Heinrich Barth et l'Afrique (review)

Heinrich Barth, a German geographer and historian who traveled to the Central and Western Sudan between 1849 and 1855 and published his accounts in English, German, and French, has been a critical source for the understanding of history and society in a broad swath of West Africa. In this book, the editors and a range of colleagues (historians, a few anthropologists, and one literary scholar), writing in French and occasionally in English, provide a multifaceted examination of this influential traveler and commentator. Many of the articles here were initially presented as papers at a conference in Timbuktu in 2004. The work is very carefully crafted, and it brings new insight to the reading and interpretation of Barth. The explorer died at the age of forty-four, just after taking up a professorship at the University of Berlin, and his early death limited the influence that he might have exercised into the last decades of the nineteenth century.

In general, Barth comes out well in these analyses, which are sensitive to the charges of bias, Eurocentrism, and orientalism. Gerd Spittler, a German anthropologist who has written extensively on European travelers, contributes a particularly insightful article, showing how Barth related to his African companions and informants, learned their languages (so that he did not need translators or intermediaries), and compiled his accounts—moving progressively from notebooks to journals to extended texts, and finally to the Travels and Discoveries in North and Central Africa in the Years 1849–1855. He shows Barth's preference for the company of African caravans as distinguished from European expeditions with their heavy infrastructure, and how this preference led to some of the main insights of his work. Mamadou Diawara, an anthropologist who heads the Frobenius Institute in Frankfurt, develops similar themes in his contribution, including a discussion of how Barth dealt with his acknowledged Christian identity in very Muslim settings.

At the same time, Barth's work was influenced by many of the conventions operative in European publications on Africa in the mid-nineteenth century. Achim von Oppen, a German historian (and who, as a descendant of Barth's sister, grew up with memories of his illustrious ancestor), gives a fascinating account of how the maps and drawings made in the field were reworked for the publications. The maps were rendered with some faithfulness by August Petermann and remain very useful today. The images were reworked by Martin Bernatz from the often rude sketches of Barth, and they were often done from Eurocentric notions of what a desert oasis or Sudanese town should look like. Color plates appeared only in some of the editions.

Von Oppen also brings attention to Abbega and Dorugu, two former slaves liberated and then employed by Barth during his stay in Kukawa about 1851. They traveled with Barth for the rest of his journeys, accompanied him to Europe, and then returned to what became Northern Nigeria, living into the twentieth century within the orbit of British colonial rule. Dorugu's account of his travels, Magana Hausa, which served the missionary Schön as a teaching and research source on Hausa, forms an interesting counternarrative to Barth's. (Dorugu's work was translated and annotated by Anthony Kirk-Greene and Paul Newman as one of the works included in their West African Travels and Adventures: Two Autobiographical Narratives from Northern Nigeria [Yale University Press, 1971]).

In general the authors credit Barth with valuing African perspectives and African history even in an age marked by Hegel's pejorative estimations. Muhammad Sani Umar argues that Barth should be exempted from many of the criticisms Edward Said leveled at Western academics and "ori-entalists." Maria Grosz-Ngaté offers a generally favorable judgment on his ethnographic observations, and Véronique Porra compares him quite favorably to René Caillié and Gerhard Rohlfs, who traveled to the Western Sudan before and after Barth did. At the same...