Domesticating the World: African Consumerism and the Genealogies of Globalization

6. Picturesque Contradictions: Taxonomies of East Africa

Chapter 6 Picturesque Contradictions Taxonomies of East Africa 147 On holiday in Zanzibar in the late 1880s, big-game hunter John C. Willoughby visited Sultan Barghash’s palace at Chukwani. “I had always been under the impression that a Sultan’s palace was indescribably blaze [sic] of pillars set with sparkling gems of incalculable value,” Willoughby wrote in his memoir, “and thus if you could pick out a single loose stone and return with it to your native land, a life with such ease and comfort as results from a large revenue . . . would be your just reward.” On arrival at Chukwani, Willoughby found neither the gems nor the incalculable value that he imagined. Instead, he found European chairs, chandeliers , Parisian mirrors, and colored prints from English Christmas periodicals . He was disgusted by the scene, despite the expense of the chandeliers and the opulence of much of the decor. The only things he found appealing were the “Turkish baths” and carpets—those things that most signified the Oriental exoticism he expected of Zanzibar.1 Willoughby’s presumptions, published a year before the formal acquisition of Zanzibar as a British protectorate, as well as later appraisals of Chukwani, reveal the great dissonance between the alterity Westerners hoped to find in Zanzibar and the actuality of East African cosmopolitanism . The perceptions of East Africa that were born of such dissonance and, more precisely, the efforts to explain it, were part of an analytical frame predicated on notions of race and discrete materialities. This frame, developed at the height of European and American fascination with the region, would shape the popular rhetoric of British intervention in East Africa, and, just as important, provide perceptual building blocks for British colonial attitudes toward East Africans. Indeed, the legacies of nineteenth-century ways of seeing still inform perceptions of the East African region, and nowhere more than Zanzibar.2 Michael Adas’s work, among other surveys of the ways in which Europeans’ valuations of their own material culture (most notably new technologies) have shaped the way Westerners perceived non-Western people , points to the important place of materiality in ideologies of imperial expansion.3 This chapter approaches imperial perceptions somewhat differently . It asks what happened when Europeans encountered their own material culture and technologies among those who were not subject to European rule and who gave new meanings to Western manufactures. To answer this question, the chapter considers how Anglophone travelwriters , missionaries, scientists, and consulate administrators referenced the cultural and material environments of East Africa to create an image of the region. The particular forms of image-making that I address arose from (1) a desire to compare East African materiality to Western ideals of “civilization ,” and (2) a discord between preconceived images and the cultural, economic, and social complexity that visitors like John C. Willoughby encountered. The concepts—that East Africans were internally contradicted , degenerate, and desperately needed the assistance of the West to engage successfully with modernity—that were embodied in resulting images represent a broader Western conceptualization of the world in the era of high imperialism. The internal contradiction that analysts came to see in East Africans, superficially evidenced by their mixing of “Oriental” and European furniture, umbrellas and nakedness, merry-go-rounds and veiled women, is an analytical invention born of nineteenth-century theories of difference, theories that continue to affect perceptions of Africa and much of the world.4 Difference was the guiding conceptual tool for all of the interpretations of East Africa that I consider below. While difference is a human fact, its rationalization and the repercussions of its meaning deserve careful scrutiny. By considering nineteenth-century images of East Africa, we can perceive some of the ways in which Western analysts defined difference, represented it, and gave it coherence, meaning, and consequence for themselves and East Africans. Hierarchies, Images, and East Africa in the West The alterity Africa evidenced was not simply one of variance. By the mid–nineteenth century, many Westerners imagined difference as evi148 Picturesque Contradictions dence of humanity’s developmental hierarchy inscribed in slippery, imprecise, and changing ideas of race.5 A discourse of natural human social stratification pervaded most accounts of East Africa, and this was firmly bound to the visible, therefore easily qualifiable and recordable, characteristics of populations, such as physical appearance and dress. Images of East Africa were scant before the mid-nineteenth century. The region captured the Anglophone world’s fascination...