Bombay Africans 1850–1910 (review)

Fig. 1.

Agnes Livingstone, Thomas Livingstone, daughter and son of David Livingstone, Abdullah Susi, James Chumah and Reverend Horace Waller at Newstead Abbey, Nottingham discussing the journals, maps and plans made by the late David Livingstone. Photographer: R. Allen & Sons 1984.

This was the second in a series of exhibitions at the Royal Geographical Society to come out of their project, ‘Crossing Continents: Connecting Communities’ (funded by the Heritage Lottery). Aiming to uncover marginalized or ‘hidden’ histories embedded in the Society’s vast and unparalleled collections, these exhibitions acknowledge the non-European contribution to the history of the Society and its role in the history of exploration. The ‘Bombay Africans’ project draws attention to the men (and where feasible women) who accompanied, assisted and worked alongside British and other European explorers as guides, porters, interpreters, gun-bearers and so on. In so doing it demonstrates that explorers though typically cast as solitary heroes were heavily dependent on ‘local’ knowledge and support. Created in partnership with historian Cliff Pereira (Royal Geographical Society-IBG), the interpretations of historical materials, narratives and themes for this exhibition were developed through a series of workshops with the Tanzanian Women’s Association (London), Friends of Maasai People (Harrow), Congolese Community in the UK, Lancaster Youth Group (Ladbroke Grove, London), Ghanaian Elders Group (Black Cultural Archives, London) and O-Bay Community Trust (Edmonton, London). Incorporating some of the community responses from these sessions into the exhibition itself, ‘Bombay Afrians’ also attempts to convey something of the relevance of such ‘hidden’ histories today. With workshops and lectures accompanying each exhibition, the Crossing Continents project helps to bring Black and Asian histories into the public domain and to highlight the diverse historical geographies of Britain and their relevance today. For the ‘Bombay Africans’ exhibition these histories are located in the Indian Ocean, with a story of multiple threads, woven into broader histories of the slave trade and of the exploration of Africa.

The exhibition focuses on a group of Africans from diverse origins who came to be known as the ‘Bombay Africans’. These men, women and children had not migrated to Asia freely, but had been forcibly removed from Africa as part of the Indian Ocean slave trade. Freed from slavery by the British Navy who actively attempted to reduce trafficking in the Indian Ocean during the mid nineteenth century, they were relocated to India in an attempt to protect them from further enslavement. Many of them, as their collective name suggests, settled for some time in the Bombay Presidency of British India. The text on the exhibition panels offers considerable (even perhaps too much) detail about the Indian Ocean slave trade and the settlement of numerous freed Africans in Bombay. But this exhibition does not dwell on the evils or horrors of slavery. The archival material chosen to illustrate the slave trade panel for instance, functions as further evidence of the location of the slave trade in the Indian Ocean rather than to emphasize the material realities of slavery, with a reproduction of an 1820 lithograph by J. Harrison entitled ‘Capture of Madagascar Slaves’. The history of the Indian Ocean slave trade constitutes one strand of the exhibition’s broader narrative, providing context for a story about a small number of formerly enslaved Africans – a number of Bombay Africans who made a significant contribution both to the anti-slavery movement and to the exploration of Africa between 1850 and 1910. It is this latter narrative on the exploration of Africa that dominates the exhibition space.

The exhibition panels are laid out in the Society’s glass pavilion in such a way that no particular route through the exhibition and its narratives is demarcated. The starting point however is clear: the exhibition is introduced by a remarkable quotation from Joseph Thomson’s 1881 account of the Society’s East African Expedition, To the Central African Lakes and Back Again:

The vague expression of the ‘Expedition’, ‘we’, or the more egoistical ‘I’ is very apt to swallow up a...