Paper long abstract:

This paper draws on the research carried out for my MA thesis which explored the connections between political change and the use and formation of landscape in Zimbabwe’s second city, Bulawayo. The research draws on current post-colonial themes within geography that seek to deconstruct the landscape revealing colonial and broader power relationships and the marginalised voices lost to history. This paper considers not only the landscapes of white authority and black resistance but also the more subtle social groupings that can be revealed through understanding the way landscape is formed and represented. My work shows how the examination of landscape representations through imagery, cartography and literature reveal a more complex landscape than can be uncovered by focusing on traditional binaries of race, gender, domination and resistance. My research shows that landscape can be an important tool for exploring the problems of a post-colonial country as well as for challenging accepted categories within academia. Drawing on the work of a range of geographers, social scientists and anthropologists, many of which are African specialists I argue that understanding the construction and representation of landscape in Zimbabwe can help to paint a more complete picture of colonial society and its diverse range of actors, as well as helping us to understand something of the current problems facing the country.

Paper long abstract:

Recently scholars have begun to predict the “end” of postcolonial theory and suggest the need for new conceptual frameworks that “provincialize” colonial discourse and practice, that foreground other geographies and cultural traditions, and that join theory with empirical research and material history (for one such discussion, see “Editor’s Column: The End of Postcolonial Theory?,” <em>PMLA</em> 2007). Some have called for accounts that place historical actors, simultaneously, on local and global stages (Feierman 1994). Others have offered provocative methods for foregrounding the preconceptual elements that shaped colonial discourse (Young 2000) or have argued that concepts like “polycentricism” offer especially productive models for understanding the contribution of non-European populations to the development of “modernity” (Friedman 2007, 2008).

Responding to such critical work, this essay develops a new reading of Samuel White Baker’s 1864 encounter with the people of Bunyoro-Kitara (a region in the northwest of modern day Uganda) as detailed both in Baker’s exploration narrative, <em>The Albert N’Yanza</em> (1866), and his 1864 diary (currently held by the Royal Geographical Society). Using Baker’s texts as well as recent African historiography and several narratives of recorded Bunyoro oral history, I locate the 1864 encounter within a broader network of local and regional political and cultural developments. These include a secession war staged by Ruyonga, brother of Kamurasi (the King of Bunyoro); Buganda military incursions from the south and south-east; a growing trade with Zanzibari caravans; and the arrival in Bunyoro, via Sudan, of Turkish and Egyptian slave traders.

Baker’s narratives, I argue, outline the simultaneous impact of all these forces on the autonomous kingdom of Bunyoro-Kitara, while also allowing us to track Bunyoro’s reshaping of these forces via such strategies as negotiation/incorporation, resistance, and spatial relocation. As a result, my essay makes a sustained attempt to “decenter” British exploration in nineteenth-century Africa by thinking beyond frameworks like “imperialism,” “colonialism,” and the center-periphery binary, and instead reads Victorian literary production within (and as shaped by) a non-Western narrative of multiplicity and multidirectionality.

Paper long abstract:

Bordering the Atlantic Ocean, Calabar, the capital of Cross River State of Nigeria, derives her historical fame from her cosmopolitan character, being a cross-roads for trade, culture, civilization and administration since the middle of the seventeenth century. Among expatriates of note who lived and worked in this ancient city were researchers, who recorded events as they occurred or as they were told by the aborigines. Over the years, rather than commending expatriate researchers, most local historians do not only criticise and condemn their reseaches for eurocentric prejudices, limitatiions, generalizations and erroneous judgements but also refer to them as garbage of no historical value. Opposed to this general view, this paper argues that studies by expatriate observers and chroniclers of events in Old Calabar remain invaluable in the reconstruction of the early history of this region of Nigeria. Expatriate researchers of this period (1650 - 1960) did not only contribute in placing Calabar on the World map but also ensured that researchers of pre-literate Calabar society are not frustrated by the lack of records or left entirely at the mercy of oral tradition. The paper concludes that if used with a critical eye, researchers and students will find works of expatriate researchers on Calabar indispensable mines of information with which to corroborate and expand existing studies on this cosmopolitan community in which the Efik, the Efut, the Qua and other ethnicities and nationalities lived in relatively peaceful coexistence.