Contesting Knowledge: Museums and Indigenous Perspectives

2. Ethnographic Showcases as Sites of Knowledge Production and Indigenous Resistance

45 2 Ethnographic Showcases as Sites of Knowledge Production and Indigenous Resistance zine magubane The Ethnographic Exhibit Unveiled The Intersection of Show Business and Racial Science In May of 1853 the Athenaeum, a popular British magazine, carried an item in the weekly gossip column about the popularity of human exhibitions (also known as ethnographic showcases). The article noted that “a man may travel a great deal without seeing so many varieties of the human race as are constantly to be seen in London.”1 Ethnographic showcases were the equivalent of human zoos wherein Indigenous people were exhibited for the amusement of the English viewing public and for the profitability of show owners and exhibitors as well as to satisfy the evidentiary needs of ethnographers and anthropologists. This paper will discuss the role that ethnographic showcases played in the production, dissemination , and ordering of knowledge about Africa and Africans. Although ethnographic showcases played a key role in staging Africa and Africans in ways that supported the aims of colonialism, the Africans who were exhibited did not allow themselves to be silenced. By reading between the lines of the historical record, it is possible to retrieve and reconstruct African voices and opinions—about European society, Europeans, colonialism , and conquest. Ethnographic showcases were immensely popular in England during the nineteenth century. As displays, they were “living nineteenth century versions of the early twentieth century museum diorama .”2 The showcases provided a unique degree of excitement and titillation because they featured racial “others” in states of near or complete undress performing the intimate rituals surrounding everything from 46 magubane weddings to warfare. The ability to gawk and gaze, without restraint, was something large numbers of the English viewing public found irresistible . The following description of an ethnographic showcase, “The Zulu Kaffirs at the St. George’s Gallery, Knightsbridge,”3 which appeared in the Illustrated London News of May 28, 1853, gives some of the flavor of what these shows were like: This brand of wild but interesting savages are taking such high rank among the metropolitan exhibitions of the present season, and represent so faithfully the manners, habits, and costume of their tribe, that we give an Illustration of a scene in their performances. A number of huts, such as they occupy, are placed upon the stage with an African landscape in the background; and, one by one, the savages make their appearance, engaged in the pursuits of their everyday life. After a supper of meal, of which the Kaffirs partake with their large wooden spoons, an extraordinary song and dance are performed, in which each performer moves about on his haunches, grunting and snorting the while like a pair of asthmatic bellows. . . . The scene illustrative of the preliminaries of marriage and the bridal festivities might leave one in doubt which was the bridegroom, did not that interesting savage announce his enviable situation by screams of ecstasy which convulse the audience. . . . The exhibition is illustrated by some excellent panoramic scenery, painted by Marshall, from sketches made in Kaffirland. The various scenes in the entertainment are explained by an intelligent young lecturer.4 South Africa was a particularly rich source of human subjects for ethnological exhibits. Indeed, a stroll through what the Illustrated London News of June 12, 1847, called, “the ark of zoological wonders—Egyptian Hall, Piccadilly,” yielded a view of, “extraordinary Bushpeople brought from South Africa.”5 Visitors to Cosmorama, Regent Street, could see “a very interesting exhibition of three natives of Southern and Eastern Africa .”6 The sight of “Bushmen in their trees” and “the preliminaries of Kaffir marriage and bridal festivities” entertained visitors to the St. George’s Gallery in Knightsbridge. The latter came courtesy of a Mr. A. T. Caldecott , who returned from Natal with twelve Zulus in tow.7 Ethnographic Showcases 47 The popularity and availability of Africans from South Africa stemmed in large part from the frontier wars that the British were waging against African people in their quest for imperial dominance. The so-called Kaffir Wars of 1835, 1847, 1851, and 1879, for example, were waged by the British with the sole objective of reducing the Xhosa people to impotence through systematic invasion and confiscation of their lands and cattle. The English were of the mind that “the only really effective way to reduce the Xhosa to complete dependence was to burn his huts and kraals, to drive off his cattle, to destroy his corn...