A long time ago, Tim, I noted the ease (and rapidity) of colonial “forgetting” even in records kept by colonial officers in the fairly limited space/time of southeastern Nigeria between 1924 and 1929. What promoted forgetting there was what we might call a sense of gender irrelevance: If women did something, there was no felt imperative to keep track of the matter, to put it baldly. When the forgotten returned, with a vengeance, it was as if no one could be blamed for putting earlier events aside and forgetting they had ever happened. It had all been so female, and therefore inexplicable, anyway. But the notes had been made and the records kept. None of the DOs or ADOs bothered to look at them, as far as I can tell, much less to call into question the “Old Coaster” truisms in (masculine) circulation. Even when there were massive inquiries, male inquirers managed to focus on each other and to ignore the inconvenient fact that hundreds of indigenous women were clamoring to testify. Or that those women who did testify (excepting only the woman the colonials thought to scapegoat), testified with gusto and organized purpose. What was filed away as “the inexplicable in Okigwe” in 1924 remained inexplicable but surely influenced by local men in 1929. The record keepers were most comfortable that way. All this to say that there were many forces pulling the West Africa Company men and itinerant traders into the space of forgetfulness (their deep complicity in internal slave trading and desire for freedom from European government oversight not the least of it). There was also the holding of trade accounts secret as proprietary information. And there was an ethos of Old Coaster fraternity and silence in the face of those staffing Colonial Office outposts like Fernando Po, etc. Don’t neglect the idea that accounts were made that didn’t fit the grand narratives of (masculine) trade and colonial power and that those accounts were ignored, lost, and tossed to help build the grand narratives that were a better fit.
Yes. One of the best examples of this for me personally--in fact, the person who made me really start thinking about it--was Lugard. That shows exactly what you're thinking about here, that the forgetting is not just a century-long process of erasure of the pre-19th Century Atlantic or Indian Ocean worlds but then an engine of male administrative power laid down atop another engine of "old hands" forgetting, two layers of almost instantaneous amnesia. Lugard's rendering of himself through text (through a woman making text for him) erased the circumstances of his arrival in East Africa, erased the desperate aspirational searching for a situation where he could convey weapons and violence into an unsettled situation and somehow come out of it an Important Man. And then his textual self erased all the other men who governed and had power in Nigeria so that he could be the composed Designer. He erased literate English-speaking and writing Igbo and Yoruba men who were long there and tried desperately to instruct him in what a genuinely "indirect rule" colonialism could or should be, erased the women clamoring to testify--and anyone whose memories might contradict was "pulled into the space of forgetfulness"--not just excluded from text-making but muted even in their own heads. Histories that plainly said otherwise were pushed into marginal invisibility, at least as far as the center of imperial administrative power was concerned. By the 1920s, all over the continent, administrators had become masterful at forgetting so completely that they effectively pre-forgot anything that they would never allow themselves to remember once it happened.
Thanks for this, Tim, which I would to read again and maybe again, and I do hope you can embark on this Atlantic adventure. And, I am trying to remember the recent, and maybe not so recent, conversations regarding the authenticity of Equiano self-described experience. I think my take first take was to imagine the extraordinary knowledge base that this man had to construct a "first-hand" account of the Atlantic trade, which must have involved sources, the archive, of four continents. If I was right in commenting back to someone at ASA who had "uncovered" the "alleged fraud," I mentioned the achievement of it going way past a straightforward autobiography. If it were such an achievement, it was all the more remarkable for the great influence it had over a couple of centuries. And, of course, I thought of, and may have spoken to, the point that we today clap ourselves on the back for unveiling the inauthenticity while missing the extraordinary achievement of the work of confecting an "original" account. Or, maybe, possibly, I have really messed up this memory of the Equiano story as it was told at an ASA session. Meanwhile, I am part way through a very remarkable podcast interview of Carolyn H. in which she hammers away and the idea of "invention."
I only know about Mungo Park from TC Boyle's novel "Water Music", which I enjoyed when I first read it a very long time ago, Curious what you think about that book.
I actually haven't read Boyle's novel, but I've wanted to for a while.
It's easy to see why Park's own book was a bestseller at the time--it's exceptionally readable, even now, and he doesn't have the unpleasant imperial braggadaccio of explorers from the mid-century onward (or more dramatically, Burton's generalize misanthropy). Pratt talks about the sentimentality of Park's narrative and I think that's a good word to use. Though she's quite critical of Park and sees him as inventing the kind of framework I'm thinking about here, and I would see him instead as an exception--not engaged in the maintenance of the Atlantic system but also not yet imagining empires. It's still a really good book regardless, and I can completely see the appeal of thinking about Park through historical ficiton.
A long time ago, Tim, I noted the ease (and rapidity) of colonial “forgetting” even in records kept by colonial officers in the fairly limited space/time of southeastern Nigeria between 1924 and 1929. What promoted forgetting there was what we might call a sense of gender irrelevance: If women did something, there was no felt imperative to keep track of the matter, to put it baldly. When the forgotten returned, with a vengeance, it was as if no one could be blamed for putting earlier events aside and forgetting they had ever happened. It had all been so female, and therefore inexplicable, anyway. But the notes had been made and the records kept. None of the DOs or ADOs bothered to look at them, as far as I can tell, much less to call into question the “Old Coaster” truisms in (masculine) circulation. Even when there were massive inquiries, male inquirers managed to focus on each other and to ignore the inconvenient fact that hundreds of indigenous women were clamoring to testify. Or that those women who did testify (excepting only the woman the colonials thought to scapegoat), testified with gusto and organized purpose. What was filed away as “the inexplicable in Okigwe” in 1924 remained inexplicable but surely influenced by local men in 1929. The record keepers were most comfortable that way. All this to say that there were many forces pulling the West Africa Company men and itinerant traders into the space of forgetfulness (their deep complicity in internal slave trading and desire for freedom from European government oversight not the least of it). There was also the holding of trade accounts secret as proprietary information. And there was an ethos of Old Coaster fraternity and silence in the face of those staffing Colonial Office outposts like Fernando Po, etc. Don’t neglect the idea that accounts were made that didn’t fit the grand narratives of (masculine) trade and colonial power and that those accounts were ignored, lost, and tossed to help build the grand narratives that were a better fit.
Yes. One of the best examples of this for me personally--in fact, the person who made me really start thinking about it--was Lugard. That shows exactly what you're thinking about here, that the forgetting is not just a century-long process of erasure of the pre-19th Century Atlantic or Indian Ocean worlds but then an engine of male administrative power laid down atop another engine of "old hands" forgetting, two layers of almost instantaneous amnesia. Lugard's rendering of himself through text (through a woman making text for him) erased the circumstances of his arrival in East Africa, erased the desperate aspirational searching for a situation where he could convey weapons and violence into an unsettled situation and somehow come out of it an Important Man. And then his textual self erased all the other men who governed and had power in Nigeria so that he could be the composed Designer. He erased literate English-speaking and writing Igbo and Yoruba men who were long there and tried desperately to instruct him in what a genuinely "indirect rule" colonialism could or should be, erased the women clamoring to testify--and anyone whose memories might contradict was "pulled into the space of forgetfulness"--not just excluded from text-making but muted even in their own heads. Histories that plainly said otherwise were pushed into marginal invisibility, at least as far as the center of imperial administrative power was concerned. By the 1920s, all over the continent, administrators had become masterful at forgetting so completely that they effectively pre-forgot anything that they would never allow themselves to remember once it happened.
Thanks for this, Tim, which I would to read again and maybe again, and I do hope you can embark on this Atlantic adventure. And, I am trying to remember the recent, and maybe not so recent, conversations regarding the authenticity of Equiano self-described experience. I think my take first take was to imagine the extraordinary knowledge base that this man had to construct a "first-hand" account of the Atlantic trade, which must have involved sources, the archive, of four continents. If I was right in commenting back to someone at ASA who had "uncovered" the "alleged fraud," I mentioned the achievement of it going way past a straightforward autobiography. If it were such an achievement, it was all the more remarkable for the great influence it had over a couple of centuries. And, of course, I thought of, and may have spoken to, the point that we today clap ourselves on the back for unveiling the inauthenticity while missing the extraordinary achievement of the work of confecting an "original" account. Or, maybe, possibly, I have really messed up this memory of the Equiano story as it was told at an ASA session. Meanwhile, I am part way through a very remarkable podcast interview of Carolyn H. in which she hammers away and the idea of "invention."
I only know about Mungo Park from TC Boyle's novel "Water Music", which I enjoyed when I first read it a very long time ago, Curious what you think about that book.
I actually haven't read Boyle's novel, but I've wanted to for a while.
It's easy to see why Park's own book was a bestseller at the time--it's exceptionally readable, even now, and he doesn't have the unpleasant imperial braggadaccio of explorers from the mid-century onward (or more dramatically, Burton's generalize misanthropy). Pratt talks about the sentimentality of Park's narrative and I think that's a good word to use. Though she's quite critical of Park and sees him as inventing the kind of framework I'm thinking about here, and I would see him instead as an exception--not engaged in the maintenance of the Atlantic system but also not yet imagining empires. It's still a really good book regardless, and I can completely see the appeal of thinking about Park through historical ficiton.