Paper long abstract:

This paper is based on fieldwork to be conducted in summer 2008. Its starting point is a collection of photographs by Wilhem Guth (1880-1980), a German pastor who was stationed at the Leipzig Mission in Gonja in the Southern Pare Mountains of Tanzania from 1911 to 1913 and again from 1927 to 1938. During these stays he took over 400 photographs recording not only missionary buildings and activities, but also the Pare landscape, villages and ‘everyday day’ scenes. I will travel to Gonja with these pictures in order to record landscape change through ‘repeat photography’, by taking pictures of the same views today. At the same time, I will use the pictures to evoke local elders’ memories of past landscapes and land use practices. Recent work in Tanzania (Shetler 2007) has shown how closely people’s historical memories are tied to particular places and landscape features – including present and abandoned villages as well as sacred groves, mountains and rivers – which serve as mnemonic devices of past events. Yet memories of landscapes changes themselves are, for a number of reasons, generally less reliable (Fairhead and Leach 1996). Old photographs can be a useful device to both highlight and address the ‘politics’ of landscape memory, possibly helping to dispel engrained narratives of environmental degradation (see also Brockington 2005). At the same time, missionary photographs themselves are problematic, in that they can be politically sensitive, misleading or simply irrelevant to what local people consider important in the landscape. The paper will therefore critically reflect on the possibilities and limitations of the use of missionary photography as a tool for exploring landscape change and landscape memory.