Knowledge in Africa: Some Historical Perspectives

The transfer of knowledge often is associated with great men (and their

students) who took a specialized form of knowledge from Europe to Africa and

other corners of their world. This view is presented in academic and popular

works and is relayed through vivid museum exhibitions and their striking

catalogues {2 pics}.1 George Basalla expressed it most forcefully close to 50

years ago.2 In a highly influential essay he wrote about how metropolitan

centres collected information, processed it into knowledge and diffused it to a

grateful world. In the periphery this knowledge accumulated around poles of

learning or hubs of knowledge. These colonial centres of calculation (Latour)

were initially dependent on the metropole and provided it with information. But

over time this ‘colonial science’ broke away from the dominance of the

metropole and its poles of knowledge developed into national hubs capable of

original research.

But while Basalla's notion of 'colonial knowledge' referred to a derivative

imprint of metropolitan knowledge bringing positive change to the periphery,

others have interpreted 'colonial science' as an invading, hegemonic force

allied to imperialism and underdevelopment.3 Although fundamental in

bringing the study of the history of science to Africa, these contrasting

perspectives treated the continent as intellectually dormant and little more

than a blank slate on which Europeans inscribed their discoveries in fields like

zoology and botany.4

There was always a resistance to these views elsewhere in the world - one

thinks here especially of the voluminous writings of Joseph Needham and his

collaborators on the history of science in China or Marcel Griaule on the

cosmology of the Dogon of West Africa. In Australia Roy MacLeod pointed out

that "colonial science" developed in different ways in the Gambia and

Australia; that its development depends on local factors, stretching from

disease regimes to economic and political structures. And he developed the

notion of a 'moving Metropolis' that was not at all derivative.5

Another group of scholars has turned to study the transnational exchange of

knowledge, an area in which South Asia has become particularly important.6

Here historians have developed ideas about multidirectional flows in the

circulation of knowledge; about networks of knowledge that were global in

extent. And at the same time, they have developed an awareness of the ways

in which colonised people both contributed to these networks of knowledge

and acquired and adapted new forms of knowledge.7 Employing the

Geertzian dichotomy separating the local from the global, many attempt to

capture 'indigenous knowledge', a project that has proved particularly

influential in post-apartheid South Africa where government supports a well-

funded National Indigenous Knowledge Systems Office (NIKSO). 8

In this paper I do not argue that Africans developed independent scientific

cultures to rival that of the west. Rather, I want to examine how Africa

contributed to the global pursuit of knowledge. Following Harold Cooke, I

believe that science grew in Europe through the accumulation of information

and evidence produced and gathered in various parts of the world; that

knowledge has developed as a product of global networks, mutuality and

interaction.9 I am particularly curious about how Africa contributed to science

as a field of universal knowledge; and I am equally interested in the way in

which this contribution has been hidden by the rise of 'western science'.10

I follow Peter Burke (& more distantly Lévi-Strauss) in understanding

knowledge to be the product of raw information that is processed, packaged

or cooked. One hundred years ago, the Swiss missionary Henri-Alexandre

Junod recognised that the Thonga of southeast Africa ordered and arranged

information in ways that explained their world. I think Lucien Lévy-Bruhl read

Junod and other field-anthropologists in a selective way when he discerned a

pre-logical thinking in the minds of 'primitives' and contrasted this with the

rationality of his 'modern' society. Junod recognised that the Thonga

'processed' information into knowledge but he also perceived a hierarchy of

knowledge systems. As a good Protestant, Junod believed in the civilizing

process set in motion by literacy, a theme later developed by Jack Goody who

went so far as to attribute the 'domestication of the savage mind' to the skills

of reading and writing.11

As a historian I find this an attractive theory, although I hesitate to attach

literacy to a forward march of civilization. I would prefer to talk in terms of the

interaction between what Ludwig Fleck called 'thought collectives'; ways in

which societies structure knowledge and give it meaning. According this

approach knowledge is not just the product of the great men and their

students who have cooked information into brilliant ideas. Knowledge is

rather 'tacit' or 'implicit', even 'hidden', made up of unspoken assumptions

learned in the process of an apprenticeship that brings a student into a

'thought collective'. So - knowledge is the product of a capacity to think and

process information but within specific 'thought styles', what Thomas Kuhn

called 'paradigms', marked by shared norms, standards and practices. What

is of interest to me as a historian is the way in which paradigms interact and

change; how societies pass on, acquire and exchange knowledge. For an

African historian, it is important to take up the call made by Henrika Kucklick

and Jeremy Vetter to stress the importance of fieldwork.12 .... Latour et al .

I start by looking at the knowledge system brought to Africa by early European

explorers and missionaries. This was based on similitudes found elsewhere,

most notable in the Bible, the great code through which Europeans made

sense of their world, & in the rediscovered Greek and Roman classics.

Looking at the establishment and development of the institutions through

which Europe gathered information and diffused knowledge remains an

important activity for the historian of Africa.13 But in this paper I want to

concentrate on the wave of global expansion that took amateurs in the field

out of Europe and into the corners of their world, particularly to central and

southern Africa. These footsoldiers of science were officers in colonial armies,

& the doctors and apothecaries who accompanied them; they were naval

officers and surgeons, colonial administrators and merchants in exotic

settings, and, most importantly, Christian missionaries. By looking at these

amateur scientists I believe we can (i) examine the history of knowledge in the

longue durée (ii) look at the local scholars and networks of knowledge on

which they drew (iii) suggest ways in which this African contribution was

hidden by the rise of a discourse about ‘western science’. My broad argument

is that a knowledge society needs a history of knowledge that encompasses

the contributions of all sectors of that society.

The primary concern of missionaries in Africa was to convert the heathen; but

their theological concerns overlapped with a deep, historical curiosity about

the natural world. Studying nature was a way of praising God by uncovering

the diversity and beauty of His creations. Missionaries were natural

intellectuals who found themselves ‘in the field’ on the edge of empire. They

were also members of global institutions that gathered knowledge in various

parts of Africa and the world – one has only to think of the Jesuits in Ethiopia,

the Dominicans in Mozambique and the Capuchins in the Congo in the 17th

century. These men wrote extensively about the new and diverse plants,

animals and insects they discovered; and compared them with findings made

elsewhere in the world. The knowledge these men brought to Africa

overlapped and fused with local ways of explaining the natural and human

world. As in most parts of Europe, knowledge in Africa was carried orally at

this time. Knowledge was confined to limited areas, it was communal rather

than individual, and it was of a utilitarian nature. Many products of African

knowledge had a commercial value for Europeans - particularly herbal and

other remedies used to fight diseases. This gave a use-value in global trade

to a series of artefacts stretching from plants to mermaids’ ribs and unicorns’

horns to bezoars and carbuncles. The causes of disease were often local in

nature but the effectiveness of these articles, as antidotes and remedies,

appealed to a much wider, world market. In this sense collecting was not just

about assembling objects; it was also about assembling the knowledge that

gave those objects both intellectual meaning and commercial value.

In the early 17thC Father Joao dos Santos described some startling diseases

in central & northern Mozambique – such as the entaca that caused women to

dry up and die after taking a herb designed to terminate an unwanted

pregnancy. And a malady that brought on blindness between sunset and

sunrise. Even more startling were the antidotes to these ailments – such as

drinking the juice of another herb within 24 hours of contracting the entaca, or

sleeping with a man in such a way as to pass the disease to him. Washing

the affected eyes in the drinking water of pigeons could cure the night

blindness, Dos Santos assured his readers.14 Marvels also made their way

into his book. He had heard that elephants lived for over 300 years and that

they could only breed and produce young after 100 years. He knew that

mermaids' long incisors could be shaped into beads used to counteract

haemorrhoids and to reduce menstruation pains.15 But Father Dos Santos

was also sceptical of many of the tales he heard. He doubted that enormous

eagles were capable of seizing elephants and dashing them on the ground, as

Marco Polo had claimed occurred on an island south of Madagascar. And

although he was frequently assured that snakebite could be cured by in turn

biting the reptile, he thought this ‘to be a fiction’.16

Eighty years later the Italian Capuchin Antonio Cavazzi produced a major

work on the kingdoms of the Congo, Angola and Matamba.17 Cavazzi’s

account of the fauna and flora of west-central Africa contained much of the

enchantment found in other contemporary descriptions of Africa. He described

flowers of such strong colouring that it was almost impossible to look at them

for any length of time. His elephants were giants whose tusks could hardly be

carried by two strong men, yet an ant could kill this pachyderm by climbing

into its trunk and biting its brain. His foxes could smell the decomposition of a

man’s body before he had died. His blind serpent was equipped with heads at

the two extremities of its body. In this world, knowledgeable individuals could

extract powerful talismans from some of these animals: for the stones

extracted from the stomachs of elephants, monkeys and crocodiles served as

bezoars that provided an antidote to both paralysis and dizziness while

mermaids’ ribs could be shaped into beads that cleansed the air and assisted

the circulation of the blood. The carbuncle on the forehead of a local species

of wild boar was known as an antidote to all poisons and fevers.18

A new modernity entered Cavazzi’s work when he anthropomorphized

animals and divided them into species that could be compared across

continents. At the same time, he directly observed animals and their

behaviour, commented on plants (eight varieties of palm tree) and listened to

locals’ views on their utility. He also employed drawings to great effect to

document and inform his textual observations. These included the underside

of a mermaid (or ‘woman fish’) {1 pic}, and an oil palm (with, in the

background, a picture of African society that is not far different from European

society) and another of a cocoa tree (with, in the background, cannibals at

work cutting up their meal). In this last case he combined his ‘scientific’ view

of Africa with a view of the dark practices of the continent’s inhabitants – and

in the process showed how ‘science’ (the illustration of the palm tree) could

not be separated from the ‘personal’ (his view of the locals’ dark practices).

Jean Barbot incorporated Cavazzi's views of Africa with other images into his

great chronicle of the continent. These were large books whose size, cost

and annotated detail spoke of their authority {1 pic}.

As monopolistic trading companies fastened themselves to the rim of Africa,

knowledge of the coastal areas was gathered and accumulated more

securely. The Compagnie des Indes, the Royal Africa Company, the Dutch

West India Company and the Dutch East India Company drew Africa into new

global networks; and brought knowledgeable soldiers and company servants

to the islands and bays of the continent.19 They also provided bases for

scientific exploration and attracted to the continent specialist scientists -

increasingly under the aegis of metropolitan patrons such company directors

of the VOC like Joan Huydecoper and Nicolas Witsen. With the support of

Witsen, governor Simon van der Stel led an exploratory expedition north of

Cape Town in the 1680s {1 pic}. He and his companions gathered

information from the hunter-gatherers and pastoralists they met on their

journey they documented information about the properties to be drawn from a

range of plants - properties at once analgesic, antiseptic, diuretic, purgative

and carminative.20 Simon van der Stel established a small museum in the

Company Gardens in Cape Town and, together with the earlier governor

Johan Bax van Heerentals (1676–1678) and the later governor Ryk Tulbach

(1751–1771), sent consignments of medicinal and other plants to Leiden.21

The Dutch were quick to appreciate the medicinal properties of the plants they

came across in Africa. From the Guinea Coast of West Africa Willem Bosman

wrote in 1704 of the »wonderful efficacy« of the »green herbs« employed by

native healers and »deplored that no European Physician has yet applied

himself to the discovery of their nature and virtue«.22 Fifteen years later, at the

Cape of Good Hope, Peter Kolbe devoted a sizable part of his Description of

the region in 1791 to "the Hottentot Practice of Physick and Surgery".23

Although the Hottentots had never dissected a body, they "have pretty good

notions of the human anatomy" he wrote, and they practised their profession

"with much surprising dexterity".24 Kolbe described with admiration the salves,

ointments, powders, infusions and poultices prepared by Hottentot

Physicians. These men had "great skill in the Vertues of their Herbs" and

knew how to bleed and cup patients, perform amputations and restore

dislocations. They constituted a profession that guarded its skills and

separated itself from "old women (who) pretend to great skill in the Vertues of

Roots and Herbs".25 Their medical skills compared favourably with those of

Europeans. "Great cures are performed" by "Hottentot Doctors", he wrote

such as, perhaps, could not be performed by the ablest Physicians or Surgeons in Europe. The Hottentots who give themselves to the Study of Medicine are generally well skilled in the Hottentot Botany. They have some excellent Notions of the Vertues of the Multitude of Herbs and Roots that are produced in the Hottentot Countries; and often apply Herbs and Roots in very difficult and dangerous Cases with wonderful Success.

Kolbe's Description of the Cape is today regarded as the first scientific

monograph on peoples, plants and animals of the southwestern edge of

South Africa. But it, too, contained aspects of plagiarism and imagination

{elephant-rhinoceros; sealion - 5 pics}.

A new concern with scientific accuracy is present in the Itinerário of Jeronimo

Lobo, a Jesuit working in Ethiopia in the mid-late 17thC.26 Or so believed

Samuel Johnson, the major figure in English life and letters, when he

translated the book into English in 1735. Johnson reassured his readers that it

contained “no romantick absurdities or incredible fictions ... whatever he

relates, whether true or not, is at least probable … he appears … to have

described things as he saw them, to have copied nature from life, and to have

consulted his senses, not his imagination".

And indeed, Jerónimo Lobo did dare to criticize Pliny the Elder’s statement

that elephants had no joints – and that they had to sleep standing up. He was

also sceptical of the idea (found in the Physiologus) that ostriches ate red-hot,

heated iron bars – though he accepted it as a possibility.27 But he did - like so

many others - report on the unicorn. Except that he described different

species of unicorns – those in a neighbouring province had short tails, while

those living further away “have long tails and manes that go down to the

ground”. At Mozambique Island, he reported, moonlight killed those who

failed to wear hats outside in September; and straw had to be placed on brass

bells and canon to protect them from the damaging moonlight. Elsewhere,

he recounted that bodiless voices could be heard in one, particularly dry place

where people simply disappeared. Lobo also recycled descriptions of snakes

that had in their heads a stone like a bezoar (the size of an egg) that had

powers against poison. He believed the bezoar and the unicorn’s horn to be

the most “effective antidotes” against snake-bite – though when he fell ill with

fever they did not seem to help him as much as goat urine, or bleeding by an

Ethiopian villager using animal horns and a wad of paper.28

What I am trying to point out is that the pre-Enlightenment sensibilities of

Europeans and Africans were close to one another, and that early Europeans

probably acquired much of their knowledge from locals. There was an easy

compatibility and convergence in early modern Europe between ideas drawn

from the Old Testament, the Greek and Roman Classics, and the discoveries

made on the fringes of Europe's world such as Africa. Some of these images

could still be found in Africa well into the twentieth century: the picture of the

double-headed snake, the powers of a bezoar-like stone, and the individual’s

belief that he or she could pass on a malady by sleeping with an unsuspecting

victim.29

At this time European contact with Africa was confined to the coast, or to

islands off the coast & little was known about the interior of the continent. It

was from slaves in the Americas that Europeans acquired much of their

knowledge about Africa. Let us remember that three-quarters of all immigrants

to the Americas between 1500 and 1820 came from Africa. Recently Judith

Carney has shown how West Africans brought rice to the Carolinas and the

skills needed to grow it.30 African therapeutic traditions thrived in the New

World, especially on plantations manned by large numbers of African

slaves.31 Although they practiced in an uneasy relationship on the plantations

with European doctors, African healers included masters and their friends

amongst their clients. This expanding medical culture fed off a bricolage of

new discoveries and could be seen on both sides of the Atlantic.32

As comparison became a crucial aspect of botany & zoology, patrons of

science like Linneaus and Joseph Banks encouraged their students to collect

plants in Sierra Leone and the Cape, African colonies run by commercial

companies.33 This produced a new form of knowledge increasingly distinct

from that practised by Africans. Individuals like Michel Adanson in Senegal,

Henry Smeathman in Sierra Leone, Palisot de Beauvois in the Bight of Benin,

and Johann Koenig, François le Vaillant, Anders Sparrman, Carl Thunberg

and Francis Masson at the Cape of Good Hope published works on natural

history for a growing reading public curious about Africa and other

‘undiscovered’ corners of their world. They strove above all to produce

truthful sources of evidence that could be trusted by their readers. Their work

had to be original, informative and unsullied by plagiarism. It had to withstand

the criticism of their peers and win a trustworthy place in authoritative journals

and publishing houses. Their reputations came to rest on their ability to

correct the mistakes of earlier generations and to provide their texts with

enlightened commentaries and with references to their sources of evidence.

The gratification of curiosity that had marked earlier works on nature was

increasingly replaced by a more systematic approach to its study. This

growing disenchantment of the world, with its regimes of truth, joined

scientists in a thought collective that increasingly separated them from what

they saw as 'old women' (Kolbe), alchemists and magicians, both at home

and abroad.

Linneaus' student Anders Sparrman provides a good example of this growing

concern with scientific accuracy. In his account of his stay in South Africa, he

assures his readers that he is a man of science, knows Linnaeus, has a

doctorate, is a member of the Royal academy of Science of Stockholm & of

“several other learned societies”. During his exploration, he tells us he was

“fired with the love of science and the truth”, he has “a passionate regard for

the truth”. He was particularly critical of earlier scientists – like Kolb (a stay-

at-home who failed to travel widely). He was also critical of the beliefs of local

farmers who, for example, wanted to capture an example of a species of

hermaphrodite hyena. He says that he has often been asked to comment on

the existence of “prodigies and uncommon appearances” in Africa. But that

he considers "men with one foot, cyclops, satyres, troglodytes, etc” to be

“imaginary beings” and that they will “not to be found in my journal”. His book

contains a long, detailed, and quite fascinating chapter on elephants and a

17-page description of the black (African) rhinoceros (that Kolb had plated in

armour). He also included new and careful descriptions and drawings of

various animals (still little known in Europe), such as the giraffe and the

springbok. So, just as the modern reader is convinced of reading a real work

of science, Sparrman announces that, reading from a San rock painting, it is

obvious that a unicorn had once lived in the Agter Bruntjes Hoogte area near

Somerset East! And indeed, a unicorn's horn, brought back from southern

Africa, would grace the LMS museum well into the 19C {1 pic}.

Much of the information sent to Europe from Africa was processed into

knowledge in metropolitan centres of calculation. In sites of learning such as

the botanical gardens in Leiden, Vienna or London, the British Museum or the

Natural History museums in Paris and later Berlin. In these centres of

calculation experts classified and compared fossil remains, plants, animals

and other objects and developed theories to explain their existence and

evolution. Explorers, travellers, traders and company officials initially supplied

the metropolitan museums with the data on which the experts developed their

theories. This was particularly the case at the Cape of Good Hope where an

enlightened Dutch republican government (1803-6) brought scientists to the

Cape who, like Hinrich Lichtenstein {1 pic}, would play a leading role on their

return to Europe in the establishment and professionalization of various

scientific disciplines.

The establishment of British rule at the Cape brought some leading

metropolitan scientists to Africa. But it was only in the mid-1820s that ‘hubs of

knowledge’ started to emerge in this outpost of the British empire on the

southwest tip of Africa. A small community of collectors had emerged in Cape

Town by this time and, with the support of the colonial state, they arranged for

an army doctor to establish a museum; and then paid for an expedition he

would lead into the interior. On his return, Andrew Smith constantly called on

these collectors to support his museum and its journal and he stressed their

right not just to collect specimens, but to organise and explain them. The men

who supported this ‘colonial knowledge’ were residents at the Cape who

came from different nations – English & Scots, but also Germans and French

(J. Herschell, C.F. Ludwig, L. Krebs, J. Drège, C. Villet, P. Delalande,

Verreaux brothers). Here the object of Natural History research became not

just the accumulation of knowledge & fame; but increasingly the living wage,

prizes and state decorations that it won for individuals. Fieldwork in parts of

Africa also became the sine qua non for men of science seeking to establish

knowledge disciplines in Europe and the institutions on which to base them

(Hinrich Lichtenstein and Wilhelm Peters in Berlin stand out in this regard).

The British Admiralty played an important role in establishing and developing

the networks of knowledge linking these men of science with other parts of

Africa and the world. Its warships were captained by men trained from an

early age in astronomy, hydrography and engineering; and were manned by

surgeons familiar with a range of herbal remedies and medicines. Captains

gave berths on their ships to scientists working for metropolitan experts

(J.Forbes up Zambezi, 1823; Wilhelm Peters in the 1840s - who would

replace Lichtenstein in Berlin; Edgar Layard 1850s).34 John Hershel would go

on to prepare a Manual of Scientific Enquiry for the Admiralty in1849 (a

collection of essays by foremost scientists - including Charles Darwin).

As Saul Dubow has shown, this intellectual community at the Cape produced

a local nationalism that included a broad, cosmopolitan, notion of what it was

to be both ‘British’ and ‘South African’. This identity was centred on

institutions such as the SA Museum, the SA Library, the Royal Observatory,

the botanical gardens, and various learned societies; as well as a range of

journals that we might qualify as ‘scientific’. Middle-class colonists of

European descent made up the core of this community, but it did not exclude

Africans (who contributed to it artefacts of human manufacture and specimens

of plant and animal life – as well as the information that gave meaning to

these items).

This ‘colonial science’ had its own methodology (William Burchell) - the ox-

wagon that served as a travelling museum and laboratory {2 pics}; and its own

set of values; a pride in the diversity of the African landscape and in the

authenticity and originality of a primitive wilderness little changed since first

made by God. Knowledge was made in spaces outside institutions like

musems, herbaria, etc. – e.g. apothecaries’ shops, officers mess and

sleeping quarters in naval vessels, coffee houses, pubs, all encouraging what

Raj Kapil calls “recherche en plein air”. As Ronald Numbers & David L.

Livingstone have shown, these colonial scientists - which included a very few

women - such as Mary Barber - by mid-century - had their own ways of

interpreting works such as Darwin’s Origin of Species. At the centre of this

‘science in the colonies’ was the iconic figure of the sturdy fieldworker looking

to find objects in their natural and social context rather than the metropolitan

expert who uprooted these objects and displayed them in museums where

they took on a meaning different from the one they had in situ, in the field. Yet

the primary task of the colonial fieldworker was to recognize the diversity and

authenticity of the natural world in Africa – and to bring it to the attention of the

metropolitan experts who ordered it (& subjected it to a controlled

modernization and progress).

While army officers, colonial officials and amateur collectors (who lived from

this activity) were at the heart of this knowledge in colonial institutions, a new

generation of missionaries worked ‘in the field’, often beyond the political

frontier. The most successful of these missionary naturalists was David

Livingstone. Imperial institutions threw their weight behind the scientific aims

of Livingstone’s Zambezi expedition in the late 1850s in a way that was still

rare in the metropole. The Foreign Office provided Livingstone with consular

authority and a salary of £500 a year; Parliament voted an annual sum of

£5,000 to the enterprise; the Royal Navy’s anti-slavery squadron (based at

Simonstown) ferried missionaries along the coast; Kew Gardens, the British

Museum, the British Association for the Advancement of Science, the Royal

School of Mines and, particularly, the Royal Geographic Society (RGS),

assisted the project in a multitude of ways. It gained the backing of influential

metropolitan intellectuals, such as Richard Owen (zoology) and Sir Roderick

Murchison (geology).35 Joseph Hooker drew up ‘the Principal Duties

Expected of the Botanist’ for John Kirk, the expedition’s ‘Economic Botanist’.36

The Royal Geographical Society led this process by creating a media

sensation about his geographical discoveries, the press built his reports on

the slave trade into a reinvigorated moral crusade, and the leading publishing

house of John Murray turned his account of the expedition into an

international best-seller.37 Livingstone felt he could make central Africa ‘better

known in the world and thereby indirectly affect the slave trade' by gathering

‘considerable collections of plants, birds and insects’ together with ‘vegetable,

animal and mineral productions’. Like Burchell, Livingstone also considered

collecting to be a patriotic duty, for members of the expedition were honour-

bound to offer any collections they took home to government museums so as

to preserve their findings for the nation.38 He was a thoroughly modern

missionary who scoffed at oft-repeated tales of horned-men three feet high,

unicorns, or moon-blindness (other than the type caused by a lack of vitamin

A).39

His books, articles and letters are full of descriptions of climate, environment,

geology, palaeontology, mammals, birds, snakes, frogs, insects and plants.

He reported on the behaviour of numerous species of wildlife; and

documented for the first time the existence of both pygmy elephants and

several new species of antelope. He was familiar with the findings of earlier

naturalists such as William Burchell and Andrew Smith and he counted the

naturalist-hunter William Oswell as a close friend.

More sedentary missionaries became important observers of nature through

their knowledge of native languages, their intimate relationship with Christian

converts, and their long presence in a place often far-removed from colonial

towns. By the turn of the century, missionaries in different parts of Africa led

research in different areas of entomology & botany, mineralogy, geology &

palaeontology, meteorology &, especially, tropical medicine, cartography,

linguistics and anthropology.

In the field, missionaries came into contact with African ways of seeing and

explaining nature. For Africans, this acquisition of knowledge started in

childhood when boys were required to look after the cattle and sheep and girls

were needed to protect the crops from birds and rodents. This kept children

in the field for long periods where they learned about the small animals they

could catch and cook, and about the plants they could eat. Those who

became hunters later in life – especially professional hunters – had to know

about large animals and birds; just as those who became herbalists had to

know about the medical and nutritional, as well as the sartorial and

intoxicating, properties of plants. Diviners also explored the natural world and

in many ways produced a true science. Their attempt to capture its powers

and unlock the secrets of providence were little different from those of

astrologers and alchemists in Europe. The skills of an agriculturalist included

an ability to calculate the patterns of nature so as to optimise output; and this

knowledge fused with a natural philosophy that, through various rituals,

improved the chances of success or, perhaps, explained failure. Fishermen,

hunters and metallurgists had their own ways of observing, explaining and

exploiting the regularities of nature.

When Africans had a use for plants and animals they gave them distinct

names: Thonga informants told the Swiss missionary, Henri-Alexandre Junod

about the names of 92 different plants, and compiled a long list of the birds

and animals, of south-east Africa; Edwin Smith said the Ila (of today’s

Zambia) distinguished between 72 different species of tree and gave 24

names to different grasses. They also provided him with the names of 45

species of birds, as well as long lists of the different mammals and fish they

ate. The Anglican missionary John Roscoe noted that the Baganda had

names for well over 40 varieties of plantain and 66 for different types of

barkcloth. In south-eastern Nigeria, another Anglican missionary, G. T.

Basden, was aware of the names given by the Ibo to well over twenty

varieties of yam. The Catholic Trappist father, and lecturer in African Studies

at Wits, Alfred Bryant, gathered a list of 240 medicinal plants that, he thought,

constituted only a third of the medicinal plants known to native specialists in

Zululand and Natal. Father Bryant depended on Zulu assistants to collect

plants, something that led him to believe that an average Zulu was ‘quite

astonishingly learned in the domain of his own environment’ and could ‘boast

of a larger share of pre-scientific knowledge than the average European’.

Bryant shared this view with Junod and others.

In tropical parts of Africa Europeans often depended for their survival on the

skills of African healers.40 Africans were sufficiently confident in their

knowledge to reject some of the views about nature held by Europeans: the

idea that animals could be divided into ‘lower types’ seemed nonsense to

people who ate with relish certain beetles, locusts, caterpillars & ants (and

named them and knew where to find them). At the Cape in 1820, a party of

slaves was horrified when they were obliged to dig up the corpse of a man

drowned after escaping from Robben Island. And their revulsion grew

markedly when their master [Ludwig Krebs] severed the head from the

corpse, wrapped it in a handkerchief and placed it in a box. What the slaves’

master saw as ‘craniology’, these slaves clearly saw as witchcraft! 41 In some

parts, Africans criticised the methods used by European doctors to treat

malaria, such as bleeding and mercury.42 They might also have been

sceptical of mesmerism or the power of European royalty to cure 'scrofula'.

They might also have questioned the powers given to a single God by Natural

Theology, a philosophy that at mid-century explained nature to most

Europeans. But some Africans adopted the practices brought by Europeans,

and made them their own in ways that provided them with new sources of

power and social mobility. The acquisition of literacy provides a clear example

of the ways in which knowledge systems were not hermetically sealed.43

Medicine provides another example of the ways in which African healers

adopted European remedies and practices or, in KZN, how Indians and

African ways of dealing with medical ailments came together (Flint)

II. The Great Divergence:

The expansion of imperial power in the mid-nineteenth century contributed in

a meaningful way to the development of a 'great divergence' between medical

practices centred in Europe and Africa. The terms under which the transfer of

knowledge between the two continents took place changed markedly as

Europeans took hold of Africa. Increasingly, the continent became a site for

the collection of raw information to be transformed into useful knowledge by

professional scientists in the European metropole. As naturalists moved into

the African interior with the aid of quinine, colonial governments and private

institutions, Europe became the repository and archive of specimens collected

by innumerable footsoldiers of science. Professional experts in the metropole

named, compared and classified plants and medical procedures, and

subjected them to investigation. They increasingly turned to study the

morphology of plants and the function of their chemical elements. From these

plants chemists developed new drugs like quinine and strychnine and

painkillers like morphine and aspirin. Research on bacteria located the cause

of scourges like leprosy and cholera. In Britain a general medical council

controlled access to the ranks of the medical profession and guarded the

contents of the national pharmacoepia.44 This new medical knowledge

circulated and spread in Europe with the growth of literacy and advances in

the fields of printing and communications. Although this scientific revolution is

indelibly associated with individual researchers like Pierre-Joseph Pelletier,

Louis Pasteur or Robert Koch, the knowledge on which they built their

theories was cumulative and drawn from many parts of the world.45 In Africa,

Scottish missionaries became particularly visible in this process when they

engaged in what we would call 'bioprospecting' in the mid-nineteenth century.

From the Niger Delta to the highlands of south-central Africa they turned to

knowledgeable Africans to locate plants that could be sent home for analysis.

Experts in Edinburgh and London then isolated the plants' chemical elements

and used them to develop a range of drugs employed in the treatment of

various ailments.46

Towards the end of the nineteenth century, as the colonial state created

departments and university positions, professional scientists started to replace

the amateurs. Even within the missionary societies a new scientific rigour

gained ground as doctors trained in the new, biological medicine replaced

missionaries equipped with only a cursory knowledge of healing. In this new

climate of confidence, Europeans quickly reduced African drugs and medical

practices to the categories of 'magic' and 'superstition' and healers and

diviners to 'witchdoctors'.47 In 1891 in KZN the state required inyangas to be

licenced, in a way that made it far more difficult for Indians to practice in this

field (Flint, 182).

A missionary like Henri-Alexandre Junod provides a good example of this shift

in thinking. As a missionary, Junod filled his spare time with botany and

entomology. He had a great respect for Africans as observers of nature –

they were people who knew where to find specific animals and plants,

distinguish between them, and note their behaviour. Junod remarked that the

Thonga classified plants into groups broadly resembling genera and even

species; and he thought their botanical knowledge was the product of what he

called “a true and, in a certain sense, scientific observation on their part”. It

was perhaps comparable to “that of our forefathers of two or three hundred

years ago, before botany became a true science”. He found “a notion of

order” in the way the natives divided mammals into broad groups and he saw

that they even distinguished between four classes of wasps. A range of

different taboos also provided people with the means to group plants and

animals in specific categories.

As professionals moved into the fields of botany and entomology, Junod

turned to examine the social life of the people amongst whom he lived, quickly

linking his interest in science with an equal passion for the study of society. In

a chapter entitled 'medical art' he wrote in 1898 that the Ronga people (the

southern group in the Thonga cluster) treated illnesses with 30-40 different

drugs that were applied in a variety of therapeutic ways. But he also drew a

line between these 'medical practices' and the 'superstitions' that often

accompanied them. He considered that Ronga medicine had a very limited

notion of Pathology and Anatomy and that herbalists and healers were

specialists unable to treat more than one or two diseases. Most seriously,

medicine could be used for malicious purposes as easily as for beneficial

ones.48

Almost thirty years later, when Junod published the second edition of his two-

volume Life of a South African Tribe, he was far more critical of Thonga

medicine. In the intervening years he had adopted an evolutionist approach to

his understanding of what he defined as the Thonga 'tribe'. In a chapter now

entitled 'Magic' he wrote that 'there may be true scientific elements in Thonga

medical practice (but) the medical art passes with the greatest ease into the

domain of magic, all the more so as the difference between Science and

Magic is not perceived'.49

Junod was also critical of other shortcomings in the knowledge of native

naturalists (the fact that they showed no interest in the morphology of plants

and were unable to explain the respiratory function of leaves or distinguish

between male and female plants; or the functions of hidden parts of the

anatomy of humans, animals and plants). From his teleological perspective,

indeed a positivistic perspective, the practice of divination reflected an early

stage of scientific development (much like alchemy and astrology - with its

own tools, categories and explanations). But divination was nonetheless a

backward, outmoded (and irresponsible) practice from which native peoples

needed to be liberated by ‘science’ (and Christianity). But he nonetheless

recognized their contribution to scientific endeavour and, like many other

missionary naturalists, frequently named the women, men and children who

helped him. But Junod now discerned a hierarchy of knowledge based on a

two-storey model with only a narrow stairway between them. He saw science

as a value-free, objective ordering of knowledge that was strictly separated

from folklore and custom. This was 'the age of the optic nerve' R.L. Stevenson

would write critically, an age that regulated and patrolled the borders of

science and that relegated imagination to the realm of superstition and magic.

III. Colonial State

As the British erected a modern state in South Africa at the start of the 20th

century, amateurs like missionaries lost their place in the construction of

knowledge. While government departments came to focus on economic

botany and entomology, the universities placed a new stress on the laboratory

sciences of plant anatomy and embryology, mycology and bacteriology, and

focused research on distinct categories of plants [such as Phanerograms

(seed-bearing plants) and Cryptograms (that produce spores) or the fungi

studied by plant pathologists]. Missionary savants inevitably played a

diminishing role in areas of research ever-more dominated by scholars

working with new technology in specialized areas of, increasingly, distinct

scientific disciplines. A caste of professors and professionals emerged as

bright young graduates from metropolitan universities came to the colonies to

establish or develop nodes of learning and scientific authority. Despite their

dependence on British and American universities, these institutions quickly

developed into centres of scientific research and teaching with their own

growing, national autonomy.

Knowledge-producing institutions in the colonies built their authority and

professionalism on their ties of sociability, training and experience with

metropolitan centres. International recognition cemented the authority of the

professionals in the laboratory but increasingly separated them from the

amateurs familiar with the languages and knowledge systems of native

peoples. And in the process the university professionals built the strength of

their disciplines and institutions on an understanding of science that was

increasingly divorced from native practitioners in the field.

While knowledge became more abundant and was more easily obtained,

through public schooling and the networks created by modern technology,

and could be seen as liberating, it also became tied more indefatigably to the

European metropole. From this perspective, it could be seen as controlling

and even dehumanizing. Some Africans found an upward mobility and a

source of power in this new definition of knowledge; but for many it was a

means of exclusion that confined them to a world of ‘tradition’ and

‘superstition’ strictly separated from the ‘modernity’ and ‘progress’ associated

with the colonial project.

In time, ‘science’ became a western product that overlooked the long

contribution of ‘indigenous knowledge’ to its development. The declining

influence of missionaries in a field increasingly dominated by professionals

facilitated the emergence of a new concept of science and, with it, an

accompanying discourse. This was the discourse that carried ‘western

science’ from the imperial centre to the colonial periphery; and from hubs on

the outskirts of empire to a grateful hinterland. In the process, local ways of

naming, ordering and explaining nature were lost or ignored, and the power of

‘science’ was irrevocably tied to a modernising project underscored by a

mission aimed at bettering and ‘civilizing’ native peoples. In the process, the

history of science occluded the work of amateur naturalists, as well as the

knowledge provided by their indigenous informants and assistants. One task

of the historian of Africa is to uncover the contribution of native peoples to

‘western science’ and to underline the global nature of knowledge. Another is

to employ the social sciences to challenge the positivistic, hagiographic and

teleological traditions that dominate the history of science. And in the process

to show how fragile and tentative is the ‘expert opinion’ that dominates

modern life today.

1 See Siegfried Huigen, Knowledge and Colonialism: Eighteenth-century travellers in South

Africa (Brill, Leiden, 2009); Richard Holmes, The Age of Wonder (London, 2008); IZIKO Le

Vaillant exhibition; Stow exhibition; British Museum books.

2 George Basalla, ‘The Spread of Western Science’, Science (1967) 156. For a more critical

approach, Sörlin, Sverker, ‘Ordering the World for Europe: Science as Intelligence and

Information as Seen from the Northern Periphery’ Osiris (2000) 15.

3 Joseph Needham and his collaborators rejected this view entirely in their writings on the

history of science in China. Joseph Needham, Science and Civilisation in China, Cambridge,

1954-95, 7 vols.

4 Sujit Sivasundaram, ‘Sciences and the Global: On Methods, Questions, and Theory’, Isis,

(2010) 101: 1, p.154; Londa Schiebinger, ‘Forum Introduction: The European Colonial

Science Complex’, Isis (2005) 96, p. 52. Pioneering works employing this approach

include Robert A. Stafford, Scientist of Empire: Sir Roderick Murchison, Scientific

Exploration and Victorian Imperialism (Cambridge, 1989); Lucy Brockway, Science and

colonial expansion: the role of the British Royal Botanic Gardens (New York, 1979); Roy

MacLeod and Philip F. Rhebock (eds.), Darwin’s Laboratory: Evolutionary Theory and

Natural History in the Pacific (Honolulu, 1994); David Philip Miller and Peter Hans Reill

(eds.), Visions of Empire: Voyages, Botany and Representations of Nature (Cambridge,

1996); Nicolaas A. Rupke, Richard Owen: Victorian Naturalist (London, 1994), pp.80-83.

5 Roy MacLeod, 'On visiting the 'Moving Metropolis': Reflections on the Architecture of

Imperial Science' Historical Records of Australian Science 5, 3, 1982, 1-16.

6 Gyan Prakash, Another Reason. Science and the Imagination of Modern India, Princeton

1999, Toby E. Huff, Intellectual Curiosity and the Scientific Revolution. A Global

Perspective, Cambridge 2010, David W. Chambers and, Richard Gillespie, Locality in the

History of Science. Colonial Science, Technoscience, and Indigenous Knowledge, in: Osiris,

Vol. 15, 2000, pp.221-240, Schiebinger, Introduction, p. 53, Kapil Raj, Relocating Modern

Science. Circulation and the Construction of Knowledge in South Asia and Europe, 1650-

1900, London, 2007, Manolis Patiniotis et al., Science and Technology in the European

Periphery. Some Historiographical Reflections, in: History of Science, Vol. 46, 2008, pp.

153-175, Patrick Harries, Butterflies and Barbarians. Swiss Missionaries and Systems of

Knowledge in Southeast Africa, Oxford 2007.)

7 E. G. Musselman, Plant Knowledge at the Cape: A Study in African and European

Collaboration in: International Journal of African Historical Studies, 36, 2, 2003; W.

Beinart, K. Brown, D. Gilfoyle, Experts and expertise in colonial Africa reconsidered:

Science and the Interpenetration of Knowledge in: African Affairs 108, 2009; Harries,

Butterflies and Barbarians, esp. chs 5, 6.

8 The South African government developed an indigenous knowledge systems policy in

2004 and a National Indigenous Knowledge Systems Office (NIKSO). 'Indigenous

Knowledge Systems Policy', (Department of Science and Technology, Pretoria, 2004);

www.nikso.co.za. See also the Traditional Health Practitioners Act, 2004. (No. 35 of 2004).

A national archival and knowledge management project is led by the); promulgated laws

aiming to regulate traditional healing (Republic of South Africa 2004b). E- Musselman et al

9 Harold Cook, Matters of Exchange: Commerce, Medicine, and Science in the Dutch

Golden Age (New Haven, 2007), 414-16.

10

. Helen Tilley, Global Histories, Vernacular Science, and African Genealogies; or, Is the

History of Science Ready for the World?, in: Isis, Vol. 101, No. 1, 2010, pp. 110-119, Marwa

Elshakry, When Science Became Western. Historiographical Reflections, Vol. 101, No. 1

,2010, pp. 98-109.

11

Goody, The Domestication of the Savage Mind (Cambridge, 1977)

12

Kucklick, 'Personal Equations: Reflections on the History of Fieldwork, with Special Reference to Sociocultural Anthropology' Isis 102, 1, 2011; Vetter, ed., Knowing Global

Environments: New Historical Perspectives on the Field Sciences (New Brunswick, Rutgers

U.O., 2011)

13

See most notably Saul Dubow, A Commonwealth of Knowledge: Science, Sensibility, and

White South Africa 1820-2000 (Oxford, 2006)

14

. Dos Santos, Ethiopia Oriental, book one, chapter xxvi; book two, chapter xii.

15

. Ibid., Dos Santos, Ethiopia Oriental, book one, chapters xxv, xxvii; book two chapters

vii, xvi.

16

. Ibid., Dos Santos, Ethiopia Oriental, book one, chapters xxiii, xxiv.

17

. John K. Thornton, ‘New Light on Cavazzi’s Seventeenth-Century Description of Kongo’

History in Africa 6, 1979, p.253.

18

. Cavazzi, Relation historique de l’Ethiopie Occidentale (1687, French ed. Paris, 1732),

pp. 151, 153, 156, 163-64, 175, 178, 186, 201.

19

Siegfried Huigen, Jan L. de Jong, Elmer Kolfin eds., The Dutch Trading Companies as

Knowledge Networks (Brill, Leiden, 2010)

20

M.L. Wilson, T. Toussaint van Hove-Exalto, W.J.J. van Rijssen, eds., Codex Witsenii

(Davidii Media, Amsterdam, 2002), pp. 28, 40, 94–95, 132–33, 136–37; D.O. Wijnands, M.L.

Wilson, T. Toussaint, eds., Jan Commelin's Monograph on Cape Flora: Drawings and

Descriptions of the Plants That the Hon. Simon van der Stel, Governor of the Cape of Good

Hope, Found on his Great Journey, 1685 (Cape Town, 1996)

21

R.P. Brienen, ‘Nicolas Witsen and his circle: globalisation, art patronage, and collecting in

Amsterdam circa 1700’ in Nigel Worden (ed,), Contingent Lives: Social Identity and Material

Culture in the VOC World (Cape Town, 2007); 'Correspondence between Carl von Linne and

C. Rijk Tulbagh, Governor of the Dutch colony of the Cape of Good Hope: including a list of

203 specimens sent in or about the year 1767 to Uppsala' Proceedings of the Linnean Society,

130th session, 1917–18 (London, 1918).

22

Bosman, A New and Accurate Description of Guinea, Divided into the Gold, the Slave and

the Ivory Coast (1704, translated from the Dutch by .... London, 1705), p.225

23

Chapter XXV of his The Present State of the Cape of Good Hope (1719, translated from

German by Mr Medley (London, Innys and Mauby, 1738). This & following quotes will need

to be in original German.

24

Vol I, pp.304–5

25

Kolbe, vol I, pp.87–88, 304–7.

26

Jerónimo Lobo, The Itinerário of Jerónimo Lobo (London, 1984, trans D. M Lockhart

from the Portuguese MS, n.d 1660s-70s, ed., M.G. da Costa)

27 Lobo, Itinerário, pp.97, 163, 166-67. Jean-Francois de Rome also criticized the idea that

a tropical climate produced black skins, Fondation de la mission, p. 103.

28

. Lobo, Itinerário, pp.41, 60, 137, 166. Jena-Francois de Rome also mentions local

practices of cupping and bleeding. Fondation de la mission, pp.120-21.

29

. Cf. In the Grassfields of Cameroon. Hastings in Church in Africa, p.75; Edwin Smith

and Andrew Dale, The Ila-speaking Peoples of Northern Rhodesia (London, 1920), II, p.224;

H.-A. Junod, The Life of a South African Tribe (London, 1927), I, pp.393, 406; II, pp.339,

548

30

J. Carney, Black Rice: The African Origins of Rice Cultivation in the Americas ( );

Carney and R. N. Rosomoff, In the Shadow of Slavery: Africa’s Botanical Legacy in the

Atlantic World (Berkeley, 2009)

31

James Sweet, Domingos Alvares: African Healing, and the Intellectual History of the

Atlantic World (Chapel Hill, N.C., 2011); N. Z. Davis, 'Decentering History: Local Stories

and Cultural Crossings in a Global World' History & Theory 50, May, 2011.

32

Walter Hawthorne, From Africa to Brazil: Culture, Identity and an Atlantic Slave Trade,

1600–1830 (Cambridge, 2011); Sharla Fett, Working Cures: Healing, Health, and Power on

Southern Slave Plantations (Chapel Hill, N.C., 2001); Kalle Kananoja, 'Healers, Idolators,

and Good Christians: A Case Study of Creolization and Popular Religion in Mid-Eighteenth

Century Angola' International Journal of African Historical Studies 43, 3, 2010.

33

See especially the first herbal produced in South Africa, Carl Thunberg's Dissertatio de

Medicina Africanorum (1785).

34

John Herschel (ed.), Admiralty Manual of Scientific Enquiry; Prepared for the Use of Her

Majesty’s Navy: and Adapted for Travellers in General (London: John Murray, 1849), xi +

488 pp.; 2nd ed. in 1851; 3rd in 1859; 4th 1871; 5th in 1886. JH’s publications in this volume

are the preface (pp. v–ix), the article “Meteorology” (pp. 268–322), as well as the “Appendix”

(pp. 11–13) to the article “Astronomy” and the “Appendix” (pp. 441–4) to the article

“Ethnology.” The last item was reprinted in EEQR, pp. 745–50.

35. Nicolaas A. Rupke, Richard Owen: Victorian Naturalist (New Haven and London, 1994),

p.364n39; Robert A Stafford, Scientist of Empire: Sir Roderick Murchison, scientific

exploration and Victorian imperialism (Cambridge, 1989), p.174-79.

36 . Lawrence Dritsas, Zambesi; ‘Civilising Missions, Natural History and British Industry:

Livingstone in the Zambezi’ Endeavour 30, 2, 2006; D. Liebowitz, The Physician and the

slave trade: John Kirk, the Livingstone expeditions and the crusade against slavery in East

Africa (New York, 1999);

37

. Felix Driver, Geography Militant: Cultures of Exploration and Empire (Oxford, 2001),

chapters 2, 4.

38

. Clendennen, 1992, p.72.

39

. David & Charles Livingstone, Narrative of an Expedition to the Zambezi and its

tributaries (London, 1865, new ed 2005), pp. 148, 249, 437.

40

Paul Jenkins and Daniel Antwi, 'The Moravians, the Basel Mission and the Akuapem

State in the early Nineteenth Century' in Christian Missionaries and the State in the Third

World (Athens, Ohio, 2002), eds., Holger Hansen and Michael Twaddle, p.41; Jon Miller,

Missionary Zeal and Institutional Control (Grand Rapids, Michigan, 2003), p.144; K. Flint,

Healing Traditions: African Medicine, Cultural Exchange, and Competition in South Africa

(Athens, Ohio, 2008) pp??. See also Lobo, The Itinerário, pp.67-68

41

. Lichtenstein, Travels in Southern Africa in the Years 1803, 1804, 1805, and 1806

(London, 1812), translated by A Plumptre; Pamela ffolliott & Richard Liversidge, Ludwig

Krebs: Cape Naturalist to the King of Prussia/1820-28 (Cape Town, 1971), pp.23-24

42

. Thomas Boteler, Narrative of a Voyage of discovery to Africa and Arabia (London,

1835), vol. II, pp.255, 271, 284

43

Harries, 'Marxists, Missionaries and Magic: ... Literacy' JSAS 2001

44

Roy Porter, ed., Cambridge Illustrated History of Medicine (Cambridge, 1996), pp.132-

38

45

Steffan Müller-Wille, 'History of Science and Medicine' in Oxford Handbook of the

History of Medicine (Oxford, 2011), pp. 474-75

46

. Aneba Dove Osseo-Asare, ‘Bioprospecting and Resistance: Transforming Poisoned

Arrows into Strophanin Pills in Colonial Gold Coast, 1885-1922’ Social History of Medicine

21, 2, 2008;Markku Hokkanen, 'Imperial Networks, Colonial Bioprospecting and Burroughs

Wellcome & Co.: The Case of Strophanus Kombe from Malawi (1859-1915)' Social History

of Medicine, ??, 2012

47

John and Jean Comaroff, Of Revelation and Revolution: The Dialectics of Modernity on a

South African Frontier (Chicago, 1997), pp.328-29, 354; Adam Mohr, 'Missionary Medicine

and Akan Therapeutics: Illness, Health and Healing in Southern Ghana's Basel Mission,

1828-1918' Journal of Religion in Africa 39, 2009, pp448-51; K. Flint, Healing Traditions.

48

Junod, 'Les Ba-Ronga: étude ethnographique sur les indigènes de la baie de Delagoa'

Bulletin de la Société Neuchâteloise de Géographie X, 1898, pp363-76.

49

Junod, The Life of a South African Tribe (London, 1927), II, p.456.