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For
an African (and in my case, South African) reader, it must be unimaginable to
think that barely the elite of erstwhile mid-19th century Britain
was informed on and about Africa. After all, Britain affirmed its authority in
South Africa for way more than a century after 1806, followed by approximately
4000 British Settlers entering the country in 1820. Leila Koivunen allows these
thoughts to crosses one's mind in Visualizing Africa in Nineteenth-Century
British Travel Accounts, which makes worthy reading on the traveling
history of the British in Africa through Western eyes.
Koivunen,
in an informed and structured way, explain how organised travelling to Africa
initially was to share alien and foreign continental information with the broad
British people. Danger and health risks were part of this
adventurous package. Yet, as explained in Visualizing Africa, enough
brave and courageous professionals from a variety of stands, backgrounds and
skills attempted the challenges and have contributed to understand Africa from
a variety of different visual mediums. These various modes of visual
expressions are assessed by Koivunen from a modern day post-colonial insight.
In hindsight, it is so much easier to identify stereotyping practises and
distortions ordered on native Africa by British travellers. Koivunen has
a special close engagement with particularly early British traveling accounts in
field sketches and wood engravings, with the intention to understand how
distorted and stereotyped imagery of Africa was initially constructed. Her
approach and visual dimensions chosen is a refreshing new approach to the
African academic discourse mainly visible in written contributions. To engage
with the distorted and stereotyped imagery on Africa, Koivunen structured her
book in two parts with four chapters each.
The
first part of Visualizing Africa mainly covers a literature exposé on
visual views of Africa, complimented by what the ideal is for visual
documentation. She continues by debating issues around problematic
picturing before uncovering to the reader how Africa is captured in pictures in
chapter four. Chapter five mainly is a representation of experiences and
ways of disseminations by explorers on selections of the African environmental
and indigenous landscape. To what extent financial and persona gains features
in some of the travellers' intentions of visualising Africa to the British
masses, appears less prominent in Visualizing Africa, but to Africans Europe's
economic gains in pre-colonial and colonial Africa will remain an inevitable
question, inclusive of possible financial gains in British traveling imagery
accounts.
Chapter
six covers the daunting process of imagery selection based on several published
examples, with Chapter seven revealing, in a very stimulating writing style, the
inevitable transformation of images. Chapter eight conceals the
modification process of original African images as a means to cope with the
"Unknown Continent," but not necessarily to always depict an absolute lifelike
reflection of reality. Koivunen, in the summarizing conclusion of Visualizing
Africa, confirms the impossibility of authenticity in the publications of
British travel accounts due to constructions and transformations before
publication. Furthermore, the visualising of Africa by pioneering nineteenth
century British travellers was mostly connected with their Western
understanding of what will be of interest or value to the community they
"cater" for. The "other" as the different (for example African nakedness)
is frequently featured, probably more than curiosity than to inform.
Though
Adrian S Wisnicki in Victorian Studies (2010:673–675) so well
articulates Koivunen's notable extensive literature contribution to the
critical theoretical debate on Victorian travel images (and Wisnicki's
impressions are endorsed), a lack of intercultural representation indeed is a
concern and will remain an obstruction progressing towards a representative
debate among scholars in and outside the continent. Impressions by
Africans on outsider expressions via various visual mediums, are equally due. Apart
from absences and silences in African scholarship in so many debates about
Africa, First World learning should perhaps take more cognisance of scientific
contributions coming from the continent on some pioneering British travellers
in parts of books and in articles. One such example from African scholarship is
that of Johann Tempelhoff's on David Livingstone and his perspectives (also
visually) on nineteenth-century water in Southern Africa (New Contree, 57,
2009). However, having said this, it must be accentuated that Koivunen's
outstanding contribution in the field of British traveling in Africa certainly
acknowledges her as one of the leading Western scholars in this field.
Elize
Van Eeden is a Professor at North-west University in South Africa, and has
published more than sixty scholarly articles and is the author of "Didactical guidelines for teaching history in a
changing South Africa" (Potchefstroom: Keurkopie Uitgewers, 1999). She is
currently chairperson of the South African Society for History Teaching and
editor of the accredited peer reviewed scientific journals Yesterday and
Today and New Contree. She can be contacted at elize.vaneeden@nwu.ac.za |
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