions, and they cannot be reduced to a formula. Moreover, while pictures appear very specific in their denotations, they are vulnerable—even more than are texts—to widely varying interpretations. In other words, if photography became a concrete tool of empire, it is also true that the apparent meaning of particular photographs is a slippery matter. This essay seeks to unite these two ideas into a single approach to understanding the role of photography in the colonial era in Africa.

THE RESOLUTION OF CATEGORIES

“Who but I should sing of you, your brother in arms, in blood?” Leopold Senghor wrote of the tirailleurs Sénégalais, French colonial African troops whose image had been used in advertisements for a cocoa breakfast drink. “I will tear down the banania smiles from every wall in France.”3 The hallmark of the mid-Victorian age was the “impulse to classify nature and man into types,”4 and the African soldier, before he became a logo, had been a type: staunch, dependable, loyal, French, and disposable. This sort of reductiveness was not by any means applied only to blacks or Africans. Robert Knox, Pierre Paul Broca, John Beddoe, and most famously Linnaeus and later Gobineau, all sought to arrange, rank, and essentialize all humankind, “Caucasians” included. Each of their efforts relied on an assumption: that a useful classificatory scheme must be capable of being indexed by visible signs of difference.5 142 PAUL S. LANDAU Figure 5.1. Advertisement for Banania, a brand of cocoa breakfast drink. © Bestfoods France. Martin Jay has referred to the results of such synechdochic connections as constituting “empires” of visualization.6 The simile of “empire” is more than appropriate, for while Broca and Knox were debating the relative purity of humanity’s various distinct types, the (British East India) “Company School” of painting, in that empire called the Raj, was reducing India’s humanity to visual categories.7 Just as zoologists and botanists drew and catalogued species from life, so such painters depicted peoples. Emblematic types were not necessarily caricatures. The midVictorian British Pre-Raphaelites, for instance, praised the benefits of painting from nature, and when Holman Hunt sought to render biblical scenes with “complete visual and archaeological correctness,” he scrutinized the faces of living residents of Palestine. Yet he too must have thought in terms of a catalogue of human variety when he wrote to Dante Gabriel Rossetti, “Think how valuable pictures of the social life of the tribes of men who are in this age undergoing revolutions would be in aftertimes.”8

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