Ethnographic Collecting and African Agency in Early Colonial West Africa: A Study of Trans-Imperial Cultural Flows 9781501337925, 9781501337956, 9781501337949

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Ethnographic Collecting and African Agency in Early Colonial West Africa

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Contextualizing Art Markets

This series presents new, original research that reconceives the scope and function of art markets throughout history by examining them in the context of broader institutional practices, knowledge networks, social structures, collecting activities, and creative strategies. In many cases, art market activities have been studied in isolation from broader themes within art history, a trend that has tended to stifle exchange across disciplinary boundaries. Contextualizing Art Markets seeks to foster increased dialogue between art historians, artists, curators, economists, gallerists, and other market professionals by contextualizing art markets around the world within wider art historical discourses and institutional practices. The series has been developed in the belief that the reciprocal relation between art and finance is undergoing a period of change: artists are adopting innovative strategies for the commercial promotion of their work, auction houses are expanding their educational programmes, art fairs are attracting unprecedented audience numbers, museums are becoming global brands, private galleries are showing increasingly ‘curated’ exhibitions, and collectors are establishing new exhibition spaces. As the divide between public and private practices narrows, questions about the social and ethical impact of market activities on the production, collection, and reception of art have become newly pertinent. By combining trends within the broader discipline of art history with investigations of marketplace dynamics, Contextualizing Art Markets explores the imbrication of art and economics as a driving force behind the aesthetic and social development of the art world. We welcome proposals that debate these issues across a range of historical periods and geographies. Series Editor: Kathryn Brown, Loughborough University, UK Editorial Board: Véronique Chagnon-Burke, Christie’s Education, USA Christel H. Force, Metropolitan Museum of Art, USA Charlotte Galloway, Australian National University, Australia Mel Jordan, Royal College of Art, UK Alain Quemin, Université Paris-8, France Mark Westgarth, University of Leeds, UK ii

Forthcoming Volumes in the Series: Reframing Japonisme: Women and the Asian Art Market in Nineteenth-Century France (1853–1914), by Elizabeth Emery Pioneers of the Global Art Market: Paris-Based Dealer Networks, 1850–1950, edited by Christel H. Force Collecting Prints, Posters and Ephemera: Perspectives in a Global World, edited by Ruth E. Iskin and Britany Salsbury Corporate Patronage of Art & Architecture in the United States, Late 19th Century to the Present, edited by Monica E. Jovanovich and Melissa Renn Théodore Rousseau and the Rise of the Modern Art Market: An Avant-Garde Landscape Painter in Nineteenth-Century France, by Simon Kelly Women, Art and Money in Late Victorian and Edwardian England: The Hustle and the Scramble, by Maria Quirk

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Ethnographic Collecting and African Agency in Early Colonial West Africa A Study of Trans-Imperial Cultural Flows Zachary Kingdon

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BLOOMSBURY VISUAL ARTS Bloomsbury Publishing Inc 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in the United States of America 2019 Copyright © National Museums Liverpool, 2019 For legal purposes the Acknowledgments on pp. xxi–xxiii constitute an extension of this copyright page. Series design by Irene Martinez Costa Cover image: Diviner’s figure or spirit companion figure. Akan (Probably Akye or Allangoa) from Côte-d’Ivoire. © National Museums Liverpool (World Museum) All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Inc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN :

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Series: Contextualizing Art Markets Typeset by RefineCatch Limited, Bungay, Suffolk To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

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To the memory of my mother

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Contents List of Illustrations List of Colour Plates Acknowledgements List of Abbreviations Preface Kathryn Brown 1

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Introduction Approach Structure and Outline

xi xviii xxi xxiv xxv 1 5 7

Prologue: Western Africa, Africans and Liverpool’s Municipal Museum After the Slave Trade The Niger Expedition Joseph Mayer and the Inauguration of Liverpool’s Ethnography Collection Between Empire and Trade Conclusion

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Arnold Ridyard and his Assemblage Ridyard’s Family Background and Methodist Identity Maritime Career, Collecting Practices and Social Networks Acquisition and Generosity Ridyard’s Dissenting Interests Conclusion

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Diasporic Dialogues: The Sierra Leonean Donors I W. R. Renner: West African Capitalist Krio diaspora: Collecting and Culture in the Early Twentieth Century Women Donors: Mrs W. E. Johnson and Miss B. Yorke The Muslim Donors: Colonial Exclusion, African Regional Trajectories Conclusion

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Trans-imperial Identities: The Sierra Leonean Donors II Freetown Architecture and Krio Self-orientation Krio Male Elites ‘Upbuilding’ and Empire

11 15 21 26 36

41 42 54 57 69

78 85 95 105 112 117 118 124 128

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Contents Claudius Dyonisius Hotobah During Conclusion

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Coastal ‘Kings’: The Gold Coast Donors I Ababio IV, Amonu V, Acquah II and Prince Tackie Kojo Ababio IV, Accra Political Player Potters of Accra’s Western Plains Ambiguous ‘Traditionalist’: E. W. Quartey-Papafio Dr Edward Mettle, ‘Man of Mystery and Power’ Conclusion

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Coastal Cosmopolitans: The Gold Coast Donors II Frederick Lutterodt, West African Photographer Arthur Robert Chinery, Euro-Ga Professional John Mensah Sarbah, ‘Cosmopolitan Patriot’ J. P. Brown, C. J. Bannerman and Other ‘Cosmopolitan Patriots’ Mobile Elites: C. J. Reindorf, H. van Hien and Others Conclusion

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Museum Meanings: Regimes of Classification, Representation and Display Exhibiting Order Rearranging and Re-evaluating Liverpool Museum’s African Collection in the 1930s Erosion and Occlusion: The Ridyard Assemblage at the Liverpool Museum, 1905 to 1968 Conclusion

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Epilogue References Index

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151 159 165 173 180 191

200 206 220 230 237 240

248 255 260 271 277 281 295

Illustrations The copyright for all photographs belongs to National Museums Liverpool (World Museum), unless stated otherwise.

Chapter 1 1

Photograph of the Liverpool Museums and William Brown Library in 1895. Photographer: Thomas Burke. Courtesy of Liverpool Record Office, Liverpool Libraries.

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Chapter 2 2

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‘Sapi-Portuguese’ ivory hunting horn from the sixteenth century. Presented to the museum in 1867 as part of the Joseph Mayer donation. M13014. Oba Ovonramwen with guards on board the steam yacht Ivy on his way to exile in Calabar in 1897. Photograph by the Ibani Ijo photographer J. A. Green. Howie photo album. Courtesy of National Museums Liverpool (Merseyside Maritime Museum).

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Chapter 3 4

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Portrait of Arnold Ridyard (1851–1924). Photographer and date unknown but probably taken on, or after, his retirement from service with Elder, Dempster & Co. in 1916. World Museum Ethnology Department archive. 1980.108.38. The SS Tarquah. Elder, Dempster & Co. ship of the West Africa service on which Arnold Ridyard served between 1909 until 1916. Merseyside Maritime Museum Archives, Elder Dempster Lines Album 6 (MCR 29/45). Courtesy of National Museums Liverpool (Merseyside Maritime Museum). Certificate of thanks issued to John Mensah Sarbah in 1903 by the Liverpool Museum in gratitude for a king’s messenger sword (15.1.03.9, now lost) from the Gold Coast. PRAAD SC 6.36, Accra, Ghana. Photo: the author 2009.

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Illustrations Studio portrait of a Krio woman. Photographer: W. S. Johnston & sons, Freetown, Sierra Leone, probably early twentieth century. From Ridyard’s papers given to the Bolton Museum after his death. Bolton Council, from the collections of the Bolton Museum.

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Chapter 4 8

Portrait of Archdeacon D. C. Crowther (1844–1938) from about 1865. CMS Archives, CMS /ACC 314/Z1. Photographer unknown. Courtesy of Church Mission Society Archives. 9 Portrait of Sarah Crowther probably from about 1865. Missionary Leaves Association Photo Specimen Book. CMS Archives, H/H 31/AGI /1. Photographer unknown. Courtesy of Church Mission Society Archives. 10 Three Sherbro Mende combs from Sherbro Island, Sierra Leone. Presented by C. D. Hotobah During in 1908. 14.2.08.8, 14.2.08.9, 14.2.08.10. 11 Wooden spoon from the ‘interior of Sierra Leone’. Presented by C. D. Hotobah During in 1908. 14.2.08.7. 12 Earthenware pot with lid, probably Itsekiri. From Warri in the Niger Delta, Southern Nigeria. Presented by James Brown of Wellington Street, Freetown, in 1909. 20.5.09.14. 13 Portrait figure of Queen Victoria from Abeokuta. Presented by Mrs W. E. Johnson of Bathurst (now Banjul), The Gambia. 13.2.09.27. 14 & 15 Two black-painted wooden figures of a man in European military-style clothing wearing detachable pith helmet. Presented in 1911 through Ridyard by Miss B. Yorke of East Street, Freetown. 10.4.11.42 (left) and 10.4.11.43 (right). 16 Black-painted wooden figure of a man in European-style clothing seated at a desk with open book wearing detachable pith helmet. Presented in 1911 through Ridyard by Miss B. Yorke of East Street, Freetown. 10.4.11.45. 17 Wooden figure of a man in European-style clothing seated at a desk with open book. Detachable pen and pith helmet missing. Collected at Lagos in 1910 by Ridyard. 12.9.10.2. 18 & 19 Two wooden figures of a man in European-style clothing seated at a desk with D. C. inscribed on it. Detachable pith helmets missing. Collected at Lagos in 1915 by Ridyard. 15.3.15.10 (left) 15.3.15.11 (right). 20 Wooden figure of a man in European military-style clothing. Detachable pith helmet missing. Collected at Lagos in 1910 by Ridyard. 12.9.10.1. 21 Wooden figure of a man in European military uniform with pillbox-style cap. Collected at Lagos in 1915 by Ridyard. 15.3.15.9.

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Illustrations 22 Wooden figure of a man wearing European-style clothing and peaked flat cap. Collected at Lagos by J. C. Henderson and presented in 1911. 1.2.11.48. 23 Wooden figure of a man wearing European-style clothing and boater-like hat. Collected at Lagos by J. C. Henderson and presented in 1911. 1.2.11.49. 24, 25 & 26 Three pyro-engraved wooden ladles from Matam on the Senegal River, Senegal. Presented by Abubakar Savage in 1908 through Ridyard. 18.1.08.6 (top), 18.1.08.7 (middle), 18.1.08.8 (bottom).

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Chapter 5 27 Plot and remains of the Gibson family frame house in Saunders Street, Freetown. Bombed during Revolutionary United Front (RUF ) rebel war 1999. Permission Patricia Gibson. Photo: the author 2010. 28 Nineteenth-century Krio couch in Mohammed Muyu Deen Savage’s house in Dan Street. Permission Kosnah Savage. Photo: the author 2010. 29 St John’s Maroon Methodist Church in Freetown. Built in 1808. Photo: the author 2010. 30 Malamah House, East Street, Freetown. Built in the 1880s for John Henry Thomas by J. T. Ojokutu-Macaulay. Photo: the author 2010. 31 Detail of Malamah House showing the carved stone heads projecting below the first-floor windows. Photo: the author 2010. 32 Memorial plaque to the Liberated African Abraham Deigh in Buxton Memorial Methodist Church in Charles Street, Freetown. Photo: the author 2010. 33 Ceremonial staff from the Mende town of Blama, Sierra Leone. Given to the Liverpool Museum by Alfred Williams through Arnold Ridyard in 1908. 30.7.08.9. 34 Mende Sande society mask given to the Liverpool Museum by Alfred Williams through Arnold Ridyard in 1910. 12.9.10.12. 35 George Punshon During (†1911) and Claudius D. Hotobah During (1886–1973). Father-and-son portrait probably taken in 1907 before Claudius (standing) departed for London to study law at Middle Temple. Photographer unknown. Permission: Solomon Jawara. 36 Soso ornamental comb. Presented by G. P. During in 1900. 26.2.00.52. 37 Yoruba cooking pot from Lagos, Nigeria. Presented by C. D. Hotobah During in 1908. 14.2.08.12. 38 Cigarette tin covered in ornamental leatherwork by Mande leatherworker. Presented by C. D. Hotobah During through Ridyard in 1906. 16.2.06.22.

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Chapter 6 39 Portrait of Nii Kojo Ababio IV, (formerly Amoako Atta) (1873–1938), mantse of James Town’s Alata quarter of Nleshi (James Town), Accra. Photographer: J. K. Bruce-Vanderpuije, Accra (c.1935). © Isaac BruceVanderpuije and National Museums Liverpool (World Museum). 40 Portrait of Niibi Nii Daniel Ayidzaku Tackie (1872–c.1931). ‘Prince’ Daniel Ayidzaku Tackie was a son of Ga Mantse (‘King’) Nii Tackie Tawiah I. Photographer unknown. Permission: Niibi Nii Teigo Tackie. 41 Drum body (skin and tuning pegs missing). Akan (Fante) from Anomabu, Gold Coast (now Ghana). Presented in 1904 by Omanhene Amonu V of Anomabu. 15.8.04.27. 42 Ceremonial palm wine vessel. Akan (Fante) from Anomabu, Gold Coast (now Ghana). Presented in 1902 by Omanhene Amonu V of Anomabu. 7.7.02.14. 43 Earthenware vessel echoing a seventeenth century European form. Akan (Fante) from Anomabu, Gold Coast (now Ghana). Presented in 1906 by Omanhene Amonu V of Anomabu. 24.5.06.35. 44 Earthenware water vessel in the form of a hen. Ga from Accra, Gold Coast. Presented in 1905 by Mantse Kojo Ababio IV of Nleshi (James Town), Accra. 2.5.05.2. 45 Double-spouted water vessel. Ga from Accra, Gold Coast. Presented in 1905 by Niibi Nii Daniel Ayidzaku Tackie. 10.2.05.35. 46 Red earthenware water pitcher. Ga made in the village of ‘Weifan’ (probably Weija), Accra Plains. Presented in 1909 by Mantse Kojo Ababio IV of Nleshi (James Town), Accra. 19.11.09.12. 47 Earthenware ceremonial spoon from Weija village, Accra Plains. Presented in 1914 by Mantse Kojo Ababio IV of Nleshi (James Town), Accra. 12.5.14.7. 48 Earthenware food dish. Ga, made at Oblogo village, Accra Plains. Presented by Ridyard in 1910. 23.11.10.10. 49 European-style earthenware bowl. Ga, made at Oblogo village, Accra Plains. Presented by Ridyard in 1910. 23.11.10.9. 50 European-style earthenware tureen. Ga, made at Oblogo village, Accra Plains. Presented by Ridyard in 1910. 23.11.10.15. 51 European-style earthenware jug. Ga, made at Oblogo village, Accra Plains. Presented by Ridyard in 1910. 23.11.10.12. 52 Earthenware model of a pair of European leather boots. Ga, made at Oblogo village, Accra Plains. Presented by Ridyard in 1910. 23.11.10.16. 53 Innovative vessel based on European ewer form with two lips and handle on each side. Ga, made at Oblogo village, Accra Plains. Presented by Ridyard in 1910. 23.11.10.21. 54 Double-spouted botijo-style water vessel. Ga, made at Oblogo village, Accra Plains. Presented by Ridyard in 1911. 11.9.11.5.

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Illustrations 55 Lidded water cooler. Ga, made at Oblogo village, Accra Plains. Presented by Ridyard in 1910. 23.11.10.18. 56 Lidded decanter. Ga, made at Oblogo village, Accra Plains. Presented by Ridyard in 1911. 1.2.11.1. 57 European-style earthenware cup. Ga, made at Oblogo village, Accra Plains. Presented by Ridyard in 1912. 18.4.12.6. 58 Basketry sieve. Ga from Accra. Presented by E. W. Quartey-Papafio in 1901. 20.5.01.12. 59 Plaited basket. Ga from Accra. Presented by E. W. Quartey-Papafio in 1901. 20.5.01.17. 60 Wooden ladle with handle in the form of a snake. Ga from Accra. Presented by E. W. Quartey-Papafio in 1901. 20.5.01.13. 61 Hat of plaited fibre trimmed with leather. Hausa from Accra. Presented by E. W. Quartey-Papafio in 1901. 20.5.01.14. 62 Hide-covered cartridge belt and powder flask. Ga from Accra. Presented by E. W. Quartey-Papafio in 1903. 15.1.03.10. 63 Portrait of Dr Edward Mettle. Photographer: Albert Lutterodt, Accra. © Bolton Council, from the collections of the Bolton Museum. 64 Earthenware tureen. Ga made in the village of Korlibu, Accra. Presented by Dr Edward Mettle in 1903. 31.7.03.21. 65 Earthenware jug. Ga made in the village of Affarmah, Accra Plains. Presented by Dr Edward Mettle in 1909. 13.2.09.18. 66 Chief ’s spokesman’s staff (okyeame poma). Akan from Kwawu. Presented by Dr Edward Mettle in 1904. 15.8.04.28.

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171 171 172 174 174 175 175 176 181 186 187 188

Chapter 7 67 Portrait of Frederick Lutterodt probably taken in the early 1890s. Published in Smith 1895. Photographer unknown. 68 Ceremonial sword. Akan (Asante) from Kumase. Presented by Frederick Lutterodt in 1900. 24.9.00.38. 69 Ceremonial sword (parts missing). Ekonda from Congo Free State (DRC ). Presented by A. R. Chinery in 1906. 3.9.06.22. 70 Lidded earthenware water cooler on tray. Ga from Accra. Presented by A. R. Chinery in 1907. 14.10.07.17. 71 European-made terracotta cooler with stopper and tray (probably made on Madeira). Accra, from the collection of Leonard Crossland. Permission: Leonard Crossland. Photo: the author. 72 Portrait of Arthur Robert Chinery (1863–1954) and Fanny Chinery (1872–1958) taken at Accra in 1899. Photographer: (Probably) Lutterodt and Sons, Accra. Permission: Smyly Chinery. 73 Photograph of the Chinery family taken at Accra in 1905. Photographer: (Probably) Lutterodt and Sons, Accra. Permission: Smyly Chinery.

201 204 206 210

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74 Photograph of Arthur and Fanny Chinery taken in 1937 to mark their 40th wedding anniversary. Photographer: (Probably) J. K. BruceVanderpuije, Accra. Permission: Smyly Chinery. 75 Burnished earthenware vessel. Made at Keta, southeastern Gold Coast. Presented by Fanny Chinery in 1911. 1.2.11.30. 76 Photograph of Fairfield House, the Chinery family residence in James Town, Accra, from 1902. Permission: Bobby Chinery. Photo: the author 2009. 77 Brass gold weight in form of man with sword in his belt. Akan (Asante) from the Gold Coast. Presented by John Mensah Sarbah in 1910. 26.4.10.47. 78 Portrait of John Mensah Sarbah (1864–1910). © The British Library Board (The Pen-Pictures of Modern Africans and African Celebrities, by Charles Hutchinson). Photographer unknown. 79 Photograph of Peter Awoonor Renner (1861–1938) in his uniform as aide-de-camp to the governor in 1925. Photographer unknown. Permission: Afrograph. 80 Earthenware water bottle made in the Wassa style. Probably made by a Fante potter at Cape Coast Castle, Gold Coast. Presented by J. P. Brown in 1906. 3.9.06.21. 81 Brass gold weight in the form of a shield for weighing gold dust currency. Akan (Asante) from the Gold Coast. Presented by Peter Awoonor Renner in 1903. 22.10.03.25. 82 Brass staff of a Shango priest. Yoruba from Odigbo in Southwest Nigeria. Presented by Peter Awoonor Renner in 1903. 14.4.03.15. 83 Oval earthenware dish with cover. Probably Effutu from Winneba, the Gold Coast. Presented by C. J. Reindorf in 1909. 13.2.09.22. 84 Burnished earthenware water bottle. Ga made in the village of Afuamang, Accra Plains. Presented by C. J. Reindorf in 1912. 24.6.12.10. 85 Group photograph taken at the Pan-African Association Conference in London, July 1900, showing C. J. Reindorf and J. P. Brown. From West Africa, November 1900, page 208.

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Chapter 8 86 Plans of the extended Liverpool Museum of 1906. 87 A display of Asante brass gold weights and gold dust storage boxes from the Gold Coast, intended to induce ‘delight’. Designed by Trevor Thomas. Published as Plate VIII in Thomas’s article ‘Penny Plain Twopence Coloured: The Aesthetics of Museum Display’ in Museums Journal, 39 (1): 1–12.

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Illustrations 88 Diviner’s figure or spirit companion figure. Akan (Attie) from Côte d’Ivoire. Presented by A. H. Garburah through Ridyard in 1905. 8.11.05.23. 89 Diviner’s figure or spirit companion figure. Akan (Ebrie) from Côte d’Ivoire. Presented by J. T. Mensah through Ridyard in 1905. 10.2.05.43. 90 Funerary ancestor figure in earthenware. Akan from Ghana. Purchased from Gallery 43, London, in 1966. 1966.218.6.

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Colour Plates 1 2

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Nupe robe of honour embroidered with silk. Collected by Selim Aga on the voyage of the Dayspring and purchased by the museum in 1860. 20.11.60.2. Sixteenth-century Edo head of a queen mother in copper alloy. Acquired for the museum in 1899 by Ridyard from an unknown intermediary in West Africa. 27.11.99.8. Duala Losango society mask in the form of an antelope or buffalo, from the West Coast of Cameroon. Acquired by the museum in 1808 from James Harrison. 3.11.08.3. Kongo ‘power figure’ or nkisi nkondi, named Mangaaka, from Cabinda (Angola). Donated by Hatton & Cookson trader Oscar Sonnenberg in 1900, through Ridyard. 29.5.00.21. Kongo ‘power figure’ or nkisi nkondi, named Kozo, from Cabinda (Angola). Acquired by Ridyard from the Hatton & Cookson trader William Shawcross in 1898. 9.8.98.43. Medicinal root sample collected in Sierra Leone by Ridyard. Manchester Museum, K 22745 (EM 550524) ‘Egboshie’ or Yellow Fever root (Sarcocephalus esculentus). Manchester Museum, University of Manchester. Two-story frame and plank-clad house on raised masonry foundation, Liverpool Street, Regent Village, Sierra Leone. Photo: the author 2010. Big Market, Wallace Johnson Street (formerly Water Street), Freetown, Sierra Leone. Photo: the author 2010. Hat of plaited fibre trimmed with leather. Mande from Perai on the upper Gambia River, The Gambia. Presented by Mohammed Muyu Deen Savage in 1906 through Ridyard. 3.9.06.11. Nineteenth-century Krio ‘tropical Georgian’ house built by Mohammed Muyu Deen Savage, Dan Street in Freetown’s Fourah Bay district. Photo: the author 2010. Women’s beaded apron from Matadi, Congo Free State (now Democratic Republic of Congo). Presented by C. D. Hotobah During in 1908. 14.2.08.5. Hausa-style plaited hat from Lagos decorated with Islamic protective symbols in coloured leather. Presented by C. D. Hotobah During in 1908. 14.2.08.1. European stoneware flagon covered in ornamental leatherwork by Mande leatherworker. Presented by C. D. Hotobah During through Ridyard in 1906. 19.12.06.19. Pair of female medicine association figures on a stand. Mende from Sierra Leone. Presented by C. D. Hotobah During through Ridyard in 1911. 27.11.11.12.

Colour plates

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15 Wooden figure, probably representing a railway official, made by a Mende sculptor at Kenema, Sierra Leone. Presented by C. D. Hotobah During through Ridyard in 1913. 22.12.13.10. 16 King’s messenger sword. Akan from Anomabu, Gold Coast (now Ghana). Presented in 1904 by Omanhene Amonu V of Anomabu. 15.8.04.30. 17 Umbrella top of pyro-engraved wood in the form of a hen sheltering chicks. Effutu from Winneba, Gold Coast. Presented in 1907 by Omanhene Acquah II of Winneba. 8.7.07.11. 18 Umbrella top of wood in the form of a mythical sankofa bird. Effutu from Winneba, Gold Coast. Presented in 1906 by Omanhene Acquah II of Winneba. 19.12.06.6. 19 Umbrella top of wood in the form of a group of birds feeding on a millet stalk. Effutu from Winneba, Gold Coast. Presented in 1907 by Omanhene Acquah II of Winneba. 8.7.07.10. 20 Head of a spokesman’s staff in wood with symbols of the Ga state. Ga from Accra, Gold Coast. Presented in 1906 by Mantse Kojo Ababio IV of Nleshi (James Town), Accra. 19.12.06.7. 21 Earthenware water vessel covered with mica slip in the form of a chicken. Ga made in the village of Afuamang, Accra Plains. Presented in 1914 by Mantse Kojo Ababio IV of Nleshi (James Town), Accra. 12.5.14.5. 22 Earthenware decanter with stopper and linear decorations in mica slip from the village of Oblogo, Accra Plains. Presented in 1914 by Mantse Kojo Ababio IV of Nleshi (James Town), Accra. 12.5.14.6. 23 Female figure for the shrine of the lagoon deity ‘Koole’. Ga from Accra. Presented by Dr Edward Mettle in 1899. 27.11.99.36. 24 Cast brass lid for a gold dust currency storage box. Akan (Asante). Presented by A. R. Chinery in 1906. 24.5.06.36. 25 Accra Lighthouse, with James Fort to the right. James Town, Accra. Photo: the author 2009. 26 Zamble festival mask. Guro from Côte d’Ivoire. Purchased from Gallery 43, London, in 1966. 1966.373.1. 27 Nkishi power figure. Songye from Democratic Republic of Congo. Purchased from P. Goldman in 1966. 1966.373.2. 28 Personal shrine figure. Baule from Côte d’Ivoire. Purchased from Gallery 43, London, in 1966. 1966.109.2. 29 Reliquary guardian figure eyema byeri. Fang from Gabon. Purchased from Charles Ratton in 1967. 1967.113.2. 30 Figure of a seated hogon (priest) for a shrine. Dogon from Mali. Purchased from Charles Ratton in 1967. 1967.113.1. 31 Naidugubele diviner healer’s headdress worn during consultations. Senufo from Côte d’Ivoire. Purchased from Gallery 43, London, in 1966. 1966.218.4. 32 Diviner’s figure or spirit companion figure. Akan (probably Akye or Allangoa) from Côte d’Ivoire. Presented by J. T. Mensah through Ridyard in 1906. 3.9.06.36.

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33 Liverpool Counterpoint 8. Polychrome lino print by Atta Kwami, with designs sketched from Ghanaian stools in the World Museum displays. Purchased with the assistance of the Art Fund in 2015. LIV.2015.51.8 34 Liverpool Counterpoint 3. Polychrome lino print by Atta Kwami, with designs sketched from Asante cast brass gold weights and boxes in the World Museum collection used for storing gold dust currency. Purchased with the assistance of the Art Fund in 2015. LIV.2015.51.3.

Acknowledgements Much of the primary research for this study was funded by a Leverhulme Trust Research Fellowship (RF /6/RFG /2009/0224) granted in 2009, which allowed me to conduct field and archival work in Ghana and Sierra Leone, as well as archival work in the UK . My employers, National Museums Liverpool, approved the project. I am grateful to both organizations. My head of department, Emma Martin, and the Director of World Museum Liverpool, Stephen Judd, have been staunch supporters of the project throughout all its stages, for which they deserve special credit. The origins of this study can be traced back as far as June 1999, when I arrived at the then Liverpool Museum to take up the newly created position of Curator of African Collections and take forward the development of the Africa displays for a new World Cultures Gallery. The gallery was to be a key part of the museum’s ambitious redevelopment plans funded by the Heritage Lottery Fund and an Objective 1 grant from the European Regional Development Fund. However, the position of Curator of African Collections was only created after determined campaigning by Louise Tythacott, the museum’s then ‘Head of Ethnology Section’, for which, among many other things, she deserves great credit. As a social anthropologist with research experience in East Africa, I faced a steep learning curve on my arrival in Liverpool. I had to get to know a large historical collection of mainly West and Central African artefacts, while at the same time labouring under tight designers’ deadlines to develop exhibition themes and select exhibits to populate the Africa displays of the new World Cultures Gallery. In that early period, the direction, influence and friendship of Dmitri van den Bersselaar, then lecturer in African History at Liverpool University, proved crucial. While I was fortunate to be able to bring Dmitri in as a consultant on the gallery-development project, his influence persisted well beyond the project’s completion and a number of the themes discussed in this study were initially raised in our numerous conversations about issues in West African history. I am also very grateful for the time that Dmitri put into reading and commenting on part of the book manuscript at a particularly busy period in his calendar. Other expert consultants brought in to assist with aspects of the gallery-development project, who contributed to my knowledge of the collections, included Charles Gore, the late Keith Nicklin, Olu Olaseinde, John Picton, William Rea, Sarah Worden and Babatunde Zack-Williams. Stimulus and direction were also provided by Liverpool residents, Paul Clarkson, Ray Costello, Susan Goligher, Levi Tafari and Sandra Warriner. In getting to grips with Liverpool’s long-standing and significant connections with West Africa I was also encouraged through my many formal and informal conversations with community activists and local residents, including Tayo Aluko, Chief Angus

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Chukuemeka, the late Dorothy Kuya, Eric Lynch, Garry Morris, Ben Quartey, Helen and Archie Renner, Abraham Sankoh and others. This book was written alongside ongoing documentation work on the African collections at World Museum. The documentation work was fed into a database that served as a crucial source for my research and will provide the basis for online access to the collections scheduled to go live at about the time of publication. The book has involved the efforts of many people, including the museum’s photographers and information technology teams, but also numerous volunteers and placement students. Long service credits for voluntary work are due especially to Ben Jones, Ha-Il Kim and Marion Servat-Fredericq. Thanks are also due to many others who assisted especially with documentation including Katie Brown and Caroline Routledge, as well as Hannah Bedford, Catriona Donaldson, Elpiniki Vavritsa and Elisabeth Whittall. A great many people assisted me during my research visits to Ghana (in late 2009) and Sierra Leone (in early 2010). Although it would be impossible to list them all, I owe major debts of gratitude to my excellent research assistants, Daniel Kumah (of Accra) and Emmanuel Kamara (of Freetown), who did much valuable work in helping to trace descendants of West African donors to the museum collections. Among the descendants of donors traced in Ghana whose collaboration assisted me immeasurably, I owe a particular debt of gratitude to Smyly Chinery and his late aunt Maude Hammond, as well as Leonard Crossland, Victor Mettle and Niibi Nii Teigo Tackie. Many others, descendants and non-descendants alike, were also very helpful, including George Abaka, Joseph Addaquay, John Kwesi Egyir Aggrey, Michael Allotey, Cynthia Allotey, Omanhene Kantamanto Amonu XI , Denise Awoonor-Renner, Peter Awoonor Renner, Dr Kofi Baku, Kate Bannerman, Nii Kwaku Bibini III , Isaac BruceVanderpuije, Atta Robert Chinery, Arthur Robert Otoo Chinery, Herman ChineryHesse, Emmanuel Nii Dodoo Dodoo, Kodzo Gavua, George Albert Lutterodt, Bart and James Mettle, Supi Minnah, Nana Ocran, Hugh Quartey Papafio, Nana V Nketia, Josiah Reindorf, Ekow Renner, the Hon. Elizabeth Sackey, Dr Kofi Essilfie Taylor. Thanks are also due to the very helpful staff at the Public Records and Archives Administration service at Accra and Cape Coast Castle. In Sierra Leone I was also generously assisted by numerous descendants of donors and Freetown luminaries including, Dr Walter Awoonor-Renner, Dr W. E. BoyleRoberts, Alhaji Abdul Aziz Cole, Tunde Eccles James, Albert Fonah, Magbaily Fyle, Cassandra Garber, Osman Gblah, Patricia Gibson, Rashid Gillen, Professor Vidal Godwin, Claudia Miriam Hotobah During, B. B. Ibrahim, Solomon Jawara, Mohammed Jobe, Eldred Jones, Josephine Kargbo, Andrew Marke, Ayo Mason, the late Donald Porter (aka Hotobah During), Ade Rahman, Hamid Savage, Kosnah Savage and Glen Wilson. For stimulating collegial discussions in Freetown, my thanks also go to Paul Basu, Emma Christopher, Paul Lovejoy, Ian Noah, Suzanne Schwarz and Johanna Zetterstrom-Sharpe. In the course of researching the widely distributed Ridyard assemblage of West African artefacts I have been assisted by curators and other staff at various institutions. I am grateful for the help I was given at the American Museum of Natural History in New York, the Manchester Museum, the Salford Museum, the London Zoological

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Society and, of course, the National Museums Liverpool. Thanks also go to Jeremy Coote at the Pitt Rivers Museum for facilitating my inspection of the Archdeacon Crowther Collection and documents there. A special thanks to Zoë Strother for permitting me to read and quote from some of her work in progress (referenced in the notes in Chapter 2). I am most grateful to friends and colleagues who took the time to read and comment on parts of my manuscript. Dmitri commented on Chapter  2, Catherine Morris commented on Chapter 3, Ola Uduku commented on Chapter 5 and Benedetta Rossi commented on other related material. For sharing ideas and enthusiasm about African coastal collections, many thanks to Julia Binter, Alba Mañe and others. Grateful thanks also to Atta Kwami for his inspirational prints, which feature in the Epilogue of this work. I thank Margaret Michniewicz, visual arts editor at Bloomsbury Academic, for her support, and also Bloomsbury’s three anonymous peer reviewers for their helpful comments. Finally, profound thanks to family and friends for all their support, encouragement and, at times, appropriate distraction.

Abbreviations AMNH

American Museum of Natural History

ARPS

(Gold Coast) Aborigines’ Rights Protection Society

CMS

Church Mission Society

CMSP

Church Mission Society Papers (University of Birmingham, Cadbury Research Library)

GCL

The Gold Coast Leader

PRAAD

Public Records and Archives Administration Department (Ghana)

SLWN

The Sierra Leone Weekly News

TNA

The National Archives (United Kingdom)

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Preface The series Contextualizing Art Markets locates and analyses transactions involving cultural objects within a broad range of institutional practices, knowledge networks, social structures, collecting activities and creative strategies. For these purposes, the term ‘market’ is understood in a broad sense. Extending beyond the familiar parameters of art dealer brokering and auction house activity, it encompasses a dynamic terrain of exchange, gift, barter and negotiation. By challenging ideas about what constitutes a ‘market’ for cultural objects, the series draws attention to a wide, and often underexplored, range of agents who transfer financial and symbolic interests in such objects to suit their own needs, desires and ambitions. Against this background, I am delighted to introduce Zachary Kingdon’s Ethnographic Collecting and African Agency in Early Colonial West Africa as the opening volume in the series. Kingdon’s book challenges discourses that have shaped interpretations of the formation of British collections of West African artefacts from the 1850s to 1916. As is well known, the international slave trade, institutionalized racism, and colonial expansion (including histories of looting) determined the agenda of much nineteenth-century European collecting. To the extent that transactions between European traders and African individuals constituted a ‘market’ in cultural objects, it was one typically based on unequal power relations, coercion and force. Kingdon’s book adds a new and important thread to this history. Rather than understanding Africans solely as victims of collecting practices that were informed by imperial expansion, Kingdon shows how individuals and communities on the coast of West Africa created complex networks of exchange and determined the terms of transactions with European collectors in ways that suited their own socio-political interests. Kingdon’s book is the product of detailed archival study, theoretical analysis, discussions with descendants of Sierra Leonean donors, and examination of curatorial practices in UK museums, notably the World Museum in Liverpool. He focuses, in particular, on the assemblage of almost 2,500 African cultural objects transported to the museum by Arnold Ridyard, the chief engineer on a steamship that travelled between the United Kingdom and West Africa from the 1880s to 1916. By showing how West Africans actively contributed to the formation of that collection and by analysing their motivations for giving or selling pieces, Kingdon encourages viewers to look differently at the museum’s holdings. On a broader level, he reveals a way in which the social biography of objects can stimulate a reconception of familiar museum categories and, in their place, bring to light dynamic systems of cultural flow. In consequence, Kingdon offers a more nuanced view of the origins of the museum’s collection and permits a wider range of voices to speak about its formation and legacy. His analysis contributes, therefore, to a reshaping of ideas that relate to both institutional collecting practices and histories of colonialism. xxv

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Questions about the gendering of art markets and museum collections have been posed with increasing insistence by curators and art historians over the past decade. Kingdon’s book makes an important contribution to such debates by illuminating the role of West African women in the creation of the collection at Liverpool’s World Museum. By tracing the personal histories of, and donations of artefacts by, nineteenth- and early twentieth-century female medical practitioners and traders in Krio communities of Sierra Leone and The Gambia, Kingdon illuminates the difficulties and opportunities that women experienced when asserting an independent identity both within their local communities and in response to gender roles encouraged by Christian missionaries. By signalling, as Kingdon puts it, the ‘dynamic cultural agency’ of such women, this book makes an important contribution to gender studies as well as to histories of trade and collecting. One of the aims of Contextualizing Art Markets is to show that markets for cultural objects do not develop in isolation, but are embedded in a range of financial, social, epistemic and imaginative networks that support or compete with each other. Kingdon develops this theme by focusing not just on the individuals who participated in late nineteenth-century transactions involving African artefacts, but by examining how those pieces moved and carried meaning from one continent to another. He shows how exchanges mapped onto existing trade networks, including maritime routes between the United Kingdom and settlements along the West Coast of Africa. In an important part of this story, Kingdon reveals how African entrepreneurs exploited the European interest in ‘curiosities’ by offering and, in some cases, producing items that were designed to satisfy that demand. This part of the book’s narrative anticipates some of the ways in which contemporary, transnational art markets develop, namely, by tracking patterns of consumption and building on infrastructures that connect the interests and acquisition habits of different communities. The subtleties of these connections play out in Kingdon’s book both geographically and through the complex identities and international careers of individuals including John Mensah Sarbah, a Cape Coast barrister, Methodist, and member of a leading Anomabu family, and the photographer Frederick Lutterodt whose family lineage was European (Danish) and African (Ga, Accra). In his discussion of the ways in which the Liverpool Museum’s African collection was catalogued and displayed from the 1930s to the late 1960s, Kingdon extends his discussion to show how objects can challenge curatorial practices and elude preexisting categories. Faced with the rise of a twentieth-century European market for African artefacts and prejudices about the classification of certain materials in ‘art’ or ‘ethnographic’ collections, some of the objects under discussion (in particular ceramics) defied placement within established taxonomies. Kingdon insightfully shows that critical and historical discourses need to be kept under review in order to identify and express the complex and changing ideas that attach to such objects throughout history. Kingdon’s book is a fitting opening to a series that is dedicated to understanding how artefacts are ascribed value, traded, interpreted and displayed. Alongside colonial agendas based on racism and exploitation, Kingdon uncovers relationships of trust and confidence that, in many cases, transcended differences of ethnicity, class, gender and

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nationality. By analysing the entangled personal and socio-political histories that shaped an important part of the Liverpool Museum’s African collection, Kingdon’s study uncovers new transnational dialogues and reveals the vital role played by African individuals who contributed their own ideas, narratives and ideologies to form a unique and polysemic assemblage of cultural objects. Kathryn Brown Loughborough, Spring 2018

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1

Introduction

This book is concerned with the flow of hundreds of objects from coastal West Africa to museums in northwest England during a roughly sixty-five-year span of the early colonial era, from the 1850s to 1916. While this flow is seen to have been fundamentally the product of imperial infrastructures, ideas and processes, most of it cannot be understood as having constituted spoils of colonial conquest, nor can it be seen simply as the result of coercion, or unequal power relationships. Instead, it holds evidence of a two-way process of cultural collaboration. This is because one of the book’s key protagonists was marine engineer Arnold Ridyard, who not only orchestrated much of the flow during the last two decades of the period, but also conducted a return flow of British cultural materials to West Africa. Ridyard was an energetic figure who served as chief engineer on the steamers of Elder, Dempster & Co.’s West Africa service from about 1880 to his retirement in 1916. Chapter 3 describes how Ridyard transported more than 6,500 African things to the museum in Liverpool (see Figure 1) and other institutions in northwest England, from numerous voyages along the coast of western Africa between 1894 and 1916. Ridyard transported artefacts and natural history ‘specimens’ to institutions in northwest England from the entire length of the western African coast from Senegal to Angola, and from British-controlled territories as well as those claimed by Spain, Portugal, France and King Leopold II of Belgium. So, this was a distribution that mapped directly onto late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century British trading geographies and shipping routes, rather than simply mirroring the spread of British colonial control in West Africa. Museum records show that Ridyard built up an astonishing network of about 222 contacts and collaborators on Africa’s Atlantic coast who contributed to his collecting operation. These collaborators included many Europeans, the majority of whom were traders. But the records of Liverpool’s World Museum also indicate that about one hundred West Africans contributed at least 775 artefacts as gifts to the original collection of the present-day World Museum through Ridyard. Consequently, no other museum collection of African artefacts in Britain from the late nineteenth and early twentieth century can match the World Museum in the proportion of artefacts in its holdings that are known to have been presented by West Africans. As well as considering Ridyard’s own agendas and motivations as a European in the acquisition of West African artefacts for British museums, this study is primarily concerned with addressing the role of African agency in the creation of the assemblage. But the role that Ridyard’s West African collaborators played in the creation of his 1

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Ethnographic Collecting and African Agency in Early Colonial West Africa

Figure 1 Photograph of the Liverpool Museums and William Brown Library in 1895. Photographer: Thomas Burke. Courtesy of Liverpool Record Office, Liverpool Libraries.

assemblage is acknowledged and explored, not simply to assert that Africans ‘had (and continue to have) agency’ (Harrison 2013: 3), nor to assert a ‘naïve democracy’ of plural perspectives (Clifford 1997: 23). Rather, it is done to help reinsert Africans, all too often largely written out of collecting histories, as principal actors in the account, and as real people actively responding in complex ways to the particular historical and political forces of their day. Museum collecting in this context, then, must be understood, not only as the product of European imperialism and projects of acquisition, but, also, as the consequence of West Africans’ active and selective responses to the encounter with Europe, and with particular Europeans, against the backdrop of the European colonization of West Africa. Various critical texts have been published on museum collecting during the colonial era, especially with regard to collections defined as ‘ethnographic’. However, much of this critical work has focused on the way that such collections were ordered within institutions to express asymmetrical colonial power relations. Its concerns lay primarily with the politics of cultural removal and misrepresentation (e.g. Clifford 1988, 1997; Karp and Lavine 1991; Coombes 1994; Barringer and Flynn 1998; O’Hanlon 2000), although the ‘entangled’ nature of colonial relationships expressed through objects was also explored (see Thomas 1991). While this study aims to build on such texts, it

Introduction

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also attempts to problematize and go beyond the politics representation (Macdonald 2006: 3), as well as commonly held assumptions of removal. The idea that all, or most, museum objects have been forcibly, or otherwise,‘removed’ from their original and ‘intended’ places and times of manufacture, use, valuation and ownership, evokes the kind of essentialist trope of cultural boundedness that Bravmann convincingly overturned in his 1973 publication Open Frontiers: The Mobility of Art in Black Africa. Bravmann not only argued that international trade networks had ‘a direct effect upon the material culture and arts’ of African societies, he insisted that the ‘dynamics of market systems’ helped explain ‘much of the vitality of art’ in Africa (Bravmann 1973: 13). Of course, there is no denying that significant numbers of objects in museums were looted or stolen by Europeans. Such cases must be explored, explained and criticized. But, these instances notwithstanding, cultural materials travelled in both directions between Africa and Europe, with unpredictable effects. While a museum’s claim to legitimately own and authentically value various African objects may be contested, other issues are also at stake. The need to problematize the assumption of ‘removal’ derives from the fact that it tends to reinforce the perception that the peoples who first made, used and owned artefacts that are now in museum ‘ethnography’ collections exercised no agency or agendas of their own in determining what items ended up in museum collections and why. The default assumption of ‘removal’ also suggests that colonized peoples were unable to envisage a context in which their own cultural productions or acts of donation could speak to sectors of the colonizing nation in ways that might serve their own cultural or political interests. Moreover, such assumptions about colonial relations which effectively leave ‘all agency at one end’ have not meant that European agency at that end was analysed, so that it has frequently remained ‘undifferentiated, assumed and unexplored’ (Stoler and Cooper 1997). Perspectives underpinned by such assumptions would seem to preclude a sociology of museum donation by elite West Africans, through strategic cultural collaboration with atypical European figures like Arnold Ridyard, as is elaborated in this book. Nineteenth-century tropes generally cast museums as neutral spaces where static things embodying fixed meanings were intended to accumulate over time, to be shuffled into hierarchical and temporal strata, as the products of natural systems. Twentiethcentury critical reassessments recognized that while the constituent objects in collections may have been acquired and deposited in stores over many decades, successions of curators have intervened in employing selected items from collections in carefully constructed viewing spaces, according to institutional formats that visually articulate knowledge for particular audiences (Ames 1992: 47, 127, 141; Bennett 1995; HooperGreenhill 1992; Moser 2006). Such reassessments destabilized museum objects and granted them the possibility of taking on a multiplicity of meanings, depending on their shifting institutional contexts of categorization, valuation, interpretation and display (Macdonald 2006: 6). Recent texts have increasingly addressed the unhelpful perception that colonized peoples had little agency in the creation of museum ‘ethnography’ collections, nor any significant impact on the nature and affordances of such assemblages (e.g. see Phillips and Steiner 1999; Harrison, Byrne and Clarke 2013; Jacobs, Knowles

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Ethnographic Collecting and African Agency in Early Colonial West Africa

and Wingfield 2016). Such studies have begun to engage with a full range of processes through which museum collections are created, and to trace complex networks of human and material interaction that were implicated in their acquisition and which extend over time and space. British imperialism and the institutions it bequeathed have left problematic, ongoing, consequences in Britain and Africa today. As Coombes demonstrated in her seminal 1994 monograph Reinventing Africa, collections of African ‘ethnology’ were used in museums and other institutions to construct and disseminate imaginary representations of Africa and Africans. These invented representations, disseminated in various ways, principally served to deny Africans their full humanity as complex historical subjects in their own right and helped situate them within static ‘primitive’ worlds in need of redemptive ‘development’ by colonizing nations with a superior destiny (see Chapter 8). These ideas have also left multiple traces in museums, most of which still tend to structure access to their collections through outdated objectifying systems that slot artefacts into predetermined ethnic, geographical and aesthetic categories. Such systems tend to separate connected objects. They help to obscure the original meanings and biographies of certain objects, as well as the personalities and relationships of the collectors who created the collections in the first place (Shelton 2001: 19). The important realization that museum collections ‘necessarily tell us more about the nexus of European interests in African affairs and about the colonizer, than they do about Africa and the African’ (Coombes 1994: 3) was won largely through a focus on institutional practices in British cultural bodies and on collectors who served as colonial functionaries in some way, or who had clear imperialist agendas. While existing studies that focus on museum practices and the ‘official’ cadre of collectors have certainly helped provide insights into the development of European epistemological paradigms and academic disciplines like anthropology (e.g. see Mudimbe 1988; Kuklick 1991; Coombes 1994; Schildkrout and Keim 1998; Henare 2005), they do not provide a full picture of the range of interactions, negotiations and cultural transactions that took place ‘alongside and beyond’ (Newell 2002: 44) the official colonial presence, so that further questions can be raised about the way in which the general paradigms developed. The transactions, interactions and discourses that shaped Africa’s pre- and early colonial history were multifarious and not infrequently discordant. European collectors were cast from a variety of moulds and the ‘official’ cadre of collectors was not invariably the most significant one. African ‘suppliers’ of artefacts to European collectors also had diverse social and cultural interests. Indeed, colonial institutions and functionaries often helped to create or accentuate ethnic distinctions among Africans through various forms of categorization, discrimination, compartmentalization and exclusion (e.g. Coleman 1958: 194; Ochonu 2014: 7). Studies of the ‘official’ cadre of European collectors, and the metropolitan institutions they supplied, have been crucial in helping to illuminate the ways in which colonial collecting and museums contributed to the imagining and definition of Africa in Britain, but in making this important argument scholars inevitably underplayed the

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role of African agency as a prime factor in the make-up of museum collections of African artefacts. Elsewhere, this author has argued that the interests and strategies of Africans who provided Europeans with artefacts for their collections have constituted an under-examined aspect of the contexts in which museum collections are usually understood to have been acquired (Kingdon 2008: 32; see also Phillips and Steiner 1999, where other regions and periods are concerned). One reason for this neglect lies with the fact that African interests and strategies were habitually written out of collecting histories, something that had to do with dominant Western ideologies and attitudes towards Africans. The Western collectors or curators who articulated these discourses, generally ignored or misrepresented African cultural narratives in their assumption of a ‘primitive’ African world in need of ‘redemption’, ‘representation’ and, latterly, ‘preservation’ (Clifford 1988: 200). Western collectors often sought to maintain the perception of being active agents in relation to their African counterparts, who, in line with representations of Africans more generally, were regarded as more passive. But this was far from the actuality. In the precolonial period and into the early colonial era, many Africans still had authority to assert their interests, in most places, and to manage their relationships with Europeans, whose movements they either restricted to the coasts, or monitored and controlled during inland expeditions (Fabian 1986: 2000). Ironically, European collectors often found themselves in the ‘patient’ rather than the ‘agent’ role (Gell 1998: 29) with respect to the Africans who satisfied their ‘knowledgegathering’ obsessions, sometimes by actively creating new genres of artefact especially intended for European collectors (see Chapter  2). European conquest of African territories from the late nineteenth century did not result in a simple equation of rulers on one hand and ruled on the other, because ostensible European control was imposed ‘with no clear idea of how particular areas should be governed nor any substantive knowledge of many subject cultures’ (McCaskie 2004: 182; see also Ochonu 2014). In order to realize hegemonic colonial projects, colonizers had to enter into entangled relations with indigenous elites, ‘and at each step along the way’, these groups ‘reshaped each other’ (Cooper 1997: 407).

Approach The account that unfolds in the following chapters adopts a perspective on museum collecting partly inspired by the work of scholars like James Clifford and Nicholas Thomas that emphasizes ‘contact’ and ‘entangled’ relations in colonial encounters. Clifford claims to view ‘all culture-collecting strategies as responses to particular histories of dominance, hierarchy, resistance, and mobilization’ (Clifford 1997: 213), and this work shares his insistence on situating instances of collecting within their specific social contexts. This is obviously vital in order to be able to understand why particular things were collected at particular times and what personal and political messages might have been negotiated through the process, both by the receiving and relinquishing parties in the interactions. However, this is hardly an easy task, given the deficiencies of collectors’ narratives and way that African experiences are generally

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Ethnographic Collecting and African Agency in Early Colonial West Africa

written out of them. Significantly, museum collections are increasingly being recognized as the product of entangled material and social interactions of objects, people and institutions, from a perspective that views museums as ‘meshworks’ of intricately entwined ‘material and social assemblages’ (e.g. see Thomas 1991; Harrison 2013: 4). In stressing the need for an effective stimulus to new knowledge about the complex nature of collections, Harrison and others advocate drawing on an ‘archaeological sensibility’ that conceptualizes collections as ‘assemblages’ in order to pose questions regarding their ‘composition, structure, and function’ (Harrison 2013: 20; Harrison, Byrne and Clarke 2013). This study makes use of this approach, while equally attempting to apply anthropological, historiographical and art historical ‘sensibilities’ alongside the ‘archaeological sensibility’ wherever possible. The contact perspective adopted in this study focuses largely on the‘collector’/‘supplier’ relationships between, for example, Ridyard and his contacts on Africa’s Atlantic coasts, as well as the ‘transcultural’ and trans-imperial infrastructures through which the parties interacted. This approach owes much to Clifford’s articulation of the ‘ethnographic encounter’, and thus to the notion that collecting interactions are always pre-enmeshed in ‘the wider global world of intercultural import-export’ (Clifford 1997: 23). In this view the African ‘supplier’ of museum artefacts emerges as a complex historical subject in his or her own right, whose collaborative cultural interests and practices must be brought into more concerted and detailed focus. Given the general lack of reliable narratives for the early colonial period, a ‘contact and encounter’ perspective on collecting in western Africa that gives due emphasis to West Africans’ collaborative cultural interests would appear to be a difficult one to achieve. However, the Ridyard assemblage provides a unique vantage point for such a perspective, because it is relatively well documented for its time. Ridyard was neither trader, colonial officer nor soldier. He did not directly acquire artefacts as loot through military conquest (see Chapter 2 section three) and he was not in a position to directly receive diplomatic gifts from indigenous rulers in the course of his engineer’s duties. Nor was he in a position to coerce indigenous Africans into parting with artefacts that he coveted through the exercise of any religious authority. It would probably have been while travelling on his ship that many of the West Africans who subsequently went on to contribute to Ridyard’s collecting operation first became acquainted with him. As a marine engineer and a Methodist, who paid fleeting visits to western African ports, Ridyard did not belong to the ‘official’ cadre of Western collectors. Ridyard’s Methodism should be seen as significant here, because it was the Anglican Church that constituted the official church in British colonies. Moreover, many of the West African ports at which Ridyard called had long-established Methodist congregations, with which he evidently established affinities, because Methodists made up the majority of his West African collaborators. Crucially, a few of Ridyard’s West African collaborators wrote notes to accompany their gifts, which contain vital narratives that shed light on their personal motivations and cultural interests. Also important are the surviving letters and letter books associated with the Ridyard assemblage held by the Salford Museum and the Manchester Museum. These documents record details of the British cultural resources, such as illustrated magazines,

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7

that Ridyard took back to West Africa to present to his West African collaborators in return for museum donations (see Chapter 3). They therefore help illuminate ways in which Ridyard’s own, essentially Nonconformist, cultural interests intersected with those of coastal West Africans. Although museum archives constituted vital primary sources for this study, it has also been crucially underpinned by research carried out in Ghana and Sierra Leone, supported by a Leverhulme Trust Research Fellowship granted in 2009 (RF /6/RFG /2009/0224). Three months were spent in Ghana at the end of 2009 and a further two months in Sierra Leone at the beginning of 2010. Descendants of twentythree West African contributors to Ridyard’s collecting operation for British museums were interviewed during these research trips. Records consulted in national archive collections held at Accra and Cape Coast Castle (Ghana) and Freetown (Sierra Leone) yielded biographical and contextual data relating to thirty-eight of Ridyard’s West African collaborators. Archives and newspaper collections in London and Liverpool also yielded important primary data. A key aspect of the research carried out in Ghana and Sierra Leone was its collaborative research methodology, which incorporated the use of images as a resource for a ‘visual repatriation’ exercise (e.g. Banks 2001; Peers and Brown 2003; Brown and Peers 2006), and as foci for eliciting memories and discussion. The process involved presenting photographs of relevant artefacts to living descendants of the original donors who had given the artefacts to the museum in the early twentieth century. Additional archival photographs from Ridyard’s bequest to the Bolton Museum were also presented. The images were handed over to be lodged in descendants’ family archives and they proved effective, as sites of ‘intersecting histories’ (Edwards 2003: 83), in engaging the interest of donors’ descendants. The stimulus that the images injected into discussions, enabled the author to explore with descendants some of the oral and archival narratives and sources that related to their ancestors’ biographies. Secondary sources were relied upon to a large extent in the construction of a historical framework for the study. On a wider canvas the book contributes to an understanding of cultural aspects of British imperialism in West Africa. However, it does not add especially to dominant themes, such as the ways in which cultural difference was used to structure ‘both colonial rule and the imperial imagination’ (Ballantyne 2008: 177). On the other hand, the book breaks new ground in the way it reveals the play of colonial processes on West African lives and institutions, and in the way it tracks cultural flows and exchanges that took place ‘alongside’ the official colonial presence in West Africa. In part, it explores some of the unofficial processes of crosscultural collaboration in West Africa that can be understood broadly to have worked against the fixing of cultural differences and relationships of opposition.

Structure and Outline This book is organized in the form of seven interrelated essay-style main chapters, with their own concluding sections, and it ends with a short epilogue.

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Ethnographic Collecting and African Agency in Early Colonial West Africa

Chapter 2 demonstrates how the Liverpool Museum’s early African collection broadly reflected the geography of Liverpool’s long-standing shipping and commercial links with the coast of western Africa and, especially, the transformation of commercial and political systems brought about by the introduction of steam shipping in western Africa from 1852. Collecting histories covered in this chapter are presented in chronological sequence and support the argument that, until the period of conquest, African artefacts were not usually acquired on European collectors’ terms, but predominantly on the terms of the Africans who owned them. In an inevitably disjointed way, the case studies chart the changing parameters of encounter and the emerging networks of cross-cultural interaction through which the Liverpool Museum’s collections from Africa were acquired over the second half of the nineteenth century. In so doing, this chapter provides a historical background for the study as a whole. Chapter  3 provides an interpretive account of Ridyard’s remarkable collecting operation for museums in northwest England between 1894 and 1916. As a steamship engineer born in 1851, Ridyard is presented as a man of his times, who exploited the dynamic capacity of steamers to separate and connect people in order to operate an unofficial communication system for his collaborators on the western coast of Africa in return for museum donations. Ridyard’s Methodist principles are understood to have helped generate the ‘frictional’ energy (Hempton 2005) that motivated his collecting efforts, while his Nonconformist credentials are shown to have been fundamental in enabling him to connect with West African Methodists and nonMethodists alike in an unofficial capacity. Ridyard’s assemblage is interpreted as embodying implicit dissent from the anthropological ‘science’ of his day, because its diverse range of objects embodied evidence of movement, connection and exchange between peoples, in a way that was not conducive to rigid constructions of cultural hierarchy and geographical boundedness. Chapter 4 explores the historical and cultural contexts in which Krio traders from Sierra Leone made their donations to museum collections in Britain. The first part of the chapter profiles the single early Krio donor to the Liverpool collection W. R. Renner, whose biography hinges on his participation in the palm oil trade, through which he was able to create a new identity and status for himself in accordance with a Victorian philanthropic vision for the capitalist transformation of West Africa. His biography is counterpointed against a background account of the way the Krio community’s liberated and Christianized slave ancestors, from disparate parts of Africa, took advantage of steam shipping to exploit new commercial opportunities that gave rise to a Krio diaspora along the West African coast. The second part of the chapter investigates the ways in which the Krio diaspora’s history of movement, trade and cultural interaction within West Africa is embodied in Krio donors’ contributions to the Ridyard assemblage. It demonstrates that the picture created by their contributions highlights ways in which Sierra Leonean Krios were bound up with the flows of empire in a dynamic system in which they appropriated diverse elements to create a heterogeneous, trans-West African culture. Chapter 5 explores the broad contexts in which elite Krio donors from Sierra Leone contributed to Ridyard’s collecting operation. In the urban colonial context of the early

Introduction

9

twentieth century, where the contradiction between empire’s universalizing claims and its exclusionary practices was keenly felt by Freetown’s mercantile and professional elite, the detached, critical figure of the ‘flâneur’ is shown to have been a compelling one. Krio ‘flânerie’ is seen to have been embedded in Freetown’s storied architecture as an elite mode of self-orientation that also drew on panoramic texts, like those mined and created by the Krio historian A. B. C. Sibthorpe ([1906] 1970). Understood as part of the cognitive toolkit of empire, panoramic perspectives are seen as having enabled elite Krios to insert themselves, as an advance guard, into scenarios of ‘modernizing’ and ‘civilizing’ action, thus helping to bring about the imperial transformation of West Africa. The figure of the Krio flâneur is interpreted to have overlapped with the elite Krio collector of African artefacts. But, while Krio collections were made in the context of British imperialist ideas that denigrated African cultural achievements, Krio livelihoods bound them up with others in networks of exchange that offered perspectives from which dominant European representations of indigenous Africans and their cultural productions could be critically reassessed. Chapter 6 discusses artefacts donated by Ridyard’s Gold Coast collaborators who were indigenous office holders from chiefly lineages of the Ga, Fante and other coastal groups. An overview of the donated artefacts shows them to relate closely to the donors’ individual identities and social positions. As in other chapters, Chapter 6 investigates the donated artefacts’ histories of use and ownership. The identities and interests of individual office holders, and the competing positions they assumed in struggles to shape the politics of colonial Accra and Winneba, for example, are exposed to help explain why particular office holders gave up specific emblematic heirlooms for display in institutions in the heartland of empire. The early twentieth century was a challenging time for indigenous office holders, because their authority was being eroded through imposition of colonial policies and institutions that competed with indigenous ones or replaced them altogether. Broader conclusions as to why the Gold Coast office holders involved themselves in Ridyard’s museum collecting project are addressed primarily in relation to their interests in opposing British cultural imperialism and upholding their own prestige, as well as that of indigenous institutions, through a strategy of playing on the differences of opinion that they encountered within the spheres of British authority. Chapter  7 discusses the Western-educated Gold Coast traders and professionals who presented objects to museums through Ridyard. This was a group whose members also belonged to high-status Ga and Fante families, but unlike the office holders, they did not rely much on indigenous institutions and titles for social advancement and they were not so restricted by ethnic allegiances. Many of the gifts presented by these donors are interpreted to constitute assertions of an African sophistication and modernity, made in the face of increasing European racism and cultural imperialism, within the context of emerging visions of the future and recalibrated ideas about the West African past. This chapter deals in some detail with the cultural interests of protonationalist donors and especially those of the celebrated barrister, activist and author John Mensah Sarbah. Sarbah’s donations to the Liverpool collection are interpreted in the context of his wider political activities and especially his Gold Coast history publications. These publications, written in English and published in Britain, have been

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Ethnographic Collecting and African Agency in Early Colonial West Africa

viewed by historians to represent part of a strategy of cultural ‘counter-penetration’ (Baku 1990: 40), used as a defence of African interests against British cultural imperialism. Sarbah’s presentation of West African objects to an institution in Liverpool that promoted imperial ideologies is interpreted similarly, but in more collaborative terms, as flowing from his understanding that the heartland of empire was not in all respects a bastion of imperialism. Chapter  8 addresses the issue of what happened to the African artefacts in the Ridyard assemblage after Ridyard delivered them to the Liverpool Museum and how well they fared through the dramatic, and sometimes traumatic, decades of the twentieth century. It considers how successive museum curators deployed them in museum exhibits and how changes were effected in their connotative meanings once they were processed through the museums’ systems of ordering and display. In following the institutional fate and exhibitionary career of the Ridyard assemblage up to the late 1960s, this chapter traces successive re-evaluations of the African collection staged at the Liverpool Museum and exposes some of the persistent Western tropes relating to Africa and Africans that adhered to the collection over the decades. The book’s broader conclusion comes at the end of Chapter 8 and the work ends with an epilogue that briefly references the more recent exhibitionary career of the Ridyard assemblage. Through a series of short examples, it considers the way that the assemblage and its constituent artefacts continue to travel through time and space, attracting new meanings and responses, while also extending the ‘meshwork’ of human and material relations in which the artefacts can be said to be embedded.

2

Prologue: Western Africa, Africans and Liverpool’s Municipal Museum

From a broad perspective, World Museum’s early acquisitions from Africa reflect the history of Liverpool’s long-standing shipping and commercial interactions with Africa’s Atlantic coast. In particular, they reflect the transformations brought about by the introduction of steam shipping in western Africa, which took place in 1852 with the launch of the African Steamship Company, roughly one year after the founding of Liverpool’s municipal museum. This technological change not only transformed the commercial environment, but also political and social conditions, and it would facilitate conquest and consolidation of colonial overrule in West Africa. The collection histories for objects acquired during the museum’s first decades that are presented in this chapter, broadly reflect these changes. Assembled in chronological narrative sequence, these unavoidably disjointed case studies contextualize the museum’s early African acquisitions in relation to the often hidden systems of cross-cultural interaction and intermediation of which they were the product. Subsequent chapters in this study mainly cover the acquisitions made by Arnold Ridyard in the early twentieth century, through his wide network of West African collaborators based in coastal settlements in colonial Sierra Leone, the Gold Coast (now Ghana), the Niger Delta and The Gambia. This chapter therefore serves as a prologue to those that follow, because it provides a historical perspective on the changing parameters of encounter and some of the emerging networks of interaction through which the Liverpool Museum’s collections from Africa were acquired over the second half of the nineteenth century.

After the Slave Trade Infamously, Liverpool’s shipping and commercial connections with western Africa had their roots in the era of the transatlantic slave trade. From the late seventeenth century, Liverpool’s financiers and ship owners, like those of other European nations, sent ships to small enclaves and river mouths on western African coasts, where the ships’ captains exchanged manufactured goods for captive Africans (as well as some gold and ivory) and transported them to a life of brutal forced labour on plantations in the Americas. The British parliamentary abolition of the slave trade in 1807 did not immediately end this traffic in human beings, which continued illicitly until the 1860s with the support 11

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Ethnographic Collecting and African Agency in Early Colonial West Africa

of European and American traders (Richardson, Schwarz and Tibbles 2007). This brutal slave trade episode in Liverpool’s connections with West Africa left problematic legacies and continuities in various social arenas in Liverpool and elsewhere (e.g. see Sherwood 2007). Only a few of these are followed through the partially connected collecting histories explored in this chapter. For the most part, the slave trade lies beyond the scope of this study. In Liverpool, the topic was presented and interpreted in the basement Transatlantic Slavery gallery at Liverpool’s Merseyside Maritime Museum from 1994 to 2007, a project initiated and sponsored by the Peter Moores Foundation (see Tibbles 1994). An expanded and updated version of this gallery opened on the third floor of the same museum in August 2007 in the guise of National Museums Liverpool’s International Slavery Museum.1 The World Museum Liverpool had its origins in the post-abolition era. It was founded in 1851, when the Corporation of Liverpool first established a municipal museum with the 13th Earl of Derby’s bequest of his extensive zoological collection. The resulting Derby Museum opened to the public in 1853, with two halls in Duke Street’s former Union Newsroom exhibiting only natural history specimens, although ‘ethnographic’ accessions began to be added to the collection from 1852 (Ford 1955: 4). While the museum’s post-abolition origin means that the slave-trading episode in Liverpool’s history is not directly evident in World Museum’s African collections, continuities from the slave trade and abolition can be traced through the museum’s early contributors. For example, in June 1855 the Lord Mayor of Liverpool James Aspinall Tobin (1818–91), scion of a formerly slave-trading Liverpool family, gave the new museum a four-foot long crocodile preserved in spirit from the Bonny River in the Delta of the Niger River.2 The following year Tobin, no longer mayor, gave the museum a white-faced whistling duck and a dwarf flamingo from the southwest coast of Africa (Liverpool Museums 1856: 4). In 1857 he made further donations of a rat, three kingfishers, two bee-eaters, a glossy starling, a warbler, an elephant’s ‘grinding tooth’, three small specimens of tree coral, and various insects from Ambrizette, on the northern coast of present-day Angola.3 In these instances, it was not the gifted items that held historical resonance, but the identity of their donor. This was not only because Tobin’s family and firm had their roots in the transatlantic slave trade, but also because they appear to have profited, in one way or another, from the illegal slave trade after 1807 (Sherwood 2007: 33) and a proportion of their palm oil profits may have been accumulated with the labour of unfree Africans in the Niger Delta and the Cross River regions of present-day Nigeria.4 Tobin had taken over his business from his father, Thomas Tobin (1773–1863), who claimed to have been the first to send palm oil ships to Bonny in what is now southeastern Nigeria (Latham 1978: 215) and he had become one of Liverpool’s largest importers of African palm oil by the 1840s. Large profits were to be made in the palm oil trade during the 1850s, as industrialization, especially in northwest England, had led to greatly increased demand for vegetable oils in the manufacture of soap and candles and also as a lubricant for machinery. In 1854, the Liverpool price for palm oil would have been about £50 a ton, while the price at Bonny would have been about £19, so James Aspinall Tobin would have been a wealthy man indeed when he made his donations to the Derby Museum (Lynn 1989: 227).5

Prologue

13

The accession records for his 1856 and 1857 donations indicate that the ‘specimens’ were forwarded to him by Mr Bark ‘per the schooner “Margaret” ’, which was probably one of the ships Tobin sent to buy palm oil on the western coast of Africa. However, Mr Bark is unlikely to have hunted down and caught all these specimens himself. Some of them were probably collected by indigenous Africans, and African middlemen may also have been involved in transporting the ‘specimens’ by canoe to Mr Bark’s schooner in order to exchange them for European items. The new wave of European traders on African coasts, from the 1840s and 1850s, had diverse commercial interests and many African traders with canoes would probably have gained from feeding European appetites for collecting tropical animals and birds as zoo inmates, pets and natural history specimens. In fact, as the slave trade had declined a shift occurred in Atlantic African economies towards individual entrepreneurs involved in the production and export of forest produce. While land and labour became increasingly commercialized as the production of palm oil and rubber for export increased, so the profits of the produce trade tended to be distributed in a more egalitarian way than during the period of the slave trade (Lynn 1997: 56–58; Northrup 1978: 188). As a result, cheap, mass-produced imports could spread widely in western Africa. Increased interactions between Europeans and small-scale African entrepreneurs probably assisted a trade in ‘curiosities’ and museum ‘specimens’ via the new commercial networks. The British trader Whitford gave a short account of the canoe-borne traders of the southwest coast of Africa who supplied his ship’s crew with natural history novelties at some point in the 1860s or 1870s: She [the ship] commenced at Landana to take homeward cargo, although still bound further south with English cargo. At each place canoes come off, peddling grey parrots, blue-nosed monkeys . . . and big ugly ones; also snakes, young crocodile, and a great variety of birds . . . Whitford 1877: 324

At a personal level, James Aspinall Tobin’s public-spirited support for one of Liverpool’s newest public institutions may well have been aimed at eclipsing his family’s slave-trading roots and entrenching his status as a rational, responsible and cultured citizen (Hill 2005: 32) among Liverpool’s wealthy political and cultural elite. However, viewed within a wider context, Tobin’s contributions to the Derby Museum collection and his hold on the mayorship in 1854–55, also demonstrate the considerable impact that Liverpool’s links with western Africa had on the city’s economic, cultural and political life in the nineteenth century. Indeed, as suggested above, Liverpool’s African links and the part they played in shaping the city can be traced directly back to the slave-trading days of the eighteenth and early nineteenth century through the Tobin family (as well as through other similar families), because James Aspinall’s father, Thomas, and his uncle John Tobin had both served as slave ship captains in the 1790s (Lynn 1995: 63). Thomas and John both became pioneers in stimulating development of the palm oil trade in southeastern Nigeria after the British parliamentary abolition of the transatlantic slave trade in 1807, and both brothers became extremely wealthy

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Ethnographic Collecting and African Agency in Early Colonial West Africa

through their separate palm oil importing businesses. John Tobin (1763–1851) rose to become a leading Liverpool Tory and was elected mayor in October 1819, a few decades before his nephew James Aspinall Tobin was to hold the same office (Latham 1974: 867 & 863). Former Liverpool slave traders like the Tobin brothers had a distinct advantage in the palm oil trade because the systems of credit provision that kept out competitors and the methods of guaranteeing ‘trusts’ that they had negotiated with African slave suppliers were equally effective in ensuring their commercial advantage in monopolizing palm oil supplies. The African slave brokers’ ability to influence interior markets and encourage increased palm oil production through existing trade networks also proved crucial. John Tobin’s most effective partner in helping him to develop the palm oil trade was Duke Ephraim (Efiom Edem) of Duke Town, a young Efik trader from one of the leading independent ‘towns’, or quarters, that constituted Old Calabar in the mouth of the Cross River in what is now southeastern Nigeria. Partly through his alliance with John Tobin, Duke Ephraim came to dominate Old Calabar politics in the early decades of the nineteenth century (Latham 1974: 863). Similarly, the wealth that John Tobin accumulated as a consequence of this same partnership, up to and through 1818 (the peak year for palm oil prices), helped to boost his own political ambitions. Thus, in 1819 at the height of his confidence, John Tobin launched a successful campaign to become Mayor of Liverpool. According to the Liverpool Mercury his victory did not come cheap. The newspaper alleged that he paid out six shillings for each vote in his favour, in what it described as one of ‘the most barefaced acts of bribery that ever disgraced even the electioneering annals of this venal rotten borough’.6 The peak year for oil profits, when prices consistently hit £60 per ton, also appears to have led Thomas Tobin to encourage the palm oil trade at Bonny in the Niger Delta, of which he had personal knowledge from his days as a slave ship captain before 1807. Thomas remained a major exporter of oil from Bonny throughout the 1820s and Bonny eventually superseded Old Calabar as the preeminent palm oil port (Latham 1978: 213 & 215; Lynn 1997: 19). The various ‘dashes’ that European firms paid to maintain alliances with African traders, the ‘trust’ system, and practices such as comey (permission-to-trade fees), were all carried over from the slave trade era and continued partly as a consequence of the fact that it was African brokers in the Niger Delta and on the Cross River who largely controlled the mechanisms of the palm oil trade. This highly effective commercial system, co-produced by European and African traders over decades, was not only integral to the economies of the Delta and Cross River ‘citystates’, but also to their power hierarchies. However, the system was not without its problems. Rival European firms’ attempts to outbid each other could lead to ‘trust’ inflation, so that even palm oil produced over several years was insufficient to pay for the large quantity of European goods given out on credit. Long delays spent waiting for cargoes could cause a firm to go out of business, which reinforced the position of the firms with the most effective trading alliances. Sometimes this led to violence if a trader decided to take oil by force from a broker to whom he had given ‘trust’. These problems became more serious from the 1840s after a new generation of firms, without direct links to the slave trade, began to enter the West African palm oil trade.

Prologue

15

The new firms, like Thomas Harrison & Co., which was launched in 1837, were attracted by the high oil prices of the late 1830s. Without the benefits or inertia of inherited techniques, they were encouraged to innovate and began to employ ‘supercargoes’ who took up residence on a ship that remained anchored in a river. Supercargoes continued to buy palm oil from these offshore bases, which they could then rapidly load and ship out to Europe on the periodic sailings of their firm’s cargocarrying ships. The onset of a regular steamer service to the coast in the 1850s accelerated these changes and led to the use of ‘hulks’, or obsolete sailing ships converted into floating warehouses. The steam revolution of the 1850s also opened up the palm oil trade to further groups like the mission-educated Africans from Sierra Leone (see Chapter  4) and the Gold Coast, who presented new challenges to European firms (Lynn 1981: 333; 1995: 66–67; 1997: 154). Increasing volumes of trade, along with improvements in the steamer services, led to heightened competition and a lowering of prices through the 1860s and 1870s. These commercial changes had a ‘disintegrative effect’ on African political structures (Law 1995: 24). Political power on the coast was built on close commercial partnerships invested in elaborate infrastructures of cross-cultural translation and exchange of which the ‘trust’ system was a part. Increased lawlessness was symptomatic of European traders attempting to bypass established systems by ‘taking the law into their own hands’ (Lynn 1995: 71). The heightened competition characteristic of this period also led to violence between European traders, and especially against the Sierra Leoneans (see Chapter 3). In order to try and improve their profitability, the new firms attempted to push inland to trade directly with African palm oil producers in the hinterland. This led to conflicts, because European traders’ efforts to reach interior markets were thwarted by African brokers of the coastal ‘city-states’ who dominated the interior palm oil producing regions. The need for British consuls on the coast to intervene in, and attempt to settle, disputes of this kind has been identified as one of the factors that contributed to a creeping British interference in African politics in southeast Nigeria, which eventually led to the creation of the Oil Rivers Protectorate in 1884 (Lynn 1981: 334, 347–48). But other more organized attempts at interference and intervention in African political and economic culture were also at play in helping to consolidate European colonial control in western Africa. Some of Britain’s earliest official efforts at direct intervention in the interior of Nigeria are reflected in the World Museum’s archives and in the institution’s first acquisitions of African artefacts, which were collected on two exploratory voyages of the Admiralty’s Niger Expedition.

The Niger Expedition Britain’s growing awareness of its power towards the mid-nineteenth century led to a new aggressive drive, scientific as well as economic and religious, ‘to replace the tropical Africa of the imagination . . . with a continent explored, explained, and domesticated to British ideals of Christian culture’ (McCaskie 2004: 174 after Temperley 1991) and in the ‘interests of British liberal capitalism’ (Law 1995: 26). Led in part by a triumphant

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Ethnographic Collecting and African Agency in Early Colonial West Africa

anti-slavery movement, with a confident sense of a ‘superior British destiny’, this urgent new drive became inextricably linked with the Victorian vision of ‘progress’ and with the idea that ‘civilized government’ imposed on ‘barbarous’ Africans would be for their own good (McCaskie 2004: 177). In his examination of British anti-slavery ideology and the ways in which it aided colonization and the advance of imperial power in Africa during the Victorian era, Huzzey makes the observation that there was little doubt ‘from any quarter that slavery was incompatible with progress’ (Huzzey 2012: 175). This allowed a key early rationalization for colonialism because it presented British access to African territories as desirable on the assumption that British antislavery action would enable fertile expanses of African land to be cultivated by free African labour ‘just as soon as the slave trade was suppressed’ (Huzzey 2012: 175). Thus, after 1834, a victorious British anti-slavery movement, having successfully campaigned for the emancipation of slaves in the British Empire, turned its attention to the rooting-out of slave trading in the African interior. In 1832, Macgregor Laird, younger son of the Birkenhead shipbuilder William Laird, led a pioneering expedition up the Niger River, which proved that it could be navigated by steamers. This inspired a highly ambitious second expedition in 1841 that aimed to set up an outpost of Christian ‘civilization’ at the confluence of the Niger and Benue Rivers in the Nigerian interior, where the economic benefits of plantation agriculture producing crops for British markets could be demonstrated in a bid to undermine the African slave trade (Lynn 1992a: 421; McCaskie 2004: 174; Temperley 1991: 165). The 1841 expedition lost a third of its European members to malaria and was pilloried in the British press as a dismal failure. However, Macgregor Laird remained undeterred and in 1854 he was again in a position to send an expedition up the Niger, this time in collaboration with the British government. The Admiralty contracted Macgregor Laird’s brother John to design the expedition’s vessel, the Pleiad, to their specifications and it was built at the Laird family shipyard in Birkenhead. This remarkable expedition succeeded in travelling hundreds of miles up the Niger and Benue Rivers to reach the town of Dulti in Adamawa. It was led by Dr William Baikie who kept the expedition members on a daily dose of quinine. Consequently, he lost none of them to disease and was able to prove the effectiveness of quinine as a malarial prophylactic (Hollet 1995; Temperley 1991: 170). Among the 1854 expedition’s twelve European members there was William Guthrie, the senior engineer, Lieutenant John Hawley Glover, the Admiralty surveyor, and Dr Thomas Joseph Hutchinson, the expedition’s senior surgeon-cum-trader. The Reverend Samuel Adjai Crowther was one of the fifty-four African members of the expedition and travelled as a representative of the Church Mission Society (CMS ), with the aim of establishing a mission on the Niger. Ten years later this remarkable Sierra Leonean, who began life in the Yoruba town of Osogun and had famously been liberated from a Portuguese slave ship by the British navy, was to be ordained Bishop of the Niger Territory. The African missionaries on the expedition were there in fulfilment of an explicit early CMS policy for the exploitation of ‘African agency’ in the establishment of missions in West Africa, whose chief promoter was Henry Venn, CMS Honorary Secretary from 1841 to 1873 (Ajayi 1965: 174).

Prologue

17

The voyage of the Pleiad resulted in the Derby Museum acquiring its first ‘ethnographic’ artefacts from Africa. This initial clutch of thirty-four African items was accessioned in April 1855 as the gift of William Guthrie.7 Guthrie provided no information as to precisely where, or from whom, any of the items were acquired, probably because he did not view his role on the expedition as encompassing a ‘knowledge-gathering’ function. Significantly, however, Samuel Crowther, who published a full account of the expedition, described how the wife of a one-legged man from Rogan-Koto in Doma gave Guthrie a calabash full of rice in gratitude for the wooden leg that Guthrie fixed up for her husband (Crowther [1855] 1970: 75). Given that Guthrie included a calabash among his 1855 donations to the Derby Museum, this could have been the one that he received with the gift of rice at RoganKoto. Guthrie also included a spear among the items donated to the Derby Museum. In this case, clues as to its origin are to be found in T. J. Hutchinson’s account of the voyage of the Pleiad. Hutchinson’s account includes a description of an audience with Sultan Mohammed, the ‘Saraki’ of Hamarrua, which he attended with Dr Baikie and William Guthrie. The party from the Pleiad were given a present of ‘five poisoned javelins’ on this occasion, so one of these may have ended up in Guthrie’s possession (Hutchinson [1855] 1966: 131). It seems entirely possible that such weapons could have been presented in the spirit of a diplomatic warning to the riverine intruders from Britain. Thus, while the Pleiad expedition as a whole was intended to advance ‘knowledge’ of African peoples and environments, it would seem that it also provided opportunities for African groups on the banks of the Niger and Benue Rivers to learn something about the British explorers’ intentions as well. Indeed, it makes little sense to account for the presence of Guthrie’s items in the Derby Museum collection according to any idea that assumes ethnographic collections in British museums were acquired entirely on terms set by their European ‘collectors’. ‘Asymmetries in power’ can be assumed to have existed, either one way or the other, on the various occasions when Guthrie acquired the items that he later presented to the Derby Museum, but his acquisitions should be viewed ‘as the consequences of complex and entangled social relationships’ (Thomas 1991; Torrence and Clarke 2013: 171) between Pleiad expedition members and the far-from-disinterested Africans who made gifts of them, or relinquished them on their own terms in the context of some form of diplomatic exchange. Guthrie’s donations entered the Derby Museum in the same year that James Aspinall Tobin presented his pickled crocodile and it would seem significant that the first ‘ethnographic’ items from Africa to be added to the museum’s collections were not collected on the coast, but in the interior, and that they were not the gift of a Liverpool palm oil merchant but were presented by a member of a government-backed expedition. Tobin and his natural history donations aside, Liverpool’s palm oil merchants and their antecedents were not well known for their contributions to institutions of science and knowledge gathering. On the contrary, they were held to account for the fact that even Africa’s well-plied west coast remained little more than a figment of the geographical imagination for mid-nineteenth-century Europeans. The infrastructure of the ‘trust’ system that was carried over from the slave trade was probably not conducive to

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Ethnographic Collecting and African Agency in Early Colonial West Africa

nascent forms of imperial ‘knowledge gathering’. But Dr Baikie pinned the blame directly on the Liverpool oil merchants’ brutal ways and exclusionary trade tactics for the fact that ‘much less was known of the Gulf of Guinea than of New Zealand and of the far-distant groups of islands of the Pacific’.8 Anti-slavery enthusiasts and advocates of African ‘regeneration’ like Macgregor Laird and Dr Baikie, assisted by their supporters in government, represented a powerful new faction in the competitive trade environment in West Africa. Their relative success with the voyage of the Pleiad, in its return without loss of life to disease, helped to revive official British interest in the economic potential of the African interior and opened the way in 1857 for Macgregor Laird to operate a steamer service on the Niger River for five years, with a generous government subsidy. This enabled Dr Baikie to open a series of strategically placed trading posts on the Niger River at Lokoja, Onitsha and Aboh, although not without the backing of naval gunboats like the HMS Espoir, because Aboh was a town allied to Bonny, while Onitsha was a market to Brass, and Baikie’s competing trading posts provoked confrontation with these Niger Delta ‘citystates’ (Dike 1956: 171, 178). The British government had already been subsidizing Laird’s African Steamship Company since 1851, when it had awarded him a ten-year contract to establish and maintain ‘postal and other communication, by means of steam navigation’ between Britain and the main ports of the West African coast (Hollet 1995: 179). In the wake of the voyage of the Pleiad, Laird’s next collaborative expedition up the Niger River was that of the Dayspring, another Birkenhead-built vessel. It cleared Liverpool on 7 May 1857. Like the voyage of its predecessor, that of the Dayspring had an ostensible anti-slavery and ‘civilizing’ mission. The reverends Crowther and Taylor were again CMS representatives on this voyage, with the intention of setting up a Christian mission at the confluence of the Niger and Benue Rivers. In addition to its explicit anti-slavery and ‘civilizing’ mission, the expedition was also equipped to carry out trade, and was intended to advance economic and geographical knowledge of the African interior. Lieutenant John Hawley Glover, the expedition’s chief surveyor, succeeded in completing the first accurate chart of the Niger River up to Bussa during the voyage (Temperley 1991: 173; Hastings 1926: 172). His wife and biographer, Lady Elizabeth Glover, claimed that he also spent his time ‘shooting a collection of birds for the expedition, which were sent home and . . . placed in the South Kensington Museum’ (Glover 1897: 43–44).9 It is unlikely that he did much bird collecting and skinning himself, however, considering how busy his surveying kept him. It is more than likely that this work was carried out unacknowledged by his ‘most trusty’ head servant Selim Aga (c.1826–75).10 After all, this was the kind of work that Aga carried out a few years later, when acting as Richard Burton’s guide and servant during an expedition to Abeokuta, conducted while Burton was serving as consul at Fernando Po (now Bioko). In his report on the Abeokuta expedition, Burton stated that Aga stuffed ‘small animals’ for him and listed among his guide’s many skills an ability to ‘shoot and stuff birds’ and ‘collect spirit specimens’ (Burton 1863: x, 10). Selim Aga also acquired ‘ethnographic’ artefacts during his service with Glover on the Dayspring expedition and he sold seven of these to the Derby Museum through an intermediary in November 1860. This was one month after the museum had reopened

Prologue

19

with great pomp and ceremony in an imposing new neoclassical building raised on Shaw’s Brow (Ford 1955: 4).11 The seven items purchased from Aga were accessioned in the museum’s register on 20 November 1860 and included a ‘Native hat malfa [in Hausa] or sun hat from Ilorin’ in Western Nigeria (20.11.60.1); a silk embroidered robe from Bida, the Nupe capital in Central Nigeria (20.11.60.2, see Plate 1); a decorated calabash food dish from Rabba in Nupe (20.11.60.3); two mats ‘Tabeerma’ [tabarme in Hausa] ‘constituting the bed, seat, and travelling equipages of West Central African’s [sic] in general’ (20.11.60.4 & 5) and two leopard skins (20.11.60.6 & 7, now no longer in existence). The records for the two leopard skins indicate that Aga inherited them from Lieutenant Glover, because they are footnoted with additional information which reads: *Presented to Lieut. Glover by the Bashoron or War Chief of Abeokuta as an emblem of peace & friendship. **Presented by Mahama Saba King of Nupeh as an emblem of peace & friendship between him and Lieut. Glover.12

The voyage of the Dayspring was another ill-fated expedition. This time the specially designed and built steam vessel ended up wrecked on a rock at Jebba on 7 October 1857 hundreds of miles up the Niger River. After the wrecking, Aga accompanied Glover on an overland expedition to Lagos to collect supplies for the stranded expedition. They took the ‘Yoruba road’ that passed through Ilorin, so this may have been when Aga acquired the hat he sold to the museum in Liverpool. The road also passed through Abeokuta, where Glover would have been given one of the leopard skins. Before the wrecking Aga had also visited Nupe, and its capital Bida, with Glover. The museum records and other sources reveal that Glover exchanged gifts with the Emir of Nupe, Etsu Masaba, who gave the explorers a ‘bodyguard’ to monitor them during their collecting and surveying excursions (Glover 1897; Hastings 1926). Like the leopard skin from Masaba (20.11.60.7), the silk embroidered ‘robe of honour’ from Bida (20.11.60.2), which Aga sold to the Derby Museum in 1860, is also likely to have been among the gifts the explorers received from the Emir. Selim Aga may have seen good reason to join an expedition whose stated aim was to undermine the internal African slave trade, because he had been enslaved himself at around the age of eight. Aga was born in the Kingdom of Taqali in the Sudanese Kordofan on the edge of the Nubian Mountains. In about 1834, while out tending his father’s goats, he was kidnapped by Arab slavers and carried off to Kordofan, where he eventually ended up as one of the household slaves of a Turkish military officer, who treated him with extraordinary cruelty. Over the next year he travelled down the River Nile, passing from one master to another, suffering many cruel abuses and hardships, until he arrived in Cairo. He was put up for sale at a Cairo slave market and purchased by Robert Thurburn, a Scottish merchant and British commercial consul in Alexandria. Although technically no longer a slave, Aga effectively became a dependent of the Thurburn family and travelled with them on a sightseeing trip up the Nile, before being sent as a gift to Robert Thurburn’s sister-in-law in Peterculter, near Aberdeen in Scotland. Aga was sent to the local school to be educated and Christianized, and

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Ethnographic Collecting and African Agency in Early Colonial West Africa

he waited at table in the Thurburn mansion dressed in Egyptian clothing (McCarthy 2006, 2007). After completing his service with Lieutenant Glover on the Dayspring expedition, Aga settled in the Nigerian coastal town of Lagos.13 Aga was still in Lagos in December 1861, when he is recorded as having sold a consignment of natural history specimens to Liverpool’s Derby Museum (9.12.61 accession series). A short while later he joined forces with the controversial British consul and explorer Richard Burton, with whom he made another visit to Abeokuta as Burton’s guide and assistant. He also visited the great West African Kingdoms of Benin and Dahomey with Burton. Later on, in 1863, Aga managed Burton’s expedition up the Congo River and wrote an account of it that was published in the Geographical Magazine in July 1875 (Aga 1875). Burton saw Aga as a potential tool of British expansionism and he imagined a future sphere of British imperial activity in which such functionaries served as ideal adjuncts to British explorers. He described how Aga ‘took all the trouble of life off my hands’ and was inspired to muse that: Some years hence, when we also shall have topographical engineers, and when exploration shall become a profession, not, as at present, an affair of mere amateurship, Selim Agas will be useful in cutting a path for the European pioneer through outer Asia and Central Africa. Burton 1863: 10

The final leg of Aga’s epic, and ultimately tragic, life story is not reflected in the Derby Museum archives and is only partially discernible in the archival fragments available elsewhere. These fragmentary sources suggest that Aga quit service with Burton in order to make an independent life for himself in West Africa. He became the ‘intimate friend and companion’ of Jacob C. Hazeley, a Sierra Leonean printer, trader and journalist, who had links with the American Colonization Society.14 He may have travelled to Cape Palmas in Liberia with Hazeley in 1866. The Society had founded the Republic of Liberia in 1847 with a constitution following the American model and it arranged transport and settlement of American ex-slaves interested in emigrating. Aga made a number of expeditions into the Liberian interior that were probably sponsored by the American Colonization Society and the Society reported in 1867 that he made ‘some important discoveries’ up the Cavally River (McCarthy 2007: 6). Selim Aga was to suffer an untimely and violent death in Liberia on 10 October 1875, after disputes over land and trade between the black settlers from America and the indigenous Grebo-speaking population resulted in armed conflict during September that year. The Grebo force made an attempt to drive out the entire Liberian colony and inflicted a number of crushing defeats on the Liberian militia. Aga was killed by Grebo warriors while serving as assistant-surgeon with the Liberian forces during the conflicts (McCarthy 2007: 6–7). Selim Aga had worked closely with Glover’s Hausa translators and guides during the Dayspring expedition. He evidently forged close working relationships with them, because he kept five of them on in his own employment, for a short while, after he

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settled in Lagos. He planned to organize a hunting expedition into the Nigerian interior with them and to visit the Hausa city of Kano in the north. He wrote to Sir Roderick Murchison at the Royal Geographical Society requesting financial assistance ‘for the purchase of presents for the Kings and Chiefs of the Yoruba, Nupeh and Zaria countries and also a suitable gift to Sidi Ali of Kano’. His plan was to try and retrieve books and papers from an earlier ill-fated overland expedition to Northern Nigeria, then thought to be in the hands of Kano’s Emir.15 Despite a letter of recommendation from Glover, the requested funds were not supplied and so the expedition did not go ahead.16 Aga’s letter nevertheless suggests that he did not see himself in the way that Burton did, as an instrument in the hands of would-be British imperialists and as an unequal partner in their projects. The letter reveals Aga’s taste for travel and his vocational ambitions as an independent explorer; ambitions that he was later able to fulfil more fully and with greater recognition in Liberia, through the auspices of Hazeley and the American Colonization Society. Aga’s contribution of ‘travelling equipages’ from Northern Nigeria to the collections of Liverpool’s municipal museum should therefore be seen as serving to advertise his expertise as a pioneering traveller in West Africa. If this integral set of well-documented artefacts included items that he had used himself, then they can be seen to have directly projected an aspect of his explorer’s persona. If acquired under more complex circumstances, perhaps through the Hausa translators and guides with whom he worked, then the items would not only have demonstrated Aga’s professional experience as an expert traveller, they would also have served to highlight the existence of well-developed indigenous systems of travel, interconnection and diplomacy in the West African interior. In other words, this was a set of objects that reflected the agency, institutions and identities of Africans in complex ways. It cannot be understood to have been acquired on European terms and was accessioned into the Liverpool Museum’s collection as a consequence of densely entangled ‘social and material interactions’ (Harrison 2013: 5).

Joseph Mayer and the Inauguration of Liverpool’s Ethnography Collection Liverpool was early to enter the great Victorian museum age. The municipality opened the doors of the Derby Museum in Duke Street to the public in 1853. But, as already mentioned, the museum was stocked primarily with natural history ‘specimens’ at this stage and it was relatively slow to fully enter the age of ‘ethnographic’ collecting. By 1860, Liverpool was possibly the largest port in the world and also one of the most technologically advanced. The city functioned as a gateway in and out of Britain’s overseas empire and as a hub of commercial enterprise with international connections that spanned the globe. West African palm oil flooded into Merseyside during the 1850s, where it provided raw materials for soap-making and other industries, but the so-called ‘ruffians’ who competed to extract palm oil from the forests of West Africa’s coasts and deltas probably had little interest in publicizing their limited and specialized knowledge of these profitable haunts and it was the engineer Guthrie and the

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African-born Selim Aga, after serving on government-backed expeditions up the Niger River, who made the first and most significant founding contributions of West African artefacts to the museum in the 1850s and in 1860. While some, like Laird, may have complained about the hindrances to knowledge gathering perpetrated by Liverpool’s old established trading firms, others complained about the opportunities squandered by merchant mariners. In a speech to the Liverpool Literary and Philosophical Society in 1862, Cuthbert Collingwood, a botanist and future honorary secretary of the society, lamented that: No accessions of importance are derived to our museums and collections from the labours of sea-faring men. A piece of coral, a parrot, a shell or two, or something that has received attention from its oddity, is occasionally brought by the sailor . . . but anything of value or importance is not even to be looked at. No system of any kind marks the seaman’s gatherings . . . It is this utter want of system – this absence of rudimentary information which renders the ordinary collections of seamen so entirely valueless. Collingwood 1862: 48

‘Sea-faring men’ were evidently not invested in imperial-style ‘knowledge-gathering’ agendas at this time. What they brought back to Liverpool from African coasts probably reflected the kind of items that might have been sold to them by the likes of the Central African canoe-paddling ‘peddlers’ described by Whitford. As O’Hanlon has suggested, mobile collectors, like seafarers, were more likely to collect a limited range of items than collectors who took up a long-term residence within a local community (O’Hanlon 2000: 16). But coastal Africans would also have had the power to prohibit removal of most types of cultural artefacts from their territories during the precolonial period (see below). Collingwood’s critique of seafarers’ collections echoed wider calls for more systematic approaches to museum collecting at this time (Tythacott 2001: 159). However, it would seem that infrastructures of cross-cultural translation and exchange on Atlantic coasts, which were carried over from the slave trade, helped to bolster the cultural and political interests of African trading communities and so probably worked against nascent patterns of imperial collecting. In the years after Selim Aga’s 1860 contribution, the Derby Museum continued to develop primarily through a ‘disorderly’ accumulation of natural history ‘specimens’. However, in 1867 the nature of the institution was to shift significantly when the Liverpool goldsmith and antiquarian Joseph Mayer gave the Corporation of Liverpool a 14,000-piece collection of his ‘art treasures’. Mayer’s donation included ancient Egyptian, Greek and Roman things as well as medieval and later antiquities. Among the African items that formed part of this internationally significant collection were two royal ivory bracelets from the Yoruba Kingdom of Owo (M13025a–b), a sixteenthcentury Sapi-Portuguese ivory horn from present-day Sierra Leone (M13014, see Figure 2) and a masquerade costume from southeast Nigeria (M12674). Little, if any, information survives about how these items were originally acquired but they formed part of the private assemblage of a reputable antiquarian with an international network

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of fellow enthusiasts, collectors and dealers. Mayer had an unfulfilled ambition to write a history of the art of the British Isles, as well as a craftsman’s interest in ancient designs and creative techniques, which he used as sources for his own designs (Gibson and Wright 1988). Rather than directly reflecting maritime geographies and commercial links with Africa, the artefacts in the Mayer donation reflected Mayer’s antiquarian intellectual network and the international network of dealers and collectors to which he belonged and within which he exchanged valued objects. Mayer’s large and prestigious donation required a dedicated curator to organize it and in 1872 a new appointment was made in the person of Charles Gatty. Gatty entertained ethnographic interests and began slowly building up the ‘ethnographic’ collections of the museum alongside the ‘prehistoric art’ and ‘antiquities’ collections. In 1878 Gatty accessioned five ‘Gold Ornaments from South America’ that Mayer donated to the museum in October of that year, one of which was later identified as being a squashed soul washer’s disk in gold from Asante, in present-day Ghana (10.10.78.45). In fact, with the exception of Egyptian items, African objects were not among Mayer’s special interests. Consequently, many other African items he donated to the museum also appear to have been acquired incidentally along with other items, because he was concerned to preserve the integrity of the collections he bought from others whenever possible. The Sapi-Portuguese ivory hunting horn, for example, was purchased along with an important collection of classical and medieval ivories in 1855

Figure 2 ‘Sapi-Portuguese’ ivory hunting horn from the sixteenth century. Presented to the museum in 1867 as part of the Joseph Mayer donation. M13014.

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from a Hungarian political exile of aristocratic descent living in London (Gibson and Wright 1988: 106). Horns like this were commissioned from African ivory carvers in sixteenth-century Sierra Leone by Portuguese merchants and purchased by European aristocrats as prestigious novelty ornaments to adorn their homes and cabinets, or to be given as gifts to kings and popes (Bassani and Fagg 1988: 53). In 1880, a new department called the ‘Mayer Museum’ was created within the institution to accommodate the Mayer collection, as well as the museum’s other ethnographic and archaeological items. In the same year Gatty, now curator of the new department, organized a temporary exhibition of ‘Prehistoric Antiquities and Ethnography’, which opened early in 1881 at the Walker Art Gallery, just up the street from the museum. The exhibition was initiated by ‘a committee of Liverpool gentlemen’ (Gatty 1882: iv), but Gatty curated it and wrote the catalogue. In addition to Mayer Museum items, it included many artefacts loaned by members of the public from various parts of England. The exhibition represented a first attempt to impose a system of order on an otherwise chaotic assemblage of stored artefacts from various parts of the world and from a wide range of historical periods. It was also an attempt to help promote and legitimate the new ‘science’ of ethnography and its methods of collecting and comparing ‘specimens’, or types of artefacts, from diverse human groups around the world. Gatty laid out the exhibits in geographical groupings but the epistemological system in which the artefacts were to be tabulated, compared and apprehended, was borrowed from natural history and related sciences (see Fabian 1983: 106). Gatty remained curator of the Mayer Museum until about 1884. He mainly added African ethnographic items to the museum collections from coastal West and Central Africa acquired from ships’ captains. Very few masks and figures are listed in the accession registers for this early period and the odd ones that do appear are called ‘idols’. A few items labelled ‘charms’ were also acquired during this period, along with items relating to indigenous weaving and a few musical instruments. By a significant margin, the majority of items accessioned before 1880 were weapons collected from riverine locations in Cameroon, Gabon and southern Nigeria. These would have been acquired overwhelmingly through coastal trading networks and the preponderance of weapons probably reflected the fact that weapons were primarily personal items, individually owned by their wearers. This would have meant that they were more readily ‘alienable’ than some other items and so could be sold or exchanged unproblematically on the spot by their owners (Thomas 1991: 59). In contrast, masks and figures tended to be hidden away by their owners when not in use. Ritual sculpture of this sort was usually communally owned, or its use was controlled by initiation associations, so it could not easily be commodified until the era of colonial overrule, when colonial administrators began confiscating it, or missionaries and charismatic converts began sanctioning its use. Among the accessions to the museum’s ‘ethnographic’ collection from this period one stands out both for its size and its special significance. Generously presented to the museum by the wealthy Sierra Leonean merchant W. R. Renner, it consisted of a canoe and paddle from the village of Alenso, on the west bank of the Niger River near Onitsha (14.8.73.1 & 2, now both lost), and it held the distinction of being the first gift made

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directly to the museum by a West African. This important contribution to the museum’s nascent ‘ethnographic’ collection by a West African did not merely reflect Liverpool’s commercial and maritime links with Africa’s west coast. In its material form as a vessel of riverine transport and trade, the canoe and paddle also embodied the African entrepreneurial agency implicated in extending these links inland via West Africa’s interior waterways (see Chapter 4). The 1870s and early 1880s saw a rapid expansion of Europe’s so-called ‘legitimate commerce’ on the western coast of Africa. Medical advances and advances in steamship technology contributed to this expansion, as they brought a new generation of trading firms safer, faster and more comfortable access to African coasts and rivers. Instead of conducting their business from the relative safety of their converted hulks anchored offshore, agents employed by new-generation trading firms, like Liverpool’s Hatton & Cookson, negotiated rights to establish onshore premises with African authorities on Central African coasts. On the Loango coast, Vili title-holders witnessed ‘rental’ agreements and also provided each European trader with a ‘linguister’, or Mafuka, who watched over the trader’s interests ‘conjointly’ with those of the regional title-holder (Dennett and Smith 1902: 270). These developments led to new-formed infrastructures of translation and cross-cultural interaction between Europeans and Africans in the coastal settlements and, for the Europeans at least, new ways of conducting the trade. In order to prosper European traders depended on close relationships with their ‘linguisters’ and with trusted brokers who brought produce from inland markets. These relationships also enabled the acquisition of ‘ethnographic’ collections. Indeed, many traders became socially, and even politically, integrated into African societies during this period, marrying African women from influential trading families and using African artefacts in their daily lives (Kuklick 1991: 283; Kingdon 2015). The Liverpool trader J. G. C. Harrison and the Hatton & Cookson agent Robert Bruce Napoleon Walker, who made donations to the Mayer Museum in the 1870s and 1880s, were two traders who evidently became integrated into African communities in present-day Gabon (Kingdon and van den Bersselaar 2008: 107–8; Kingdon 2015). Harrison claimed to have been made ‘King of Kaputa’ by Vili authorities from Loango who evidently held sway in Sette Cama at the time. At some point before 1883, these Vili authorities gave Harrison a ritual staff as his ‘official insignia of office’ (1.11.83.1), which he subsequently donated to the Liverpool Museum. Two of his status caps ‘from the Loango country’ (1.11.83.3 & 9) that he presented to the museum at the same time are whitened by salt deposits, suggesting that he sweated into them as a result of wearing them on a regular basis, as would have befitted his status as ‘King of Kaputa’. A number of the Eshira items that Harrison donated to the museum in 1879 were prestige ornaments made and worn by women, including two beaded necklets (8.7.79.2 & 3) and a beaded belt (8.7.79.4). Also significant is the Eshira ornamental ivory hair pin (8.7.79.1) donated in 1879 and the ‘rattle used by the women in medicine making from Sette Cama’ donated in 1883 (11.10.83.12, now lost). These items, especially the ‘rattle’, could not easily have been acquired, except through a close personal relationship with their female owner, who in this case may have been Harrison’s African wife. Although little is known about J. G. C. Harrison, and although the accession records relating to

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his gifts are brief, it is clear that the objects he presented to the Liverpool Museum in 1879 and 1883 were closely linked to the status he acquired, and the relationships he formed, in the African communities in which he was politically and socially integrated. Thus, the items Harrison donated, not only embodied the creative agency of the Africans who made them, but also the ritual ties through which they had become related to him (Kingdon 2015: 27).

Between Empire and Trade Even before the onset of formal colonization in West Africa, nineteenth-century trading relationships between Europeans and Africans could often be characterized as ‘informal empire’, because economic and military power was concentrated unequally in European hands (Gallagher and Robinson 1982: 1–18). But, from the late nineteenth century, European nations became involved in an increasingly competitive ‘scramble’ for African territories and resources, so that late nineteenth-century Africans experienced an unprecedented spate of conquests at the hands of various European powers. This was followed up by an aggressive drive towards colonial consolidation and knowledge production. Many locally revered African artworks were looted from royal treasuries and the shrines of religious associations during this time, to be spirited away as military trophies, or to be sold, or donated, to British museums. This formed part of an imperial language of destructive gestures increasingly unleashed against various material expressions of indigenous African religion and African judicial and moral authority. This new imperial iconoclasm was intended to speak both to European metropolitan audiences and to indigenous Africans. In the minds of some colonial officials who were particularly swayed by missionary narratives, it took on the significance of a ‘crusade’ (Mockler-Ferryman 1892: 27–28), while in other cases an anti-‘fetishism’ ideology helped to justify the use of coerced African labour by furnishing colonial apologists with the rationalization that it represented a relative gain to the African slave by being freed from the control of African authorities and in the employment of a European establishment (Huzzey 2012: 175, 210). The period during which Britain rapidly conquered huge swathes of West Africa largely between 1880 and 1914 corresponded with the period of most rapid growth of Liverpool’s municipal collections from western Africa. The reasons for this rapid growth are complex, but iconoclastic looting certainly played its part. Strother has underlined the fact that, from around the 1880s, African shrines and altars, especially in southern Nigeria ‘became targets for systematic campaigns of destruction’ by British colonial agents (Strother 2016: 2).17 Such shrines and their associated practices were characterized in purely pejorative terms as sites of ‘cruel and nonsensical fetish rites’ that were the antipathy of Christianity (Ayandele 1966: 106; van den Bersselaar 1998: 152). The words ‘fetish’, ‘juju’ and ‘idol’ belonged to a class of derogatory terms for imagined African cultural practices, which triggered responses of derision and horror. The savage agency that these pejorative terms connoted, was to be ‘broken’ through the performance of destructive gestures that would ‘discredit African gods and expose

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their priests for charlatans’ in the eyes of a manipulated and childlike African populace (Strother 2016: 6). Iconoclastic gestures of British colonial agents in southern Nigeria usually involved the torching of shrines, but not before their compliment of sculptural altarpieces had been looted. As Strother indicates, the destruction of shrines in many cases proved unsuccessful in putting an end to the religious and judicial practices associated with them (Strother 2016: 6) and its repetition can probably be put down to the fact that, as a form of communication, the destructive gesture was intended as much, if not more so, for British audiences than it was for African ones. A fact that appears to be supported by the British habit of looting shrines before burning them and then sending the loot to museums, where it was displayed primarily according to triumphalist narratives, as foils to an ideology of British cultural supremacy and its power to order the world (see also Chapter 8). The conquest of the Edo Kingdom in southern Nigeria by British military troops in 1897, and their looting of the Oba’s palace in the kingdom’s capital city of Benin, was a key episode in the ‘scramble’ for Africa. From the 1880s British traders and colonial officials had begun to view the independent Edo Kingdom, and the Oba’s control over Edo markets, as an obstruction to their interests. British commercial firms dominated in southern Nigeria and British political control was consolidated with the creation of the Niger Coast Protectorate in 1893, which encompassed former tributary territories of the Benin Kingdom. This threat from the British came after a long period of economic decline and additional threats from the Edo Kingdom’s neighbours. Benin’s northern trade had recently been taken over by the newly established Nupe emirate, while Itsekiri and Ijo trading chiefs, who controlled key waterways in the Niger Delta, increasingly monopolized the coastal trade with Europeans. Historians have suggested that, in the face of these various external threats, nineteenth-century Obas increasingly relied on their religious, rather than military, role to bolster their authority. Their religious role involved the privilege of staging human sacrifices in order to insure the kingdom’s continuity (Plankensteiner 2010: 19–20). This practice became the prime focus of the reports published by late nineteenth-century European visitors to Benin, like Richard Burton. Burton visited Benin with Selim Aga in 1862 and published a gruesome account in which he described it as a ‘city of blood and skulls’ (Burton 1863). His one-sided report helped to legitimize British designs on the Edo Kingdom. The British force sent to take Benin was launched after a group of nine colonial emissaries and their 200 African carriers were ambushed while on their way to Benin City. The ill-advised expedition had ignored Oba Ovonramwen’s request for a postponement of their visit. The ambush was carried out by an Edo military party led by a number of dissenting chiefs, which succeeded in killing most of the British party. Britain’s response in sending the so-called ‘punitive expedition’ was intended to wreak retribution on the Edo Kingdom and take it over. The capital was largely destroyed by the British attack and the subsequent fire that swept through the city. Oba Ovonramwen was ‘deposed’ and exiled to Calabar (see Figure  3), while Benin’s astonishing wealth of royal treasures, made in ivory and bronze, was stripped from the palace buildings (Eyo 1997; Igbafe 1970). Much of it was shipped to London as the official booty of the

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Figure 3 Oba Ovonramwen with guards on board the steam yacht Ivy on his way to exile in Calabar in 1897. Photograph by the Ibani Ijo photographer J. A. Green. Howie photo album. Courtesy of National Museums Liverpool (Merseyside Maritime Museum).

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expedition where it was auctioned to offset the costs of the ‘punitive expedition’. The remainder was shared out among the officers as unofficial loot (Eyo 1997: 34). Consequently, most of the royal Benin artworks now held in Western museums and other collections, were originally part of the British military loot from 1897. The military looting of Benin’s royal altarpieces constitutes a prime example of African artefacts being acquired purely on European terms. It resulted in museums around the world acquiring potent African artworks, which they could not have acquired through any other methods. The process was also highly destructive in the iconoclastic way in which it effectively shattered the indigenous ‘mesh’ of relationships between people, artefacts and royal institutions, through which political authority in Benin was articulated and reproduced. The Oba’s palace in Benin was the religious and political hub of the kingdom and the Oba ruled through his court officials and the town chiefs. He gave palace titles to those officials who served him directly. He also gave town chieftaincy titles to those who achieved success by their own efforts. Edo society as a whole was divided into citizens and slaves and was hierarchically stratified according to a system of age grades. A man’s eldest son was responsible for his funeral rites, during which he placed a staff on the family’s ancestral altar. He then became the new mediator between the ancestors in the spirit world and his family, who relied on him to secure the ancestors’ goodwill. In a similar way, the Oba mediated between previous Obas at the royal shrines on behalf of the entire Edo Kingdom and this underpinned his spiritual and moral authority over the kingdom. The palace complex housed numerous shrines, because when an Oba died the next Oba had to erect a new royal shrine for his predecessor. The deceased Oba joined the ranks of royal ancestors from an ancient dynasty that could be traced back for centuries. His shrine was adorned with commemorative sculptural works in ivory and copper alloys commissioned from specialist guilds of brass casters and ivory carvers maintained by the palace (Plankensteiner 2010: 9–10, 42). Thus, when the British forces stripped Benin’s palace shrines of their brass and ivory altarpieces in February 1897, their act of iconoclasm destroyed a centuries-old memory bank of history and cultural practice. Among those who participated in the ‘punitive expedition’ against Benin was Dr Felix Roth. He had travelled to West Africa in 1892 to take up a position in the British Medical Service in the Niger Coast Protectorate. He joined the ‘punitive expedition’ as surgeon to the advance guard (Roth 1903: Appendix II , iii). As one of the officers with experience in West Africa, he played a major part in the fighting in February 1897 and would have received part of the unofficial loot that was shared out among the officers after the fall of Benin. Dr Roth sold four items from this loot to the Liverpool Museum in December 1897 (21.12.97.3–6). He probably sent much of the rest of his loot to his brother Henry Ling Roth, curator at the Bankfield Museum in Halifax, and Henry subsequently sold six Benin works to the Liverpool Museum in 1898 (19.4.98.1–4, 26.4.98.2, 15.1.03.19). Most of these works were illustrated in the book on Benin that Henry Ling Roth published in 1903, titled Great Benin: Its Customs, Arts and Horrors. A number of other altarpieces from the royal palace in Benin were purchased by the Liverpool Museum’s director from dealers soon after the official auction of the material in London, but the best-known piece in the museum’s collection from Benin

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was donated by the Elder, Dempster & Co. steamship engineer Arnold Ridyard (see Chapter 3) in November 1899. This is a beautifully cast sixteenth-century head of a queen mother (27.11.99.8, see Plate 2), which Ridyard had acquired a month or two earlier that year on the West African coast from an unknown intermediary. A later contribution to the museum’s royal Edo artworks consisted of an ivory armlet decorated with relief emblems of royal authority, including figures of leopards and a Portuguese soldier on horseback. It was given to Ridyard in 1906 by W. E. Johnson, a Sierra Leonean Krio established at Bathurst in The Gambia who may have acquired it some years earlier from one of the Sierra Leonean members of the 1897 British military expedition against Benin.18 While most of the African artefacts that were added to the Liverpool Museum collection during the period of its fastest growth between 1880 and 1914 were not acquired as a consequence of direct looting of the sort exemplified by Dr Felix Roth in Benin, this did not mean that other forms of collecting in western Africa were necessarily benign, or that they had an insignificant impact on African societies. Materials like bronze and ivory were restricted and valuable materials in African societies, but even when an African figure was made in a commonly available material like wood, for example, the rituals involved in the creation and consecration of ritual figures could be very expensive in terms of sacrifices and other investments, so that it was no easy matter to replace them, or the potent reputations they would have acquired through use over a period of time. This meant that acquiring African religious or ritual sculptural works through non-coercive exchange was an expensive business, when it was possible at all. For example, in 1899 Arnold Ridyard took delivery of a Kongo diviner’s divination set for the Liverpool Museum. It was given to him at the Hatton & Cookson trading post in Landana on the coast of present-day Cabinda. The diviner’s set came with an accompanying note from its collector Mr Host, an employee of the trading firm, who described it as ‘Fetish – “Se Keh tem beh” ’ (26.6.99.44). In his letter Mr Host complained that the figure was ‘very costly’ and that there was a delay on the part of the Mayombe people from whom he acquired it. Imperialist patterns of ‘knowledge production’ had long been a potent framing motivation for European collecting by this time (see Willink 2007). Europeans were evidently concerned with acquiring examples of ‘primitive’ religious practice embodied in so-called ‘fetishes’. But Africans on the Loango and Kakongo coasts, as at many other places, were apt to subvert these European aims. The obstacles put in the way of Europeans intent on acquiring even small figures through exchange were evident from the high prices asked for them. At many places on the western coast of Africa, sculptors took to making unconsecrated, commercial versions of their religious and ritual artworks. They also made a host of other artefacts and trinkets for sale to Europeans as ‘curios’. The British trader Whitford, whose account of trading up the Central African coast during the 1860s or 1870s has already been mentioned, described how, at each coastal trading settlement, canoes approached his vessel with live animals for sale as well as ‘excellent mats, made of grass woven into fancy patterns, curious spears, bows and arrows, fancy gourds, porous earthenware watercoolers, and an infinite variety of pleasing curiosities’ (Whitford 1877: 324).

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A couple of decades later, when Ridyard began making regular contributions to the ‘ethnography’ collection of the Salford Museum in 1897, the curator Ben Mullen sometimes thought it necessary to note that particular artefacts were ‘more for sale than for useful purposes’ (Salford Museum accession record for 1897.120–23). In one accession record he writes, ‘[T]his object is not for native use, and like the preceding (no. 59) is of little or no value in the ethnographical collection.’19 The note would have been deemed necessary in order to prevent subversion of his tightly bounded category of ethnographic authenticity (O’Hanlon 2000: 22). In these instances, it was Ridyard who informed Mullen of the objects’ intended use as ‘commodities’ (see Chapter 3), but it was not always easy for collectors and curators to distinguish between African artefacts made for sale as commodities and those intended for indigenous use. Nor was it necessarily the case that artefacts made for sale to Europeans displayed lesser degrees of virtuosity in their construction and ornamentation. For instance, in 1908 James Harrison gave the Liverpool Museum a Duala Losango society mask in the form of an antelope or buffalo from Cameroon, which displays exceptionally well-executed geometrical designs in European, industrially produced paints (3.11.08.3, see Plate 3). The mask shows little sign of wear and could very well have been made for sale to European collectors. Such works might be described as ‘inauthentic’ or ‘fake’ by collectors of African art or museum curators (see e.g. Jones 1994), yet they are likely to have been made by the same sculptors who created ritual figures for indigenous use. It was rarely the case that a European collector at the end of the nineteenth century fully understood what he was acquiring when he collected an African cultural object. In many instances we can assume the African creators of such works were intent on pursuing their own, primarily economic, agendas, rather than actively seeking to subvert European collectors’ ‘knowledge-gathering’ agendas. Nevertheless, such artefacts embody the economic initiative and creative agency of coastal Africans responding to the historical forces of their day. The diviner’s set Ridyard acquired from Mr Host, mentioned above, remains part of the World Museum’s remarkable assemblage of Kongo sculptural works from Central Africa, which was acquired through Hatton & Cookson employees in the Lower Congo region between 1895 and the middle of 1901. The assemblage includes an astonishing series of Kongo minkisi (sing. nkisi) power figures of the spectacular nkondi type. Outstanding within this series is a complement of two figures named, respectively, Kozo (9.8.98.43) and Mangaaka (29.5.00.21). Mangaaka (Plate 4), the larger figure of the pair, takes the form of a powerfully planted male figure leaning slightly forward with hands on hips. In the middle of his torso, which bristles impressively with nails and iron blades, he sports a raised boss (bilongo), which has the impression of a large cowry shell that must originally have been inserted into it. Kozo (Plate 5), the smaller figure, takes the form of a dog, with a head at each end of its body. Kozo is similarly bristling with pieces of iron and has a cylindrical boss on its back, now partly emptied. These dramatic and powerful works of art were intended to inspire awe and to astonish. Special rituals were performed in order to activate their powers, which involved driving nails or iron blades into them (MacGaffey 1993: 44, 76, 79, 95). Many Europeans interpreted Kongo minkisi according to misconstrued, derogatory and derisory terms,

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like ‘fetish’ or ‘idol’. Yet spectacular minkisi minkondi figures of the Mangaaka type were important instruments of judicial and social control. They were held in particular awe by the populace and could be used to open and close trade routes, to punish thieves and to sanction social rules (MacGaffey 1993: 153). Dramatic and powerful works, like consecrated minkisi minkondi, could only be acquired by force, because they were not available through barter, as were some other lesser items like baskets, bracelets and swords (see e.g. Willink 2007: 214). The two minkisi minkondi figures, Kozo and Mangaaka, which Ridyard transported to Britain in 1898 and 1900 respectively, were apparently ‘confiscated’ with the help of the Hatton & Cookson trading agents stationed at Landana in Cabinda (now Angola). Indeed, Arthur Clare, the agent who acquired the Liverpool Kozo and another Mangaaka figure that Ridyard sent to the Salford Museum, stated in a 1904 letter to the Salford curator that he was given the figures by ‘the Portuguese Government for acting as intermediary in a palaver between them and the natives’.20 Furthermore, in the 1898 accession record for the Salford Mangaaka, the Salford Museum curator quotes Ridyard as saying that ‘The Portuguese and French Governments are taking these Fetishes away by force as they stop the trade of the country.’ Ridyard’s statement emphasizes that the traders would not have been neutral intermediaries in the process and would have had an interest in gaining greater influence over the conduct of the region’s trade, much of which was still under the control of local African authorities and arranged through indigenous African brokers. Intriguingly, the Liverpool Mangaaka and Kozo figures have been partly disassembled and are incomplete. Kozo shows signs of having had the ‘medicines’ of its bilongo pack deliberately removed from the cylindrical boss on its back, along with the all-important mirror that would originally have been fitted on top. Mangaaka is in an even more denuded state. When compared with similar Mangaaka figures in other museum collections, it becomes evident that many of his original parts and attachments must have been removed. For example, the Liverpool Mangaaka figure no longer wears a thick raffia skirt, typically worn by more complete figures of this kind (see LaGamma, Howe and Rizzo 2015: 260–61). He has also lost much of his beard and pale marks on his neck suggest that he has also lost one, or more, necklets that would undoubtedly have contained potent ‘medicines’. Like the cowry shell missing from his belly boss, these would have been integral to his effectiveness as a power sculpture in his original Central African context of use. These accessories would originally have held part of his empowering bilongo, or ‘medicines’. Interestingly, no mention is made of Mangaaka’s partial disassembly in his museum accession record, which must have been effected in Central Africa before his departure for Liverpool. The removal of Mangaaka’s bilongo ‘medicines’ would have constituted a form of deconsecration. Indeed, close physical analysis and X-radiographic imagery carried out by the Metropolitan Museum of Art on a sample of similar Mangaaka figures that were collected at roughly the same time as the Liverpool one, shows that bilongo material was inserted behind the ceramic inlays of the eyes of a number of these figures. Moreover, the analysis shows that bilongo material was even removed from behind the eyes of some figures, as indeed appears to have been the case with the Liverpool Mangaaka (see LaGamma, Howe and Rizzo 2015: 260–61). European

Prologue

33

collectors would have had no interest in damaging the minkisi figures they acquired in Central Africa, so it seems clear that the deconsecrations of the Liverpool Mangaaka and Kozo figures reflect the actions of the original Kongo owners of the works. It is not hard to see why the Portuguese colonial authorities in Cabinda would have wanted to confiscate Mangaaka figures from their Bakongo owners at the end of the nineteenth century. These were powerful and revered instruments of judicial and social control that posed a threat to the limited authority that the Portuguese were able to assert over the territory. At this time the Portuguese did not have the power to forcibly remove the most powerful minkisi from their Kongo owners by themselves, and they would have feared the consequences of un-negotiated confiscations. This much is suggested by a description which accompanies an nkisi figure collected by Robert Visser, a trading agent for the Dutch firm the Nieuwe Afrikaansche Handelsvennootschap: No. 19: Pumbo, the very old and most feared fetish of the Bavilli. This fetish was known to have murdered over 200 persons, whereupon it was vindicated (sic) [confiscated] by the French Government but through which the authorities became involved in a bloody conflict themselves. Adler and Stelzig 2002: 42

Richard Dennett, a Hatton & Cookson agent who was active in the Cabinda area from 1880 to 1902, was critical of ‘European Governments’, who he said ‘seem to take a delight in clearing the country’ of minkisi (Dennett 1906: 94). He also noted that such measures were ineffective and was critical of the fact that colonial governments removed minkisi without having ‘got the country properly in hand’ and were unable to give ‘the inhabitants that security they are so fond of talking about’ (Dennett 1906: 94). In this context it seems clear that the colonial authorities in French-claimed Congo and Portuguese-claimed Cabinda sought out Hatton & Cookson traders to help them remove powerful minkisi from their Kongo owners, because they were not able to conduct the necessary negotiations themselves. British traders were required to negotiate agreements with local African authorities in order to conduct their trade, so they had the necessary experience of Kongo modes of negotiation that qualified them to act as intermediaries for the colonial authorities. The negotiations would have been complex, because all three parties in the proceedings would have had their own interests at stake and so probably entertained hidden agendas. This may be reflected in the confused state of much of the documentation relating to the acquisition of the Liverpool and Salford Mangaaka and Kozo figures, both around the issue of who gave Ridyard the figures in the first place, and over what happened to the figures prior to their being entrusted to Ridyard. For example, Ridyard told Mullen that it was William Shawcross who gave him the 1898 Salford Mangaaka (Manchester Museum 0.9321/1) and the 1898 Kozo figure in the World Museum Liverpool (9.8.98.43). Yet in a 1904 letter to Mullen, Arthur Clare claims that he was the donor of the Salford Mangaaka (0.9321/1) and the Salford Kozo (0.9321/2), now both in the Manchester Museum.

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Ethnographic Collecting and African Agency in Early Colonial West Africa

In this letter, Clare seemed unaware that Ridyard had split up the 1898 Kozo and Mangaaka pair by sending Kozo to Liverpool and Mangaaka to Salford. In the same letter, Clare remembered having acquired a double-headed dog (evidently the Liverpool one) which clearly does not correspond with the single-headed animal with a tail at its back end now in the Manchester Museum. Interestingly, Arthur Clare claimed that the single-headed Salford Kozo lost one head while left in a store that got flooded, although it is hard to see how a flood could have caused the figure to lose a head, especially as it clearly has a tail attached to its back end, rather than a decapitated second head. More revealing is the claim he made that ‘neither of the fetishes are in the condition they were when I obtained them from the Portuguese Government for acting as intermediary in a palaver between them and the natives’. Clare’s 1904 letter indicates that the figures’ condition altered after their confiscation by the Portuguese colonial officers and while they were in the custody of Hatton & Cookson agents. The apparent tampering is hardly likely to have been the result of a flood and, since neither Sonnenberg nor Clare acknowledge any agency for this tampering, it would seem that admission of the actual cause would have been either politically sensitive or embarrassing; politically sensitive if the Portuguese authorities got to hear of it, embarrassing if it happened under the noses of the Hatton & Cookson agents. This confusion might suggest that the traders played a dissembling role when acting as intermediaries on behalf of the Portuguese in the negotiations for the removal of Mangaaka and Kozo figures. While acts of deconsecration performed on minkisi figures must have been executed by Bakongo, it also seems likely that the deconsecrations took place under the noses of the Hatton & Cookson agents, and possibly with their tacit agreement, after being placed in their hands by the Portuguese. This would leave open the question as to who really held control over the figures, even after they had been ‘confiscated’. Reading between the lines of Clare’s 1904 letter, it would appear that the figures remained partly under the control of their original Kongo owners, even once they had been transferred to the Hatton & Cookson premises at Landana. If this is so, it raises the intriguing possibility that it may have been with the agreement of their Kongo owners that Shawcross was authorized to give Ridyard the 1898 Mangaaka and Kozo pair that Arthur Clare claimed he had received from the Portuguese. In any event, the removal of the figures to the Liverpool and Salford museums cannot be understood as a clear-cut example of iconoclastic confiscation of indigenous African cultural objects by a coercive colonial power. The relative impotence of the Portuguese colonial authorities at the time meant that it was something rather more intriguing and complex than that, and it brought into play a mesh of competing agendas and intersecting interests. Despite his own role in the confiscation of minkisi by the Portuguese colonial government, Clare was fully aware that the measure did not achieve its ostensible aims. Indeed, at the end of his 1904 letter to Mullen he offered that: It may be of interest to know that, owing to the great abuses of the fetish priests the Portuguese Government determined to destroy the fetishes some six years ago but notwithstanding the destruction fetishism is just as it was then.21

Prologue

35

A few years earlier, in September 1901, Oscar Sonnenberg, another Hatton & Cookson agent, explained in a note on Mangaaka that ‘The Portuguese Government has removed by force some of these fetishes but by no means is fetishism extinct amongst the natives, even in the vicinity of the settlements of the whites.’22 This latter statement suggests that the actions of the Portuguese colonial authorities may have had an effect opposite to that intended, as it may have stimulated increased production of minkisi figures in order to replace ones that had been removed. In an environment of competing interests and agendas, European interest in, and desire to appropriate, Kongo minkisi probably only helped to demonstrate the strategic value of minkisi ownership and use in Kongo eyes, with the likely outcome that it reinforced the prestige and prevalence of certain types of minkisi in Kongo communities, along with the beliefs and practices associated with them. If this was the case, then deconsecration of World Museum’s Mangaaka and Kozo figures by their original owners, was probably not only a way of disempowering them, but was perhaps also a way of retrieving powerful materials used in their construction for incorporation into replacement figures. After all, Dennett indicated that: When any injury has been done to one of these fetishes [minkisi] . . . its ‘KULU ’, or spirit, goes back to the owner of the fetish, and keeps on afflicting him until he has given it a new figure. Dennett 1906: 86

It may seem difficult to confirm whether European interests and actions actually helped to uphold the use of powerful minkisi of the Mangaaka and Kozo type in Cabinda or not, but Sonnenberg’s 1901 phrase ‘even in the vicinity of the whites’ suggests that, for a period at the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth, this may indeed have been the case. In any event, it would appear that we cannot really understand the prevalence, power and prestige of minkisi figures like Mangaaka and Kozo on the Kongo coast, without taking into account the impact of European traders’, colonists’ and collectors’ interests in these remarkable indigenous instruments of judicial and social control. In the end, we are left with the incontrovertible material and archival evidence that Bakongo in Cabinda effectively subverted Portuguese designs on their political and material culture, with the likely complicity of Hatton & Cookson traders. In the process, the ‘knowledge-gathering’ agendas of European museums were somewhat hindered and subverted. Crucially, however, it would seem that, for a while at least, Bakongo trading communities in Cabinda were able to uphold their own political and cultural interests into the twentieth century, through indirect methods that avoided armed confrontation, despite competition and coercion from Portuguese institutions and functionaries. But it would seem that this form of resistance against colonial domination was achieved through the still relatively intact infrastructures of exchange and translation, co-produced over decades in the cosmopolitan space of cross-cultural engagement (Tsing 2005: xi) between Bakongo authorities in the Cabinda region and agents of the Liverpool firm Hatton & Cookson.

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Ethnographic Collecting and African Agency in Early Colonial West Africa

Conclusion Documentation relating to the early collections from Africa in Liverpool’s World Museum generally elide, or obscure, the infrastructures of cross-cultural interaction and translation of which they were usually partly the product. This chapter has attempted to provide a historical backdrop to the acquisition of these collections, which gives due emphasis to such structures. Liverpool’s merchant seamen had long traded with Africa’s Atlantic coasts in compliance with complex systems of translation and exchange through which the slave trade, and subsequently the export trade in forest products was conducted. The fact that few of the museums’ earliest donations can be shown to have been presented by traders, suggests that the commercial infrastructures carried over from the slave trade were not conducive to the kind of ‘ethnographic’ collecting typically associated with imperial modes of ‘knowledge gathering’. Significantly, it would seem, the museum’s earliest ‘ethnographic’ acquisitions were collected on two early British ‘knowledge-gathering’ expeditions up the Niger River in Nigeria. These voyages held the seeds of imperialist ambitions and aimed to bypass infrastructures of exchange and translation that helped to mediate and bolster African cultural and political interests within coastal zones of cross-cultural interaction. However, members of the Niger Expedition still had to negotiate local diplomatic conventions in the interior and expedition members were forced to depend on Northern Nigerian modes of travel, translation and interaction when their exploring vessel, the Dayspring, was wreaked at Jebba and they had to travel overland. Notable African cultural items acquired by the museum from the voyage of the Dayspring appear to reflect the diplomatic conventions of the upper Niger River and regional modes of travel and interaction. Also significant is the fact that they were acquired from one of the expedition’s African-born members, Selim Aga, because much of the expedition’s work was conducted by supposedly disease-tolerant ex-slaves, or ‘Liberated Africans’ (see Chapter 4), whose individual contributions were usually unacknowledged in expedition reports and museum records. Late nineteenth-century transformations of the export trade led to new-formed infrastructures of translation and cross-cultural interaction between Europeans and Africans in the coastal settlements. European traders with the Liverpool firm Hatton & Cookson depended on close relationships with African brokers in order to prosper and acquired some Central African artefacts as a consequence of their integration into African coastal communities. However, the late nineteenth-century period of conquest and consolidation of colonial overrule was to shift the power relationship between Africans and Europeans. This was a time when military looting became a means through which the museum was to acquire potent ritual artefacts, like the royal altarpieces from Benin, which could not have been acquired in any other way. Colonial overrule also meant that colonial officers became more invested in imperial notions of ‘knowledge production’, which included the collection of ‘ethnographic’ artefacts, because this was seen as helpful to the administration of newly acquired African territories (see Chapter 8).

Prologue

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Consolidation of colonial overrule was accompanied by an increasing marginalization of African interests and a growing racism among colonial officers and other Europeans (see Chapters 4 and 5). These shifts impacted significantly on indigenous office holders in West Africa, as well as on Western-educated merchant elites in Atlantic port towns, whose participation in the export trade had already come under sustained attack from wellcapitalized European firms. In response to a dominant and derogatory European cultural imperialism, these West African elites assumed a range of new political and cultural interests, both separatist and collaborative. Christianized elites established churches and social organizations that were independent of European control or oversight, while others allied themselves with ‘traditional’ African office holders and also forged collaborative links with British ‘colonial critics’. In this transformed political landscape, West African elites deployed African cultural artefacts as part of a currency of new meanings in subtle resistance strategies underpinned by widespread reassessments of African cultures and histories. In the early years of the twentieth century this currency was partly mobilized through Ridyard’s collecting operation for museums in northwest England and by his network of West African collaborators. It is largely towards the exploration of these and other related issues that the next five chapters turn.

Notes 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

10 11

12 13 14 15

See: https://www.liverpoolmuseums.org.uk/ism/index.aspx. Derby Museum accession register record for 28 June 1855. Derby Museum accession register records for 12 February 1857. See Law ed. (1995) for discussion of the various social and political contexts in West Africa through which palm oil was produced for export. See Lynn 1992b for a sense of the various factors involved in calculating the actual profitability of the palm oil trade. Liverpool Mercury, 22 October 1819 (quoted in Lynn 1992b: 91). Derby Museum accession register, records 11.4.55.1–9. TNA , FO, 2/23, F.P., Baikie to undersecretary, FO, 10 June 1857 (quoted in Dike 1956: 170). Records of the Natural History Museum in Kensington, London, indicate that the Foreign Office gave the museum 23 bird specimens (accession numbers 1862.6.30.12–34) in 1862, which they had received from Dr William Balfour Baikie, leader of the Dayspring expedition. Royal Geographical Society Corr. Block CB 4 1851–60, John H. Glover to Dr Shaw. The necessary funding for the new building had been provided by William Brown, a wealthy merchant banker and Liberal MP for South Lancashire (1846–1869), and Shaw’s Brow was afterwards renamed William Brown Street in the banker’s honour. Derby Museum accession register, 1860, for records 20.11.60.1–7. See Aga’s letter to Sir Roderick J. Murchison from Lagos, 3 October 1860, Royal Geographical Society IBG Archives London: RGS Corr. Block CB 4 1851–60. See Jacob Hazeley’s carte-de-visite published in Haney 2010: 65. See Aga’s letter to Sir Roderick J. Murchison from Lagos address dated 3 October 1860, RGS /IBG Archives London: RGS Corr. Block CB 4 1851–60.

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16 See Glover to Dr Shaw, 21 November 1860, RGS /IBG Archives London: RGS Corr. Block CB 4 1851–60. 17 The unpublished chapter manuscript and permission to quote from it kindly provided by Z. S. Strother, 2016. 18 An appendix to World Museum’s royal Edo art collection was added in 1978, when a unique sixteenth-century bronze equestrian figure was purchased by the museum with Art Fund assistance. The figure had been given to the nineteenth-century Liverpool trader John Henry Swainson by Oba Ovonramwen of Benin when Swainson visited Benin City with a British diplomatic expedition in 1892, so its arrival in Britain predated the 1897 looting of Benin (see Kingdon and van den Bersselaar 2008: 103). 19 Salford Museum accession register record for 1906.60. 20 Letter of 1 April 1904 from Arthur Clare to Ben Mullen. Manchester Museum history file for 1898.56. 21 Manchester Museum Archives, Mullen to Ridyard, 15 February 1904. 22 Note on Mangaaka figure by O. Sonnenberg, 25 September 1901. Manchester Museum Archives (file for Mangaaka 0.9321/1).

3

Arnold Ridyard and his Assemblage

Arnold Ridyard (1851–1924), steamship chief engineer, energetic collector and prolific donor to museums, was a man of his times, although an exceptional one. He was born at the beginning of 1851 in the same year that the great Crystal Palace Exhibition was held, a spectacularly successful event that served to inaugurate the great Victorian era of museum creation. Liverpool was no late-comer to this era and established its own municipal museum in the same year (see Chapter 2). Ridyard would later make his remarkable contribution of numerous natural history ‘specimens’ and ‘ethnographic’ artefacts from western Africa to this same municipal institution in its later incarnation as the Free Liverpool Museums. The year 1851 also roughly marks the middle of the steam age and it was the year in which Macgregor Laird launched the African Steamship Company. This company, whose management was taken over by Elder, Dempster & Co. in 1890, ran the first regular steamer service between Britain and the main ports of the West African coast (Hollet: 1995: 179). It was the company for which Ridyard worked as an engineer, in one capacity or another, over a period of about 40 years until he retired in 1916 (1980.108.38, see Figure  4). Ridyard was also a man of his times in another sense, because he was a Wesleyan Methodist from a working-class family who forged a successful career as a high-ranking marine engineer during an age that had seen Methodism transformed from a religious and cultural movement that initially prided itself in appealing to unschooled working people but had ultimately arrived ‘at somewhere near the centre of middle-class culture’ (Hempton 2005: 7, 179). These historical facts help to mark out a context in which Ridyard’s remarkable collecting operation can be seen to make sense. They are important because Ridyard left no journals or reports relating to his collecting activities, which would shed direct light on his personality or his motivations. None of the letters that he wrote to Liverpool Museum staff survive, and very few of those that were written to him by curators remain in the archives of National Museums Liverpool. The only significant collection of letters written to Ridyard that survives is in the curator’s letter books at the Salford Museum, while the only significant collection of correspondence written by Ridyard consists of notes addressed to the Salford Museum curator Ben Mullen and the Owens College (now Manchester Museum) curator Dr Hoyle, both now held in the Manchester Museum archives. Virtually everything we know about Ridyard’s collecting operation is to be found in these letters and in the records of his donations in museum accession registers. As far as Ridyard’s family life is concerned, almost everything we know of this comes from official records: birth registration, the national censuses, marriage 39

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Ethnographic Collecting and African Agency in Early Colonial West Africa

Figure 4 Portrait of Arnold Ridyard (1851–1924). Photographer and date unknown but probably taken on, or after, his retirement from service with Elder, Dempster & Co. in 1916. World Museum Ethnology Department archive. 1980.108.38.

registration and death registration. In the end, however, the sum of these disparate and fragmentary sources reveals enough about the man to be able to see that his strong Methodist culture was a defining influence in his social life, and also in the way he organized his work and other affairs. The fact that Methodism was a ‘cultural revolution from below’, founded on the ‘voluntary association of free people’, which did not locate authority in a centralized place or institution, meant that it became a transnational movement of ‘ordinary people’ and was able to thrive in an age of vastly extended and improved transportation networks. In fact, early Methodist itinerant preachers actively defied established church authority by engaging in extra-parochial forms of communion. They drew criticism for the ‘madness and enthusiasm’ of the ecstatic spirituality they incited in their followers, but their religious and cultural movement was readily able to take root on the margins of empire and to move across boundaries of ‘race’ and class (Hempton 2005: 7, 10, 30, 33). Although not wishing to take the analogy too far, it is tempting to imagine Ridyard in the role of an old-style mobile Methodist ‘enthusiast’ travelling up and down the coast of western Africa ‘preaching’ the cause of free public museums and recruiting collaborators to voluntarily assist in his phenomenal collecting

Arnold Ridyard and his Assemblage

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project for museums in northwest England. Sticking with the facts however, one can make out clear signs in the sources available that his ethos and his instincts were those of a Wesleyan Methodist Nonconformist. Hempton has suggested that the energy which drove the Methodist movement to the confident position it held across the British Empire and beyond by the end of the nineteenth century, was created through ‘dialectical friction’ between contrasting Methodist principles. In Hempton’s words: Methodism as a religious movement . . . appeared to thrive on the energy unleashed by dialectical friction. It was a movement of discipline and sobriety, but also of ecstasy and enthusiasm. It was a voluntary association of free people, but also specialized in rules, regulations, and books of discipline. It railed against riches, but became inexorably associated with the steady accumulation of wealth. It once prided itself on its appeal to the unlearned, but then founded educational institutions with unparalleled fecundity. Hempton 2005: 7

These ‘energy’ generating diads would seem to have had their parallels in the sources of ‘friction’ that drove Ridyard. For example, the Methodist principles of acquisition and generosity find clear expression in Ridyard’s collecting operation, while enthusiasm and practicality are also in evidence. A further dynamic, generated through the principles of connection and mobility embodied in the coming and going of steam shipping services between Liverpool and West Africa, can be understood as having constituted a fundamental precondition for Ridyard’s collecting operation. The Methodist principles involved here should be viewed as cultural, as much as anything, so they can be expected to have found secular expression in a man with a Methodist background, whether or not he was a believer.

Ridyard’s Family Background and Methodist Identity Arnold Ridyard’s family was rooted in a tight-knit, Methodist, working-class community in the town of Bedford, in what was then the Lancashire district of Leigh. In the mid-nineteenth century, Leigh was a centre of the silk weaving industry and both Arnold’s parents, along with his brothers and sisters, appear to have worked in silk or cotton mills at one time or another. At the time of Arnold’s birth on 31 January 1851 his father William Ridyard was a bookkeeper and it is likely that he kept books for a silk mill, because his profession was listed as ‘Silk Warper’ a few years earlier, when Arnold’s eldest brother’s birth was recorded. Arnold’s mother, Amelia, was ‘house keeper’ and mother to the five Ridyard children. Amelia was to give birth to two further children after Arnold, but the absence of Edwin, the lastborn, from the 1871 census suggests that he died before his tenth birthday. William and Amelia Ridyard clearly worked hard to provide for their children, but the family was far from being comfortably off. In 1861, Mary and Jane, Arnold’s two sisters, were working as silk winders, while his eldest brother, Samuel, worked as a cotton weaver. Arnold’s brother James worked as a cotton

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or silk piecer, joining broken threads in a spinning mill, despite the fact that he was only twelve years old and still at school. The family were clearly strict followers of the Methodist work ethic, because by 1871, with her six children at school or having left the home, the 54-year-old Amelia Ridyard was employed as a silk picker, removing stray lint and threads from finished cloth. Arnold Ridyard’s father, William, evidently had some schooling, because he was a bookkeeper at the time of Arnold’s birth, but the ‘X’ that his mother Amelia used to make her mark on Arnold’s birth registration document suggests that she was unschooled.1 Arnold appears to have made the most of his schooling and by the age of twenty-three, when his marriage was recorded, he was working as an engine fitter. His wedding took place on 10 August 1874 at the Wesley Chapel in Bedford according to the ‘rites and ceremonies of the Wesleyan Methodists’.2 His bride Mary Thornley had worked in a weaving mill as a silk winder and was the daughter of an ‘Overlooker of Silk Weavers’. It is possible that Mary and her father, Thomas Thornley, worked in the same silk mill in which Arnold’s own father and sisters also worked. But, in any event, Arnold’s marriage to Mary Thornley in Bedford’s Wesley Chapel reinforces the evidence that he belonged to a tight-knit, Wesleyan Methodist community. A letter Ridyard wrote to the curator of the Salford Museum in 1903 indicates that he remained in close touch with his brothers and sisters during his adult life.3 All this, and the fact that he was eventually interred in the Nonconformist section of Bebington Cemetery on the Wirral, suggests that he retained a strong Wesleyan Methodist affiliation and sense of identity throughout his life. The close-knit Ridyard family reproduced itself in the names given to new members in succeeding generations. For example, Arnold named his eldest daughter Amelia after his mother, his eldest son William after his father and his youngest daughter Mary Thornley after his wife. But this was by no means a sign of social recapitulation, because the family had moved firmly into the middle class by the beginning of the twentieth century. Indeed, Ridyard’s eldest daughter, Amelia, became a piano teacher and was a piano accompanist with the Gleam Choral Society of Birkenhead in 1900.4 His youngest daughter, Mary, qualified as an elementary school teacher. Significantly, while at college doing her training in January 1911, Mary Ridyard was able to capitalize on her father’s reputation as a major donor to the Liverpool Museum when she borrowed a selection of artefacts from the museum’s collection to stage a small ‘exhibition’ on ‘the art of the West African natives’.5 Thus, successive generations of the Ridyard family consolidated the family’s assumption of an increasingly middle-class identity in an almost perfectly scripted Methodist trajectory. Ridyard’s strong sense of identity, rooted in a tight-knit Wesleyan Methodist community, no doubt coupled with a confidence in his own professional achievements, would have been a key foundation of his evidently outgoing and generous personality; a personality that found particular expression among other Methodists.

Maritime Career, Collecting Practices and Social Networks Ridyard’s rise through the ranks from junior engineering positions in Elder, Dempster & Co.’s West Africa service, would have required disciplined application and hard work.

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He began his engineering career soon after completing his schooling, probably through an apprenticeship. The National Census for 1871 indicates that he was working as a range fitter by the age of twenty. His marriage certificate indicates that he had graduated to engine fitter three years later. By February 1876, Arnold Ridyard had left Bedford for Liverpool where he gained his engineer’s certificate of competency, second class, after which he soon embarked on a seagoing career. His certificate of competency record, at the National Archives in Kew, indicates that he initially made several voyages on the Ambriz, one of the steamers of the African Steamship Company. The next year he served as Fourth Engineer on the ‘Chimbarazo’, a 3,847 gross ton steamship charted by Anderson & Anderson for their Orient Pacific Line’s first London to Sydney service of 12 August 1877.6 In 1879, he joined the African Steamship Company again and began his unbroken 37-year career of regular voyages from Liverpool to the western coasts of Africa. Ridyard served first on the Biafra for at least two years and then on various other ships of the African Steamship Company, including the Nubia, the Akassa, the Winnebah and the Landana.7 On 17 February 1880, Ridyard obtained his first class certificate of competency, which would have been necessary in order to gain the rank of chief engineer, and he began working on the SS Niger in 1885. The Niger was a 2,000ton steel screw schooner built in 1883, with two decks and accommodation for twentysix first class passengers and eight second class (Cowden and Duffy 1986: 68). As a ‘Liverpool boat’, it was a mail steamer that called at the more important ports on the western coast of Africa. Ridyard worked on the SS Niger until it was sold for demolition in 1903.8 After that he worked on the SS Nyanga for a couple of years before joining the crew of the newly built SS Addah in middle of 1905 for about three and a half years. By early 1909 he was working on the SS Tarquah (see Figure 5), the ship he served on until his retirement in 1916. When Ridyard began collecting for the Liverpool Museum in 1894 he was chief engineer on the SS Niger, a role that carried considerable authority and was next in line to the captain in terms of importance and pay (Thornton [1939] 1945: 246). The West African coastal route was a difficult one with few adequate harbours and very limited ship repairing facilities. As chief engineer, Ridyard would have been responsible for keeping his ship running safely and efficiently for a full three- or four-month voyage with a staff that would probably have included various engineers, an electrician, boilermaker, greasers, firemen and trimmers (Maginnis [1892] 1900: 141). The explorer Mary Kingsley, writing in 1897, was effusive in her praise of Elder, Dempster & Co. shipping and claimed that ‘The service of English vessels to the West Coast is . . . the chief thing in West Coast trade enterprise that England has to be proud of ’. She added that: Any one of the English boats will go anywhere that mortal boat can go; and their captains’ local knowledge is a thing England at large should be proud of and the rest of the civilised world regard with awe-stricken admiration. Kingsley 1897: 456

In the difficult and risky operating environment of the West African coastal trade route, an efficiently operating steamer was essential, so some of the credit Kingsley

44

Figure 5 The SS Tarquah. Elder, Dempster & Co. ship of the West Africa service on which Arnold Ridyard served between 1909 until 1916. Merseyside Maritime Museum Archives, Elder Dempster Lines Album 6 (MCR 29/45). Courtesy of National Museums Liverpool (Merseyside Maritime Museum).

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enthusiastically apportioned to the ships’ captains could also have been claimed by the ships’ chief engineers. In fact, Elder, Dempster & Co. claimed in 1902 that their entire ships’ crews, ‘from the commanders down to the stewards, have been trained up in the service, and are therefore experts’ (Elder, Dempster & Co. 1902: 18). Mary Kingsley travelled from Gabon to the Cameroon port of Victoria (now Limbe) on Ridyard’s ship, the SS Niger, in September 1895 and described it as ‘one of the most comfortable ships of all those which call on the Coast’ (Kingsley 1897: 396). Given that a steamer’s chief engineer was responsible for the upkeep and maintenance of the whole machinery, hull, deck and fittings of a vessel, this suggests that Ridyard was at the top of his game in 1895, even by the high standards set by Elder, Dempster & Co. His long experience climbing through the ranks would have played a part in this and it was probably the ease and proficiency with which he managed his staff and discharged his responsibilities as chief engineer that allowed him to devote time to collecting ethnographic artefacts and natural history specimens for museums. Ridyard was not only a supremely competent chief engineer, but also a highly practical collector, who clearly put his engineering skills to good use in attending to the practical matters necessary for the safe transportation of fragile artefacts and sensitive live animals and plants on board ship. Some of the ceramic items he transported from West Africa were rather brittle, like the elaborate Hausa and Nupe painted ceremonial vessels from Lokoja on the Niger River, and the unfired clay vessels from the Gold Coast (e.g. 23.11.10.3–7). The fact that Ridyard managed to ship most of them to Liverpool undamaged (we don’t know how many were broken while being moved about after having arrived at the museum), would have been a credit to Ridyard’s packing skills, but the transportation problems posed by sensitive live animals posed even greater challenges. Ridyard was reported to have been the first collector successfully to have transported living mudskippers (Periophthalmus koelreuteri) into Europe (Liverpool Museums 1896: 12) and his success in keeping them alive was all down to the extraordinary care he took over maintaining favourable environmental conditions for them. On board ship he mixed brackish water for the mudskippers by pouring three and a half inches of fresh water into a three-gallon zinc bucket and then adding sea water up to nine inches. He changed the water of the live fish twice a day and kept their tanks at an even 70° Fahrenheit by placing them in galvanized trays filled with water which he warmed with gas or steam.9 Ridyard was an astonishingly energetic museum collector and his collecting operation was highly sociable. Museum accession records show that for the first two and a half years of his collecting career he donated things to the museum only in his own name, although he was already relying on the assistance of friends on the coast to acquire items for him during these early years (Liverpool Museums 1895: 10). In 1897 he began transporting ‘ethnographic’ contributions to museums in the names of his friends on the coast, almost all of whom initially appear to have been European agents for Liverpool trading firms. But, from 1898, he began forging collaborative friendships with West Africans from a range of different social and cultural backgrounds at ports on the western coast of Africa. Over the next few years Ridyard continued to extend his range of European friends on the coast but was increasingly drawn into a

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complex, cosmopolitan social network of well-travelled African traders, celebrated Krio missionaries, highly educated West African professionals, and politically astute indigenous chiefs. Consequently, the agency and personalities of these West African men and women became tightly bound up in the assemblage that Ridyard shipped to museums in northwest England. Accession records of the World Museum Liverpool, of the Salford Museum and of the Manchester Museum, indicate that during the course of his collecting career Ridyard connected with at least 222 people based at various places on the western coast of Africa, who contributed to his operation by giving him items for institutions in Britain. Approximately half of them (at least 100) were West Africans and the great majority of the West Africans were Methodists.10 At first sight Ridyard’s exceptional collecting record might be considered surprising, because, as a steamship engineer, he rarely stopped for long in any one place and he might be expected to have been restricted to a few opportunistic acquisitions.11 However, the frequency and regularity of his visits to particular ports on the coast of western Africa meant that he became well known among traders and other coastal residents for his willingness to purchase (or barter for) particular types of cultural artefact. This method of collecting would inevitably have had implications with regard to the ‘authenticity’ of some of the artefacts he acquired, such that some of them may have been quite literally made to expectation (see Chapter 2). But these issues aside, it would seem clear that the phenomenal success of Ridyard’s collecting operation was very largely due to his extraordinary network of well-connected collaborators resident on the African coast. Among his network, some individuals, whose names were recorded in the museum accession registers, donated items through Ridyard, but others, whose names were not recorded, would have sold him items that he subsequently donated to the museums. The relationships that Ridyard maintained with his fellow crew members would also have been an important factor in the success of his collecting operation. Some among his ship’s crew would have assisted him as a matter of course in carrying larger items and in attending to all the live animals and plants that he brought back to Liverpool. For example, he would have co-opted the Kru seamen under his management into assisting with his collecting in various ways. Although it seems that they sometimes refused to touch some of the more potent artefacts. An interesting record in the Salford Museum accession register, relating to the impressive Kongo nkisi figure called Mangaaka that Ridyard acquired at Landana (now Cacongo) in 1898 (see Chapter 2), describes how, when Ridyard boarded such figures to transport them back to Liverpool, ‘none of his Kroo-boys [sic] would touch them’.12 Constance Larymore, writing in the first decade of the twentieth century, appears to have found the care of livestock on board Elder, Dempster & Co. ships cheerfully taken on by a ship’s cook or butcher. ‘These good folks’ she wrote, ‘are so accustomed to the care of all kinds of live stock, domestic and wild, being carried to and from West Africa, from a full-grown giraffe to tiny gazelles, no larger than a rabbit, that they are invariably most ready and willing to supervise anything of the sort’ (Larymore 1908: 233). The goodwill of Ridyard’s fellow crew members towards his collecting operation is suggested by the fact that two officers on the SS Addah, Ridyard’s ship from the middle of 1905 to about the end of 1908,

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contributed their own donations to the Liverpool Museum through Ridyard. The ship’s chief officer, W. L. Henderson, contributed three West African ant nests to the museum’s natural history collections in May 1906, as well as an Ibibio puppet (24.5.06.22) from Opobo in southeastern Nigeria, while C. W. Harty, the ship’s purser, contributed a warri game board (14.10.07.10) from the Gold Coast to the ‘ethnography’ collections in October 1907.13 A ship’s chief officer had responsibility for the deck areas and handling cargo, among other things, so his cooperation would have been essential for ensuring appropriate stowing of Ridyard’s numerous acquisitions, both living and inanimate. In fact, the general economy of goodwill that must have existed on board Ridyard’s ship appears to have extended onshore and it is clear that Ridyard used his engineering skills and the staff under his management to win the gratitude of at least one community on the West African coast. In a letter Ridyard sent to the Salford Museum curator Ben Mullen from his home in Rock Ferry in November 1908, he explained how he had received a fan from Abonnema as a token of appreciation for repairing a church bell: Dear Mr Mullen, Yesterday you should have got a parcel from Liverpool, which contained, a fan from Abonnema, New Calabar, Southern Nigeria. Also 3 baskets from Bathurst, Gambia. The fan was from the congregation of St Augustines church, for repairing the Church Bell for them. After fixing it up, we got the full volume of sound out of it, which was something new for them, & the women danced outside the church and clapped their hands for joy. We can hear the Bell when lying in the middle of the River now.14

Although work of this kind would probably have been down to Ridyard’s own discretion and that of his captain, Elder, Dempster & Co. permitted Ridyard to make use of ‘various facilities’ (Clubb 1916: 5) to assist with his extra-curricular collecting work for museums. This, and the fact that the shipping company’s director, Sir Alfred Jones (and his successors), permitted free passage for items addressed to the Liverpool Museum from West and Central African ports, would have meant that Ridyard was known to a range of company employees at coastal ports with whom he liaised on a regular basis. Ridyard’s wide network of collaborators on the West African coast indicates that he must have had a sympathetic personality and a gift for friendship. Crucially, however, it was the capacity of steamers to separate people, yet also to connect them, that helped create the dynamic conditions under which much of Ridyard’s collecting for museums took place. As a chief engineer on the Elder, Dempster & Co. ships, Ridyard kept the ships moving from place to place. He also acted as unofficial postman to many of his contacts on the coast, who not only entrusted him with personal letters, but also money and receipts. In return, Ridyard received gifts for museums. For example, the letter of 14 January 1899 that Ridyard received from O. Saunders, a British trader based at Chiloango on the Cabinda coast, begins: ‘Dear Mr Ridyard, Many thanks for your kindness. Letter safely to hand. Fetish. I herewith send you the small fetish I promised you.’15 Some donors clearly provided Ridyard with artefacts for museums in gratitude for receiving magazines and newspapers from Britain. The correspondence between Ridyard and Ben Mullen, curator and chief librarian at Salford’s Royal Museum

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and Libraries, shows that Mullen frequently supplied Ridyard with old editions of newspapers and illustrated magazines.16 The fact that Ridyard took illustrated magazines and other reading matter back to West Africa in return for artefacts destined for museums in northwest England, indicates that his collecting operation consisted of a dynamic exchange of cultural materials.17 This interchange can be viewed as contributing to what Newell has termed the ‘ “paracolonial” flows of culture’ that took place ‘alongside and beyond the British presence in the region’ (Newell 2002: 44). But while it is clear that Ridyard was involved in an informal system of exchange, it is not usually clear who would have initiated a particular exchange. Ridyard was certainly proactive in cultivating individuals on the coast who were in a position to acquire artefacts for him. One of his strategies was to insist that the Liverpool and Salford museums should register donations acquired through his friends and contacts in their own names. In his notes to curators he also frequently requested that they send formal certificates of thanks to his contacts in recognition of their donations (see Figure  6). On the other hand, it would appear that in some cases it was, in fact, Ridyard’s isolated and homesick contacts on the coast who cultivated him, by providing him with artefacts in the expectation that he would then help them to achieve their own ends. The somewhat desperate tone of the garbled note that Ridyard received in 1897 from a Gold Coast or Sierra Leonean trader based at the port of Bata in present-day Equatorial Guinea, suggests that it would have been this Gold Coaster, rather than Ridyard, who initiated their exchange relationship: Dear Mr Ridyard, I am sending you once more god and goddess. The god is the great-grandfather to the King of M’Bia, and the goddess is the great grandmother to the queen of Sambalah. The goddess is impregnant with the god, and no money to support the goddess, then the god went into M’Bia town and stole one fowl, one egg, and one plantain for the goddess. Somebody saw the god running with the fowl, and in hurrying and fear the egg fell down, and was caught, ran away with and saw the goddess on the way and came to me for protection. I am sorry that I have no paper to give you full history of them. Now Mr Ridyard the money I gave you for Mr Brown goldsmith at Accra, I have not got a reply from him, his receipt I got from you. My wife wrote me that she has not got the money. It appears to me that the signature is not Brown’s, else he would have sent the money to his sister. I have sent your receipt, and the other receipt you received at Accra, to Cape Coast to find it out, therefore I beg to you to assister me to find the right person whom you handed the money to. I received a letter from Dr Forbes [the director of the Liverpool Museum] and replied to. I have many words to speak to you, and perhaps I may come on board. Yours truly, [Illegible].18

Another unofficial service that Ridyard performed for his West African contacts is revealed in a series of formal portrait photographs of West Africans that remained in Ridyard’s possession at his death and was subsequently donated to the Chadwick (now Bolton) Museum by his daughter Mary. The photographs are annotated in ink on the back, with instructions regarding enlargement of the portraits and the number of

Arnold Ridyard and his Assemblage

Figure 6 Certificate of thanks issued to John Mensah Sarbah in 1903 by the Liverpool Museum in gratitude for a king’s messenger sword (15.1.03.9, now lost) from the Gold Coast. PRAAD SC 6.36, Accra, Ghana. Photo: the author 2009.

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copies to be made. One of these is a photographic print mounted on card showing a Krio woman standing before a studio backdrop, with hand on a chair, wearing a dark, two-piece costume, consisting of a long-sleeved top and full-length skirt (Figure 7). The card mount bears the photographer’s studio details, ‘W. S. Johnston & sons, Art Photographers, Freetown, Sierra Leone’. The inked annotation on the back reads: From John A Reffell, Customs Department Forcados. To A Ridyard, Chief Engineer Tarquah. To be enlargen (sic) 12 inches by 9 ½ inches. 6 copies with frames of glass.

In this case Ridyard was evidently tasked with getting the enlargements made in Liverpool, or Freetown, by request from one of his West African contacts, who must have been an employee in the colonial customs administration in Nigeria. The Sierra Leonean woman shown in the print may have been a deceased relative of John Reffell’s and the requested enlargements may have been intended as commemorative images to be distributed to relatives. The numerous African artefacts and natural history ‘specimens’ that Ridyard obtained through his friends or collected himself were delivered to a network of curators and collectors in Britain. These included Henry Ogg Forbes, director of the Liverpool Museum; along with Peter Entwistle, the ethnology assistant curator; and Joseph Clubb, the natural history assistant curator. Also, Ben Mullen, curator and chief librarian at the Royal Museum and Libraries at Peel Park in Salford; Dr W. E. Hoyle, curator of Owens College (now Manchester Museum); the Liverpool Botanic Garden director; the keepers of fish at both the London Zoological Gardens and the Belle Vue Zoological Gardens in Manchester; and Richard Bennett, a Liverpool miller and historian of food preparation. Entwistle also acted in a private capacity as an intermediary for Dr H. C. Bumpus, Director of the American Museum of Natural History in New York after Dr Bumpus had visited the Liverpool Museum in 1905 to organize an exchange of ‘ethnographical’ material between the two institutions.19 Entwistle acquired various West African artefacts for Dr Bumpus through Ridyard, as well as others that he acquired through Liverpool curio shops.20 Entwistle also helped Ridyard to make a donation of West African artefacts from his personal collection to the Chadwick Museum (now Bolton Museum) in 1920 and a further donation to the Bolton Museum from Ridyard’s personal collection was made after his death by his daughter Mary in 1946.21 Other West African artefacts collected by Ridyard were sent to the Science and Arts Museum in Dublin by the Salford Museum curator, Ben Mullen.22 Ridyard’s well-placed collaborators on the West African coast meant that he was readily able to respond to curators’ and collectors’ requests. For example, Richard Bennett, who had plans to write a world history of milling, received many West and Central African ‘appliances used in the preparation of foodsuffs’ from Ridyard.23 Also, the twenty or so live primates that Ridyard gave to the Liverpool Museum, many of which were transferred to the London Zoological Gardens, may have been in direct response to requests from Forbes at the Liverpool Museum, because Forbes was a physical anthropologist and osteology expert who published a new edition of his

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Figure 7 Studio portrait of a Krio woman. Photographer: W. S. Johnston & sons, Freetown, Sierra Leone, probably early twentieth century. From Ridyard’s papers given to the Bolton Museum after his death. Bolton Council, from the collections of the Bolton Museum.

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A Handbook to the Primates in 1896. Forbes launched a dynamic new phase in the development of the Liverpool Museum and its collections when he took up his position as the museum’s director on 20 February 1894. It cannot have been a coincidence that Ridyard made his first official donations to the museum about four months later in June 1894. If Ridyard had offered his services to the energetic new director on his arrival at the museum, then the timing of these first donations suggests that they were made on Ridyard’s return to Liverpool after his very next voyage to the coast of West Africa. Ridyard’s first gift to the museum in June 1894 went to the museum’s aquarium. It consisted of about twenty-four live West African lungfish from the River Gambia and other West African rivers. The lungfish (Protopterus annectens) were in their aestivating state entombed in their burrows within desiccated blocks of mud. The blocks would have been acquired from indigenous Africans, who may have been in the habit of digging up the lungfish in their burrows during the dry season in order to store them as a supply of fresh meat. In the Annual Report for 1894 the new director recorded that he had made a special point of drawing the museum committee’s attention to Ridyard’s exertions both personally and through his friends on the coast to procure specimens for the Museum, as well as the trouble and care – so requisite to success – which he has expended in bringing them over, or in getting them forwarded from ports besides those at which his own vessel called. Liverpool Museums 1895: 10

A year later, when the Annual Report for 1895 acknowledged Ridyard’s gifts of several live electric catfish (Malapterurus electricus) to the museum, it stated that this species had been ‘for many years past a great desideratum among physiologists’. Forbes had his own academic and professional networks and he passed on ‘specimens’ delivered by Ridyard to various other institutions. The electric catfish were especially in demand at other institutions and it did the scientific reputation of Forbes and his museum no harm to be able to exhibit one of these curious and exciting creatures at a conversazione of the Royal Society in London on the evening of 1 May 1895. On that occasion, ‘several hundred of the guests, including T.R.H. The Duke of Saxe-Coburg, The Duke of Teck, and Prince Albert of Coburg, and many physiological and electrical authorities, received shocks singly or in parties’. This spectacular animal apparently showed no signs of fatigue after delivering electric shocks for the amusement of the conversazione guests over almost four hours (Liverpool Museums 1896: 17). In fact, almost all the living fish that Ridyard transported for the Liverpool Museum between 1894 and 1897 belonged to species that would have been of great interest to late nineteenth- and early twentiethcentury zoologists and physiologists. As well as lungfish and the electric catfish, Ridyard also brought back to Liverpool a total of at least 537 living and 786 dead mudskippers during his collecting career. These charismatic fish were no doubt a draw for museum visitors while they remained alive, but the fact that they were referred to as ‘walking fish’ in museum annual reports, suggests that they were probably also seen as especially interesting from a scientific point of view at a time when Darwin’s theory of evolution

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had led to a popular fascination with the idea of evolutionary ‘missing links’. In a newspaper announcement for the annual meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science held in Bradford on 5 September 1900, one of the especially topical lecture subjects highlighted for the section on zoology and physiology was ‘The Bearing of Fossil Ichthyology on the Doctrine of Descent’.24 Like the curious ‘walking fish’, the remarkable air-breathing mudfish and the spectacular electric catfish were also of special interest to numerous scientists in Forbes’s network, including figures at the London Zoological Society, the Zoological Gardens Dublin, the Manchester Museum, the Halifax Museum and the American Museum of Natural History. The seven live ‘African walking fish’ that Forbes gave to the London Zoological Society from the Derby Museum on 18 December 1897 would certainly have been acquired from Ridyard, as would the various other live ‘walking fish’ that he gave the zoo to replace those that died each year thereafter until June 1900. Indeed, Ridyard personally made a final donation of twenty live mudskippers to the London Zoological Society on 7 September 1906, although unfortunately they too were all dead within ten weeks.25 As was the case with the natural history ‘desiderata’, Forbes also placed requests with Ridyard for West African artefacts to augment the ‘Ethnographical Gallery’, because in the 1899 Annual Report he acknowledges several of Ridyard’s friends on the coast for being ‘ever ready to obtain for the collection special wants’. Although there is little explicit indication, at this early date, as to what these special ethnographic wants might have been, masquerade headdresses and so-called ‘fetish’ figures, like Ijaw shrine figures and Kongo minkisi (sing. nkisi) figures, are frequently described as ‘highly interesting’ in the annual reports, while the bronze queen mother head from Benin collected and presented by Ridyard in 1899 (27.11.99.8) would doubtless have counted as a ‘unique’ item (Liverpool Museums 1900: 34, 1905: 33). By 1900 the museum’s explicit policy under Forbes, where the African collections were concerned, was to provide in the Ethnographical Gallery ‘as complete a representation as possible of the Ethnography of West Africa, the region with which Liverpool is so intimately in relation’ (Liverpool Museums 1903: 30). This policy was partly rooted in the museum’s identity as an institution that served a local community and projected local strengths and characteristics (see Chapter  8), but it also appears to have been developed in response to Ridyard’s many contributions from West Africa. When Forbes resigned after sixteen years of service as director of the Liverpool Museum in 1910 and Entwistle assumed the deputy curatorship, Ridyard was given more formal direction by Entwistle. The museum’s Annual Report for 1910 notes that ‘Mr Ridyard has paid special attention (by request) to the procuring of examples illustrative of the primitive potter’s art as now carried on in Africa, an art gradually disappearing owing to the introduction of metal ware’ (Liverpool Museums 1911: 9). This explains Ridyard’s sudden focus on West African pottery from 1910 onwards. For example, before 1910 Ridyard had only personally collected six ceramic items from the Accra region and had received another twenty-four from his Gold Coast collaborators, but from 1910 to May 1914 Ridyard transported at least 107 pottery-related items to the Liverpool and Salford museums from a single village in the Accra region (see Chapter 6). This reflected the formulation, rather belatedly, of a more systematic collecting policy at the museum, in line with

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museological ideas of the period that had been advocated since the end of the nineteenth century (see Chapter 8), and which favoured a shift of emphasis away from ‘curious’ and ‘spectacular’ artefacts in favour of everyday, representative and ‘authentic’ ones (Tythacott 2001: 174–75). Ridyard’s phenomenal collecting operation was highly social and spread its western African bounty through networks that reached well beyond Ridyard’s own circle of museum contacts. To paraphrase Larson’s reference to Sir Henry Wellcome’s astonishing mania for collecting, ‘Gathering objects on this scale also necessitated a gathering of people’ (Larson 2009: 3). But an important difference between Ridyard and Wellcome lies in the fact that while Wellcome was involved in an almost maniacal intellectual project in his attempt to ‘marshal’ and ‘master the material world’ (Larson 2009: 287), Ridyard appears not to have harboured strong intellectual pretentions. He was evidently willing to respond to curators’ requests and, while there is evidence that he also pursued enthusiasms of his own, his collecting operation was, to a significant extent, a matter of accumulation.

Acquisition and Generosity During the course of his collecting career, Ridyard made frequent requests to museums for tallies of his donations. In response to a request made in 1904, Joseph Clubb, the Derby Museum’s assistant curator for natural history, sent him the following matter-offact reply: In response to your request, I beg to supply the following statistics of the donations made by you or by friends through you, to the museum from the 19th June 1894, to Aug. 15th 1904. Nat. History specimens {living 511} 1,362 {dead 851} Ethnographical specimens 1,300 Grand total 2,662.26

The West African Mail reported that Ridyard’s grand total had reached 3,128 in October 1906, not including the 240 plants that he had presented to the Liverpool Botanic Gardens by that time.27 In 1911, Ridyard wrote an undated note to Ben Mullen at the Salford Museum stating that he intended to visit him the following Saturday at 10.00 am and he added the request: ‘Is it possible to get my exhibits counted for that time, as I intend to stop collecting in a short time. I am trying to finish Liverpool at 5,000.’28 Mullen’s reply, although less precise than Clubb’s, was considerably more appreciative and effusive. Thus: I am writing myself to say that I have carefully gone over our collections, and as nearly as possible I estimate that you have given us not less than about two hundred and fifty specimens for the Ethnographical Collections. This is a splendid record,

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indeed, which those alone can appreciate who understand all that it means in thought, in trouble, in the making and keeping of friends, and in the constant exercise in a fine public spirit coupled with much self-sacrifice. I should certainly say that your record for gratuitous and devoted and sincere public work for museums stands without a rival.29

Whatever impact this reply may or may not have had on Ridyard, he evidently did not carry out his expressed intention to stop collecting. In fact, he continued to make donations to the Liverpool Museum until his retirement in 1916, although the volume of his donations reduced yearly from 1911. Similarly, Ridyard continued making donations to the Salford Museum until 1914, when Mullen sent his friend a note to say that he was no longer able to continue sending him packages of old magazines, because the Salford Municipal Libraries and Museum Committee had decided to send them to soldiers and sailors instead.30 The sum of Ridyard’s donations to the Salford Museum calculated from the incomplete records in the Salford Museum accession registers suggest that he contributed at least 343 ‘ethnographic’ items from West Africa to the Salford collection. At the time of Ridyard’s retirement in 1916, Joseph Clubb reported to Liverpool’s Sub-Committee for Museums that the indefatigable chief engineer had ‘contributed the handsome total of 6,450 specimens’ to the Liverpool Museum over his twenty-oneyear collecting career. Of these, 3,969 were classified as natural history (1,585 being specimens for the museum aquarium), while the remaining 2,481 items were classified as ‘Ethnography’ (Clubb 1916: 3).31 It is very likely that Arnold Ridyard began collecting artefacts from western Africa as early as 1886, which would have been soon after he joined the crew of the SS Niger and presumably after he had gained the rank of chief engineer.32 He probably began collecting only for himself, members of his family and for friends. He must have accumulated a large collection of African artefacts over the years, because he made a donation of over 100 items from his personal collection to the Chadwick (now Bolton) Museum in 1920 and 1921.33 Ridyard’s children were beneficiaries of their father’s generosity and retained collections of African artefacts after their father’s death in 1924.34 In 1973, Ridyard’s granddaughter Joan Stark gave the Liverpool Museum a series of twelve Igbo cotton textiles from Akwete in southeast Nigeria that she had inherited from her mother, Mary. Another grandchild, Mr A. A. Horrocks, donated a further collection of about thirtynine African artefacts to the Liverpool Museum in 1980, part of which may have belonged to his grandmother, because it included an ivory souvenir showing an elephant pushing down a coconut tree, with a carved inscription that reads, ‘A present from Africa to Mrs. M. Ridyard’ (1980.108.33). But Ridyard’s largesse was not restricted to his family and the institutions to which he made such important contributions. He also made personal gifts to his curator friends. Peter Entwistle, the Mayer Museum assistant curator (and later deputy curator) was one recipient, as were Ben Mullen and his wife.35 Ridyard evidently took an immediate liking to Mullen, such that a day after their first meeting at the Salford Museum, on 25 August 1897, Ridyard sent Mullen a note in which he said: ‘On my way home from Manchester yesterday, I thought I might make you up a few things from home. They have been in the house for some time. . . . They will be forwarded

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tomorrow Friday.’36 On 16 November 1898, after numerous further museum donations and a number of personal gifts from Ridyard, Mullen wrote to Ridyard expressing his thanks, making further museum requests and inviting him to lunch. Thus: The hum’g[?] fly is certainly a beauty. I shall prize it very much. My wife desires me to give you her best thanks for the mats you so thoughtfully brought her. They are very nice, indeed; and all different, one from the other. . . . Should any of your many friends on the Coast (Gaboon) [Gabon] get me an anvil, hammer and punches (Fan) [Fang], I should be greatly obliged. I wonder will you be able to spare the time to run over here some day, before you sail again, and have a bit of dinner with me at (say) 1 o’clock! It would give me much pleasure. You might regard it as an official visit! That is to say, I should pay with pleasure, your expenses.37

On this evidence, Ridyard not only used his operation to accumulate expertise as a museum collector, but also to win friends. Consequently, by November 1898, he had evidently been welcomed into an influential middle-class peer group. Unlike Ridyard, Mullen was not from a working-class background. The male members of Mullen’s family had been freemen of the Borough of Dublin for many generations and Mullen’s father served as the resident governor of Dublin’s government hospitals. Ben Mullen had been educated in music at Dublin University, while his brother John William Mullen was a doctor and held the position of medical superintendent of the Salford Corporation hospitals.38 Nevertheless, as a Dubliner in Manchester, who was eventually to retire to Bournemouth, Mullen, like Ridyard, would also have been a cultural outsider attempting to construct a new identity to accompany his transition from one way of life to another. In collecting for museums, Ridyard was not simply pursuing a rational hobby. As he gathered ‘specimens’ and ‘exhibits’, Ridyard also gathered interesting friends and influential contacts, so his project can be understood as the acquisition of social and even spiritual capital. In his monograph Methodism: Empire of the Spirit, Hempton states that the ‘ultimately contradictory’ Methodist principles of ‘serious acquisitiveness and careless generosity were played out in Methodist minds and societies wherever the movement took root’, but he claims that they ‘proved to be incapable of mass realization’ (Hempton 2005: 129). Ridyard, on the other hand, appears to have settled on a unique way of squaring the circle, as it were, because although his collecting operation represented a serious program of acquisition, the fact that he gave so many of his African acquisitions to free, public, educational institutions, meant that his acquisitiveness was visibly transformed into social benefits. Indeed, the radical change in the meaning of his acquisitions and the transmutation of his personal acquisitiveness appears to have been very much the point of his generosity towards the museums that he supplied with African artefacts. Ridyard’s acquisitiveness, and its conclusion in acts of public generosity, can thus be interpreted as a version of an essentially Methodist program of accumulating ‘scriptural holiness’ that was rooted in John Wesley’s conviction ‘that works of benevolence and holy charity were essential components of true spirituality’ (Hempton 2005: 58). It is therefore telling that, in requesting an accounting of his generosity from Ben Mullen, Ridyard did not refer to

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the body of African cultural objects he had presented to the Salford Museum as ‘my objects’, ‘my collection’ or ‘my donations’. In other words, he did not think of them as materials of raw acquisition. Instead he referred to them in their morally or spiritually transformed state as ‘my exhibits’.39 The idea that Ridyard was successfully able to combine the contradictory Methodist principles of acquisitiveness and generosity, through his energetic program of collecting for free public institutions, and in the process achieve a form of ‘saintliness’ in the eyes of some of his friends, is supported by a comment that Mullen made in a note he sent to Entwistle at the Liverpool Museum in May 1908. The note was sent after Mullen had taken delivery of a blacksmith’s tool set (Salford Museum 1908: 12–43) that Ridyard had acquired as a donation from Fred Afisia Dublin Green (1879–1950), chief of the Dublin Green House at Bonny in Nigeria’s Niger Delta region. In his note, Mullen sings Ridyard’s praises with the words: Yes, Mr. Ridyard is a grand man! The blacksmith’s outfit from Bonny is complete and will make a particularly interesting exhibit. I never met, nor have I ever heard of, any man to approach our friend for public spirit, kindness, enthusiasm and modesty combined! Have you?40

Ridyard’s Dissenting Interests Ridyard could not have been effective in the working environments of a steamship had he been ‘afraid of being with the natives’. Since the eighteenth century, Kru villagers from settlements on the Liberian coast had been taken on by European ships to replace crews who died of tropical fevers or fell ill. The tradition continued into the steam age, not only because Africans were thought to be able to cope better with the heat of engine rooms in tropical latitudes than Europeans, but also because the shipping firms could get away with paying them a lower wage. Kru migrants were employed on shore as labourers or stevedores and they also manned the surfboats that were essential for loading cargoes and disembarking passengers and goods at the many harbourless ports of call on the western coast of Africa (Frost 1995: 23). By the end of the nineteenth century, Kru migrants were frequently being engaged as greasers, firemen and stokers, and Ridyard would have sweated with them in the sweltering engine rooms of the African Steamship Company vessels that he served on. Most of the Kru seamen were picked up at Freetown or Liberia on the outward journey. They would have spoken little English, so Ridyard would have had to master the West African pidgin that served as a lingua franca along much of the coast in order to be able to communicate with them effectively. These West African seamen had a reputation for ‘better discipline and greater energy’ than Europeans in tropical regions and one can surmise that Ridyard would probably have come to admire the energy and fortitude of the Kru seamen whom he managed and worked with in the extreme conditions of his ships’ working environments.41 Unnamed Kru seamen from coastal Liberia employed under Ridyard in the engine department of his ship would probably have been among his earliest collaborators, because the first clutch of fifty-three ethnographic objects that Ridyard

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donated to the Liverpool Museum on 9 July 1895 contained eight Kru items from Cape Palmas, Liberia. Almost all of the twenty-three or so ‘Kroo-boy’ artefacts that he transported to the museum could be described as personal items and included a water bottle, a snuff mortar, a flute, dance rattles (‘saka’), harps (‘cannie’, ‘hoba’, ‘pidu’) and containers (‘bru’ or ‘kitikon’). The indigenous names for these items, information that was relatively rarely recorded in relation to his other West African donations, would probably also have been supplied by Kru seamen, perhaps while Ridyard was labelling and organizing his acquisitions on board ship. Indeed, the first issue of the Bulletin of the Liverpool Museums published in 1897 records that Kru seamen on shore in Liverpool were called directly to the museum in order to be ‘interrogated’ about the habits of the electric catfish (Malapterurus electricus) and to describe the fish’s indigenous uses.42 In this regard, it is significant that the museum records hold evidence which suggests Ridyard may have been a sympathetic manager who was remembered with respect by his former staff. For example, in July 1911, two and a half years after Ridyard had completed his service on the SS Addah, a Mr W. A. G. Ramaz, second engineer on that ship, gave Ridyard a young python from the Gold Coast for the Liverpool Museum collections. Furthermore, some years earlier, in February 1904, Ben Mullen wrote a letter to Ridyard to which he added the following intriguing postscript: P.S. – Bye-the-bye, have you ever read any of Frank T. Bullen’s books? ‘Sack o’ Shakings’, ‘Cruise of the Cachelot’ +c. You might let me know.43

Frank Thomas Bullen (1857–1915) was, at the time, a popular British author who came from an impoverished background and initially pursued a seagoing career. Significantly, perhaps, his obituary in The Geographical Journal states that he was also ‘keenly interested in bettering the condition and raising the moral tone of our merchant seamen’.44 The fact that Mullen was interested to know whether Ridyard was aware of Bullen’s writings, suggests that he may have perceived an affinity between the two men with regard to their interests in the conditions under which merchant seamen served. Between 1897 and 1914, Ridyard gave the Liverpool Museum at least seventy samples of West African medicinal herbs and roots, as well as several other dyes and cosmetic preparations, mostly collected by himself. He also gave Owens College (now Manchester Museum) at least thirty-one samples of medicinal roots from Sierra Leone between 1902 and 1904. These root samples were well documented and came with pieces of paper on which their local names were recorded along with the maladies they were used to cure. It seems clear that these samples represented one of Ridyard’s own enthusiasms. In the note Ridyard sent to the Owens College curator on 10 February 1904, Ridyard listed the roots he had presented and gave further detail about their preparation and use. Thus: Yellow Fever Root (Egboshie) Yirra Root for Black water Fever Bubi watu root for Piles

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Shay girra root for Syphillis (sic) Alum root for Gonnerhea? (sic) Bangba root for Kidney Trouble Boboshay root for African Fever Egirra root for African Fever Finger root for causing an erection Spice. For pains in body & cleaning Out the bowels (Purgatives) (my informant says it makes you eat like a Jackass) Coomback. For cleaning out the Bowels (Purgative) These roots are placed in a jar + Covered with water, for 3 days. Dose. A wine glass on rising in the Morning. If a stubborn case another Glass at two in the afternoon.45

Although the Owens College curator, Dr W. E. Hoyle, had trained as a surgeon before following a zoological career (Alberti 2009: 34), it is likely that Ridyard made this collection for Owens College on his own initiative, rather than in response to a request from Hoyle, because in the same 1904 letter he asked Hoyle to: ‘Kindly let me know what other roots I have sent before, as I want to complete the Herbal Medicines used at Sierra Leone, the same that I am doing for Liverpool.’ Ridyard’s passion for collecting West African medicinal roots and the careful attention he paid to documenting each sample, is likely to have stemmed partly from imperial bioprospecting notions, but probably also from a humanist desire to assist the advance of medical progress. However, the practical use he was able to make of them in relieving his own ailments also seems to have been a factor. This is indicated in a note Ridyard sent Dr Hoyle in October 1903 in which he provides information on a prior donation of medicinal roots. Thus: The Bangba roots are from Sierra Leone, & are used for kidney trouble, & to strengthen the back, it is steeped in water for 3 days, dose, a wine glass on rising in the morning, peppers are added in jar (7 for women, 10 for men) to warm it. I have used the Bangba myself so I know that it is right.46

The fact that Ridyard used some of the herbal medicines that he collected in Sierra Leone suggests that he did not regard them merely as ‘ethnographic’ curiosities. His experimentation with these root medicines, not only suggests that he had a highly practical attitude towards them, but, also, that he was a ‘dissenter’ with respect to official colonial regimes of ‘tropical sanitation’ and health. In the late nineteenth century and into the twentieth, colonial programs of sanitary engineering in West Africa led directly to social segregation. Europeans in the colonies, and especially colonial officials and other elites, separated themselves physically and socially from indigenous Africans by retreating to exclusive, ‘sanitized’ enclaves and hill stations (Bhattacharya 2012: 19; Odile 1998). Indeed, social segregation was an implicit, if not explicit, aim of colonial sanitary measures and its racist underpinning was illustrated not only by the fact that African communities were treated as reservoirs of infectious disease, but also by the fact that African doctors were not permitted to hold positions in the colonial medical

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service that gave them authority over white Europeans, no matter how highly qualified and experienced they were (Patton 1989: 634; Wyse 1989: 62–63). If Ridyard was a dissenter with regard to the exclusionary practices of colonial health regimes, he seems to have held more conventional contemporary ideas about the primacy of the dominant European narrative of progress in his optimistic assumption that European technology and methods of intensive commercial agriculture would equally benefit Sierra Leonean cotton farmers, Elder, Dempster & Co.’s trade and the textile mills of Lancashire. This is suggested in a short handwritten piece that Ridyard penned on ‘Cotton Growing in West Africa’, which survives in the Bolton Museum’s archives. The piece may have been a preliminary draft of an article that Ridyard sent to Elder, Dempster & Co.’s Alfred Jones, dated 28 November 1903. The draft reads as follows: (1) Cotton Growing in West Africa Mano is a place 106 miles from Freetown, Sierra Leone, where they are growing cotton on a small scale. They plant their cotton and rice side by side alternately. Enough cotton can be grown in this district if properly cultivated, that would supply all the mills in Lancashire. The bush wants clearing and the roots taken out of the ground, which the natives are beginning to do, now they have been shown by one of the officials of the Government Railway. This gentleman takes a great interest in showing them how to cultivate the land properly, & how to preserve more seed each time the crops grow up, so that their farms will grow larger and better cultivated all the time. The country wants instructors of this class very bad, men who are not afraid of being with the natives & knows how to work and to do it properly. A man is of no use with an African unless he can show practical results, & if a man is put over them who is always talking and nothing being done, they simply say, he no savey natting, he no have head; or he get big mowf for talk, he talk too much. I am sorry to say that there too many of this class in West Africa at the present time, who leave the country in the same state that they found it. In the Mano district, as well as the hinterland of Cape Mount, Liberia, they have always grown cotton for making cloths for their own use.47

While this piece requires careful interpretation, as it was obviously partly a response to Alfred Jones’s well-known interest in promoting cotton production in West Africa, it is important, not so much for what it tells us about Ridyard’s ideas of progress, but rather, for his ideas about who could claim to be bringing it about. The hero of the piece is a hard-working, practical man who is helping West Africans to introduce more intensive agricultural practices. He is contrasted with a ‘class’ of ineffectual European colonial officials who are ‘afraid of being with the natives’ and incapable of gaining their respect. As well as demonstrating his knowledge of Krio language and idioms, Ridyard’s piece is remarkable for the way it ‘speaks forth’ (Hall 1996: 141) from an African position in order to articulate a critique of ineffectual European colonial functionaries, who are unable to fulfil the mandate of driving ‘progressive’ change in West Africa.

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Victorian and Edwardian notions of progress and modernity were expressed through iconic ‘tools of empire’ (Headrick 1988), like steamships, and we can surmise that Ridyard would probably have considered empire, as such, to be a force for modernity and progress. But it seems unlikely that he would have considered the telos of progress to have been the white bourgeois male of British metropolitan culture. Ridyard was a hard-working, practical, engineer in the same mould as the railway official he describes in his piece on cotton growing. So, it is a fair bet that he would have seen himself as belonging to the ‘class’ of men who were drivers of progress – men who sweated with Africans and got things done. Crucially, as a Nonconformist, Ridyard came from a tradition of British radicalism and probably considered his own outlook to be both technologically and socially progressive, modern and forward-driving. In the nineteenth century, Wesleyan Methodists, like other Nonconformists, had zealously campaigned for more humanitarian social legislation and had championed various oppressed groups. Thus, during the Annual Meeting of the Methodist Missionary Society in 1896 or 1897, the vice chairman was able to muster a sense of pride and selfcongratulation among the society’s members by invoking the earlier achievements of the Methodist revival. As they looked back they had cause for hope. They were better as a nation than a century ago. They had real reason to be infinitely grateful to the men who had produced the change, and to be proud as a Church that after the first decade of the century they had produced some of them. Whereabouts were they today? Women no longer worked in mines, and children are not allowed to work till they are thirteen years of age. Religious disabilities were at an end almost. Prize-fighting and cockfighting were abolished. The nation was vastly improved since the century came in; and that improvement was more due to the Methodist revival than to any other agency.48

Owens College, the educational institution to which Ridyard made his donations of West African medicinal roots, was founded in 1851 by John Owens, a Nonconformist Congregationalist who stipulated that there were to be no religious tests for students or teachers at the college.49 The college opened in the year of Ridyard’s birth and it is likely that he would have been aware of its history. In fact, it is highly likely that Ridyard saw himself as continuing a proud Nonconformist, socially progressive movement, when he began making his donations to public museums in northwest England. The context in which he framed his first donation to the Salford Museum, made on 25 August 1897, further supports this conjecture. This first gift was a loom (1897.100) from the Anlo Ewe village of Dzelu Kofe on the southeast coast of the Gold Coast. In the note Ridyard sent to Mullen prior to making this gift, he expressed the hope that Mullen would accept the loom for the museum because ‘when a boy over 30 years ago, we used to visit Peel Park Museum, from Leigh, which is my native place’.50 In mentioning to Mullen the improving family visits he made to this museum in his youth, Ridyard was effectively presenting himself as an exemplar of the social benefits of free public

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museums, while also putting himself forward as someone intent on continuing those benefits and extending them to others. Museums have been characterized as a technology through which ‘the public’ as an ‘aggregation of self-directed citizens was imagined into being’ (Bennett 2006: 263; Macdonald 2006: 86). Moreover, Wesleyan Methodism has been described as a ‘theology emphasizing human agency’ and by the third quarter of the nineteenth century it also placed great emphasis on education as a means to self-improvement (Hempton, 2005: 187). So Ridyard would probably have understood free public museums as playing an important role in fostering the drive for self-improvement, because he would have seen them as places that ordinary people could visit voluntarily in order to feed their personal enthusiasms for learning and knowledge. Although many of the artefacts that Ridyard transported to museums in Britain would have been obtained through exchange, the relationships that he formed with his collaborators were not merely instrumental. The fact that the great majority of Ridyard’s many West African collaborators in Freetown, Cape Palmas, Cape Coast, Accra and elsewhere on the West African coast, were themselves practising Methodists of one stripe or another, suggests that he may have worshipped alongside them during his ship’s longer calls at these West African ports. They would have formed an extended community in relation to which Ridyard would have been able to develop a more cosmopolitan sense of his Methodist culture and identity. Prominent Methodist figures among Ridyard’s collaborators included the Reverend Samuel David Ferguson Jr. in Liberia, as well as Methodist lay preachers like Joseph Peter Brown, Thomas Addaquay and Prince Daniel Ayidzaku Tackie in the Gold Coast.51 And Ridyard appears to have made some firm friends among his West African contacts on the coast. For example, in a letter sent to Mullen at the Salford Museum on 20 January 1908, Ridyard wrote of ‘my friend Chief Fred Green’. Furthermore, the fact that the Sierra Leonean Archdeacon Dandeson Coates Crowther of the Niger Delta Mission made his final gifts to the Liverpool Museum through Ridyard in 1920, four years after Ridyard had retired, suggests that their friendship endured long after Ridyard had ceased visiting the West Coast of Africa. We can venture that the sense of communion Ridyard would have felt in the company of his West African friends must have helped transform his understanding of the world and his own identity. His entirely untypical fellowship with West Africans, at a time of growing British racism, is evidenced by the fact that he welcomed many of his West African friends into his home in Britain. His granddaughter, Joan Stark, related that her grandfather hosted ‘many sons of chiefs’ at his house in Rock Ferry on the Wirral. Some of them were on their way to schools or colleges in Britain and Ridyard apparently ‘received many gifts from them and their fathers for his hospitality’. Joan Stark stated that it was her mother Mary’s duty ‘to escort these young men around the locality of the Wirral and Liverpool to familiarize them with our curious ways’, and she added that Mary ‘thoroughly enjoyed’ this duty as she was ‘a complete extrovert’.52 Newspaper reports and institutional records show that at least one of Ridyard’s West African contacts and several of their sons (not all of them sons of chiefs) were at schools or law colleges in England around the time that they or their fathers made

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donations to the Liverpool Museum through Ridyard. These included William and Charles Awoonor Renner who attended Liverpool College between 1902 and 1906. They were sons of the Gold Coast barrister Peter Awoonor Renner, who made numerous donations of ‘ethnographic’ artefacts to the Liverpool Museum through Ridyard in 1903. James Kuofie of Cape Coast Castle was also educated at Liverpool College, but tragically died in Liverpool in 1904 having spent only about a year at the school.53 His father James Jackson Kuofie made donations to the Liverpool Museum in 1901, 1903 and 1905. Kwamin Atta Amonu, the son of ‘King’ Amonu V of Anomabu who made many important donations through Ridyard between 1902 and 1908, entered Lincoln’s Inn in 1908 in order to study law, while Claudius Dyonisius Hotobah During, son of George Punshon During, was admitted to Middle Temple in the same year and was called to the bar in 1911. Hotobah During made donations to the Liverpool Museum in 1906, 1907 and 1908, and once he had returned to Freetown to practice as a barrister in 1911, he continued to make donations through Ridyard every year until 1915. But, in hosting these men, Ridyard was not merely enjoying their fellowship or soliciting gifts. Nor was he simply engaging in benevolent acts. The West Africans he hosted were from the wealthy merchant, and chiefly, elites of Sierra Leone, the Gold Coast and southeastern Nigeria. Most were Methodist, yet some bore princely titles and would have been schooled to a higher level than Ridyard had been in his youth, even before they had completed their studies in Britain. We must therefore assume that they would have added to the Ridyard family’s Methodist social cachet on being shown off around the community of Rock Ferry by Mary. Ridyard can be expected to have shared the public’s enthusiasm for the charismatic live fish he collected, but it is much more difficult to determine the degree to which he shared curators’ scientific interests in them. It is therefore impossible to know how far he was acting on his own impulses in collecting the fish, and how far he was responding to requests from museums. When it came to the masks and so-called fetish figures he acquired from Central Africa, which appear to have been among the special ethnographic ‘desiderata’ requested by the curators (see Chapter  2), the evidence indicates that his own interests in these works were probably aesthetic before anything else. This is suggested by an annotation added to the accession record for a mask from ‘N’Gore, Congo Français’ (now Republic of Congo) that Ridyard gave to the Liverpool Museum in November of 1898 (24.11.98.23). The mask was described as having a hood and a fibre beard and as being painted red and black. The annotation states that the mask was ‘Taken by Mr Ridyard in exchange for a finer specimen No.  24.9.00’. The replacement mask is described in the museum accession register as ‘Wooden mask, painted red, black and white, with long grass beard round the face’ (24.9.00.10, now lost). But this mask, despite being ‘finer’ than the one it replaced, was not from the same location, since it came from ‘Cape Lopez, Congo Français’. The suggestion that aesthetic considerations trumped ‘ethnographic’ ones, as far as Ridyard was concerned, is supported by the fact that no ‘ethnographic’ details concerning the meanings or functions of these two masks were noted, as in fact was the case with the majority of Ridyard’s donations. Moreover, when Ben Mullen accessioned the remarkable nailstudded nkisi nkondi figure, named Mangaaka (Salford Museum 1895.56), he quoted

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the chief engineer in its accession record, thus revealing Ridyard’s enthusiasm for the aesthetic qualities of the figure. Ridyard is quoted as having said: ‘No doubt Mungarka is fine, and you are a very lucky gentleman to get it.’ Yet Ridyard could not satisfy Mullen’s request for further information on Kongo figures from Central Africa of this kind (see Chapter 2). So Mullen was forced to send inquiries to the Hatton & Cookson trading agents from whom Ridyard acquired the figures in order to gather information about their function. He subsequently made use of this information in an article he published in 1905 in Man, the Journal of the Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland, titled ‘Fetishes from Landana, South-West Africa’ (Mullen 1905).54 Ridyard quite evidently had a particular enthusiasm for African weaving machines. He provided a total of at least seventeen African looms or loom parts to museums in northeast England during his collecting career, as well as at least twenty-three textiles woven on African weaving machines, despite the fact that these were relatively expensive items to obtain.55 As well as the first present of an Ewe loom that he made the Salford Museum, he had earlier included an Ewe narrow strip loom (9.7.95.46) in his first set of ‘ethnographic’ donations to the Liverpool Museum made in July 1895. The fact that these seminal donations were Anlo Ewe looms is especially significant and appears to conform to Baudrillard’s idea that collecting is a highly personal activity reflective of the self (Baudrillard 1994: 12). This is because the Anlo Ewe community of Dzelu Kofe was one that would have included men who worked both as weavers and fishermen. Like Ridyard, their identity was founded on the twinned domains of seagoing and cloth-making, because Ridyard’s family, as mentioned in the first section above, was from the working-class textile manufacturing community of Leigh. Ridyard made another personally resonant donation in his second, spur-of-themoment gift to the Salford Museum, which he assembled a couple of days after presenting the loom, from things he had at home that had ‘been in the house for some time’.56 The diverse assemblage of sixteen objects he sent Mullen on this second occasion was a mixture of cultural and natural history items from various locations on the western coast of Africa. His list reads as follows: 1. Calabash or Gourd, from Banana, River Congo 2. Guana [sic, probably monitor lizard] skin. From Copa Sette Cama 3. Kroo boys hat. From Cavally. Kroo Coast 4. Grass Cover. Mandingo Country. Sierra Leone 5. Earthenware Pot. From Tabou. Kroo Coast 6. Small basket from Porto Novo. Nr. Lagos 7.& 8. Slippers & sandals, from Bida. River Niger 9. Bells for calling servants from Niger River 10. Snuff box from Goree, (this is short of plug on top made from a gourd or calabash) 11. Cocoa Pod. From Georges Bay. Fernando Po 12. Hippopotamus tooth from Bobangi. Upper Congo 13. Knife and sheath from Mayumba. S.W. Africa 14. Small round gourds or calabashes from Banana. River Congo

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15. White calabash from Lagos, West Africa 16. Mask. From Copa Sette Cama. The men frighten the women with these masks, being covered over with a dress & cannot be recognised.57

The exchange between Ridyard and Mullen that followed this donation is revealing, because it demonstrates that Ridyard gave little thought to ideas of cultural hierarchy and boundedness, when he selected the items that made up this assemblage. Moreover, by including the hippopotamus tooth from Bobangi and the cocoa pod from Fernando Po in his gift, he also appears to have disregarded the category of the ‘ethnographic artefact’. In response to Mullen’s subsequent inquiry about the objects, Ridyard wrote back with a personal commentary on the objects and included an introductory passage enthusing about the diverse forms of gourds and the ingenious range of uses to which Africans put them. Interestingly, his comment on item 14, the small round gourds, appears to speak directly to the relationship he had just struck up with Mullen. In this comment he says: The small gourds or Calabashes, Banana Congo, have the designs put on them & are more for sale than for useful purposes. Owing to the various shapes and designs, people buy them when coming home to present them to their friends as curiosities.

Where Ridyard’s commentary on the white calabash from Lagos (item 15) is concerned, the versatility, ubiquity and mobility of African gourd artefacts was emphasized. ‘These are a special feature of Lagos & are made in all sizes,’ he said, ‘they are in demand on the Gold Coast & Sierra Leone especially the latter, in these two colonies they burn their designs on.’ Ideas of mobility and connection were also emphasized with regard to the hippopotamus tooth (item 12), about which Ridyard related that ‘Hippo teeth are brought down by the ivory caravans, with the Tusks of Ivory & are sold to the Traders. The one I have given you, was given me by a coloured carpenter, who had been employed by the missionaries at Bobangi.’ In his general commentary on gourds Ridyard wrote: Calabashes or gourds, are used for almost every purpose with the natives, eating & drinking vessels etc. the large ones being used for holding their goods same as our trunks, & it is surprising what they can put in them when travelling. When going on a journey, they put them inside a net with large meshes, to prevent the contents falling out. The ladies of today, are only copying their coloured sisters, when taking their bag nets to make purchases. They grow these Calabashes in all shapes for use as water bottles & fishermen using them as buoys for their nets, having one at home that has been used for that purpose.58

There was very little in the way of the special ethnographic ‘desiderata’ requested by the Liverpool Museum among the items that made up Ridyard’s second donation to the Salford Museum and his commentary showed no regard for the hierarchical

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ordering of cultures that was to be found at this time in Ogg Forbes’s displays at the Liverpool Museum (see Chapter  8). Instead the practical ingenuity of Africans was held up for admiration. There is even a hint of modernist inversion of cultural hierarchy in Ridyard’s suggestion that the British ‘ladies of today’ were in fact copying their African ‘sisters’, rather than the other way round, in their respective uses of net bags. The sixteen objects Ridyard presented as his second donation to the Salford Museum included items used when travelling, objects that had been transported long distances and other items that were used over wide areas. So his presentation appears to have formed an assemblage that was intended to celebrate the connectedness of people and places through the dynamic flows of material objects. In short, it would seem that Ridyard put together this assemblage partly in an attempt to encompass and communicate, in material form, the multifaceted panorama of connection and material flow that characterized his African voyaging experience. In making a donation with intimate personal meanings like this, Ridyard would have intended to express his sense of fellowship with his new curator friend Ben Mullen. But in making this gift Ridyard was also staking a claim to authorship of the Salford Museum’s African collection. Consequently, it appears to have led to a tussle between the curator and his collector friend over who controlled the contents of the collection. Mullen’s intention, and that of the committee to which he was answerable, was to build an ‘ethnographic’ collection, whereas Ridyard had less orthodox views on the ostensible nature of what he was helping to create. The discrepancy in the two men’s understandings of what they thought they were doing came to a head in December 1898 when Mullen sent Ridyard a note of thanks for new donations headed with the more formal ‘Dear Sir’, in which he wrote: ‘May I remind you that all such objects to be exhibited in a museum should be (1) made by natives for (2) native use; and they are all the better for having been actually used by the natives.’59 Ridyard does not appear to have taken much notice of Mullen’s exhortation because in February 1909 Mullen wrote to Ridyard again with the same advice, although on this occasion it was framed more politely, if rather patronisingly. Thus: May I tell you a little rule of guidance which I devised some years ago for collectors of ethnographical specimens? It is simple and I think useful: Each object should be made throughout by natives, from native materials, for native use; and if it has been used by the natives, so much the better.60

One of the items Ridyard presented around this time, which may have caused Mullen to be concerned that the notion of ‘ethnographic authenticity’ was being subverted, was the fan that Ridyard had been given towards the end of 1908 by the congregants of St Augustine’s at Abonnema as a token of their appreciation for his repairing of their church bell (see above). Mullen accessioned this gift in 1909 but added the proviso in its accession record that the fan was ‘made in connection with church work’.61 Ridyard’s seemingly indiscriminate collecting was not conducive to the construction of orderly museum displays whose official narratives served to make clear hierarchical contrasts between supposedly static, primitive, pagan cultures and progressive, civilized Christian

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ones (see Chapter 8). But Ridyard’s apparent lack of concern with issues of cultural hierarchy and notions of ethnographic authenticity may have been a consequence of the fact that he had other interests. The fact that Ridyard gave the fan from the congregants of St Augustine’s Church to the Salford Museum and did not keep it for his home collection suggests that it held important meaning as a signifier of the collector’s agency and the idea that, although his work as a collector might be freely given, it nevertheless constituted a practical and ‘progressive’ form of labour. Here Ridyard’s attempt to stake a claim of authorship in the Salford Museum collection should probably be seen in political as well as personal terms. McClintock has emphasized the idea that the museum’s ‘panoptical’ mechanisms and ‘anachronistic’ narrative spectacles of progress (like evolutionary trees) were techniques for stopping history in its tracks in order that ‘the agency of women, the colonised and the industrial working class are disavowed’ and so that ‘the labor of changing history . . . tends to disappear’ (McClintock 1995: 40). This may be an ‘overdrawn’ analysis (Bennett 2004: 187), yet the objectifying mechanisms of museums have tended to efface biographies of objects and the efforts, personalities and relationships of their collectors (Shelton 2001: 19). I suggest that Ridyard, the engineer collector from Leigh, sought acknowledgement of the labour involved in making collections for museums through the sheer magnitude of his contribution, but also through requesting tallies of donations to ensure that his efforts were accounted for and remembered. Given that Ridyard seems to have had an interest in labour issues and regarded himself as socially progressive, questions remain over his stance with regard to colonial excesses in West and Central Africa during his career with the West Africa service of Elder, Dempster & Co. In a souvenir pamphlet that Elder, Dempster & Co. produced in 1902, the shipping company boasted that their fleet was ‘one of those which enable Great Britain to astonish the world in the rapid and safe transport of troops, guns, horses, and stores’. Alfred Jones, the chief executive of the company, shamelessly acted as consul in Liverpool for the so-called Congo Free State, King Leopold II of Belgium’s murderous private colonial estate in Central Africa between 1886 and 1908. Furthermore, an Elder, Dempster & Co. subsidiary company transported all Leopold’s loot from the Congo Free State to the port of Antwerp (Davies 1973: 129). Given what we know of Ridyard’s outlook and Methodist background, there can be no doubt that he would have been shocked and disturbed by the reports of atrocities perpetrated against Central Africans by Leopold’s Congo Free State agents. As an apparently principled man of action, how did Ridyard square the knowledge that Elder, Dempster & Co. profited from Leopold’s murderous regime in the Congo and that the company’s chief executive acted as an apologist for the regime, with his own pursuit of a career in the same company? One way in which he did this may have been by assisting Africans with their educational aspirations and especially with their ambitions to pursue legal studies in London (see above).62 He also appears to have ensured that he did not personally profit from his position in the company. It would seem significant, for example, that all the African objects that Ridyard contributed to museum collections between 1894 and 1916 were donations. There is not a single record in the accession registers of the Liverpool, Salford and Manchester museums,

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which shows that Ridyard was ever paid for an item that he contributed to a museum collection. As a frequent visitor to the Congo River before June 1901, with many resident contacts, and given his status as a trusted unofficial postman and his astonishing ability for collecting things and mobilizing others to collect for him, did Ridyard play any part in assisting Edmund Morel’s celebrated campaign against Leopold II ’s regime in the Congo Free State? There is some evidence that he might have. Ridyard would have been aware of the Congo Free State atrocities (see Hochschild [1998] 2002) before they had become widely publicized by Morel, because he was in contact with Hatton & Cookson traders and other figures on the Congo River who would have been direct or indirect witnesses to them. For years before Morel began his campaign against Leopold, certain British, American and Swedish missionaries, especially, had borne more or less helpless witness to the vicious raids and punishments of Leopold’s rubber regime.63 The hippo tooth that Ridyard presented to the Salford Museum in 1897 (Salford Museum 1897.118) that had been given to him on some prior voyage by ‘a coloured carpenter’ who had worked for missionaries at Bobangi on the Congo River, indicates that Ridyard had contacts linked to some of these missions. Perhaps more significant, in this regard, are the two plant specimens Ridyard gave the Liverpool Museum from the Swedish Mission at Matadi in 1899. These may have held personal meanings symbolizing, respectively, the violence and the bloodshed perpetrated by agents of Leopold’s regime, because the first was described as ‘Dried specimen of “Wild Passion Flower” in fruit’ (botany accession register E, 28.2.99.5), while the second was described as ‘Dried specimen of a creeper with red flowers’ (botany accession register E, 28.2.99.6). More significant still, is the fact that one of Ridyard’s collaborators in the Congo Free State’s capital of Boma was the Lagosian businessman Hezekiah Andrew Shanu. Shanu was a complex figure (see Chapter 6), who started off as an employee of the Congo Free State in 1884 before setting himself up as a businessman in 1893 (Hochschild [1998] 2002: 218). In 1900, Shanu gave Ridyard a fishing spear from Bangala on the upper Congo River (24.9.00.49) but he later provided Roger Casement, the British consul in the Congo Free State, with information about the mistreatment of West African workers in the Congo and he delivered a coup to Morel’s Congo Reform Association campaigns by providing incriminating evidence against the state’s officials in 1904 (Hochschild [1998] 2002: 219).64 By 1902, reports began to be published in the British press, many of them from Morel’s pen, after thousands, if not millions, of Congolese had already been killed or mutilated for failing to fulfil impossible latex quotas, although by this time Ridyard’s ship had already been transferred to a shorter route that did not include calls at ports on the Central African coast south of the Equator. Morel had a remarkable ‘knack’ for extracting inside information on the Congo Free State regime (Hochschild [1998] 2002: 189) and later evidence indicates that he would have been aware of Ridyard’s collecting operation on the western coast of Africa, because Morel’s newspaper, The West African Mail, reported on it in November 1904 and October 1906.65 The mystery of whether Ridyard played any role in Morel’s campaign against Leopold II is likely to remain unresolved. However, he may well have acted as a

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secret courier for some of the early reports on the Congo Free State atrocities. If this was the case, it would make Ridyard a more significant figure in the history of Liverpool’s interrelationship with western Africa than this book is adequately able to explore.

Conclusion Various writers on collecting have emphasized the fact that collections are ‘authored statements’ offering ‘tangible evidence of the extent of one’s influence, place and connections in society’ (Moser 2006: 13). This was no less true in the case of Ridyard, except that Ridyard was unlike many other collectors of his day in that he had little interest in demonstrating the status, intellectual pretensions and tastes of a bourgeois metropolitan gentleman. Ridyard appears to have been largely indifferent to the cultural hierarchies and panoptical display schemas of the Liverpool Museum under Ogg Forbes (see Chapter  8). The vast, and apparently heterogeneous, panorama of objects he donated to museums can be seen as radical in the sense that it included objects that embodied evidence of movement, connection and exchange between West African peoples, as well as between West Africans and Europeans. The fact that Ridyard made such extensive and diverse African collections, and the fact that he also transported the donations of many other contributors to his museum collecting operation, would seem to put his authorial agenda beyond close analysis. However, if we focus on Ridyard’s symbolically loaded early gifts to Mullen at the Salford Museum as key indicators, then the issue becomes less intractable. What these gifts seem to show, in their claim to a stake in the authorship of the Salford Museum displays, is not so much dissention from anthropological ‘science’ and its rigid constructions of cultural hierarchy and boundedness, but something altogether more ‘ecstatic’. Ridyard can be said to have made his early Salford Museum gifts partly in order to communicate the panorama of connection and interaction that characterized his African voyaging experience, but in conducting his collecting operation he acknowledged the contributions of many other people. Ridyard would have been aware of the underlying currency of ideas to do with the re-evaluation of African cultures that his collaborators donations referenced (see Chapters  4 to 7), so his collecting operation was not simply about making claims for himself. Moreover, given that most of Ridyard’s West African collaborators were Methodists of his own stripe, he would probably also have acknowledged their gifts, in part, as indices of their own Methodist spirit of benevolence and possibly even as expressing a Methodist-inflected spirit of free and voluntary cultural collaboration. If Ridyard assembled a collection that reflected a world that was dynamically interconnected and changing, this was partly due to some of the types of artefacts he received from his West African collaborators, but his notions of interconnection would undoubtedly have been part of a consciously held perspective informed by the panorama of connectivity he experienced on the steamships on which he served professionally as chief engineer, but also enjoyed as a ‘flâneur’. One of the objects he

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collected for the Liverpool Museum that particularly excited him in this regard was the pair of Swahili lavatory clogs from the East African island of Zanzibar that had been transported thousands of miles over land and water, which he acquired from a Lagosian trader on the Congo River. Its accession record quotes Ridyard enthusing about the fact that: These pair of Sandals have crossed Africa, from Zanzibar to Buna on the Congo. Obtained from a Lagos native who brought them from Kabambarra, Upper Congo.66

The disparate territories that constituted the British Empire in West Africa were essentially connected up and held together by steam shipping and Ridyard would have been well aware that the flow of goods carried on his ships helped to sustain and extend imperial power and culture. However, Ridyard’s ships were also contact zones in themselves where people from diverse regions and walks of life travelled together and interacted. Most numerous were the African passengers. They came on board at the various ports of call on the western coast of Africa and included traders, of both sexes and of various ethnicities, as well as professionals, clerks and tradesmen from Sierra Leone, the Gold Coast and other territories. The spectacle of human energy, initiative, creativity and fortitude these people provided in the daily conduct of their business would have helped fill out the great panorama of the human spirit that Ridyard would have witnessed while serving on his ships. The vast array of African artefacts that he acquired for museums, also panoramic in their scope and diversity, may have been understood, by a self-directed Methodist like Ridyard, as the material reflections of a single, coeval and commensurate, yet creative, human spirit. In providing Mullen with details about the West African donations he supplied from his home collection, Ridyard emphasized the surprising practicality of their functions. Large calabashes, he said, were ‘used for holding their goods same as our trunks, & it is surprising what they can put in them when travelling’. ‘The ladies of today,’ he claimed, ‘are only copying their coloured sisters, when taking their bag nets to make purchases.’67 So the significance for Ridyard of gathering a panoramic African assemblage for public display in British museums may have been for the diverse scenarios it presented for the expression of the ‘spectrum’ of the human spirit, distinct from the telos of the bourgeois man and woman of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century British metropolitan culture. The diverse range of people who assisted Ridyard in his collecting operation, makes the assemblage he transported to museums in Britain a highly complex one that cannot be understood as the outcome of his own energy and interests alone. As was argued in the previous chapter, indigenous African authorities and makers often exerted control over what could be acquired by European collectors in the first place. But Ridyard’s numerous West African collaborators can be expected to have had their own motives for presenting African cultural artefacts to British museums through him. It is to the collaborative cultural interests of some key figures in this remarkable group, and to their particular agendas, that the discussion turns in the next four chapters.

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Notes 1 Registration of Birth No.378, 18 February 1851; Register of Births in the sub-district of Culcheth in the Registration District of Leigh. 2 Registration of marriage No.4, 10 August 1874; Register of Marriages in the Registration District of Leigh. 3 Manchester Museum Archives, letter to Mr Mullen from Ridyard, 28 October 1903. 4 Liverpool Mercury, Local News, 26 January 1900; National Census for 1901. 5 Archives of National Museums Liverpool, MM 3, Letter book 11 (1905–11), P. Entwistle to Miss Ridyard, 24 January 1911; National Census for 1911, Mary Thornley Ridyard. 6 State Records Authority of New South Wales: Shipping Master’s Office; CGS 13278, Passengers Arriving 1855–1922; X138–139, SR Reel 436, 1877. (Transcribed 2003) http://mariners.records.nsw.gov.au/1877/10/004chi.htm; http://www.theshipslist.com/ ships/descriptions/ShipsC.html. 7 TNA , BT 139/8, certificate no. 13.042. 8 Ridyard’s route included ports on the Central African coast only until the middle of 1901. After June of that year, his ship must have been transferred to a shorter service that did not call at ports south of the Equator. 9 Manchester Museum Archives, letter from Ridyard to Hoyle, 24 July 1903. 10 It is not always easy to work out whether an individual donor is African or European, especially in the case of Sierra Leoneans when no address or other details are recorded in museum records. This is because virtually all had inherited European names from their ‘Liberated African’ ancestors (see Chapter 4). 11 For the way in which mobility of a collector may affect his or her collecting, see O’Hanlon 2000: 16. 12 Salford Museum and Art Gallery Register of Acquisitions 1895–1925, p. 44, 1898.56. 13 Derby Museum accession register D, 25.5.06.1–3; Mayer Museum accession register, 24.5.06.2 & 14.10.07.10. 14 Manchester Museum Archives, letter from Ridyard to Mullen 6 November 1908. 15 Letter inserted into Mayer Museum accession register, 1895–1900, relating to accession 9.3.99.23. 16 A typical phrase reads ‘Magazines duly came to hand, many thanks’ (in a note sent to Ben Mullen on 5 November 1903). 17 It is also likely that Ridyard visited second hand stores in Liverpool to buy old clothes, and especially umbrellas, which he exchanged for West African items that he donated to museums on his own account. In 1971, Captain Webster recalled him doing this, and it may have been a form of trade commonly practiced by seamen. However, since the elderly Webster remembered serving with Ridyard on the SS Karina, which was not a ship that Ridyard served on, he may have confused Ridyard with some other collector. World Museum Archive, Capt. A. E. Webster to Charles Hunt, 9 July 1971. 18 Note inserted into World Museum accession register relating to the records for two Fang wooden figures, 20.8.97.11 & 12. 19 AMNH Archives, Entwistle to Bumpus, 27 October 1905 (AMNH 1905–50). 20 AMNH Archives, handwritten note from Peter Entwistle to Dr Bumpus, 27 October 1905. 21 Letter of 7 October 1920 (Entwistle to Midgley) in the Bolton Museum Archive; Bolton Museum accession register entries for 1946. 22 Salford Museum Archives, curator’s letter books, Mullen to Ridyard, 16 November 1898 (L/CS /DL 1/3, p. 623).

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23 These were eventually donated to the Liverpool Museum in 1902 by Bennett’s wife and were accessioned in the series 17.7.02. 24 ‘The British Association’s Meeting’, Daily News, 25 August 1900. 25 London Zoological Society Archives, Book of Daily Occurrences, arrivals and departures from 7 September to 15 November 1906. 26 Archives of National Museums Liverpool, Liverpool Museums Letter books MM 3, Clubb to Ridyard, 22 August 1904. 27 The West African Mail, 12 October 1906: 692. 28 Manchester Museum Archives. Letter from Ridyard to Mullen, 1911 [day and month missing]. 29 Salford Museum Archive, curator’s letter books (L/CS /DL 1/20, p. 893), Mullen to Ridyard, 14 September 1911. 30 Salford Museum Archive, curator’s letter books (L/CS /DL 1/24, p. 853), Mullen to Ridyard, 14 October 1914. 31 The figures reported by Joseph Clubb in 1916 do not correspond to my own calculation of the number of objects donated from accession records in the museum’s stockbooks, which are incomplete. For example, the original Derby Museum geology accession register no longer exists. 32 In a letter of 7 October 1920 (Entwistle to Midgley) in the Bolton Museum archive, Entwistle states that Ridyard’s West African donations to the Liverpool Museum were the result of thirty years collecting. As Ridyard retired in 1916 this would mean that he started in about 1886. 33 See Bolton Museum accession register and correspondence files. 34 These collections are referred to in letters from Ridyard’s grandchildren, T. A. Roberts and Joan Stark, in World Museum Liverpool Ethnology Department archive. 35 World Museum Liverpool Ethnology Department archive, letter to Tythacott from Entwistle’s grandson Captain J. D. Igoe, 28 August 1998. Salford Museum Archive, curator’s letter books, Mullen to Ridyard, 6 April 1898 and 13 June 1900 (L/CS /DL 1/3, p. 55 & L/CS /DL 1/5, p. 15). 36 Manchester Museum Archives, Ridyard to Mullen, 26 August 1897. 37 Salford Museum Archives, curator’s letter books, Mullen to Ridyard, 16 November 1898 (L/CS /DL 1/3, p. 623). 38 Obituaries of Ben H. Mullen and his brother Dr John William Mullen, Manchester Guardian, 26 October 1925, p. 12 and 18 February 1924, p. 9. 39 Manchester Museum Archives, letter to Mr Mullen from Ridyard, 28 October 1903. 40 Salford Museum Archive, curator’s letter books, Mullen to Entwistle, 8 May 1908 (L/CS /DL 1/16, p. 388). 41 TNA , Home Office, 45/11897/332187 (quoted in Frost 1999: 35). Significantly, discipline among Kru sailors was in the hands of their own headmen. 42 Bulletin of the Liverpool Museums, August 1897, vol. 1 (1): 26. 43 Manchester Museum Archives, Mullen to Ridyard, 15 February 1904. 44 The Geographical Journal, 1915, vol. 45 (4): 344. 45 Manchester Museum Archives, Ridyard to Hoyle, 10 February 1904. 46 Manchester Museum Archives, Ridyard to Hoyle, 28 October 1903. 47 Bolton Museum and Art Gallery Archive, Ridyard Collection. 48 Fifty-Fourth Annual Report of the Methodist Missionary Society, for the nine months ending, 31 March 1897: xxxiii.

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49 Under the University Charter of 1880, Owens College became linked to the new colleges in Liverpool and Leeds as part of the federal Victoria University. It gained its own charter to become the University of Manchester in 1903 http://www.manchester. ac.uk/discover/historyheritage/history/victoria/ (accessed 11 July 2016). 50 Manchester Museum Archives, Ridyard to Mullen, 24 August 1897. 51 See Bartels, 1965: 77; The Gold Coast Leader, 5 November 1904, 3 (124): 1. Information on Daniel Ayidzaku Tackie from Niibi Nii Teigo Tackie of Accra, interviewed 28 December 2009. 52 Letter from J. Stark to Charles Hunt, 27 March 1973. National Museums Liverpool, Ethnology Correspondence files. 53 Liverpool College registration records and GCL, 30 April 1904, 2 (97). 54 Salford Museum Archive, curator’s letter book, Mullen to Clare, 14 December 1899 (L/CS /DL 1/4, p. 318) and 16 December 1899 (L/CS /DL 1/4, p. 333). Manchester Museum Archives, Clare to Mullen, 1 April 1904. 55 The accession record for the Ewe cloth (15.11.04.6) from southeast Gold Coast that Ridyard gave to the Liverpool Museum in 1904 includes a list of prices. Thus: ‘Complete cloths are sold as follows: Cotton 3/6 to £1. Cotton and silk £1 to £4. All silk £4 to £8.’ Ridyard also stated in a letter to Hoyle (28 October 1903) that weavers in the Igbo village of Akwete in southern Nigeria ‘only make two of the good cloths a month’. 56 Manchester Museum Archives, Ridyard to Mullen, 26 August 1897. 57 Manchester Museum Archives, Ridyard to Mullen, 26 August 1897. 58 Manchester Museum Archives, Ridyard to Mullen, 30 August 1897. 59 Salford Museum Archives, curator’s letter books, Mullen to Ridyard, 7 December 1898 (L/CS /DL 1/3 p. 699). It is not possible to determine what objects led to this stipulation because Mullen said he intended to send some of the items donated in December 1898 to Dublin, while a note in the Salford Museum accession register indicates that some of the final 1898 donations were omitted from the register (Salford Museum accession register for 1898, p. 49). 60 Salford Museum Archives, curator’s letter books, Mullen to Ridyard, 16 February 1909 (L/CS /DL 1/17, p. 439). 61 Salford Museum accession register for 1909, p. 210. 62 Perhaps significantly, C. D. Hotobah During set up an auxiliary branch of the AntiSlavery and Aborigines Protection Society in Freetown after his return from London in 1911 as a qualified barrister. Bodleian Library Anti-Slavery Society Papers, Sierra Leone Auxiliary, 1910–29 (Brit. Emp. S.22.G244); Hotobah During to Buxton, 7 February 1912. 63 The African American, George Washington Williams, is reputed to have been the first person to have publicly criticized King Leopold II for abuses against the Congolese in his Open Letter to the king of 1890 (Hochschild 2002: 111, 190). 64 Shanu committed suicide in 1905. He was ruined economically after he had been identified as the source of information leaked to the Congo Reform Society and his businesses in Boma lost the patronage of the colonists (Morimont 2005: 215). 65 The West African Mail, 25 November 1904, 2 (87): 821 and 12 October 1906: 692. Morel founded The West African Mail in 1903 and edited it until 1907. 66 Mayer Museum accession register record for 26.2.00.21. 67 Manchester Museum Archive, Ridyard to Mullen, 30 August 1897.

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Diasporic Dialogues: The Sierra Leonean Donors I

In 1815 a man called Joseph Johnson, one of London’s black beggars, drew attention to himself by going around wearing a hat surmounted with a model sailing ship, complete with masts, sails and rigging.1 Johnson belonged to the victimized and impoverished community of ‘Black Poor’ from which the philanthropist Granville Sharp had earlier recruited settlers for his ‘visionary’ experimental colonization of Sierra Leone (see below). As well as referencing the African cultural medium of masquerade, Johnson’s hat was literally ‘the badge of his migrant status’ worn on his head (Dawes 2005: 255– 56). Johnson’s act seems to have embodied a provocative understanding of the world of early nineteenth-century London and the way that it looked at him and defined him (Dawes 2005: 255–56). Within its layering of meanings, Johnson’s ‘masquerade’ would have encoded his pain and sense of revolt (Vivan 2008: 233). Importantly, however, it would seem that the hat also referenced, and participated in, the flows of a multidimensional dialogue between the disparate, but linked, worlds of the Atlantic rim. So, in addition to being a vessel of pain and revolt, Johnson’s ship hat may also have been a vessel of dreams, desires and hopes – of broken dreams perhaps, and of hopes for charity no doubt, but of other hopes too. The potent image of the ship in motion was also one that Paul Gilroy used to conceptualize the ‘Black Atlantic’ (Gilroy 1993: 4). As a way of revealing the play of transnational cultural processes, it proved effective and helped to open up a new field of inquiry. But, in broaching such a wide and fluid landscape, Gilroy inevitably attracted criticism for failing to recognize the full complexity and diversity of diasporic processes. He was also criticized for his Black Atlantic epistemology, which traced the genealogy of a black counterculture of modernity in the slave trade and located it in the ‘space of colonial encounter’ (Pratt 1992: 6) that is his Atlantic (Oboe and Scacchi 2008: 5). Nevertheless, like Johnson’s elaborate hat, Gilroy’s multilayered conceptualization of the ship retains its relevance as a ‘living, micro-cultural, micropolitical, system in motion’ (Gilroy 1993: 4) and as a multidirectional infrastructure of travel and cultural flow. This chapter and the following three, attempt to track black and other hews of Atlantic cultural encounter and exchange in various new directions, and also to analyse some of the material flows that resulted from these transcultural engagements. In so far as Gilroy’s conceptualization of the ‘Atlantic’ as a multilayered space of colonial encounter and transnational cultural processes remains valid, Freetown stands out, perhaps more obviously than most African settlements, as an ‘Atlantic’ city. It was a 75

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city manifestly shaped by the coming and going of ships and the flows of people, goods and ideas that they carried across the Atlantic Ocean. Not only would it be ‘protected’ by the British navy and sustained through the flow of goods and personnel carried on ships, but many of its first black settlers would arrive in ships of ‘redemption’ (Vivan 2008: 228) that brought them across the Atlantic from Britain and the Americas. But Freetown was equally an African city that was also fundamentally shaped by the networks of connection created by African vessels and trade caravans. African canoes played an important role in conducting the flows and exchanges between Freetown and its hinterland, and between the various African groups that contributed to its growing population (Fyfe 1962: 148; Whitford 1877: 22). Gilroy’s provisional charting of the ‘Black Atlantic’ had little to say about Africa itself, or about inter-African networks of connection. Sierra Leone’s links with Europe were inaugurated in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, when Portuguese mariners first established commercial relations with peoples on West Africa’s Atlantic coast. These links intensified during the slave trade of the seventeenth and eighteenth century when European traders established more or less formal commercial, and even political and marital relations with African broker communities on Sierra Leone’s littoral. Colonial experiments on the Sierra Leone Peninsula began in 1787, when British philanthropists, notably the abolitionist Granville Sharp, facilitated the ‘repatriation’ of a diverse collection of London’s poor to Sierra Leone. Sharp and his colleagues wanted to create an exemplary Christian settlement in Sierra Leone that would serve as a beacon of ‘civilization’ for the region. They drew up a constitution for a self-governing farming community and, with British government assistance, ‘purchased’ land in the Sierra Leone Peninsula from the local Temne chief. The initial settlement was made up largely of ex-slaves and black refugees from the War of American Independence, but they faced destruction at the hands of an indigenous Temne group, so the Sierra Leone Company took control in 1791. In 1792, the surviving settlers from this ill-advised experiment were joined by a contingent of black loyalists who had fought with the British during the American Revolution and had subsequently been settled on low-grade land in Nova Scotia. A third group of settlers arrived in 1796 when the British shipped to Freetown a group of Jamaican Maroons whom they had exiled to Nova Scotia.2 The surviving settler population from these groups was eventually dwarfed by tens of thousands of ‘recaptured’ Africans whose origins ranged from Senegambia to Angola. They arrived after Britain abolished the slave trade in 1807 and sent Royal Navy cruisers to patrol the West African coast in order to apprehend slave traders and confiscate their ships. The human cargoes of captured slave ships, called ‘recaptives’ were processed through a court of Mixed Commission in Freetown and settled in various places on the Sierra Leone Peninsula. About 84,000 Africans were ‘recaptured’ by British naval cruisers from slave ships intercepted off the West African coast between 1808 and the final end of the Atlantic slave trade in about 1864. Once processed through the court, many of the ‘Liberated Africans’ were initially ‘apprenticed’ to settlers or government employees. Some were then employed on public works as carpenters and masons, while many others set themselves up in business and took on ‘apprentices’

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of their own. Although most were given a Christian education, a significant number of them were Muslims, who not only retained their faith, but also consolidated it through the connections they established with centres of Islamic learning in the hinterland. By the late 1820s most Africans who had been liberated at Freetown were Yoruba speakers who had earlier been taken prisoner during the so-called Yoruba wars that followed the collapse of the Oyo Empire (Fyfe 1962: 170). Already holding a sense of shared heritage, Yoruba speakers in Sierra Leone formed a distinct group where they were known as ‘Oku’ (Aku in the colonial era literature) after the way they greeted each other.3 Ajayi (1965: 21) indicates that the Oyo Yoruba greet in such a way and suggests that the first Yoruba to be ‘liberated’ at Freetown were therefore Oyo. Faced with limited employment opportunities in Freetown the liberated Oku, who were particularly known for their solidarity, pooled their resources employing indigenous capital accumulation methods, such as asusu associations, to buy European goods from captured slave ships at prize auctions organized through the Mixed Commission Court.4 In a short space of time, Oku traders who had set themselves up in this way were doing so well that they were able to purchase prize slave ships at auction and begin trading down the coast of West Africa on their own account. On reaching Badagry, a Nigerian port with links to the Egba refuge town of Abeokuta, Oku traders began to meet with people who were known to them, which encouraged some to attempt a return to their own homeland. Inspired by the idea of being reunited with home and family and by potential economic opportunities, liberated Oku launched a series of diasporic migrations along West Africa’s Atlantic coast. In 1839, three Oku entrepreneurs joined together and bought a condemned slave ship at auction. They renamed it Queen Victoria and fitted it out with a cargo of trade goods. On 1 April of that year, they took on some sixtyseven passengers and the Queen Victoria cleared Freetown for Badagry, where some of the Oku pioneers soon succeeded in setting up a base (Fyfe 1962: 212). Among the pioneers who settled at Badagry were Christian converts who wished to bring Christianity and European ideas to their relatives inland. Having established friendly relations with the ruler of Badagry, they appealed to missionaries in Freetown to come and teach them ‘more about the way of salvation’.5 By the 1830s, the Egba had become by far the most numerous Yoruba speakers to be ‘liberated’ at Freetown (Ajayi 1965: 20–21; Kopytoff 1965: 199); and by 1845, many of them had succeeded in re-establishing contact with their relatives in the Egba refuge town of Abeokuta in southwestern Nigeria. The first reports from Sierra Leonean Oku of the friendly reception they had received from their relatives in Abeokuta, and the interest that Abeokuta’s ruler Shodeke had expressed in Christianity, encouraged both the Methodists and the CMS to establish missions there. The CMS sent a party of missionaries that arrived in Badagry in January 1845 and eventually reached Abeokuta in August 1846. Along with the European missionaries and the various Sierra Leonean school masters, carpenters, labourers and servants, the party also included the Rev. Samuel Ajayi Crowther, along with his wife Susan and their children, including a very young Dandeson Coates Crowther (see Chapter 4). Further Oku emigrants from Sierra Leone followed and by 1850, Abeokuta may have become home to as many as 3,000 emigrants from Sierra

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Leone.6 The emigrants, called Saro in Nigeria, included merchants, missionaries and craftsmen, some of whom were to gain positions of trust as advisors to Abeokuta’s rulers and they facilitated the signing of ‘treaties’ between Yoruba leaders and the British. Some Sierra Leonean emigrants who returned to Yorubaland re-assimilated completely into their original culture, but the majority in Abeokuta (as was the case in other places where they settled) retained their new-found Christian identity and formed a prominent community within the town with their churches, schools and other institutions. They played an important role in the transformation of Yoruba society towards the end of the nineteenth century and in the creation of an inclusive Yoruba identity.7 Numerous Saro merchants settled in Badagry and Lagos where their reliable contacts with towns in the hinterland enabled them to establish themselves as middlemen in the European trade (Kopytoff 1965: 95, 199). Many also established themselves on the Niger River, often following the establishment of mission stations by Sierra Leonean missionaries with the CMS ’s Niger Mission (Ajayi 1965: 211–15, 217). Some found employment as clerks in colonial administrative centres, or established themselves at African coastal settlements as teachers, as carpenters, and in other professions. Sierra Leoneans who dispersed across West Africa refused to submit to indigenous law in some of the places where they settled. In Old Calabar, they claimed British protection. Some also purchased slaves locally and sought emancipation papers for them. This was seen as a threat to indigenous authority in Old Calabar. The conflict that such activities created, as well as the various trade disputes Krio and Saro merchants became involved in, contributed to the need for British consuls on the coast to intervene, which constituted one of several factors that contributed to increasing British interference in African politics in southeast Nigeria (Latham 1973: 109; Lynn 1981: 334, 347–48). As the British Empire grew into a widely dispersed, disparate collection of territories scattered over vast areas of the globe, it was largely ships that held the whole thing together (Hawkins and Morgan 2004: 1). Ships, especially steamers after 1852, were ‘tools of empire’ and fully acknowledged as such. If one excludes steamer crews (and many Sierra Leoneans worked on steamers), no other African group can have travelled more on ships, during the period of rapid imperial expansion, and few others can have experienced, as intensely, the uprootings, dislocations, reconnections and interconnections of maritime travel.

W. R. Renner: West African Capitalist Given the important role that boats of one kind or another played in Krio history and in the structuring of a shared Krio experience, it would seem significant, on several levels, that the first known donation of African items to the Liverpool Museum from a Sierra Leonean Krio took the form of a boat. The donation was recorded in the museum accession register on 14 August 1873 and, although the donated items no longer exist, their accession records indicate that the gift consisted of a canoe and paddle

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(14.8.73.1 & 2) from the village of Alenso, on the west bank of the Niger River near Onitsha. The name of the evidently wealthy and generous Sierra Leonean who made this remarkable gift is recorded as W. R. Renner. Renner’s gift would have been appreciated as an important addition to the collections of the Liverpool Museum. The logistics of transporting such a large and weighty gift from Alenso to Liverpool, would have involved great expense and trouble for Renner. There can be little doubt, therefore, that the canoe and paddle would have held considerable significance for Renner himself. His gift may have stood as a fine example of an African vehicle of riverine travel and trade, but it would also have been freighted with a cargo of other meanings and memories. Little is known about Renner, except that he appears to have been a wealthy merchant based at Lagos in Nigeria who would have been involved in the palm oil trade on the Niger River.8 His name indicates that he was a descendant of Sierra Leonean Liberated Africans. In fact, Renner’s father or grandfather, would most likely have taken his name from the Wurtemburg missionary Melchior Renner, one of the first to arrive in Sierra Leone with the CMS in 1804. This is because Liberated Africans took, or were given, a European name on being baptized. In the early period, most Liberated Africans were sent to villages on the Sierra Leone Peninsula, especially during MacCarthy’s governorship (1814–24). These villages were organized according to the parish system and were supervised by missionaries and settlers (Fyfe 1962: 119, 169). Melchior Renner acted as the parish superintendent at Bathurst village on the Sierra Leone Peninsula in the second decade of the nineteenth century, where his name would have been taken by a number of his Christianized Liberated African charges.9 W. R. Renner would probably have settled in Lagos during the steam revolution of the 1850s and 1860s, which allowed African traders to take advantage of new economic opportunities in West Africa’s palm oil trade. As indicated in Chapter  2, the steam revolution was inaugurated with the creation of Macgregor Laird’s African Steamship Company in 1852 and it led many Liberated Africans and their descendants in Sierra Leone to launch a largely economically motivated migration along the West African Atlantic coast. Macgregor Laird (1808–61) was granted a Royal Charter in 1852, with a ten-year government contract to establish and maintain ‘postal and other communication, by means of steam navigation’ between Britain and the main ports of the West African coast (Hollet 1995: 179). Macgregor’s brother, John Laird, built the company’s steamships in the family shipyard at Birkenhead, the first of which, the Forerunner, cleared out of London for Freetown on 12 October 1852.10 The relatively fast, regular and more economical service that the steamships offered, especially after the introduction of technological advances in the 1860s and 1870s, brought about a radical transformation of West Africa’s already highly competitive trade environment (Hollet 1995: 179).11 The new steamer services forced palm oil traders to abandon their sailing ships, and eventually their offshore warehouse hulks as well. Wherever possible they established shore-based warehouses, or ‘factories’, for their buying and oil processing operations. Because anyone could now charter cargo space on the steamers, many African merchants entered the palm oil trade from 1852, along with various new European firms. According to one account, the number of trading

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companies on the West African coast jumped from ‘very few’ in the days before the steamer service, to ‘upwards of 200’ by 1856.12 The new companies offered strong competition to the large Liverpool firms (see Chapter 2) that had previously relied on high entry costs to keep out start-ups (Lynn 1992a: 425, 1989: 231). The regular services of the African Steamship Company also significantly reduced the capital costs of commission houses, who shipped goods out to traders in West Africa and then sold the palm oil and other produce the traders sent back on the ships’ return journeys to Liverpool. Although they charged commission on transactions going both ways, the commission houses could now send small quantities of goods to suit the budgets of independent merchants, which greatly increased the number of African traders who were able to enter into direct commercial relations with Britain (Lynn 1992a: 426). W. R. Renner would probably have been one of the many highly literate Sierra Leoneans from the Liberated African community who was able to take advantage of the Commission House system to establish himself in the palm oil trade at around this time. The initial success of the Sierra Leonean pioneers hinged on their low overheads, which allowed them to conduct a viable palm oil trade in marginal areas that could not be exploited by the larger European firms. Some of them subsequently became very wealthy and set up merchant houses of their own. They were instrumental in helping to build prosperous communities in Atlantic settlements such as Bathurst (Banjul), Freetown, Monrovia, Lagos, Old Calabar, and Fernando Po (Malabo) in the 1850s and 1860s (Lynn 1997: 140). Steam power lay at the heart of the nineteenth-century idea of ‘progress’, because it was considered to facilitate secular processes of economic ‘development’ alongside the spread of Christianity and ‘civilization’, things that Macgregor Laird had signalled in the names of his African Steamship Company’s vessels, which included ships called Forerunner, Faith, Hope, and Charity. In the Victorian imagination, the steam revolution in West African shipping remained firmly linked with the Christian and capitalist ‘regeneration’ of Africa and it was seen as the final nail in the coffin of a lingering illegal slave trade that had continued for decades after abolition until about 1864 (Haws 1990: 27). Writing about his experiences from the 1860s and 1870s, the British trader Whitford observed: Steam launches are gradually taking the place of canoes; river steamers of light draft are becoming common in lieu of lumbering slave cutters; and everywhere, wherever trade justifies it, traders run steamers of their own to and from Europe; and thus King Steam has extended his benefit-yielding comfort and speed even to benighted Africa. Whitford 1877: 316

Thus, when W. R. Renner gave his canoe and canoe paddle from Alenso to the Liverpool Museum in 1873, he did so at the height of the steam revolution in West Africa. At that time Liverpool’s imposing neoclassical museum building in William Brown Street was just over twelve years old and had become an important cultural landmark for the city. Renner’s generous gift, which was listed in the museum’s twenty-first Annual Report,

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would have made a prestigious addition to its holdings and would have attracted the attention of the institution’s governing body, the Committee of the Free Public Library, Museum, and Gallery of Art, of the Borough of Liverpool (Liverpool Museums 1873: 18). Among those serving on the Committee would have been well-connected, influential city officials and Renner may have had good reason to want to establish his credentials with them, and other potential supporters. This is because Renner probably came to Liverpool in 1873 with commercial deals to transact and with the intention of purchasing a steam launch from a Liverpool shipyard in order to boost his business activities in West Africa. His gift can be seen as the projection of a cultural position, an ‘articulation’ (Hall 1996: 141), as it were, calculated to win him access to a potentially supportive Liverpool peer group, in showing himself to be one of a new ‘breed’ of middle-class West Africans with ‘rational’ and ‘civilized’ values (Lynn 1992a: 422; Hill 2005: 27, 47, 48). And Renner was clearly a credit-worthy capitalist, because he subsequently had a sixty-ton capacity, twin screw steamer built for £3,000, which he took to West Africa in 1875. The values that W. R. Renner aimed to project through his gift to the municipal museum in Liverpool and his personification of the new figure of the Christian ‘native capitalist’ would have found special favour among members of pressure groups like the African Aid Society. Indeed, it would seem that Renner sought to signal his own personification of the ‘new breed’ of African capitalist by naming his steamship the SS Renner when he launched it at Lagos in 1875.13 Members of the African Aid Society and their sympathizers would have been encouraged to see a ‘progressive’, Christian African from Sierra Leone taking advantage of new steam technology to help build a profitable business in the palm oil trade.14 The Society’s newspaper The African Times, published in London from 1861, was highly critical of European failings in West Africa and reserved particular opprobrium for the so-called ‘palm oil ruffians’ associated partly with the old, monopolistic Liverpool companies. Many of these companies, and the families that owned them, had been involved in the slave trade before 1807 (see Chapter  2). After abolition, they had pioneered the palm oil trade with their African trading partners who held powerful positions in the ‘city-states’ of the Niger Delta and the Cross River estuary (e.g. Latham 1974: 863). In order to replace the old order of the established Liverpool companies, The African Times called for ‘native agency’ to be engaged in West African trade, politics, administration and missionary endeavour. The hope of British philanthropists and missionaries, with the inauguration of the steam revolution, was that men like Renner would help replace the old commercial order and establish themselves as a dynamic force at the heart of West Africa’s maritime trade (Lynn 1992a: 422). McGregor Laird had been of similar mind and believed that African ‘redemption’ and ‘civilization’ could not be brought about by ‘European agency’ alone, and certainly not by the monopolistic Liverpool palm oil firms, which he considered to represent part of a morally corrupt system compromised by its earlier involvement in the slave trade and its dependence on the ‘savage’ agency of the African brokers of the Niger Delta and Cross River citystates (Dike 1956: 115–16). In this context, the fact that Renner had collected the canoe and paddle that he gave to the Liverpool Museum at Alenso cannot be considered arbitrary, because Alenso in 1873 was one of the trading villages on the Niger River to

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which Christianity had recently been introduced by Sierra Leonean missionaries from the Niger Mission’s Onitsha station (Ajayi 1965: 215). Alenso in the 1870s therefore offered a prime example of the achievements wrought in the African interior by ‘civilized’ African agency, in both missionary and commercial endeavour. Renner’s canoe would necessarily have held other, more personal, meanings and memories for him as well. It is impossible to know for certain what these would have been, but canoes provided essential transport for traders’ goods on the Niger River, especially when the water was too shallow to allow access for steamboats, and there can be little doubt that canoes and their crews would have formed a basis for Renner’s early commercial success in the palm oil trade. As an example of the kind of vessel that connected African trading communities on the Niger River, Renner’s canoe and paddle was a signifier of African commercial initiative, and consequently of Africans’ potential for ‘progress’ and ‘civilization’. But it would also have been the vehicle that facilitated the flow of European ideas and Christian practices from Onitsha to Alenso and to other villages like it. Rather than presenting his canoe to the Liverpool Museum to be placed in a hierarchy of vessels as a signifier of the backwardness of African cultures, as a European donor of the time might have done, Renner probably intended his Niger River canoe to stand as an index of pioneering African cultural and economic initiative, and possibly even as a technological instrument of the spread of Christian ‘civilization’ in West Africa. From a more particular perspective, it would seem appropriate that Renner brought a West African canoe to be displayed in a museum in Liverpool. The palm oil trade largely defined the relationship between Liverpool and West Africa during this period, and it was the source of a portion of the city’s great wealth. Entrepreneurs like W. R. Renner can be seen to have fulfilled the African Aid Society’s vision for the role of ‘native agency’ in the capitalist transformation of West Africa. However, the society’s vision was a minority one. Most Liverpudlians with interests in the palm oil trade during the 1870s would have opposed such a vision. Indeed, they would have been as much against allowing African merchants to hold a stake in palm oil profits, as they would have been against acknowledging African entrepreneurialism and labour as a basis for those profits. From the start, most European traders, and not just those from the old Liverpool firms, had objected to the success of African merchants in the palm oil trade and the supposedly ‘unfair competition’ they were said to present through having lower capital costs (Lynn 1992a: 433–34). Competition among traders of all stripes was fiercest in the so-called oil rivers of the Niger Delta, where in 1862 Bishop Crowther lamented that: A Sierra Leone merchant hardly gets a place in Bonny, New Calabar and Brass . . . their opponents will try to undersell them so as to involve them in losses and so drive them out of the river . . . the name of a Sierra Leone trader or merchant is an odium in the ears of everyone I have met with.15

Officers and sailors in the service of the African Steamship Company were hardly more accommodating to Africans than were the European traders and it was only competition

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from the British and African Steam Navigation Company, established in 1869, that forced the former company to act on complaints made by Africans against its staff (Davies 1973: 60). Thus, in May 1869, The African Times was able to report that: Coloured people may now go on board steamers and even travel in them without the certainty of being kicked, cuffed, stabbed, threatened, forced to jump overboard, and (when the people on board are in a good humour) damned and cursed in language of the foulest description; consignees’ goods will no longer be chucked about anywhere and anyhow, or shoved on shore promiscuously at any place.16

A series of palm oil price falls in the 1870s helped fuel a backlash by European traders against Sierra Leoneans and a virtual exclusion of African merchants form the oil trade in some places. The African Times of October 1874 reported that Sierra Leoneans attempting to use steamers for trade received ‘treatment that would make a dog sick’ and that ships’ officers were ‘cruel plunderers and haters of Africans’. The report quoted a steamer captain at Opobo who said that he would not receive any oil from Africans ‘and this not because he had not room for their oil on board, but solely because they were Africans’.17 Thus, the heyday of the peninsula Sierra Leoneans was already over by 1873 and, for Africans at least, the early promise of the steam revolution in the 1850s and 1860s had turned distinctly sour. In fact, another motivation for Renner to have transported a steamer to the Niger River in 1875 may have been to try and fulfil a pressing demand, among Sierra Leonean traders, for better access to transport for their goods in the face of aggressive exclusionary practices from Europeans.18 If this was the case, then the name of his steamer, the SS Renner, would have signalled something rather different for his fellow Sierra Leoneans than it did for European missionaries and philanthropists. Among his Sierra Leonean peers, where evangelical Christian ideas of individual achievement were often ‘fused’ with widespread West African ideas of the ‘big man’ (e.g. see McCaskie 2004: 170), Renner’s autographed steamer would have held meaning that spoke more directly to his own social prestige within Krio diaspora communities. Furthermore, it is tempting to see the SS Renner also as having presented a satisfying provocation, in the eyes of its owner, to those Europeans in West Africa for whom the name of a Sierra Leonean merchant was an ‘odium’. As far as one can tell, W. R. Renner was the only Sierra Leonean of his generation to make a donation to the museum in Liverpool. It would be just over a quarter of a century later before Arnold Ridyard would begin transporting further donations to the museum from Sierra Leoneans. By that time the Sierra Leonean Krio had entered an era of ‘disillusionment’ (Spitzer 1974: 219), after successive British administrations had increasingly disparaged their usefulness to the colonial regime and had cut back their opportunities for serving in government posts (Kimble 1963: 97–99; Fyfe 1962: 615). Over the same period, their commercial opportunities had also been eroded by aggressive and well-capitalized European firms, so that many had been impoverished. Women were important traders in Krio diaspora communities, but their status declined, especially during the early twentieth century as their autonomy and ability to

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access labour and credit was generally undermined in the European colonies and they became acutely aware of the ‘problems created by trying to conform to foreign conjugal norms’ (Mann 1983: 38, 1985: 10, 1991: 705). Furthermore, the reluctance of British missionaries to relinquish control over Christian proselytization and church leadership led to the alienation of Krios from mission churches, as it also did with many other West African Christians. The growing European pseudoscientific racism of the period played its part in these changes, as did the more general marginalization of African concerns following the European ‘scramble’ for African territories, during which Britain rapidly conquered huge swathes of West Africa, largely between 1880 and 1914. Medical advances that encouraged more Europeans to pursue careers in the colonies also played their part, as did new theories of imperial rule formulated in Britain in order to cope with the increasingly complex international political and economic implications of bringing extensive new African territories under formal colonial administration (e.g. see Mcgarry 1978: 3). One of the ways in which the Sierra Leone Krios responded to the new threats to their economic and social position was to develop their own social and religious institutions. When European missionaries denied West African Christians leadership roles in the mission churches, their consequent sense of alienation led directly to the foundation of an independent African church movement.19 From as early as the 1840s, the Christian institutions of Sierra Leone’s Liberated Africans became foci for asserting the freedom and independence of their communities and resistance against efforts, both by Freetown’s settler community and by the British clergy, to exert undue control over their churches and religious practices (Shyllon 2008: 117). Despite the exertions of the Anglican CMS in Sierra Leone and Nigeria, most Liberated African Christian converts would eventually affiliate with the Methodists. Institutions like ‘apprenticeship’ meant that Liberated African modes of worship were strongly influenced by the practices of Freetown’s black settlers who had brought their own forms of Methodist chapel community with them when they arrived in Sierra Leone from Nova Scotia in 1792. The settler congregations had arrived in Sierra Leone fully formed, cohesive, independent and unwilling to tolerate interference from European missionaries who travelled to Africa with preconceived ideas about what would be required of them in order to convert ‘heathen’ peoples (Schwarz 2011: 122– 23). The self-confidence and ready-made leadership structures of these Methodist congregations meant that they attracted Liberated African congregants from the Anglican missionary church. The fact that Methodism was essentially ‘a voluntary association of free people’ (Hempton 2005: 7) must also have been a significant factor in its appeal, and it meant that Methodist churches inevitably became a channel for resistance against colonial arrogance, not least because the Liberated Africans’ experience of slavery in western Africa, like the settlers’ experience of slavery in the Americas, had rooted in both groups a determination to lead an independent existence in which their children would lead ‘free and happy’ lives after them.20 The Liberated Africans who joined Methodist congregations adapted their ethos to their own experience. Consequently, when the leadership ambitions of Liberated Africans within the settlers’ churches were frustrated, they set up their own congregations under the

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control of their own preachers and church elders (Shyllon 2008: 117). This became a central thread in the weave of Krio experience over time and would appear to help explain why Archdeacon Crowther took the bold move of disconnecting the Niger Delta Pastorate Mission from the CMS , when the CMS attempted to place him under the authority of a European, at a time when heightened European racism in the late nineteenth century had led to widespread disparagement of Krio missionaries in West African fields (e.g. see Tasie 1978: 112). Like the Christian elites of other West African Atlantic societies (see Chapters 6 and 7), Sierra Leonean Christians also reassessed their attitudes towards aspects of African culture during the latter part of the nineteenth century. For a few, this led to their adoption of African names and African modes of dress. The more highly educated also developed a greater interest in the specific histories of African societies. On a wider plane, this reassessment of African histories and societies also encompassed an increased interest in African cultural objects. In fact, this is clearly one of the factors that lies behind the original gathering of many of the artefacts donated to the Liverpool Museum by Ridyard’s Sierra Leonean contacts between 1900 and 1915, which are discussed in the next sections and in the following chapter. West African elites did not respond to European contempt and domination with outright rejection of European culture and imperialism. Instead, their attitudes appear to have become more ambivalent and selective. It would seem that British ‘civilization’ remained something to be admired, but the rhetoric and individual agents of British colonialism were subjected to criticism, especially in the African-owned press in Freetown, Cape Coast, Accra and Lagos (Omu 1968a,b; Mcgarry 1978: 3; Fyfe 1962: 468; McCaskie 2004: 191). Krio and Saro elites in the West African diaspora were especially aware of the dominant role that Britain had played in the creation of their society and of their own role in expanding the British Empire. They found it hard to let go of a sense of pride in empire and the idea of the British nation as a beneficent force, because their own history and experiences embodied an important aspect of the nature of empire (Wyse 1989: 7, 24; Hawkins and Morgan 2004: 1). So, in the face of their new hardships, many Sierra Leoneans adopted the practiced response of again setting out across western Africa to take up more advantageous opportunities wherever they could find them.21

Krio Diaspora: Collecting and Culture in the Early Twentieth Century Between 1900 and 1916, forty-eight or so West African men and women with addresses in Freetown, or apparent links to Sierra Leone, donated some 242 ‘ethnographic’ and 143 natural history items from West Africa to the museums in Liverpool, Salford and Manchester. All of them donated items through Arnold Ridyard and almost all would have been Krio, or Saro, and descendants, in part at least, of the so-called Liberated Africans. The exceptions include the Wolof trader Mohammed Daniel Jobe (‘Job’ in the Mayer Museum accession register) and the Mandinka kola nut merchant Mohammed

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Muyu Deen Savage (called ‘Mr Minuel Savay’ in the Mayer Museum accession register). Many of them were traders or entrepreneurs, and they included a few very wealthy businessmen, like the Muslim kola nut merchant Abubakar Savage of Savage Square and the Wesleyan Methodist money lender George Punshon During. Among the most prominent donors were the barristers Peter Awoonor Renner (who settled in the Gold Coast) and Claudius Dyonisius Hotobah During (George Punshon During’s son), as well as the Niger Delta missionary Archdeacon Dandeson Coates Crowther (see Figure 8), youngest son of the celebrated Bishop Samuel Ajayi Crowther. A few of the donors held positions in West Africa’s colonial administrations. For example, Roland Cole was retired postmaster general of the Gold Coast at Accra, when he gave Ridyard six decorated gourds in 1911 (1.2.11.24 to 29, now lost). J. E. Domingo Green was the pilot who brought in and took out steamers from the port at Sherbro Island, when he gave Ridyard a Temne coil basket from Port Loko (15.8.04.32) in 1904, while G. L. Johns was a customs officer at Opobo in the Niger Delta when he gave Ridyard two locally carved coconut shell items (19.12.06.15 & 16, now lost) and a pyro-engraved wooden box from Old Calabar (19.12.06.17) in 1906. Only one of the Sierra Leonean donors was a craftsman, namely the jeweller William Charles DeGraft Rosenior, but several were marine engineers who worked on steamers plying the Niger and Benue Rivers (see below).22 A number of women, including Archdeacon Crowther’s wife, Sarah, (see Figure 9) are also listed as donors in the museum accession records. Other women include the Freetown traders Miss B. Yorke of East Street (now Ecowas Street) and Mrs James of Garrison Street and three Muslim women traders from the Fourah Bay community namely, Mrs Adejatoo Garber, Mrs Mary Anne Marie Gillen and Mrs Charlotte Gillen. Two Krio women at Bathurst in The Gambia are also recorded as donors, Mrs W. E. Johnson of New Street and Mrs Mary Jane King of Long Street. The gifts to the Liverpool and Salford museums made by these diverse Sierra Leonean and Krio donors present a complex picture. Just over half of the donors (twenty-five) had addresses in Freetown, yet about 96 per cent of the ‘ethnographic’ items they donated had been collected outside the Sierra Leone colony. In fact, 78 per cent of their donations had been collected outside both the colony and protectorate of Sierra Leone, with ninety-one objects coming from various places in Nigeria, fortyeight from the Gold Coast (Ghana), five from Matadi on the Congo River, fourteen from Liberia, six from Portuguese Guinea (Guinea Bissau), six from The Gambia and four from Senegal. A collection of fifteen stone tools from Jamaica, donated by Hotobah During in 1915, had probably been acquired during this donor’s 1914 trip to the Caribbean.23 Those donors with addresses outside Sierra Leone were based at disparate settlements on the West African coast, including Bathurst (now Banjul) in The Gambia; Grand Bassam in Côte d’Ivoire; Cape Palmas in Liberia; Accra and Cape Coast Castle in the Gold Coast; and Opobo, Old Calabar, Forcados and Bonny in Nigeria. However, many of the 382 or so ‘ethnographic’ and ‘natural history’ items they donated had originally been collected in regions a long way from the places in which they were living at the time they made their donations. For example, Mr W. E. Johnson of New Street, Bathurst, donated an ivory armlet decorated with royal emblems from the city of Benin in 1906 (16.2.06.21). Mrs W. E. Johnson, his wife, donated a fan from Lagos in

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Figure 8 Portrait of Archdeacon D. C. Crowther (1844–1938) from about 1865. CMS Archives, CMS /ACC 314/Z1. Photographer unknown. Courtesy of Church Mission Society Archives.

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Figure 9 Portrait of Sarah Crowther probably from about 1865. Missionary Leaves Association Photo Specimen Book. CMS Archives, H/H 31/AGI /1. Photographer unknown. Courtesy of Church Mission Society Archives.

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1906 (16.2.06.15, now lost), a ‘Susu hat’ from the Sierra Leone Protectorate in 1908 (30.7.08.14), a wooden figure of Queen Victoria from the Egba town of Abeokuta in Nigeria in 1909 (13.2.09.27), and a basket collected in Bathurst itself in 1912 (3.9.12.4). Likewise, the first items that Hotobah During presented to the Liverpool Museum through Ridyard in 1906 and 1907 were acquired from equally disparate origins. These included ‘two carved gourds, said to be Mandingo but most probably from the Niger’ (3.9.06.17 & 18); a ‘Mandingo cigarette cup overlaid with leather from the Sierra Leone Protectorate’ (16.2.06.22); a stoneware flagon overlaid with leather by ‘Mandingo’ leatherworkers, also from the Sierra Leone Protectorate (19.12.06.19); and a woman’s beadwork apron from Matadi on the Congo River (3.9.06.19). A few months later, in 1907, Hotobah During gave Ridyard an ‘ivory walking stick made at Old Calabar’ (8.7.07.15, now lost). Hotobah During was only nineteen years old when he began making these donations. He would have recently completed his secondary education at Freetown’s Wesleyan Boys’ High School and was working as a clerk in the colony’s Audit Department.24 At the age of nineteen, in 1906, he would have had little opportunity for travel and could not have journeyed up the Niger and Congo Rivers. He therefore must have acquired these early items he gave to the Liverpool Museum in Freetown. As all the items came from beyond the Sierra Leone colony, they were probably acquired from Sierra Leoneans who had journeyed abroad. Some may originally have been acquired by Hotobah During’s father, George Punshon During, who was a money lender and pawnbroker. Others, like the ‘Mandingo’ items could equally have been acquired from itinerant or immigrant traders from the protectorate or beyond. If this pattern of collecting exemplifies the contribution that the Sierra Leonean donors made to the African collection of the Liverpool Museum, it also bears witness to Sierra Leoneans’ physical dispersal and wide networks of connection along western Africa’s Atlantic coast and up the major rivers and trade routes. Furthermore, it illustrates the remarkable mobility of Sierra Leoneans within, and even beyond, western Africa. This mobility was not only facilitated by the steamships of Elder, Dempster & Co.’s West African service, but also by the government railways, by the river steamers operated by various trading companies, and by African canoes.25 A number of Ridyard’s collaborators, like Alfred C. Williams, A. E. Williams, D. P. Noah and John Gustavus Taylor, were, or had been, steam boat engineers on the Niger and Benue Rivers when they made their donations to the Liverpool Museum.26 The disparate provenances of early donations made by Hotobah During in particular, would seem to reflect both the dispersal of Krio family members and the strong Krio orientation towards Freetown, to which even long-term emigrants returned from time to time and on retirement. Above all, the donations made by Sierra Leoneans to the museums in Liverpool and Salford during the first fifteen years of the twentieth century, indicate that Krio emigrants who settled along the western coast of Africa made collections of indigenous artefacts at the places in which they found themselves. Even members of the settled Freetown elite made similar collections, and this seems to have been a relatively common practice among them. A few even collected natural history specimens. For example, Hotobah During gave Ridyard a collection of 132

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‘African butterflies’ in 1914, while in 1915 he gave Ridyard ‘two pieces of massive white Crystalline Quartz, and a piece of Quartzite, from Mendi Country’.27 Archdeacon Dandeson Coates Crowther also contributed to the natural history collections of the Liverpool Museum when he presented the fruit of a breadfruit tree in 1901 and ‘Samples of West African Coal, from Udi, Nigeria’ in 1920.28 Collections made by Sierra Leonean Krios were acquired in various ways. Some of the objects they donated to the Liverpool and Salford museums were clearly common household utensils that could be cheaply purchased in shops and markets, either in Freetown or at other settlements on the West African coast. Other artefacts, like the women’s Sande initiation society masks of the Mende, presented in 1910 by Alfred C. Williams (12.9.10.12) and in 1914 by Hotobah During (12.5.14.14), comprised potent esoteric paraphernalia that would have been acquired in rather different contexts and would have involved the mobilization of more complex relationships with initiation society officials or carvers from indigenous communities in the interior (see Chapter 5). Archdeacon Crowther of the Niger Delta Pastorate Mission at Bonny is an exception here, because he represents a rare instance of a missionary among Ridyard’s collaborators and also because he provided a detailed letter to go with the ‘cycle prayer board’ from Bonny that he gave Ridyard in 1914 (12.5.14.2), in which he explained how the ‘board’ was used and why it was given up to the Niger Delta Pastorate Mission.29 Notwithstanding the scarcity of documents like the ones provided by Crowther, it seems clear that Sierra Leoneans from various walks of life collected cultural artefacts in a variety of different ways from diverse social groups across a wide swathe of West and Central African territory. It would clearly be a mistake to suggest that the artefacts collected by Sierra Leonean Krio donors from different African regions and social groups were essentially ‘other’ or acquired as ‘exotic’ curios. From the earliest times, Sierra Leone’s Liberated Africans had made, acquired, used, and also traded, artefacts that originated in one way or another with other peoples, including, of course, white Europeans and North Americans. Thus, by the late nineteenth century, a large proportion of Freetown’s Krios would have lived in one- or two-story wooden frame and plank-clad houses mounted on a masonry foundation. Many examples of such houses still remain in Sierra Leone today, yet they follow a basic design from the southern United States that was brought to Sierra Leone via Nova Scotia at the end of the eighteenth century by the early black settlers. Moreover, the furnishings in these houses were sourced from disparate places too. For example, in an appendix to his The History of Sierra Leone, Sibthorpe quoted a passage from an official report in which ‘the neatness and cleanliness’ of Regent Villagers’ homes was extolled, and where sofas were favourably described as being covered with ‘clean prints or the country cloth’ (Sibthorpe [1906] 1970: 198).30 In the section of his book dealing with the reign of Governor MacDonald (1849–52), Sibthorpe quoted the ‘average price of articles sold in the market and retail shops of Freetown’. Many of these outlets would have been run by Liberated Africans or their descendants. ‘Country wooden combs’ are recorded as having been priced at ‘2d.’, for example, while ‘Sherboro mats’, calabashes and ‘blys, or country baskets’, are also shown to have been commonly sold goods that would have been in general use in most

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Freetown households (Sibthorpe [1906] 1970: 68). Locally made wooden combs, called ‘stick comb’, are still sold in Freetown’s Big Market today (see Plate 8) and follow a similar design to that of the three from Sherbro Island that Hotobah During presented to the Liverpool Museum in 1908 (14.2.08.8–10, see Figure  10). Various types of mat, basket, and calabash are also still widely used in Freetown homes and can still be found for sale in Big Market, including baskets like those that J. E. Domingo Green and Mary Anne Marie Gillen gave Ridyard in 1904 and 1906, respectively (15.8.04.32 and 3.9.06.13).31 The wooden spoon ‘from the interior of Sierra Leone’ that Hotobah During gave to the Liverpool Museum in 1908 (14.2.08.7, see Figure 11), is yet another example of a utensil whose present-day equivalents remain in common use in Freetown and are still offered for sale in markets and shops. Although the coil baskets donated by Green and Gillen were both originally collected at Port Loko, in the northwestern region of the Sierra Leone Protectorate they are of a commonly used type called shukubly in Krio. Temne, Limba and other women still make them by wrapping a grass foundation with raffia binder to make a long flexible roll that is stitched together in a continuous spiral. Krio women were given sets of such baskets at their engagement and they still use them to store jewellery and other valuables. Men also use them, the larger versions serving to store clothing and personal possessions in many Krio

Figure 10 Three Sherbro Mende combs from Sherbro Island, Sierra Leone. Presented by C. D. Hotobah During in 1908. 14.2.08.8, 14.2.08.9, 14.2.08.10.

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Figure 11 Wooden spoon from the ‘interior of Sierra Leone’. Presented by C. D. Hotobah During in 1908. 14.2.08.7.

homes. Significantly, shuku is the Limba word for basket, while the Krio terms for common cooking utensils are loanwords from, either Yoruba, Temne or Mende (see Cole 2013: 50). Coil baskets and other items used in such cross-cultural contexts would seem to pose a problem for museums, because they fail to slot neatly into discrete ethnic and geographical compartments within the tabular classificatory systems that museums still routinely use to order and to structure access to the objects in their collections. Accounts that have sought to describe the development of Krio identity and culture through the nineteenth century have tended to emphasize the role of European cultural influences while marginalizing the role of other local and regional African influences (Cole 2013: 28). Such accounts (e.g. see Spitzer 1974), which can be seen partly as resulting from a focus on the highly educated male elites and a reliance on sources such as editorials in The Sierra Leone Weekly News, have also underplayed the dynamic forces behind Krio collective experience that allowed for religious diversity and enabled ethnic, class, and certain cultural, differences to be ‘transcended’ (Cole 2013: 3). A countervailing perspective is provided by close analysis of the collection of Sierra Leonean herbal medicines that Ridyard gave to the Manchester Museum between 1902 and 1904 (see Chapter 3). The collection includes samples of roots and barks and is notable for the fact that each sample is carefully documented with a piece of paper on which Ridyard recorded the local name of the plant along with the malady it was used to cure (see Plate 6). Interestingly, the collection includes multiple samples of particular medicines for which Ridyard recorded differing names for the same medicine. For example, samples of the so-called Negro Peach, or ‘Yellow Fever root’ (Sarcocephalus esculentus) are most numerous. Ridyard attached a label to one root sample from this

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plant on which he recorded its name to be ‘Ojo Ologbo’ (Manchester Museum 42792), a term that would seem to have Yoruba linguistic origins in that it can be translated as ‘day cats’ in contemporary Yoruba. Other names for additional samples of the same plant were recorded respectively as ‘Egbessye’ (Manchester Museum 22745), ‘Egboshie’ (Manchester Museum 22745), ‘Doundake’ (Manchester Museum EM 535146) and ‘Agbeshie’ (Manchester Museum 23274), which seem to derive from various other ethno-linguistic traditions. Given the way that Krio culture and identity was forged on the Sierra Leone Peninsula from a multiplicity of different peoples, it is not surprising that Ridyard should have collected a medicinal plant with a Yoruba name at Sierra Leone. The other names for the same plant recorded with other samples also make sense in this context as they could have derived from usages current with speakers of other African language groups among the Liberated Africans settled on the Sierra Leone Peninsula after 1808. Indigenous African cultural practices persisted among the Liberated Africans, especially among the Yoruba speakers, who were by far the most numerous. Secret initiation associations of Yoruba origin, like Ojeh, were recognized for their power to maintain social order in some villages (Cole 2013: 42) and they gained a reputation for their ability to heal various afflictions. However, the Liberated Africans were intended to serve as a vanguard of ‘civilized’, Christianized Africans in West Africa, so the colonial administration and missionary churches suppressed African religions and rituals where they could. It would seem that the feared African ‘Merecin Man’ was marginalized in Sierra Leone by European colonial authorities and African Christian converts, because of his association with censured indigenous African beliefs and practices. By contrast, domestic medical practices, like the preparation of herbal remedies, evidently thrived in Liberated African households as a predominantly female practice. Women’s medical knowledge would seem to have been transformed through wider circulation among a community of Liberated Africans from diverse parts of Africa, with their own comparable medical practices, but also through familiarity with European botanical remedies and medical ideas. This would seem to find confirmation in Harrison Rankin’s account of his 1834 visit to Sierra Leone. In that account, Rankin related that: Antidotes are kindly presented where local evils abound. Amidst the beautiful shrubs of the bush, medicinal plants of healing virtue grow prolifically: the jalap, the castor-oil, and croton-oil plants are weeds found at every step. The ‘jesuits’ bark, containing the principle of quinine, or a bark essentially similar, a tonic and palliative in fevers, is a native of the woods. In addition to the pharmacopoeia of civilized practice, the negro is skilled in selection of herbs efficacious in all diseases incident to the country. Amongst the varied productions of Sierra Leone its sanitary resources are invaluable: the aged women who practise medicine are desirous of throwing a veil of mystery over their craft; but the wood and jungle are open to the botanist, and the laboratory will disclose more secrets than the profound negress would conceal. Rankin 1836: 182–83

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The fact that the Liberated Africans who were settled on the Sierra Leone Peninsula in the nineteenth century came from disparate parts of Africa with their own healing traditions may have helped them to expand their stock of medicines by communicating, sharing and competing with each other. The mobility of Liberated African women and their wide family and commercial contacts in the West African diaspora would also have helped them to source a wider variety of medicines used in different locations, while steamship services would have allowed some of them to ply their trade along the length of the West African coast. Rashid, one of the Sierra Leoneans I met during my research visit to Freetown in 2010, related that his great grandmother had been a stallholder in Freetown’s Big Market, where she sold herbal medicines as well as print cloth, head ties, spices, calabashes, baskets and women’s slippers. Although a staunch Catholic, she used to treat young children with her herbal remedies and she would travel by steamship to Bathurst (now Banjul) in The Gambia and to various other West African ports in the Gold Coast (now Ghana) and Nigeria to ply her trades.32 Rashid’s great grandmother would not have been an isolated case, something which suggests that the Krio diaspora in West Africa helped to transform and extend a regional medical culture along the West African coast. During my own visits to Freetown’s Big Market in February 2010, I usually encountered a couple of women under umbrellas by the entrance who sold medicinal roots and barks in bags and baskets, including roots that were used for treating malaria. The trans-West African character of Krio identity and medical culture was further impressed on me during my discussions with Tunde, an elderly Krio woman from an illustrious Freetown family. In the course of an interview I showed her the photograph of a lidded pot, collected in the Itsekiri town of Warri in the Niger Delta, that was given to the Liverpool Museum through Arnold Ridyard in 1909 by the Krio donor James Brown of Freetown’s Wellington Street (20.5.09.14, see Figure 12). The image of the pot sparked a memory in Tunde and she related that her father’s sister had given her a very similar pot many years ago. She had treasured the pot but somehow it had got lost over the years. Interestingly, Tunde went on to relate that many Krio people in Freetown owned pots like the one I had shown her, which they used for brewing root medicine for malaria. She stated that she still made use of the same root medicine and claimed that she had managed to control her malaria with it over the last thirty or so years. She said that when she began to feel drowsy and her mouth started to feel bitter, she knew it was time to take the root medicine again.33 Tunde’s claim that she had controlled her malaria in this way for 30 years surprised me because standard pharmaceutical medicines for malaria would have been accessible to her and she had been educated to a high level in Freetown’s Western-style schools. Yet her preference for her home-made malarial treatment makes sense in a context in which Krio medicine developed as an inherited, female domestic practice. Her root medicine was a trusted Krio remedy that had been handed down to her from her ancestors. She used to prepare it in a West African pot which she had received as a treasured gift from her aunt. The family, especially its older female members, would have provided an environment of trust and ontological security. It is therefore unsurprising that African herbal remedies and medical practices remain such a strong element in Krio culture today, despite the

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Figure 12 Earthenware pot with lid, probably Itsekiri. From Warri in the Niger Delta, Southern Nigeria. Presented by James Brown of Wellington Street, Freetown, in 1909. 20.5.09.14.

opposition to African practices Krios faced from European colonial functionaries in earlier times, and despite more recent competition from industrially produced pharmaceuticals.

Women Donors: Mrs W. E. Johnson and Miss B. Yorke Ridyard almost certainly purchased the Sierra Leonean medicinal root samples that he donated to the Manchester Museum between 1902 and 1904 from female practitioners or market traders in Freetown. Such items help reveal the practical and dynamic cultural agency that women exercised within Freetown’s Krio communities. But Ridyard also counted Krio women donors among his various Sierra Leonean collaborators, whose gifts to the Liverpool Museum appear to encode specific cultural agendas. While a lack of documentation prevents us from fully exploring the convoluted biographies of these artefacts, some offer visual and narrative clues as to their original meaning and function for their female owners. Among these artefacts are five small wooden

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carvings of genre figures, depicted in European clothing, that were donated by two Krio women in 1909 and 1911. The 1909 donation has already been mentioned above. This was the portrait figure of Queen Victoria from Abeokuta that Ridyard received from Mrs W. E. Johnson in Bathurst (13.2.09.27, Figure  13). Ridyard received the 1911 donations from Miss B. Yorke of East Street, Freetown. These consist of four male figures with detachable pith helmets on their heads. Two of the figures are depicted standing, wearing buttoned-up jackets and prominent puttees on their legs (10.4.11.42 & 43, see Figures 14 & 15). They are painted black, except on their puttees, and may represent policemen or soldiers. The other two figures are shown seated on chairs. They have no puttees and are entirely painted in black. One of them is apparently playing a ‘concertina’ (10.4.11.44). The other is shown at a desk holding a book open in his left hand, while his right hand is poised on the desktop clutching an absent pen that the carver would have made as a separate component and which is now lost (10.4.11.45, see Figure  16). Although all four of these figures are depicted in European dress, wearing shoes and pith helmets, they were probably not intended to depict Europeans. Rather, they were probably intended to represent Krio police officers and clerks. Nevertheless, it seems clear that they all represent officials or functionaries of the colonial state, whether European or African. The four figures donated by Miss Yorke are recorded as being from Sierra Leone. But, while Miss Yorke lived at an address in East Street, Freetown, the four carvings bear a very close resemblance to a corpus of fourteen other male figures depicted in

Figure 13 Portrait figure of Queen Victoria from Abeokuta. Presented by Mrs W. E. Johnson of Bathurst (now Banjul), The Gambia. 13.2.09.27.

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Figures 14 & 15 Two black-painted wooden figures of a man in European militarystyle clothing wearing detachable pith helmet. Presented in 1911 through Ridyard by Miss B. Yorke of East Street, Freetown. 10.4.11.42 (left) and 10.4.11.43 (right).

European clothing that Arnold Ridyard collected at Lagos in southwestern Nigeria between 1910 and 1915. Two of these other fourteen carvings are also painted black; a policeman and a man on horseback, but the others are in plain pale wood or have details like the shoes picked out in pyro-engraving or in green paint. Three of these carvings resemble one of Miss Yorke’s seated figures and are similarly depicted at a desk, with book in one hand and pen in the other (12.9.10.2 and 15.3.15.10 & 11, see Figures  17, 18 & 19). Two others also resemble Miss Yorke’s policeman-like figures, down to the puttees on the legs (12.9.10.1 and 15.3.15.9, see Figures 20 & 21), except that they are not painted black. Another figure, collected in 1915, is unique in that it shows a man riding a motorcycle (15.3.15.12). Two other carvings made in a more robust style, which were acquired for Ridyard by a fellow Elder, Dempster & Co. employee J. C. Henderson in 1911, appear to represent Africans. They are plain wood images of standing male figures in similar jackets, long trousers and shoes. They differ mainly in their headgear, in that one of them wears a peaked flat cap (1.2.11.48, see Figure  22) while the other wears a boater-like hat (1.2.11.49, see Figure  23). The fourteen figures collected by Ridyard at Lagos, together with the four donated by Miss Yorke at Freetown, clearly constitute a coherent formal and stylistic corpus incorporating the work of at least four different carvers. They appear to be the precursors of a genre of miniature painted figures that became popular among

Figure 16 Black-painted wooden figure of a man in European-style clothing seated at a desk with open book wearing detachable pith helmet. Presented in 1911 through Ridyard by Miss B. Yorke of East Street, Freetown. 10.4.11.45.

Figure 17 Wooden figure of a man in European-style clothing seated at a desk with open book. Detachable pen and pith helmet missing. Collected at Lagos in 1910 by Ridyard. 12.9.10.2. 98

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Figures 18 & 19 Two wooden figures of a man in European-style clothing seated at a desk with D. C. inscribed on it. Detachable pith helmets missing. Collected at Lagos in 1915 by Ridyard. 15.3.15.10 (left) 15.3.15.11 (right).

Figure 20 Wooden figure of a man in European military-style clothing. Detachable pith helmet missing. Collected at Lagos in 1910 by Ridyard. 12.9.10.1. 99

Figure 21 Wooden figure of a man in European military uniform with pillbox-style cap. Collected at Lagos in 1915 by Ridyard. 15.3.15.9.

Figure 22 Wooden figure of a man wearing European-style clothing and peaked flat cap. Collected at Lagos by J. C. Henderson and presented in 1911. 1.2.11.48. 100

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Figure 23 Wooden figure of a man wearing European-style clothing and boater-like hat. Collected at Lagos by J. C. Henderson and presented in 1911. 1.2.11.49.

expatriate Europeans in Lagos in the following decades. The man who popularized the genre and added to the variety of its constituent figures was the Ijebu born sculptor Thomas Ona Odulate (c.1900–50), whose work can be found in a number of European and North American museum collections. Later developments aside, however, it seems that such figures were being produced by a number of sculptors in Lagos at the beginning of the twentieth century and, on the evidence of Miss Yorke’s donations to the Liverpool Museum, were collected by Sierra Leonean Krios from as far afield as Freetown. Mrs Johnson’s Queen Victoria portrait figure would seem to represent a related genre to the male figures from Lagos donated by Miss Yorke. Although this figure of the British queen was said to have come from Abeokuta, rather than Lagos, it was also collected by a Krio woman, Mrs Johnson, and was evidently carried by her to Bathurst in The Gambia where she gave it to Ridyard. Wooden portrait figures of the British queen are known to have been made at Lagos at least as far back as 1897, which was the year of Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee (see Kingdon 2014: 14, 18). Fine examples of this genre that appear to have been modelled on formal photographic portraits of the queen can be found in several European museum collections, and in the collection of the Fowler Museum at the University of California, Los Angeles. On somewhat shaky stylistic grounds, these wooden portrait figures have invariably been classified as

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‘Yoruba’, yet the figures do not represent a good fit with the canons of particular regional ‘Yoruba’ sculptural styles and there is no evidence that they were used in any indigenous ‘Yoruba’ social context. Many of the earlier Queen Victoria figures (which I classify as Category 1) are smoothly finished with polish or varnish, techniques that are not characteristic of Yoruba sculpture in the indigenous context (see Kingdon 2014: 12). In my 2014 reassessment of these figures, I conclude that they represent a Krio/Saro appropriation of British Jubilee imagery associated with the imperial ‘cult’ of Queen Victoria. British colonial officers in West Africa during the late nineteenth century actively promoted the idea of a benevolent British monarch. Queen Victoria’s birthdays and jubilees were celebrated with public holidays, parades and festivals. These ceremonies sprang from the need to justify British rule through a shared ideology of empire. They were accompanied by lavish expressions of loyalty to the British monarch on the part of Sierra Leone’s Krio elite, who used such occasions to dramatize their own ‘progressive’ achievements and their trust in the British monarchy as a guarantor of them (Ranger 1983: 239). An important characteristic of both the Queen Victoria portrait figures and the male genre figures from Lagos is the well observed way in which the figures’ clothing is represented. The sculptors of these figures were evidently familiar with the details of European costume and can be seen to have emphasized costume as the principal motif of the genre. Significantly, European clothing was an important marker through which Krio and Saro demonstrated their identification with European ‘civilization’. In the context of British imperial culture in West Africa, deficiency of clothing was equated with the ‘primitive’ state of Africans before colonization, so it provided visual evidence of the Africans’ need for ‘civilization’ and part of the rationale for colonization (van den Bersselaar 2011: 95). Europeans formulated their ideas of ‘civilization’ and ‘modernity’ in direct opposition to a denigrated African antecedent ‘other’. West Africans did not necessarily allow this formulation to go uncontested (e.g. see Cole 2001: 6), but elite Krios and Saros, in particular, were anxious to present themselves as being on the side of the forces of ‘civilization’ and ‘modernity’, rather than on the side of those in need of conquest and colonization.34 The demonstration of an elite identification with European ‘civilization’ may have been seen as especially important at the end of the nineteenth century in a place like Lagos, where the Christian descendants of Liberated Africans (Krio/Saro) lived side by side with the indigenous ‘pagan’ Yoruba, and when racist colonial officials, like Governor Henry McCallum, were likely to view all blacks alike as uncivilized ‘natives’ (Hopkins 1966: 146). In fact, elite Krios and Saros used European dress as one aspect of their performance of the ‘civilized’ persona, which, among the wealthy elites, also involved the adoption of European education, cultural codes, and etiquette (see Chapter 5). As Rich has pointed out in relation to Mpongwe of the Gabon Estuary, the adoption of such ‘identities’ would not only have enabled Krio/Saro to distinguish themselves from other Africans, but also to place themselves on a level with white Europeans (Rich 2005: 190). The fact that the male figures Miss Yorke donated to the Liverpool Museum are represented wearing European-style clothing suggests that their meaning in a

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domestic context may have been as markers of Krio/Saro identity, or rather, of Krio/Saro identification with the notion of British ‘civilization’. This may have been especially the case with Mrs Johnson’s Queen Victoria portrait figure, which is represented wearing an impressive array of regal European clothing (Kingdon 2014: 21). Nevertheless, all such figures represent officials or functionaries who upheld the power and prestige of the British colonial states in West Africa. As a consequence, they may all have functioned in Krio households somewhat like ritual professions of loyalty, to dramatize their owners’ ‘civilized’ achievements and their trust in the monarch and her representatives as ‘guarantors’ of these achievements. As an embodiment of female prestige and dignity, Mrs Johnson’s Queen Victoria portrait figure may also have been invested with other, more intimate, significances by its female owner. Many questions remain about these figures, but the fact that Mrs Johnson gave Ridyard her portrait figure of Victoria in 1909 might indicate that it was used in some kind of memorial context after the queen’s death in 1901. Given that Queen Victoria was popularly referred to as ‘Our Mother’ by Krio, it is possible that she became the focus for memorial ceremonies after 1901, perhaps based on the awujoh ceremonies performed for family members. According to Wyse, awujoh ceremonies are still important religious and social events in Krio communities. They celebrate particular anniversaries of prominent deceased individuals and are intended to honour the dead person and ask for his or her ‘guidance, approval and goodwill’ (Wyse 1989: 11). Prosperous Krio women traders are most likely to have had reason to want to perpetuate the memory of Queen Victoria after her death and to seek her ‘guidance’ and ‘goodwill’, especially during the early twentieth century when, as mentioned above, Krio and Saro women were having their ability to access labour and credit undermined, along with their autonomy. Little is known about Mrs W. E. Johnson, so we do not know what kind of goods or produce she would have dealt in, but we do know that she had links with Lagos and Abeokuta, suggested by the artefacts that she collected from those places. Her Nigerian links and address in Bathurst, suggest that she belonged to a well-established, but poorly documented, diaspora of female Aku (Oku in recent literature) traders who travelled widely in West Africa in pursuit of their commercial affairs. Miss Yorke also seems to have had commercial links to Nigeria, not only because her male figures seem to have been made by a Lagos sculptor, but also because she is recorded as having donated a figurative wooden container from Lagos to the Liverpool Museum in 1911 (11.9.11.20, now lost except for lid). Both women are likely to have prospered during the nineteenth century, but the initial success of Krio female traders had been dependent on a set of economic and social conditions that had largely disappeared by the twentieth century. During the first decades of the nineteenth century there had been many Oku women among the ‘Recaptives’ who were processed through the Mixed Commission Court at Freetown. After being ‘liberated’, some of them were able to take control of their own destiny by employing their commercial skills to compete as intermediaries in the European trade with the interior.‘Recaptives’ could spend a fairly long period in custody, waiting to be processed through the court in Freetown. In the end, however, they were

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released with an understanding of their legal status under colonial law. As a group, Liberated Africans would have been made to feel socially inferior to the early settlers and to Europeans but some apparently learned to wield litigation in order to protect their rights and interests. Oku women were particularly noted for their litigiousness, which, if accurate, may help explain their success (Fyfe 1962: 191; Horton [1868] 1969: 140). An absence of family or clan obligations meant that they were not tied to the domestic sphere, while the monogamous marriage system imposed by the British, allied with the apprenticeship system, meant that they had the time and the labour necessary for their commercial operations (White 1981: 626, 628). Their economic independence allowed them to adopt a flexible attitude to marital relations and they travelled widely in pursuit of trade. By the 1860s Oku women were counted ‘among the foremost traders in the River Gambia, advancing considerable distance in the interior’ (Horton [1868] 1969: 71). But, while some Sierra Leonean Liberated African women amassed considerable wealth through trade, they also faced numerous problems and threats. Frances White has pointed out that women traders from the colony were frequent victims of plundering in the Sierra Leone hinterland. In response, some of them adopted the strategy of joining indigenous initiation associations, so that their activities were regulated according to indigenous systems of authority. Others were sometimes successful in appealing to colony authorities for help in redressing abuses (White 1981: 636–37). Some were themselves reported to have perpetrated abuses, but, as a rule, they would have had to rely on their own devices in order to maintain authority over their employees and in order to command the general respect necessary for their safety and success, and to maintain their social standing within their own social group. By the late nineteenth century, Christian missionaries in West Africa were widely promoting the ideal of the patriarchal nuclear family, in which men acted as ‘providers and decision makers’ while women’s roles were restricted to the domestic sphere. At the same time colonial culture and officialdom were instigating processes which, in Mann’s words, facilitated the ‘economic subordination of women and the feminization of poverty’ (Mann 1991: 702, 705). All Africans involved in West Africa’s external trade faced competition from well-capitalized European firms, but women were at a particular disadvantage with respect to men when it came to raising credit and labour, so that they were increasingly excluded from the external trade (Mann 2007: 217). By the beginning of the twentieth century, most Krio traders involved in interregional commerce were struggling and none more so than the women. In this context it may be significant that Miss B. Yorke was unmarried when she made her donations to the Liverpool Museum in 1911. It is not likely that she belonged to the elite levels of Freetown’s Krio society, so she may have been under less pressure to conform to Christian marriage ideals.35 Her unmarried status would have left her relatively free from ties to the domestic sphere, which would have allowed her the independence to travel in pursuit of her commercial affairs. Times would nevertheless have been hard for her and the fact that in 1911 she gave Ridyard her carved wooden figures from Lagos representing colonial officials and functionaries, might suggest that, by this time, she no longer regarded such functionaries to be the guarantors of her success in the way that she may have done in earlier times.

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As a married woman, Mrs W. E. Johnson may have faced slightly different difficulties to those of Miss Yorke, but she may likewise have given Ridyard her portrait figure of Queen Victoria at a time when she could no longer hold on to the belief that her status and achievements were guaranteed by the benevolent power of the British state. Somewhat puzzling, however, is the fact that she held on to the figure so long after Queen Victoria’s death in January 1901. Significantly, the figure can be said to embody an image of authority and dignity according to the indices of a Yoruba (or Oku Yoruba) representational code (see Kingdon 2014: 16). Mrs Johnson would doubtless have understood that the power and prestige of the British state was ritually dramatized through the prestige that was accorded its figurehead, Queen Victoria. As a woman who was also monarch, however, Victoria represented an inviolable embodiment of female dignity. Thus, even after the queen’s death, a figure of Queen Victoria may have continued to hold special personal significances for a trader like Mrs Johnson, given the threats she faced to her social status and interests. Whether or not Mrs Johnson belonged to the higher levels of Krio society in Bathurst, her social standing would have partly depended on her conforming to Victorian ideals of married womanhood. In such a context, she may have sought creatively to appropriate the image of Queen Victoria as an ideal of female prestige that did not involve the vulnerabilities and disappointments associated with the elite Christian wife’s economic dependence and loss of autonomy.36 Whether this was articulated in the context of memorial ceremonies for the British queen, as hypothesized above, is a moot point. But something of this sort must have been involved, otherwise why would Mrs Johnson still be in possession of a Queen Victoria figure in late 1908, about seven years after the British queen’s death and the succession of King Edward VII ?

The Muslim Donors: Colonial Exclusion, African Regional Trajectories In 1906 three men and three women with addresses in Fourah Bay, one of the predominantly Muslim precincts on the Sierra Leone Peninsula, gave Ridyard at least fifteen objects for the Liverpool Museum. Their details were recorded in the museum’s accession registers as, J. B. S. Cole of Savage Square, Mrs Adejatoo Garber of Fourah Bay, Mohammed Daniel Job of Abbot Street, Mr Minuel Savay of Dan Street, Mrs Mary Anne Marie Gillen and Mrs Charlotte Gillen, also of Fourah Bay. Late the next year, another Fourah Bay man, Mr Abubakar Savage of Savage Square, gave Ridyard a further three items. Although all these donors were Muslim, this is not evident from some of their names, which are evidently of Christian and British origin. In fact, Muslim Krio often had two sets of names, one Christian/English and the other Arabic, or some combination of the two (Harrell-Bond, Howard and Skinner 1978: 123). Although Liberated Africans began adopting the names of settlers, European patrons and other prominent Europeans soon after they began to be settled at Sierra Leone (Fyfe 1962: 127), the fact that Muslim Liberated Africans also adopted this practice, is indicative of the exclusionary principles enshrined in the colonial regime and exercised

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in relation to the Muslim population of the peninsula. The Sierra Leone colony was understood by successive colonial officials and missionaries to have been ‘established expressly for the purpose of abolishing the slave trade and the spreading of Christianity and civilization’.37 Yet a significant minority of Liberated Africans were Muslim and they included Mandinka as well as Hausa and Yoruba speakers. Many Muslims converted to Christianity, but others gravitated towards the existing communities of Mandinka and Fula from the Sierra Leone hinterland who had settled in Freetown and established Muslim institutions. Muslim Liberated Africans sought to strengthen their Islamic affiliations by sending students from their community to receive advanced Islamic education at Dinguiraye in Guinea, an influential centre of Tijani orthodoxy. These students subsequently returned to take up leading positions among Freetown’s Muslims (Ibrahim 1993: 12–15). Muslim influence in the region was initially characterized by most Europeans to be a threat to the colony’s objectives and was subjected to severe impediments, especially under some of the earlier governors (see Cole 2013: 81–92). Official discrimination meant that while many Islamic Liberated Africans remained Muslim in private, they adopted European Christian names in public, or nominally converted to Christianity. In order for them and their children to be able to compete with Christians in the external trade, and in securing government and professional positions, Muslim Liberated Africans needed an English education. But English education in Freetown was largely controlled by the Christian missions, which favoured Christian pupils. As a consequence, many Muslim Liberated Africans assumed Christian names so that they, or their children, could gain admission to Christian-run schools. Landownership on the Sierra Leone Peninsula was similarly discriminatory. Indeed, in February 2010, Ade Rahman, the great granddaughter of the donor Mrs Adejatoo Garber, explained to me that the original name of the Garbers was Lewally and that her husband’s branch of the Lewally family had assumed the name Garber because, at the time, a person could not easily acquire land on the Sierra Leone Peninsula unless they had a European sounding name. Thus, many Muslim Liberated Africans adapted to the hypocrisy of imperial claims to universal inclusion, with a few tricks of their own in order to try to overcome some of the more detrimental exclusionary practices exercised against them in the Sierra Leone colony. Although it is true to say that Muslim Liberated Africans in Sierra Leone had to face the full force of colonial exclusion, many were able to make the most of the opportunities that presented themselves to literate and English-educated Muslim adherents in an officially Christian colony. In particular, they were able to pioneer profitable commercial relations, alongside close cultural relations, with co-religionists in the Sierra Leone hinterland and in the Islamicized states along the northeastern trade routes. Some of these routes had been used for trade long before the nineteenth century (Ijagbemi 1970: 45) and among the more profitable goods carried along them were kola nuts. By the dawn of the twentieth century there would have been few sectors of the West African trade that still remained relatively free from European competition, but one sector that did was the age-old trade in kola nuts. In Sierra Leone, as elsewhere at this time, the kola nut trade was primarily controlled by Muslims, who

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had distributed the nuts via long-distance trade routes throughout West Africa for centuries. Kola is still valued as a stimulant and continues to be used in ceremonial contexts in the West African forest region, where the nuts are grown, and throughout much of the savannah and southern Saharan region (see Lovejoy 1980). The nuts are offered during rites associated with engagement, marriage, naming, funerals, and, less formally, in greeting and socializing, and to express hospitality. Kola nut trees (Cola nitida) flourished in the forests of the Sierra Leone Protectorate. They were harvested especially by women and children and were purchased from tree owners, or at local markets, by agents from Fourah Bay and transported to merchants in Fourah Bay and elsewhere on the Sierra Leone Peninsula. Sierra Leonean kola nuts are still renowned for their quality and were apparently in high demand along the length of the West African coast, including Nigeria. Oku women were prominent in the Nigerian trade too and were able to exploit their connections with emigrant Oku in Lagos, who acted as importing agents there (White 1981: 634). Although men tended to dominate at the higher levels of the kola trade, in Freetown, and at a few other coastal towns, there were a significant number of women at the highest level of the trade who had established themselves as major kola nut exporters.38 Early in 1906 the kola nut merchant J. B. S. Cole of Savage Square, Fourah Bay, gave Ridyard a ‘Carved Calabash with burnt decoration’ from Lagos (16.2.06.14, now lost) as well as a ‘plaited grass hat’ from Port Loko (16.2.06.13, also now lost). The fact that Cole collected the decorated calabash at Lagos suggests that he would have visited that town on business and that he exported Sierra Leonean kola nuts to Nigeria. Kola nuts are reputed to be mildly addictive, if used intensively, and they have a high caffeine content. By around 1900 Europeans would have been familiar with energizing confectionary and beverages made with kola nuts, such as ‘kola-wine, kola-tina, kola-chocolate’ and even ‘Kola Champagne’.39 Some kola would have been exported to Europe for such products as well as for medicinal uses, but it is clear that the greatest demand for Sierra Leonean kola from Fourah Bay merchants at this time came from The Gambia and Senegal. This is because Senegal and The Gambia fall outside the kola growing belt and so produced no nuts of their own, yet the region generated a huge appetite for kola, especially from the late nineteenth century after the commercialization of peanut growing for the European vegetable oil markets. The peanut fields of eastern Senegal and The Gambia drew thousands of migrant labourers from northeastern Senegal and Mali who spent a season working in Wolof and Mandinka plantations in the fertile river basins before returning to their homelands with their wages converted into consumer goods.40 The migrant labourers appear to have been given kola as a booster to keep them working long hours during the peanut cultivating season without feeling hunger or thirst.41 In Sierra Leone Oku women traders dominated the lower levels of the trade. They travelled into the Sierra Leone hinterland, where they fostered relationships with interior communities and encouraged them to increase kola production in order to meet growing demand in the Senegambian region. Other Oku women or men acted as exporters who sent their cargoes in steamers to agents or importers in towns

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like Bathurst, in The Gambia, and Saint-Louis, in Senegal, to be transported up river and sold in the interior. Huge fortunes were made by Sierra Leonean kola nut merchants, especially during the second part of the nineteenth century. Kola profits were invested in real estate and Fourah Bay still boasts a few striking examples of multistorey lateritic stone and brick houses, in the so-called ‘tropical Georgian’ style, that were built by successful kola merchants during this period. One such house that still stands in Fourah Bay’s Dan Street, was built by the donor listed in the Mayer Museum accession register as ‘Mr. Minuel Savay’ of Dan Street, Fourah Bay (Plate 10). When I visited the house in 2010, I found it occupied by Kosnah Savage who explained that the name ‘Minuel Savay’, as recorded in the Liverpool Museum accession register, was ‘a mistake’, because there was no Minuel Savay who had lived in Dan Street. She said that the donor’s correct name would have been Mohammed Muyu Deen Savage and she explained that it was he, her own grandfather, who had built the house in Dan Street. Kosnah related that her grandfather had been a Mandinka, born in Abioko village, Kanu Bay, Banjul (then Bathurst) in The Gambia. Literate in English as well as Arabic and also fluent in Mandinka and Wolof, he first came to Freetown in connection with the kola nut trade, through which he became very wealthy. In addition to owning a house in Bathurst, where he had a Wolof wife, Kosnah stated that her grandfather, who was also known as Abdul Salami Savage, had built two other houses in Freetown, in addition to her own, in order to house his three Freetown wives and their children. Savage is not a Mandinka name but, rather, an English one that had been assumed by a number of Oku Muslims, so it was probably the name that Mohammed Muyu Deen Savage adopted in order to facilitate his acquisition of property in the Fourah Bay area of Freetown. The house that Mohammed Muyu Deen Savage built in Dan Street is a three-storey affair, with British-style sash windows and a cellar-like ground floor (see Chapter  5) whose three street-facing shuttered windows would once have opened to reveal the family’s retail store within. Another of Ridyard’s Fourah Bay collaborators, Abubakar Savage, had built a similar house in Savage Square, but like so many other old Krio houses, it was razed to the ground by the Revolutionary United Front (RUF ) rebel assault on Freetown in 1999.42 Like Mohammed Muyu Deen Savage, Abubakar Savage had also transformed his social standing and the material conditions of his existence through the kola nut trade. In fact, he had been one of the most successful traders and his accumulated capital worth was expressed in the ‘more than ten houses’ of various types that he built to house his many wives and children. According to one of Abubakar’s grandsons Hamid, Abubakar Savage was a first generation ‘Creole’. In other words, he was born in the colony of Sierra Leone to a father who had arrived at Freetown as a captive African on board an illegal slave ship apprehended by a British naval cruiser. Once settled in Freetown, Abubakar’s father had earned his living as a fisherman, but his son Abubakar had done extremely well for himself. Hamid related how his grandfather had risen to become president of the Fourah Bay Community, in which role he acted as an intermediary between the local Muslim community and the city government. Many in Fourah Bay still remember Abubakar Savage as ‘a very prominent philanthropist who helped a great many people’.

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In early 1906 Mohammed Muyu Deen Savage gave Ridyard an ‘Ebony walking stick inlaid with silver filigree; with hippo tooth handle’ made at Tivaouane in Senegal (16.2.06.11, now lost). Tivaouane was a station town three hours ride from Dakar on the Dakar–Saint-Louis railway line in the heart of fertile peanut-growing land. It would have been a place to which Mohammed Muyu Deen Savage exported large volumes of kola nuts and the ebony staff with hippo ivory handle that he gave to Ridyard in 1906 may initially have been received as a gift from one of his Wolof trading partners in the town, or from a local Wolof headman. Muyu Deen Savage made a second gift to Ridyard about seven months after donating the ebony staff. This was a fine Mande woven fibre hat with leather trimmings (3.9.06.11, see Plate 9) from Perai on the upper Gambia River. Perai was probably also a place that provided a market for Muyu Deen Savage’s kola nuts, but it was situated a few hundred miles up the Gambia River and could only have been reached after a long and arduous boat trip at considerable risk to his precious cargo. Abubakar Savage, for his part, donated three wooden ladles with pyro-engraved decoration to the Liverpool Museum at the end of 1907 (18.1.08.6–8, see Figures  24, 25 & 26). The ladles were acquired at Matam on the Senegal River, which Ridyard recorded as being ‘5 days journey by boat from St. Louis, Senegal’. Matam is very likely to have provided a market for Abubakar Savage’s kola nuts, and, although the risks to his delicate cargo on such a long

Figures 24, 25 & 26 Three pyro-engraved wooden ladles from Matam on the Senegal River, Senegal. Presented by Abubakar Savage in 1908 through Ridyard. 18.1.08.6 (top), 18.1.08.7 (middle), 18.1.08.8 (bottom).

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riverboat journey would have been great, so would the profits, once the cargo was safely disembarked. Kola nut was a high value, but also highly perishable, commodity, so considerable care was required in order to keep the nuts fresh during their transportation. The nuts had to be individually wrapped in a special variety of leaf, which kept them cool and stopped any spoilt nuts from coming into contact with fresh ones. Carefully wrapped kola parcels had to be packed into wide-weave hessian sacks to be transported by steamer from Freetown to Bathurst, Dakar or Saint-Louis, where the sacks were transferred to trains or river boats for the next leg of their journey. The nuts were particularly sensitive to heat, bruising and salt water, so a merchant was exposed to financial risk if his goods fell into the hands of careless or malicious baggage handlers, more so because the price of the nuts tended to fluctuate dramatically due to the seasonal demands of peanut producers in Senegal and The Gambia. In 1915, the crew of the SS Adansi, an Elder, Dempster & Co. steamship, caused a ‘great depression’ among the kola traders in The Gambia when it delivered a cargo of Sierra Leonean nuts in a burnt condition. The kola nut traders’ losses were ‘anything between £10 and £200’ and the ‘depression’ was as much emotional as economic because, as The Sierra Leone Weekly News of 21 August that year reported: The trade season being over a large number of the traders up the rivers have come down and Bathurst is quite full of old faces – familiar and strange – to one or the other. Things are very dull and all are praying for a change for the better.43

The evidence suggests that the burning of the kola nut traders’ cargo on board the SS Adansi was deliberate and malicious, because earlier in the year Fourah Bay kola traders had had prior cause for complaint when The Sierra Leone Weekly News reported that: Serious information has reached us of a matter which is causing great anxiety to our Sierra Leone Kola Traders, both male and female . . . . we are informed, that while steamers have regularly arrived and taken kola nuts belonging to Syrians to Dakar and thereabouts, the cargoes belonging to our Sierra Leone traders are permitted to lie for weeks together in their hands and to create anxiety of the worst kind. It is generally believed that this is due to the lamentable death of Mr. E.C. Butcher, who in the Company’s interest was always just and fair in his dealings with shippers and made no preference whatever. . . . We pray on behalf of these willing and industrious workers that the steamer authorities may make it possible that the kola nut cargoes of Sierra Leone traders may be despatched with more regularity and promptness than have been the case recently.44

While there were no Sierra Leone Weekly News reports of malicious damage to kola nut consignments on Elder, Dempster & Co.’s steamships in 1906 and 1907, it is very likely that individual incidents of careless handling would have occurred from time to time to the detriment of the kola merchants involved. However, it would seem unlikely that

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such incidents took place on board the SS Addah, Ridyard’s ship from mid–1905 to about the end of 1908. Ridyard would have been well aware of the sensitivity of kola cargoes to heat, bruising and salt water, and his botanical interest in the nuts would seem to be confirmed by museum records, which show that the Fourah Bay kola trader J. B. S. Cole gave him ‘3 Kola nut pods’ for the Liverpool Museum in about April 1906.45 Indeed, Ridyard may well have played a role in ensuring safe handling and storage of kola nut cargoes on his ship. Museum records show that Ridyard was on good terms with the SS Addah’s Chief Officer W. L. Henderson, who gave Ridyard several items for the Liverpool Museum in about May 1906 (see Chapter 3). A ship’s chief officer had responsibility for the deck areas and the handling of cargo, among other things, and Mr Henderson’s careful oversight of cargoes on the SS Addah, perhaps informed by Ridyard, would have ensured appropriate stowing of kola nuts on board the ship. As we saw in Chapter 3, Ridyard’s collecting operation was characterized by an element of reciprocity. So, it may have been partly in gratitude for the safe and unprejudiced transport of their cargoes on the SS Addah that the Muslim donors of Fourah Bay presented Ridyard with gifts for the Liverpool Museum. The female donors with addresses in Fourah Bay who presented Ridyard with gifts for the Liverpool Museum may have had similar motivations, although there is little evidence to suggest that any of them were major kola nut traders in their own right. My field research in Freetown in early 2010 revealed that Mary Anne Marie Gillen was a trader of assorted items including cloth and okulapa (fancy Yoruba cloth for women). However, she was the wife of Adolphus Markie Gillen of Canton Street, a successful kola trader who died at MacCarthy Island in The Gambia. She also had a daughter Ramatu, who became one of Mohammed Muyu Deen Savage’s wives. Mary Anne Marie Gillen probably sold her wares from the shop within the bottom storey of the house at Canton Street, a two-storey stone and board house that was burnt down with all its contents during the RUF rebel assault on Freetown in 1999.46 In about August 1906, Mary Anne Marie Gillen gave Ridyard a Temne coil basket from Port Loko (3.9.06.13) for the Liverpool Museum.47 Port Loko was an important trading centre with a major market and Mary Anne Marie may have given the basket she collected there to Ridyard for reasons connected with her own independent affairs or with the affairs of her husband. However, given the complex family arrangements of the Muslim kola nut merchants, many of whom had houses and families both in Fourah Bay and in The Gambia, Ridyard may also have received some gifts from Muslim donors in return for acting as an unofficial postman for distant members of their dispersed families. Museum records show that C. W. Harty, the purser on Ridyard’s ship the SS Addah, was also a collaborator in Ridyard’s collecting operation because he gave Ridyard a warri game board (14.10.07.10, now lost) from the Gold Coast to the ‘ethnography’ collections in October 1907.48 As the officer responsible for handling the finances on his ship, the SS Addah’s purser may have helped Ridyard to bestow favours on some of the Muslim donors. These may have consisted in transfers of family or business funds from The Gambia to Sierra Leone and vice versa. Given that Ridyard was a Christian, it may seem surprising that he received gifts of West African objects for the Liverpool Museum from Muslim donors. However, it is as

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well to remember that Ridyard was a Methodist and would himself have been raised in a discriminatory environment as a Nonconformist Christian in Victorian Britain. So, it was probably precisely because Muslims were discriminated against, and excluded from many of the opportunities available to educated Christian Africans in early twentieth-century Sierra Leone, that aroused Ridyard’s sympathy and partly motivated his engagement with the six Muslim men and women who presented him with gifts for the Liverpool Museum in 1906 and 1907. But we should not interpret Ridyard’s engagement with Sierra Leonean Muslims as a consequence of Ridyard’s agency and intentions alone. Significantly, Cole has argued that Krio identity was forged in nineteenth-century West Africa through a dynamic process that ‘allowed for and transcended ethnic, cultural, class, and religious differences’ (Cole 2013: 3). Muslim Krio involvement in the kola nut trade evidently bound them up with others in imperial networks of exchange. And while the kola nut trade itself was ancient, imperial transport infrastructures helped to generate flows of people, goods, products, artefacts and ideas from diverse sources on an unprecedented scale. Moreover, the particular nature of their trade stock, the stimulating, potentially addictive, yet productivity enhancing kola nut, graphically illustrates the way that these exchange networks helped to create new cycles of desire, interdependence and dependency, which were part of the fabric of colonization (Appadurai 1996; Henare 2005: 106). Ridyard’s collecting operation for the Liverpool Museum should certainly be viewed alongside other imperial cycles of desire and flows of materials. It may well have been recognized as such by the Muslim donors who fed his collecting obsession, but on a broader canvas, these donors’ collaboration with Ridyard should probably be seen as indicative of a recognition that their interests, like those of many of their Sierra Leonean compatriots scattered across western Africa, were bound up, to a degree, with those of the British Empire and its accumulative projects (Kopytoff 1965: 199). More specifically, the collaboration of Muslim donors in Ridyard’s collecting project suggests a particular motivation on their part towards participation in a qualified way, and despite officially imposed marginalization, in the flows of empire, through which new ideas, activities and commercial opportunities were created, and through which they were able to forge new identities and statuses for themselves on West Africa’s Atlantic coast.

Conclusion According to Spitzer, whose perspective was drawn from a focus on well-educated Krio male elites, Krio retained a loyalty to the British Empire and connection to Britain, because they were ‘grateful to British philanthropy for freeing their ancestors from slavery, for educating them, and for placing them at what they believed to be the vanguard of black peoples on the African continent’ (Spitzer 1974: 41). From this received point of view, the Krio of Sierra Leone might seem to have had clear motives for giving African artefacts to the museum in Liverpool through Arnold Ridyard. For example, they may have wanted to signal their collaboration with British imperial projects that claimed to be bringing ‘progress’ and ‘civilization’ to Africa. But the picture

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presented in this chapter, with regard to the cultural artefacts gifted to the Liverpool Museum by the Sierra Leonean donors in the early twentieth century, suggests something different. Whether the items they donated through Ridyard were used by them, or collected as ornaments, and whether they were purchased, or acquired as gifts, the diverse and disparate origins of the items reflect Krio openness to engagement and interconnection with other cultural groups in western Africa. From a museological point of view, the artefacts acquired from Sierra Leonean donors described in this chapter are among the most problematic of all those that the Liverpool Museum acquired from West Africans. The disparate origins of many of them mean that they do not fit neatly into the predetermined categories – ethnic, geographical and aesthetic – defined by the museum’s technical and epistemological systems. Indeed, the range of western African material items that early twentieth-century Krios acquired, dealt in, consumed and donated to museums, not only marks out the extraordinary geographical trajectories of the Krio diaspora, it also reflects the way this diaspora created complex webs of social interaction throughout many parts of western Africa. Where the broader picture is concerned, the powerful forces of connection and dislocation engendered by marine travel, enabled or encouraged by the shifting parameters of a paternalistic colonial state, played a fundamental role in shaping Krio collective experience and no doubt contributed to their awareness of the complex layering within it. Indeed, Krio diasporic relations would seem to have been at the core of a dynamic, articulated system, in which different elements and influences from diverse sources were appropriated, depending on the contingencies of context, to create a flexible and heterogeneous culture that was fundamentally trans-African. Within this system, African cultural artefacts appear to have been deployed as part of a currency of meanings that expressed modes of connection and identification with various places, as well as calibrated professions of trust or confidence in particular people, institutions and ideas.

Notes 1 A drawing of Johnson in his hat made by John Thomas Smith in December 1815 appeared in Smith’s Vagabondiana (Smith 1817: 33ff ). 2 See Fyfe 1962; Peterson 1969; Porter 1963; Schwarz 2007; Lovejoy and Schwarz 2015; for the early history of British colonial projects in Sierra Leone. 3 Cole (2013: 8) has stated that ‘Liberated Africans of Yoruba origin were known as Oku, a term derived from their common salutation of “Oku’o”.’ He says that it was the Tribal Administration System in 1905 that led British colonial officials to anglicize the term ‘and appended it to their faith, making it Aku Mohammedan’. However, this latter statement and Cole’s assertion that ‘neither the Liberated Africans nor their progeny in Krio society . . . identified themselves as Aku’ are contradicted in usages made in reports in African owned and edited newspapers, where Aku appears before and after 1905. For example, see Sierra Leone Times, 16 July 1898, 8 (49): 2. 4 According to Peterson (1969: 271) the asusu associations of Freetown, in which members pooled their resources each week and then took turns to withdraw the accumulated amount, had their origins in Yoruba trading practices.

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5 James Fergusson to the Rev. Thomas Dove, Badagry, 2 March 1841. Nigerian Record Office: ECC 2/1096 (quoted in Kopytoff 1965: 48). 6 Forbes to Bruce, Lagos, 9 December 1851. Papers Relative to the Reduction of Lagos, Parliamentary Papers 1852. LIV (221), p. 180 (quoted in Kopytoff 1965: 51). 7 See, for example, Peel 1983: 263. 8 Birmingham University, CMSP : CA 3/0 14/4B. 9 SLWN, 9 November 1912, 29 (10): 7; Walls, Andrew F. (1960), Materials for the Study of Sierra Leone Church History – Miscellaneous Items (document in Fourah Bay University Library, RS 276.64 W1 59). Fyfe 1962: 103. Melchior Renner married his Nova Scotian housekeeper, Elizabeth Richards, who outlived Melchior by about five years and acted as superintendent of Kent village until her death in May 1826 (see Sibthorpe [1906] 1970: 33, 38). 10 In 1856 the African Steamship Company’s vessels began sailing out of the Mersey (Hollet 1995; Sibthorpe [1906] 1970: 66; also Haws 1990: 27). 11 1860 saw the introduction of Alfred Holt’s fuel efficient high-pressure compound engine, while the faster and more economical triple expansion engine underwent successive developments during the 1870s (Lynn 1989: 229). 12 TNA , CO /96/40, No. 4530, C. W. Gregory to CO, 19 May 1856 (quoted in Dike 1956: 115). 13 CMSP : CA 3/0 14/4B. 14 Renner was among a number of Sierra Leoneans who owned steamers in West Africa for collecting produce. Lynn states that MacFoy used one on the Sierra Leone coast and Leigh had one on the Niger River (Lynn 1997: 140). 15 CMSP CA 3/04/115, Crowther to Venn, 30 August 1862 (quoted in Lynn 1992a: 433). 16 The African Times, 22 May 1869, 126 (quoted in Lynn 1992a: 437). The rivalry between the two companies was short-lived, however, and in January 1870 they agreed to fix sailing dates and rates for freight and passengers (Davies 1973: 62). 17 The African Times, 30 October 1874 (quoted in Lynn 1992a: 437). 18 In the end Renner found that the boat did not fulfil his expectations and may have sold it to buy a larger one. See CMSP : CA 3/0 14/4B. 19 See Kimble 1963: 97–99; Fyfe 1962: 615; Tasie 1978: 90, 96; Webster 1964: 68; McCaskie 2004: 182. 20 Fyfe 1991:1–9, 35–40 (quoted in Schwarz 2011: 126). 21 See also Chapter 5 for cultural factors in the Krio tendency to seek opportunities widely in colonial West Africa. 22 Information on William Charles DeGraft Rosenior provided thanks to Nigel BrowneDavies, personal communication, 12 October 2013. 23 These figures probably underestimate the reality, because in some cases, where their addresses are not given, it is impossible to know whether certain donors with European names recorded in the museum accession registers are Sierra Leonean or not. 24 Sierra Leone Royal Gazette, December 1905, p. 648, lists Hotobah During as ‘Probationer, Audit Department’. 25 On 1 May 1899, the first thirty-two-mile section of the government railway from Freetown to Songo in the Sierra Leone Protectorate was opened. By the end of 1905, it had been extended to a distance of 221 miles. Prior to 1899, the French and Leopold II of the Belgians had built railway lines in their African colonies (Sibthorpe [1906] 1970: 134). 26 The Nigerian entrepreneur H. A. Shanu, born in Otta near Lagos, was himself the owner of a steam launch on the Congo River (Hochschild 2002: 218; Morimont

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2005: 213). Shanu gave Ridyard a fishing spear from Bangala on the upper Congo River (24.9.00.49) in 1900 (see Chapter 3). Hotobah During’s gift of butterflies (25.8.14.1) are recorded in the Derby Museum accession register D: Invertebrates & General. His mineral donations are recorded in the Seventy-Second Annual Report, Liverpool Museums, 1925: 37. Archdeacon Crowther’s breadfruit fruit donation (20.5.01.1) is recorded in the Derby Museum accession register, 1898–1905, botany E. His coal samples are recorded in the Seventy-Second Annual Report, Liverpool Museums, 1925: 37. Ridyard had retired by 1920 but clearly maintained his friendship with Crowther, because Crowther made his donation of coal samples in 1920 through Ridyard. Archdeacon Crowther’s donations from the Niger Delta cannot be fully dealt with in this study and will be the subject of a later publication. For a brief preliminary account, see Kingdon 2008: 36–37. The term ‘country cloth’ would have applied to various types of cloth mostly woven on the West African narrow strip loom by, for example, Temne, Mende, and Sherbro weavers outside the Sierra Leone Peninsula. The basket donated by Gillen (3.9.06.13) is now in the collection of the American Museum of Natural History in New York, with the accession number 90.0/1996. It was one of 102 objects sent to New York in 1907 as part of an exchange of ‘duplicate’ objects between the Liverpool Museum and the AMNH . Interview with Rashid Gillen, Freetown, 22 February 2010. Interview with Tunde Eccles James, Freetown, 19 March 2010. The Sierra Leone Weekly News editorial, 10 May 1890. Mann (1983: 45) states that the Lagos elite ‘seems to have regarded trade as unsuitable for young ladies’. See Mann 1985 and 1983: 56 for the pros and cons of Christian marital ideals as experienced by elite Saro women in Lagos. TNA , CO 267/23, Council Chambers, Sierra Leone, 31 October 1849 (quoted in Cole 2013: 78). SLWN, 8 May 1912, 28 (39): 1, contains an advertisement which reads ‘A LADY who understands about Kola Nuts is ready to supply firms, &c. abroad or at home, with Kola Nuts in large quantities.’ SLWN, 19 May 1900, 16 (37): 294. Kola Champagne appears to have been marketed as a stimulant especially to women (see Kiralfy 1900: iii). See Fernand Batude, L’Arachide au Sénégal, Paris 1941: 38–39 (quoted in Brooks 1975: 46). Information on this use of kola in Senegambia was imparted to me by Alhaji Abdul Aziz Cole of Savage Square, Freetown (conversation of 25 March 2010). Interview with Hamid Savage, a descendant of Abubakar Savage, conducted at Fourah Bay, Freetown, 11 February 2010. SLWN, 21 August, 31 (51): 6. SLWN, 6 March, 31 (28): 9. Derby Museum accession register, 1906, botany E (6), accession record for 15.6.1906.1. Interview with sisters Marie and Safi (née Lamin), granddaughters of Mary Anne Marie Gillen, Freetown, 9 March 2010. This basket is now in the collection of the AMNH in New York, with the accession number 90.0/1996. Mayer Museum accession register record for 14.10.07.10.

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A primary aim of the research carried out in Freetown for this study, early in 2010, was to trace living descendants of the Sierra Leonean donors who had presented African artefacts to the World Museum collection at the beginning of the twentieth century. My expectation was that the donors’ descendants would have held on to family documents and stories relating to their ancestors that would allow a picture of the identity of each donor to be built up and help illuminate the motives they may have had for contributing to Ridyard’s collecting operation. The style and scale of the Sierra Leonean donors’ homes, I imagined, would also tell their own story about their former owners’ social and economic status, assuming that some of their homes still remained in existence. I arrived in Freetown eleven years after the devastating RUF rebel bombardment of the city in 1999, which destroyed many old houses along with all their contents, so I was sanguine about what material traces of the donors’ identities might still survive to be decoded within the forlorn and neglected landscape of Freetown’s remaining architectural heritage. But while I was distressed to find that some of the Sierra Leonean donors’ former homes had indeed been razed to the ground in 1999, this did not seem to significantly hinder my efforts to trace their living descendants. In fact, I was surprised to find that when the Freetown address of a donor was recorded in the museum’s accession register, it often led me to a plot still occupied by descendants of the donor who had lived there in the early twentieth century. A couple of plots remained rubble-filled ruins (Figure 27), while others boasted recently built houses in contemporary style. A few still retained original nineteenth-century houses, built by the donors who had inhabited them at the beginning of the twentieth century. This continuity in family ownership of plots and houses was especially noticeable in the case of the Muslim donors whose addresses were all in the Fourah Bay area of Freetown. On sharing this latter observation with an elderly Krio woman from an illustrious Christian family, I set her off on a revealing critique of her own community and its younger generation. She lamented that many Freetown Krio she knew had sold their houses and built new ones or moved abroad. ‘They should never sell’, she insisted, ‘you rent it out, because you never know what the future holds’. She regretted the destruction of the old houses and said that the old ancestral houses should be kept and rented out when a new one is built. The fact that people are selling their houses these days means that they ‘lose their identity’.1

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Figure 27 Plot and remains of the Gibson family frame house in Saunders Street, Freetown. Bombed during Revolutionary United Front (RUF ) rebel war 1999. Permission Patricia Gibson. Photo: the author 2010.

Freetown Architecture and Krio Self-orientation One of Ridyard’s wealthiest Muslim collaborators, Mohammed Muyu Deen Savage of Dan Street (see Chapter 4) had built one of the best-preserved houses in Freetown’s Fourah Bay quarter. It was an attractive, three-storey, stone-built house, with an L-shaped plan and a cellar-like ground floor, whose three street-facing windows held simple wooden shutters (Plate 10). The two upper stories seemed airy and light, with British-style sash windows on three sides set beneath ornamental brickwork arches. Under each window was a decorative relief-work panel in stone showing an abstract vine-like design. The top-storey back room had a dormer window called an okiaja, with a good aspect, from which family members would once have been able to spot callers and other people approaching from a distance. The interior wood panelling and carved lattice-work features were mostly painted brown and were apparently original to the house. The furnishings were mostly from the twentieth century except for a finely fashioned mahogany couch dating from the nineteenth century, that was still in use in a ground floor bedroom (see Figure 28). Despite the fact that Mohammed Muyu Deen Savage was not descended from Liberated Africans (see Chapter 4), this was unquestionably a Krio house of a type that the nineteenth-century Sierra Leonean historian and school master A. B. C. Sibthorpe

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Figure 28 Nineteenth-century Krio couch in Mohammed Muyu Deen Savage’s house in Dan Street. Permission Kosnah Savage. Photo: the author 2010.

would have described as belonging typically to the ‘highest grade’ of Liberated African. Sibthorpe’s grading of Liberated Africans in his popular text, The History of Sierra Leone (three editions between 1868 and 1906), was linked to the era of rapid social change that took place on the Sierra Leone Peninsula towards the middle of the nineteenth century and was set out under the title ‘Advancing State of the Liberated Africans’. His system of social strata was based on the Liberated Africans’ trajectory of upward social mobility as expressed in the architecture of their dwellings. Those who had attained ‘highest-grade’ status, Sibthorpe said, were persons who: occupied two-story stone houses, enclosed all round with spacious piazzas, built from the proceeds of their own industry. In several of them were to be found mahogany chairs, tables, sofas, and four-post bedsteads, pier-glasses, floorcloths, and other articles indicative of domestic comfort and accumulating wealth. Sibthorpe [1906] 1970: 552

At the opposite end of his scale, in the lowest stratum, were those who had been most recently settled on the Sierra Leone Peninsula. Sibthorpe stated that these people ‘were to be found occupying mud-houses, and small patches of ground’ in the neighbourhood of one or other of the mountain villages behind Freetown. They farmed the land locally,

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although some soon made their way to Freetown where they found work as labourers, wood and water carriers, grooms, cooks and house-servants. Liberated Africans in the second grade, Sibthorpe said, ‘were to be found occupying frame-houses’. They conducted trade in the market and many also purchased canoe cargoes of foodstuffs from neighbouring countries, to retail in the market. Many others were artisans, namely tailors, shoemakers, straw hat makers, cobblers, blacksmiths, carpenters, masons, etc. (Sibthorpe [1906] 1970: 52–53). Sibthorpe described those in the third grade as occupying ‘frame-houses, reared on a stone foundation of from six to ten feet in height’. He went on to state that: These houses were very comfortable; painted in and outside; had piazzas in front and rear, and many of them all round; a considerable sprinkling of mahogany furniture of European workmanship was to be found in them; several books were to be seen lying about, chiefly of a religious character, and a general air of domestic comfort pervaded the whole. Sibthorpe [1906] 1970: 53–54

Many examples of such houses still exist in Sierra Leone today and are typified by the house on Liverpool Street in Regent Village shown in Plate 7. The lower half storey of these houses are usually made of dressed local lateritic stone laid in courses and jointed with lime mortar, while the upper stories are constructed on a timber frame, with external weatherboard cladding over timber studding. There were skilled tradesmen among Freetown’s early Nova Scotian settlers (see Chapter  4), including carpenters, and they built themselves these one-and-a-half storey houses on the model of the dwellings they had known in the North American settlements and plantations where they were born. There were skilled tradesmen among the Maroons as well, including masons who had doubtless learned some of their skills when put to work on building projects in Nova Scotia during their exile from Jamaica. Evidence of their building work survives in the St John’s Maroon Methodist Church in Freetown (Figure  29), which dates back to 1808. Sibthorpe stated that Liberated Africans in the third and fourth grades: evinced great anxiety to become possessed of houses and lots in old Freetown, because of proximity to the market-place and the great thoroughfares, and also for the superior advantages which they afforded for the establishment of their darling object – ‘a retail trade’. Property of this kind became much enhanced in value, and its value continued to increase from the annually increasing numbers and prosperity of this and the next grade. Sibthorpe [1906] 1970: 55

Sibthorpe’s focus on the architecture of Liberated Africans’ homes in order to illustrate their system of social stratification demonstrates how Krio modes of identification and self-orientation developed within a predominantly urban mercantile culture focused on the coastal metropolis of Freetown. The Krio idea that your identity was embodied

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Figure 29 St John’s Maroon Methodist Church in Freetown. Built in 1808. Photo: the author 2010.

in the architectural history of your family was especially rooted in Freetown. The prior dwellings of a family would have demonstrated its progressive achievement and the distance it had travelled from the state of slavery, while the height and architectural style of a family’s home announced its wealth and status. Mercantile success was often won in the interior, or elsewhere along the West African coast, yet successful Krio merchants demonstrated their wealth by building houses in Freetown, which, in a time before banks, also actually embodied their accumulated capital worth. Although many of the old houses built for so-called ‘fourth-grade’ Liberated Africans were razed to the ground in 1999, well-preserved nineteenth-century multistorey stone houses like the ones that Mohammed Muyu Deen Savage built in Dan Street and Fourah Bay Road respectively, reveal the sophistication of Krio architecture during the nineteenth century. Probably the most celebrated multistorey Krio house that survives from this period is Malamah House in East Street (Figure 30). It was designed and built in the 1880s by the Liberated African mason J. T. Ojokutu-Macaulay for the successful entrepreneur John Henry Thomas. Thomas named his new home Malamah House after the place on the Rokel River where he built his first trading factory. John Henry Thomas also assumed, or was given, the nickname Malamah Thomas, not in an attempt to indigenize his identity, but rather in recognition of his financial success and its source on the Rokel River. Similarly, when the Krio merchant Thomas John Williams, father of the museum donor Alfred C. Williams, built a two-storey stone house in central Freetown’s Oxford Street (now Lightfoot-Boston Street), he called it Gerehun

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Figure 30 Malamah House, East Street, Freetown. Built in the 1880s for John Henry Thomas by J. T. Ojokutu-Macaulay. Photo: the author 2010.

House after the Mende town (Gelehun) in the Sierra Leone interior where he established a lucrative trade.3 Fyfe has claimed that Sibthorpe’s focus on everyday life in his The History of Sierra Leone (1868 first edition) showed that he was concerned with writing a ‘history of his community’ and that this put him ‘at the forefront of contemporary historiography’ because John Richard Green’s Short History of the English People, with its ‘novel focus on everyday life’ only appeared in 1875 (Fyfe 1992: 331). For example, Fyfe writes that Sibthorpe: interspersed sections on customs and manners, ingeniously drawing on his authorities to describe styles of dress and dancing. He also listed the prices of commodities at successive periods. He would quote a proverb to make a point, as that in the 1840s salt, which came in as ship’s ballast, was plentiful, hence the saying, ‘How much can you lick from tenpence salt?’ Fyfe 1992: 331

Sibthorpe may indeed have intended to provide a history of his own community, but he clearly had other aims as well, because he structured it within a gubernatorial framework and his book can hardly be described as a history in the conventional sense of the word. It is better described as an affable stroll through time, from the foundations of the colony through to Sibthorpe’s own time of writing, in which the author frequently

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inserts himself and makes critical or diverting and whimsical observations about various contemporary events and characters. In this regard, it should not be assessed only in relation to contemporary European historical works, but to other nineteenthcentury European literary forms as well. In fact, Sibthorpe’s history should also be considered alongside nineteenth-century genres of panoramic literature (see Benjamin 2003: 18), as a work of self-orientation. Significantly in this regard, the panorama can be said to place its beholder before a ‘comprehensive, extensive, commanding, [and] aggrandizing’ prospect (Kirshenblatt-Gimblett 1991: 413). For Sibthorpe himself, it was a mode of self-orientation that placed him as if on the top floor of a multistorey house with a pier glass to his eye – a ‘monarch of the past’ taking ‘a survey of his dominions’.4 Importantly, the panorama can be said to have represented one of the cognitive tools of empire in that it provided a prospect that held ‘scenarios for future action’ (Kirshenblatt-Gimblett 1991: 413). From this perspective it seems significant that Africanus Horton’s text on The Medical Topography of the West Coast of Africa (see Horton 1859: 12–13) served as a source for Sibthorpe’s property-based strata for the various ‘grades’ of Liberated African. Colonial policies relating to tropical medicine and hygiene provide one of the most direct and pervasive examples of how colonial knowledge ‘produced dominance on the ground’ in Africa and ‘reshaped indigenous realities’ (Ballantyne 2008: 182, 185). The supposed advantages of elevated housing in combating the ‘degenerative’ influences of hot and humid climates, expounded in colonial medical texts, found architectural expression in tropical zones across the British Empire (Bhattacharya 2012; Odile 1998), while colonial programs of sanitary engineering in Sierra Leone and other West African territories led directly to racial segregation (see Chapter  3). In Freetown, the principle of elevation found elaborate cultural expression in Krio architecture in a way that can be hypothesized to have helped recast social distinctions, originally founded on ethnic and other factors, according to a dominant stratigraphy based more on socio-economic status, as well as European cultural attributes and modes of consumption. Freetown was for a long time a British naval base and centre of colonial administration and Christian proselytization, but, for Sierra Leonean Krios, it was also their metropolis and its multistorey, transatlantic style buildings looked out, as it were, over commanding prospects. Opportunities were limited in Freetown, yet enterprising Krio who made diasporic migrations in the nineteenth century, placed themselves at the vanguard of other Africans, as they saw it. They inserted themselves into scenarios of ‘civilizing’ and ‘modernizing’ action in expansive West African fields and helped set up new Krio communities at other enclaves on Africa’s Atlantic coast, which maintained strong attachments to Freetown. The panorama of West Africa from Freetown perspectives not only offered Krio entrepreneurs and missionaries promising prospects, it also offered Krio masons and carpenters scenarios for gainful employment, and they plied their trades at ports and settlements up and down the western coast of Africa (Latham 1973: 106–8). For example, former pupils of the celebrated Krio builder J. T. Ojokutu-Macaulay built houses in Lagos and Warri in Nigeria (Fyfe 1962: 619). Many other Krio also sought out and found gainful employment all along the West African coast, as teachers, clerks,

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dispensers, nurses, engineers and photographers. Partly as a consequence, Krios became active agents in British imperial expansion and in the cultural transformation of Britain’s West African territories. Thus, not only were Krio origins pan-West African, but their legacy became so too. Architecture was an important indicator of Krio social distinctions, but it was only one among several indicators, which were based, to a significant extent, on European notions of personal ‘progressive’ achievement and ‘civilization’. As was indicated in the previous chapter, consumption of European commodities, especially European-style clothing, and the adoption of Christian education and cultural codes, were other such indicators. Wealthy Krio sought to place themselves on a level with respectable white Europeans through their educational attainments and assumption of a ‘civilized’ persona, but this was often treated with suspicion, especially by European officials, because it threatened to undermine their promethean rationale for colonialism. The tensions created by such ‘colonial contradictions’ (see Nugent 2004: 11; Stoler and Cooper 1997: 37) left them feeling marginalized, even (or perhaps especially) in the urban environments in which they had invested their fortunes and built their elevated homes (Fyfe 1962: 212). John Whitford, a passing British trader in the 1860s and 1870s, was an early representative of European critics of Freetown’s emerging Krio community, at the milder end of the critical scale. He wrote that: The descendants of liberated slaves, who have been educated at the expense of Government, or by the aid of missionaries, gradually amass wealth; in the first place as clerks or labourers to merchants, subsequently as full-blown traders on their own account. They import books of fashion, get clothes made to resemble the illustrations, and turn out dandies. They imitate the walk of Government officials, and like to talk with a tone of authority. Whitford 1877: 20

Krio Male Elites For some Krio, especially men of the wealthy Freetown Western-educated elite, who had travelled as far as they could from their slave origins, the contradiction between the theory of being able to claim the rights of British imperial subjects and the experience of being excluded from the higher positions in the colonial administration, for example, would have been keenly felt.5 One can conjecture that their sense of cultural disorientation and political marginalization had its corollary, for some, in a critical, yet disengaged, participation in colonial environments. This politically detached participation in the diverse life of the colonial town involved, to some extent at least, the adoption of a disposition akin to that of the flâneur, in addition to that of his close relative the ‘dandy’. While indigenous Africans mostly lived in full view of others on open ground-level verandas and in communal compounds, Krio houses were unlike indigenous African dwellings because they concealed their occupants and furnishings from the gaze of

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passers-by. At the same time, however, Krio houses offered a spectatorial vantage from which to observe the life of the street. It seems significant, therefore, that Sibthorpe should have mentioned pier glasses as items of furniture in the houses of Liberated Africans in the ‘fourth grade’. Pier glasses may have had an architectural equivalent in the okiaja, or dormer window, on the top floor of houses like the one that Mohammed Muyu Deen Savage built in Dan Street. In Christopher Fyfe’s words, such houses demonstrated a distinction from indigenous ways of living and being, and a life turned ‘inward’ on the exclusive ‘European bourgeois model’ that emphasized the importance of individual property rights (Fyfe 1962: 144). This architecturally defined exclusiveness and detachment was part of the structuring field (Bourdieu 1977: 89) of elite Krio experience in Freetown. Significantly, Sibthorpe’s The History of Sierra Leone can be said to exhibit a style and concerns that are partly informed by the ethos of a figure akin to the flâneur. Here is how the author describes Freetown’s diverse inhabitants, as they appeared to him in 1905. Thus: The population of the metropolis is, of course, of a most motley description, and every complexion – from the shades of brown and yellow to jet black. The Europeans are becoming numerous. They include government officials, many respectable merchants, and railway workmen and engineers. . . . Heterogeneous as the population is in manners, nations, languages, and principles, they all agree in one point – the pursuit of money. Sibthorpe [1906] 1970: 219

Thus, it would appear that Krio ‘flânerie’, as an elite mode of self-orientation, was not only embedded in Freetown’s storied architecture, it was also articulated in panoramic texts like Sibthorpe’s history. The figure of the flâneur was first given prominence in the nineteenth century by the French modernist poet and critic Baudelaire. For Baudelaire the flâneur was a complex figure and a predominantly masculine urban one. While the flâneur laid claim to the exclusivity and autonomy of the individual, he also expressed a fascination with the life of the city. Like his close relative the dandy, who tended to exhibit a more provocative personal insistence on a sense of individual freedom and aesthetic selfdetermination (Eshun 2016: 15), the flâneur also expressed his need to participate in, and enjoy, the life of the city while displaying a critical detachment (Benjamin 2003: 34). Significantly, Benjamin points out that the flâneur was a figure ‘on the threshold . . . of the bourgeois class’ (Benjamin 1973: 174), but part of what made him compelling to some in the Sierra Leonean context, may have been the fact that he was a figure who could be said to adopt the disposition of a free agent and to make a performance of it. With no practical purpose necessarily in mind, he goes wherever his fancy takes him, a disengaged participant ‘botanising on the asphalt’ (Benjamin [1968] 1999: 372). Sometimes, it would seem, a visiting West African flâneur turned his aesthetic critique against Freetown’s architecture, as demonstrated in the following letter sent to The Sierra Leone Weekly News in August 1904:

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For the past two and a half days I have been in your city and have walked around a bit. I find many improvements since I was here last, say eight years ago, and I feel proud to find that native Africans are amassing wealth and acquiring valuable property, but I deprecate the idea of building and construction on the European plan – your houses are not constructed except in height of stories, for Africa or the Torrid Zone. The African needs to live more out doors, he wants the free air and sunshine that God gives him. Why not put piazzas, verandahs and porticoes to the houses, it would be pleasanter. A Liberian feels like he is imprisoned when he comes here and do not care to go out. I admire the disregard of the masses to the costumes and fashions of Europe, a bane to civilization in Africa. I do like to look at the well-developed women and men as they pass, untrammelled by corset and unduly tight fitting clothing. Africa is free, (or intended by providence to be free) and Africans should ever remember that to attain to what is allotted them is to obey God rather than Europe.6

The writer was apparently ‘a Liberian citizen’ who had held ‘several important offices in the Republic’, so this was a West African ‘flâneur’ with an outsider’s perspective. While displaying a common irritation with Freetown’s Britishness, which many visitors to Sierra Leone exhibited, the letter includes a telling postscript at the end that reads, ‘Mr Porter says that you will not publish this’; the implication being that the letter contained harsh criticism. Yet the critique is more aesthetic than political and perfectly affable. But it hinges primarily on a personal sense of freedom, or rather the lack of it. Freetown houses are like prisons, the writer says, and he adds that a Liberian does not care to go out. In other words, he feels restricted by the more inward nature of the buildings, which interferes with his voyeuristic desire to enjoy the life of the street. There would seem to be something of an architectural condensation of a Freetown gentleman’s particular sense of detachment and his spectatorial flânerie in the remarkable design of Malamah House. This extraordinary example of Krio architecture, which has survived into the twenty-first century, was built for the wealthy merchant John Henry Thomas in the 1880s by J. T. Ojokutu-Macaulay, a Liberated African architect, builder and carpenter, who was apparently of Egba Yoruba descent (Fyfe 1962: 527). A striking decorative feature of this house is the pair of carved stone heads that project from under the sill of each of the first-floor windows all around the house. These remarkable heads portray a variety of different male and female characters that look as if they could have been removed from a neo-medieval European building (Figure 31). Like sentinels, the outward-looking heads around the house reinforce a sense of the exclusivity of the life lived within. On the other hand, the heads are fascinatingly exotic in themselves, a fact that has resulted in the house garnering the nickname ‘Head-Head’ from the local Freetown populace. The heads are portrayed looking out over the life of the street such that they seem to be, at the same time, both an urban spectacle in themselves and also the sculptural embodiment of a kind of urban voyeurism. They create a flamboyant architectural spectacle that seems to suggest both a consumption of, and a participation in, the multifarious life and scenery of the street. It is important to note here that merchants’ houses like Malamah House

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Figure 31 Detail of Malamah House showing the carved stone heads projecting below the first-floor windows. Photo: the author 2010. were not simply the homes of their owners but also had shops on their ground floors. Malamah House occupied a key location in a popular commercial street and so was positioned on a prime stretch of pedestrian traffic along which Freetown’s flâneurs and dandies would have flaunted themselves and indulged in their affable urban ‘botanising’. Many elite Sierra Leonean Krios asserted themselves as imperial subjects who had not been conquered, but instead had been ‘born and fostered . . . by the British nation’.7 But it was probably precisely because they were marginalized by a paternalistic colonial state that they felt compelled to project themselves as ‘civilized’ free agents, and not only through blazé perambulation in urban colonial environments. Those wealthy enough to be able to afford it were apt to extend their performance to the imperial metropole, there to enjoy the intoxicating spectacle of the life of the city, as well as the aggrandizing exhibitionary amusements of a global empire, and perhaps also to test the empire’s claims and their own rights as British subjects. The Krio barrister, Claudius D. Hotobah During described the four years he spent studying in London between 1908 and 1911 as:

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never to be forgotten being the most glorious days of my life amidst surroundings no better to be found in any other parts of the world I travelled and which moulded me for the remaining years of my life. Wyse 1989: 7

Well-to-do Sierra Leoneans not only studied in Britain, they holidayed there as well. In 1900 one Krio family made a summer trip to London where they visited Earls Court (site of the international Women’s Exhibition), the British Museum and other attractions. It would have been made obvious to them, however, that the contradictions of empire were also deeply ingrained in the imperial metropole, not least because this Krio family faced peculiar difficulties in securing suitable accommodation during their stay. An account of their holiday was carried in the 25 August 1900 edition of The Sierra Leone Weekly News, which exposed the prejudice of London’s hoteliers to its readers, who would have been adept at reading between its sarcastic lines. The account related that: On arriving in London it was with difficulty that we obtained lodgings . . . Every hotel was occupied. Rooms in many had been booked for several days in advance. Every room in the new Hotel Russell, in which there are over 300 rooms, was occupied.8

‘Upbuilding’ and Empire For many elite Krio, it seems, their experience of colonial exclusion was a factor in their propensity to project themselves as ‘civilized’ free agents. But their experience was also plaited together with narratives of their liberation from slavery. Importantly, these narratives had their equivalents in protestant evangelical religious terms, particularly in the representation of the Christian way of life as a following of the ‘way of salvation’ (Kopytoff 1965: 48; McCaskie 2004: 169). Christian Krios expressed their narratives of religious salvation and Christian community in their communal buildings, especially their churches. In 1910 The Sierra Leone Weekly News carried the report of an appeal for the renovation of Christ Church in Freetown’s Pademba Road. The congregation was urged to: repair, enlarge . . . and beautify this ancient house of prayer which was built these many years ago, to make it worthy of its position as the second church in the native pastorate. It was a great work and required much self denial, determination and prayer. Many are the historic memories and associations which cluster around this sacred edifice, which should endear it to the hearts of the present worshippers, who should improve and hand it down to those who are to come after.9

The allusion here to the many ‘historic memories and associations which cluster around this sacred edifice’ was literally and physically manifested in the numerous memorial plaques, commemorating the lives of the church’s deceased members, mounted on the walls. Similar plaques on the walls of Freetown’s Buxton Memorial Methodist Church

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(Figure 32) bear witness to the dual salvation, both religious and secular, of Liberated Africans who made up the original congregations of the church. Like the Anglican Christ Church, the Buxton Memorial Methodist Church is itself a memorial and a focus for Krio modes of urban and Christian identification. Significantly, the linkage of secular processes of capitalist ‘development’, with the idea of the spiritual ‘regeneration’ of Africa formed a key theme in the imperial narrative of ‘progress’ and ‘modernization’, frequently expressed in the form of the oft-repeated rubric of ‘Christianity, Civilization,

Figure 32 Memorial plaque to the Liberated African Abraham Deigh in Buxton Memorial Methodist Church in Charles Street, Freetown. Photo: the author 2010.

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and Commerce’. Many elite Krio subscribed to this narrative and wrote themselves into it as active agents by celebrating their illustrious dead as ‘builders up’ of ‘civilization’ in Africa. Thus, when Accra’s Krio postmaster Roland Cole died in 1915, his obituary in The Sierra Leone Weekly News stated that ‘he was one of the many Sierra Leoneans who contributed largely to the upbuilding of West Africa.’10 Although Cole had been a postmaster he opened a commercial venture in Accra, The Busy Bee Store, when he retired (Hutchinson c.1929: 75). But, like many others in the Krio diaspora, he maintained his links with Freetown. He regularly contributed funds to the Sierra Leone Native Pastorate Church and he still owned a house on Freetown’s Kissy Road at the time of his death.11 As mentioned in Chapter 4, Cole was also a contributor to the African collection of the Liverpool Museum and gave Ridyard three decorated gourds from Accra in 1910 (4.7.10.7 to 4.7.10.9, now lost) and a further six the following year (1.2.11.24 to 1.2.11.29, now lost). Although Cole’s contribution to the creation of the Liverpool Museum’s West African ‘ethnography’ collection was obviously of a different order to his part in the ‘upbuilding’ of West Africa, both should probably be seen as reflecting a common interest, among elite Krio, in participating in the flows of empire through which new ideas, experiences and opportunities were created, and through which they were able to forge new roles and statuses for themselves in colonial West Africa. Cole’s museum donations, like his contributions to the funds of the Sierra Leone Native Pastorate Church, were probably partly intended as expressions of his Christian benevolence, but his donations may also have reflected a common Krio desire for collaborative engagement and interconnection with the imperial heartland during this period. Like Roland Cole, Thomas John Williams was also celebrated as a promoter of ‘civilization’, commerce and Christianity in West Africa and his son Alfred C. Williams, who worked closely with him from 1908, was also a donor to the Liverpool and Salford museums between 1906 and 1912. Thomas Williams was a successful merchant and a pioneering kola and cocoa planter, feted for his ‘zeal’ and innovations in agriculture in the Sierra Leone Protectorate by several colonial governors. The profitability of his enterprises in the environs of Mende towns like Blama and Gelehun had enabled him to build houses in Freetown, including Gerehun House in Oxford Street and another he built in Freetown’s East Street. His obituary in The Sierra Leone Weekly News celebrated the fact that he set up a church in the Sierra Leone Protectorate when he first went there as a trader. It related that: The deceased was born at Pademba Road, Freetown, on August 30th 1844, and was educated in the Church Missionary School at Christ Church, and at Regent Village. As a young man, after leaving school, he entered the business establishment of Mr John Heddle as a clerk, and served him faithfully for several years, after which, he started his own business in the Scarcies, Roquelle, and Sherbro Rivers, during a period of about twenty years, and did a very successful trade. He afterward served the French Company under Mons. Ernst Vohsen, as Agent of Rotumba in the Sierra Leone River. On the opening up of the Protectorate by rail, he was the first Trader to establish a factory on the upper line at Seraboo beyond Bo, and he had the honour, on the completion of the Moa bridge, to be the first merchant to send over it five

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truck loads of kernels as a test of the Bridge in the presence of His Excellency Acting Governor Frank Graves, and a party from Freetown, who had gone up to witness the opening of that portion of the line. He has been connected with the Protectorate for fully ten years and had three Factories there; one at Seraboo, Blama, and Baiima.12

Thomas Williams was another well-to-do Krio who also made a tourist trip to Europe. The 5 October 1907 issue of The Sierra Leone Weekly News gave notice of his travels in Britain and France. His 1907 sojourn in Europe was probably partly a business journey, but, as someone who would have seen himself as a modernizing agent and an ‘upbuilder’ of Christian, capitalist, ‘civilization’ in Africa, it also appears to have been something of a cultural pilgrimage.13 And it seems that it served to boost the Williams family’s prestige, not only among the inhabitants of Blama town, but far and wide among the readership of The Sierra Leone Weekly News. Under the title ‘A Gathering of Friends at Blama’ the newspaper reported: At the invitation of Mr T.J. Williams of East and Oxford Streets, Freetown, a large number of Traders, Government clerks, and natives of Blama, assembled at his large factory in the same town in the Sierra Leone Protectorate, on Sunday 24th September, at 5pm to welcome him home again and to express congratulations on his safe return from Europe. Immediately after the friends had assembled, ‘The Glory Song’ was beautifully rendered by a Monarch Senior Gramophone, the friends joined in the chorus. A short prayer was subsequently offered by Mr C.T. Roberts. Mr Williams then gave a brief history of his own life and his impressions of the several places he visited in Europe. At first he thought that perhaps at his age, 63, it was too late for him to undertake such a long and tedious voyage but he resolved to make the attempt and he could assure his friends that he never regretted his decision. Mr Williams then narrated incidents on the voyage, then his landing and travels to Manchester and London, and then to Paris. He distributed photographs of the various places he visited to his guests. Refreshments were . . . served by Mrs A.C. Williams and Mrs J.C. Lawrence, during which select pieces were rendered by the gramophone and songs by Mr Bim Davies, Miss Florie Forde, and Mr Sammy Bob.14

Thomas Williams may have anticipated that his 1907 trip would be tedious, because he was aware of the difficulties that Sierra Leonean visitors faced in finding suitable accommodation in London’s better hotels. In any case, it seems highly likely that Ridyard had a role in facilitating his trip (perhaps by putting him up at his home in Rock Ferry on his arrival in Liverpool), because Thomas’s son Alfred C. Williams gave Ridyard a mask of the Mende women’s Sande initiation association, described as ‘Bundoo Devil Head’, from the town of Blama for the Salford museum in the same year (Salford Museum 1907.80). The following year Alfred Williams gave Ridyard a Mende ceremonial staff (30.7.08.9) for the museum in Liverpool (Figure  33), also from Blama, and he gave Ridyard a Mende Sande society mask (12.9.10.12) for the Liverpool Museum in 1910 (Figure 34). In 1912 he gave the Salford Museum another Mende Sande society mask (Salford Museum 1912.347) through Ridyard.

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Figure 33 Ceremonial staff from the Mende town of Blama, Sierra Leone. Given to the Liverpool Museum by Alfred Williams through Arnold Ridyard in 1908. 30.7.08.9.

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Figure 34 Mende Sande society mask given to the Liverpool Museum by Alfred Williams through Arnold Ridyard in 1910. 12.9.10.12.

In 1906 Alfred had given Ridyard four wooden figures from the Niger Delta while employed as an engineer by the Company of African Merchants at Abonnema in southeast Nigeria (24.5.06.44; 3.9.06.31–33).15 So it seems unlikely that Alfred would soon after have been able to collect valuable and restricted items, like the Sowei masks of the women’s Sande initiation society in Sierra Leone, if the Williams family were not already well respected, or had no friends among the influential elders of the Mende community at Blama. It is not surprising, therefore, that the 5 October 1907 report in The Sierra Leone Weekly News indicates that Thomas Williams had been made Headman of the Sierra Leoneans at the Mende town of Gerehun (Gelehun in Bo District), in the Sierra Leone Protectorate, where he had built one of his trading factories. Furthermore, Thomas’s obituary in The Sierra Leone Weekly News relates that he was ‘very popular with the Natives and was known to them as “Daddy Perewa”, which in Mendi language, means a long beard’. It goes on to explain that ‘Mr William’s popularity and success with the natives in business was no doubt due to his quiet and trustful disposition.’16

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The ‘Glory Song’ played by Thomas Williams on 24 September 1907 on his Monarch Senior Gramophone in the Mende town of Blama, seventy-two miles into the Sierra Leone interior from Freetown by government railway, was composed by Charles Hutchinson Gabriel. Gabriel was music director at the Grace Methodist Episcopal Church in San Francisco from 1890 to 1892,17 something that helps to underscore the fact that the Williams family were Methodists in 1907. In fact, Thomas Williams was a ‘staunch member of Zion Church, Wilberforce Street, Wesleyan Methodist Connexion’, but while he was ‘most liberal in his Subscriptions and Donations . . . to his own Connexion’ he was also generous ‘to all others who sought his aid’.18 Ecumenical generosity of this kind was frequent among elite Krio and lends support to Cole’s argument that ‘Krio identity’ was forged in nineteenth-century West Africa through a dynamic process that ‘allowed for and transcended’ religious differences, as well as ethnic, cultural, and class differences (Cole 2013: 3). Moreover, Krio involvement in mercantile livelihoods evidently bound them up with others in networks of exchange and opened them to engagement and interconnection with other groups. Imperial transport infrastructures helped to generate flows of people, goods, products, artefacts and ideas from diverse sources on an unprecedented scale. The inclusive, Methodiststyle, gathering of people from Blama’s various social groups invited to celebrate Thomas Williams’s return from Europe in September 1907, graphically illustrates the breadth and reach of these exchange networks. It also shows that while elite Krio often found themselves caught between the British Empire’s ‘universalizing claims’ and its ‘exclusionary practices’ (Stoler and Cooper 1997: 37), they did not lose their admiration for European culture and found ways to participate selectively, and critically, in European culture through mass communication technologies like the gramophone and transportation technologies like rail and maritime steam travel, as well as through books, newspapers, magazines, photographs and the spectatorial flânerie of the tourist. Like the items donated to the Liverpool and Salford museums by Alfred Williams, various other Sierra Leonean artefacts presented to Ridyard by Krio donors were acquired by them from trusted friends, or trading partners, in the Sierra Leone Protectorate. For instance, the bow and quiver of arrows from ‘Su Su country’ (10.2.05.45, bow now lost) that H. Buckle gave Ridyard early in 1905 is recorded as having been ‘presented to Mr Buckle by Alimany Seckoo’ (sic). Buckle was obviously a Krio merchant and Alimamy Seku was probably one of his Soso trading partners, who would have given Buckle the bow and quiver set in recognition of their mutual trust. Additionally, the accession record for a sample of cloth and yarn (24.5.06.25, now lost) that William C. DeGraft Rosenior gave Ridyard for the Liverpool Museum in 1906, states that the cloth was made ‘from home grown cotton, woven by Boboh, wife of Foday Tartee at Segbwama’ (sic) [Segbwema]. Indeed, the collector’s acknowledgement of Boboh as the maker of the cloth, and his recording of her name, may have been passed on three times from collector to donor and finally to Ridyard, who made sure it was taken down by the assistant curator and included in the cloth’s accession record in the Liverpool Museum accession register. The recording and acknowledgement of the name of the maker of this artefact suggests that the maker and her family were well known to the collector, and that the relationship was one of trust and respect.19

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Moreover, in carefully noting that the cotton for the cloth was ‘home grown’ and locally woven, Rosenior would probably have been making a point about the sophistication of indigenous African industries and about African technological and creative agency. He may also have been drawing attention to the economic potential of cotton growing in the region for the supply of British markets, which was an interest shared by Ridyard at the time (see Chapter  3) and was demonstrably an interest of Ridyard’s employer, Alfred Jones of Elder, Dempster & Co., whose intention to buy 10,000 shares in the British Cotton Growing Association had been reported in November 1904.20 While Sierra Leonean Krio merchants like DeGraft Rosenior, Buckle, and Williams evidently formed relationships of trust and respect with indigenous trading partners in the protectorate, it seems unlikely that Sande society officials would have cooperated in providing a collector like Alfred Williams or his father with a full masquerade costume. Nor would they have revealed the sacred mysteries that attended initiation into the Sande society and the esoteric meanings inscribed into the forms and details of the masks and figures used in the context of Sande ceremonies. The Sowei masker embodies the Sande spirit, or ngafa, and the power of the society’s ‘medicines’, or hale (Phillips 1995: 53). Its performance, mysteries and ownership are only open to initiated women, so that a fully functional Sowei masker’s costume in the hands of an uninitiated man would have constituted a dangerous exposure to its powers as well as an infringement of its mysteries. Significantly, the three Sande society masks that Alfred Williams gave to Ridyard for the Liverpool and Salford museums between 1908 and 1912, are all incomplete in the sense that they do not include the full raffia costumes that Sowei maskers always wore with the masks during their performances. These three masks would have been relinquished on Mende terms and are likely to have been unconsecrated, or deconsecrated, ones. Ridyard was certainly keen to acquire a ‘complete’ masquerade costume, because he said so in a letter he wrote to the Salford Curator Ben Mullen in June 1908. In this letter Ridyard confided that: ‘I should dearly like to get the dress belonging to them [the Sande society masks], in order to make them complete.’21 It is telling, therefore, that when Hotobah During eventually procured a ‘complete’ Sowei masker’s costume for Ridyard in 1914 (12.5.14.14), he made it clear that, while the mask section was acquired in the town of Blama, the rest of the costume had come from the town of Bo.22 Alfred C. Williams would have mobilized the relationships of trust and respect that his father Thomas had built up with influential Mende elders in the town of Blama in order to acquire ‘ethnographic’ artefacts for the Liverpool Museums. But the fact that the Liverpool Museum accession register refers to Williams’s ceremonial staff from the Mende town of Blama (30.7.08.9) as a ‘walking stick carved out of wood with figure of a female on top’, suggests ignorance of its Mende function, as a staff of office for a chief, or leader of a ‘medicine’ association. We cannot know whether Thomas Williams would have carried the staff on strolls around Blama town, but its description as a ‘walking stick’ suggests only that the staff was understood simply as part of the paraphernalia of a flâneur by the curator who accessioned it in July 1908. We do not know whether knowledge about this artefact and its original significance simply failed to travel with it. Yet if the staff was bestowed upon Thomas Williams by his Mende friends in acknowledgement of his leadership role among the Sierra Leoneans in this Mende

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town, then the very fact that his son gave it away, would only reinforce the impression that its indigenous cultural meanings were not well understood by its Krio collector. The staff shows little sign of having been consistently used as a walking stick, and whatever indigenous meanings it was understood to hold by its collector, the staff would at least have been the object of Thomas and Alfred Williams’s ‘flâneurs’ gaze and aesthetic appraisal while in their possession. Like other elite Krio, the Williams family made collections of indigenous African artefacts in the context of British imperialist ideas that denigrated African cultural achievements but valued African material artefacts as instruments of ‘universal’ knowledge about human cultural development (see Chapter 8). However, Krio interest in African histories and cultures was inspired by a positive re-evaluation of African cultures that had become widespread among West Africa’s Western-educated elites by the beginning of the twentieth century. One of the leading lights behind this movement was Edward Wilmot Blyden, the prominent Caribbean-born intellectual and advocate of Africanism (Fyfe 1962: 468), whose critiques of British cultural colonialism, especially the colonial education system, were partly formulated through his encounters with highly articulate West African Islamic scholars and partly based on an African American black cultural nationalism (see Lynch 1971). Blyden’s ideas are likely to have influenced Alfred Williams at least, because Alfred had been a subscriber to an initiative in Freetown for the ‘Collection and Printing of Dr. Blyden’s Works’ in February 1908.23 By the same token, Alfred Williams’s donations of Mende artefacts to museums in Britain may have been partly motivated by his expectation that the exhibition of these African cultural expressions in British museums might help to promote more positive assessments of African cultural achievements in the imperial heartland. Beyond this, however, there is little evidence that Alfred Williams’s acquisitions of Mende artworks implied a specific understanding of Mende cultural history. Instead, more generalized aesthetic and spectatorial interests appear uppermost, although such interest might still have contributed towards a critical attitude with respect to dominant European assessments of the aesthetic value of African cultural productions. While Thomas Williams included ‘natives of Blama’ among the guests he invited to participate in the celebrations on his return from Europe on 24 September 1907, his prior appointment to Headman of Sierra Leoneans at Gerehun suggests a basic segregation of the Krio community within a ‘trader quarter’ of the town and limited Krio participation in Mende cultural life. Viditz-Ward has indicated that the reach of the government railway into the Sierra Leone Protectorate during the early years of the twentieth century made Mende settlements and scenes of Mende cultural life accessible to Krio photographers and their armchair flâneur clients. ‘Photographs of village scenes and protectorate people were in high demand by local citizens and visitors to Freetown’ alike (Viditz-Ward 1987: 514). Similarly, the Mende cultural artefacts that Alfred Williams entrusted to Ridyard for the Liverpool and Salford museums at around the same time, appear to have been acquired as a consequence of his spectatorial and aesthetic interests in Mende culture. These interests may well have been partly inspired by Blyden’s African cultural nationalist ideas, as well as respect for his family’s Mende friends, but they do not appear to have been indicative of a specific engagement with Mende cultural life as such.

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Claudius Dyonisius Hotobah During Claudius Dyonisius Hotobah During (1886–1973) was one of Ridyard’s most dedicated and prolific collaborators (see Figure  35). He collected some of the same kinds of Mende items from the protectorate that Alfred C. Williams gave to Ridyard between 1907 and 1912 and was probably motivated by some of the same sensibilities as Williams. But Hotobah During was a mere nineteen-year-old clerk in the colony’s Audit Department when he made his first donation to the Liverpool Museum in about April 1906. He was to become one of Freetown’s most prominent barristers as president of the Sierra Leone Bar Association and he continued to make periodic donations to the Liverpool Museum until 1915.24 Moreover, his intention to make further contributions after 1915 is evident in his will, which he completed in February 1969. Clause 5 (n), on page six of his sixteen-page will, states: I bequeath all framed pictures, carved ivories vases brass trays and other curios within my residence Hotobah Lodge to Liverpool Museum where I have contributed some curios in my Law student days in London.25

Hotobah During’s mother was a woman called Mami Dada, who lived in Freetown’s Brookfields neighbourhood, while his father George Punshon During (see Figure 35) was a licensed moneylender and government contractor whose central Freetown residence was in Wellington Street. Although Claudius was born out of wedlock, his father ensured that he received a good foundation in life by enrolling him at Freetown’s Methodist Boys High School at Falconbridge, where the boy proved an able student. George Punshon wanted his son to study law in Britain and it seems that Ridyard may have assisted him in realizing his ambition for his son. George Punshon had been acquainted with Ridyard at least since the beginning of 1900, when he gave Ridyard an ornamental Soso comb (26.2.00.52, Figure 36) for the Liverpool Museum, and some years later, in early 1905, he gave Ridyard a further donation in the form of a small basket from Port Loko (8.11.05.15). In 1906 Claudius Hotobah During’s address was Brass House, 63 Wellington Street, Freetown, which must have been the address of his father’s residence.26 The house was luxuriously and advantageously furnished with books, sedan chairs, an ‘American organ’, pictures, ‘plated goods’, glass, china and linen.27 As a wealthy moneylender and government contractor, George Punshon had no problem funding his son’s legal studies, but when Hotobah During travelled to Britain in early 1908 to begin his law degree at London’s Middle Temple, he probably stopped at Ridyard’s home in Rock Ferry on his arrival in Liverpool. Joan Stark, Ridyard’s granddaughter, indicated that her grandfather hosted many sons of his West African contacts while they were on their way to schools or colleges in Britain (see Chapter 3). And Hotobah During must have travelled with a trunk full of artefacts, because while in Liverpool in February 1908, he made a donation of thirteen African items to the Liverpool Museum on his own account (14.2.08.1–13). This donation included three wooden combs from Sherbro Island (14.2.08.8–10, see Figure  10); three women’s beaded aprons from Matadi in the Congo (3.9.06.19; 14.2.08.3 & 5, see Plate 11); a

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Figure 35 George Punshon During (†1911) and Claudius D. Hotobah During (1886–1973). Father-and-son portrait probably taken in 1907 before Claudius (standing) departed for London to study law at Middle Temple. Photographer unknown. Permission: Solomon Jawara.

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Figure 36 Soso ornamental comb. Presented by G. P. During in 1900. 26.2.00.52.

Figure 37 Yoruba cooking pot from Lagos, Nigeria. Presented by C. D. Hotobah During in 1908. 14.2.08.12. woven basketry dish-cover (14.2.08.2) and wooden spoon (14.2.08.7) from the Sierra Leone interior; a gourd vessel from The Gambia (14.2.08.6); as well as a ceramic pot (14.2.08.12, see Figure 37) and a Hausa-style sun hat (14.2.08.1, see Plate 12) from Lagos.

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Before travelling to Britain, Hotobah During had made prior gifts to the Liverpool Museum through Ridyard in 1906. As mentioned in Chapter  4, these included a ‘Mandingo’ (Mande) cigarette cup decoratively covered in leather from the Sierra Leone Protectorate (16.2.06.22, see Figure 38); ‘two carved gourds, said to be Mandingo but most probably from the Niger’ (3.9.06.17 & 18); a woman’s beadwork apron from Matadi on the Congo River (3.9.06.19); and a stoneware jug overlaid with leather by Mande leatherworkers from the Sierra Leone Protectorate (19.12.06.19, see Plate 13). Some months later, in 1907, he also gave Ridyard an ‘ivory walking stick made at Old Calabar’ (8.7.07.15, now lost). These items were clearly not all ones that a young audit department clerk could have collected himself, so he must have acquired them in Freetown from others who were more widely travelled. The fact that all the items came from outside the Sierra Leone colony reflects Krio emigrants’ strong orientation towards Freetown in the early twentieth century and suggests that it must have been fairly common practice for them to make collections of indigenous artefacts abroad, as was demonstrated in Chapter 4. A typed note written by Hotobah During that was recovered from inside the leather-covered cigarette case he donated in early 1906 (16.2.06.22) describes this item as ‘An Industrial Production by the Mandingoes of Foutah Country in the Sierra Leone Protectorate’ and gives us a sense of the ideas that informed his acquisition of his early

Figure 38 Cigarette tin covered in ornamental leatherwork by Mande leatherworker. Presented by C. D. Hotobah During through Ridyard in 1906. 16.2.06.22.

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museum donations. The note appears to show cognizance of contemporary European interests in indigenous Africans as skilled craftspeople. British missionary societies, in particular, were promoting the ‘industrial productions’ and skills of African ‘artisans’ at this time as part of their strategy to encourage government support for the various technical schools they were building in Africa (Coombes 1994: 181), which they would have envisaged as part of the means to help integrate and domesticate Christian converts more effectively within colonial economies. After completing his legal studies in London, and before his return to Freetown in 1911, Hotobah During was elected both a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society and a Member of the Royal Anthropological Institute (RAI ). Back in Freetown in April 1912, he was also elected a Member of the Royal Society of Arts of London and a Foreign Member of the Royal Societies Club of London. His proposer for his RAI membership in 1911 was Dr Herbert Spenser Harrison, the then curator of the Horniman Museum in South London.28 His seconder was the British Museum’s Assistant Ethnography Curator, T. A. Joyce. These affiliations with learned societies in London and the contacts with British scholars of anthropology that they suggest, shed light on the subsequent donations that Hotobah During made to the Liverpool Museum after qualifying as a barrister and returning to Freetown to practice law in September 1911. The first of these donations consisted of a pair of black-painted, stylized, naked, female figures carved in wood and mounted on a shared base (27.11.11.12, see Plate 14). The figures reveal elaborate hairstyles typical of high-status Mende women and the exaggerated segments on their necks, known as ‘cut-neck’, which are idealized forms understood to represent health and special beauty that are commonly applied to various Mende sculpted figures, especially ones used in the context of the women’s Sande initiation association (Phillips 1995: 116). Hotobah During probably collected this pair of figures as an ‘ethnographic’ specimen, with his Member-of-the-Royal-Anthropological-Institute hat on, as it were. This conjecture is reinforced by the caption of their accession record which describes them as ‘Two carved wooden female figures on a stand, wearing Bundu Devil Headdress’. While the implication that the figures are depicted wearing masks is probably erroneous, because the Sande society mask was never worn without a costume (Phillips 1995: 53), the caption nevertheless bears witness to a descriptive ‘ethnographic’ discourse on the part of the donor. Hotobah During was possibly also wearing his ethnographer’s hat when he acquired two ‘Sapi’ carved stone figures (3.9.12.9 & 10) that he gave Ridyard in 1912. His donations to the Liverpool Museum at this time would have been generally intended as contributions to institutions of science and universal knowledge gathering, an assumption that is supported by the fact that Hotobah During also made donations of natural history specimens to the Liverpool Museum in later years (see Chapter 4). Moreover, in 1915 he gave Ridyard a series of fifteen stone tools (15.3.15.14–28) that originated outside Africa altogether, which he would have collected during the trip he made to the West Indies with his Jamaican wife of two years at the end of 1914.29 Museum donations of this kind would have been seen as boosting his standing in Freetown society circles, as were his memberships of the above mentioned learned societies, which were prominently announced in The Sierra Leone Weekly News.30

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Although Hotobah During clearly acquired African items of scientific and ‘ethnographic’ interest for British museums, he also collected African artefacts with which to furnish his own home, as can be seen from ‘curios’ mentioned in clause 5(n) of his will, which suggests that he had an aesthetic, as well as a ‘scientific’ interest in West African cultures and histories. Furthermore, by the end of 1913 more radical ideas may have begun to inform Hotobah During’s collecting for the Liverpool Museums. This is suggested by the two wooden items from the Mende town of Kenema that he gave Ridyard at the end of 1913. The first of these items consisted of a ‘Carved wooden figure to represent a Government Official’ (22.12.13.10, see Plate 15) and the second was a ‘Wooden copy of a European helmet’ (22.12.13.12, now lost). Both items clearly embody a Mende carver’s take on the culture of the colonizer, which perhaps indicates that Hotobah During was no longer content to present ‘ethnographic’ specimens for use in displays that presented the colonist’s view of the African and that promoted colonial ideologies. Hotobah During would have encountered displays of this kind in British museums between 1908 and 1911, while he was in Liverpool and London and would probably have been unsettled by the way they framed African material productions, as well as those from other parts of the world, as ‘primitive’ in contrast with the ‘arts’ of Europe, which were used to frame European societies as ‘evolved’, ‘civilized’ and ‘modern’ (see Chapter  8). Significantly, the figure of the ‘government official’ (very likely intended to represent a Krio railway official) and the copy of the European helmet that Hotobah During gave to Ridyard in 1913 would have been considered inauthentic by most European collectors because their demonstration of European influences, and their references to African modernities, would have made them hard to place within the predetermined ‘primitive’ frame. Yet it was probably precisely these attributes that interested Hotobah During and motivated him to give them to the museum in Liverpool. It would have been in these attributes that he saw their potential to help reframe Africa closer to his own experience, in a way that subverted the dominant museum-promoted ideology of the African continent being inhabited by static, archaic and ahistorical societies.

Conclusion Cole’s argument that Krio ‘identity’ was forged in nineteenth-century colonial West Africa through a dynamic process that ‘allowed for and transcended’ religious differences, as well as ethnic, cultural, and class differences (Cole 2013: 3), does not come with a detailed examination of the processes involved. His notion of ‘identity’ can therefore be subjected to Cooper’s and Brubaker’s critique of being ‘putative’ and too ambiguous for rigorous analysis (Cooper 2005: 59–60). Nevertheless, Krio modes of identification and self-orientation were evidently complex and took place partly on ‘British’ terms, but also in spite of them. An important process in the development of Krio language and culture was the assimilation of ‘Liberated Africans’ into an existing transatlantic settler culture that had pre-adapted to British and American ideas and practices (Cole 2013: 3; Schwarz 2011: 133). The ‘Liberated Africans’ introduced diverse

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African influences to Sierra Leone as well as a determination to pursue their own goals and cultural initiatives (Kopytoff 1965: vi), despite fundamental constraints imposed by the shifting parameters of a paternalistic colonial state. The diverse origins of the Krios’ Liberated African ancestors, along with their own involvements in mercantile and professional livelihoods across West Africa, evidently helped to link Krios with others in imperial projects and networks of exchange under dynamic conditions, which acted against the development of fixed relationships of opposition and enabled different cultural elements to be adopted or jettisoned according to prevailing contexts. Imperial transport infrastructures clearly had a part to play in all this. Steam shipping did not merely hold the Krio diaspora together (Lynn 1992a; Cole 2013: 128), it helped to create it in the first place, and it conducted flows of people, goods, products, artefacts and ideas from diverse sources on an unprecedented scale (see Chapter  4). The gathering at Blama to celebrate Thomas Williams’s return from Europe recorded by The Sierra Leone Weekly News in their 5 October 1907 issue, graphically illustrates the way that these complex flows helped to create new social networks, as well as new modes of consumption and cycles of desire and interdependence (Appadurai 1996; Henare 2005: 106) that were fundamental both to the fabric of the British Empire and to Krio processes of social- and self-orientation within it. Steam transport and transatlantic styles of storied architecture seem to have played important roles in helping to ‘structure’ elite Krio experience here, partly because they helped produce, along with other cultural media, the panoramic spectacles of connection (see also end of Chapter 3) and the commanding vistas in which scenarios for commercial, and other, enterprises could be imagined. At Freetown, especially, elite Krios of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, would appear to have oriented themselves in relation to the perspectives offered them at this cosmopolitan Atlantic metropolis and centre of British imperial administration, culture and communication.31 By inserting themselves, as pioneers, into scenarios of ‘modernizing’ and ‘civilizing’ action in West African panoramas, elite Krio placed themselves at the vanguard of other Africans and became crucial agents in the imperial transformation of West Africa. As well as contributing to imperial transformation through their efforts in commerce and through their role in the spread of Christianity, the Sierra Leonean donors discussed in this chapter evidently also found specific ways to make their own contributions to panoramic spectacles of empire in Britain by adding to the ethnographic and natural history collections of the Liverpool and Salford Museums. Moreover, in some cases at least, it seems that these contributions were intended to challenge received British assessments and understandings of Africans and African cultures. However, the elite Krio donors who fed Ridyard’s collecting operation should probably be seen to have been primarily motivated by a recognition that their interests, were bound up, to a degree, with those of the British Empire and some of its projects (Kopytoff 1965: 199). Their motivation reflects Krio openness to engagement and interconnection with other groups more generally during this period, but as was noted at the end of Chapter 4, it also suggests a particular interest, on the part of the Krio donors, towards participation, on their own terms and despite officially imposed marginalization, in the flows of empire through which new ideas, activities and opportunities were created, and through

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which they were able to forge new roles and statuses for themselves in colonial West Africa. Indeed, the story of their donations helps to reinforce the idea that elite Sierra Leonean Krio, in particular, appropriated things and influences from diverse sources to create a complex, dynamic and heterogeneous, culture that was not only trans-African, but also inherently trans-imperial as well.

Notes 1 Interview with Tunde Eccles James, Freetown, 10 March 2010. 2 Sibthorpe often reworded text from other books and government documents, or used it without attribution, so it is not easy to establish the original sources for much of his work. However, it would seem that the work of the Sierra Leonean surgeon Africanus Horton was one inspiration for Sibthorpe’s property-based strata for the various ‘grades’ of Liberated African (see Horton 1859: 12–13). 3 SLWN obituary of T. J. Williams, 7 March 1914, 30 (27). 4 Sibthorpe in The Artisan (Freetown), 22 February 1885 (quoted in Fyfe 1992: 327). 5 The British Parliament had declared Liberated Africans and their descendants Queen Victoria’s subjects in 1853 (Peterson 1969: 299). 6 SLWN, 20 August 1904, 20 (51). 7 SLWN, editorial of 10 May 1890 (quoted in Spitzer 1974: 41). 8 SLWN, 25 August 1900, 16 (52): 406. 9 SLWN, 4 June 1910, 26 (40). 10 SLWN, 20 November 1915, 32 (12): 5. 11 13 November 1915, 32 (11). Letter to the editor ‘In Memoriam of Mr Roland Cole’. 12 SLWN, obituary of T. J. Williams, 7 March 1914, 30 (27). The church T. J. Williams set up was apparently taken over by the CMS . 13 7 March 1914, 30 (27). Obituary of T. J. Williams. 14 SLWN, 5 October 1907, 24 (5): 6. 15 The Company of African Merchants Limited was constituted in 1862 with a subscribed capital of £400,000. It opened offices in London and Liverpool (TNA , FO 97/434, W. Dent to the Earl Russell, 22 July 1862) and acted as a commission house for Sierra Leonean merchants in the West African produce trade (Lynn 1997: 148). 16 SLWN 5 October, 1907, 24 (5): 7 March 1914, 30 (27). 17 Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_H._Gabriel, accessed on 26 October 2016. 18 Obituary of T. J. Williams, 7 March 1914, 30 (27). 19 In the case of this item, the collector might not have been Rosenior himself, who appears to have been a goldsmith, but perhaps someone else, like his stepfather, Thomas Pilot, who is known to have been a merchant. Thomas Pilot married Rosenior’s mother, Nancy Ann DeGraft, on 13 July 1876. Personal communication with Nigel Browne-Davies. 20 SLWN, 26 November 1904, 21 (13): 5. 21 Ridyard Correspondence, Manchester Museum Archives, Ridyard to Mullen, SS Addah, Sekondi, 2 June 1908. 22 The Mayer Museum accession register record for 12.5.14.14. 23 SLWN, 29 February 1908, 24 (26), p. 6.

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24 The Sierra Leone Royal Gazette, December 1905: 648. Hotobah During’s gravestone in the Kissy Road cemetery is engraved with the following obituary details: ‘Claudius D. Hotobah-During, F.R.S.G., F.R.S.A., F.R.A.I., Barrister-at-Law, Notary Public, Doyen & Ex-President of the Sierra Leone Bar Association, Ex-President of the Wesleyan Boys High School Old Boys Association, Member of the Legislative Council, Ex-City Councillor, Founder Member of the Sierra Leone Youth League’. 25 Copy of the Last Will and Testament of Claudius Dyonisius Hotobah During, seen 17 February at the probate office of the High Court of Sierra Leone, courtesy of probate officer Andrew Marke. The items mentioned here were not received by the museum and do not constitute a part of the existing African collection at World Museum Liverpool. 26 SLWN 1905, 21 (47). 27 From G. P. During’s Will drawn up on 22 October 1910 (courtesy of Donald Porter). 28 Royal Anthropological Institute, membership records of 3 July 1911. Hotobah During may have helped establish his credentials with Herbert Spenser Harrison by selling the Horniman Museum a number of Mende artefacts from the Sierra Leone Protectorate in 1908, including a male and female pair of figures (Horniman Museum 8.397 & 8.398) and a Sande society mask (Horniman Museum 8.396). 29 SLWN, 5 September 1914, 31 (1): 5. 30 See SLWN, 29 April 1911, 27 (35): 7; 18 May 1912, 28 (39): 8. 31 My understanding of Krio perspectives at Freetown draws partly on C. L. R. James’ perspective. ‘Our world of the 20th century is panoramic’, James says, because ‘Contemporary society gives us a sense, on a scale hitherto unknown, of connections, of cause and effect, of the conditions from which an event arises, of other events occurring simultaneously’ (James 1992: 247).

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Coastal ‘Kings’: The Gold Coast Donors I

This chapter and the next discuss the assemblage of artefacts that was presented to the Liverpool and Salford museums through Ridyard by donors from the Gold Coast (now Ghana). This assemblage presents a rather different picture to the body of presentations made by Sierra Leoneans discussed in the previous two chapters. While the majority (about 78 per cent) of donations from Sierra Leoneans were collected from outside their home colony of Sierra Leone and its adjoining protectorate (see Chapter 4), the opposite was the case with the donations from Gold Coasters. Of the 182 objects donated by the thirty Gold Coast donors with Gold Coast addresses, ninety-seven were made and collected locally. Eighty-four of the 182 originated from further afield, mainly from Asante, with only ten collected from outside the Gold Coast and Asante. Ridyard’s Gold Coast collaborators bore Fante, Ga, Anlo Ewe and European family names. Apart from four, who appear to have been based in other West African territories (two in Ivory Coast and two in Nigeria), they all had Gold Coast addresses in the main coastal towns. Two of Ridyard’s Gold Coast-based collaborators had Sierra Leonean connections. These were Roland Cole, the retired Gold Coast postmaster general, who donated six gourds from Accra (see Chapter 5), and Peter Awoonor Renner, the Cape Coast barrister, who donated thirty-eight items of gold dust weighing equipment from Asante and a brass Shango staff from Nigeria (see Chapter 7). Interestingly, ethnographic artefacts were not the only items donated. Five Gold Coasters donated natural history items as well as cultural artefacts to the Liverpool Museum, while a further two only made natural history presentations. Like the Sierra Leonean donors, the Gold Coasters were from urban elites. So the more localized and ‘domestic’ pattern of ‘collecting’ displayed by the Gold Coast donors, might be seen to indicate that most of them were less well travelled than the Sierra Leoneans. But, in fact, many Gold Coasters were rather well travelled (see Chapter 7), which suggests that there were more fundamental social and cultural factors that would explain the different collecting patterns of these two West African groups. Significantly, the Gold Coast’s nineteenth-century urban elites emerged primarily from indigenous Ga, Fante or Ewe lineages and not from liberated captives from elsewhere. By the early twentieth century, many members of these lineages could also claim Danish, Dutch and English ancestors, but local town and family affiliations meant that they regarded themselves as Ga, Fante or Ewe. This was especially the case among donors who were office holders within indigenous political institutions. While this chapter covers the Gold Coast donors who were indigenous leaders and officeholders, Chapter 7 covers another group, who claimed status predominantly by 147

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virtue of their wealth, Western-style education and livelihoods (Arhin 1983: 18). In some ways this might be seen as a false distinction, because most office holders had been educated in missionary or government schools. Moreover, coastal societies in the Gold Coast at this time were ‘densely layered with overlapping hierarchies and nuanced gradations’ (Cole 2001: 68), within which particular individuals or families might hold multiple affiliations and careers (Foster 1965: 99). Nevertheless, the donors covered in the present chapter all faced the radical challenge of upholding their prestige and interests as office holders in indigenous institutions under the colonial dispensation in the Gold Coast. There were several very prominent indigenous title-holders among Ridyard’s Gold Coast collaborators. The first to donate was ‘King’ (Omanhene) Amonu V of Anomabu (Kwamin Tufuantsi, aka Charles Mends, reigned 1901–21), who gave a palm wine vessel from the Anomabu palace in 1902 (7.7.02.14). He gave further items of Fante regalia from the palace in 1904 and 1906 as well as fourteen ceramic pipe heads from Asante in 1907 and 1908. ‘King’ (Mantse) Kojo Ababio IV of James Town’s Alata quarter in Accra (see Figure 39) donated ten Ga items in ceramic and wood between 1904 and 1914, while the Effutu ‘King’ (Omanhene) Acquah II of Winneba donated two locally made umbrella finials (8.7.07.10 & 11) and a third one from ‘Pomadzi’, in distinctly Akan-style depicting the backward facing sankofa bird (19.12.06.6). Chief James Ocloo of Keta, on the Anlo coast east of the Volta River, is only recorded as a donor in the natural history accession registers of the Liverpool Museum. He gave a baboon skin and a fragment of antelope skull with two horns attached in 1904. Among the other Gold Coast donors who were members of leading Ga, Fante and Anlo Ewe families, some belonged to chiefly lineages like ‘Prince’ (Niibi Nii) Daniel Ayidzaku Tackie (see Figure 40), who was a son of Ga Mantse Tackie Tawiah I. Another prominent Accra donor, Dr Joseph Edward Mettle, was also related to Tackie Tawiah I, by virtue of his mother being the Ga mantse’s sister, and he was an important advisor to the Ga mantse.1 Emmanuel William Quartey-Papafio, who donated various items to the Liverpool Museum through Ridyard in 1901 and 1903 was a wealthy merchant farmer and a captain of the Akwashon military tribunal, who was the son of Akwashontse Chief William Quartey-Papafio, one-time head of the powerful Kpakpatsewe lineage of the Asere quarter in Dutch Accra and also one of Tackie Tawiah I’s advisors (Parker 2000: 125, 175; Doortmont 2005: 347). Although these Gold Coast donors had a variety of cultural backgrounds they were all, in one way or another, ‘collectors’ of the African cultural artefacts they donated, as well as the original owners of many of them. This chapter discusses key artefacts donated by these officeholder donors in relation to their roles under the colonial dispensation and in relation to their individual social positions. It exposes some of the political and cultural factors that may help explain why particular officeholders donated particular items and considers some of the common factors that may have motivated them to involve themselves in Ridyard’s museum collecting project in the first place. As a foil to some of the broader issues at play, the works of three low status rural potters who made works for the political elites are also discussed in this chapter.

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Figure 39 Portrait of Nii Kojo Ababio IV, (formerly Amoako Atta) (1873–1938), mantse of James Town’s Alata quarter of Nleshi (James Town), Accra. Photographer: J. K. Bruce-Vanderpuije, Accra (c.1935). © Isaac Bruce-Vanderpuije and National Museums Liverpool (World Museum).

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Figure 40 Portrait of Niibi Nii Daniel Ayidzaku Tackie (1872–c.1931). ‘Prince’ Daniel Ayidzaku Tackie was a son of Ga Mantse (‘King’) Nii Tackie Tawiah I. Photographer unknown. Permission: Niibi Nii Teigo Tackie.

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All the donors profiled in this chapter appear to have had their own personal reasons for collaborating in Arnold Ridyard’s collecting operation. As we saw at the end of Chapter  3, collections are ‘authored statements’ that demonstrate the extent of a collector’s ‘influence, place and connections in society’ (Moser 2006: 13). This was particularly evident where the Gold Coast office holders were concerned, but their statements were made in the context of a pervasive British cultural imperialism in which they were attempting to uphold their own prestige, as well as that of indigenous institutions. Their statements were also made in the context of a trusted and, to some degree, reciprocal, relationship with Arnold Ridyard, whose personal Methodist credentials recommended him to them as someone who was not part of official colonial authority in West Africa.

Ababio IV, Amonu V, Acquah II and Prince Tackie A 1904 issue of the West African Mail, a weekly newspaper that Edmund Dene Morel had founded the previous year as an organ of the Congo Reform Society, carried a short report on the Liverpool Museum. The report stated that: The West African section of the Liverpool Museum has been enriched by the recent acquisition of many interesting objects from various parts of the Coast presented by King [Omanhene] Amonoo [Amonu] of Anamaboe, King Cudjoe Ababio of Accra, Prince Tackie of Accra and Chief Ocloo, Kwitta [Keta] per Mr A. Ridyard, of the steamship ‘Nyanga’ who has also added many interesting objects to the collection, the principal one being a native working loom, complete in every detail, which may be seen in the Mayer Basement, mounted exactly as used on the Gold Coast.2

The accession registers of the World Museum confirm that all the Gold Coast officeholders mentioned in this report did indeed make presentations to the museum in 1904. Omanhene Amonu V’s three 1904 donations included an impressive king’s messenger sword (15.8.04.30, see Plate 16), sporting a dumbbell-shaped wooden handle, with incised linear decoration and an iron blade, turned up at the end, with cut out motifs. Amonu V’s second 1904 donation was a fluted wooden drum (15.8.04.27, see Figure 41), probably of a type called Fonton that is still played on palace occasions at which the omanhene appears, while the third gift was an earthenware palm wine cup ‘used by the late king of Anomabu’ (Amonu IV ) (15.8.04.29, now lost). The cup was of a piece with a figurative palm wine vessel (7.7.02.14, see Figure 42) that Amonu V had donated two years previously, which had also belonged to his predecessor Amonu IV. Once transported to Liverpool and installed in the museum displays, items like these may have been understood by Amonu V as potentially helping to promote his reputation as an ‘authentic’ African leader. Amonu V seems to have well understood how to play up to the part, because after his death in 1921, the then Governor of the Gold Coast, Brigadier General F. G. Guggisberg, paid tribute to the Omanhene

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Figure 41 Drum body (skin and tuning pegs missing). Akan (Fante) from Anomabu, Gold Coast (now Ghana). Presented in 1904 by Omanhene Amonu V of Anomabu. 15.8.04.27.

of Anomabu at a meeting of the Legislative Council on 25 April 1921 in the following terms: Nana Amonoo V was, to my mind, one of the finest specimens of the big, real African Chiefs. He was a man, as far as I know, who always thought very deeply over the problems of this country. Ephson 1969: 106

The governor’s dubious tribute, with the offensive objectifying term ‘specimen’ used to describe the omanhene, merely underscores the fact that the notion of the ‘big, real, African Chief ’ was a convenient creation of the colonial imagination. It also suggests that the success with which Amonu V negotiated the conflicting demands of his difficult role, as a ‘big real chief ’ within the colonial system of so-called indirect rule, depended, to some extent, on his ability to manipulate the perceptions of British colonial agents. The omanhene’s reputation as an ‘authentic’ African ‘chief ’ (or ‘king’) was one that the West African Mail would have been keen to celebrate, because Morel, who edited the newspaper until 1907, was a strong supporter of the ideology of ‘indirect rule’, and he considered indigenous ‘rulers’ to be a necessary ingredient of British

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Figure 42 Ceremonial palm wine vessel. Akan (Fante) from Anomabu, Gold Coast (now Ghana). Presented in 1902 by Omanhene Amonu V of Anomabu. 7.7.02.14.

colonial administration in Africa (Ayandele 1966: 171). Crucially, however, African leaders in the Gold Coast faced many challenges under colonial overrule. By the end of the nineteenth century they were suffering a steep decline in their moral authority and economic resources, partly brought about by the removal of their judicial powers and associated revenues (Parker 2000: 146). As their positions were ultimately dependent on approval from the colonial regime, they were required to collaborate with the British administration and demonstrate loyalty to its officials. This brought them into conflict with their traditional supporters, especially over the implementation of the most unpopular colonial policies. But collaboration with colonial power also afforded some Gold Coast office holders opportunities to advance their own interests, especially when they were able to restructure long-established brokering roles to take advantage of the increasing commoditization of land and labour. The fact that Morel’s West African Mail was popular among British colonial administrators (Ayandele 1966: 171) would have meant that its 1904 report on the Gold Coast ‘kings’ could potentially have served to help boost the credentials of those

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whose generosity was recorded in it. Amonu V, Omanhene of Anomabu, and Kojo Ababio IV, mantse of James Town’s Alata quarter, were considered more or less exemplary ‘progressive chiefs’ by British colonial administrators in the Gold Coast.3 These two title-holders made their donations to the Liverpool Museum outside the immediate context of their collaboration with British colonial administration, but their gifts can still be viewed, on the general level at least, as ostensible affirmations of their collaboration with British imperial interests. The 1904 report in Morel’s West African Mail was recycled less than a month later in the locally edited Cape Coast newspaper The Gold Coast Leader, where it would have generated additional positive publicity for the four chiefly donors concerned.4 Such publicity may have encouraged them to make additional gifts because, with the exception of Chief Ocloo, who only made two natural history donations in 1904, all the other Gold Coast donors mentioned in the West African Mail report, went on to make further donations in subsequent years. For example, in 1906 Amonu V gave Ridyard a handled vessel in blackened earthenware with a bulbous body and cylindrical neck (24.5.06.35, see Figure  43), which he followed in 1907 and 1908 with two gifts of figurative ceramic pipe heads from Asante (8.7.07.17–28 and 23.4.08.6–7). Early in 1905 Kojo Ababio IV gave Ridyard a large drum (2.5.05.1), a black earthenware water vessel in the form of a hen (2.5.05.2, see Figure 44), and a ‘black earthenware basin and cover in the shape of a sitting hen’ (2.5.05.3, now lost). The image of a hen, especially one sitting on eggs or chicks, commonly represents the protective role of the

Figure 43 Earthenware vessel echoing a seventeenth century European form. Akan (Fante) from Anomabu, Gold Coast (now Ghana). Presented in 1906 by Omanhene Amonu V of Anomabu. 24.5.06.35.

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mantse over his family and followers. Similar ceramic items apparently still exist in the Alata mantse’s palace treasury, while large drums are regularly played during palace ceremonies and festivals.5 These artefacts can therefore be seen as equivalent to items of royal regalia and, like Amonu V’s earlier donations, could have served to emphasize Ababio IV ’s legitimacy and authenticity as an indigenous African leader. Prince (Niibi Nii) Daniel Ayidzaku Tackie’s 1904 gifts of a double-skinned hourglass-shaped drum (15.11.04.27) and a ‘miniature double sword’ (15.11.04.28, now lost) were likewise followed up by two blackened earthenware vessels in 1905, a pitcher (10.2.05.34, now lost) and a double-spouted water vessel (10.2.05.35, see Figure  45). The ‘miniature double sword’ no longer exists but may have been an office holder’s sword of some kind. The drum, on the other hand, is of a type that appears to have been ‘made to sell to travellers’.6 During my 2009 research visit to Accra, I showed a photograph of the double-spouted water vessel to Niibi Nii Teigo Tackie, a grandson of Daniel Ayidzaku Tackie, and he was immediately taken with it, exclaiming that it was ‘a beautiful pot’. He said that, because the pot had two spouts, it must be a ‘cooler’. He claimed to have seen coolers of various designs in use as a youth and said that the photograph showed a ‘special cooler’. As a child (in the 1950s–60s) he knew ‘special coolers’ only to have been used by ‘big men’ and he remembered seeing them used to hold drinking water as well as for serving guests wine decanted from the cask. Prince Daniel Tackie was a Methodist

Figure 44 Earthenware water vessel in the form of a hen. Ga from Accra, Gold Coast. Presented in 1905 by Mantse Kojo Ababio IV of Nleshi (James Town), Accra. 2.5.05.2.

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Figure 45 Double-spouted water vessel. Ga from Accra, Gold Coast. Presented in 1905 by Niibi Nii Daniel Ayidzaku Tackie. 10.2.05.35.

lay preacher and a wealthy merchant. He had a house on Horse Road and sold ‘elite drinks’, as well as other imported provisions, to African urban consumers. As a successful merchant and son of Mantse Tackie Tawiah I, Daniel Tackie was certainly a ‘big man’, so the cooler he donated to the museum was commensurate with his status and can be seen as a statement about his own social position and cultural refinement. The 1904 West African Mail report and its republication in The Gold Coast Leader may well have boosted Ridyard’s reputation as a collector with influential British connections and could have encouraged further Gold Coasters to make donations to the Liverpool Museum in subsequent years. An example of this may be the Akan-style regalia in the form of umbrella tops that Omanhene Acquah II of Winneba donated in late 1906 and in about the middle of 1907 (19.12.06.6 and 8.7.07.10 & 11). The umbrella top in the form of a hen sheltering five chicks (8.7.07.11, see Plate 17), would have emphasized the role of the omanhene as protector of the people. Acquah II made a point of emphasizing that this carving was ‘over 50 years old’ when he donated it, a rare indication of an object’s age that was recorded in parentheses in its accession record. Ridyard may not have been aware of the significance of the umbrella top’s age, but it was duly recorded during the process of accessioning, as a means to place the carving on an objective chronological scale. The local historical and subjective meanings

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associated with the carving’s half century of use and ownership in Winneba appear to have been overlooked. Yet Acquah II ’s emphasis on the umbrella top’s age, when he entrusted it to Ridyard in around the middle of 1907, can be viewed as a statement touching on the legitimacy of his own position as omanhene, made in the context of competition for this position by a candidate from the Ghartey family. Acquah II (aka Kojo Abeka) was a prominent Methodist and a merchant, who went by the name of George Acquah Robertson (c.1853–1916) before he succeeded to the Effutu stool in 1898.7 He belonged to the matrilineal Ayirebi Acquah family who competed with the patrilineal Ghartey family for control of the Effutu stool, within the improvised framework of the so-called ‘indirect’ system of British rule (Gocking 1999: 163). The first Ghartey to occupy the Effutu paramount stool was Robert Johnson Kwamena Gyete (aka Ghartey IV ) who came to prominence as a successful merchant and through his ability to act as an intermediary between the Europeans and Effutus. He claimed descent from the original priestly founder of Winneba, through the patrilineal line, and acted as representative of the kings and chiefs who joined the Fante Confederation in 1869. He was appointed ‘King of Winnebah’ by Governor J. Pope Hennessy in June 1872, but appears only to have been accepted as ‘regent’ by the majority of the populace until his death in 1897, after which Acquah II succeeded to the Effutu stool in 1898.8 When Acquah II was destooled in 1907 for financial impropriety, his deposition was recognized by the colonial administration, but Winneba’s two asafo companies did not allow the Ghartey family to place their own candidate, Robert J. Ghartey, on the Effutu stool.9 It was only after a lengthy interregnum, during which a British colonial official conducted an inquiry into the heady politics of the town, that Acquah II was eventually permitted to return to the stool in 1913 (Gocking 1999: 163–64). Acquah II ’s assertion that the umbrella top in the form of a hen sheltering five chicks, which he gave to the Liverpool Museum in 1907, was made more than 50 years earlier, is highly significant. It indicates that the item was made prior to 1857 in the reign of Ayirebi.10 Ayirebi died in 1857 and is credited with having created the Effutu paramount stool in 1826 after winning a reputation as protector of the Effutu people during the Katamanso war. As commander of Effutu forces at Dodowa, Ayirebi is remembered to have led a victorious attack on an Asante ‘king’, whose severed head he carried back to Winneba (Ackom 2005: 14, 20; Hutchinson c.1929: 13). After the war the head of the defeated Asante ‘king’ was used to consecrate the first Effutu blackened stool, modelled on the Fante institution in which chiefly inheritance was traced through the matrilineal line. The stool’s creator Ayirebi was made omanhene and became the founder of the Ayirebi (later Ayirebi Acquah) dynasty (Ackom 2005: 13, 14, 15). It was through matrilineal descent from Ayirebi that Acquah II derived his candidacy for the Effutu paramountcy. The umbrella finial from the time of Ayirebi’s reign, which he donated to the museum (8.7.07.11), may have made reference to Ayirebi’s own reputation as protector of the Effutu people in its depiction of a hen protecting her chicks. Umbrellas and staffs with figurative heads are used by the attendants and spokesmen of chiefs and ‘kings’ among Akan influenced groups. The

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fact that their figurative tops illustrate pithy sayings, or proverbs intended either to make political statements or to reinforce cultural values, adds credence to the idea that Acquah II gave the Liverpool Museum an umbrella top from the time of Ayirebi’s reign to make his own political point. His own point was probably to evince his legitimacy as omanhene, because Acquah II ’s prior ownership of the umbrella top demonstrated, in pithy visual form, that he was descended from, and was ultimate successor to, the founder of the Effutu stool. This fact also suggests that the other two umbrella tops that Acquah II gave up for display in the Liverpool Museum may have been intended to make similar statements about his own status or about Effutu culture and politics in the context of British colonial overrule. The backward facing ‘stork’ (19.12.06.6, see Plate 18) donated in 1906, for example, shows the mythical sankofa bird that is said to go back to retrieve any feather that it drops. Depending on the context of its use, the sankofa bird expresses the idea that one should not be afraid to undo past mistakes, or that one should retain the good things from the past. The group of birds feeding on a millet stalk depicted on Acquah II ’s third umbrella top (8.7.07.10, see Plate 19) expresses commonly held ideas about unity and awareness of common group affiliation among Akan and Akan influenced peoples. In the absence of any accompanying documentation gathered from the donor at the time, however, one can only speculate on the sorts of statements Acquah II may have intended to make through his gifts of these other two umbrella tops. In any case, Acquah II ’s gifts constituted a form of indigenous African regalia, which emphasized his claim to the Effutu stool. Interestingly, Acquah II ’s predecessor, Ghartey IV, had emphasized a rather different regalia in an 1897 letter he sent to the governor of the Gold Coast colony in order to stress his own family’s claim to the stool. The letter, written shortly before his death, begins by thanking the governor for the silver medal he had been given the previous month on behalf of Queen Victoria ‘for services rendered by me as King of Winnebah during the recent Ashanti Expedition 1895–6’. It goes on to relate that the ‘loyalty’ of the people of Winneba to the colonial government is not of today. Their manageableness and courage in some previous struggles with the Ashantees won for them a high opinion as evidenced by the presentation to their King late Aryirabi [sic] at Tantum of one puncheon rum, one sword and one silver medal bearing the inscription of King George IV of Great Britain 1814. This sword and medal we still preserve.11

Ghartey IV concludes his letter with a series of requests in which he asks that his thanks be conveyed to the queen for his medal, and that his chiefs and the Winneba people be treated with ‘leniency and justice’. He also asks the governor ‘to recognize, protect and help the successor from my offspring so that my name may not be lost to the Government’. By informing the governor of the British objects preserved as items of Effutu regalia, Ghartey IV acknowledges the role of British intervention in Effutu politics. Furthermore, in thanking the governor for the medal he won from the British

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queen in return for his loyalty to the colonial regime, Ghartey IV seems to have impressed upon the governor his own understanding of the reciprocal nature of his relationship with colonial authority before making his ‘last solemn request’, in which he directly asks the governor to ensure his family’s continued control over the Effutu paramount stool. Ghartey IV ’s directness and assumption of reciprocity contrasts with Acquah II ’s less cosy relationship with colonial officialdom and his rather more subtle and indirect assertion of his own claim to the Winneba stool in the form of his gifts of indigenous Effutu regalia to the Liverpool Museum.12 Significantly, Acquah II ’s subtle appeal was made to an institution in Britain that he probably saw as an alternative site of authority, and it was effected through the unofficial agency of the steamship engineer Arnold Ridyard.

Kojo Ababio IV, Accra Political Player If Ababio IV ’s gifts up to 1905 may be broadly viewed as affirming his collaboration with British imperial interests, the item he went on to donate in 1906 suggests something rather different. The museum’s accession record for the wooden artefact that Ababio IV gave Ridyard in that year describes it as a ‘Piece of wood carved to represent an open pillar, round the base is a snake, and on the platform above, an elephant with a stoolshaped saddle with a deer (sic) [duiker] on it; the whole is picked out with burnt ornamentation’ (19.12.06.7, see Plate 20). During my research visit to Ghana in 2009, I showed a photograph of this piece to four individuals in the Accra region. The first person with whom I discussed the photograph was the acting ‘chief ’ of Weija village. She showed considerable interest in the carving, which she identified as ‘something from a linguist’s staff ’. She immediately requested a copy of the photograph but would not be drawn on the meaning of the carving’s iconography and maintained an intriguing silence on the subject.13 The next person to whom I presented the photograph was the mantse of Oblogo village, Nii Kwaku Bibini III. He was also immediately struck by the image and identified it as representing ‘a symbol of the whole Ga state’.14 When asked to elaborate he explained that the image of the weak duiker on top of the strong elephant referred to the idea that the Ga are a small group who nevertheless overcame the mighty Asante.15 He explained the snake at the bottom of the staff in similar terms as representing the Ga people who, like the snake, have a reputation for being ‘slow but sure’. At a first audience with the James Town Alata Mantse’s Stool Secretary, Emmanuel Nii Dodoo Dodoo, he described the duiker on the elephant motif similarly, as ‘symbols of the Ga states’. He also explained that the staff head shown in the photograph could have been made in Weija and that such things were still made in that village. In a second audience he explained that the snake at the base of the staff head ‘symbolizes the authority of the paramount chief because he is the only person who is able to put his feet on the head of the cobra’. He presented an alternative account of the elephant and duiker motif to that of the Oblogo mantse in suggesting that the duiker, as a weak animal on the elephant, the Ga mantse’s symbol, shows regard for the people, and that ‘the weak are also held in respect’.16 The stool secretary also identified fish symbols

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carved out of the sides of the open pillar in the centre of the staff head. He interpreted this central feature to be a symbolic representation of a fisherman’s house and pointed out that fishermen’s houses are located behind the mantse’s palace. At this point he seemed to be suggesting, like the Oblogo mantse, that the staff head’s various emblems amounted to ‘a symbol of the whole Ga state’. When I showed the same image of Ababio IV ’s staff head to Niibi Nii Teigo Tackie, a great grandson of the Ga Mantse Tackie Tawiah I, he sounded a more critical note. Teigo Tackie explained that although the emblem of the Ga state is a duiker on top of an elephant, the way it was depicted in the staff head that Kojo Ababio IV gave to the Liverpool Museum in 1906 was not correct. The correct emblem, he said, must show the duiker standing directly on the elephant’s back and not on a stool-like platform carried by the elephant. Furthermore, he said that each mantse’s spokesman carries a staff with the emblems of his own quarter and it is only the Ga mantse’s own spokesman who can carry a staff that depicts the emblem of the duiker on the elephant.17 In the same interview Niibi Nii Teigo Tackie pointed out that Ababio IV styled himself the James Town mantse, which was not correct, because he was only the mantse of the Alata quarter of James Town. Alata, he said, means ‘Nigeria’ in Ga, and it reflects the ‘Lagosian’ (or Allada) origins of the quarter’s founding residents (Parker 1995: 20); origins, he stressed, that are still celebrated in Nleshi Alata ceremonies to the present day.18 The keen interest in the picture of Ababio IV ’s staff head expressed by those to whom I showed it in Ghana in 2009, indicated that it was a potent and controversial, cultural artefact. After more than one hundred years it retained the power to initiate discussion of cultural authenticity, authority and political affiliation, within Ga communities in the Accra region. These issues have a long history yet remained relevant in 2009 and still revolved around who was and who was not a ganyo kron or ‘true Ga’ (Parker 2000: 174), who had authority over what land, and who had the rights to use particular political emblems. How Kojo Ababio IV came to possess a staff head showing an unorthodox version of the emblem of the Ga state, and why he then donated it to the Liverpool Museum, is not clear. Nevertheless, the staff head’s freshlooking wood, without any sign of patination, indicates that it would not have been an heirloom from the palace treasury inherited from one of Ababio IV ’s predecessors. Instead, it appears to have been a newly carved display piece that evidently represented a potent refashioning of Ga cultural and political symbols whose creative rationale was rooted in Accra’s early colonial politics. While Ababio IV ’s legitimacy as a Ga leader in early twentieth-century Accra was not disputed, the authenticity of the Alata akutso’s identity as ‘true Ga’ and the extent of the Alata mantse’s authority had long been contested issues in a high-stakes struggle over who controlled the early colonial refashioning of the Ga state in Accra (Parker 2000: 129). Immigrants and ‘foreigners’ had played important roles in the Ga state’s earlier refashionings, going back at least to the defeat of the Ga by Akwamu in 1680–81 (Parker 1995: 17). From that time ‘foreigners’ who settled in Ga territory and achieved influence, or gained many followers, were encouraged to identify with the Ga state and to contribute to its defence. The Alata akutso, which occupies much of what is still sometimes called ‘British Accra’, but more often Nleshi, or James Town, was initially

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settled by ‘Lagosian’ or ‘Yoruba’ newcomers who arrived as slaves and artisans with the British Royal African Company in the seventeenth century (Reindorf [1895] 1966: 40). Through their skills they acquired wealth and influence. Their leader at the end of the seventeenth century, Wetse Kojo, gained power through his role as chief broker or ‘linguist’ of the English (Odotei 1991: 66; Parker 2000: 14). He had his own oblempon (private) chiefly stool carved, which was consecrated to him by Kinka Mantse Oto Brafo (Reindorf [1895] 1966: 40) and he adopted the Akwamu (Akan) purification ceremony Odwira to bolster his legitimacy. He claimed stewardship of James Town land acquired by the British and, through his access to guns and his prowess in war, he eventually superseded the Sempe mantse, who was the original custodian of the land on which James Fort was built (Odotei 1991: 66; Parker 2000: 49, 175). In November 1891 Amoako Atta, a descendant of Wetse Kojo, was enstooled at the age of eighteen as the Nleshi Alata mantse. He took the name Kojo Ababio IV and was thrust into an ongoing dispute between James Town’s Alata akutso and Ussher Town’s Asere akutso. The dominant issue in the dispute at that time centred on the question of which akutso controlled the land and people of the western sector of the Accra Plains (Parker 2000: 128). A benchmark decision had been settled in the colonial Supreme Court in 1880 in favour of the then Alata Mantse Kofi Oku (‘King’ Solomon) who produced convincing evidence that these villages had been settled by slaves attached to the Alata akutso in earlier decades.19 In an attempt to reassert the ritual authority of Kinka’s ‘true Ga’ paramount stool, over Nleshi’s semi-independent oblempon, or richman’s, stool held by the Alata akutso, the newly enstooled Ababio IV was brought to swear an oath of allegiance to the Ga Mantse Tackie Tawiah I in October 1892. After the ceremony, Tackie Tawiah I took Ababio IV to Christiansborg Castle to be introduced to the governor of the Gold Coast colony (Parker 2000: 140). British colonial records relate what happened during the audience, when the governor congratulated Ababio IV on ‘being elected chief of one of the quarters of James Town’: Amoako Atta [Kojo Ababio IV ], drawing himself up, said ‘I am not one of King Tackie’s chiefs, I am King of James Town. James Town is an English Town and Ussher Town is a Dutch Town, and English people can’t serve Dutch people.’20

In his commentary on this episode Parker states that Kojo Ababio IV ’s ‘calculated appeal to the English antecedents of Nleshi and its historic autonomy from its Dutch neighbour would over time strike a chord with British officials who continued to view Kinka as a stubbornly tradition-bound and often hostile community’ (Parker 2000: 140). As a professed Anglican who had been educated at the government school in James Town, Kojo Ababio IV was able, in Parker’s words, ‘to refine his discourse’ so that he soon emerged as a skilled political player, whom the British colonial administration regarded as ‘progressive’ and as the de facto mantse of James Town as a whole (Parker 2000: 177). But Ababio IV apparently overreached himself in 1907, when he refused to accept that the Sempe akutso of James Town had the right to elect their own mantse. This attempt to subordinate the Sempes backfired, because they then refused to recognize Kojo Ababio IV as the mantse of James Town as a whole (Odotei 1991: 67).

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During my audience with the James Town Alata mantse’s stool secretary, in September 2009, he offered the opinion that Ababio IV made his various gifts to the Liverpool Museum in order ‘to show what they have as a people’. In other words, he understood it as a form of ‘identity’ display. Interestingly, the right to display chiefly regalia, especially during the Homowo festival, was an important visual indicator of oblempon, or ‘richman’, status and, like Wetse Kojo long before him, Ababio IV was an innovator when it came to political display. Parker relates how, by the 1920s, Kojo Ababio IV ’s ‘James Town Odwira’ had become a focal celebration during Accra’s Homowo season, with its climax, a great durbar, held in the Alata mantse’s palace square. The durbar was regularly attended by colonial officials, including the governor and so served as a ‘potent display of Kojo Ababio’s carefully nurtured relationship with colonial power’ (Parker 2000: 218). The dispute between Kinka and Nleshi was inevitably shaped by the vagaries of colonial legislation and jurisdiction and was often inflamed by broader struggles with the colonial administration, especially when acquisitions of urban plots for public works were involved. However, the protagonists in the dispute considered their struggle to be an ‘African palaver’ (Parker 2000: 40). On the other hand, the mantsemei (sing. mantse) of Kinka and Nleshi were essentially part of the British colonial administration in the Gold Coast colony, because they were required to collaborate with the British in the administration of Accra according to ‘the dogma of Indirect Rule’ (Heussler 1968: 84, 91). In his struggle with the colonial state to advance his own interests, a figure like Ababio IV would have been acutely aware that he was not only up against the opinions, preconceptions and ideologies of British administrators in the Gold Coast, but also those of their political masters in the colonial office and parliament of the colonial metropolis. As a skilful and literate political player in his own right, he would also have been aware that colonial policies were influenced by public opinion in Britain and by campaign groups like the Congo Reform Society in Liverpool. He may even have been aware of the influential role played by ‘the Liverpool Sect’ (Nworah 1971) of which Morel was a leading member, in constructing knowledge about Africa and in helping to determine the direction of British policy relating to West Africa. In any event, Ababio IV would probably have seen the museum in Liverpool as one of several potential stages on which to present his carefully choreographed political credentials to a British audience. This may have been a factor in why he donated the staff head (19.12.06.7) to the Liverpool Museum in 1906. However, the significance of the staff head’s iconography would have been lost on most museum visitors in Liverpool, especially as the piece came without any kind of explanatory narrative. So, while the staff head does not look as if it was ever used, it seems unlikely that it would have been made specifically for the museum. More likely, perhaps, is that it may have been an early experiment in figurative staff making, at a time when figurative kings’ spokesmen’s staffs appear to have been a recent introduction to Accra’s culture of political display (see section five below). It may therefore have been implicated in the earlier political jostling between Ababio IV and Tackie Tawiah I, which clearly extended to the issue of who had the right to use particular political emblems. Indeed, the apparent claim to paramount authority that Ababio IV ’s staff head articulates, with its emblem of the

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Ga state represented by the duiker on the elephant, suggests that it would inevitably have caused political provocation had Ababio IV ever actually used it for public display in Accra. When Kojo Ababio IV made his initial 1904 donation to the Liverpool Museum of a blackened earthenware water jug with lid and anthropomorphic face modelled under the lip (15.11.04.11), he evidently told Ridyard that it had been made in the village of Daama. The old village of Daama is now part of the Dansoman suburb of Accra, but in 1904 it was situated a few miles from the town and was one of the villages that owed allegiance to James Town’s Alata mantse. Ababio IV ’s later donations in 1909 and 1914 were also ceramic vessels and it seems that he was equally concerned in these cases that Ridyard should note where they were made. His 1909 gift was a red earthenware ‘jug’ or pitcher (19.11.09.12, see Figure 46), which Emmanuel Nii Dodoo Dodoo claimed would have been used to store water for cooking and washing. The World Museum accession register records that it came ‘from a village named “Waifain” 12 miles from Accra’. Ababio IV ’s 1914 donations included a ‘bronzed’ earthenware water pot in the form of a chicken with ‘loop suspender’ (12.5.14.5, see Plate 21) from ‘Afuamang 17 miles from Accra’, a ‘bronzed’ earthenware spoon from ‘Wiegian’ (Weija) village (12.5.14.7, see Figure 47) ‘9 miles from Accra’, and a blackened earthenware decanter with stopper and ‘bronze’ linear decorations (12.5.14.6, see Plate 22) from the village of Oblogo (‘8 miles from Accra’).21 Emmanuel Nii Dodoo Dodoo thought that the ornate decanter could have been used to hold the mantse’s personal supply of alcohol, while the other vessels would have been used to store cool water that was offered to visitors in the mantse’s palace hall. He suggested that the ‘bronzed’ spoon was of a type that could have been used for the stool purification ritual at the palace during the Odwira festival. While little was recorded in the museum accession registers about the functions

Figure 46 Red earthenware water pitcher. Ga made in the village of ‘Weifan’ (probably Weija), Accra Plains. Presented in 1909 by Mantse Kojo Ababio IV of Nleshi (James Town), Accra. 19.11.09.12.

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Figure 47 Earthenware ceremonial spoon from Weija village, Accra Plains. Presented in 1914 by Mantse Kojo Ababio IV of Nleshi (James Town), Accra. 12.5.14.7.

of these items, beyond names like ‘jug’ or ‘water pot’, the names of the villages in which they were made, and their distances from Accra, do appear to have been provided by Kojo Ababio IV. So it would seem that this represented the most notable information about them from his perspective. These villages are situated to the west of Accra near Sakumo and Korle River clay deposits, but more importantly, they are all villages over which James Town’s Alata mantse would have claimed control. As mentioned above, however, the issue of who controlled them was a source of potential dispute between Accra’s Nleshi and Kinka quarters. A confrontation flared up between these two town quarters after the death of Chief Lamptey of Oblogo village on 21 January 1910. Although Ababio IV and his ‘chiefs and councillors’ had appointed a temporary successor, a rival group from Kinka arrived in the village on 6 March that year to ‘discharge firearms, beat drums, blow horns and attempt to enstool one Kwatei Kojo’ as the new chief of Oblogo.22 In a letter of complaint to the acting secretary for native affairs, Ababio IV asked him to intervene and referred him to the 1880 case of ‘King Solomon v. Noy’ that had been brought over a previous dispute about who controlled land at Oblogo, and which had been settled in the Alata mantse’s favour. In April 1910, the Ga Mantse Tackie Obili wrote to the secretary for native affairs to inform him that a nephew of the late Chief Lamptey, Kwatei Kojo (a Kinka man from the Asere akutso), had been duly installed on 22 March as headman of Oblogo.23 In fact, this was one of several challenges to the Nleshi Alata mantse’s authority by a resurgent Asere akutso, which saw itself as a ‘bastion of Ga tradition’ (Parker 1995: 302). These challenges, and Ababio IV ’s counter challenges, were played out in a series of expensive legal suits that began in 1910 and spanned more than eight years (see Parker 1995: 300–310). Given the ongoing nature of the dispute between the Nleshi and Kinka quarters over who controlled the land and settlements of the plains to the west of Accra, Ababio IV ’s gifts of ceramic vessels from Oblogo and other western villages in 1904, 1909 and 1914 should not be seen merely as general affirmations of his collaboration

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with British imperial interests or ‘statements’ about his relationship with British colonial power. They were clearly presents freighted with quite specific local political meanings. Potters from the villages under the control of the Alata mantse’s stool may have presented Ababio IV with some of the vessels as a tribute during Odwira, the Alata stool purification ceremony held at the close of the annual Homowo festivities.24 As works given up by Ababio IV for display in a British museum, they can be more fully understood as material testaments to Ababio IV ’s authority and to the wealth and political interests of the Nleshi Alata akutso.

Potters of Accra’s Western Plains The dispute over Chief Lamptey’s successor at Oblogo casts Arnold Ridyard’s collection of Gold Coast ceramics from 1910 in an interesting light. As was mentioned in Chapter  3, the 1910 Annual Report of the Liverpool Museum states that Ridyard was asked to collect ‘examples illustrative of the primitive potter’s art as now carried on in Africa’ (Liverpool Museums 1911: 9). Ridyard appears to have responded enthusiastically, because he transported a proportionally much larger number of West African ceramics to the museum in 1910 and in subsequent years than he had in previous years. Before 1910, Ridyard had only personally collected six ceramic items from the Accra region (including three from Affarmah and one from ‘Quarjue’) and he had transported another twenty-four from his Gold Coast friends and contacts. None of those from his contacts are recorded as having been made at Oblogo, although many are described as having come from other villages, or are listed simply as being from ‘Accra’. Starting in 1910, the year of Chief Lamptey’s death, and continuing to 1914, Ridyard transported at least 107 pottery-related items to the Liverpool and Salford museums that originated in Oblogo but none from other villages on the Accra Plains. Oblogo was the largest source for Ridyard’s West African pottery collection as a whole, by a large margin, and included completed vessels and ceramic ornaments as well as unfired vessels (23.11.10.3–6). It also included potting tools (23.11.10.2 & 23), samples of clays for potting (23.11.10.1), slip samples (Salford 1912.25), and leaves used in blackening pots after firing (23.11.10.24). While this represents a major effort on Ridyard’s part, it would seem that the potters of Oblogo, chiefly one unnamed woman and her two daughters, were the prime movers behind the operation. The evidence for this is revealed in the captions of two unattributed photographs that Ridyard gave to the Liverpool Museum in 1910 and to the Salford museum in 1912 along with his respective donations of pottery from Oblogo to these two institutions. The caption to the Liverpool photograph reads: ‘Photograph of the women potters (who made the above specimens [23.11.10.1–24]) with specimens of their work’.25 The caption of the Salford photograph is more detailed and reads: Woman and her daughters working at and polishing objects of pottery. These women made the pieces of pottery that follow [Salford 1912.22–35].

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They walked eight miles from Oblogo to Accra in order to show Mr Ridyard (the donor) how they did their work.26

These three unnamed women were evidently prolific and creative, professional potters who made a diverse range of items from traditional African-style stew dishes (23.11.10.10, see Figure 48) to European-style bowls (23.11.10.9, see Figure 49), tureens (23.11.10.15, see Figure 50) and jugs (23.11.10.11 & 12, see Figure 51), to miniature models of boots (10.4.11.32 and 23.11.10.16, see Figure  52). One remarkable vessel appears to be an invention based on a European-style ewer with two lips, two handles and a lid topped with the figure of a fowl (23.11.10.21, see Figure 53). This vessel in particular would appear to indicate that European models were not merely copied, but creatively interpreted in order to fashion new and original forms. Ridyard did not provide the names of the three women, which means that he did not consider them to be donors and would have paid them in some way for the pots he collected from them. Nevertheless, given the fact that these potters walked eight miles in order to demonstrate their art, they can be considered collaborators in Ridyard’s collecting operation. The women would have had complex motives for their eight-mile walk to show Ridyard how they made their pots, which also clearly amounted to an expression of pride in their work. It is impossible to guess the extent to which their contribution may have been motivated by the changeover of the Oblogo

Figure 48 Earthenware food dish. Ga, made at Oblogo village, Accra Plains. Presented by Ridyard in 1910. 23.11.10.10.

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Figure 49 European-style earthenware bowl. Ga, made at Oblogo village, Accra Plains. Presented by Ridyard in 1910. 23.11.10.9.

Figure 50 European-style earthenware tureen. Ga, made at Oblogo village, Accra Plains. Presented by Ridyard in 1910. 23.11.10.15.

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Figure 51 European-style earthenware jug. Ga, made at Oblogo village, Accra Plains. Presented by Ridyard in 1910. 23.11.10.12.

Figure 52 Earthenware model of a pair of European leather boots. Ga, made at Oblogo village, Accra Plains. Presented by Ridyard in 1910. 23.11.10.16. chieftaincy, but Parker has noted that ‘an underlying dynamic in the dispute between Kofi Oku and Noi, and by extension between James Town and Ussher Town, is the shift away from the control over people as an economic and political resource towards the control over land’ (Parker 1995: 197). Ababio IV depended for his reputation as a

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Figure 53 Innovative vessel based on European ewer form with two lips and handle on each side. Ga, made at Oblogo village, Accra Plains. Presented by Ridyard in 1910. 23.11.10.21. ‘progressive’ on providing labour from among the inhabitants of tribute paying villages for the construction of colonial municipal and infrastructure projects. Yet one of the ironies of the so-called ‘indirect’ system of colonial rule in the Gold Coast was that his control of this rural labour force as an oblempon leader was partly based on allegiances that derived from the legacy of a defunct system of slave ownership (Parker 2000: 141). The three women potters from Oblogo are likely to have been descendants of slaves, because Oblogo was established by Mantse Kofi Oku and his predecessor predominantly through sending Alata war captives and their descendants there to farm for them (Parker 1995: 195). Indeed, by the mid-nineteenth century, the villages on the Sakumo River bed west of Accra were all largely populated by ‘slaves, pawns and clients controlled to varying degrees by office holders and merchants based in Accra’ (Parker 1995: 198). These three potters appear to have mainly catered to elite urban patrons and possibly other clients in Accra, who would have included indigenous office holders as well as wealthy merchants. The quality and sophistication of their work suggests that they were specialist potters. Many genres of vessel produced in the villages on Accra’s Western Plains reveal a preoccupation with status, articulated through elite modes of drinking and eating that would have been influenced by European conventions and

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manners. But although some pot genres may have been used, at times, to serve European foods and drinks, thus helping to demonstrate their users’ European-style dining habits and notions of hygiene, many vessels, especially the more elaborate ones, are likely to have been intended only as display pieces. Others may have been ceremonial pots used only during the Homowo festival in the homes of elite urban patrons. A few were clearly dishes of a type that would have been used regularly by a wider range of urban or even rural clients (e.g. 1.2.11.10). As display pieces, European-style vessels made reference to their users’ cosmopolitan sophistication as well as their European cultural inheritance. This referencing can be seen in the examples of double-spouted Portuguese- or Spanish-influenced coolers or botijos (11.9.11.5, see Figure 54); lidded, Victorian-style tureens (23.11.10.15); lidded water coolers (23.11.10.18, see Figure  55) and decanters (18.4.12.4 and 1.2.11.1, see Figure 56); copies of European cups (18.4.12.5 & 6, see Figure 57); lidded ornamental ewers (15.11.04.11); decorated jugs (1.2.11.2) and even a Victorian-style, covered saltdip dish described as a butter dish in the Salford Museum accession register (Salford 1911.13). The miniature models of leather boots (Figure 52) could have been inspired by Victorian, or even Dutch delftware, originals seen in the homes of urban patrons during Homowo festival gatherings, but they also clearly reference an elite preoccupation with a European-style urban culture that was predominantly concerned with display. The Victorian-style salt-dip dish can be characterized as the ultimate in elite and refined crockery. The cover of the salt-dip is modelled in the form of a sitting hen and, while it may have been copied from a European model, because European versions exist (especially in coloured glass), the sitting hen is typically a Ga subject that symbolizes the protective role of the chief or family head. Indeed, the fact that many such vessels did not simply copy European tastes and vessel forms, suggests that Ga

Figure 54 Double-spouted botijo-style water vessel. Ga, made at Oblogo village, Accra Plains. Presented by Ridyard in 1911. 11.9.11.5.

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Figure 55 Lidded water cooler. Ga, made at Oblogo village, Accra Plains. Presented by Ridyard in 1910. 23.11.10.18.

Figure 56 Lidded decanter. Ga, made at Oblogo village, Accra Plains. Presented by Ridyard in 1911. 1.2.11.1.

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Figure 57 European-style earthenware cup. Ga, made at Oblogo village, Accra Plains. Presented by Ridyard in 1912. 18.4.12.6.

elites made use of European-style goods, and a vocabulary of European manners, to fashion their own notions of refinement.27 The image of the protective hen is a common motif and one that embellishes various different ceramic genres. It is a subject that potters may have repeated partly in order to remind their urban patrons of their reciprocal obligations towards their rural dependents. This would suggest that the display of European-style vessels in a town house not only signalled the sophistication of the owner as a member of the wealthy urban manbii who enjoyed full civic rights within the Ga social order, it also neatly embodied the social contract that bound wealthy urban office-holding families to rural ‘dependents’ whose status was that of kosebii (‘country’ or ‘bush’ people), a term with connotations of inferiority and restricted rights (Parker 2000: 7). In this context, the strikingly original forms, like the lidded ewer with two lips and a handle on each side (23.11.10.21), or the ‘teapot’ form with two spouts and handle attached at the top (10.4.11.14), would appear to take on a special significance. The remarkable creative confidence manifest in these self-consciously innovative works, appears explicitly to contradict the terms of kosebii identity, with its assumptions of rustic simplicity. Elsewhere it has been noted that European collectors often avoided acquiring ethnographic objects that showed signs of European influence, because they considered such items to be inauthentic (e.g. see O’Hanlon 2000: 22). Ironically, however, it would have been precisely the European-style forms created by the Oblogo potters that

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appealed to their elite patrons in Accra. Significantly, Arnold Ridyard appears to have been unusual in consistently acquiring all kinds of artefacts, whether or not they were considered ‘authentic’ by museum curators (see Chapter  3). It is probable that the Oblogo potters encouraged Ridyard’s patronage, not simply for the financial gain it may have brought them, but because his acquisition of their work would have demonstrated the appeal of their European-inspired wares to Europeans themselves. Ironically, Ridyard’s acquisition of their work for the museum to illustrate ‘the primitive potter’s art’ may therefore have been regarded by the potters themselves as an endorsement of their products’ refinement and a boost to their individual creative reputations. The potters’ enthusiasm in demonstrating their art, and in providing Ridyard with examples of their work for the museum, may also underscore the fact that much of their work was created primarily for display purposes. The opportunity to have their work displayed in a museum in Liverpool may therefore have been part of their bid, already mentioned above, for recognition of their own cultural sophistication in a way that was not entangled with a demonstration of their subservient identity as rural kosebii who were obliged to serve urban, officeholding families. Thus, while not constituting a direct challenge to the social order, the Oblogo potters’ contribution to Ridyard’s collecting operation might still be seen as an attempt to claim social esteem and independent agency for themselves. Their claim may also have reflected social changes that were brought into the foreground by Oblogo’s headship dispute. The new Oblogo chief installed in 1910 was from the Asere akutso and his control over Oblogo may have resulted in a weakening of villagers’ old allegiances to office-holding families from Accra’s Nleshi Alata quarter and encouraged an entrepreneurial bid, on the part of the potters’, to gain greater control over the products of their own creative labour by opening up new markets for their wares.

Ambiguous ‘Traditionalist’: E. W. Quartey-Papafio Of the eleven artefacts that Emmanuel William Quartey-Papafio (1857–1930) donated to the Liverpool Museum through Ridyard in 1901 and 1903, only seven still exist in the World Museum collection. Six of these are Ga items and include a basketry sieve (20.5.01.12, see Figure  58), a lidless basket woven from wide strips of palm leaf or similar fibre (20.5.01.17, see Figure 59), an ornamental wooden ladle with handle in the form of a curved snake gripping the bowl in its mouth (20.5.01.13, see Figure 60), a Ga-style, waisted ‘soup’ dish (20.5.01.15) and a simple, bowl-shaped, earthenware cooking dish (20.5.01.16). The sixth Ga item was donated in 1903 and consists of a war belt with ten canister shaped pockets for powder cartridges, to which a gourd powder flask is attached, all covered with animal hide and bound with hide straps (15.1.03.10).28 Interestingly, the seventh surviving item, a basketry hat decorated with leather (20.5.01.14, see Figure 61), is clearly of Hausa make. Two other leather items that are now lost, a pair of leather sandals (20.5.01.18) and a pair of leather slippers (20.5.01.19), are also likely to have been of Hausa make. None of these items are described as

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Figure 58 Basketry sieve. Ga from Accra. Presented by E. W. Quartey-Papafio in 1901. 20.5.01.12.

Figure 59 Plaited basket. Ga from Accra. Presented by E. W. Quartey-Papafio in 1901. 20.5.01.17.

Hausa in their original accession records but all eleven articles originally donated by E. W. Quartey-Papafio are recorded as having come from Accra. Emmanuel William Quartey-Papafio was a prominent member of the Kpakpatsewe, the Asere akutso lineage that controlled the powerful Ga office of Akwashontse. The Akwashontse presided over the Akwashon military tribunal and claimed a chiefly stool as well as control over extensive lands. He held theoretical command of all the forces within the Ga system of companies or asafoi (Parker 2000: 19). Emmanuel William’s grandfather was Kwatei Kojo, a celebrated Akwashontse who had led the Ga forces to

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Figure 60 Wooden ladle with handle in the form of a snake. Ga from Accra. Presented by E. W. Quartey-Papafio in 1901. 20.5.01.13.

Figure 61 Hat of plaited fibre trimmed with leather. Hausa from Accra. Presented by E. W. Quartey-Papafio in 1901. 20.5.01.14.

victory against the Asante at the battle of Katamanso in 1826.29 As a celebrated defender of the Ga state and owner of numerous enslaved war captives, Kwatei Kojo gained great authority and wealth, which he had used to strengthen the position of the Kpakpatsewe so that it stood at the centre of political power in Kinka (Parker 2000: 124). Emmanuel William’s father, Chief William Quartey-Papafio (also known as Nii Kwatei Kojo or ‘Old Papafio’), had himself served as Akwashontse during the 1880s (Doortmont 2005: 347; Parker 2000: 175) and it is clear that Emmanuel William also took on the mantel of his family’s martial tradition. The Gold Coast Government Gazette for the half year

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ending 30 June 1896 and 30 June 1897 carried notices indicating that he was promoted from lieutenant to captain and then to adjutant in the Gold Coast Rifle Volunteers.30 Given the fact that the colonial government and its predominantly Hausa forces had effectively taken over the putative role of defending the Ga state by this time (Parker 1995: 223), Emmanuel William may have viewed his enrolment in this colonial auxiliary force, and his progression through its ranks, as a way to preserve his family’s martial reputation and prestige. Ultimately, it may well have been viewed as an important qualification for his role as an Akwashon captain and for his succession to acting Akwashon chief, a position he held, at times, prior to October 1910. After the 1910 Native Jurisdiction Ordinance denied official recognition to the Akwashon military tribunal (Parker 2000: 177), Emmanuel William was made a councillor of the Asere mantse’s tribunal in 1911, in a move that might have been designed to preserve Kpakpatsewe authority and partially circumvent the Native Jurisdiction Ordinance ruling against the Akwashon tribunal.31 Indeed, this move seems to reflect one of the ways in which the Asere hierarchy strove to preserve the institutions and functions of the Ga state in the face of opposition and competition from the colonial state and its institutions. When E. W. Quartey-Papafio made his 1903 gift of the war belt (15.1.03.10, see Figure  62) to the Liverpool Museum, he was one of the Akwashon captains (Parker 1995: 236 n.18).32 But, as an example of Ga weaponry, the cartridge belt with powder flask attached would have been directly connected to his martial heritage and should therefore be seen as representing, at some level, a statement about his lineage, as well as his own title and status. Colonial forces had supplanted the defensive role of Ga military institutions by 1903, and British weaponry used by these forces would also have rendered old Ga weaponry obsolete. The social and cultural role of the Ga asafoi remained, however, as warfare had historically been a highly important determinant of Ga collective identity and a route to wealth and status, as well as to moral and political authority (Parker 1995: 60). A similar impulse to that which motivated QuarteyPapafio to preserve the martial reputation and prestige of his family by enlisting in a colonial auxiliary force, when this reputation and prestige was undermined by the

Figure 62 Hide-covered cartridge belt and powder flask. Ga from Accra. Presented by E. W. Quartey-Papafio in 1903. 15.1.03.10.

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colonial state, may have encouraged him to give up the war belt, as a material remnant of the Ga military, to be preserved in a British museum. Moreover, whatever explicit meanings Quartey-Papafio intended to attach to his gift, his relinquishing of the war belt, as an ‘obsolete’ item of Ga military paraphernalia, would have been indicative of the transformation of the Ga military, through the impact of colonial consolidation, and of a reoriented Ga relationship with British power. The significances of E. W. Quartey-Papafio’s 1901 donations would seem less clear than his 1903 gift of the cartridge belt, but we can make an informed guess about the likely sources of these earlier items. E. W. Quartey-Papafio was the successor to his father, Akwashontse William Quartey-Papafio, and it appears that he took over his father’s lands and responsibilities shortly before his father’s death in 1889. In his testimony on 12 March 1912 in the case of Hammond v. Ababio, involving a dispute over who controlled a portion of land west of the Kole (or Korle) lagoon allocated to the Hausa leader Malam Baako, E. W. Quartey-Papafio claimed to be a ‘planter’ and stated that he started working on the disputed land in 1888. He claimed to have taken over the land from his ‘father’s people’, by which he meant his father’s ‘slaves, half brothers and sisters’.33 It is more than likely that artisans among his ‘father’s people’ would have made some of the rustic items that E. W. Quartey-Papafio gave to the Liverpool Museum in 1901. The items of Hausa make that he donated in 1901 were probably gifts he had received from Malam Baako, or other members of the Muslim community whom he had permitted to settle on land that he controlled on the west side of the Korle lagoon.34 Accra’s Muslim community at that time was involved in its own power struggles and the Asere hierarchy, as controllers of land and brokers of the rights to use it, had significant influence on the selection of Muslim leaders in the town (Parker 2000: 165). It would therefore have been in Malam Baako’s interests, as an ambitious Hausa elder, to maintain good relations with his ‘landlord’, which he probably did partly through the presentation of periodic gifts. While the basket (20.5.01.17), basketry sifter (20.5.01.12), cooking dish (20.5.01.16) and waisted soup dish (20.5.01.15) that Quartey-Papafio gave Ridyard in 1901 are all items that could have been made and used in a village context, the ornamental ladle with handle in the form of a snake (20.5.01.13) may have been intended as a decorative item for an urban household. Similar ladles were hung on the walls in the houses of the Ga elite.35 This example may well have been made in a village context, as it is decorated with pyro-engraved drawings of forest scenes including, leopard, butterflies, and turacos (fruit-eating forest birds) in a treetop. Such rustic, or bush, imagery appears to differ from the imagery preferred by the Oblogo potters discussed in the previous section. Although the women potters of Oblogo did create miniature models of animals like the tortoise (10.4.11.28), frog (6.2.12.11 & 12), elephant (10.4.11.18) and parrot (10.4.11.21), they did not create any vessels in the form of bush animals, only in the form of domesticated fowl. They also demonstrated a confident facility with forms derived from European crockery and table services, used in the homes of the urban manbii in a way that appears explicitly to contradict the terms of a ‘bush’ confined kosebii identity. In contrast, the – presumably male – wood carver who made the pyro-engraved ladle appears to acquiesce with the terms of a rustic kosebii identity by

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making an artefact for his urban ‘protector’ decorated with images of bush-related animals. E. W. Quartey-Papafio’s probate records indicate that he controlled at least 50 acres of cocoa plantation, as well as other land at the time of his death.36 His ‘father’s people’ would have lived and worked on this land and, as his father’s successor, he would have had certain responsibilities towards them, like finding them work if they could not be employed on the plantations. It would seem that he also considered it his responsibility to provide them with ‘civilizing’ religious resources. Kimble indicates that E. W. Quartey-Papafio was editing a Ga language Sunday school paper for Methodists, Hogba Skul Ngmalo, before the turn of the century (Kimble 1963: 517 n.1), while a notice in The Gold Coast Leader of 27 February 1904 indicates that he was secretary of the Accra Auxiliary of the British and Foreign Bible Society at that time.37 This society’s aim was to assist members to publish editions of the Bible in any language for which a readership could be found. The Ga urban elite were educated in English, so E. W. Quartey-Papafio’s involvement in the publication of Sunday school literature and Christian scripture in the Ga language suggests a paternalistic concern with the ‘spiritual development’ of slave descendants and rural villagers. However, the 1890s was a time when Ga office holders, especially ones whose predecessors had controlled large numbers of slaves, pawns and clients, were facing ‘a serious erosion of their moral authority’ (Parker 2000: 146). Seen in this context Quartey-Papafio’s Sunday school project may therefore have been part of an attempt to revive a declining formal moral authority in the indigenous sphere through appropriation of informal Christian religious means. Given that Ridyard was a Methodist and evidently carried magazines and other cultural materials to his contacts in West Africa (see Chapter 3), it is possible that Ridyard may have provided Quartey-Papafio with Methodist literature from England as source materials for his religious projects. The rustic Ga items he received from Quartey-Papafio in 1901 may have been given in recognition of this assistance. On the other hand, Ridyard may have assisted Quartey-Papafio in a somewhat different venture. The nature of the venture is set out in the record of an Executive Council action published in the Gold Coast Government Gazette of 28 February 1899, which granted Quartey-Papafio permission to ‘engage and ship to Matadi . . . fifty men as Artisans’. Four conditions were imposed on the permission that reflected the precautions enacted in response to abuses and atrocities perpetrated against West African workers by Congo Free State officials under Leopold II , which had earlier led Governor W. B. Griffith to ban Congo Free State agents from recruiting labour in the Gold Coast colony (Cookey 1965: 267–69). The four conditions were listed in formal terms. Thus:

(a) No person of Hausa tribe or nation be engaged or shipped by the said EMMANUEL WILLIAM QUARTEY PAPAFIO under this Order.

(b) All men engaged and shipped . . . under this Order shall upon their arrival at Matadi aforesaid . . . be brought and caused to present themselves before the British Vice-Consul at Boma.

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(c) None of the men so engaged and shipped . . . shall during the period of service during which they have contracted to serve shall be permitted to enter the service of or to be employed by or have their services lent to the government of the Congo Free State or any of its officials but shall be employed in the service of the Congo Railway Company. (d) No person under the age of sixteen shall be engaged or shipped by the said EMMANUEL WILLIAM QUARTEY PAPAFIO under this Order.38 Quartey-Papafio made a second application to the governor in council for permission to send 100 men to work for the Congo Railway Company on 4 July 1899, which was granted the same month in the Government Gazette of 31 July, with similar conditions.39 The intriguing question of whether Ridyard played a role in Quartey-Papafio being granted official permission for his recruitment ventures hangs over ten accession records for items acquired from Ridyard that were entered into the Liverpool Museum accession register in June 1899. The ten items were photographs showing Central African scenes and, although the photographs themselves no longer exist, their records provide brief descriptions of their subjects. One of the photographs was titled ‘Street in Matadi looking from the Railway Office’ and another, ‘Street in Matadi looking from the judge’s house’, while a third was recorded as showing ‘Stewards and servants of M. de Baeker, Director of Railways, Matadi’.40 Other photographs showed scenes in Boma. These descriptions provide evidence that Ridyard must have been in contact with a photographer in Matadi or Boma. This photographer would almost certainly have been the Lagosian entrepreneur Mr H. A. Shanu, whose name appears in the museum’s accession register the following year, when he gave Ridyard a fishing spear from Bangala on the upper Congo River (24.9.00.49). Hezekiah Andrew Shanu was a complex figure who had initially arrived in the Congo Free State in 1884 to work as a recruiter for the state’s so-called ‘Force Publique’. Later he served as a translator on the Governor General’s staff at Boma before leaving the state’s service to set himself up as an independent businessman in 1893 (Hochschild [1998] 2002: 218). Shanu is known to have practiced photography and several of his pictures were published between 1892 and 1895 in a Belgian magazine Congo Illustré (Morimont 2005: 216). It seems that Ridyard had an interest in labour issues (see Chapter 3), so it is possible that he may have liaised with Shanu, and possibly even the Director of Railways M. de Baeker himself, on behalf of Quartey-Papafio in order to obtain assurances for the British administration in Accra that the conditions of Quartey-Papafio’s permission to recruit artisans for the Congo Railway Company would be fulfilled. As a British subject with the requisite experience of working for the Congo State, Shanu would have been in a good position to provide such assurances, and possibly even to monitor the treatment of workers from the Gold Coast at the hands of the Congo Railway Company. Indeed, it seems that Shanu later provided Roger Casement, British consul in the state, with information about the mistreatment of West African workers in the Congo Free State.41 Evidence from the Gold Coast Government Gazette indicates that Quartey-Papafio successfully exploited the ‘modern’ bureaucratic procedures of the colonial state in order to assume the new role of labour broker in a move that should be seen as a part

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of his response to new economic and political realities and to the erosion of his authority and economic power within the indigenous social order. It is not clear whether or not Ridyard played any role in facilitating Quartey-Papafio’s recruiting venture, nor whether the rustic items Ridyard received from Quartey-Papafio in 1901 had any bearing on it. Nevertheless, when considered as a whole, Quartey-Papafio’s donations to the Liverpool Museum do appear to be implicated in the various new brokering roles, and in the range of ‘modern’ skills, that he marshalled, both in order to shore up his own prestige and responsibilities as an office holder, and also to help preserve particular functions of the Ga state threatened by competition and opposition from the colonial regime.

Dr Edward Mettle, ‘Man of Mystery and Power’ Of all the Gold Coast office holders who donated items to the Liverpool Museum through Ridyard, Dr Edward Joseph Mettle is the one whose memory survives in the most potent form in Accra today. Not unrelatedly, perhaps, he was also one of the most skilful cultural brokers, in the sense of being both a full player on the ‘traditional’ Ga political stage, and conversant with European culture and learning. Arnold Ridyard kept in his papers what appears to be a wedding photograph of Mettle seated beside one of his various wives (Figure  63).42 Ridyard’s daughter Mary Horrocks gave the picture to the Bolton Museum with other papers in 1946, many years after her father’s death. The portrait photograph would have been commissioned from the Accra studio photographer Albert Lutterodt, probably in the early 1890s (Haney 2004: 125), and reveals Mettle to have been a man of two, intermeshed worlds. Although he wears a cloth of imported European plaid, he wraps it in traditional Ga style like a toga. Around his head he sports a headband embellished with gold ornaments, while his feet are clad in Western-style leather shoes. His wealth and eminence are also signalled by the long gold chain that hangs around his neck and other items of gold jewellery that adorn his left wrist and two fingers of his left hand. Tied around his upper left arm is a fabricwrapped amulet, while his bare neck is knotted with a European tie. In his right hand he holds a bunch of storage chest keys, a further sign of his eminence and wealth. Mettle’s wife is dressed in a Victorian-style top and full-length skirt cut from the same plaid material as her husband’s cloth. She wears gold jewellery on her arms and around her neck and her elaborate hairdo is also bedecked with gold ornaments. While Ridyard may have valued the portrait as an exotic souvenir of his friendship with an African aristocrat, its careful composition would have coded subtle messages for a Ga audience. When I showed this portrait to Niibi Nii Teigo Tackie he pointed out to me that Mettle ‘is wearing a tie to show that he is a scholar’, and on noticing that Mettle is wearing an amulet in the photograph, he mentioned that Mettle ‘could take leaves and recite things and perform things’. Mettle was ‘a man of mystery (Kpaatse) and a man of medicine (Tsofatse) who sought spiritual powers from all sorts of places,’ he said.43 When I asked retired Accra policeman Albert Bart Mettle about his grandfather in October 2009, he claimed that Dr Mettle was a fearless man who, ‘if he was here now

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Figure 63 Portrait of Dr Edward Mettle. Photographer: Albert Lutterodt, Accra. © Bolton Council, from the collections of the Bolton Museum.

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could turn himself into a cat’. At my official meeting with the Mettle family, at a house in Accra’s Zongo Lane in December 2009, another of Mettle’s grandsons told me that he was writing a book about his grandfather in which he was attempting to record the many stories that people told about his grandfather’s extraordinary powers and his incredible feats of healing. One of the stories he had collected described how his grandfather wore a special device over his heart, which, if punched, caused his assailant to be electrocuted. The most famous story concerned how Dr Mettle had cured the ‘king of Abeokuta’ when all other healers had failed. The ailing king in Abeokuta learned of Dr Mettle’s reputation as a healer and sent a delegation to Mantse Tackie Tawiah I in order to seek a cure from the celebrated herbalist. Mettle asked the delegation to describe the king’s ailment and he then provided them with an appropriate remedy and instructions for its use. The remedy was taken back to Nigeria for the king and duly administered. Two weeks later the king was cured and back on his feet. In gratitude the king sent Mettle a gun with the inscription ‘Oshogba Osborne’ on it. He also sent the herbalist two children from the royal household, a boy and a girl, because in having saved a life the king wanted to repay Mettle with the lives of the two children. The story goes that when the girl reached a certain age, she became another of Mettle’s wives and in due course added new branches of descendants to the Mettle family tree. Mettle belonged to the Agbon lineage of the Asere akutso of Kinka (or Ussher Town) in Accra. Descendants living in Accra say that Dr Mettle’s grandfather had been a Dutch trader by the name of James Mettle who settled in Accra and married a Ga woman. James Mettle had one son who was named Nii Kojo Mettle after Nii Kojo Ababio, the James Town Alata mantse at the time of the child’s birth. Nii Kojo Mettle married Janet Nyanchi Plange, a sister of Ga Mantse Tackie Tawiah I. Edward Mettle was the youngest of Janet Nyanchi Plange’s four sons.44 He was educated at the government school in Christiansborg (Osu) Castle and appears to have initially acquired wealth through trade in produce like rubber and through money lending.45 He appears to have invested much of his wealth in the form of land, which he was careful to register with the land registry, often employing British legal firms to do so. As well as growing cocoa on this land, Mettle also purchased cocoa from others for sale to trading factories, and he travelled widely in pursuit of his business interests. He acquired a mining concession in the West Akim area and was something of an entrepreneur who involved himself with diamond prospecting.46 It is conceivable that Ridyard assisted Mettle in protecting his commercial interests by putting him in touch with British legal firms. Alternatively, Ridyard may have assisted Mettle with his medical work in some way. Certainly the two men had a common interest in African medicines. In a note of 10 February 1904 addressed to W. E. Hoyle, director of the Manchester Museum, Ridyard listed the various roots and ‘spices’ he had left for the Manchester Museum with Mr Entwistle at the Liverpool Museum and described how a dose of the root medicines was to be prepared (see Chapter 3).47 According to his descendants, Mettle had written a manuscript in which he had compiled West African herbal medicine recipes for many illnesses.48 Like Mettle, Ridyard also had a practitioner’s interest in African herbal medicines and used at least

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one of them to treat his ‘kidney trouble’. Unfortunately, the question of whether Mettle ever treated Ridyard for any ailment must remain purely speculative. Mettle’s name is hardly ever mentioned in connection with political cases in the colonial court records, but he was a close supporter of Tackie Tawiah I and is said to have accompanied his uncle to Elmina Castle when the Ga mantse was imprisoned there by the British from 1880 to 1883. He may have tried to keep out of the way of colonial administrators, yet Mettle must have played a significant role in Ga politics behind the scenes, because he served as one of the Ga mantse’s councillors, at least for the years immediately prior to the mantse’s death in 1902. As a councillor he was among the close associates of Tackie Tawiah I who attempted to impose their authority over town politics in the immediate aftermath of the Ga mantse’s death (Parker 1995: 236). Although he styled himself a doctor, Edward Mettle had not trained in Western medicine. At times he referred to himself as a ‘native doctor’49 while later sources appear to refer to him as a ‘herbalist’.50 Nevertheless, Mettle was a ‘scholar’ or, in other words, a graduate from a school established by Europeans, and he may have educated himself in aspects of Western medicine, as he clearly had some knowledge of Western science. Mettle’s first donations to the Liverpool Museum through Ridyard were natural science specimens accessioned on 27 November 1899. They consisted of three cocoons attached to twigs, ‘native name “Kokofran” ’, and two land molluscs, ‘native name “Wa” ’.51 Two living catfish were also donated, which were documented as follows: 27.11.99.1 & 27.11.99.1a – two Catfish, Clarias sp. From river Densu, Accra: native name ‘Adsen’. Presented by Dr. J. Edward Mettle, Newhaven, Lutterodt road, Accra, who described them as ‘walking siluridaes’. . . .52

According to Linnaean classification, air-breathing catfish belong to the order Siluriformes, so Mettle’s reference to ‘walking siluridaes’ was one instance in which he exhibited his familiarity with Western scientific learning and presented himself to a European interlocutor as an educated gentleman. But Mettle was a complex figure and, as his portrait suggests, he would have presented himself to different effect among Ga compatriots. Mettle donated a total of twenty items to the Liverpool Museum but only two appear to have been obviously connected to his personal and professional interests as a ‘native doctor’. These were gourd artefacts described as ‘Two enemas for children’ (2.5.05.8) that he gave Ridyard in 1905.53 Although it is possible that the ‘country pot – “Gbe” ’ (27.11.99.35, now lost) and the ‘two carved coconuts, Native tumblers’ (27.11.99.37, now lost) that Mettle donated in 1899 may have been used for the mixing of herbal preparations, this is not mentioned in their accession records. The Liverpool Museum’s 1899 Annual Report acknowledges Dr J. E. Mettle as one of Ridyard’s several friends on the coast who had been ‘ever ready to obtain for the collection special wants’ (Liverpool Museums 1900: 34). Although there is little explicit indication as to what these special ethnographic wants might have been, so-called ‘fetish’ figures, including various types of shrine figure, are frequently described as

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‘highly interesting’ or ‘desirable’ in the annual reports, so it is likely that these were especially requested by the director of museums through Ridyard. The beautiful female shrine figure sporting the distinctive oduku ceremonial headgear, with delicate, separately carved and attached arms and feet (27.11.99.36, see Plate 23), that Mettle gave to the Liverpool Museum through Ridyard in 1899, would undoubtedly have been one of these ‘special wants’. A male shrine figure in similar style, which Ridyard gave to the Liverpool Museum the previous year (9.8.98.7), was probably also acquired from Mettle, but in this case Ridyard may have purchased it from him because the Mayer Museum accession register lists Ridyard rather than Mettle as the donor. The figure donated by Mettle is described in its accession record as, ‘Wooden figure of a female painted black and white = Kole, a chief goddess’. This is followed by a quote attributed to Mettle with the explanation: ‘Worshipped by the native fetish men and women. Sheep, goats and oxen are sacrificed to her every year as the Fetish priest directs.’ The quote obviously refers to the ‘goddess’ Kole rather than the wooden figure, but the accession record equates the one with the other to suggest that it was the wooden figure itself that was worshipped like an idol. Kole or Koole was one of the three principal deities ( jemawoji) of Accra. She was associated with the Kole (or Korle) lagoon on the west side of Accra and was considered the guardian of Ga lands (Parker 1995: 29). From a Ga point of view, it would have been inconceivable, indeed impossible, for anyone to have given up the Koole deity to be installed in a museum in Britain. As was the case in many parts of West Africa, shrine figures would have been created in Accra as foci for communication with spirits and deities and not as ‘fetishes’ or ‘idols’ to be worshipped in themselves. The word ‘fetish’ is a European term that derives from the Portuguese word feitiço. European explorers and traders used it from the fifteenth century to describe various types of African charms, amulets and other artefacts. By the nineteenth century, ‘fetish’ had acquired a derogatory meaning (Shelton 1995) and Western scholars and curators were in the habit of recruiting African figurines to occupy the role of ‘fetish’ in museum displays that aimed to exemplify the superstitious and irrational attachments that ‘primitive’ peoples made to material artefacts. As a ‘scholar’, Mettle would have had a largely Christian education (he may have been a nominal Christian), so he would have been aware of the pejorative valence associated with the term ‘fetish’ and the underlying ideas that informed it. These ideas were part and parcel of a derogatory British cultural imperialism in which a ‘modern’, ‘evolved’, ‘civilized’ and Christian Europe was formulated in opposition to an African antecedent ‘other’. We do not know how Mettle acquired the Kole figure he gave to Ridyard in 1898. Nor can we know what Mettle would have thought about giving a Ga shrine figure to a museum in Britain, which he must have known would be used to exemplify, at some level, pejorative ideas about Africans. But whether he was a professed Christian or not, Mettle was well versed in Ga history and cultural practices and it is quite evident that he made a point of contesting some of these pejorative ideas in a letter he sent to Ridyard that accompanied his next donation, made in 1900. Only a fragment of this letter remains. It consists of a paragraph in blue type pasted into the museum accession register alongside the entry for his gift of an impressive warrior’s coat or smock (24.9.00.55) of a type that would have been

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festooned with cloth and leather packages, along with other protective amulets and charms.54 The paragraph reads: I have also with pleasure sent you my grandfather’s ‘Dania’ meaning Life-Coat, which he had used in actions during several Wars, particularly the Battle of Katamansu (sic) in the year 1826. This Life-Coat is an important link in the great chain of events of the Africans in their past History. It is superstitiously noted that the wearer of it could not be hurt by either bullet, Arrows, Spears, Swords etc. in Battlefield or elsewhere, the traditional views on this subject began to fade away, the unwholesome superstition of the past. The cost of this Life-Coat in Olden Times is a compensation of ten Slaves or ten Peredwans £80.00. It descended to me from my late Father the successor of my Grand-father.55

This is a unique document that reveals Mettle’s attempt to foreground meanings for his grandfather’s dania that made sense from the point of view of his own African perspective and cultural agenda. In it, Mettle notably avoids using the pejorative term fetish. He refers to his gift by its Ga name dania and explains that the name means ‘lifecoat’. He goes on to assert individual and personal significances for his gift, in contrast to the collective ethnic attributions that were routinely made for African objects displayed in Western museums. He also emphasizes the idea of African cultural change, in contrast to ideas about the ahistorical nature of African cultures prevalent in Europe at the time, and he counterpoints simplistic European notions about ‘superstitious’ Africans with his own contemporary sophistication and African modernity. Mettle’s next donation, presented to the Liverpool Museum in 1903, was an elaborate lidded dish in blackened earthenware (31.7.03.21, see Figure 64). It is described in its accession record as a ‘native soup tureen made in an Accra village called Korlibu one mile from Accra’. I showed a picture of this piece to Niibi Nii Teigo Tackie and he claimed that it was a ‘rare food dish for soup or stew’ of a type that would have been used only by wealthy people. The vessel’s form suggests that it could have been modelled on a European silverware tureen, but the dish may have been intended only as a display piece, because it shows no sign of ever having contained food. As a piece intended for display in the household of a merchant or office holder, it would have signalled the cosmopolitan sophistication and refinement of its owner. Interestingly, Mettle gave the blackened earthenware tureen to Ridyard long before the museum had asked Ridyard to collect ‘examples illustrative of the primitive potter’s art’ in 1910. Unlike the Koole shrine figure that Mettle donated in 1898, therefore, the tureen would not have been one of the museum’s ‘special wants’ at the time of its donation in 1903. On the contrary, it was probably something that Mettle himself chose to give to the museum in Liverpool partly in order to contest pejorative European ideas about Africans. The piece embodied Ga notions of cosmopolitan sophistication and its formal references to refined European silverware, and/or crockery soup tureens, would have made it hard for a European curator to have used it to exemplify ideas of African backwardness and savagery. This may partly explain why he did not include an explanatory note to go with this donation, nor with the three other earthenware vessels

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Figure 64 Earthenware tureen. Ga made in the village of Korlibu, Accra. Presented by Dr Edward Mettle in 1903. 31.7.03.21.

that he went on to give the museum in later years. These other ceramic gifts would probably have been presented for similar reasons to those that motivated his 1903 gift of the tureen. They included a jug or jar from Affarmah village (24.5.06.33, now in the American Museum of Natural History), presented in 1906, and a small plate from Accra, presented in 1909 together with a jug from Affarmah (13.2.09.18, see Figure 65), which sports a human face modelled under the lip. The World Museum accessions register records that Mettle made two donations to the Museum in 1904. One of these was described as: ‘Carved Soup ladle, in form of a gun with bird at top, carved with an ordinary pen knife. From Pokusai, 10 miles from Accra’ (15.8.04.31, now lost). This was probably an ornamental wooden ladle, similar to the pyro-engraved example that Quartey-Papafio donated in 1901 (see 20.5.01.15), of the kind that were reputedly displayed on the walls of Ga houses. The second item that Mettle donated in 1904 was described as a ‘carved wooden walking stick, with a bird on top’ (15.8.04.28, see Figure  66). This description would have been entered by the museum’s assistant curator, but in parentheses after this description the words ‘King’s Linguist’s Sceptre’ appear, which were evidently copied from the original label that was attached to the object by Ridyard or by Mettle himself. The item was recorded as having been acquired from the Akan chiefdom of ‘Kwahu’ (or Kwawu) ‘seven days from Accra’.56 This information and the item’s identification as a ‘King’s Linguist’s Sceptre’ could only have come from Mettle. The uncertain outcome of Mettle’s struggle to attach his own African meanings to the objects that he gave to the Liverpool Museum is revealed in the way that the

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Figure 65 Earthenware jug. Ga made in the village of Affarmah, Accra Plains. Presented by Dr Edward Mettle in 1909. 13.2.09.18.

museum’s ‘objectifying’ classificatory system placed his donation in the category of ‘walking stick’, thus subordinating the authority of its African attribution as a ‘King’s Linguist’s Sceptre’. In contrast to the humble walking stick, a sceptre is a staff carried as a symbol of royal or imperial authority. So Mettle’s use of the word ‘sceptre’ in this case would seem to be part of his attempt to counteract the pejorative meanings habitually given to African cultural artefacts by Europeans at the time. In fact, the term ‘sceptre’ provides a relatively accurate description of the way such staffs, (okyeame poma in Twi nomenclature) were used in Akan societies, as emblems of chiefly and regal authority held by a chief ’s or king’s spokesman (okyeame) to signal the formal, official nature of his speech. The word ‘linguist’, on the other hand, which appears to have been established British usage in the Gold Coast (Cole and Ross 1977: 161), does not begin to describe the important role of the Akan okyeame, who could be spokesman, ambassador, counsellor, historian and more, to the king (Cole and Ross 1977: 158). The fact that the finial of the okyeame poma that Mettle gave to the Liverpool Museum in 1904 has a damaged green-stained surface patina, may or may not suggest that a valuable metal foil covering was removed at some stage either before or after it was acquired by Mettle. The staff is carved with typical Akan motifs like the wisdom knot and the sankofa bird finial. The midsection of the staff includes a naked human figure with hands meeting

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Figure 66 Chief ’s spokesman’s staff (okyeame poma). Akan from Kwawu. Presented by Dr Edward Mettle in 1904. 15.8.04.28.

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in front, which may represent a defeated enemy depicted in humiliating form as a beggar (see Cole and Ross 1977: 166). The questions of how and why Mettle came to be in possession of an okyeame poma from the Akan region of Kwawu ‘seven days’ journey due north of Accra are impossible to answer with any certainty. Perhaps it was acquired from a Kwawu okyeame as early as 1889, when the British deposed the ‘un-cooperative’ Kwawu King Yaw Donkor and imprisoned him in Accra.57 Given Mettle’s reputation as a man who sought power from ‘all sorts of places’ it is possible that he originally acquired it for a specific purpose of his own. Mettle was an advisor to Tackie Tawiah I and one of the Ga mantse’s counsellors and the Kwawu okyeame staff may have interested him as an item of political regalia. Intriguingly, in this regard, the Kwawu staff incorporates motifs that look very similar to motifs incorporated into the design of the spokesman’s staff shown being held by E. W. Quartey-Papafio’s brother Dr Benjamin William Quartey-Papafio in a 1912 photograph (see Haney 2010: 133). The photograph was taken by the Eliot and Fry Studio in London and shows the Gold Coast Aborigines’ Rights Protection Society deputation that went to London in order to protest the terms of the Gold Coast Forestry Bill initially proposed in 1910 (Kimble 1963: 363). The staff top is carved in the form of a duiker on top of an elephant, the symbol of the Ga state, which indicates that this was the Ga mantse’s spokesman’s staff that lent Dr Quartey-Papafio the authority to speak on behalf of the Ga mantse. Interestingly, the staff also has a wisdom knot motif occupying its upper section, which is carved in the form of two looped, opposing canes, interlocked in the central knot. The form of the knot and the way its parallel cane ends are joined to the shaft of the top section, as if bound either side of it, looks very similar to the way this feature is represented in Mettle’s Kwawu staff. So it seems likely that the okyeame poma from Kwawu may have served as a partial model for the Ga mantse’s spokesman’s staff, shown in the 1912 photograph. The photograph shows two of the Fante members of the deputation, E. J. P. Brown and J. E. Casley Hayford, to be holding elaborate ceremonial swords, probably kings’ representatives’ swords of one kind or another, while T. F. E. Jones holds a somewhat European-style staff, with an elaborate, but non-figurative, knob at the top. Dr Quartey-Papafio is the only member of the deputation holding a staff with a figurative finial. Intriguingly, Cole and Ross suggest that the use of ‘linguist staffs’ in the Gold Coast was ‘borrowed entirely from the Europeans, probably beginning near the middle of the seventeenth century’ (Cole and Ross 1977: 161). They state that nineteenth-century sources only describe non-figurative canes, which could be covered in gold foil, and they claim that the first evidence of a spokesman’s staff featuring a carved, gilded figurative top appears in a photograph of Accra chiefs published by Alice Hodgson in 1901 (see Hodgson 1901: facing 288).58 Based on such sources, Cole and Ross surmise that figurative staff tops were a late nineteenth-century development that originated on the coast (Cole and Ross 1977: 161). The evidence presented by Mettle’s 1904 donation of an okyeame poma from Kwawu, which must already have been many years old when it was collected, and may even have been acquired as early as 1889, suggests a more complex picture. Indeed, it seems highly likely that Kwawu chiefs could have been using the figurative okyeame poma well before it was adopted by the Ga mantse.

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Perhaps the Ga mantse and his counsellors had reason to admire the political traditions of the fractious, but plucky, Akan state of Kwawu, which had dared to assassinate the Asantehene’s emissary in 1888, in an assertion of independence, and which harboured a strong resistance movement in the 1890s that had opposed British attempts to subjugate them to Akuamoa.59 Whatever the case, Mettle’s possession of an okyeame poma from Kwawu, which bears similarities to the Ga mantse’s spokesman’s staff shown in use in 1901 and 1912, raises questions about Mettle’s own possible role as a cultural intermediary, and about the extent to which a new type of figurative staff reflected the changing role of the king’s spokesman in colonial Accra. While McLeod counterintuitively suggests that figurative staffs developed among the Asante only when the role of the spokesman became less important (McLeod 1981: 101), the evidence from Accra suggests a different scenario. The need for Accra mantsemei to maintain Western-educated counsellors and lawyers to mediate in their conflicted relations with the colonial administration, may well have reduced their need for a customary spokesman in the colonial courts or in communicating with colonial officials. However, the demands made on them as ‘rulers’ by the colonial state, also led mantsemei to experience difficulties and conflict in their relations with their own followers, as well as with rival groups. So the skill of a customary spokesman in helping to maintain a mantse’s dignity and authority through formalized communication may have become even more important during colonial times, at least when it came to a mantse’s interactions with his followers and rivals. In contrast to what McLeod suggests was the case among the Asante, it may have been the increased, rather than decreased, importance and specialization of the spokesman’s role in colonial Accra that was reflected in the adoption of the high-impact, gilded, figurative spokesman’s staff. Significantly, Ababio IV ’s 1906 donation of a staff head to the Liverpool Museum, which was evidently intended to rival that of the Ga mantse’s spokesman’s staff (see section two), suggests that the long drawn-out dispute between Accra rivals, Kinka and Nleshi, extended to the issue of who had the right to use particular political emblems. The dispute between these groups was characterized as ‘African palaver’ (Parker 2000: 40) by its protagonists and it seems obvious that figurative spokesman’s staffs displayed by mantsemei in Accra would have played a role in articulating such rights when communicating with followers and rivals in ‘African’ institutional contexts. While Mettle’s role in all this is not at all clear, he was an office holder with a vested interest in enhancing the prestige of the Ga mashi, the original Ga settlers of Accra, which included those of his own Kinka akutso. He also had an interest in upholding the functions and prestige of Ga political and cultural institutions within the newly consolidated colonial dispensation of the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Gold Coast. His cosmopolitan outlook meant that he probably saw this as little different from upholding the prestige of African history and culture in the face of pejorative European ideas, which characterized African societies as representing ‘primitive’ antecedents to ‘evolved’ European cultures. The original motivation for adding Kwawustyle okyeame poma elements to Ga modes of regal display may well have been a response to the cultural imperialism of the British and could have been carried out in order to replace European-inspired canes that had been widely used beforehand (Cole

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and Ross 1977: 161). In fact, the British had begun to introduce official government staffs in the late nineteenth century that were made in England and given to West African chiefs to distinguish their official representatives in communicating with colonial officials (Bravmann 1973: 12–13). The display of such a thing by Tackie Tawiah I might not have played well among all his followers in Accra. So it may have been partly in order to assert African cultural meanings and precedents, in opposition to British colonial ones, that the Kwawu-influenced staff was developed for the Ga mantse’s spokesman. A further motivation may also have derived from a deep-rooted sense of competition with the Asante confederacy tinged with admiration for the splendour of Asante forms of political display, witnessed, perhaps, when the colonial government placed Kwadjo Akuamoa on the Kwawu stool at a ceremony staged in Christiansborg Castle in March 1889 after they had deposed the ‘troublesome’ Yaw Donkor (Agbodeka 1971: 122).60 As a ‘scholar’ who pursued ‘modern’ European commercial practices, as well as African medical methods, Mettle belonged seamlessly to two worlds. He was evidently a consummate cultural broker, but this role was not, of course, a neutral one. His innovation, if his innovation it was, of adding Kwawu elements to the Ga mantse’s spokesman’s staff, is unlikely to have presented any contradiction vis-à-vis his interest in upholding the prestige of Ga institutions. Over the centuries there had been much borrowing of Akan cultural elements by the Ga. This included political regalia, titles, aspects of the asafo military organization, festivals like Odwira, along with music, religious practices and even aspects of matriliny.61 The evidence provided by Mettle’s spokesman’s staff from Kwawu suggests that the ‘Gaisation of Akan institutions’ (Parker 2000: 25) was ongoing at the turn of the nineteenth century. Mettle would have been well aware of the depth of Akan influences on Ga culture and, like many among the Ga elite in Accra, he probably shared a sense of competitive admiration for the political achievements and cultural splendour of the Asante confederacy, while possibly preserving a level of ‘Christian’ opprobrium for what Europeans commonly referred to as its ‘pagan barbarities’.62 Significantly, Mettle also played a brokering role in relation to Ridyard’s collecting operation. The particular information he provided, along with the objects he entrusted to Ridyard, show that he was keen to contest pejorative European ideas about Africans and African institutions. In effect, he seems to have attempted to help ‘broker’ richer, less pejorative understandings of African cultures, especially Ga culture, through his remarkable and historically significant contributions to Ridyard’s collecting operation for the Liverpool Museum.

Conclusion The early twentieth century was undeniably a challenging time for indigenous leaders and office holders in the coastal towns of the Gold Coast. Their moral authority and judicial independence, as well as their revenues, were being eroded by the British colonial institutions and unpopular colonial policies. Under the so-called ‘indirect’ system of colonial rule indigenous authority was held by British officials to derive from

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‘tradition’ or ‘customary law’. ‘Tradition’ was often viewed to be an inflexible corpus, frozen at some unspecified point in the distant past, to which new precedents or legislation could not be added.63 At the same time indigenous leaders were expected to collaborate with the colonial government in implementing its policies, keeping order in their communities and in raising labour for colonial public works projects or load carriers for military expeditions. Their positions were ultimately dependent on approval from the colonial administration, which meant that they were obliged to demonstrate loyalty to a colonial government whose officials often spent short periods of time in West Africa, had little understanding of African cultures and the workings of African politics, and were frequently racist and disparaging towards Africans and their institutions. At first glance, then, it would appear curious that the Gold Coast leaders and office holders, who are the focus of this chapter, should have donated cultural artefacts from their own homes, palaces, or followers, to an institution in Liverpool that was evidently a pillar of the dominant imperial power. But, given the framework of ‘indirect rule’ in which the Gold Coast leaders were enmeshed, making a few gifts to a museum in Britain may have seemed a relatively painless way for them to demonstrate loyalty to the colonizer. On the other hand, the World Museum Liverpool is exceptional in having such a large number of important West African artefacts in its collection that were donated by West Africans. Ridyard’s sympathetic personality evidently played a part in this, and so did his Methodism (see Chapter 3). Significantly, in this regard, the majority of Gold Coast indigenous office holders who donated items to the Liverpool Museum were Methodists. As a steamship engineer, Ridyard operated outside the structures of colonial officialdom and, as a Wesleyan Methodist himself, he would have held opinions and cultural values that intersected with those of many Gold Coast donors. This is likely to have been one of the things that helped Ridyard to win the donors’ trust as a sympathetic intermediary where their own agendas and cultural interests were concerned. Ga and Fante office holders would have been well attuned to the differences in religious opinion among the various Christian ‘sects’ in West Africa and the degrees of latitude each allowed Africans in advancing their African cultural interests. Similarly, many among the Gold Coast elites would have been aware of diverse sites of political authority and opinion in Britain. They would have been attuned to some of the shades of opinion expressed in relation to Africans and the colonies by rival political parties in Britain and by campaign groups like the Aborigines’ Protection Society, headquartered in London (see Dumett 1981), and the Congo Reform Society in Liverpool. Equally, the influential role that unofficial groups, like the ‘Liverpool Sect’ (Nworah 1971), of which Edmund Dene Morel was a leading member, played in constructing knowledge about Africa and in helping to determine the direction of British colonial policy in western Africa, would probably have been well known to them. Indeed, in attempting to resist detrimental colonial policies, and to gain support for their own positions and interests, Ga and Fante office holders played on the differences of opinion that they encountered ‘within the world of white authority’ (Hawkins and Morgan 2004: 11). Some actively contributed to colonial processes of constructing knowledge about West Africa through the colonial courts and other forums (see Chapter 7). This experience, coupled with their knowledge

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of the diversity of opinion in the colonizing state, seems to have encouraged Gold Coast leaders and office holders to make donations to the museum in Liverpool. Whether or not the museum was always understood to be an institution that constructed and disseminated knowledge about the world, Gold Coast office holders (Ababio IV for example), appear to have regarded it as a potential or alternative platform for promoting their own competing positions and cultural interests under the colonial dispensation. While many of the artefacts that were given to Ridyard by Gold Coast office holders reflected their own elite status and political office, others, like the Hausa items given by Quartey-Papafio, for example, were implicated in the donor’s wider social networks and brokering relationships. Interestingly, a few coastal office holders, including Amonu V, Quartey-Papafio and Mettle, gave Ridyard items that originated beyond their own Ga or Fante territories. This not only speaks to their interactions with representatives from neighbouring political and ethnic groups, but it also seems to exemplify their openness to other West African cultural influences. The fact that Ga and Fante officeholders did not donate only Ga and Fante cultural objects suggests that they had quite broad-based interests, especially in related neighbouring African cultures, as well as a degree of competitive admiration for them. Mettle, for one, clearly showed understanding of Kwawu political regalia and a desire to claim respect and prestige for Africans and their institutions in the face of general European denigration of Africans and African cultures. European denigration of African institutions, and particularly the distain expressed by colonial officials who made no secret of wanting to abolish various indigenous African customs and institutions, would have been viewed by Gold Coast office holders as a particular threat to their authority and prestige. Yet their attempts to attach positive connotations to the items they donated to the Liverpool Museum, exemplified particularly in Mettle’s case, were precarious at best. Notwithstanding Ridyard’s apparently sympathetic intermediation, once the donated artefacts were submitted to the museum’s classificatory system, other connotations were largely occluded on the artefacts’ assumption of ‘objective’ meanings informed by imperial ideologies (see Chapter  8). Despite this tendency for the museum to negate their donors’ apparent intentions, however, Gold Coast office holders appear to have had complex reasons for giving things to the museum. As well as harbouring a desire to uphold their own prestige and to claim broader respect for African institutions, African office holders, like some other African elites, had a strong interest in bringing ‘implicit differences within the world of white authority into the open’ (Hawkins and Morgan 2004: 11). As an intermediary for the Gold Coast office holders’ donations, Ridyard, the Methodist marine engineer, would have been known as someone who subscribed to unofficial sources of opinion and authority in Britain. His intermediation was widely publicized in the acknowledgement he received for the 1904 donations that were reported in Morel’s West African Mail and in The Gold Coast Leader. So the Gold Coast office holders’ acts of giving ‘interesting’ African regalia to Ridyard for the Liverpool Museum in 1904, had the effect of exposing the alternative sites of British opinion and authority that Ridyard stood for and the unofficial, or ‘paracolonial’ (Newell 2002: 44), flows and networks through which he operated. Indeed, this may well have been a salient motivation for Gold Coast office

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holders who gave Ridyard artefacts for the museum in Liverpool. Their donations constituted pointed demonstrations of political agency, because, despite the fact that the artefacts’ African meanings were largely substituted for British imperial ones once they were installed in the museum, their act of donation to the Liverpool Museum via Ridyard served as a foil to the ‘implicit’ variegations in the edifice of British authority. Consequently, although far from constituting a rebellion against British authority, Gold Coast office holders’ collaborations with Ridyard offered a subtle means for Africans to recalibrate official authority in the Gold Coast with alternative estimates of its pomp and arrogant posturing.

Notes 1 From a memorial service sheet for Nathanael Annan Mettle, a son of Dr Joseph Edward Mettle. My thanks to Selwyn Bart Mettle for showing me a copy of this sheet. 2 The West African Mail, 25 November 1904, 2 (87): 821. 3 Both Ababio IV and Amonu V were eventually to be awarded the King’s African Medal for African Chiefs. 4 GCL, 17 December 1904, 3 (130): 1. The GCL report does not mention the loom donated by Ridyard, to which The West African Mail gives such prominence. 5 Interview with James Town Alata Mantse’s Stool Secretary Emmanuel Nii Dodoo Dodoo, Accra, 21 September 2009. 6 This can be established from the fact that a similar drum, given to the Salford Museum in 1906 by A. R. Chinery through Ridyard, was recorded by the curator as having been ‘made to sell to travellers’ (Salford Museum accession register 1906.59, item now lost). 7 Interview with Dr Kofi Essilfie Taylor, 17 November 2009. 8 PRAAD Cape Coast, Winnebah Native Affairs, ADM .23/1/147, R. J. Ghartey to Acting District Commissioner of Winneba A. C. Lorena, 13 March 1909. PRAAD Accra, Winnebah ADM .11/1/289, District Commissioner for Winnebah Gerald H. Cowie to the Colonial Secretary, Victoriaborg, 6 June 1895 (Sarbah [1906] 1968: 192; Ackom 2005: 16). 9 PRAAD Cape Coast, Winnebah Native Affairs, ADM .23.1. No.2, asafo officials to Assistant District Commissioner for Winneba D. M. Taplin, 7 September 1909. 10 This would seem too early a date if the artefact was a figurative staff top, because McLeod claims that southern Akan groups were the first to develop elaborate staffs and that ‘Fante groups began to develop staffs with carved [figurative] tops towards the end of the nineteenth century’ (McLeod 1981: 100). Umbrella tops, on the other hand, were in common use even among the Asante at the beginning of the nineteenth century (see Bowdich [1819] 1966: 34, 57–58). 11 PRAAD, Cape Coast ADM .23.1.147, Winneba Native Affairs, letter from Ghartey IV to W. E. Maxwell KCMG , 27 July 1897. 12 Acquah II ’s tense relationships with colonial officials are evident in his correspondence with them. PRAAD, Cape Coast, ADM .23.1.229, Acquisitions of Land Winneba, G. A. Robertson to B. M. Taplin, 2 May 1913. 13 Interview with Weija’s ‘Queen Mother’ and acting ‘chief ’, 5 October 2009.

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14 Interview with Nii Kwaku Bibini III , Chief of Oblogo, 7 October 2009. 15 This probably relates to the overthrow of Asante control by the Ga in coalition with other coastal states and British forces at the battle of Katamanso in 1826. 16 Interview with Emmanuel Nii Dodoo Dodoo, Accra, 21 September 2009. 17 Interview with Niibi Nii Teigo Tackie, Accra, 28 November 2009. 18 Reindorf claims that Alata was ‘a Fante name for people of Lagos, Yoruba, &c.’ (Reindorf [1895] 1966: 40). 19 See PRAAD SCT 2/4/13 Divisional Court Vol. 4C, Solomon, King of James Town v. Noy, 1880. Also, Parker 1995: 194–99. 20 PRAAD ADM 11/1/1086, minutes by CS , 21 October 1892 (quoted in Parker 2000: 140). 21 The metallic ‘bronzing’ of these and other Ga ceramic items was achieved using a pounded mica wash or slip. 22 PRAAD, ADM 11.1.1443, Oblogo Affairs. Letter of 8 March 1910 from Ababio IV to the acting secretary for native affairs. 23 PRAAD, ADM 11.1.1443, Oblogo Affairs. Letter of 11 April 1910 from Tackie Obili to the secretary for native affairs. In an earlier letter of 9 March, the Ga mantse had requested that a police officer be present at Kwatei Kojo’s installation. 24 See Otokunor’s testament in the Land for Accra Water Works case, PRAAD SCT 2/4/68 Vol. 52, p. 233. Also, Reindorf [1895] 1966: 118. 25 Mayer Museum accession register for 1910, record for 23.11.10.24a. 26 Salford Museum accession register p. 230, record for 1912.20. 27 See Rich (2005) for examples from Libreville elites. 28 For an image of a similar Asante war belt, see McLeod 1981: 102. 29 Katamanso was the historic battle fought on 7 August 1826 near Dodowa, on the plains northeast of Accra. It resulted in the defeat of an invading Asante force, which was repulsed by an alliance of coastal states combined with the British and the mercantile community of Accra (Parker 2000: 55–57; Wilks 1989: 182–83). 30 The Gold Coast Rifle Volunteers were raised by Frederick Mitchell Hodgson in 1892 while Gold Coast Colonial Secretary (1888–98). It was probably modelled on the earlier corps founded in 1863 by R. Hutchinson (Kimble 1963: 90). 31 PRAAD, SCT.2.4.50, Mantse D. P. Hammond v. Mantse Kojo Ababio IV and others. Accra Divisional Court records 1912, p. 576. 32 The Akwashontse between 1902 and 1904 was Joseph Boi Quartey (Parker 1995: 236). 33 PRAAD, SCT.2.4.50, Mantse D. P. Hammond v. Mantse Kojo Ababio IV and others. Accra Divisional Court records 1912, p. 570. 34 Another donor, McDonald G. Bonso-Bruce, also gave a Hausa artefact to Ridyard for the museum (‘Fan of hide’ 22.10.03.5, now lost). In this case the accession record states that it was ‘made by the Hausas at Accra’. 35 Interview with Kate Bannerman, Osu, 29 September 2009. 36 PRAAD, SCT.2.4.350, Probate Records 1930, p. 494. 37 GCL, 27 February 1904, 3 (88): 1. 38 Gold Coast Government Gazette, 1899, 28 February 1899: 28. 39 Gold Coast Government Gazette, 1899, 31 July 1899: 187. 40 This is probably Shanu’s photograph of the ‘Belgika’ personnel during the inauguration of the Matadi to Leopoldville railway taken at Matadi in July 1898 and reproduced in Morimont (2005: 214).

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41 Shanu apparently made such an impression on a previous British vice consul that the man recommended Shanu to the Foreign Office as his temporary replacement when he went home on leave (Hochschild [1998] 2002: 219). 42 Mettle married numerous women and I was not able to firmly establish the identity of the wife depicted in this photograph. She is clearly of high social standing and may have been a ‘princess’ by the name of Naa Atsreku, based on information from Niibi Nii Teigo Tackie. 43 Interview with Niibi Nii Teigo Tackie, Accra, 5 December 2009. 44 Personal communication with Victor Mensah, 14 February 2012. 45 PRAAD Accra Divisional Court Records, SCT.2/4/24 (23 March 1897, Mettle v. Affia); SCT.2/4/26 (12 August 1901, Basel Mission Factory v. J. E. Mettle). 46 Interview with Mettle family representatives on 3 December 2009. PRAAD, Accra Divisional Court Records (Judges notebook), SCT.2/4/ 59, Charles Lane & Co. Plt. v. Neils William Lutterodt Dfd (19 February 1916, p. 522). 47 Manchester Museum archives file no. 1907’5. 48 Interview with Mettle family representatives on 3 December 2009. Apparently, the manuscript was destroyed in a house fire sometime after Mettle’s death. 49 PRAAD Accra Divisional Court Records, SCT.2/4/48, 17 October 1910, p. 243, J. E. Mettle v. Alimo Angbo. 50 E.g. On a memorial service sheet for Nathanael Annan Mettle, son of Edward Mettle (thanks due to Bart Mettle for this source). 51 Derby Museum accession register, Volume D (General and invertebrates), 27.11.99.2 & 3. 52 Derby Museum accession register, Volume C (Ichthyopsida) 27.11.1899.1 & 1a. 53 One of these two enema gourds is now lost while another was sent in exchange to the AMNH in New York (possibly 90.0/66) in September 1905 (Mayer Museum accession register, annotation added to accession entry for 2.5.05.8). 54 Although the coat no longer exists (it was probably destroyed in 1941 when the museum was gutted by fire after being hit by a German bomb), this description is based on surviving examples of warriors’ coats from the same region, because many Akan and Akan-influenced groups are known to have used similar warriors’ coats. For an illustration see, for example, the Asante batakari smock shown in McLeod 1981: 147. 55 Letter fragment from Dr Edward Mettle accompanying accession 24.9.00.55 (September 1900). Mayer Museum accession register, National Museums Liverpool. 56 Kwahu or Kwawu is an Akan state situated north of the Afram River on the west side of what is now Lake Volta. 57 TNA , CO 96/209, no. 74, Griffith to Knutsford, 13 March 1890. Referenced in Agbodeka 1971: 122. 58 This staff appears to show a duiker on top of an elephant, which indicates that it was the Ga mantse’s spokesman’s staff. 59 Phil Bartle, Studies Among the Akan People of West Africa: Community, Society, History, Culture; With Special Focus on the Kwawu (http://cec.vcn.bc.ca/rdi/ accessed 6 August 2017). Agbodeka 1971: 112. 60 This deep-rooted sense of competition reasserted itself spectacularly in 1947, on the occasion of the Asantehene Prempeh II ’s visit to Accra. The visit inspired the then Ga Mantse, Tackie Tawiah II , to have a huge, elephant-shaped palanquin constructed for

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him that had to be carried on a car. This ostentatious show trumped the Asantehene who was transported by bearers in a regular Akan-style palanquin (Tschumi 2013: 63). 61 Ankwandah, Rediscovering Ghana’s Past, p. 124 (quoted in Gocking 1999: 36). 62 E.g. see Hutchinson’s praise for Asantehene Prempeh I (Hutchinson c.1929: 150–51). 63 E.g. judgment against King Acquah II in the case of P. A. Ashong v. King Acquah II , 8 September 1899. PRAAD, ADM .28.4., Winneba Civil Record Book, pp. 703–6.

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There were several Western-educated traders and professionals among the Gold Coast donors who contributed to Ridyard’s collecting operation for museums in northwest England. This chapter explores the cultural and social contexts in which their presentations were made and attempts to examine, where possible, the motives that individual donors would have had for making particular gifts. Like the office holders covered in the previous chapter, the donors discussed here also belonged to high-status Ga and Fante families. Unlike the office holders, however, they did not rely on indigenous institutions and titles for social advancement and they were not so restricted by ethnic allegiances (Arhin 1983: 18). Most were rooted in what Jenkins has described as the ‘intricate network of African trading communities, which had emerged in the towns of the Gold Coast littoral during and after the 1820s, when missionaries and palm oil merchants steadily replaced slave traders’ (Jenkins 1986: 113). European industrial capitalism in the nineteenth century led to a rapid expansion of so-called legitimate commerce in the Gold Coast from the 1820s to the mid-1870s (Reynolds 1974a). Enterprising members of the Gold Coast trading communities brokered influential roles for themselves in the mercantile, religious and diplomatic relations that developed during this period of economic revolution. They tended to intermarry among themselves and with members of the Euro-African mercantile families established as a consequence of European settlement on the coast during the period of the slave trade (Priestley 1969: 13). Indeed, Tenkorang has noted that intermarriage among the Christianized, Western-educated families in coastal communities ‘facilitated a common interest’ among them and contributed to making them ‘one large extended family of blood and affinal relations’ (Tenkorang 1973: 67). Intermarriage not only brought families together from different Euro-African dynasties, it also helped, in Gocking’s words, ‘to break down the boundaries between people who were also part of Ga or Akan cultural environments, and served to make this elite more culturally homogenous’ (Gocking 1999: 54). The donors covered in this chapter, were not merely rooted in this grouping of coastal mercantile elites, many were also merchants or commercial agents themselves. All were educated in Western-style schools and were at least partly Christian in outlook, and almost all were practising members of the Gold Coast Wesleyan Methodist Church established by Thomas Birch Freeman in 1835 (Bartels 1965). Most of them held committee seats in voluntary associations and served as lay leaders in the Wesleyan Methodist Church. A few of them also held titles in the asafo military companies of the coastal societies, or at least filled nominal positions in the asafo by virtue of their 199

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patrilineal affiliations. Only a couple of the Gold Coast donors discussed in this chapter held positions in the colonial administration, but all of them appear to have been well travelled and, at times, highly mobile. Some had been educated in Britain or Freetown, while others had visited Europe on business or for training. Donors like the photographer Frederick Richard Christian Lutterodt, the merchant Christian Josiah Reindorf, the barrister Charles James Bannerman, the port officer Arthur Robert Chinery, the hotel proprietor McDonald G. Bonso-Bruce, and the merchant Matilda Bruce were all prominent members of Accra’s Euro-African families, who constituted a part of the Ga elite by virtue of their European ancestors having married into leading Ga lineages. Even Fanny Virginia Chinery (neé Hall), Arthur Chinery’s wife, whose paternal and maternal grandfathers were both Jamaican missionaries, could claim descent from a prominent Euro-Ga lineage through her Hesse grandmother. Among the Cape Coast and Anomabu donors, prominent Fante lineages were similarly represented. For example, John Mensah Sarbah, a Cape Coast barrister, belonged to a leading Anomabu family. His father John Sarbah, a wealthy Fante merchant and prominent Wesleyan Methodist, had been cousin to Omanhene Amonu IV of Anomabu and had served as the omanhene’s advisor.1 The Cape Coast donors Joseph Peter Brown and Henry van Hien both belonged to influential Euro-Fante families. Like John Mensah Sarbah, Brown was also a leading lay member of the Wesleyan Methodist Church. Another Fante donor, James Jackson Kuofie, although a wealthy entrepreneur, is said to have come from ‘humble origins’. He originally trained as a tailor and accumulated wealth through trade, eventually rising to become a member of the Cape Coast Stool Council and Supi, or Captain, of Ntsin Asafo, Number Three of the Fante military companies in Cape Coast.2 The period from 1898 to 1914, in which these donors made their gifts to museums in Britain, was a time when British colonial regimes were not only undermining the prestige of African indigenous institutions and authorities, they were also sidelining the interests of Africans more generally. British colonial officials were becoming increasingly disparaging of the usefulness of Western-educated Africans to the colonial administrations in West Africa and aggressive, well-capitalized, British firms were also limiting commercial opportunities for African merchants (see Chapter 4). Gold Coast African elites were not inactive in the face of these challenges to their dignity, ambitions and prospects. Indeed, the principal voluntary association to which most of the donors covered in this chapter belonged, was the Gold Coast Aborigines’ Rights Protection Society (ARPS ), which served as a focus for anti-colonial protest and brought together various sections of Gold Coast society in united action against colonial impositions detrimental to their interests. Moreover, many of the donors held seats on one or other of Cape Coast or Accra Gold Coast ARPS committees.

Frederick Lutterodt, West African Photographer The first Gold Coaster to make a contribution to Ridyard’s collecting operation for the Liverpool Museum was the photographer Frederick Richard Christian Lutterodt (1871–1938) (see Figure 67). Lutterodt made his initial gifts to the Liverpool Museum

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Figure 67 Portrait of Frederick Lutterodt probably taken in the early 1890s. Published in Smith 1895. Photographer unknown.

early in 1898. These consisted of forty-three photographic prints, including portraits of Duala chiefs and their families, ‘King Ja Ja’s War Canoe’ at Opobo, as well as landscapes, streetscapes, bridges, and the establishments of various commercial firms, in the Gold Coast, Lagos, Cameroon, Gabon, Congo Français, Congo Free State, Fernando Po and São Thomé. Other subjects included an American Missionary taking an evening walk at Baruka in Gabon, a Congo River ‘hamaphrodite’ (sic), the sanatorium at Aburi in the Gold Coast (no doubt taken for the Basel Mission which ran it), and Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee celebrations in Cameroon (presumably in Victoria). Photographs of ethnographic subjects taken in Cameroon included canoe making, men singing after a funeral, a ‘fetish play’ (probably a masquerade), as well as whale, alligator (sic), and leopard ‘fetishes’ (probably masquerade headdresses). Lutterodt made a third donation of photographs late in 1899, but these were not listed by title in the museum accession register and are recorded only as: ‘Eight photographs of W. African subjects’. The late 1890s was a time when Lutterodt was working as a more or less itinerant photographer, away from family and friends in Accra. He must have met Ridyard at intervals during his frequent travels on Elder, Dempster & Co. ships and it seems likely that some of the photographs he gave the chief engineer may have been requested by the museum. Some may even have been commissioned by the museum through

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Ridyard, because a ‘New Ethnographical Gallery’ had opened at the Liverpool Museum on 19 June 1895, with ambitious expansion plans, and with a particular vision for the role of photography in the displays. In the annual report for that year, the director Henry Ogg Forbes had expressed the hope that photographs and drawings would continue to be added alongside exhibits ‘as rapidly as they can be obtained or made’ (Liverpool Museums 1895: 18). Ridyard had no doubt been recruited, or offered himself, to help fulfil the director’s ambitious plans, because he started collecting for the museum in the same year, and his first specimens were accessioned exactly four months after Ogg Forbes took up his position as the new director of the Liverpool Museum in February 1894 (see Chapter 3). Furthermore, Lutterodt was one of among at least four West African photographers who can be counted among Ridyard’s collaborators.3 Some of the pictures that Lutterodt gave Ridyard in 1898, like the images of canoe making (19.4.98.66) and masquerades (19.4.98.62), can be seen as fulfilling Forbes’s requirement for images that ‘elucidate’ exhibits. But the subject matter of many other photographs suggests that they were originally taken for European clients and a few African ones as well. Some, like those featuring river scenes (19.4.98.77), townscapes (9.8.98.52), waterfalls (19.4.98.73), bridges (9.8.98.59) and M’pongwe women (19.4.98.70), appear to correspond to popular genres of ‘types’ and landscapes. These would have been produced to contribute to a shared stock of images that circulated and were consumed throughout the British Empire and beyond, across the broad space of intercultural interaction that Jürg Schneider has characterized as the ‘Atlantic visualscape’ (Schneider 2011, 2013: 35–65). Frederick Lutterodt belonged to a prominent Euro-African family whose European great-grandfather, Georg August Lutterodt (1790–c.1851), was a Danish official, plantation owner and trader, who married a woman from a leading Ga lineage in Accra (Haney 2004: 125; Doortmont 2005: 286 n.491). Born in Accra in 1871 to a Wesleyan Methodist family, Frederick Lutterodt began working in the colonial administration, as a clerk in the Accra Audit Office, before embarking on a career as a photographer in 1889.4 He appears to have acquired his photographic training from his uncle Gerhard Lutterodt. After the itinerant phase of his career, Frederick settled in Accra and made a considerable success of his vocation. By 1920 his stature was such that he was given a profile in the Red Book of West Africa, which praises his ‘excellent business’ and states that he served as the official Gold Coast government photographer, accompanying Governor Guggisberg on tours of Togoland and various Gold Coast provinces during 1919 and 1920 (Macmillan [1920] 1968: 201). Frederick Lutterodt’s success was won against the odds in a colonial West Africa during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when, as mentioned earlier, Europeans were becoming increasingly derogatory towards Africans and were sidelining Western-educated Euro-Africans. In such an environment Lutterodt’s success is likely to have been partly down to his ability to fulfil European expectations and exploit European networks, an ability he probably inherited alongside his dual European and African heritage. His portrait in the Red Book shows a moustachioed man in formal European dress, with hair parted in European style. Careful attention to his dress is likely to have been complemented by equally impeccable manners. In short it seems that

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Lutterodt would have presented himself as a ‘civilized’, ‘modern’ African who was able to command the respect and patronage of many Europeans. Hutchinson indicates that he was also highly regarded among the African elites in the Gold Coast and he mentioned his friendship with Lutterodt in the praise poem he wrote for the photographer in his Pen-Pictures in order to reflect well on his own reputation.5 Given what we know about Ridyard, it is very likely that Lutterodt gave Ridyard copies of his photographs for the Liverpool Museum in gratitude for, or in order to elicit, periodic favours from Ridyard (see Chapter 3). Lutterodt would have required timely deliveries of photographic materials at different locations in order to have been able to work effectively as an itinerant photographer and Ridyard may have helped him out with supplies on occasion. It is even possible that the chief engineer provided Lutterodt with pure water from his ship’s condensers or other apparatus, as water of good enough quality for developing photographs was not always easily available in West African towns (Gore 2013: 288). As a young travelling photographer, Lutterodt would have been partly dependent on European social networks for his livelihood and Ridyard may also have acted as an intermediary in helping to maintain or extend these networks. The titles of some of Lutterodt’s photographs show that he would have benefited especially from the patronage of European missionaries, government officials and traders during the 1890s. Interestingly, Haney has traced a document associated with Lutterodt which indicates that he worked for German governors in Cameroon during this period. The document consists of a photograph showing European staff at the Basel Mission’s Accra trading house annotated with the photographer’s credentials on the reverse of the mount. The credentials read: ‘The Duala Photographic Studio, Fredk R.C. Lutterodt, Gold Coast Colony. Certificates of Merit Awarded in Kamerun 17 August 1894 by Governor Zimerrar, H.W.G. In Victoria 11th July 1899 by Governor Puttkamer, H.W.G.’ (Haney 2004: 128). Many of the photographs Lutterodt gave Ridyard for the Liverpool Museum would not have been considered of ethnographic or scientific interest, so perhaps Ridyard initially used them to help Lutterodt promote his services along the western coast of Africa. Ridyard may even have helped Lutterodt to keep in touch with family and friends in the Gold Coast, or on Fernando Po where the Lutterodt family had a photographic studio and cocoa plantations. Of particular interest in this regard is a photograph that Lutterodt donated in 1898 of ‘Dr Zintcroft’s cocoa farm’ in Victoria (9.8.98.67). Although this picture may have been taken at Dr Zintcroft’s behest, the likely depiction of German cocoa-growing methods it captured would probably have been of interest to Lutterodt family members involved in cocoa farming on Fernando Po. From the titles of his photographs it would seem that Lutterodt counted Duala chiefs and their families among his early clients, but as far as one can tell, his relationships with these indigenous elites did not involve the kind of interests and influence that might have resulted in him being able to acquire ‘ethnographic’ artefacts from them for Ridyard’s collecting operation. It suggests that his interests and relationships with indigenous African elites outside the Gold Coast were on a commercial footing and predominantly mediated through his camera lens. The records for some of his photographs of ‘ethnographic’ subjects, as entered into the Mayer Museum accession

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Figure 68 Ceremonial sword. Akan (Asante) from Kumase. Presented by Frederick Lutterodt in 1900. 24.9.00.38. register, would seem to provide less than the usual level of documentation expected for items acquired for the Liverpool Museum through Arnold Ridyard. For example, one title reads simply, ‘Photograph of Fetish play in the Cameroons’. Such brevity reinforces the impression that Lutterodt’s position was very much that of the foreign spectator in relation to such scenes. His photographs of various bridges, and one with the title ‘Photograph of Improving the main street, Gabon’, suggests that his own interests were not primarily ‘ethnographic’, but were more concerned with the promotion of ‘progress’ and ‘modernization’ in western Africa. As an adept, with the still novel technology of photography, he also may have been interested in positioning himself as a modernizing agent in western Africa with respect to such tropes. Once Lutterodt had returned to settle in Accra in 1900 his donations of photographs to the Liverpool Museum through Ridyard ceased. But he made a final gift in July or August that year of an Asante sword ‘from Kumasi’ (24.9.00.38, see Figure 68). This was the only African artefact that Lutterodt gave to the Liverpool Museum and he provided an accompanying explanatory note to go with it, which is relatively detailed. Thus: It is said that who ever is in charge of this sword and have gone through all the fetish or medical mysteries connected with it, has the power of preventing any sword or knife from injuring him; and they are said to be with the King in time of war.6

Another Gold Coast donor, Amonu V of Anomabu, donated a similar Akan-style sword (15.8.04.30), yet this was described less sensationally in the Mayer Museum accession register as a king’s messenger sword. Such swords, with dumbbell-shaped wooden handles, are still used in a variety of contexts among the Akan, while Ga chiefs and mantsemei use similar ones.7 The museum records provide no clue as to how Lutterodt would have acquired his sword and the explanatory note that Lutterodt provided to accompany the sword seems primarily intended to enhance its value as a historically significant display item by emphasizing its association with the formidable Asante military. The sword’s stated association with Kumasi would have made it a topical and symbolically loaded gift, because Lutterodt gave it to Ridyard around the time that a politically charged event took place in Accra. Under the title ‘A Picturesque Garden Party. Five Ashanti Kings Present’, the Daily News of London reported that: His Excellency the Governor [Hodgson] gave a garden party on Monday, [August] the 6th inst., at Government House, when the resident Europeans and local Kings

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of Accra were invited to meet the loyal Kings and Chiefs of Ashanti who escaped with the Governor from Kumasi. It was an interesting and picturesque gathering. Each was attended by a numerous retinue. Photographs of the assemblage were taken, and the Governor then called on the chiefs to drink the health of the Queen, thanking them for the loyal manner in which they had behaved, and promising them that, when they returned to their country, their services would not be forgotten by the Government.8

Governor Hodgson’s garden party was held directly on the governor’s return to Accra, after his dramatic escape from the besieged British garrison in the Kumasi fort. A few years earlier the British had marched into Kumasi and deposed the Asantehene (‘King’ of Asante), Prempeh I, who chose not to fight the British forces. But Governor Hodgson’s arrogant demand for the golden stool, the sacred symbol of the Asante state, at a public palaver in Kumasi on 28 March 1900, had helped to precipitate an Asante resistance movement led by the Asante Queen Mother, Yaa Asantewa, which had dealt a series of devastating defeats on the British occupiers (see Agbodeka 1971: 170, 175). The outcome of the Yaa Asantewa War still lay in the balance when Lutterodt gave his Asante sword to Ridyard in July or August 1900. In his note regarding the sword Lutterodt was careful to place a decorous objective distance between himself and the ritual practices relating to the sword in its Asante context by using the passive case constructions, ‘it is said that’ and ‘they are said to be’. Here Lutterodt would essentially have been demonstrating the sophistication of what he would probably have regarded as his own ‘civilized’, Christian modernity. Yet the tone of Lutterodt’s note is not unequivocal, because he uses two alternative terms to describe the rituals through which the sword’s original holder was empowered. In so doing, the photographer emphasizes the inadequacy of the derogatory European pseudo-anthropological term ‘fetish’ for describing indigenous African cultural practices and offers the non-derogatory ‘medical’ as an alternative. Although the evidence here is limited, it does invoke a sense of ideas and meanings in transition. While this might imply that Lutterodt’s own ideas were in transition at this point, it would also seem to suggest that Lutterodt’s interest in tropes of progress and modernity, and his assertion of his own ‘civilized’ status did not conform uncritically to the imperial, pseudo-anthropological notion of ‘civilization’ that was formulated in opposition to a ‘primitive’ African ‘barbarism’. Significantly, one of the ways in which the Western-educated elites of the Gold Coast responded to the increasing racism of Europeans, and their general contempt for indigenous African cultures by the end of the nineteenth century, was to re-evaluate and embrace previously disregarded aspects of their African heritage (Gocking 1984). The Asante sword and accompanying note, with its terminology in flux, that Lutterodt gave Ridyard in 1900, seems to be implicated in this project. Moreover, by choosing to make his gift to the Liverpool Museum when he did, the photographer would appear to have chosen a time of imperial upset, namely the British humiliation by the Asante resistance forces, in order to attempt to unsettle arrogant British ideas about the inferiority of Africans and the insignificance of their cultural achievements.

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Arthur Robert Chinery, Euro-Ga Professional At the beginning of the last chapter it was noted that the majority of the 182 objects presented by the thirty Gold Coast donors with Gold Coast addresses, were made and acquired locally, or in Asante. Only ten were collected from outside the Gold Coast and Asante. Arthur Robert Chinery (1863–1954) was the main exception among the majority of Gold Coast donors who only donated items form the Gold Coast or from the Gold Coast and Asante. Over an eight-year period from 1906 to 1914 he gave Arnold Ridyard a total of sixteen artefacts. Fifteen of these were presented to the Liverpool Museum, while one went to the Royal Museum and Libraries at Peel Park in Salford. The sixteen artefacts included four items from Northern Nigeria, two from the Congo in Central Africa and three from Asante. The remaining seven artefacts included a basket (24.5.06.39, now in American Museum of Natural History) and two drums (Salford Museum 1906.59 and 3.9.06.23, now in AMNH ) from Accra, along with six Ga ceramic items. The Nigerian items, unfortunately all now lost, are recorded as having being a brass and copper ‘coffee pot’ (probably a Nupe ablutions vessel) from Lokoja (13.2.09.20), a Hausa fan from Sokoto (20.5.09.16) and two Northern Nigerian ‘fly whisks’ (12.9.10.14 & 15). The two Central African items survive and include an incomplete Ekonda ceremonial sword in brass, described in museum records simply as a ‘knife’ (3.9.06.22, see Figure 69), and a ‘red earthenware water bottle’ (26.4.10.8). The three Asante items consisted of a brass gold weight in the form of a stool (24.5.06.37), a brass gold dust box lid decorated with sixteen miniature birds (24.5.06.36, see Plate 24), and an earthenware pipe head (19.11.09.2, now lost). As a young man Chinery had worked with European traders at Old Calabar on the Cross River and at Bonny in the Niger Delta, but it is unlikely that he had ever travelled to the Congo or Northern Nigeria. At the time he made his donations, he held the position of port officer in the Customs Department at Accra, so it is very likely that he would have acquired the six non-Gold Coast artefacts in the course of his duties. Indeed, the fact that these items came with minimal and erroneous documentation,

Figure 69 Ceremonial sword (parts missing). Ekonda from Congo Free State (DRC ). Presented by A. R. Chinery in 1906. 3.9.06.22.

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supports the idea that they were probably collected as souvenirs by others. Although it is possible that Chinery could have acquired some of these ‘foreign’ objects from consignments of goods that were confiscated and auctioned when their owners failed to pay the required customs duties, it seems more likely that he would have received them as gifts. The courteous assistance that Charles Francis Hutchinson describes Chinery offering travellers and merchants during the course of his duties (see below), is likely to have been rewarded, from time to time, with tokens of appreciation; tokens that may have included Asante, Nigerian and Central African items that he subsequently entrusted to Ridyard for the Liverpool Museum. Indeed, it is entirely possible that the source for some of these non-Gold Coast items could have been European or Sierra Leonean merchants with whom Chinery had dealings in his capacity as Accra’s port officer. After all, many of the artefacts that Chinery gave Ridyard appear to conform to popular European tastes in souvenirs. Europeans appear frequently to have acquired fans, brassware and pipes as personal souvenirs. Exotic, ‘Oriental’-style, brass ablution vessels, made in the Nupe capital Bida, would probably have been available to traders at the Lokoja market and at markets elsewhere in Hausaland. Significantly, Europeans perennially regarded African drums and weapons as being genuinely primitive and authentically African objects. In particular, many of the more dramatic African weapons had the added advantage of neatly (albeit inappropriately) condensing European ideas of African savagery (Spring 1993: 14). Chinery gave Ridyard two drums from Accra in 1906, one of which was donated to the Salford Museum (1906.59, now lost) in Chinery’s name. Interestingly, the Salford Museum curator noted that this drum had been made ‘to sell to travellers’ and that it was ‘not made for native use’.9 In this case the curator clearly thought it necessary to note the drum’s purpose in order to counter subversion of his carefully constructed notion of ethnographic authenticity (see Chapter 3); a threat which he clearly felt was presented by the addition of a supposedly anomalous, made-for-sale object to the collection of African cultural artefacts in his care. Chinery, on the other hand, would appear to have been untroubled by such concerns and probably took for granted the fact that Africans in Accra routinely made things for sale that were not intended for their own use. Indeed, if Chinery aimed to supply Ridyard with African artefacts for museums in Britain that addressed British interests in African cultures, then it may well have made sense for him to have given Ridyard a drum that was made in response to British travellers’ interest in such drums. Chinery would have acquired an understanding of European tastes in African artefacts as a young man, when he worked with British traders at Old Calabar, and also at Bonny in the Niger Delta. He must have worked in the Niger Delta for a fairly long period, because his grandson Smyly remembers that Chinery used to speak Ijaw with policemen who hailed from Bonny at the local James Town police station. Chinery’s more eccentric European habits, like his penchant for drinking weak whiskey and soda after a day’s work, would almost certainly have been picked up from European traders.10 In fact, Chinery cultivated European tastes in most things and even displayed trophy heads of wild animals on the walls of his house, things that he would have acquired from European associates or from European households during his auctioneering days.11

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Through his English father, Chinery would have been able to make some claim to European identity when it suited him, but his West African upbringing, Ga family affiliations, and other social attachments to Accra, would have meant that he saw himself as African and Ga, rather than as a European. Chinery’s English father, who was also called Arthur Robert, had first arrived in West Africa in about 1859 in the employ of the British trading firm Parker, Foster & Co.12 After moving from Bathurst (Banjul) in The Gambia to Accra, a woman from one of James Town’s leading families called Kwaamah ‘caught his eye’. Arthur Robert Sr married Kwaamah according to Ga custom and later removed with her to Badagry in southwestern Nigeria, where Arthur Robert Sr served as agent for the London and African Trading Company (Chinery 1864: 10). Chinery was born in Badagry on 29 November 1863, but his father died six months later, so Kwaamah returned to Accra with her baby son. Kwaamah was also to die a few years later, but the young Chinery was well provided for by his mother’s wealthy relatives. Kwaamah had been the granddaughter of a Ga warrior who became Mantse Armah-Twitwego of James Town’s Alata quarter and it was her cousin, George Frank Cleland (1830–87), popularly known as Owula Okpeisa, who eventually took charge of the young Arthur Robert Chinery. Cleland, an ‘educationist, merchant, soldier and statesman’ (Ephson 1969: 75), was an influential member of the Euro-Ga merchant elite. He was well versed in Ga law and custom and was consulted both by Europeans and the townspeople (Ephson 1969: 77). Before his death in 1887, he had simultaneously served, for a number of years, on the colonial Legislative Council and as the James Town Alata quarter regent. He was revered by many in Accra for the part he had played in averting conflict between the people of James Town (Nleshi) and Ussher Town (Kinka) in 1883 (Kimble 1963: 417; Parker 2000: 131). Cleland was a dominant influence on Chinery’s early development. He sent Chinery to the government school in James Town for his primary education, and Chinery subsequently became a staunch member of the Anglican Church.13 Cleland’s James Town houses were furnished predominantly in European style and he would have instilled in his young charge the refined manners and gentlemanly ways of the Ga urban elite.14 Chinery began working for the Gold Coast colonial administration in the Customs Department in about 1896 and had risen to supervisor of customs, with an office in the Accra lighthouse (see Plate 25), by the time of his retirement in 1922 (Doortmont 2005: 171 n.309). This was a rare and exemplary career trajectory for the period. In his Pen-Pictures, Hutchinson (c.1929: 68–69) highlights Chinery’s ability and dedication to his work when he reproduces the words that Brigadier General F. G. Guggisberg (governor and commander-in-chief of the Gold Coast between 1919–27) delivered in the Legislative Council on the occasion of Chinery’s retirement. Thus: The Customs has lost a good a faithful servant. Mr Chinery’s career of thirty-one years is a fine example of hard work, ability, and honesty of purpose and loyalty. Hutchinson c.1929: 69

After his retirement in 1922, Chinery continued to exploit his status as a former customs officer in the colonial administration, and the confidence he was able to

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inspire in Europeans through his performance of a ‘civilized’ persona, by setting up an auction business with an English partner called Dyson. According to Chinery’s daughter Maude Hammond (neé Chinery 1914–2015), he used to sell land and property as well as goods received from the court sheriff that had been confiscated from traders who failed to pay the required customs duties. Later on, Chinery also set up the Accra Ice Company in partnership with another Englishman called Nicholson. Smyly described how his grandfather’s acting skills were revealed during auction sales, and how he saw ‘another side’ to his grandfather on such occasions, because Chinery transformed his sales into ‘entertaining chat shows’.15 In his Pen-Pictures Hutchinson suggests that Chinery’s public persona involved a masterly performance of the refined and ‘civilized’ gentleman. Thus: You were kempt and concise in all you did; You passed through your crowded duties with ease. You were courteous to enquirers, Passengers, and merchants. And your respect was reciprocated. All was orderly under your command. Hutchinson c.1929: 69

Chinery’s mastery here would have been part and parcel of his ability to gain the confidence of British colonial officials, which undoubtedly helped him rise to the position of supervisor of customs in a colonial administration that had become hostile to the idea of promoting Africans to positions of responsibility by the end of the nineteenth century. On its own, Chinery’s ability and competence probably would not have been sufficient to convince the colonial administration of his ‘loyalty’ or to have enabled him to carry out his duties as port officer authoritatively and efficiently. For that he would have had to place himself on a level with Europeans culturally. As well as his dress and manners, his membership of the Anglican Church, the ‘official’ church of the Gold Coast colony, would also have helped here.16 Indeed, it is tempting to assume that Chinery’s performance of the ‘civilized’ identity represented an attempt to inhabit the persona of the British gentleman. But this would be too simplistic a conclusion. Chinery’s ability to project a ‘civilized’ and refined persona, could not just have been a question of his adopting British cultural norms and etiquette in his day-to-day habits. We need to bear in mind that Chinery was brought up and educated entirely in West Africa17 and the British gentleman was generally lamented for his absence in West Africa by newspapers like The Lagos Times.18 More significant, perhaps, is the observation the Englishman William Smith made when he visited Accra in 1726, namely, that the Ga were ‘the most courteous and civil to strangers of any on the Gold Coast’.19 According to Arhin, the Asante say that an admirable man is ‘like a chief ’. But the coastal Ga, like their Fante neighbours, regard the admirable man to be one who is ‘well educated’ and who ‘lives and behaves like a “gentleman” ’ (Arhin 1983: 2). So the courteous manners that Chinery demonstrated in his day-to-day exchanges should probably be viewed as belonging to a set that overlapped with attributes that epitomized refinement and civic

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virtue among Accra’s Ga elite. In any event, this was a group whose cultivation of European education, manners, styles of dress, and patterns of consumption, predated the colonial era and reflected centuries of contact with European culture through commercial activity. Although the cultivation of refinement among merchant elites was a process that drew significantly on European forms and practices, it had long been an important Ga strategy for acquiring social status in coastal towns. As was mentioned at the beginning of this chapter, this was a distinct strategy, which, although not incompatible with indigenous political institutions and titles, did not depend on them. The Ga ceramic items that Chinery gave Ridyard would have been part of a set of ornaments and furnishings typical of Accra’s elite Ga households. As was illustrated in the previous chapter, many ceramic vessel types produced in villages on Accra’s Western Plains reveal a preoccupation with elite status articulated through European-influenced forms and modes of consumption. This is clearly visible in the ‘black earthenware bottle with tray and stopper’ from the village of ‘Quarjue, 3 miles from Accra’ (14.10.07.17, see Figure 70) that Chinery donated in 1907. This set is especially interesting because it is a

Figure 70 Lidded earthenware water cooler on tray. Ga from Accra. Presented by A. R. Chinery in 1907. 14.10.07.17.

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Figure 71 European-made terracotta cooler with stopper and tray (probably made on Madeira). Accra, from the collection of Leonard Crossland. Permission: Leonard Crossland. Photo: the author. relatively complete copy of a locally found European prototype. At least two wheelmade European terracotta coolers, with stoppers and trays (see Figure 71), were rescued from the hallway of the ‘Garden House’ in Accra’s James Town after it was destroyed by the earthquake of 1939.20 The ‘Garden House’ had belonged to three female descendants of John William Hansen, a Euro-Ga trader and one-time civilian commander of James Fort between 1833 and 1840. After the earthquake the three Hansen sisters continued to live in a wooden dwelling erected in the ‘Garden House’ compound. According to Leonard Crossland, a relative of the sisters, they kept these and other ceramic vessels in a special display cupboard in their pantry and used them only on ceremonial occasions. In 1972 Crossland took over the European vessels for safekeeping. He explained that these, and the other locally made vessels, had been used to hold the drinks and foods consumed by the sister’s extended family and its dependents during the communal feast that marked the end of the annual Homowo ‘harvest festival’. Once the festivities were over, the vessels would be cleaned, polished and put back in their display cupboard ready for the next year’s celebrations.21 The fact that these European-made vessels are known to have been used for ceremonial purposes in an elite James Town household during Homowo, suggests that it would have been at Homowo gatherings in the town that village potters saw many of the prototypes for the refined, European-style vessels

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that they made for their urban patrons and customers. In fact, the ‘black earthenware bottle with tray and stopper’ that Chinery gave Ridyard in 1907, seems to offer the most direct evidence of the social and cultural context that provided the fertile source for the innovative creativity which distinguishes the work of Ga potters in all the artisanal villages on Accra’s Western Plains, including Oblogo and Weija. Chinery’s 1907 gift of the cooler with tray and stopper undoubtedly would have constituted a statement about his own stratum in Ga society, because such vessels reference a preoccupation, among Accra’s urban elites, with status articulated partly through European tastes and conventions (see Chapter 6). Interestingly, however, the evidence suggests that Chinery took the preoccupation with European conventions to extremes. This is not altogether surprising because, as we have seen, he was brought up from an early age amidst the European furnishings of Cleland’s James Town houses. Later on, he was employed by British trading firms in southeastern Nigeria, where he would have immersed himself in the expatriate lifestyle of the British traders he worked with. The initiation that Chinery received into British methods of trade and British tastes and manners while in southeastern Nigeria, would have helped to advance his career in the colonial administration. Similarly, his membership of the Anglican Church, the ‘official church of the Gold Coast’, would also have been viewed positively by his superiors in the colonial administration. In his retirement years, at least, Chinery fully involved himself in church lay structures by serving as priest’s warden and chairman of the Harvest Festival Committee at Accra’s Holy Trinity Church. Chinery’s uncle Cleland had also been a member of the Anglican Church, but, unlike his nephew, Cleland was typical of the Euro-Ga elite of the late nineteenth century in displaying broad aspirations that, in Parker’s words, ‘interacted with those of the common townspeople, producing political action that was neither unambiguously “modern” nor “traditional” ’ (Parker 2000: 136). Chinery’s aspirations were narrower than his uncle’s and they led him along a more clear-cut path. Indeed, it seems that Chinery aspired to lead a primarily ‘modern’, and European, lifestyle. In the end, however, his appropriation of British cultural attributes cannot simply be explained in terms of his ambition to advance in his career. While, in general terms, the trait can be viewed as one belonging to the Ga elite as a whole, Chinery evidently had specific reasons for taking it to extremes. Smyly Chinery, a grandson who was brought up in Chinery’s household, explained that his grandfather lived in a way that was different from other James Town families of similar social standing. This distinctness was clearly demonstrated in Chinery’s dining arrangements. At least in his retirement years, Chinery was a keen gardener, and his garden was always planted with British vegetables like beetroot, cabbage, cauliflower and carrots, which he proudly described as ‘everything required for healthy nutrition’.22 He insisted on being served turkey at Christmas and used to eat his meals at his own table, separate from the rest of his family. Chinery’s youngest child Maude was usually required to keep him company at meal times, when she would sit at his table and share the English-style food that his cooks prepared. She remembered eating plates of meat, with rice or potatoes with him. She was particularly partial to his cabbage and said that her father’s own favourite vegetable was cauliflower.23 Maude also remembered that her father used to procure European foods like beef, apples, bread and butter, from the

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ships that visited Accra. More notable, however, was the fact that during the Homowo ‘harvest’ festival, when James Town families shared special foods in traditional Ga fashion at large communal meals in the courtyards of their homes, Chinery would insist on being served his European-style food at a table laid in British fashion. Chinery’s non-participation in Homowo would have been a significant statement, because observation of Homowo ‘Harvest Custom’ was virtually synonymous with Ga affiliation and brought rural, urban, ‘Pagan’ and Christian Ga together in inclusive celebration (Parker 2000: 186). This was publicly acknowledged in an announcement in The Gold Coast Leader of 20 August 1910, which read: The celebration of the Homowo Festival commenced on Thursday the 18th. The Bush people have joined their Families at home and the usual festivities are in full swing. We wish our friends in Accra Many Happy Returns of the Season.

Significantly, the Western-educated members of the Fante elite who produced The Gold Coast Leader at Cape Coast were apt to respond to European racism, and the general European denigration of traditional African cultures in the early twentieth century by explicitly embracing aspects of their African heritage.24 Members of the Ga elite, like A. B. Quartey-Papafio, who wrote articles on Ga traditions, including Homowo, responded similarly. Chinery, on the other hand, seems not to have responded in this way and appears to have been more concerned with signalling his conformity to a Christian, ‘modern’ and European lifestyle. But Chinery’s chairmanship of the Holy Trinity Church’s Harvest Festival Committee would seem especially significant in light of the fact that he refused to participate in the popular Ga ‘Harvest Custom’ of Homowo. It suggests that he articulated his adoption of a ‘modern’, Christian and European-style identity partly through his opposition to non-Christian, or ‘uncivilized’ African cultural practices. More precisely, Chinery’s distancing of himself from the inclusive Homowo celebrations, may have reflected his desire to signal an unambiguous stance of opposition to particular anti-modern, African meanings that were asserted during the Homowo festival. For example, Reindorf (1895 [1966]: 118) indicates that Homowo was an occasion on which rural ‘inferiors’ (slaves or ex-slaves – kosebii) affirmed their allegiance to their urban masters by bringing their masters firewood and ‘other presents’. Wealth in people represented a primary source of property and status among the Ga, and Chinery’s uncle George Cleland had owned numerous slaves (Parker 2000: 86). Although the legal status of slavery had been abolished as early as 1874 in the Gold Coast (McSheffrey 1983: 350), numerous former slaves, and their descendants, were still allied to their former master’s lineages in relations of inferiority at the beginning of the twentieth century. So while Chinery’s opting out of Homowo festivities may partly have had a religious rationale, his main concern may have been to signal that his social status was not dependent on indigenous institutions like the defunct institution of slavery, whose legacy persisted in Ga society and still contributed in some degree to the wealth and status of many prominent Ga families. This attitude may have rubbed off on his daughter Maude, who was firm in her assertion that her father had never inherited anything and that everything he owned he had worked for.25

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Consistent with this concern is the fact that, although Chinery was held in high enough regard in the Nleshi Alata akutso to be invited to take the mantse’s stool in the 1950s, he declined to do so.26 In effect, Chinery’s avoidance of the popular Homowo festivities, and his refusal to take the Alata mantse’s stool in the 1950s, served to emphasize that his social status was derived from his education and European-style refinement and accomplishments, rather than from official participation in Ga institutions. Although Chinery only appears to have completed primary schooling, he educated himself and added to his knowledge of Europe and other parts of the world by avidly reading books, magazines and newspapers.27 The books and papers he read would have enhanced his status as a ‘well-educated’ man who behaved like a ‘gentleman’ (Arhin 1983: 2) and it would have kept him informed of European and world news. Furthermore, judging by the sense of fashion and panache in the way he dressed, evident in his portrait photographs (see Figures 72, 73 & 74), it would seem that the magazines and papers Chinery read also kept him up to date with the latest cultural trends in Europe. Arnold Ridyard is likely to have acquired books and magazines for Chinery in England, and it may have been partly in return for these that Chinery gave Ridyard African artefacts for the museum in Liverpool. As was pointed out in Chapter 3, Ridyard took illustrated magazines and other material back to West Africa in return for artefacts delivered to museums in northwest England, so his collecting operation can be characterized as involving an interchange of cultural materials. The fact that Arthur Robert Chinery and Arnold Ridyard were friends is suggested by the impressive lidded ceramic vessel that Chinery’s wife Fanny gave Ridyard for the Liverpool Museum in 1911 (1.2.11.30, see Figure  75). Ridyard is likely to have met Fanny while a visitor at ‘Fairfield House’, the Chinery residence in Accra’s James Town (see Figure 76).28 The vessel came from Keta in the southeastern Gold Coast and it is tempting to speculate that Fanny Chinery may have given it to Ridyard in exchange for British cultural materials. Fanny was better educated than her husband, in the sense that she had been schooled to secondary level in Lagos. Her education may have instilled British cultural and literary interests in her, and family photographs show that, like her husband, she too kept up with British fashions over the years (see Figures 72, 73 & 74). As well as magazines, it is also possible that Ridyard may have brought her sheet music for popular British hymns and songs. Ridyard’s eldest daughter, Amelia Ann, qualified as a piano teacher at the Royal Academy of Music in 1899 and could have sourced the music.29 However, Ridyard may have been a member of his ship’s band and a keen musician himself, because a number of his West African contacts appear to have had a musical bent.30 Speculation aside, Smyly remembers that his grandmother used to play the guitar, a rare accomplishment for an Accra woman at that time. She was also a talented singer with a wide vocal range, so that she could trim her voice to any tone when singing hymns at the James Town Methodist Church.31 Both Fanny’s grandfathers were Presbyterian ministers with the Basel Mission who had been recruited from the Moravian mission in the Montego Bay area in Jamaica. Fanny’s maternal grandfather was the Reverend Alexander Worthy Clerk, the only bachelor to be recruited from Jamaica in 1843. At the time of his arrival in the Gold Coast he was twenty-three years old and originally worked as a mission school teacher

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Figure 72 Portrait of Arthur Robert Chinery (1863–1954) and Fanny Chinery (1872–1958) taken at Accra in 1899. Photographer: (Probably) Lutterodt and Sons, Accra. Permission: Smyly Chinery.

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Figure 73 Photograph of the Chinery family taken at Accra in 1905. Photographer: (Probably) Lutterodt and Sons, Accra. Permission: Smyly Chinery.

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Figure 74 Photograph of Arthur and Fanny Chinery taken in 1937 to mark their 40th wedding anniversary. Photographer: (Probably) J. K. Bruce-Vanderpuije, Accra. Permission: Smyly Chinery.

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Figure 75 Burnished earthenware vessel. Made at Keta, southeastern Gold Coast. Presented by Fanny Chinery in 1911. 1.2.11.30.

Figure 76 Photograph of Fairfield House, the Chinery family residence in James Town, Accra, from 1902. Permission: Bobby Chinery. Photo: the author 2009.

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before qualifying as a reverend. In 1848 he married Paulina Hesse, a woman from one of the Euro-Ga families of Christiansborg (Osu). Fanny’s paternal grandparents, the reverend John Hall and his wife Mary, were both born in Jamaica. Her father, probably Peter Hall, appears to have died in the same year as her birth, so her grandparents and uncles became an important influence in her life. As a child, Maude used to visit Aburi with her mother to spend time with the Reverend Alexander Worthy Clerk, while he was still alive. She remembered that her great-grandfather kept a large bible in the middle of the dinning-room table. She described the old missionary as a very strict and uncompromising man, who made her relate everything that had been said during the service after her attendance at church.32 The accession records at World Museum Liverpool hold no clue as to how Fanny would have collected a ceramic vessel from Keta in 1911, although it is likely that she donated it in response to the museum’s request made to Ridyard in 1910 to collect items ‘illustrative of the primitive potter’s art as now carried on in Africa’ (Liverpool Museums 1911: 9). In the absence of other documentation one can only assume that she might have acquired it through her uncle, the Reverend Nicholas Timothy Clerk (1862–1961), who had established mission stations in the Volta Region of the Gold Coast and in present-day Togo and may have travelled to Keta while based in the eastern regions.33 If this was the case, Fanny’s donation of the vessel to the Liverpool Museum would partly have constituted a statement that underlined her personal identity and status in Gold Coast society as the descendant of illustrious Jamaican missionaries. Her initial acquisition of the vessel may also have indicated a personal interest in African ceramic arts because when I discussed this donation with Maude, she volunteered that her mother may have been inspired to take an interest in African ceramics during her stays at Aburi, where she would have witnessed the activity in the mission pottery workshops there.34 With reference to the Krio of Sierra Leone, Spitzer has claimed that they responded to the contempt in which they were frequently held by British officialdom from the latter part of the nineteenth century, by differentiating between Europeans and ‘categorising them according to their apparent racial empathy with . . . Africans’ (Spitzer 1974: 219). Many Euro-Africans in the Gold Coast would have responded in similar ways, and Chinery appears to have been no exception. Indeed, it would seem that Chinery’s decision to name his eldest son Roger Casement Chinery is indicative that he may have elevated his response of differentiating between Europeans to a personal political act.35 The Irishman Roger Casement can be viewed as having been a prototypical ‘sympathetic European’ by the time his report on the Congo Free State atrocities was published in 1904, but Chinery may have met him earlier in Nigeria in the early 1890s, while Casement was working for the British colonial administration in Nigeria.36 By then Casement had witnessed much brutality perpetrated under European colonial systems in Africa and already had a reputation for sympathy with the plight of exploited and abused Africans in European administered territories (Hochschild [1998] 2002: 197). Notwithstanding his position in the Gold Coast colonial administration, Chinery’s apparent admiration of Casement suggests that, like the Irishman, he was likewise opposed to exploitative European colonial regimes, just as he also may have been opposed to a Ga system that restricted the rights of kosebii in the rural villages, as suggested above. Ridyard would also

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have qualified as a sympathetic European in Chinery’s eyes (see Chapter 3). He would have known the chief engineer from early on as a trusted figure who was authorized to transport artefacts to the museum in Liverpool free of freight and duty charges. This would help explain why Chinery favoured Ridyard with so many contributions of African artefacts towards Ridyard’s collecting operation for museums in northwest England.

John Mensah Sarbah, ‘Cosmopolitan Patriot’37 The Sarbah papers held by Ghana’s Public Records and Archives Administration Department (PRAAD ) in Accra contain an official certificate from The Committee of the Liverpool Free Public Library, Museum and Gallery of Arts, expressing thanks to the Cape Coast Barrister John Mensah Sarbah (1864–1910) for his donation of a King’s Messenger Sword of Chief Yaw Antoo of the Gold Coast (see Figure 6).38 The certificate was made out on 16 January 1903, a day after the sword was accessioned to the Liverpool Museum with the number 15.1.03.9. Ironically, while the certificate of thanks sent to Sarbah has been preserved to the present day in Accra, the sword he donated to the museum in Liverpool has not. The sword was probably lost during the 1941 bombing of the Liverpool Museum (see Chapter 8). Nevertheless, we know from other examples of Akan ‘King’s’ messenger swords of the period in Ghana, and in various Western institutions, that it would have been a magnificent object. As is typical for Akan swords of this kind, its distinctive iron blade, probably including cut out motifs and a turned-up end, would have been fitted with an ornately carved, dumbbell-shaped, wooden handle. We know that the sword’s handle was covered in gold leaf, because its record in the museum’s accession register describes it as having being ‘coated in gold’. The sword was Sarbah’s first donation to the Liverpool Museum and Ridyard presented it to the curator on Sarbah’s behalf after returning home from his sixty-fourth voyage. Early in 1910 Sarbah presented a further four items to the Liverpool Museum through Ridyard. These included a dyed leather cushion cover of Hausa make (26.4.10.9, now lost) and three brass gold weights from Asante (26.4.10.47, 48 & 49, see Figure 77). The weights, which were widely used by Akan peoples to weigh out specific values of gold dust currency, may originally have been acquired from Asante traders who would have been frequent visitors to Cape Coast. They might even have belonged to a collection that Sarbah used as a youth when he spent some time trading along the western littoral of the Gold Coast under the supervision of his father’s friend James Ahuma Solomon, who worked as an agent for the London firm F. and A. Swanzy (Jenkins 1986: 119). Alternatively, he may have acquired them from his father, whose businesses he inherited in 1892 and continued to manage thereafter. The leather cushion cover would have been of a type that was typically made by Hausa craftsmen. These were widely transported for sale in disparate West African markets by Hausa itinerant traders, but Hausa would have begun to settle in Cape Coast from 1874 when a British led defeat of the Asante enabled the ban on northern traders travelling through Asante territory to be lifted so that they could reach the trading towns of the Gold Coast littoral (Adamu 1978: 166–67).

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Figure 77 Brass gold weight in form of man with sword in his belt. Akan (Asante) from the Gold Coast. Presented by John Mensah Sarbah in 1910. 26.4.10.47. Apart from adding the information that its handle was ‘coated in gold’, the accession record for Sarbah’s king’s messenger sword simply replicates the same information provided on Sarbah’s certificate of thanks in stating that the sword belonged to ‘the late Chief of Seforti, Yaw Antoo, Cape Coast’. But while the sword may have belonged to a Fante chief, it seems that his name ‘Yaw Antoo’ and town may have been incorrectly recorded by Ridyard, as I have not been able to discover anything about such a chief, nor about a Ghanaian settlement named ‘Seforti’. Such inaccuracies only compound the limitations of a museum archive in which there are no surviving letters from Cape Coast donors that would help explain why they made their donations. In the end, we are left mainly with sparse circumstantial information and biographical sources for constructing arguments as to the Cape Coast donors’ motives for collaborating in Ridyard’s collecting operation for the Liverpool Museum. Sarbah’s cultural interests and agendas can be seen to have been rooted in his era and his social group. Sarbah’s father, John Sarbah Sr (1835–92), had been one of Anomabu’s early recipients of a Methodist education in the days when Anomabu served as the principal port of the Gold Coast and was a focus of British commercial, missionary and administrative activity. After some years as head teacher at the Wesleyan primary school, a post he fulfilled while also working as an agent for a British trading

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firm, Sarbah Sr set himself up as an independent trader and eventually became one of the wealthiest Fante businessmen on the coast, with twelve British commission houses on his books (Jenkins 1986: 119; Kaplow 1971: 94). Although a Methodist whose wealth allowed him to educate his children in Britain, Sarbah Sr had broad aspirations that were rooted in the Fante cultural and social world. He was cousin and advisor to Omanhene Amonu IV of Anomabu, and he served as an official in one of the military companies (asafos) of the town.39 From 1887 to his death in 1892, he also served on the colonial Legislative Council as an unofficial African member having been appointed by Governor Blanford Griffiths, with recommendations that included being ‘a merchant of pure African descent, resident at Cape Coast, of good social and commercial repute and independent means’.40 John Mensah Sarbah (1864–1910) (see Figure  78) was educated at Cape Coast’s Wesleyan High school, joining its first class in 1876, the year of its inauguration. But this was a time when the aspirations of the coastal trading communities were being frustrated. The protectorate of the Gold Coast and Asante had been proclaimed two years earlier and a pervasive British cultural imperialism was taking hold, so that colonial officials were increasingly insisting on British values, skills and cultural practices, while at the same time disparaging the usefulness of mission-educated

Figure 78 Portrait of John Mensah Sarbah (1864–1910). © The British Library Board (The Pen-Pictures of Modern Africans and African Celebrities, by Charles Hutchinson). Photographer unknown.

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Africans in the expanding colonial administration (Jenkins 1986: 119). Perhaps partly in response to these changes Sarbah Sr, who wanted his son to join the family business (Jenkins 1986: 119), decided to educate his son in Britain. So in 1880 he enrolled John Mensah Sarbah for nearly four years of schooling at Wesley (now Queen’s) College in Taunton, England. After a successful career at Wesley College, during which the young Sarbah would have been aware of political changes taking place in the Gold Coast and the deteriorating conditions facing the trading communities on the coast (see Reynolds 1974a: 263), John Mensah persuaded his father to enable him to study for a law degree. He was subsequently admitted to Lincoln’s Inn in London on 25 June 1884, where he was called to the bar three years later on 4 May 1887 (Jenkins 1986: 120). After qualifying, Sarbah returned to Cape Coast as the Gold Coast’s first African barrister and set up his own legal practice, which he titled Mensakof Chambers. He was also to inherit his father’s businesses when John Sarbah died in 1892. Having been partly educated at institutions run by a British Nonconformist church, which had zealously organized and campaigned for more humanitarian social legislation through the nineteenth century, Sarbah lost no time in concerning himself with the political condition of the Gold Coast and he became one of the moving spirits behind the formation of the ‘Fante Political Society’, or Mfantsi Amanbuhu Fékuw, in 1887 (Tenkorang 1973: 70). The impetus for the establishment of the Fékuw had been to oppose an increasing government denigration of Africans and their institutions, and to provide an alternative to the new triumphal imperialist idea of history and progress, which denied Africans valid cultural and historical agency of their own. The Fékuw therefore promoted the use of Fante language, names and clothing among the missioneducated Fante elite, as well as the use of indigenous institutions relevant to particular legal, political and economic affairs. It encouraged the documentation and publication of Fante traditions and it promoted, both the reconstruction of Fante history, and the re-evaluation of Fante beliefs and practices. But the Fékuw also sought to adapt Fante culture to appropriate European values, ideas and cultural practices, especially as these were expressed through European religious, educational and administrative institutions (Jenkins 1985a: 361). By 1897 Sarbah was already a veteran of agitation against what he saw as the increasingly destructive and demoralizing ideologies and policies of the British colonial dispensation in the Gold Coast. As a key intellectual light of the Mfantsi Amanbuhu Fékuw, he was therefore destined to play a crucial part in the formation of the Fékuw’s more politically effective successor organization, the Gold Coast Aborigines’ Rights Protection Society (ARPS ). The new association’s name referred to one of Britain’s leading evangelical-humanitarian lobby groups of the Victorian age, the Aborigines Protection Society. This society was formed in 1837–38 by a Nonconformist, the Quaker Thomas Hodgkin, in order to promote Britain’s moral obligation to protect the welfare and interests of ‘native races’ within its empire (Dumett 1981; Knorr 1944: 383). In fact, the formation of the Gold Coast ARPS had been partly inspired by Fox Bourne, the Secretary of the Aborigines Protection Society in London, who wrote to The Gold Coast Chronicle in 1891 with the suggestion that patriotic groups should be set up in the Gold Coast’s main towns in order to supply useful information to his society, so that it might

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help to secure more humane and just colonial policies (Kimble 1963: 330). The crucial stimulus came after November 1894, however, when the Gold Coast Chief Justice published the Crown Lands Bill, which proposed ‘to vest Waste Lands, Forest Lands, and Minerals in the Queen’ (Kimble 1963: 334). Opposition to the Bill served as a focus for anti-colonial protest and galvanized broad sections of Gold Coast society to organize for united action. The Gold Coast Methodist Times, under the editorship of Rev. S. R. B. Solomon, was early to join the fray with a vociferous campaign against the proposed Bill, while the Fékuw sent petitions and a delegation to the governor in order to voice their antagonism towards the Bill. But by April 1895 Governor Griffiths had retired leaving matters in the hands of his successor Sir William Edward Maxwell. Maxwell considered the Crown Lands Bill to be too weak and withdrew it in favour of a new Lands Bill which he published in 1897. The Lands Bill proposed to take over all ‘unoccupied’ and forest land as government property, to force those already occupying land to apply for a ‘settler’s right’ and to enable anyone to purchase or lease unoccupied, now ‘public’, land for an initial fee and an annual tax on gross profits (Tenkorang 1973: 71). On learning of the new proposals, the Fékuw leapt into action and appointed a committee, which included Sarbah and J. P. Brown, to analyse the Bill. The committee concluded that a new mass-membership society should be set up to oppose the Lands Bill. Consequently, the Gold Coast Aborigines’ Rights Protection Society was formed and officially inaugurated at a public gathering in Kotokuraba Square in Cape Coast on 17 April 1897. The Gold Coast ARPS retained Sarbah to address the Legislative Council on its behalf, which he did in a lengthy attack of virtually all the Land Bill’s sixty-three sections. He was assisted by two other barristers, Peter Awoonor Renner and Charles James Bannerman, who were retained by the chiefs of Accra, Winneba and Gomuah (Tenkorang 1973: 71–72). There was widespread fear that the alienation of Gold Coast land from its indigenous custodians proposed by the Lands Bill constituted a British attempt to take possession of the Gold Coast by stealth. Furthermore, the Bill was the latest in a series of unpopular ordinances and tax proposals that left the merchant elite feeling victimized and the indigenous chiefs feeling threatened and disempowered. The government proposals set out in the Lands Bill were ostensibly represented as serving to control abuses and illegal practices in the concessions industry. But by the late nineteenth century, concessions remained one of the few economic activities still controlled by Africans. In his addresses to the Legislative Council, Sarbah proposed that the Lands Bill’s ostensible aims could be better achieved through the creation of a Concessions Board that would examine concessions and validate them only on assurance that ‘African grantors had been fairly dealt with, and grantees had acquired indefeasible titles’ (Tenkorang 1973: 72). But Sarbah did not stop there. As advisor to the Gold Coast ARPS , he recommended that a delegation be sent to the British parliament in London to meet the colonial secretary and persuade him to withdraw the Bill. The Gold Coast ARPS delegation travelled to London in August 1898 and succeeded in getting the colonial secretary to agree to drop the Lands Bill. The Bill was replaced in 1900 with a Concessions Act after Sarbah was appointed by Governor Hodgson to the Gold Coast Legislative Council as an extraordinary member in order to help draft it. Sarbah was then retained as an

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unofficial member of the Legislative Council to represent ‘native’ and Fante interests until his untimely death in 1910 (Lodge 2004: viii; Kimble 1963: 456). Shortly before his death Sarbah was awarded the title of CMG by King George V on the recommendation of the Gold Coast’s then Acting Governor, Sir John Rodger. This apparently caused some of his countrymen to question his motives in serving on the colonial Legislative Council (Sampson 1937: 220). But it is clear that Sarbah saw himself as a patriot, albeit one who was prudently committed to using ‘lawful means and methods’ (Sampson 1937: 215) to achieve his aims. It was in the name of patriotism that Sarbah paid back the fee he received from the ‘Kings and Chiefs and Members of the Gold Coast Aborigines’ Rights Protection Society’ who had engaged him as counsel to represent them at the bar of the Legislative Council in their opposition to the Lands Bill. On so doing, he stated that ‘I do not spurn or refuse the very handsome retainer of four hundred guineas, but in serving my country . . . I seek no reward, nor expect any remuneration’, and he recommended that the ARPS buy a printing press with the money so that ‘every Native of the Gold Coast may acquire a correct knowledge of the constitutional history of his dear native land’ (Sampson 1937: 216).41 Soon after Sarbah had returned to the Gold Coast in 1887, his friends in the Mfantsi Amanbuhu Fékuw suggested that he write a series of newspaper articles on Fante customary law based on his study of court records. Later on, his experiences fighting colonial land bills encouraged him to gather this collection together to form the basis of his first book, Fanti Customary Laws, which he published in England in 1897. His decision to publish the book with an established London press was a deliberate strategy, because the book was partly intended as the ‘textual foundation’ of Fante opposition to colonial land legislation (Lodge 2004: ix), and publication in England was the best way to reach British politicians, colonial lawmakers and the British public. In the book Sarbah described Akan social systems as based on land-related relationships and rights. He argued that there was no land ‘without owners’, that land could not be acquired as private property, and that an individual’s access to land was either inherited through matrilineal descent or granted by its corporate owners (Lodge 2004: ix). In his preface to Fanti Customary Laws, Sarbah explicitly stated that one of his principal aims in writing it, was to provide ‘the first correct idea on Customary Laws to newly arrived European officials, who, having no intelligent person to explain things to them, would fain say there were no Customary Laws’ (Sarbah 1897). A similar aim would probably have motivated Sarbah’s donation of a Fante king’s messenger sword to the Liverpool Museum in late 1902, and the other items, like the gold weights, which he donated in early 1910. In short, they may have been intended to help illustrate the political, technical and economic sophistication of African cultures, and to help counteract contemporary ideas, in general circulation among the British public, regarding Africans’ lack of culture or their low level of development on a supposedly universal hierarchy of social evolution. Significantly, in this regard, Sarbah used the example of gold weights in his 1906 book, Fanti National Constitution, to give emphasis to the antiquity and sophistication of gold use among Akan peoples. In his chapter covering the Gold Coast’s early history, he included a table comparing Fante and Asante gold weight names and values, alongside which he asserted that:

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From the very earliest period the people knew the value of gold, and had for different values names which are used and known even now, although the demonetization of gold dust in 1889 has tended to the gradual disuse of these weights. Sarbah 1906: 71

The well-organized campaign of the ARPS against the Lands Bill had been very effective in getting its objectionable parts removed, and the success of Sarbah’s 1897 book, which ran to two editions in six years, meant that it exerted an enduring influence on British policymaking in the Gold Coast (Jenkins 1986: 128–29). By aiming over the heads of the local colonial authorities in the Gold Coast and appealing directly to metropolitan imperial authorities and the British public, Sarbah intended to unleash a blow at a British cultural imperialism that denied Africans in the Gold Coast a valid history and cultural agency of their own. While it may not be possible to draw direct parallels between Sarbah’s political and literary aims and his intentions on making donations of African artefacts to the Liverpool Museum, it seems clear that his donations should be understood as another part of his strategy of cultural ‘counterpenetration’ (Mazrui, quoted in Baku 1990: 40), used as a defence of African cultural and political interests, and of Fante social practices, against a pervasive British cultural imperialism. In Fanti National Constitution, his second book, Sarbah clearly articulated the ideology he was up against. Thus: The new Imperialism of recent times . . . declared these territories undeveloped estates, to be specially exploited with all expedition, primarily, if not mainly, for the benefit and profit of Great Britain. . . . [M]uch harm was done to British West Africa, for there were not a few Government officials, with more zeal than discretion and more assurance than knowledge, who thought it good policy to ridicule and try to break up the aboriginal institutions of the people, to undermine the authority of their natural rulers, and to subordinate everything possible to the paramount claims of what they called Imperial uniformity. In the minds of such persons, the doctrine of the individualism or distinct characteristics of each nation or race had no existence; to introduce English laws wholesale, abolish what is peculiar to Africans, and to treat them as subject races, saved them much trouble . . . Thoughtful men realise that each of the colonies essentially British should develop her own individuality – political, social, financial, and intellectual. Sarbah 1906: 226

Ironically, the museum in Liverpool was a primary site for the dissemination of the triumphal imperial view of history (see Chapter 8) that Sarbah had set himself against, something he would certainly have been aware of, because he had visited Liverpool in 1896, some months after the Liverpool Museum had opened its new Ethnographical Gallery (Liverpool Museums 1896: 18). However, rather than donating a ‘fetish’ figure, for example, to comply with the museum director’s ‘special wants’ (see Chapter  6), Sarbah decided, in late 1902, to donate a king’s messenger sword. This was an item of Fante chiefly regalia, and therefore illustrative of Fante politics and statecraft. The

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timing of the gift would seem significant, because by late 1902 Sarbah must have begun thinking about his second book, Fanti National Constitution, and Fante politics and statecraft are likely to have been on his mind. He travelled to London in July the next year, where he would have spent a great deal of his time finding documents and other sources for his planned new work (Jenkins 1986: 125). The book would not be published until 1906, but it seems that Sarbah chose to frame this work partly as a sophisticated response to the urgings of Mary Kingsley, the celebrated and, by then late, explorer, amateur ethnographer, and ‘symbol of dissent from certain imperial attitudes towards West Africa’ (Nworah 1971: 352). In the book’s appendix, Sarbah reproduced two letters from Kingsley, including one that she had written to him in 1898 after she had read his first book. In this letter she stated that, ‘There are at present here very few men conversant with African institutions, hence grave misapprehensions regarding them rule public opinion.’ She had then urged that: It is exceedingly necessary for us to demonstrate the existence of the African state, after Professor Westlake’s article in the Contemporary Review for April. You have done more than anyone by your valuable ‘Fanti Customary Law’ – which I continually advertise – to help, and I sincerely hope you will do more and soon. Sarbah 1906: 260

Kingsley ended her letter by expressing the conviction that ‘the general English public . . . are quite with you and me if we can make them understand the facts of the case’, a line that Sarbah found apposite to quote in the preface to his book (Sarbah 1906: xx). But Sarbah’s second book cannot be viewed as having been inspired by Kingsley’s narrow exhortation. Instead, the ‘endorsement’ that Sarbah garnered from Kingsley’s letter probably had more to do with the conscious positioning of his work as a piece of colonial criticism, legitimized through the backing of an internationally connected ‘pressure group’ (Jenkins 1986: 123) of British ‘colonial critics’ focused largely on Liverpool, within which Kingsley had been a prime mover (Nworah 1971: 350; Zachernuk 2000: 47). Fanti National Constitution did far more than demonstrate the ‘existence of the African state’. In documenting the trajectory of British hegemony in the Gold Coast, the book revealed the extent to which Africans had actively influenced this trajectory, and had helped to determine the contemporary colonial dispensation in the Gold Coast (Agbodeka 1971: 182). As well as describing indigenous Fante political institutions and their practical functioning, which was shown to be dependent upon the active participation of the people, the book emphasized how the checks and balances of consensus also embodied considerable scope for change and institutional modification. Indeed, Sarbah used the book as a vehicle for his conviction that ‘aboriginal institutions’ should be modernized rather than being dismantled or replaced by colonial policymakers (Lodge 2004: x). He also used the book to promote his belief that the colonial state should be developed through a ‘sympathetic’ collaboration between Africans of the literate, educated elite and ‘thoughtful’ colonial agents and policymakers, with the objective of making it possible for the administration to be handed over to a populace appropriately

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‘qualified’ and educated in the history and constitution of their own nation (Sarbah 1906: 225, 248). In short, Fanti National Constitution was inspired by the same underlying patriotic motive that caused him to write his first book, Fanti Customary Laws. Furthermore, this underlying patriotic motive, and the sophisticated strategy of cultural ‘counterpenetration’ that it embodied (Baku 1990: 40), can also be ascertained behind his decisions, in 1902 and 1910, to donate a Fante king’s messenger sword and Akan gold weights to the Liverpool Museum through Arnold Ridyard. Almost all the Cape Coast donors were members of the Gold Coast Wesleyan Methodist Church’s Cape Coast circuit and virtually all of them also seem to have been members of the Gold Coast ARPS . In fact, the Gold Coast ARPS was an organization that Bartels characterized as the creation of Cape Coast Methodists (Bartels 1965: 144), which seems a fair assessment, particularly when one considers the fact that the British society that loosely served as its model was likewise the creation of reformers working within a Nonconformist campaigning tradition. Ridyard was also a Wesleyan Methodist and so would not have been unfriendly to the interests of this group. As the Nonconformist he was, he could hardly have been opposed to the aims of the Gold Coast ARPS , but it is impossible to know how overtly or actively he supported them. While evidence of the Cape Coast Methodists’ collaboration in Ridyard’s collecting project is clearly documented in the accession registers of the Liverpool Museum, there is little direct evidence to indicate how Ridyard reciprocated, or exactly where the interests of the Cape Coast Fante elite may have intersected with his own. We know that Ridyard supplied some of his collaborators on the West African coast with British magazines and newspapers. In the letters that the curator of the Salford Museum sent Ridyard, he frequently informed Ridyard that he had forwarded him used magazines from the Salford libraries. Indeed, in July 1902, just before Ridyard launched on his sixty-third African voyage, Mullen wrote: ‘I am sending you along today some magazines I have been accumulating, in the hopes that they may be of some service to you on the coast.’42 On his next voyage Ridyard was given the king’s messenger sword by Sarbah. On this same sixty-fourth voyage, he was also presented with the much more modest gift of a ‘Native sponge’ (15.1.03.11) by Thomas Addaquay, a prominent trader with a shop on Cape Coast’s Commercial Road and another on the Ashanti Road Circus.43 This tangled pad of vine-like vegetation was Addaquay’s first, and only, contribution to Ridyard’s collecting operation and, like Sarbah’s sword, it was also accessioned on 15 January 1903. The Gold Coast Leader reported in its 21 March 1903 issue that Addaquay was a member of the Gold Coast ARPS Press Committee, a position that would presumably have been well served through access to British newspapers and magazines around this time. It is very likely that Sarbah would have been the recipient of Ridyard’s largess at certain points. But, if Sarbah gave Ridyard an Akan king’s messenger sword, with gold leaf covered handle, on Ridyard’s sixty-fourth voyage, after receiving used magazines from the Salford libraries on Ridyard’s previous voyage, this would have been a very unequal reciprocation. It therefore seems more likely that Addaquay, rather than Sarbah was the recipient of British newspapers and magazines from the batch that Ridyard received from Mullen in July 1902.

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From the limited archival sources relating to Arnold Ridyard, he comes across as a man possessed of a more practical than intellectual disposition (see Chapter 3). Sarbah, on the other hand, was one of the foremost Gold Coast intellectuals of his day, a complex and highly educated man, of many interests, talents and achievements. As well as writing three books of his own, he also published several journal articles and numerous items of journalism.44 A significant biographical and critical literature exists on his life, social milieu and works.45 Far easier, then, to start with Ridyard’s apparent interests and try to work out where they might have intersected with Sarbah’s. As was revealed in Chapter  3, Ridyard’s family history followed a trajectory of upward social mobility through the nineteenth and early twentieth century that was typical of a great many Nonconformist, formerly working-class, families. Ridyard evidently held on to his deep-rooted, Nonconformist ethos throughout his life and is likely to have been a practising Wesleyan Methodist. As already mentioned in Chapter 3, Wesleyan Methodism has been characterized as a ‘theology emphasizing human agency’ (Hempton 2005: 187), and by the end of the nineteenth century it also placed great emphasis on education as a means to self-improvement, an emphasis that Ridyard evidently shared. Indeed, his museum collecting operation probably reflected his strong attachment to the free public library and museum movement in Britain. Furthermore, the fact that Ridyard hosted ‘many sons of chiefs’ at his home at Rock Ferry while they were on their way to schools or colleges in Britain, suggests that he aimed actively to help young Africans fulfil their educational aspirations and achieve the kind of self-development and ‘progress’ that he would have envisaged for Africa’s new generations through the lens of his ingrained Wesleyan Methodist mindset. As a leading Gold Coast Methodist who was also a leading light of the Fékuw and, later, as a founding member of the Gold Coast ARPS , Sarbah had been particularly concerned that education should promote ‘national’ rather than colonial agendas. Thus, in 1902 he gained the support of a number of Fante chiefs for the establishment of the Mfantsi National Education Fund. The fund was intended to establish secondary schools as well as primary schools, where pupils would be taught to read and write in Fante, and where they would study the history and geography of the Gold Coast, including its indigenous customs and institutions. The fund was also intended to provide scholarships to promising students and to promote Fante literature. It was to be financed through interested chiefs contributing 10 per cent of the rents they accrued from mining concessions. But the fund failed to live up to expectations, so Sarbah and other officials and trustees then decided to limit their liability by registering the restructured Fanti Public Schools as a limited company and they attempted to raise money for it by public subscription (Kimble 1963: 85–86). Before 1906 companies could only be registered in Britain and it seems that Sarbah and his friend W. E. Sam made a trip to Britain between July and December 1903 partly in order to register Fanti Public Schools Ltd in London (Bartels 1965: 165; Tenkorang 1973: 75). It seems most likely, then, that Ridyard’s overt collaborative cultural interests intersected with Sarbah’s predominantly where the issue of education for West Africans was concerned. Ridyard may have provided Sarbah with practical assistance and advice ahead of his 1903 trip to Britain, and could also have put him in touch with potential

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supporters of his Fanti Public Schools proposals through British Wesleyan Methodist networks. Partly in gratitude, Sarbah may have given Ridyard the king’s messenger sword he donated to the Liverpool Museum late in 1902. Similarly, Sarbah may have presented Ridyard with the other items he donated to the Liverpool Museum in 1910, partly in gratitude for Ridyard’s possible practical assistance with resources for his book on the History of the Gold Coast. This book, which remained unfinished at the time of Sarbah’s untimely death on 27 November 1910, was intended especially for the pupils of Mfantsipim, the Fanti Public Schools Ltd high school that Sarbah initiated in 1904 at Cape Coast (Tenkorang 1973: 76).

J. P. Brown, C. J. Bannerman and Other ‘Cosmopolitan Patriots’ Tenkorang has stated that Cape Coast was famous for its nightlife in the nineteenth century, and that Sarbah was exceptional in avoiding such distractions ‘to burn the midnight oil’, which earned him a reputation as an eccentric recluse (Tenkorang 1973: 76). Judging by the relatively few mentions he received in the social events columns of Cape Coast’s local newspapers and, notwithstanding the fact that he found time to play the organ and was an ‘accomplished musician’ (Sampson 1969: 220), it seems likely that he also avoided some of the other more ‘worthy’ social activities of his contemporaries, like participation in temperance societies, for example. By contrast, some of Ridyard’s other Cape Coast collaborators appear to have been the leading socialites of their day, including Sarbah’s barrister colleagues, Peter Awoonor Renner and Charles James Bannerman. The Freetown-born Awoonor Renner (see Figure  79) appears to have been the town’s principal impresario. He was an accomplished singer and leader of a band called the Amagics. The Gold Coast Leader of the second week of February 1903 reported that Mr Renner’s band ‘had a most successful Fancy Dress Ball and Costume Concert in which most of our ladies and gentlemen took part on Friday last, at the Castle’.46 In December 1904 the band played at an even more successful ‘Smoking Concert’, held to raise money for Cape Coast’s Victoria Park, where Awoonor Renner reportedly ‘brought the house down’ with his rendition of the English popular song, ‘The Honey Suckle’.47 On an August bank holiday in 1904, Awoonor Renner and Bannerman led the Cape Coast cyclists’ club in a colourful public entertainment at the Chapel Square that was enjoyed by numerous society guests, including the British Judge Pennington, at Mr Bannerman’s residence.48 A few years earlier, on 3 September 1898, Bannerman had presided over a ‘magic entertainment’ at Lutterodt Hall in Accra. Bannerman was also the patron of a Cape Coast reading club, as well as a founding patron of the Accra Social and Reading Club, whose meetings he hosted at his Accra residence ‘St Edmunds’.49 Unlike Awoonor Renner, it would seem, Bannerman was also involved in more ‘worthy’ charitable activities, like the temperance movement, along with notables such as J. P. Brown and J. J. Kuofie.50 The various other interests and social activities of Sarbah’s contemporaries, would seem to cloud the picture with regard to their possible motives for donating African artefacts to the Liverpool Museum and in relation to where their interests would have

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Figure 79 Photograph of Peter Awoonor Renner (1861–1938) in his uniform as aide-de-camp to the governor in 1925. Photographer unknown. Permission: Afrograph. intersected with those of Arnold Ridyard. Although it is evident that, like Sarbah, virtually all of Ridyard’s Cape Coast collaborators were deeply involved with the aims of the Gold Coast ARPS , it is also clear that they shared other public and private interests. As has already been mentioned, J. P. Brown was one of the Gold Coast ARPS ’s first vice presidents, while Peter Awoonor Renner and Charles James Bannerman assisted Sarbah at the bar of the Legislative Council in opposing the 1897 Lands Bill. In

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1903 Addaquay sat on the press committee of the Gold Coast ARPS and, in the same month, he represented the society on its Commercial Board at a meeting with the governor, while Bannerman sat on the Educational Board at the same meeting.51 In addition, Bannerman was instrumental in setting up the Eastern Province branch of the Gold Coast ARPS at Accra in December 1912 and he served as the new branch’s first president. Another of Ridyard’s Accra collaborators, M. G. Bonso-Bruce, stood as the Eastern Province branch’s first Otsame, or spokesperson.52 Among Ridyard’s Cape Coast collaborators, Joseph Peter Brown, who made two contributions to Ridyard’s collecting operation in 1906, probably led the most active public life. As a founding member of the Mfantsi Amanbuhu Fékuw, and a first vice president of the Gold Coast ARPS , Brown put himself in the front line in the campaign against the 1897 Lands Bill and other colonial legislation. Brown claimed to have been ‘born a Wesleyan’ (Sampson 1969: 99) and remained a staunch Methodist throughout his life. His father had been a Wesleyan Methodist missionary based at Dixcove, where Brown was born in 1843. His mother may have died while he was still a child because when his father died in 1854 Brown was left an orphan (Ephson 1969: 111). Brown completed his early education at the Methodist school at Abura Dunkwa and afterwards taught at the Cape Coast Wesleyan Elementary School. At Cape Coast he formed the first literary club with four friends, which he kept up until 1862 when the Wesleyan Mission sent him to train as a teacher and preacher at their Theological Institute in Freetown, Sierra Leone. He returned to teach at the Cape Coast Wesleyan Elementary School under John Sarbah Sr’s headship in 1864, and he took over the headship himself when Sarbah Sr retired in 1870. In 1873, Brown took part in the British military campaign against the Asante and afterwards joined the London firm F. and A. Swanzy, where he rose to become their general agent for the Gold Coast (Sampson 1969: 97). Brown was also a pioneer cocoa farmer and he became wealthy through the mining syndicate he started with J. Biney and J. E. Ellis, which yielded a very profitable operation in Obuasi (Ephson 1969: 115). Like John Mensah Sarbah, Brown championed the development of educational institutions in Cape Coast. So when the Wesleyan Methodist Synod decided to close down the Wesleyan Boys’ High School in 1889, due to lack of funds, Brown joined Sarbah and others in getting the school reopened and he helped support it in its revived form as the Collegiate School. By 1897, he was general superintendent of Wesleyan Schools and he helped to found the Cape Coast Wesleyan Girls’ High School (Ephson 1969: 111 & 115). Brown was a strong supporter of the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church from its foundation in Cape Coast in October 1903 by Frank Atta Osam-Pinanko and he presided over a meeting held at the close of the church’s first anniversary celebrations on 30 October 1904. Moreover, in July 1899, when Brown was made consul at Cape Coast for the Liberian government, the Gold Coast Aborigines newspaper embellished their report on the appointment by adding that: Mr Brown is always in the fore in all movements religious, social or political – having for its aim, ‘the safety of the public and the welfare of the races’. . . . In brief

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he is at this moment Vice President of the Gold Coast Aborigines’ Rights Protection Society, Senior Officer of the Independent Order of Good Templars, and a Steward of the Wesleyan Methodist Society.53

Although the newspaper did not mention them by name, two other important ‘movements’ to which Brown belonged around this time included the Cape Coast Stool Council and the Akrampa asafo.54 The Akrampa asafo, or number six of the Fante military companies in Cape Coast, was also known in colonial and English-speaking circles as the ‘mulatto company’ or the Cape Coast Volunteers (Gocking 1999: 152). But the Fante word akrampa does not translate as ‘volunteer’. Instead, its meaning is closer to ‘intermediary’ and in virtually every major domain, whether cultural, religious, political or social, Brown appears to have acted as a boundary-crossing intermediary, who, in one way or another, acted against fixed relationships of opposition and ossification of cultural difference.55 Early in 1906 Brown gave Ridyard a moth collected at the coastal town of Axim in the southwestern Gold Coast (23.2.06.1). Later on, in the same year, he also donated a ceramic water vessel from Cape Coast described as having been ‘made in imitation of Wassau pottery’ (3.9.06.21, see Figure  80), Wassa being a major market town in the predominantly Moslem west-central region of Ghana that had historical trade links

Figure 80 Earthenware water bottle made in the Wassa style. Probably made by a Fante potter at Cape Coast Castle, Gold Coast. Presented by J. P. Brown in 1906. 3.9.06.21.

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with Cape Coast. These two very different contributions to Ridyard’s collection operation suggest a man of broad interests, which encompassed both natural history and cultural history, something that would seem to be supported in his being a member of the African Society at around that time.56 But Brown’s donations seem minor, when compared with the value and number of items donated by Sarbah, Chinery or Peter Awoonor Renner (see below). So it may be that Brown, who was ‘always in the fore in all movements . . . having for its aim . . . the welfare of the races’ may actually have been somewhat circumspect in his collaboration with Ridyard’s collecting operation for the Liverpool Museum. The accession record for Brown’s moth provides no clue as to its peculiarities, or to why he considered such a moth to be a significant donation to the museum in Liverpool. Transported to Liverpool as a museum specimen, it therefore appears simply to stand as a generalized, uncontroversial, and perhaps incontrovertible, contribution to the science of entomology. On the other hand, Brown’s gift of a ceramic vessel ‘made in imitation of Wassau pottery’ would seem to be the embodiment of a controversial, or even controvertible, ‘ethnographical specimen’. As a Cape Coast vessel ‘made in imitation’ of one from Wassa, Brown’s ‘ethnographic’ gift could be construed as ‘inauthentic’, in being unrepresentative of the ‘race’ or ‘tribe’ that made it. Brown is likely to have been aware of his donation’s potentially problematic status as an ‘inauthentic’ specimen in the museum context, so it would appear that it was in fact his intention to disrupt or destabilize the natural science inspired taxonomic methods employed by museums. In short, because Brown’s Cape Coast vessel was made in imitation of Wassa pottery, this would have made it resistant to the kind of rigid correlation, typically made in museum displays of the period, between an object’s form or style and its maker’s supposed ‘tribal’ or ‘racial’ identity (see Chapter 8). This, in turn may have allowed Brown to maintain a sense of control over the meaning of his donation in the face of dominant imperial ideas that promoted a static view of African cultures. The Wassa-style vessel would seem to evince a local African dynamic of cultural development, rooted in regional histories of interaction and influence, in contradistinction to universalizing European ideas in which different cultures represented different stages on a hierarchical scale of cultural evolution. ‘Always in the fore in all movements religious, social or political’, Brown was clearly the most political active public figure among Ridyard’s Cape Coast collaborators. Not only was he a member of the Pan-African Association and the highest-ranking Gold Coast ARPS official, he was also one of the staunchest supporters of the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church in Cape Coast. The fact that he, as well as Ridyard’s other Cape Coast collaborators, were all politically active, especially within the Gold Coast ARPS , suggests that their common concern with the campaign for African political rights in the Gold Coast colony was a concern that Ridyard explicitly shared and may have helped to promote in discreet or covert ways. Like Sarbah, and probably for some of the same reasons, Peter Awoonor Renner and McDonald G. Bonso-Bruce both gave Ridyard Asante brass gold weights for the museum in Liverpool. Bonso-Bruce’s donation of six gold weights of ‘various forms’ (15.8.04.36a–f) from ‘Eastern Akim’ and Asante was made in about July 1904. Although the names and values of these weights were not noted, the donor also made various

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other gifts to the Liverpool Museum in 1903 and 1904, which included a Katanga copper cross, or ‘coin from the interior of the Congo’ (15.8.04.35) for which he did include a note detailing their value as ‘equivalent to 12/6 or 15/- (according to exchange) in English money’. This might be interpreted as an attempt to demonstrate the relative sophistication of African trading practices and technologies. Awoonor Renner’s donation, made in about September 1903, consisted of a complete gold dust measuring set. The set includes twenty-six brass gold weights (22.10.03.25–50, see Figure 81), three pear-shaped shovels in copper and brass for cleaning gold dust (22.10.03.13–15), a circular brass pan for washing gold dust (22.10.03.16), three brass spoons with engraved and repoussé decoration for placing gold dust on the balance (22.10.03.17–19), three balances for weighing gold dust (22.10.03.20–22), and a cylindrical brass box containing an assortment of small objects (22.10.03.24). The accession records for all but one of the weights include their Asante names and their values in British currency, information that would certainly have been provided by Awoonor Renner at the time of his donation. Earlier in the same year Awoonor Renner had given Ridyard a remarkable oshe Shango (14.4.03.15, see Figure 82), or staff of a Yoruba Shango priest from Odigbo. The oshe is cast in brass and incorporates the figures of a couple of naked kneeling Shango devotees at the apex and a woman nursing a child in the middle. The staff ’s accession record, which undoubtedly would have been provided by Awoonor Renner, describes it as a ‘medicine man’s wand’. While the items of Asante gold weighing equipment donated to the Liverpool Museum by Awoonor Renner, Chinery and Bonso-Bruce are likely to have been originally acquired from Asante and Akim traders, Awoonor Renner’s Shango staff

Figure 81 Brass gold weight in the form of a shield for weighing gold dust currency. Akan (Asante) from the Gold Coast. Presented by Peter Awoonor Renner in 1903. 22.10.03.25.

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Figure 82 Brass staff of a Shango priest. Yoruba from Odigbo in Southwest Nigeria. Presented by Peter Awoonor Renner in 1903. 14.4.03.15.

would have had some other origin. It may be that Awoonor Renner’s interest in cultural productions of the Yoruba-speaking peoples had been sparked by his positive reassessment of his own African ancestry. Awoonor Renner’s father, J. C. Renner, was a wealthy Sierra Leonean merchant whose own grandfather may have been an Ijesha captive settled at Freetown after having been liberated from an illegal slave ship by a British naval cruiser (see Chapter  4).57 But whatever interest he took in his Ijesha ancestry, Awoonor Renner visited Nigeria periodically to visit friends and clients, so it may have been on one of these visits that he acquired the oshe Shango.58 By the beginning of the twentieth century there would have been a number of Sierra Leoneans

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with commercial, and missionary, interests in the eastern Yoruba-speaking region of Nigeria who may have been in a position to acquire an oshe Shango. Awoonor Renner was born at Freetown in 1861 to a Sierra Leonean father, but his mother Phyllis Renner (1830–1900), who was a wealthy trader in her own right, appears to have been a member of the literate Anlo chiefly elite. Better known as Mamhe Gha of Keta, Phyllis Renner’s grave stone in Cape Coast describes her as, ‘daughter of Awoonor and Vydaweynoo, a mother and wise guardian of a people’. Peter Awoonor Renner was schooled in Freetown and in Germany, probably through his parents’ business links with the German trading company of Brodecker and Meyer (Akyeampong 2001: 96), and he subsequently trained in law at Lincoln’s Inn in London, where he was called to the bar in 1883 (Fyfe 1962: 424). He built a very successful private law practice in the Gold Coast, frequently taking on cases against the government, and he claimed to be able to earn £1,000 per year by 1888 (Kimble 1963: 96). By the 1930s he owned properties in Accra, Cape Coast, Old Keta, Takoradi, Sekondi and Sierra Leone.59 Awoonor Renner’s wealth allowed him to educate his two sons, from his first marriage to Hannah Smith, in Britain. After attending the Boy’s High School in Freetown, the two young men, Charles and William, were then sent to Liverpool, where they completed another four years of schooling at Liverpool College from 1902 to 1906. Charles subsequently went on to study law at Middle Temple in London and was called to the bar in 1919, while William attended Lincoln’s Inn and was called to the bar there in 1914.60 Charles and William should certainly be counted among the many sons of West African elites that Ridyard is known to have assisted while they were in Britain to study at schools and colleges in Britain (see Chapter 3), because it was in 1903, while his boys were at Liverpool College, that Awoonor Renner made his donations to the Liverpool Museum through Ridyard. This fact would therefore suggest that Awoonor Renner was motivated to contribute to Ridyard’s collecting operation for the Liverpool Museum primarily in relation to his personal family interests.

Mobile Elites: C. J. Reindorf, H. van Hien and Others Christian Josiah Reindorf (born 1868) and Henry van Hien (1857–1928), two of Ridyard’s Gold Coast collaborators based at Winneba, are likely to have been recipients of British cultural materials through Ridyard in exchange for items that they donated to the Liverpool Museum. In the early twentieth century, van Hien was employed as the Winneba agent for Alexander Miller Bros and notices published in The Gold Coast Leader newspaper in 1904 indicate that he set up a social club in the town that year. The notices indicate that he was subsequently elected president of ‘The Social Club’, while Reindorf, the Winneba agent of J. J. Fischer & Co., was elected vice president.61 The Social Club’s officials appear to have been prominent members of Winneba’s business community and they clearly sought the patronage of local elites, because Prince R. Johnson Ghartey was invited to The Social Club’s inaugural dinner held on 22 November 1904.62 The club’s members would have been expected to observe

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Christian values, to wear European suits and to speak English (Newell 2002: 32). Such clubs often engaged in charitable activities and staged dinners, speeches, debates, concerts and other entertainments. It is not known how long van Hien and Reindorf ’s Winneba club continued but Ridyard may have had a hand in its success by supplying it with magazines that covered topical cultural matters in Europe, because in 1906 van Hien gave Ridyard a wooden carving of ‘a group of elephants and a palm tree’ (19.12.06.12, now lost). In mid-1907 both van Hien and Reindorf made a donation each to the Liverpool Museum through Ridyard. Reindorf ’s gift consisted of a ‘Carved ladle with various figures down the sides’ from ‘Swedru (Angona)’ (8.7.07.14, now lost), while van Hien presented a ‘Carved wooden spoon, [with] burnt decoration, made by a cripple in a village behind Bereku, near Winebah Winnebah’ (8.7.07.12, now lost). In late 1908 or early 1909, van Hien and Reindorf both gave Ridyard further donations for the museum. On this occasion Reindorf donated two lidded, tureen-like vessels (13.2.09.22 & 23, see Figure  83), made by local Winneba potters, while van Hien donated a wooden ‘poker-worked fan’ from Accra. Van Hien’s 1907 gift of a wooden spoon ‘made by a cripple’, may have served to highlight The Social Club’s charitable activities, and would probably also have constituted a statement about his own civic virtue and Christian benevolence. Indeed, Hutchinson introduces van Hien as ‘Squire of Charity-Ville’ in his Pen-Pictures and mentions that van Hien gave the Wesleyan Methodist Church at Cape Coast its turret clock (Hutchinson c.1929: 190). Interestingly, The Social Club’s leading officials, van Hien and Reindorf, were from Elmina and Accra respectively, rather than from Winneba itself, and both had also spent long periods of time in Europe.63 This points to an important characteristic of Gold Coast social clubs of the period, namely their promotion of European ways, and their tendency to emphasize new, cosmopolitan social affiliations made possible through the use of English as the common language of communication and through the shared aspirations of their members. Many of Ridyard’s Gold Coast contacts appear to have

Figure 83 Oval earthenware dish with cover. Probably Effutu from Winneba, the Gold Coast. Presented by C. J. Reindorf in 1909. 13.2.09.22.

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been members of European-style associations of one kind or another. As was indicated above, the Euro-Ga barrister Charles James Bannerman, for example, was an official of a Cape Coast temperance society and a cycling club between 1898 and 1904, as well as being patron of a Cape Coast reading club and the Accra Social and Literary Club.64 The Sierra Leonean born Peter Awoonor Renner (Gocking 1999: 130) was likewise a member of the Cape Coast Cycling Club and leader of the Amagics concert band.65 Reindorf spent sixteen years as J. J. Fischer & Co.’s agent at Winneba before moving back to Accra in 1909, where he used his European training and commercial experience to set up an independent business. He made a fourth and final donation to the Liverpool Museum through Ridyard in 1912. This was a blackened and burnished lidded earthenware bottle from the village of Afuamang near Accra (24.6.12.10, see Figure 84). This bottle would probably have been donated as a contribution to Ridyard’s drive to collect examples of ‘the primitive potter’s art’ for the museum from 1910. But like the Winneba tureens he donated in late 1908 or early 1909, its form is clearly based on a type of imported European ceramic vessel and it would probably have signalled the sophistication and complexity of the donor’s cosmopolitan cultural heritage (see Chapter 6). Social and literary clubs in the Gold Coast have a noteworthy history. Their popularity in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries corresponded with the radical transformation of the Gold Coast economy as a result of the steam revolution and the related expansion of trade in agricultural and forest products. As already mentioned above, expansion of the cash economy and the introduction of formal, European-style education led to the rise of a wealthy merchant elite, whose position depended on property ownership and the ability to take advantage of colonial

Figure 84 Burnished earthenware water bottle. Ga made in the village of Afuamang, Accra Plains. Presented by C. J. Reindorf in 1912. 24.6.12.10.

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institutions and infrastructures, rather than on indigenous systems of authority (Arhin 1983: 17; Foster 1965: 91–93). The clubs, through which this mobile elite sought to create new social affiliations and help forge a distinctive civic culture, aimed not merely to mimic Western lifestyles, as their critics declaimed, because the meanings created by their activities were not ‘anchored to meanings generated in the metropolis’ (Newell 2002: 44). Newell develops the idea that literary clubs were part of the attempt by Western-educated Africans to gain social prestige in ways that did not depend on belonging to indigenous status systems (Newell 2002: 44). But seen together with related associations like cycling clubs and concert parties, for example, all such associations can also be understood as ways of staging and negotiating often contradictory visions of modernity (Cole 2001: 132) as part of the process through which Gold Coasters from the Western-educated elites strove to make themselves more at home in their world and connect a troubled present to the horizon of an anticipated future. This is most sharply evinced by the fact that both C. J. Reindorf and J. P. Brown attended the first Pan-African Association Conference in London in July 1900 (see Figure  85).66 The conference was organized by Sylvester Williams, a Trinidadian law student at Lincoln’s Inn, and it brought together campaigners and intellectuals from Africa, the Caribbean, Europe and the USA in order to address political and humanitarian concerns shared by peoples of African descent around the world (Sherwood 2011: 247; Mathurin 1976: 56). As original members of the Pan-African Association, Reindorf and Brown would have sought to create new cosmopolitan and humanitarian social affiliations, and to insert themselves into optimistic new antiimperialist political landscapes and collaborative cosmopolitan networks.

Conclusion In his assessment of John Mensah Sarbah’s legacy as a Gold Coast historian, Jenkins (1986) sought to address what he termed ‘the obvious paradox’ of why a West African should ‘research, write and publish anti-colonial, patriotic African history in the heartland of the Empire’. Indeed, this book seeks to address parallel ‘paradoxical’ questions of how and why West Africans came to contribute African cultural artefacts to the ‘ethnographic’ displays of British museums. But Jenkins’s question seems to ignore the significance of Sarbah’s Methodist education and principles, and his Nonconformist social networks, in helping to shape his understanding of Britain and its Empire and his own potential for politically transformative action from within the Gold Coast colony. It seems safe to assume that Sarbah’s teachers at Wesley College in Taunton would have equipped him to arrive at the decision he made in 1884, to the effect that his pursuit of a legal education, rather than management of his father’s business interests, would best enable him to address the political condition of the Gold Coast under a British regime set on consolidating colonial control. No doubt Sarbah adopted his strategy of cultural ‘counter-penetration’ through his books (and museum donations too) along the lines that Baku suggests, as part of his defence of African

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Figure 85 Group photograph taken at the Pan-African Association Conference in London, July 1900, showing C. J. Reindorf and J. P. Brown. From West Africa, November 1900, page 208.

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cultural and political interests against a derogatory British cultural imperialism. However, it seems doubtful that he would have done so if he was not already possessed of a clear-sighted understanding that the heartland of empire was not in all respects, and in all quarters, a bastion of imperialism. It was partly through the influence of his Nonconformist networks, and through his links with various British ‘colonial critics’, that this understanding would have been forged. Fox Bourne, Mary Kingsley and Ridyard represented constituent parts of these wider networks, but the collaborative parts they filled can be seen to reflect the broader issues that were at play. The clear-sighted perspective on the world of his day shown by Sarbah was by no means unique among Ridyard’s collaborators. However, Sarbah was notable for the seriousness with which he immersed himself in the study of the history and culture of the Fante people, with whom he most closely identified, and for the remarkable way in which he used these studies to weave alternative narratives that took a new measure of the West African past and contested the authority of a pejorative European one. He envisaged that further studies like his own would force Europeans to entirely revise their view of Africans along with their prescriptions for Africa’s future political and cultural development (Sarbah [1906] 1968: ix). While Sarbah was sober and scholarly in his weaving of new potential trajectories for Africans’ future political and cultural development in the face of European colonialism, others were less direct, more exuberant and more experimental in their responses. The ‘Grand Displays’ of the Cape Coast Cycling Club, and the fancy dress balls and costume concerts of Awoonor Renner’s Amagics band, were inclusive, multiethnic, events that staged versions of modernity and ‘civilization’ as performance. As Cole has observed, performances of this kind made subtle critical play with the ‘untenable dichotomies of colonial ideology’ and ‘transformed “civilization” into a practice rather an ontological status’ (Cole 2001: 132). Some of the gifts that the Gold Coast donors made to the Liverpool Museum, like ceramic vessels whose forms fuse African and European design elements and symbols of refinement, can be said to stage a ‘contradiction’ in the very mode of their aesthetic creation. In the lineaments of their materiality they seem to demand a revision of colonial ideas about Africans and African cultural history. Moreover, through the act of presentation, and in their status as gifted museum display pieces from cosmopolitan West African donors, such items can also be said to represent staged negotiations of African modernity and refinement. Yet all the African artefacts of the various kinds that were given to Ridyard for museums in Britain by the donors covered in this chapter, can be understood, in one way or another, to constitute assertions of an African sophistication and modernity, made within the context of emerging visions of the future and recalibrated ideas about the West African past.

Notes 1 PRAAD, ADM 11/1/15, Anomabu Native Affairs. J. Sarbah to Hodgson, 5 December 1890; Amonu IV to Hodgson, 4 April 1893.

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2 Memorial service leaflet, ‘Thirty-Sixth Remembrance Service 1937–1973 for the late James Jackson Kuofie’, African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church, Cape Coast, 4 November 1973. J. J. Kuofie’s donations cannot be discussed in this work and must await future research. 3 Ridyard’s other photographer friends included J. A. Green, a prominent Ibani photographer based at Bonny; the Lagosian businessman and photographer H. A. Shanu, based at Boma in the Congo Free State (see Chapter 6); and John P. Joof (Diouf) a Gambian photographer, based at Bathurst (now Banjul). 4 Most of Arnold Ridyard’s West African contacts in the Gold Coast were Methodists but the assumption that F. R. C. Lutterodt was a Wesleyan Methodist is based mainly on the fact that a funeral service for his wife, Emily Adjuah Tetteh, was held in Accra’s James Town Wesley Chapel (The Gold Coast Independent, 14 May 1938, 21 (20): 478). 5 In the first verse Hutchinson writes, ‘Lutterodt the brave and frank, Befriends only the “square” ’, while in the fourth verse he addresses Lutterodt as ‘Friend Fred’ (Hutchinson c.1929: 123). 6 Quotation from F. R. C. Lutterodt accompanying the Mayer Museum accession register record 24.9.00.38 for the Asante sword he donated in 1900. 7 Ga swords of this type were probably based on Asante models introduced during the period of Akan (Akwamu) overrule from 1742 to 1826. In his portrait (shown in Figure 39), the Mantse Kojo Ababio IV of James Town’s Alata quarter can be seen holding a similar style sword. 8 Daily News, London, 25 August 1900. While it is tempting to speculate on whether Lutterodt was the official photographer on this occasion, and on whether he obtained the sword from one of the Asante chiefs who attended the event, there does not appear to be anything in the sources to support this. 9 Record for 1906.59 in Salford Museum accession register. 10 The Rock from Which You Were Hewn (privately published pamphlet on the history of the Chinery family); Interview with Smyly Chinery, 6 December 2009. 11 Personal communication with Smyly Chinery, 23 November 2013. 12 The Rock from Which You Were Hewn. 13 This assumption is based on the fact that Chinery was a member of the Anglican Church. 14 Among the English pictures that hung on Cleland’s walls was one that depicted the Colonial and Indian Exhibition of 1886. Chinery’s witness statement of 9 October 1894, PRAAD, SCT.2/4/21, p. 27, Taylor, Laighland v. Cleland Addo M. Claimant. 15 Interview with Smyly Chinery, Accra, 6 December 2009. 16 As the official church in the British colonies in West Africa, the Anglican Church was to become the ‘denomination of choice’ among James Town’s elite in the 1890s (Parker 2000: 140). 17 Hutchinson (c.1929: 69) suggests that Chinery visited England but this would have been later in his life, either for training or perhaps to meet English relatives. 18 ‘When will real gentlemen be sent to occupy posts which require their holders to comport themselves with dignity and exemplary self-respect?’ The Lagos Times, 9 March 1881. 19 Quoted in Parker 2000: 12. 20 My thanks to Mr Leonard Crossland for showing me these vessels and permitting me to photograph them. 21 Interview with Leonard Crossland, Accra, 28 November 2009. 22 Interview with Smyly Chinery, 6 December 2009.

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Interview with Maude Hammond, 30 October 2009. See, for example, Gocking 1984. Interview with Maude Hammond, 30 October 2009. In the end, the stool was taken by Chinery’s eldest son Roger instead. Interview with Roger Chinery’s son, Bobby Chinery, Accra, 28 November 2009. Interview with Smyly Chinery, Accra, 6 December 2009. The James Town house that Chinery built in 1902 was probably named ‘Fairfield House’ after the Moravian mission at Fairfield near Montego Bay in Jamaica, where Alexander Worthy Clerk, Fanny Chinery’s maternal grandfather, would have come from. The Musical Times, 1 February 1900: 74. On 17 October 1906, the band of the Tarquah (which was to become Ridyard’s ship early in 1909) played German airs to entertain officers of the German ship the Sperber (The African World, 24 November 1906 (quoted in Cowden and Duffy 1986: 109). John Mensah Sarbah played the organ and was an ‘accomplished musician’ (Sampson 1969: 220). Also, the GCL of 7 February 1903, 1 (33/34): 1 describes Peter Awoonor Renner as leader of a Cape Coast band called the Amagics. Interview with Smyly Chinery, Accra, 6 December 2009. According to Maude, after Fanny married Arthur Robert she joined the Methodists, because the Methodist church was close to the Chinery home in the Palladium area of James Town. Interview with Maude Hammond, 30 October 2009. Ofosu-Appiah, L. H. (1977), The Encyclopaedia Africana Dictionary of African Biography (volume 1, Ethiopia-Ghana), Reference Publications (reprint accessed online on 7 November 2016 at www.dacb.org/stories/ghana/clerk_n.html). Interview with Maude Hammond, 30 October 2009. The products of these pottery workshops are also likely to have served as an influence on the Ga potters discussed in the previous chapter. Roger Casement Chinery was born in 1895. He was the only child from Arthur Robert’s first marriage to Emily Smith who survived into adulthood. Emily died in about 1896. Interview with Smyly Chinery, Accra, 8 October 2009. Emily Smith married Arthur Robert in 1890 (see PRAAD, SCT.2/2/1 6.mp.1225, certificate issued 9 April 1890). Roger Casement worked as a member of the Survey Department for the Oil Rivers Protectorate from 1892 (Mitchell 2006: 50–55). The term ‘cosmopolitan patriot’ used here is taken loosely from Appiah (1998). PRAAD SC 6.36. PRAAD ADM .11/1/15 (Anomaboe Native Affairs), J. Sarbah to Hodgson, 5 December 1890; Amonu IV to Hodgson, April 4 1893; Gold Coast Aborigines, 20–27 August 1898. Dispatch No. 157 of 12 May 1888, from Brandford Griffith to Knutsford; TNA , CO /96/191 (quoted in Kimble 1963: 417). Sarbah’s recommendation was heeded and a press was purchased, with which the ARPS newspaper, Gold Coast Aborigines, was launched (Sampson 1937: 218). Salford Museum Letter book, L/CS /DL 1/8, p. 423, Mullen to Ridyard, 7 July 1902. Gold Coast Aborigines, 1898, 2 (2): 1. E.g., Sarbah 1897, 1904, 1906, 1909. See, for example, Baku 1990; Boahen 1996; Crabbe 1971; Dumett 1983, 1972, 1973; Edsman 1979; Ephson 1969; Jenkins 1985a,b, 1986; Lodge 2004; Lynch 1968; Sampson 1969; Tenkorang 1973.

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GCL, 7/14 February 1903, 1 (33/34): 1. GCL, 24 December 1904, 2 (131): 1. GCL, 6 August 1904, 3 (111): 1. Gold Coast Independent, 30 September 1898, N.S. 1 (1); GCL, Saturday 26 November 1904, 3 (127): 1. GCL, 16 April 1904, 2 (95): 1. GCL, 7 March 1903, 1 (37): 1; 21 March 1903, 1 (39): 1. PRAAD, ADM .11/1/445. J. W. Blankson to secretary for native affairs, 30 December 1912. Gold Coast Aborigines, 22 July 1899, 2 (29): 3. West Africa, 1900, November: 208. Interview with Supi Minnah, 2 November 2009, Cape Coast. Translation of akrampa kindly provided by Supi Minnah. Interview with Supi Minnah, 2 November 2009, Cape Coast. GCL, 17 January 1903, 1 (30): 1. The African Society was formed in 1901 in memory of Mary Kingsley and members received the society’s journal. A report in The Sierra Leone Weekly News describes Peter Awoonor Renner’s brother, Dr William Awoonor-Renner, as possessing ‘the special characteristics of the Ijesha tribe of the “Aku” nationality to which he belongs’. SLWN, 9 November 1912, 29 (10): 7. Interview with Ekow Renner, 7 November 2009, Cape Coast. Interview with Ekow Renner, 7 November 2009, Cape Coast. Registration records of Liverpool College, Lincoln’s Inn, and Middle Temple. Obituary, W. Awoonor-Renner Esq., SLWN, 23 January 1943, p. 5. GCL, 1904, 3 (111): 2 and 1904, 3 (124): 2. GCL, 1904, 3 (127): 3. Prince R. J. Ghartey was also a member of the Winneba business community because he was an employee of Yates, Bros & Shattuck at Winneba by 1896 (see Sampson 1969: 121). Ephson (1969: 133) mentions that van Hien was educated in Holland and Britain, while the Red Book of West Africa (Macmillan 1920 [1968]: 205) states that Reindorf ’s employers, J. J. Fischer & Co., sent him to Liverpool for two years in 1891 ‘for a thorough commercial training’. GCL, 1904, 2 (95); 1904, 3 (111, 112, 127). The Gold Coast Independent, 1898, 1 (1): 2. GCL, 1903, 1 (33/34); 1904, 3 (131). C. J. Reindorf and J. P. Brown are shown in a photograph taken in London while they were attending a Pan-African Association meeting in July 1900 (Published in West Africa, 1900, November: 208).

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Museum Meanings: Regimes of Classification, Representation and Display

This chapter explores how the specific currencies of meaning, expressed through the African artefacts donated to museums in Britain by Ridyard and his West African collaborators, were converted into altogether different currencies once they were processed through the museums’ systems of ordering and display. In particular, it explores how curators at the Liverpool Museum deployed African artefacts from the Ridyard assemblage in the Ethnographical Gallery of 1895 and in subsequent public exhibits. Arnold Ridyard’s first ‘ethnography’ shipment of fifty-three African artefacts was delivered to the Liverpool Museum in early July 1895, just a couple of weeks after the museum’s new ‘Ethnographical Gallery’ had been formally opened. Some of the newly delivered artefacts would have been added to the Ethnographical Gallery almost immediately and numerous other items that Ridyard delivered on his return from subsequent voyages were also added to the gallery displays. A great many of the artefacts from western Africa that Ridyard transported to the Liverpool Museum between 1995 and 1916 were therefore slotted into a pre-existing exhibitionary framework conceived by Dr Henry Ogg Forbes, the museum’s director from 1894 to 1909. Although this chapter is primarily concerned with revealing ways in which the meanings of the Ridyard assemblage and its constituent artefacts were transformed as they were put through the objectifying processes of the museum, it also exposes how the assemblage resisted its intended subordination to the museum’s meanings and to the received ideas of curators. These issues are not straightforward, partly because sources on the early museum displays are brief and phrased in general terms. However, it is clear that the Ridyard assemblage progressively outgrew the physical display spaces allotted to African artefacts within the new Ethnographical Gallery, which disrupted the overarching exhibitionary structure intended to help assign African artefacts specific positions and significances within a universalizing epistemological system. Indeed, it would seem that the Ridyard ‘West African Collection’ took on a somewhat unruly life of its own, as a direct consequence of the rapid growth in its size and complexity. Over time the Liverpool Museum’s African collection was pruned by adversity and was subsequently reassembled and augmented by acquisitions from other museums and collectors, so that the Ridyard assemblage became a less dominant component 247

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within a progressively more diverse African collection. This seems to have favoured marginalization of parts of the Ridyard assemblage that did not fit in with later curators’ attempts to construct neatly delimited re-imaginings of the African continent that complied with prevailing pseudoscientific imperial epistemologies, or with later ideologies of cultural value and systems of commodification.

Exhibiting Order The Ethnographical Gallery opened on 19 June 1895 and was the first gallery project completed under the supervision of Henry Ogg Forbes (see Chapter  3), the newly appointed director of Liverpool’s joint Derby and Mayer Museums, who had arrived to take up his position on 20 February 1894. The gallery was evidently conceived as a milestone in an ambitious plan for the joint development of the Derby and Mayer Museums, which was intended to impose a unitary order on their distinct collections according to a single, dominant, evolutionary framework. Thus, at the opening ceremony for the new gallery Councillor Picton of the museums committee stated that: with the extension of the building which was in contemplation they might ere long be enabled to rearrange the Museum in such an orderly and scientific way as had never yet been accomplished in any museum in this country.1

Having inherited an institution in two halves, created through the thirteenth Earl of Derby’s initial natural history bequest, followed by Joseph Mayer’s later donation of artworks and antiquities (see Chapter  2), Forbes and the municipal museums committee appear to have viewed the Ethnographical Gallery as a key part of their strategy for the development and integration of the institution’s collections to provide an ‘object lesson in order’ (Bennett 2006: 269). Forbes’s system consisted in categorizing all human-made artefacts according to the ‘racial group’, as he saw it, of their creators. This was a crudely colour-coded system, typical of his times, in which he grouped together the ‘productions’ of a great diversity of peoples from Africa and the Pacific, dubbed the ‘black races’, in a section glossed as the ‘Melanian department’. The productions of the so-called ‘yellow races’ were exhibited in the ‘Mongolian’ section, which encompassed a similar diversity of peoples. In fact the ‘Mongolian’ section exhibited artefacts from the Americas (Peru and Mexico), Madagascar, ‘China, Japan, the Malay archipelago, Burma, Siam, Tibet, Java, Sumatra, Sarawak, Borneo, Lombok and the Philippines’ (Tythacott 2011: 135). The productions of the so-called ‘Caucasian race’ (mainly European and Egyptian) consisted primarily of ‘antiquities’ and ‘artworks’ from the Mayer donation, which were not exhibited in the museum’s basement Ethnographical Gallery. The ‘Caucasian’ objects were explicitly referred to in annual reports as the productions of the ‘civilised races’ (Liverpool Museums 1901: 55) and were exhibited in the main hall and on the main hall’s surrounding balconies. Forbes’s system meant that all the museum’s human-made objects were used to promote an

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overarching, pseudoscientific message about fundamental differences in the ‘racial’ characteristics of different peoples around the world, with putative ‘European’ characteristics promoted as the most highly evolved. In his own address at the Ethnographical Gallery’s opening ceremony, Forbes presented his vision for the museum as follows: The Derby and Mayer Museums appear to many, I fear, to contain collections with little or no relationship to each other, the one being biological and the other devoted to antiquities, pottery and other works of art. If the building in which these museums are housed were so constructed as to enable the biological collections to be arranged in scientific order – that is in the sequence of their origin and development – an arrangement which, I trust, may be possible at no very distant date with the intended extension of these buildings – then this ethnological gallery would follow naturally and immediately after that devoted to the history of the anthropoid animals. As in the ornithological gallery, for instance, we should exhibit the whole history of the different groups of birds by specimens of the different species, then structure, then eggs, then habits; so in the anthropological gallery, devoted to the history of the highest family of the anthropoid man, we attempt to display his osteology, embryology, his geographical distribution, and the effects of climate and surroundings in producing different races – in other words his biological history. Then in this gallery we follow his intellectual history tracing its rise and progress through the barbarous or less civilized peoples, following his culture and achievements in the adjoining galleries of the Mayer Museum. The collections in this gallery are arranged geographically, commencing in the near room with the earliest traces of man; then follows the ethnography of the peoples of Siberia, Greenland, and Labrador, the Esquimaux, and Samoyeds; then that of the Indians of the American continent from Canada to Patagonia; in the further room we traverse the Eastern Hemisphere and study the ethnography of the black peoples or Melanesians of Africa, Australia, Papua, New Hebrides and Fiji, then of the Polynesians of Samoa, New Zealand, and the Pacific, next the Mongolians of Malaya, China and Japan, and finally that of the Indian Peninsula and Burmah. The study of the handiwork, manners, and customs of these primitive peoples will enable the student to go back and live in some measure again in the infancy of the most highly cultivated races, whose civilisation had in its beginnings nothing that was very different from those of the negro or the Patagonian.2

Tythacott has amply analysed Forbes’s intellectual background and the contemporary ideological context in which these ideas took form (see Tythacott 2011). She emphasizes that the director’s new ethnographical displays followed a late nineteenth-century tendency to adapt Darwin’s theory of biological evolution to human societies in accordance with a widespread Euro-centric discourse of cultural and racial hierarchy. She also demonstrates how this official exhibitionary framework was structured within the Liverpool Museum spaces and how, following Bennett (1995: 47, 186–95), it served

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to help prop up imperial ideologies of ‘progress’ (Tythacott 2011: 133–34, 140). There can be no doubt that Forbes’s supposedly ‘scientific’ system was intended to encourage visitors to make assumptions about their own position relative to other peoples in a universal, socio-evolutionary hierarchy in a way that would have helped to justify European political, economic and cultural domination of the so-called uncivilized ‘races’ (see, for example, Barringer and Flynn 1998; Bennett 1995, 2004, 2006; Coombes 1991, 1994). But by placing the new Ethnographical Gallery in an intermediate position between the Derby Museum’s natural history galleries and the Mayer Museum’s art and antiquities displays within an overarching evolutionary framework, Forbes and his museum committee aimed to construct a very broad ‘civic vision’ for museum visitors that would implant them within ‘unidirectional’, ‘developmental’, time. As Bennett has argued, this would have been intended to foster, ‘as a civic task, an awareness of the need to contribute to the continuing progress of civilization’ (Bennett 1995: 47, 2006: 269). The ‘ethnographic’ displays were crucial to this aim, because it was through the presentation of customs and technologies that were interpreted as outmoded in these displays that forms of ‘civilized’, middle-class behaviour could be stimulated. The new Ethnographical Gallery was popular, both with visiting anthropologists and the general public, so that the Annual Report for 1895 could boast that visitors were ‘evidently taking a greater interest in the objects on exhibition here than in many other sections of the Museums’ (Liverpool Museums 1896: 18). The gallery’s layout and object interpretation were clearly intended to foster a progressive ‘civic vision’ and to enable it to function in a seemingly ‘objective’ way, rather than as an overtly ‘committed’ instrument of empire (Barringer and Flynn 1998: 4). But by exemplifying evolutionary narratives that placed European cultures in a dominant position at the apex of human development, the claim of objectivity could be a hard one to maintain. Individual visitors to British museums at around this time would have had varied reactions to displays of African artefacts. Wintle has underlined the fact that their responses would have drawn on wider experiences and cultural references (Wintle 2012: 37). This would have been especially so in Liverpool, with its important trading and shipping links with western Africa, because many visitors to the Liverpool Museum, like Ridyard and his trader friends, for example, would have had personal, first-hand knowledge of Africa and Africans. These visitors’ responses would not necessarily have meshed with the official aims of curators. Indeed, from its very opening, it seems that the museum’s Ethnographical Gallery ‘misdirected’ the intended ‘civic vision’ of its visitors as a consequence of the inherent contradictions within its overarching socio-evolutionary narrative. This appears to have been the case even where a journalist from the Liverpool Mercury was concerned, who reported in admiring terms on the exquisite quality of the ‘uncivilized’ artefacts in June 1895. Thus: The space now devoted to the ethnographical collection has . . . been entirely panelled with wood, cased with elegant bay-wood cabinets . . . In these cases and on the walls are now tastefully arranged the instructive, picturesque, and often exquisitely carved productions of chiefly the uncivilised races of mankind all over the globe.3

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Forbes’s vision for the Ethnographical Gallery was such that he sought to crowd out visitors’ wider cultural references to ensure that their civic vision would not be misdirected, because he hoped that labels, photographs and drawings would continue to be added to the new displays until ‘there is no object which shall require other information for its elucidation than is found close to it’ (Liverpool Museums 1896: 18). But this hope was very soon subverted by the large influx of artefacts from western Africa contributed by Ridyard and his collaborators, which meant that even though the assistant curator was ‘constantly employed in labelling specimens and in adding explanatory drawings and photographs’ (Liverpool Museums 1896: 18), he would not be able to meet the requirements of all the newly arriving exhibits. The museum’s collections were explicitly referred to as scientific and historical ‘treasures’, which were understood to constitute a form of local and municipal cultural capital.4 It was a form of elite cultural capital through which a productive citizenry, with a civic vision embedded in ‘progressive time’ (Bennett 2006: 269) and embodying ‘middle-class’ values (Hill 2005: 48), could be encouraged. The museum was committed to the further accumulation of such capital, and new additions of African artefacts to the museum’s basement Ethnographical Gallery meant that it had to be rearranged, such that, by the end of 1902, it was ‘exclusively devoted to Melanian Ethnology’ (Liverpool Museums 1903: 30). Moreover, the director’s plans for the basement gallery by this time had shifted pragmatically to focus primarily on the African collections, so that his explicit priority was now to provide in the gallery ‘as complete a representation as possible of the Ethnography of West Africa, the region with which Liverpool is so intimately in relation’ (Liverpool Museums 1903: 30). This policy was essentially forced on Forbes, as he had explained in the Annual Report for 1898, due to the many contributions of West African artefacts that Ridyard continued to present to the museum. Thus: The West African section of the Ethnographical Gallery has increased so rapidly as to necessitate the allotment of additional space for its better exhibition. This has been provided by removing the Australian and part of the New Guinea exhibits from the East side of the gallery, and devoting the vacant space to West African. The whole of the East side of the gallery now contains West African exhibits. Liverpool Museums 1899: 29

This policy shift notwithstanding, it is evident that particular types of artefact continued to be given priority for exhibition in the Ethnography Gallery. These ‘special wants’ (Liverpool Museums 1898: 29, 1899: 34), as the director termed them, consisted particularly in the ‘spectacular’ and ‘exotic’ masks and so-called ‘fetishes’ that museum ethnographers at this time recruited to exemplify the superstitious and irrational attachments that ‘uncivilized’ or ‘barbarous’ peoples made to material objects, and which these scholars classified as being the most ‘primitive’ form of religious practice.5 The fact that such artefacts continued to be given centre stage in the Ethnographical Gallery is underlined in the Annual Report for the year ending December 1909, where the director stated that:

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The Melanian department continues as hitherto to receive numerous acquisitions from West and South West Africa. Mr. Ridyard . . . has continued his donations of desirable objects to this Department. Two cases containing Fetishes and Masks have been added to this Department. Liverpool Museums 1910: 16

The new policy forced upon Forbes as a consequence of Ridyard’s numerous additions to the African collection changed the spatial grammar of the museum displays and gave stronger emphasis to another integral function of the institution, which was presented as the serving of local stakeholder interests and the promotion of civic pride through the projection of local strengths and characteristics. The reference to West Africa being ‘the region with which Liverpool is so intimately in relation’, clearly referenced Elder, Dempster & Co.’s important West Africa service and this Liverpool-based company’s monopoly in carrying commercial freight and passengers between Britain and the coast of western Africa. Significantly, the company’s chief executive Alfred Jones was a prominent patron of the museum, because he allowed Ridyard to transport artefacts from the western coast of Africa to the museum in Liverpool free of freight charges (Liverpool Museums 1898: 29). By 1906, when the museum inaugurated its long-awaited extension, through which it gained two large horseshoe-shaped galleries for new natural history displays (Figure 86), these functions had evidently acquired greater significance, because the Earl of Derby in his opening address pointed out that: [T]he extension formed a valuable addition to the links connecting the commerce of Liverpool with science, art and natural history, and also aided and supplemented the work of the university by affording opportunities of fostering the study of nature among the people. Liverpool Museum Extension 1907: 271

The ‘West African Section’ of the museum had become a particular source of pride by this time, with The West African Mail in October 1906 praising Ridyard for having helped raise Liverpool ‘to the position of having the finest West African collection in the United Kingdom, that city being second only to Berlin in the whole world in this respect’.6 But the new extension also allowed Forbes an opportunity to reassert his hierarchical evolutionary system in the museum displays. According to a piece in the Museums Journal of February 1907, the upper horseshoe gallery, which exhibited the ‘chief families, orders and genera of the animal kingdom, arranged systematically’, also prominently included the ‘human race’ along with the primates at its northeastern end (Liverpool Museum Extension 1907: 272). Strangely, the ‘human race’ was represented using ‘selected photographs and casts of typical examples of the three great races [sic] – the white (or Caucasian), the black (or Melanian) and the yellow (or Mongolian)’. The anonymous Museums Journal reporter then added that:

Regimes of Classification, Representation and Display

Figure 86 Plans of the extended Liverpool Museum of 1906.

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This threefold division, it may be noted, has also guided the arrangement of the ethnographical collections in the Mayer Museum, which the newly acquired space has rendered it possible to exhibit in a much more satisfactory manner than heretofore. Liverpool Museum Extension 1907: 273

Ironically, some of the human casts exhibited in the upper horseshoe gallery had been obtained from the American Museum of Natural History as part of an exchange in which the AMNH received fifty-six ethnographic items from the Liverpool Museum, including thirty-two ‘duplicate’ African artefacts originally donated by Ridyard and his collaborators (Liverpool Museums 1906: 38).7 While sources that would tell us how Liverpool’s citizens responded to the enhanced and extended museum are hard to come by, details of how visiting Africans might have responded are scarcer still. However, it would seem significant that when the editors of The Sierra Leone Weekly News took it upon themselves to quote from an article in the Museums Journal, it was from a piece that seemed to subvert the intellectual value and authority of most museums. The article in question was one authored by Dr William Evans Hoyle, which appeared in the July 1912 issue of the journal, titled ‘Museums:Interesting and Otherwise’. In his piece Hoyle found little to commend most museums and wrote that: There are few pastimes more fatiguing than visiting museums. To drag for a couple of hours or more through a series of galleries half seeing objects of all kinds, sizes and colours, reduces the mind to a species of pulp, in which neither intellectual pleasure nor profit is possible; at least that is my own experience, and I speak after a prolonged course of museum visitation. Hoyle 1912: 10

Hoyle made recommendations as to how his readers should visit such institutions, which was the section that The Sierra Leone Weekly News chose wryly to summarize as follows: Dr Hoyle, F.R.S.E., in the ‘Museums Journal’, says the way to see a museum is not to spend more than an hour there, read the labels and look carefully at what they indicate, and then go either into the open air or into the refreshment-room. It is cheering to think that the majority of visitors do the thing properly.8

When Forbes retired in 1909 the structure of the Liverpool Museum displays remained largely unchanged under the new director, Joseph Clubb, who was the former assistant curator of the Derby Museum and a natural scientist. However, the assistant curator of the Mayer Museum, Peter Entwistle, appears to have instituted new priorities where the museums ‘special wants’ were concerned and he requested in 1910 that Ridyard pay ‘special attention’ to acquiring ‘examples illustrative of the primitive potter’s art as now carried on in Africa, an art gradually disappearing owing to the

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introduction of European metal ware’ (Liverpool Museums 1911: 8). In fact, pottery was not the only focus. In his report to the museums sub-committee on 17 March 1916 upon Ridyard’s retirement, Clubb related how Ridyard made a special point ‘by request’ of collecting ‘representative examples of those arts and industries that are now fast dying out, owing to the rapid replacement of them with European goods’: For example, the Blacksmith’s Art in West Africa is illustrated in the museums by the whole of the native workman’s outfit . . . The Art of Weaving is illustrated by a complete native loom, set up with its actual surroundings, as when used by the fishermen-weavers of Jellah Coffee [Dzelu Kofe]. Clubb 1916: 4

The assumption here was that the ‘primitive’ tribal era was being forced to give way to the advanced industrial age driven by the West and that ‘primitive’, ‘native’, cultures must be ‘saved’ for ‘history’. The immediacy, as well as the ironies, of such ideas were likewise given emphasis in the Annual Report for 1910, which stated that: The usefulness of many of the objects in the African Section for trade purposes is evinced by the reproduction of designs on native cloths by a local firm, and the copying of designs by Manchester calico printers. Liverpool Museums 1911: 89

These changes were indicative of the belated formulation of a systematic collecting policy at the museum, in line with museological ideas of the time that had been advocated since the end of the nineteenth century, which favoured a shift of emphasis away from ‘curious’ and ‘spectacular’ artefacts in favour of everyday, representative and ‘authentic’ ones (Tythacott 2001: 174–75). But while the museum’s new collecting policy implied an underlying note of nostalgia for a lost authenticity and a new ambivalence with regard to the colonial ‘civilizing’ project, it made no acknowledgement of African agency or of African cultures having their own dynamics of change and creativity.

Rearranging and Re-evaluating Liverpool Museum’s African Collection in the 1930s Following a long period of stasis and neglect through the 1920s, Liverpool’s museum committee hired ex colonial officer J. Withers Gill OBE in 1930 to revise, rearrange and catalogue the Liverpool Museum’s African displays. With this appointment the committee members appear to have overlaid their former concerns with fostering a progressive civic vision, and with reflecting local strengths and interests, in favour of more homogenized imperial interests. Gill was a former resident (colonial administrator) of Kano in Northern Nigeria and therefore something of an imperial ideologue, as well as being a Hausa linguist who had translated several Hausa texts into

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English.10 In addition to rearranging the African displays, Gill wrote a handbook to the exhibits, which demonstrated that he held a prevalent colonial vision in which Africans in Africa were to be ‘conserved’ (Cooper 2002: 18) as pacified and productive imperial subjects, within ‘traditional’ social units imagined as static and homogenous. Despite the fact that the first decades of the twentieth century represented a period of radical social change, Gill’s rearrangement of the West African displays followed this static conception of African societies, so that any understanding of the collection as a predominantly coastal, trade-related one, that embodied a history of dynamic crosscultural interaction, was pre-empted. Gill’s handbook set out a dominant hierarchical division between ‘Moslem’ and ‘Pagan’ cultures. He said ‘the culture of the one is superior to the culture of the other’ (Gill 1931a: 13). Apart from asserting fixed ethnic hierarchy, this statement probably also reflected his Northern Nigerian perspective in echoing the attitudes of a Hausa ruling class towards their despised, so-called Pagan, neighbours and vassals.11 Gill claimed that the ‘craftsmen par excellence of West Africa are to be found among the Hausa and Nupe races of Nigeria’ (Gill 1931a: 28) and, in stereotypically ‘orientalist’ (Said [1978] 1985) terms, described the Hausa as, ‘a picturesque race in their flowing robes and turbans, with all the dignity and punctilio with which the creed of Islam endows its followers’ (Gill 1931a: 28). As ‘flowing robes and turbans’ were worn by the ruling class, the majority of whom being of Fulani origin, this description clearly promoted a ‘visualization’ of ‘Hausa identity’ in the image of its elite stratum. Such an image would have been the most familiar and reassuring one to a British colonial ‘corps’ who administered Northern Nigeria largely in alliance with an Islamic ruling class, according to ‘the dogma of Indirect Rule’ (Heussler 1968: 84 & 91; Ochonu 2014). Gill’s emphasis on Africans as craftsmen (craftswomen are not overtly mentioned) chimed with, in Gill’s words, a contemporary ‘obsession for economic development’ (Gill 1931b: 109). In both administrative and missionary circles, ‘technical’ skills and education had been seen as part of the means to promote putative imperial economic agendas and to help domesticate Christian converts more effectively within neglected colonial economies (e.g. see Coombes 1994: 181). It also fed into domestic justifications for colonial rule that had been advocated at least since the beginning of the twentieth century, in the guise of the policy of ‘social imperialism’, through which all classes in Britain could be ‘comfortably incorporated into a programme of expansionist economic policy in the colonies coupled with the promise of social reforms at home’ (Coombes 1991: 190). Moreover, the image of productive labour and peaceful pursuit of economic activities in the colonies could be employed to project a spectacle of ‘civilization’, ‘progress’ and ‘harmony’ under British colonial rule. This had been a principal aim of the 1924 British Empire Exhibition at Wembley where the benefits to colonizer and colonized alike of a paternalistic Pax Britania were clearly presented to the British public in King George V’s opening speech (Clendinning n.d.: 1, 3). In a piece he wrote for the West Africa magazine in 1931 Gill explained: ‘Of the peaceful arts of Hausaland we make an elaborate exhibit’. However, nomadic Africans, who were able to move across arbitrarily defined colonial borders and could thereby evade submission to the colonial order, were written out of his imperial version of

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history. Thus, while Gill could write: ‘We show much handiwork of the toilers of Moslem West Africa’; he followed this with, ‘but the pastoral folk furnish nothing from which we can strike a note of interpretation. Nomads neither make history nor practice crafts’ (Gill 1931b: 109). The spectacle of domesticated ‘conserved’ Africans under colonialism – peaceful, sedentary and productive – had to be constructed in opposition to invented precolonial Africans who were depicted, not only as lazy, but also as uniformly violent and tumultuous, such as Gill projected in the following passage from his guide. Thus: Such tribal annals as there are of those parts of Africa, to which the exhibits in the Museum relate, are annals of aggressive immigration, of violence and disturbance, of slave-raiding and human sacrifice, and the rise and fall of transitory negro kingdoms. Their tale of years is scarred with bloodshed, rapine and slavery. It is towards the understanding of the characteristics of the peoples who are now being brought under the influence of Western civilization, that the re-arrangement of the African Gallery exhibits has been designed. Gill 1931a: 14

This purveyed a generalized image of precolonial Africa constructed in order to help legitimize the colonial order by showing that Africans were incapable of governing themselves in a peaceful and productive manner. Where Gill mentioned particular historical events with regard to the rearranged displays, these related only to the British conquest of West African territories, in which Gill had probably played a part, and served only to support his triumphalist version of imperial history. Thus: Relics of events in the recent history of Nigeria lie embedded amongst domestic utensils and weapons of war. There is a signal drum from the battlefield of Yola in 1902. A devotional book . . . was picked up after the fight at Satiru in 1906. There are relics of the Aro expedition of 1904. The bamboo water bottles used by the Mendis on one of the Ashanti campaigns revive recollections of another clash between Europeans and Africans. Gill 1931b: 109

Although Gill acknowledged ‘the indefatigable energy of an Elder Dempster officer Commander Ridyard’ (Gill 1931b: 108), his use of ‘Commander’ as a title for Ridyard (whether appropriate or not for his role as a chief engineer with a merchant fleet), lends Ridyard undue credit as the singular marshalling and shaping agent behind the collection. Gill goes on to say that: ‘Other hands have contributed, but the collection rightly bears the name of the Ridyard collection’ (Gill 1931b: 108). By this sleight of hand, any sense of the intellectual agency of Ridyard’s West African collaborators is elided, along with any idea that the collaborators’ agendas could have played a significant role in the creation of the collection. Moreover, the potential value of the artefacts donated by Ridyard’s West African collaborators for the construction of a more convincing version of West Africa’s history is also effectively disregarded.

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When Gill died in 1931, Trevor Thomas (1907–93) was hired to take up the position of keeper of the Ethnology Department at the Liverpool Museum later in the same year. This youthful inheritor of Gill’s six-month rearrangement job on the African displays came from a South Wales coal mining family. He had been a prizewinning singer as a boy and completed an honours degree in human geography and anthropology at Aberystwyth University.12 Thomas had served as secretary and lecture assistant in the Department of Geography at Manchester’s Victoria University (now Manchester University) before moving to Liverpool and he remained keeper of Liverpool Museum’s Ethnology Department from 1931 to 1940. Although he presided at a time of general stagnation in the institution, he not only managed to bring a new perspective to the interpretation of the museum’s African collection, but also introduced innovative design ideas to the ‘ethnographical’ displays. Thomas’s experiments with ‘modernist’ forms of display, which he began in the Oriental Gallery, were partly borrowed from the department store and partly from the art gallery, but were also ostensibly inspired by a jazz-focused négrophilie, along with contemporary ideas in architecture, art, theatre, dance and psychology (see Thomas 1939). He fitted cases with backgrounds of cool attractive colours and placed exhibits on blocks of different heights, ‘so as to give rhythm to the display’ and so that the ‘spectator’ was able to see ‘each specimen for itself, isolated against a field of neutral grey, and not, as formerly, obscured in a jumbled mass’ (Thomas 1934: 224–25). In his 1934 article in the Museums Journal, Thomas stated that: The post-war years have shown a searching for new expressions in art and music, and the film medium has brought a sense of artistry nearer to the general public, whereas the museum as a repository of the past has been more conservative in its acceptance of new formulae. Thomas 1934: 221

As well as arguing for, and practising, ‘modernism’ in museum displays (Thomas 1934: 221), Thomas also advocated approaching ‘primitive art’ from ‘an aesthetic point of view’.13 In fact his innovative display ideas were partly intended to highlight the aesthetic qualities of exhibits, as well as being ‘delight’-inducing arrangements in their own right that were intended to communicate ‘an aesthetic experience’ (see Figure 87). But they were also intended to stand as ‘a reflection of . . . the curator’s personality’ (Thomas 1939: 11–12). Thomas evidently knew little about African histories and cultures. His avant-garde reassessment of ‘the qualities of primitive art’ (Thomas 1935: 29), although still promoting a static and ahistorical view of African societies, nevertheless subverted Gill’s rearranged display of the museum’s African collection. In his article for the Liverpolitan magazine in 1935, Thomas likened Gill’s rearranged basement African Gallery to ‘a bargain basement’. He described the collection as being ‘[a]rranged as far as possible according to the type of specimen’ and suggested that ‘for those who have the eyes and time to explore its wealth’ there were ‘works of art’ to be found there that were ‘worthy of the finest civilization’. The ‘outstanding specimens’ he said, were the

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Figure 87 A display of Asante brass gold weights and gold dust storage boxes from the Gold Coast, intended to induce ‘delight’. Designed by Trevor Thomas. Published as Plate VIII in Thomas’s article ‘Penny Plain Twopence Coloured: The Aesthetics of Museum Display’ in Museums Journal, 39 (1): 1–12.

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‘carved masks and fetish figures’, which he claimed demonstrated ‘rare appreciation of aesthetic values in the subtlety of their craftsmanship’ and he added that: Many of the figures show a marked affinity to some of the works of Epstein, and that is not surprising, for the sculptor is well-known as a collector of negro art. Thomas 1935: 29

Thomas was concerned to re-evaluate Liverpool Museum’s African collection in line with contemporary modernist primitivist ideas in art, but his own agenda was tied up more broadly with his enthusiasm for ‘modernist’ values across the arts as well as in society more generally. Thus he could write: because we were unaware of it, we have for a long time wallowed in the jazz which initially was rooted in West Africa, probably because its strong rhythms made too irresistible an appeal to our thinly veiled sensual primitive natures. But that a “nigger” should be able to show us the way in art values was really too impossible a suggestion. Thomas 1935: 29

Thomas’s promotion of African works in the Liverpool Museum collection as works of art, according to a Western modernist view in which art was imagined to be universal, suited his broader agenda. This might be viewed as a positive development in comparison with the views promoted by his predecessors, but it would not have helped museum visitors to understand African artefacts as cultural achievements in their own right and on their own terms. In this regard, Thomas’s modernist art perspective, although largely excluding Forbes’s and Gill’s ethnological and ethnographic discourses, can only be seen to have confirmed the radically decontextualizing function of these prior discourses, which so effectively removed African cultural works in the museum from the domains of their original creation, and from any lingering associations with the individual histories of their use and acquisition (see Clifford 1988: 200). As exhibitions of so-called primitive art began to be held with increasing frequency during the 1930s, prominent art historians like Robert Goldwater joined Trevor Thomas and many others in extolling the aesthetic qualities of African cultural artefacts. But as they loudly celebrated the entry of these objects into Western art institutions, they remained conveniently quiet about the often illegitimate methods through which the objects were then being acquired and the frequently controversial routes by which they were making their acclaimed entrances.14

Erosion and Occlusion: The Ridyard Assemblage at the Liverpool Museum, 1905 to 1968 The ‘Ridyard West African Collection’, as it was often termed, faced perilous times and the assemblage is no longer as extensive as it was when Arnold Ridyard retired from his

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seagoing career in 1916. A significant number of the artefacts that Ridyard transported to the Liverpool Museum between 1895 and 1916 were lost, destroyed or dispersed over the decades. The process began in May 1905 when thirty-two western African objects from the Ridyard assemblage were sent to the American Museum of Natural History in New York, in part exchange for a series of plaster casts of the busts of indigenous Americans, as well as a selection of artefacts from the Philippine Islands. A further twenty-one items from the Ridyard assemblage went to New York in May 1907 as part of the same exchange (Liverpool Museums 1906: 38, 1908: 30). At the time of the exchange these items were considered ‘duplicates’, a term that exemplifies their disconnection from the unique, living associations that embedded them in their original context and their reclassification in the museum as ‘specimens’ and therefore examples of types of objects (see Dias 1994: 166; McCarthy 2007: 20). In November 1930, five western African artefacts from the Ridyard collection were lost in transit and never recovered when they were lent, along with other items, to the British Empire pavilion at the International Colonial Exhibition in Antwerp (Liverpool Museums 1931: 4). But the greatest loss to the Ridyard assemblage was suffered during the Second World War. On the night of 3 May 1941, a 225 kg German bomb fell on the library in William Brown Street and the ensuing fire spread to the adjoining museum building (Allan 1941: 105). The museum had remained open with reduced displays as a morale boost during the war and hundreds of exhibits were destroyed. The basement African Ethnology Gallery managed to escape the worst effects of the fire, but a number of important West African exhibits were destroyed or damaged. Some exhibits were also taken by members of the public, although most of those who rushed to help with the salvage operation after the bombing evidently did so out of a sense of civic duty. One of the stolen objects, a Duala model ceremonial canoe from Cameroon collected by Ridyard in 1897, eventually found its way to the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago via a series of intermediaries (Field Museum catalogue number 175469). The exhibits that survived the bombing of the museum were quickly moved out of Liverpool to safe locations in Wales. After the war, the museum’s surviving ethnographic collections were reassembled in Carnatic Hall, a mansion in southeast Liverpool, where they were stored in chaotic and damp conditions. Not least of the ravages wrought in the chaos of the Carnatic Hall storage was the loss of artefacts’ labels, which recorded their unique accession number. Many wooden objects were originally stamped with an accession number using metal punches soon after their arrival in the museum, while other objects had their numbers painted onto them in indelible paint. However, this was not done with items like textiles and the loss of a label in many cases could mean that an object effectively lost all documentation, as it was not always easy to reconcile an artefact with its original accession record. The physical erosion of the Ridyard assemblage was equalled after the war by an eclipse of its prominence through the acquisition of ‘replacement’ collections, with rather different histories of acquisition, acquired from various other institutions that were rationalizing, or otherwise disbanding, their unwanted ethnographic collections. The two largest of these ‘replacement’ collections arrived respectively from the Norwich Castle Museum in 1956, and from the Wellcome Historical Medical Museum in various

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consignments between 1941 and 1982.15 As a consequence, the acquisitions from these two very different institutions now constitute a major part of the more than 10,000 objects that make up the museum’s present-day African collection. Another more premeditated ‘replacement’ collection was made in the early 1960s, while the museum was being rebuilt following its long post-war limbo. This was enabled by the institution being assigned a government War Damage Fund in order to help the further rebuilding of the collections. A large portion of the fund was allocated to the Ethnology Department, which meant that the financial resources at the disposal of the then Keeper of Ethnography, Richard Hutchings, were relatively generous. Prior to joining the staff of the then City of Liverpool Museum in 1964 to serve as keeper of ethnography, Richard Hutchings briefly held the position of trainee assistant keeper at the Kelvingrove Museum in Glasgow. He had studied social anthropology at undergraduate level at Cambridge University, where he was inspired to take a particular interest in the cultures of the southwest Pacific by Reo Fortune (1903–79), his New Zealand-born tutor.16 On taking up his post, Hutchings took stock of the Liverpool ‘ethnology’ collections and, with the approval of the museum’s director, Thomas Hume, decided that a radical new collecting policy would be instituted and that new meanings would be imposed on the collection. Hutchings decided that it would be impossible to collect for a future gallery of ‘world ethnography’ and so proposed to concentrate resources on acquiring works of ‘primitive art’. He also had the idea that he would attempt to plug the gaps, as he saw it, in his department’s holdings of ‘primitive art’. Museum records show that Hutchings spent most of his War Damage Fund allocation on Papua New Guinean sculpture and on masks and figures from francophone West and Central Africa, purchased mainly from dealers in London, Paris and the Netherlands, but also at a few Sotheby’s auctions in London. Artefacts from Eastern, Southern and Northern Africa appear to have been deliberately avoided. At the time of Richard Hutchings’s appointment, many of Europe’s former West African colonies had recently gained their independence. British and French overrule had given way to political self-determination in newly independent African nations and to optimistic visions of voluntary cooperation within the commonwealth. At the same time, anti-establishment political trends and an organicist turn in the primitivism of Western youth cultures of the post-war generation had also taken hold. The avantgarde fashion for the ‘primitive art’ of Trevor Thomas’s day had entered the mainstream and the market for ‘African art’ was booming (Steiner 1994: 7). The deep-rooted tendency of museum ethnographers to dismiss the past associations and historical meanings of artefacts in African collections in favour of meanings that derived from the artefacts’ putative positions in a structured code (Kingdon 2008: 33) was assisted in the early 1960s by the currency and growing popularity of a new structural anthropology, exemplified in the works of Claude Levi Strauss. This new structuralism insisted on a sophisticated underlying logical grammar to ‘primitive thought’, which tended to essentialize ‘primitive societies’ as organic, unreflective totalities – ideas that Cooke considers to have contributed to a popular ‘feeling of unity and affinity’ with so-called prehistoric and ‘primitive’ man (Cooke 1991: 139–40), which she attributed especially to Western artists in the 1960s.

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At some level Hutchings may partly have taken his cue for the radical collecting policy of his department from these contemporary cultural trends, but the reevaluation of certain African ‘ethnographic’ works as art was already well established in museum circles by this time, led in Britain by the dominant figure of William Fagg at the British Museum. The youthful Hutchings was not confident in his own judgement when it came to potential African acquisitions and it is clear that he deferred to Fagg before purchasing many of his War Damage Fund items for the Liverpool Museum. Fagg was then deputy keeper of the Department of Ethnography at the British Museum and a leading authority on African sculpture. He had published an exhibition catalogue for the Webster Plass Collection of African Art in 1953, which focused on masks and figures from francophone West Africa. In advising Hutchings, it seems clear that Fagg introduced his young protégé to some of the ‘primitive art’ dealers in his stable of contacts, including the Parisian gallery owner Charles Ratton (1895–1986). Hutchings’s memos relating to his purchases of African masks and figures, which are preserved in the object history files at the World Museum, provide a fascinating insight into his collecting decisions and the role that Fagg played in them. The memos were all written between 1965 and 1968 and addressed to Mr Hume, the director of the museum. A typical memo is set out as follows: MEMORANDUM 7th December 1966. To: Director From: Keeper of Ethnology. [Title] Two Objects of Primitive Art In The Collection of Mr. Goldman One is a Guro (Ivory Coast) animal mask at £290 and the other is a Basonge (Congo) fetish figure at £300. Photographs are attached. William Fagg has seen these photographs and commented favourably on the objects. There is a pressing need for both pieces to fill conspicuous gaps in our collection of West and Central African art.

This particular memo clearly indicates that Hutchings consulted Fagg on the quality of pieces before making purchases and a favourable response from Fagg, initially at least, seems to have been a requirement for the director of the museum to persuade the Libraries, Museums and Arts Committee to approve a purchase. There is only one short note from Fagg to Hutchings during this period, so it is likely that the two men mainly communicated in person. Philip Goldman of Gallery 43 in London, with his wife Rosalind, who acted as agents for Hutchings (they attended Sotheby’s auctions on Hutchings’s behalf), may have sent some photographs of prospective acquisitions directly to Fagg at the British Museum.17 Fagg’s singular note in the World Museum files relates to the subject of the memo quoted above and reads: Dear Hutchings, Thank you for your letter of 28 November. So far as I can judge the Guro mask is of excellent quality [1966.373.1, see Plate 26], and the Basonge (sic) figure also appears to be in good style [1966.373.2, see Plate 27] and might probably date from

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before the last war. I would think therefore that they would be a good buy, depending of course on the price.

The issues that this memo throws up have to do with the historical and intellectual contexts that could be said to have shaped and motivated Hutchings’s perception of a pressing need for these particular pieces to fill gaps in the collection and why those gaps were seen to be conspicuous. Hutchings only purchased the one Songye figure during his time at the museum, so in this instance, at least, it seems that a single nkisi figure ‘in good style’ was sufficient to plug the Songye gap. In fact, it is clear that, in Hutchings view, entire ethnic groupings could be represented in the museum’s collection by the acquisition of a single object. Thus, in a memo of 8 August 1966 he writes: Fertility figure (Malinke, Mali and neighbouring territories). These figures are the most important art productions of the Malinke, and we shall probably need to buy nothing else from this group. £215.

This prefigures the misleading idea that Africans lived in ‘tribal’ social groups that constituted closed cultural and ‘artistic’ entities, an idea that Bravmann argued strongly against in a groundbreaking 1973 exhibition, Open Frontiers: The Mobility of Art in Black Africa. Bravmann attributed the popularity of the ‘one tribe=one style’ equation to the ‘frenzy associated with the increasing discovery of . . . [African] arts’ in the West during the 1960s and 1970s (Bravmann 1973: 9). Moreover, the tautological implications of making simple correlations of this kind between artistic style and a ‘tribal’ or ‘ethnic’ identity have been roundly exposed by Kasfir (1984: 163–93). Interestingly, when it came to the Baule of Côte d’Ivoire, Hutchings appears to have considered that the gap in the museum’s holdings from this celebrated art-producing ‘tribe’ required more than one female statuette in order to fill it. Thus, in a 1966 memo to the director of the museum, Hutchings wrote: During my recent visit to London, I examined the ethnographical objects due to be auctioned by Sotheby’s on 9th May. Of particular interest to me are some of the pieces from the Baule of the ivory coast. Until we bought a Baule female figure from Gallery 43 recently [1966.109.2, see Plate 28], this famous style province was virtually unrepresented in our collections, and I feel that we should have at least a small group of Baule pieces.

However, not all Baule objects came in the right shape to plug the gap because on 8 September 1966, Hutchings set out another memo to the director as follows: I have here three African art objects on approval from Gallery 43. These are: (1) ‘Guli’ type mask (Baule, Ivory Coast). This is not a very good example. Fagg did not care for the general appearance when I showed him the photograph, and I feel that the whole mask, especially the frontal portion, is too high. The paint has a rather

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harsh and shiny appearance, when it should be dull with a matt finish. The price of the piece is £350. I suggest we return it to the Gallery 43.

There was clearly a hierarchy of aesthetic importance and a scale of conformity to a formal stereotype being applied here. Susan Vogel highlights the kinds of issue at play when she states in her 1997 book, Baule: African Art Western Eyes, that ‘Baule art has remained at the core of the Western canon of African art, even as ideas about the canon have evolved and tastes have changed.’ Vogel argues that Baule objects appealed to Western taste from the outset in their naturalistic style, their ornamentation and in the virtuosity with which they were carved, and she goes on to say that: Today these objects are appreciated for their subtle rhythms and a beauty that stops short of sweetness. To the Western eye, an essence of Baule style is a balanced asymmetry that enlivens while suggesting stability and calm. Vogel 1997: 26

Although Vogel is making use of a rather more involved language here, than the simple expression of objects being ‘in good style’ that Fagg applies in the letter quoted above, she employs it to illustrate similar connoisseurial concerns that focus entirely on the physical form of the object. Vogel’s book addresses much wider concerns than those to do with the physical form of Baule objects alone. Moreover, it would also be unfair to suggest that William Fagg was a mere connoisseur of African art, because Picton has indicated that Fagg took the study of African sculpture in Britain ‘out of the myth of primitivism and placed it within the context of African social history, also establishing the secure identification of style and insisting that wherever possible we identify the individual artist’ (Picton 1994: 26). However, Fagg was partly the intellectual descendant of the coterie of Western artists, critics, art dealers and collectors who helped to valorize and promote African objects as art during the first decades of the twentieth century. Paris in particular became a focus for the development and propagation of these ideas. At that time Paris was home to a group of artists and critics who were at the forefront of a search for alternatives to the naturalist cannons of most European art and the Impressionists’ emphasis on perceptual form. Myths abound as to which artist was first to take a serious interest in African sculpture. Matisse was certainly among the first. In 1906 he bought a small wooden figure from a curio shop in the Rue de Rennes and was apparently struck by the way it revealed a mode of construction that was opposed to that of European sculpture. Matisse later discussed the piece with Picasso at the home of Gertrude Stein, and Picasso himself relates that it was with Matisse that he had first encountered African art (Flam 1984: 216). Significantly, however, Picasso and his contemporaries knew almost nothing about the history or function of the African objects that they became interested in, so that the inspiration they found in such works related to their own artistic concerns. In the years after 1906, the avant-garde artists in Paris and their circle of friends and associates developed a strong taste for African sculpture, and many of them built

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up collections of their own. In this, they were assisted by a growing fraternity of collector/dealers, some of whom fostered close relationships with ethnographic museums and their curators. William Fagg, himself, referred to the complementary development of museums, collectors and connoisseurial expertise (MacClancy 1988: 163–76). Furthermore, Fagg was known to be friends with numerous collectors and with artists like Roland Penrose, Jacob Epstein, Henry Moore and, especially, Leon Underwood, who helped inform his own aesthetic sensibilities and preferences. Fagg apparently attributed his discriminatory eye as a connoisseur of African sculpture to the opportunities he took to work with well-known early collections, like that of the Parisian dealer/collector Charles Ratton and that of Josef Mueller, the Swiss collector – collections that had been acquired before the ‘faking’ of African sculpture, as he termed it, that apparently took off in response to its popularity with Western collectors (Picton 1994: 26). Paudrat has emphasized that Charles Ratton belonged to the ‘second generation of Negro Art specialists’ and that he holds a prominent position in the genealogy of promoters of ‘primitive art’. Ratton actively cultivated relationships with avant-garde artists, anthropologists and museum curators. In the 1930s he hosted a number of innovative Surrealist exhibitions and in 1932 he organized and financed an exhibition of looted royal Edo brass and ivory altarpieces from the Benin royal court at the Musée d’Ethnographie du Trocadéro in Paris. He also wrote books, catalogues and essays on African sculpture (Paudrat 1984: 162–63). Ratton is credited, along with the dealer Paul Guillaume, with having conferred upon particular forms of West African sculpture, a special aesthetic value and importance. This gave rise to an enduring and widespread transformation of taste that some writers have referred to as the ‘classical style’ of African art. Typically, this includes certain kinds of masks and figures from groups living in the former French and Belgian colonial territories including the Dogon, Bamana, Baule, Dan, Guro, Senufo, Fang, Kota, Kuba, Luba and Vili. According to Rubin (1984: 17), the ‘classical style’ is characterized by ‘highly refined, often intricate workmanship, beautifully polished or patinated surfaces, and a restrained stylized realism’. These characteristics were favoured, in part because they were seen to compare with ‘archaic’ sculpture and were therefore interpreted as expressing ‘early’, more ‘authentic’ human motivations. Unsurprisingly, old and well-used pieces fetched higher prices, but were only considered authentic so long as they showed no signs of Western influence. Textiles, basketry, leather work, pottery and personal ornaments were almost completely ignored and excluded (Phillips and Steiner 1999: 8) – a neglect that reflected a wider Western ethnocentrism in which ‘works of art’ were distinguished from crafted ‘artefacts’ and items made by women were also largely overlooked. Hutchings, for his part, was clearly aware of Ratton’s reputation as an influential dealer and successfully applied for a separate grant from the Victoria and Albert Museum in London towards the cost of purchasing four African pieces from Ratton, which included the two most expensive African acquisitions of the 1960s. He also found a way to bypass the foreign expenditure restrictions that local government authorities had been placed under at that time. His arguments in favour of the purchases are set out in a memo of 8 June 1966:

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OBJECTS OF PRIMITIVE ART FROM THE COLLECTION OF CHARLES RATTON I examined twelve African art objects at the Paris residence of Charles Ratton, the well-known collector and dealer. Of these, four pieces are important from our point of view. 1. Carved figure for a reliquary (Fang, Gabon) [1967.113.2, see Plate 29]. With the single exception of the M’Pongwe tribe, we are very weak in the native art of Gabon, especially in the case of the Fang, who are the most important artproducing tribe. Ratton’s Fang figure resembles the University of California specimen (see accompanying booklet, page 85). Genuine examples are now very scarce, hence the high price. £2,625. 2. Carved figure, seated on a stool, with supporters (Dogon, Mali) [1967.113.1, see Plate 30]. We are still not adequately provided in the case of Dogon figure sculpture. We bought two good figures at Sotheby’s last year, but these are not distinguished (neither were they expensive). For display and other purposes we need a figure more in the ‘masterpiece’ category to serve as a centre-piece for the others. This carving would do very well. £2,500. 3. Antelope dance headdress (Bambara, Mali). This piece represents one of the three or four important types of Bambara antelope headdress (see accompanying book, figs.  61 and 64). This is an old one, and old examples are becoming scarce. £450. 4. Face mask (Dan, Ivory Coast). We have two Dan masks, and need about two more to illustrate important stylistic variations. We also need some smaller carved objects, like ladles, if we can get them. We ought to have a fair amount of Dan things, since these are very useful in teaching African art. This piece is not expensive. £190.

The four listed items fall squarely within the ‘classical’ canon and the memo clearly shows the central role that publications on African sculpture played in Hutchings’s project. Works of these types still dominate the pages of art publications, reinforcing a Western stereotype that continues to influence popular understanding of African cultures today and gets in the way of our ability to understand African artworks historically and as cultural achievements in their own right. Interestingly, Hutchings did not stick invariably to his stated collecting policy of only acquiring works that he considered to be ‘primitive art’ and made a few anomalous acquisitions that he described as ‘ethnographical specimens’. For example, in a memo of 9 August 1966, titled: ‘A Consignment of Primitive Art Objects from The Continent’, the seventh item reads: Sheep’s skull and cowrie shell dance head-piece. This is a well-documented ethnological piece. Although it is rather expensive, it is well worth getting to support our growing Senufo collection. £105 [1966.218.4, see Plate 31].

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Another exception to his policy of collecting ‘primitive art’ was made in June 1967, with the acquisition of a ‘charm’ from Papua New Guinea. Hutchings’s memo on this item reads: Dugong charm from Saibai(?) I. New Guinea. This is not strictly an object of primitive art, but rather an ethnographical specimen of some rarity which would be an asset in our educational work. £40.

Significantly, a work of ‘primitive art’, for Hutchings at least, was created by promoting it out of the category of ‘ethnographic specimen’. Evidently, however, one consequence of promoting certain categories of ethnographic object to ‘art’ is that others must remain fully in the category of ethnographic specimens. ‘Ethnographic specimens’, it seems, are made with rude objects like skulls, or animal parts, and are useful in teaching one about an exotic anthropology of magic, superstition and the ‘traditional’ dances that are performed in an ‘authentic’, timeless ethnographic present. The promoted works also become more expensive. The process involves a partial denial, or forgetting, of the original associations and significances of the object in order to confer upon it aesthetic values based on a Western view of art that is supposedly universal. On another level, the process draws on modes of classification, valuation and distribution, within a contemporary twentieth-century Western system of commodification. As far as the historical discourses and processes that can be said to have helped determine Hutchings’s acquisitions policy are concerned, the notion of the ‘ethnographic present’ is predominant. As Ames has stated, modes of interpreting ethnographic artefacts have followed changes in anthropological theory, but they have still generally tended to ‘freeze’ the objects, and the people who made and used them, into ‘that mythical anthropological notion of time [or timelessness] called the “ethnographic present” ’ (Ames 1994: 99). Hutchings’s adherence to the ahistorical notion of the ‘ethnographic present’ can be clearly seen to have distorted his reading of the existing African collections at the museum. This is especially shown up in an otherwise undated memo of 1967 in which he writes: One of our objectives in recent years has been to acquire art objects from the Ivory Coast, since the old Liverpool collections contained nothing from this important area.

This comment is significant for the way it promulgates the idea of important art styles and regions, but it suggests that some kind of denial or forgetting is also in evidence here, because although the pre–1964 collections of the Liverpool Museum did not contain any Côte d’Ivoire Dan masks, then considered one of the most ‘famous’ art styles, they did contain three remarkable female figures from Grand Bassam in the less famous Lagoons area of coastal Côte d’Ivoire (8.11.05.23, 10.2.05.43, see Figures 88, 89 & 3.9.06.36, see Plate 32). Another even more significant instance of denial in relation to the existing African collection appears in a memo of 9 August 1966, when Hutchings

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Figure 88 Diviner’s figure or spirit companion figure. Akan (Attie) from Côte d’Ivoire. Presented by A. H. Garburah through Ridyard in 1905. 8.11.05.23.

Figure 89 Diviner’s figure or spirit companion figure. Akan (Ebrie) from Côte d’Ivoire. Presented by J. T. Mensah through Ridyard in 1905. 10.2.05.43.

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made a case for purchasing his only ceramic addition to the museum’s African collection. The memo reads: Pottery effigy (Akan, Ghana). We need at least one of these funerary figures to fill out our small Ghanaian collection. £225. [1966.218.6, see Figure 90]

In fact, the museum’s holdings of objects that originated from the region of present-day Ghana were larger in Hutchings’s time than those from any other African country bar Nigeria. The problem for Hutchings here, it would seem, was that the museum’s existing holdings from Ghana included a large number of ceramic vessels from the Accra and Winneba areas. These could not be accommodated within the ‘primitive art’ category, nor could they be considered ethnographic pieces that ‘authentically’ represented Ghanaian cultures, because, as discussed in Chapter  6, these vessels exhibited a profusion of forms inspired by European vessels like ewers, teapots, barrels and soup tureens (see Chapter 6). This profusion of forms, which illustrated the fashion among coastal elites for displays of refinement and cosmopolitan sophistication, implied a

Figure 90 Funerary ancestor figure in earthenware. Akan from Ghana. Purchased from Gallery 43, London, in 1966. 1966.218.6.

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complex history of trade and exchange that brought cultural influences to the coast of Ghana from Europe, from the Caribbean, from Brazil, and from various African cultures. Although the Ridyard assemblage contains a number of masks and figures that Hutchings would have had no hesitation in admitting to the canon of African art, it also contains a significant number of artefacts, like the ceramic items from Accra, which bear witness to Africans’ interest in European, and other foreign, goods. Such items visibly embody a dynamic history of maritime contact, trade and colonialism, in which reflective, inventive Africans can be seen to have been actively responding to a range of cultural influences. They also bear visual witness to West Africans’ interests in projecting notions of cultural sophistication, modernity and refinement. In this context Hutchings’ acquisitions program, and his acts of forgetting in relation to what he calls the ‘old Liverpool collections’, seem to add up to an attempt to deny early colonial West Africans historical agency of their own. It is surely significant, therefore, that Hutchings should have wished to add a new and, for him, more ‘authentic’-looking, ceramic specimen to the Ghanaian collection. This ‘pottery effigy’, as he called it, seems to have aided his attempt to impose the ‘ethnographic’ paradigm on an otherwise problematic Ghanaian collection, by fitting it out with a new static reference point from which to make his preferred ahistorical reading of the Ghanaian collection. By this sleight of hand, Hutchings reveals that he sought to delegitimize the ‘old Liverpool collections’ in order to resituate a revised, ‘new’, collection within a seemingly less problematic, timeless, domain.

Conclusion The apparent concerns of museum curators at the Liverpool Museum from 1894 to the 1960s, as demonstrated through the collecting, classifying and display programs they instituted, can be starkly juxtaposed with the donation agendas of many of Ridyard’s West African collaborators. In particular, they clash with the expressed concerns of one of Ridyard’s first West African collaborators, namely, Dr Edward Mettle of Accra. As described in Chapter  6, Mettle gave Ridyard his grandfather’s dania, or protective tunic, for the museum in Liverpool in 1900 (24.9.00.55). The tunic is now unfortunately lost, but in the surviving explanatory note that Mettle sent with his donation, he pointed out the tunic’s importance as a ‘link in the great chain of events of the Africans in their past History’. In his note Mettle clearly asserted the personal meanings that his grandfather’s dania held for him, as well as the wider significance the tunic held for the appreciation of a dynamic African history (see Chapter 6). This strongly contrasts with the static aesthetic and ethnic attributes that Hutchings imposed on African items in the Liverpool African collection, as suggested by his program of West African sculpture acquisitions in the 1960s. Mettle’s concern is shown to have been with the idea of historical change, rather than with a timeless ethnographic present, and also with a desire to promote a sense of his own African modernity and sophistication. Mettle wrote his note at a time when many African objects displayed in museums were anonymously classified by ‘tribe’ according to a Western imperialist perception that

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categorized them as ‘fetishes’, ‘idols’, or ‘juju’. But if his note was aimed at countering contemporary pejorative ‘anthropological’ preconceptions about Africa, perhaps typified by Ogg Forbes’s evolutionary displays, it seems equally to prefigure a pertinent critique of Gill’s attempt to reorganize the displays in 1931 and Thomas’s and Hutchings’s respective attempts during the 1930s and 1960s to re-imagine the Liverpool Museum African collection in accordance with the timeless and supposedly universal category of ‘art’. This can clearly be attributed to the fact that while the modes of interpreting ethnographic artefacts have followed changes in anthropological theory, they have generally ‘frozen’ both the objects and the people who made them into what Ames has termed ‘mythical’ notions of time, like the ‘ethnographic present’ (Ames 1994: 99). Moreover, while Western discourses and institutions of art excluded those of anthropology, the two domains have, in Clifford’s words, ‘confirmed each other’ in ‘inventively disputing the right’ of non-Western artefacts to be contextualized and represented. Both discourses, Clifford says: assume a primitive world in need of preservation, redemption and representation. The concrete, inventive existence of tribal [sic] cultures and artists is suppressed in the process of either constituting authentic, ‘traditional’ worlds or appreciating their products in the timeless category of ‘art’. Clifford 1988: 200

While Mettle was clearly concerned with asserting his right to represent his grandfather’s dania in its African contexts of past uses, ownership and historical associations, Ogg Forbes and Thomas were more concerned with attaching meanings to African works in the Liverpool Museum’s collections that derived from the cultural hierarchies and aesthetic codes (see Hodder [1987] 1994: 12) that respectively structured Western ‘anthropological’ discourse and Western notions of art. The aesthetic code that Thomas used in his re-evaluation of African works in the Liverpool Museum collection helped to obscure the historical contexts in which they were acquired (see Kingdon 2008: 33) and was of little value in allowing museum audiences to understand and appreciate African cultures and histories in their own right. But Hutchings’s collecting plan in the early 1960s was especially radical. This was because Hutchings not only appeared blind to the Ga ceramic collection from the Gold Coast, for example, he actually seems to have wanted to deny or eclipse its existence. The pottery in the Ga ceramics collection at Liverpool Museum clearly embodied within their material contours the complex history of Ghana’s Atlantic connections and cosmopolitan cultural influences. They can be said to embody a complex West African history of what some would call ‘transculturation’ (Pratt 1992: 6; Clifford 1997: 201). But for Hutchings, these seem to have been turbulent artefacts that refused to conform, either to the static parameters of an ethnographic present, or to prevalent notions of the authentic ‘primitivist’ cannon of African art, which he sought to project through the acquisition of works from art dealers for a ‘new’ Liverpool African collection. Consciously or not, Hutchings’s implicit subscription to parameters of value rooted partly in a twentieth-century Western system of commodification, not only devalued,

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or demoted, certain items from the ‘old Liverpool collections’, it effectively denied them interpretative and exhibitionary visibility altogether. *

*

*

In 1973 René Bravmann, the historian of African art, comprehensively discredited the supposed cultural insularity and closed ‘tribal’ nature of African societies. He pointed out that African peoples had experienced the rise and fall of expansionist state systems as well as the widespread migrations of populations and cultural influences from distant sources conducted along international trade routes. But Bravmann limited his paradigmatic examples of dynamic cultural influences across supposed boundaries to the inland regions of west-central Ghana and the grasslands of Cameroon (Bravmann 1973: 10). His short work did not consider the complex cosmopolitan dynamics of West African coastal societies, with their transatlantic and trans-imperial maritime links, and his purview was also limited by a strong focus on material objects in themselves. This book takes up a wider perspective than Bravmann’s. It adopts a multifaceted approach to the study of Ridyard’s diverse assemblage of artefacts from coastal western Africa amassed during the early colonial era. While it follows the artefacts’ trajectories of travel through space and time, and across political and cultural zones, this study places considerable emphasis on the ideas, interests and agendas of the people who donated and transported the artefacts to British museums. To paraphrase Clifford, the movement of things, like human travel, is not a ‘supplement’ to life, or a characteristic of particular regions. Instead, it should be seen as part of ‘a complex and pervasive spectrum’ of human activity and experience (Clifford 1997: 3). By the same token, this book attempts to deal with a broad spectrum of human experience across disciplines. While this chapter critiques the ways in which Ridyard’s West African assemblage was interpreted and displayed in museums, the book as a whole is fundamentally concerned with a spectrum of ideas, experiences and practices through which the assemblage was acquired, and it attempts to reconstruct, in a nuanced way, the specific terms on which various elite Africans participated in European collecting projects during West Africa’s early colonial period. An important purpose of this study has been to illuminate the background, agency and interests of Africans who contributed to museum collections in northwest England. However, it does not neglect to explore Ridyard’s own sociocultural background and the points of intersection at which his agendas apparently overlapped with those of his West African contacts. What emerges from this two-sided approach is a comprehensive case study of early colonial collecting as a process of collaboration between individually identified West African donors and a highly mobile European museum collector, with all parties represented, to the extent that sources allow, as complex historical subjects in their own right. While there is no suggestion that the collaborating parties benefited equally, or shared the same aims, evidence is presented which indicates that their collaboration facilitated the creation of new perspectives and identities on both sides. As far back as 1971 a historian like Agbodeka was able to discuss the specific ways in which Africans had influenced the development, trajectory and expression of colonialism in the Gold Coast, and this study demonstrates how elite West Africans can

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be seen to have played somewhat parallel roles in determining the nature of museum ‘ethnography’ collections in British museums during West Africa’s early colonial period. More recently, Cooper and Stoler have suggested that hegemonic colonial projects in Africa were often modified, displaced or failed in their encounter with ‘collaborators’ as much as with ‘resisters’ under the weight of their own contradictions and incoherence (Cooper 1997: 407; Stoler and Cooper 1997: 33). Ethnography museums in Europe have invariably reflected colonial contradictions in the ways in which they have interpreted their collections. Unsurprisingly, perhaps, the sheer volume of West African contributions to the Liverpool Museum provided by Ridyard and his collaborators in the 1890s and early 1900s, soon caused the museum’s interpretive framework to falter and be diverted, as was revealed in the first part of this chapter. However, it took scholars much longer to recognize the incoherence and weakness of the ‘ethnographic museum’s’ ‘historic mandate’ as a site for representing ‘other’ cultures (Harris and O’Hanlon 2013: 8), and it will probably take a while longer still for the purpose and projects of the ‘ethnographic museum’ to be fully modified and revised. If ‘ethnographic museums’ have failed in their ‘historic mandate’ regarding the representation of other cultures, this and other recent studies demonstrate that they can nevertheless become locations for reflection on the creativity and entangled histories engendered by colonial, paracolonial, and other, transglobal, interrelations and negotiations, with all the ‘attendant ambiguities and complexities that this involves’ (Jacobs, Knowles and Wingfield 2015: 21). The Ridyard assemblage is unique among British ‘ethnography’ collections in containing the donations of so many West Africans. It represents a special case of collaborative collecting, not least on account of the unofficial, ‘paracolonial’, means through which it was acquired. However, as a case study that exposes the likely aims and agendas of West Africans who contributed to museum collections in northwest England, the findings presented in this work have implications and relevance to museum collections well beyond those in Liverpool and Manchester. Where research on other collections is concerned, a crucial significance of this study may be to help sensitize researchers to the embodied presence of indigenous agency and interests within ‘ethnographic’ assemblages more generally, and to the ‘complex and pervasive spectrum’ of flows and human experiences through which ‘ethnographic’ assemblages can be understood to have been created.

Notes 1 2 3 4

‘The Museum Ethnographical Section’, Liverpool Daily Post, Thursday, June 20 1895: 3. ‘The Museum Ethnographical Section’, Liverpool Daily Post, Thursday, June 20 1895: 3. ‘Ethnographical Gallery for Liverpool’, Liverpool Mercury, Wednesday, 19 June 1895: 3. ‘Liverpool Museums Extension’, Liverpool Daily Post & Liverpool Mercury, 19 October 1906: 3. See also Allan 1937: 22 and Liverpool Museum Extension 1907: 275. 5 See for example, Tylor 1871. 6 The West African Mail, 12 October 1906: 692.

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7 See Liverpool Museums 1906: 38. Also the Annual Report for 1906 records that ‘The following objects were received from Dr. H.C. Bumpus, Director, American Museum of Natural History, New York, in exchange for duplicate Ethnographical objects, as per minute September 15th, 1905:- Plaster casts from life of heads of American Indians and Philippine Islanders (1.8.06.1–12), Wichita, Sioux, Zuni, Moqui, Apache, and two other North American Indian types, and a Visayan, Tagalo and Igorotes of the Philippines are represented’ (Liverpool Museums 1907: 42). 8 SLWN, 19 July 1913, 29 (46): 14. 9 ‘Presented: . . . Square of silk with designs copied from a native cloth from Jellah Coffee [Dzelu Kofe], West Africa, in the Museums, made and presented by Messrs. Watson Jacques & Co.’ (Liverpool Museums 1911: 21). 10 See Gill 1931b: 108. Gill may also have been Resident of Zaria in the first decade of the nineteenth century, because he authored the Zaria Provincial Annual Report for 1910. 11 For a full account of the influential role that the Hausa ruling class played in the colonial administration of Northern Nigeria, see Ochonu 2014. 12 See the obituary of Trevor Thomas by Robert Stuart in The Independent, published 9 July 1993 (http://www.independent.co.uk/news/people/obituary-trevorthomas-1483804.html, accessed 20 February 2017). 13 Anonymous report on an address by Trevor Thomas titled ‘The Approach to African Art’, in West Africa magazine, 28 March 1936: 410. 14 Writing originally in 1938 Goldwater stated that: ‘Museums of art . . . have begun to widen their aesthetic horizons to include works from primitive cultures around the globe . . . Moreover, museums concentrating on the primitive arts have been founded in Zurich, New York, and Paris. Thus the artistic creations of the primitive cultures have entered fully into the world history of art, to be, like those of any other cultures, understood and appreciated on their own merits’ (Goldwater [1938] 1986: 13). 15 See Larson (2009) for a study of the history of the Wellcome collection. 16 Personal communication with Richard Hutchings, October 2007. 17 Mrs Goldman is mentioned as bidding on the Liverpool Museum’s behalf in an undated memo concerning a Sotheby’s sale of 9 May 1966.

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Epilogue The exhibitionary career of the Ridyard assemblage continues, at the time of writing, primarily in the World Cultures Gallery at National Museums Liverpool’s World Museum in William Brown Street. The gallery’s Africa section, which I curated, displays a contingent of about 600 West and Central African works from the museum’s collection, of which about half were selected from the Ridyard assemblage. The World Cultures Gallery opened in April 2005 as part of the renovated and renamed World Museum. The renovation was one section of a major redevelopment project for National Museums Liverpool funded by a large Heritage Lottery Fund grant awarded in 1998, and additional resources provided through an Objective 1 grant from the European Regional Development Fund. The relevance of enhanced museums for the development of tourism and wider strategies for urban regeneration were major factors behind the granting of these awards. But the national and international significance of Liverpool’s ‘ethnographic’ collections and the need to bring a greater proportion of them out of storage, in order to make them more accessible for public benefits, were also important factors. The World Cultures Africa displays at World Museum were broadly designed so that visitors are able to follow the Elder, Dempster and Co. shipping route through the space, taking in vitrines displaying works from former colonial territories, beginning with the Sierra Leone vitrine at one end and concluding with one for the Lower Congo region at the other end. In developing the displays, I particularly wanted to put named Africans into the narrative and explore their role and agency, ‘not only in creating the Liverpool collections, but also in allowing us to understand them’ (Kingdon 2008: 35). I was therefore fortunate to have been introduced to Susan Goligher in the early stages of the gallery-development project. Goligher is a Merseyside resident with Ghanaian connections. Her maiden name was Renner and it turned out that her great-greatgrandfather was brother to the museum donor Peter Awoonor Renner, so I invited her to help me curate a display of Akan brass utensils for the Ghana section of the gallery, which included items donated by Awoonor Renner (see Chapter 7). This collaboration helped to bring Goligher into closer touch with her ancestral relative, while also emphasizing Liverpool’s ongoing human interconnections with West Africa. Descendants of other African contributors to the Liverpool collections have found their way to the World Museum in recent years. In seeking to draw closer to their ancestors, they are often keen physically to touch the artefacts, while also being touched emotionally by the artefacts that their ancestors acquired for the institution more than a century ago.1 The museum’s World Cultures displays are now frayed, outdated and in need of renovation, but the objects exhibited within this faulty framework, along with counterparts that remain in storage, continue to travel through time and occasionally

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through space, enmeshed in human interactions. As ‘nexi for their ongoing relations with people’, they attract donors’ descendants and researchers, among others, ‘accumulating histories, involving themselves in academic debates and developing artistic traditions’ (Henare 2005: 9, 48). Objects in the Ridyard assemblage have been reproduced photographically and so become virtual nexi, as their images are added to the museum website and as they proliferate in other forms. For example, while undertaking field research for this book in Ghana and Sierra Leone in 2009 and 2010, I carried digital and print copies of artefacts from the assemblage with me. The images served as part of a ‘visual repatriation’ exercise and were handed over to be lodged in the family archives of living descendants of original donors who had given Ridyard artefacts for the museum in the early twentieth century. The images were effective in eliciting discussion with descendants and constituted a principal part of my collaborative research methodology (see Chapter 1). As a consequence of the exercise, artefacts from the Ridyard assemblage that I distributed in pictorial form have since gained enhanced roles as virtual nexi within descendants’ family networks in Ghana and Sierra Leone. Biakpa is an eastern Ghanaian town in Avatime State, which lies in the country’s Volta Region. Early one morning in July 1996, Biakpa’s paramount chief (Okusie) Takyi IX gathered his clansmen and kinsmen together to relate the narratives of nineteenthcentury wars and the origins of the various local chieftaincies. A stool was brought before the gathering to serve as a public mnemonic for the historical narratives that reinforced the precedents of each chieftaincy. Among the people gathered attentively before the paramount chief in Biakpa town that morning was the Ghanaian artist Atta Kwami. Eighteen years later, in the summer of 2014, Kwami was on a sketching expedition in Liverpool, when he experienced a vivid recollection of some of the historical narratives he had heard Takyi IX recite at the dawn gathering in Biakpa town in July 1996. Kwami’s vivid memories were triggered while he was sketching stools from Ghana on exhibit in the World Cultures Gallery of Liverpool’s World Museum. Kwami’s trip to Liverpool was initiated one day in the Spring of 2014, when he contacted me after a visit to the Africa displays in the museum’s World Cultures Gallery. He had been particularly excited by the works from Ghana that he had seen there and wanted to make drawings of them for a series of prints. I was excited by his proposal and by the prospect of being able to exhibit his finished prints in the gallery, so I invited him to visit the museum stores as well. Kwami immediately took to the idea of getting to see the numerous African artefacts stored behind the scenes and returned to Liverpool a few months later. In the end, he spent three days sketching African works in the collection store and in the World Cultures Gallery. Kwami chose lino printing as the method for creating the prints that resulted from his Liverpool sketches, because it allowed him to produce images that resonated with his paintings. His technique with each print involved cutting several blocks of lino into specific shapes, which he inked with different colours. These were then placed in a special arrangement to make a colourful base print. Once the base print was dry he then printed further blocks on top, cut from his sketches of the museum objects, in

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arrangements that revealed the base colours in some areas, but which overprinted the underlying colours in other areas. Before he even began work on his lino prints, Kwami decided to call the series Prints in Counterpoint.Counterpoint is a musical term that refers to the simultaneous sound of two or more independent melodies added above or below a given musical phrase. Kwami’s prints can be viewed as representing a kind of visual counterpoint in their rhythmic under- and over-layering of colour blocks and also in the improvised re-framings, reworkings and juxtapositions of the sketched objects that they present. One of Kwami’s aims, with this series, was to enable viewers to see and appreciate objects in the museum’s Africa collection in intriguing new ways. In ways that can’t be codified and that make the objects ‘resonate’, he said, ‘with hidden energies embodied in their original making and usage’. Kwami was most aware of these ‘resonances’ himself when sketching two Ghanaian stools in the World Cultures Gallery at World Museum, which appear in print number 8. These were the stools that had brought back his vivid memories of the narratives recited by Togbe Takyi IX at the dawn gathering he had attended in Biakpa town back in July 1996. So when he came to make his Counterpoint 8 print, Kwami was inspired to include a line portrait of Togbe Takyi IX remembered from that morning gathering (LIV.2015.51.8, see Plate 33). Kwami positioned this portrait above his images of the museum’s stools on a lino block that he overprinted on the right-hand side of the print. On the left-hand side of the base print, Kwami overprinted a block in pale yellow ink in which he had cut another series of drawings of Ghanaian stools that he had sketched elsewhere. The stools depicted on this yellow block are hard to distinguish and contribute to the print’s seemingly subtle evocation of the missing individual narratives, memories and titles that would have attached to the stools in their original Ghanaian context, before they were acquired by a museum. During his three-day sketching trip in Liverpool in 2014, Kwami was particularly interested in items from Ghana, especially those that had been given to the museum by the Gold Coast donors in the early twentieth century, and focused much of his visual research on these. His Counterpoint 3 print includes designs based on his sketches of brass gold weights and gold dust currency storage boxes made by Asante brass casters in the nineteenth century using the lost wax process (LIV.2015.51.3, see Plate 34). The process, still used in Ghana today, involves covering a wax original with clay, which is then heated to burn out the wax. The resulting empty mould is then filled with molten brass to create a metal cast of the wax original. In Counterpoint 3, Kwami overprinted boxed, disk-shaped, weight images within a confining grid. These sun-like disks, with their various radiating patterns, glow yellow and red within their mould-like boxes, as if to suggest the heat and energies involved in their original making. Like the other prints in Kwami’s Counterpoint series, this one can be understood to embody poetic and schematic evocations of memory, place and experience. In referencing African works in the World Museum collection, they help to activate the latent power of the museum artefacts to inspire curiosity, imagination and debate. As well as being vibrant and aesthetically important contemporary art works in themselves, the prints provide stimulating new ways of seeing, engaging with, thinking about and understanding works in World Museum’s African collection. In so doing, they complement the

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research on the museum’s African collection presented in this book and, in their own visually exciting way, add new meaning and cultural relevance to it. A set of Kwami’s Liverpool Counterpoint prints was purchased for the World Museum in 2015 with the assistance of the National Art Fund and they hang, at the time of writing, in the introductory area to the Africa displays in the World Cultures Gallery. But this is not the end of the story where the Ridyard assemblage is concerned. The assemblage as a whole, with its constituent and related artworks, will continue to travel through time, within, as well as outside, the ‘contact zone’ (Clifford 1997: 211) of the museum, gathering further histories, interpretations, and creative responses, and extending the networks of human and material relationships in which it is embedded.

Notes 1 See: https://blog.liverpoolmuseums.org.uk/2014/06/reconnecting-with-the-ancestorsat-worldmuseum/ (accessed 22 June 2017).

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Index Page numbers in italics refer to figures. Ababio IV, ‘King’ 148, 149, 151–65, 168–9, 190 Abeokuta, Nigeria 77–8 ‘aboriginal institutions’ 227 Aborigines’ Rights Protection Society (ARPS ) 200, 223–6, 228, 231–2, 234 Accra, Gold Coast ceramic artefacts 271 Ga affiliations 208, 210 ‘kings’ of 159–65 Mettle family at 182 photography 204–5 Reindorf at 239 Western Plains potters 165–73 Acquah II , ‘King’ 148, 156–9 acquisitiveness 54–7 Adansi ship 110 Addah ship 46–7, 111–12 Addaquay, Thomas 228, 232 aesthetic considerations 63–4, 136, 258, 260, 266 African Steamship Company 39, 43, 79–80, 82–3 Aga, Selim 18–22, 27 air-breathing catfish 183 Akan people 157–8, 187, 189, 190–3 see also Fante people Akan-style swords 204, 204, 220, 221, 243n.7 Akrampa asafo 233 Aku traders see Oku traders akutso disputes 161 Akwashontse office 174–6 Alata quarter, James Town 160, 162, 164–5, 169, 173, 208 Alenso, Niger River 81–2 altarpieces 26–7, 29 American Colonization Society 20

American Museum of Natural History (AMNH ) 254, 275n.7 Amonu IV, ‘King’ 222 Amonu V, ‘King’ 148, 151–9, 204 Amonu, Kwamin Atta 63 ancestor figures 270 ancestral houses, Krio 117 Anglican church 84, 209, 212, 243n.16 animal exhibits 45, 52 Anlo Ewe community 64, 147–8 anthropology 141, 272 anti-slavery movement 16, 18 apprentice system 76–7, 84 ‘archaeological sensibility’ 6 architecture, Freetown 118–24, 126–7 archival material 7 ARPS see Aborigines’ Rights Protection Society artists, Paris 265–6 asafo companies 199–200, 233 Asante culture 190–1, 206, 259 Asante swords 204–5, 204 Asere hierarchy, Ga State 176–7 ‘assemblage’ concept 6 asusu associations 113n.4 ‘Atlantic’ cities 75–6 ‘authenticity’ of artefacts 46, 66–7, 207, 255, 271 Gold Coast ‘kings’ 151–2, 160 ‘authored statements’ 151 Awoonor Renner, Peter 63, 147, 230–1, 231, 234–7, 239, 242, 277 awujoh ceremonies 103 Ayirebi dynasty 157 Badagry town 77–8 Baikie, William 16, 18 Bannerman, Charles James 230–7, 239 basketry 91–2, 111, 173, 174

295

296 Baudelaire, Charles 125 Baule objects 264–5 Benin Kingdom 27–8, 29–30 Bennett, Richard 50 Bennett, Tony 249–50 Biakpa, Ghana 278–9 Bibini III , Mantse 159 bilongo material 32–3 ‘Black Atlantic’ concept 75–6 Blama town 130–1, 132 Blyden, Edward Wilmot 136 boat, travel by 78–9 see also ships/shipping Bolton Museum 50, 55 Bonny, Niger Delta 14 Bonso-Bruce, M.G. 232, 234–5 boots, models of 166, 168, 170 botijo-style water vessels 170, 170 bottles 212, 239 Bourne, Fox 223–4 bowls, European-style 166, 167 brass gold weights see gold weights Bravmann, René A. 3, 264, 273 British Empire ‘civilization’ 85 Muslim donors 112 shipping 78 British and Foreign Bible Society 178 British ideology 15–16 British monarchy 102 brokering activities 179–80, 191 ‘bronze’ artefacts 163 Brown, Joseph Peter 200, 230–7, 240, 241 Buckle, H. 134–5 Bullen, Frank Thomas 58 Bumpus, H.C. 50 Burton, Richard 18, 20, 27 bush animals 177–8 Buxton Memorial Methodist Church 128–9, 129 canoe and paddle accession 24–5, 78–9, 82 Cape Coast donors from 234 educational institutions 232 capitalism 78–85 Carnatic Hall, Liverpool 261

Index cartridge belt gift 176, 177 carved wooden figures 96–101, 104 catfish specimens 52–3, 58, 183 ‘Caucasian’ section, Liverpool Museum 248 ceramic vessels 164–5, 210, 214, 219, 233–4, 271–2 ceremonial staff artefact 131, 132, 135–6 ceremonial swords 204, 206, 206 ceremonial use kola nut 107 pots 170 Chadwick Museum see Bolton Museum charitable works 238 Chief ’s spokesman’s staff 188 Chinery, Arthur Robert 200, 206–20, 215, 217 Chinery, Fanny Virginia 200, 214, 215, 217, 219 Chinery, Maude 212–13 Chinery, Roger Casement 219, 244n.35–6 Chinery family photographs 216, 218 Christianity African culture 85 Ga interaction 213 Krio people 84–5, 112 Muslim conversion to 106 Oku Yoruba people 77 salvation 128 steam revolution and 80, 83 see also Methodism Church Mission Society (CMS ) 16, 18, 77–8, 84–5 cigarette case acquisition 140, 140 city life, ‘flâneurie’ 125, 127 ‘city-states’ 15 ‘civic vision’, Liverpool Museum 250–1 ‘civilization’ British Empire 85 clothing 102–3 Gold Coast donors 205, 209 Krio people 124, 129–30 as performance 242 steam revolution 80 Clare, Arthur 32, 33–5 ‘classical style’, African sculpture 266–7 classification regimes 247–75 Cleland, George Frank 208, 212–13

Index Clerk, Alexander Worthy 214–15, 219 Clerk, Nicholas Timothy 219 Clifford, James 5–6 clothing office holders 180 wooden figure donations 96–7, 97–101, 102–3 Clubb, Joseph 50, 54–5, 254–5 CMS see Church Mission Society cocoa plantations 203 coil baskets 91–2, 111 Cole, Herbert M. 189 Cole, J.B.S. 107, 111 Cole, Roland 130, 147 collaborative collecting 274 ‘colonial contradictions’ 124 combs, artefacts 91, 139 commission houses 80 commodification of objects 30–1 Company of African Merchants Limited 144n.15 competition, palm oil trade 82–3 Concessions Act 224 concessions industry 224–5 ‘confiscations’, Kongo works 34 Congo Free State 67–9, 178–9 connoisseurial concerns 265–6 ‘conserved’ Africans 257 contact perspective 6 Cooke, Lynne 262 cooking pots 139 coolers 155–6, 170, 171, 210–11, 211–12 cosmopolitan donors 199–245 Côte d’Ivoire, sculpture 268, 269 cotton production 60, 135 Counterpoint prints 279–80 ‘country cloth’ 115n.30 craftsmen 256 ‘Creoles’ 108 Cross River palm oil trade 14 Crossland, Leonard 211 Crown Lands Bill 224 Crowther, Dandeson Coates 62, 77, 85, 86, 87, 90, 115n.28–9 Crowther, Samuel Ajayi 16–17, 18, 77 Crowther, Sarah 86, 88 cultural achievements, Krio 136 cultural artefacts, Krio diaspora 85–95, 113

297

cultural assimilation, ‘Liberated Africans’ 142–3 cultural capital 251 cultural hierarchy 65–7 cups, donations 151, 153, 172 customary law, Fante 225 customs officers 208–9 ‘cut-neck’ segments 141 Daama village, Accra 163 ‘dandies’ 124, 125, 127 dania tunic 185, 271–2 Dayspring expedition 18–19, 36 dealer–collectors 266 decanters 170, 171 Deigh, Abraham 129 Dennett, Richard 33 Derby Museum 17, 18–19, 21–2, 250 diasporas Krio people 143 Sierra Leone 75–115 display 173, 185, 247–75 diviner’s figures 30–1, 269 Dodoo Dodoo, Emmanuel Nii 159, 163 double-spouted vessels 155, 156, 170, 170 drums 151, 152, 155, 194n.6, 207 Duala chiefs 203 duiker motif 159–60, 163, 189 ‘duplicates’ term 261 During, George Punshon 137, 138 earthenware 154–5, 154–5, 233, 270 Accra 163, 163, 164, 166–8, 172 Euro-Ga 210–12, 210, 218 Mettle’s collection 185–6, 186, 187 mobile elites 238–9, 239 economic development 256 economic independence, women 104 Edo Kingdom 27, 29–30 education Cape Coast institutions 232 Chinery’s 214 Muslim Africans 106 public museums 62 Renner’s sons 237 Sarbah’s 221–3, 229–30, 240 Effutu stool 157–9 Ekonda swords 206

298 Elder, Dempster & Co. cotton production 135 kola nut trade 110 Ridyard and 42–3, 44, 45–7, 60, 67, 252 electric catfish specimens 52–3, 58 elephant and duiker motif 159–60, 163, 189 elevated houses 123–4 elite Gold Coast lineages 147, 178, 192–3, 199–200, 203 Euro-Ga professionals 210, 212–13 mobile elites 237–40 pottery donations 169–70, 172–3 elite Krio 124–36, 143–4 engineering career, Ridyard 43, 45 English education, Muslims 106 entrepreneurialism 82 Entwistle, Peter 50, 53, 55, 254 Ephraim, Duke 14 Eshira artefacts 25 ‘ethnographic authenticity’ 66–7, 207 ‘ethnographic present’ notion 268, 272 Ethnographical Gallery, Liverpool Museum 247–51 ‘ethnographical specimens’ 267–8 ‘ethnology’ 4 Euro-African families 199–200, 202, 219 Euro-Ga professionals 206–20 ‘European’ characteristics, exhibiting 249 European-style clothing 102–3 European-style pottery 166, 167–9, 170, 172–3, 172, 211, 211 evolutionary theory 52–3, 249–50 Ewe collectors 147–8 Ewe looms 64 ewers 166, 169, 172 exchange systems 48 exclusionary practices, Muslims 105–12 exhibiting order, Liverpool Museum 248–55 Fagg, William 263–6 Fante customary law 225–7 Fante people/lineages 147–8, 200, 213, 222–3, 225–7, 230 see also Akan people Fanti Customary Laws (Sarbah) 225, 228

Index Fanti National Constitution (Sarbah) 225–8 Fanti Public Schools 229–30 Fékuw establishment 223–5 ‘fetishes’/‘fetishism’ 26, 30, 34–5, 183–5, 251 fish collections 52–3, 58, 63 fish symbols 159–60 ‘flâneurie’ 9, 124–7, 134, 135–6 food preparation 212–13 food vessels 166–7 Forbes, Henry Ogg 50, 52–3, 66, 202, 248–52, 254 Fourah Bay kola nut trade 107–8 Freetown city architecture 118–24, 126–7 ‘Atlantic’ concept 75–6 Hotobah During’s career 141 houses of donors 117–24, 118–19, 122 kola nut trade 108 Krio orientation 89, 91, 94, 140 ‘upbuilding’ 128–36 funding education 229 War Damage Fund 262–3 World Cultures Gallery 277 funerary ancestor figures 270 furnishings 90, 118 Fyfe, Christopher 122 Ga artefacts 170–5, 177, 184–6, 189–91, 272 Ga language 178 Ga lineages Euro-African families 200 Euro-Ga professionals 206–20 Gold Coast 147–8, 160 Ga state, Gold Coast 159, 163–4, 180, 183, 192–3 Gabriel, Charles Hutchinson 134 The Gambia 107–8, 109 Garber, Adejatoo 106 ‘Garden House’, James Town 211 Gatty, Charles 23–4 generosity 54–7, 134 Ghana archival material 7 Bravmann’s work on 273

Index Liverpool Museum artefacts 270–1, 277–9 see also Gold Coast Ghartey IV, ‘King’ 157–9 Ghartey family 157, 245n.62 Gibson family house, Freetown 118 Gill, J. Withers 255–8 Gillen, Adolphus Markie 111 Gillen, Mary Anne Marie 111 Gilroy, Paul 75–6 Glover, John Hawley 18–19 Gold Coast ARPS 200, 223–6, 228, 231–2, 234 donors from 147–97, 199–245 office holders 9, 147–8, 151, 169, 173, 180, 191–4, 199 gold dust measuring sets 235, 235 gold dust storage boxes 259 gold weights 220, 221, 225–6, 228, 234–5, 235, 259 Goldman, Philip 263 Goligher, Susan 277 gourds 65, 130 Guggisberg, F.G. 208 Guthrie, William 16–17, 21–2 Hall, John and Mary 219 Hansen, John William 211 Harrison, Herbert Spenser 141, 145n.28 Harrison, J.G.C. 25–6 Harrison, Rodney 6 Harty, C.W. 111 ‘harvest festivals’ 211, 213 hats, Hausa 175 Hatton & Cookson traders 36 Hausa-made acquisitions 173–4, 175, 177, 195n.34 Hausa people 20–1, 176, 256 Hazeley, Jacob C. 20–1 head sculptures 126, 127 healing powers, Mettle 182 health regimes 59–60 Hempton, David 41, 56 hen motif 154–7, 155, 170–1 Henderson, W.L. 111 herbal medicines 92–4, 182–3 Hesse, Paulina 219 hippopotamus tooth artefact 65, 68, 109

299

historical works, Sibthorpe 122–3 Hodgson, Governor 205 Homowo festival 211, 213–14 Hotobah During, Claudius Dyonisius 63, 86, 89–91, 127–8, 135, 137–42, 138 household item donations 90–1 houses During’s 137 Krio 124–5 Sierra Leone 117–24, 118–19, 122 ‘upbuilding’ 130 Hoyle, William Evans 39, 59, 254 Hutchings, Richard 262–9, 272 Hutchinson, Charles Francis 207–8, 238 Hutchinson, Thomas Joseph 16, 17 iconoclastic looting 26–7, 29 identity, Sierra Leone 117–45 indigenous office holders 9, 147–8, 169, 191–2 see also office holders indigenous use, artefacts 31 indirect rule system 152, 169, 191–2 initiation associations 93, 104, 135 intermarriage, Euro-African families 199 Islamic affiliations see Muslims Itsekiri towns, Niger Delta 94, 95 James, C.L.R. 145n.31 James Town Alata quarter 160, 164, 208 Chinery family 212–13, 218 ‘Garden House’ 211 mantse elections 161–2 see also Nleshi Jenkins, Ray 240 Jobe, Mohammed Daniel 85 Johnson, Joseph 75 Johnson, W.E. 86, 95–105 Jones, Alfred 60, 252 Joyce, T.A. 141 jugs 166, 168, 187 Katamanso battle 195n.29 ‘kings’ of the Gold Coast 147–97 king’s messenger swords 220–1, 225–8, 230

300 Kingsley, Mary 43, 45, 227 Kinka community 161–2, 164, 190 knot motifs 189 ‘knowledge-gathering’ activities 17–18, 22, 31, 36 Kojo, Kwatei 174–5 Kojo, Wetse 161 kola nut trade 106–12 Kole (Koole) goddess 184 Kongo artefacts 31–5, 46, 53, 64 kosebii identity 172, 177–8 Kozo figures 31–5 Kpakpatsewe lineage 174 Krio people 51 British Empire 85 Christianity 84–5 ‘civilization’ 102–3 cultural appropriations 144 diasporic culture 85–95, 113, 143 ‘disillusionment’ era 83 Euro-African families 219 in Freetown 117, 140 male elites 124–8 Muslims 112 self-orientation 118–24, 142 traders 8–9, 83–4, 104 ‘upbuilding’ 128–36 women traders 83–4 Kru people 46, 57–8 Kuofie, James 63, 200 Kwami, Atta 278–80 Kwawu, Gold Coast 189–91 labour issues, progress 67 labour recruitment 178–9 ladles 109, 109, 173, 175, 177, 186 Lagos town 79, 103, 107, 139 Laird, Macgregor 16, 18, 79–80 Lamptey, Chief 164, 165 Lands Bill 224–6 leatherwork acquisitions 140, 140, 173–4, 175, 220 legal practices 223–5, 237 legal status, ‘Liberated Africans’ 104 Leopold II , King 67–8 ‘Liberated Africans’ apprentice system 76–7, 84 cultural assimilation 142–3

Index grading system 119–20, 123, 144n.2 legal status 104 medical practices 93–4 Muslim donors 105–6 Yoruba origin 113n.3 lidded water vessels 170, 171, 172, 210, 214, 238–9 ‘linguist staffs’ 189 ‘linguisters’, trading firms 25 ‘linguists’ 186–7 lino printing 278–9 literary clubs 239–40 Liverpool (Municipal/World) Museum 1, 2, 10–38, 47, 58 erosion/occlusion of collections 260–71 exhibiting order 248–55 Gold Coast donors 151, 162, 165, 193, 203–4, 226, 230–1 Hotobah During’s donations 141 plans of extension 253 re-evaluating collections 255–60 rearranging collections 255–60 Renner’s gifts 79–81 Ridyard assemblage 247–75, 277–80 Sierra Leone links 85–6 ‘upbuilding’ 130 Liverpool port function 21 palm oil trade 82 ‘Liverpool Sect’ 162, 192 looms 61, 64 looting 26–7, 29–30 lost wax casting process, prints 279 lungfish specimens 52 Lutterodt, Frederick 200–5, 201, 243n.4, 243n.8 Lutterodt, Georg August 202 magazines 48, 214, 228 Malamah House, Freetown 121, 122, 126–7, 127 male elites, Krio 124–8 male figures, donated 96–7, 97–101, 102–3 ‘Mandingo’ artefacts 89, 140 Mandinka names 108 Mangaaka figure 31–5, 46, 63–4 mantsemei 160–2, 164–5, 190–1

Index maritime career, Ridyard 42–54 Maroons 120 marriage systems 104, 105 masks 63, 131, 133, 135, 141 ‘masquerade’ concept 75 Matam, Senegal 109 Matisse, Henri 265 Maxwell, William Edward 224 Mayer, Joseph 21–6 Mayer Museum, Liverpool 24, 250 meaning, museum regimes 247–75 medical practices 92–5, 182–3 medicinal roots 58–9, 92–5 memorial plaques 128–9, 129 ‘Melanian’ section, Liverpool Museum 248, 251–2 Mende people 135–6, 141 Mende towns 130–1, 132–3, 133, 142 mercantile donors 121, 199–200 ‘meshworks’ concept 6 messenger swords 220–1, 225–8, 230 Methodism Brown 232 Gold Coast elites 199 ‘Liberated Africans’ 84 Ridyard 6, 8, 39–42, 56–7, 61–3, 69, 178, 192 Sarbah 221–2, 228–9 Williams family 134 Methodist churches, Freetown 120, 121, 128–9, 129 Mettle, Edward Joseph 148, 180–91, 181, 193, 196n.42, 271–2 Mfantsi Amanbuhu Fékuw society 223, 225 Mfantsi National Education Fund 229 military institutions 176–7 miniature models 97, 101, 166, 168, 170 minkisi figures 31–5, 53 see also nski figures missionaries Krio independence 84 Niger expedition 16, 18 Ridyard’s collaborators 90 missionary society schools 141 mobility collectors 22, 237–40 Sierra Leoneans 89, 94 ‘modernism’ 66, 258, 260

301

modernity clothing 102 notions of 61 as performance 242 in ‘primitive’ frame 142 modernization, photography 204 ‘Mongolian’ section, Liverpool Museum 248 monopolistic companies, slave trade 81 Morel, Edmund 68–9, 152–4, 162 ‘Moslem’ cultures 256 moth, donation of 233–4 mudskippers 45, 52–3 Mullen, Ben 31, 33, 39, 47–8, 50, 54–8, 63–6 multistorey houses 121–2 museum collections creation 4–5 as ‘meshworks’ 6 musicians 214, 230 Muslims 105–12, 177 National Museums Liverpool 277 ‘native agency’ 81–2 natural history specimens 89–90, 147, 183 newspapers 228 Niger Delta Chinery’s work 207 Itsekiri towns 94, 95 palm oil trade 14 trading posts 18 Niger expeditions 15–21, 36 Niger River, Alenso village 81–2 Niger ship 43, 45 Nigeria Hausa identity 256 women donors 103 Yoruba speakers 77–8 Nleshi, Accra 173, 190 see also James Town nomadic Africans 256–7 Nonconformism 61, 228–9 see also Methodism Northern Nigeria, Hausa 256 nski figures 46, 63–4 see also minkisi figures nut trade see kola nut trade

302

Index

Oba Ovonramwen 27, 28 Obas 27, 29 ‘objectivity’, evolutionary theory 250 Oblogo village, Accra 164–6, 169, 172–3 Ocloo, James 148, 154 Odulate, Thomas Ona 101 Odwira ceremony 165 office holders, Gold Coast 147–8, 151, 153, 169, 173, 180, 191–4, 199 see also indigenous office holders ‘official’ cadre, collectors 4 Ojokutu-Macaulay, J.T. 126 okiaja windows 125 Oku, Kofi 169 Oku traders 77–8, 103, 107–8, 113n.3 okyeame poma gift 187, 189–90 omanhene, Gold Coast 151–2, 157–8 oshe Shango staff 235–7 Owens College 58–9, 61, 73n.49 Oyo Yoruba people 77 ‘Pagan’ cultures 256 palm leaf baskets 173 palm oil trade 12–14, 17, 21, 79–83 palm wine cup gift 151, 153 Pan-African Association Conference 240, 241 panorama perspective 69–70, 123, 143 Paris, artists in 265–6 patriarchal family ideal 104 patriotism 228, 230–7 peanut growing 107 Perai, The Gambia 109 performance concept 242 photography 48, 50, 51, 179, 200–5, 278 Picasso, Pablo 265 pier glasses 125 Pilot, Thomas 144n.19 Plange, Janet Nyanchi 182 plants see medicinal roots Pleiad expedition 16–18 policeman-like figures 96–7 political interests Ababio IV 159–62 Cape Coast donors 234 Mettle 183 Sarbah 223 political power, ‘trust’ system 15

portrait figures, Sierra Leone 96, 96, 101–3, 105 portrait photographs see photography Portuguese colonialism 33–5 pots, donated 94, 95, 139 potters/pottery 53, 165–73, 254–5 see also ceramic vessels powder flask gift 176 Prempeh I, ‘King’ 205 Prempeh II , ‘King’ 196n.60 ‘primitive art’ aesthetic qualities 258 avant-garde artists 266 exhibiting order 255 Ghana 270 Hutchings’s views 262–3 modernist values 260 as museum speciality 275n.14 Ratton’s collection 267 ‘primitive’ frame, modernity 142 progress concept 60–1, 67, 80–1, 102 property-based rating system 123, 144n.2 public museums, benefits 61–2 ‘punitive expeditions’ 27, 29 Quartey-Papafio, A.B. 213 Quartey-Papafio, Chief William 175, 177 Quartey-Papafio, Emmanuel William 148, 173–80 Queen Victoria portrait figure 96, 96, 101–3, 105 Queen Victoria ship 77 racial grouping system 248–9 racism, Gold Coast society 213 RAI see Royal Anthropological Institute railways, Sierra Leone 114n.25 Ramaz, W.A.G. 58 Ratton, Charles 266–7 ‘recaptives’ 76, 103 reciprocity 159 refinement attributes 209–10 regional trajectories, Muslim donors 105–12 Reindorf, Christian Josiah 237–40, 241 religious diversity, Krio 92–3 religious role, Obas 27 religious salvation 128–9

Index ‘removal’ concept 3 Renner, J.C. 236 Renner, Melchior 79 Renner, Phyllis 237 Renner, W.R. 8, 24, 78–85 Renner ship 81, 83 ‘replacement’ collections 261–2 representation regimes 247–75 Revolutionary United Front (RUF ) 117 Ridyard, Amelia 41–2 Ridyard, Arnold 1–2, 6–10, 30–4, 39–73, 40 Brown and 234 Chinery and 207, 214, 220 dissenting interests 57–9 Gold Coast links 147, 151, 156, 165–6, 173, 178–80, 182–3, 191–4, 231–2 Liverpool Museum assemblage 247–75, 277–80 Lutterodt and 201–3 Renner and 237 Sarbah and 228–30 Sierra Leone links 85–6, 90, 92–3, 95–6, 109, 111–12 trans-imperial identities 131, 134–5, 137 Winneba’s social club 238–9 Ridyard, Mary 42, 63 Ridyard, William 41–2 ritual figures 30 rituals, Asante 205 Robertson, George Acquah 157 root samples 58–9, 92–5 Rosenior, C. DeGraft 134–5 Ross, Doran H. 189 Roth, Felix 29–30 Roth, Henry Ling 29 Royal Anthropological Institute (RAI ) 141 RUF see Revolutionary United Front rural dependency, urban patrons 172 rustic kosebii identity 177–8 St John’s Maroon Methodist Church 120, 121 Salford Museum 55, 61, 66–7, 69, 73n.59, 165 salvation 128–9

303

Sande society masks 131, 133, 135, 141 sanitary engineering 59, 123 sankofa bird myth 158 Sapi-Portugese artefacts 22, 23–4, 23 Sarbah, John Mensah 9–10, 49, 200, 220–30, 222, 232, 240, 242 Sarbah, John Sr 200, 221–3, 232 Saro merchants 78, 85, 102–3 Saunders, O. 47 Savage, Abubakar 86, 108–10 Savage, Mohammed Muyu Deen 85–6, 108–9, 119, 121 ‘sceptre’ acquisition 186–7 science institutions 141–2 ‘scramble’ for Africa 26, 27, 84 sculptors, commodification by 30–1 Second World War 261 segregation see social segregation self-orientation, Krio 118–24, 142 Sempe mantse 161 Senegal, kola nut trade 107–9 Shango staff gift 235–7, 236 Shanu, Hezekiah Andrew 68, 73n.64, 114n.26, 179, 196n.41 Sharp, Granville 75, 76 Sherbro Island combs 91, 91 ships/shipping 75, 78–9 see also steam shipping shrine figures 183–4 shrines, looting 26–7, 29 shuku(bly) baskets 91–2 Sibthorpe, A.B.C. 118–20, 122–3, 125, 144n.2 Sierra Leone archival material 7 donors from 71n.10, 75–115, 117–45, 147 Krio traders 8–9 photography 50 progress narrative 60 Yoruba-speaking people 236–7 sieves, Ga ware 173, 174 slave ownership system 169, 213 slave trade 11–15, 19, 36, 76, 81 see also anti-slavery movement snake motif 173, 175, 177 social clubs 237–40 social distinctions, Krio 124

304

Index Tackie Tawiah II , Mantse 196n.60 technical schools 141 Teigo Tackie, Niibi Nii 160, 180 terracotta coolers 211, 211 Thomas, John Henry 121, 126 Thomas, Nicholas 5–6, 272 Thomas, Trevor 258, 260 Thurburn, Robert 19–20 Tivaouane, Senegal 109 Tobin, James Aspinall 12–13, 14, 17 Tobin, John 13–14 Tobin, Thomas 12, 13–14 trade and empire 26–35 tradesmen 120, 123 trading firms 25, 79–80 trading posts, Niger Delta 18 ‘traditionalists’ 173–80, 192 trans-imperial identities, Sierra Leone 117–45 Transatlantic Slavery gallery, Liverpool Museum 12 transportation of artefacts 45, 110, 261 transportation technologies 134 ‘tribal’ groups 264 ‘trust’ system 14, 15, 17–18 tureens 166, 167, 185–6, 186, 238 Tythacott, Louise 249–50

‘social imperialism’ policy 256 social networks, Ridyard 42–54 social segregation 59, 136 social stratification system 119–20 Solomon, James Ahuma 220 Solomon, S.R.B. 224 Sonnenberg, Oscar 35 Soso ornamental comb 139 souvenirs 207 Sowei masker’s costume 135 ‘specimens’ concept 24, 261, 267–8 ‘spectacle’ 126, 127, 134, 136, 143 spirit companion figures 269 spokesman’s staff 160, 188, 189–91 SS Adansi 110 SS Addah 46–7, 111–12 SS Niger 43, 45 SS Nyanga 43, 151 SS Renner 81, 83 SS Tarquah 43, 44, 244n.30 staff heads 159–60, 162 staffs Gold Coast 187, 188, 189–91, 194n.10 Shango 235–7, 236 Stark, Joan 62 static conception, African societies 256 steam shipping herbal medicines 94 introduction of 11, 15 Krio people 143 Renner’s ship 81, 83 revolution 79–80 Sierra Leone 114n.14 ‘stick combs’ 91 structuralism 262 supercargoes 15 ‘suppliers’, collections 6 swords Akan 220, 221, 243n.7 Asante 204–5, 204 Ekonda 206 Fante 225–8, 230

van Hien, Henry 200, 237–40 vessel genres, Accra 169 Victoria, Queen, portrait figure 96, 96, 101–3, 105 Victorian-era imperial power 16 Victorian-style pottery 170 ‘visual repatriation’ exercises 7, 278 Vogel, Susan M. 265

Tackie, Daniel Ayidzaku, ‘Prince’ 148, 150, 151–9 Tackie Tawiah I, Mantse 148, 156, 161–2, 182–3, 189, 191

war belt gift 176–7 War Damage Fund 262–3 warrior’s coat gift 184–5, 196n.54 Wassa town 233–4

umbrella tops 156–8, 194n.10 Underwood, Leon 266 ‘upbuilding’ 128–36 urban elites, Gold Coast 147, 169–70, 172, 178

Index weapons, Mayer Museum 24 Wellcome, Henry 54 Wesleyan Methodism 228–9, 232 see also Methodism Williams, Alfred C. 131, 133–7 Williams, Sylvester 240 Williams, Thomas John 130–1, 133–6 Winneba ‘kings’ of 157–9 social clubs 237–8 Wolof traders 109 women’s situation 83–4, 86, 94–105, 107–8 wooden figures 95–102, 97, 104, 142 wooden spoon artefact 91, 92

305

World Cultures Gallery, Liverpool Museum 277–9 World Museum, Liverpool 151, 192 see also Liverpool (Municipal/World) Museum Yaa Asantewa War 205 Yorke, B. 86, 95–105 Yoruba artefacts 105, 139 Yoruba origins, ‘Liberated Africans’ 113n.3 ‘Yoruba’ sculptural style 102 Yoruba-speaking people 77–8, 93, 236–7 Zintcroft, Dr 203

306

307

308

Plate 1 Nupe robe of honour embroidered with silk. Collected by Selim Aga on the voyage of the Dayspring and purchased by the museum in 1860. 20.11.60.2.

Plate 2 Sixteenth-century Edo head of a queen mother in copper alloy. Acquired for the museum in 1899 by Ridyard from an unknown intermediary in West Africa. 27.11.99.8.

Plate 3 Duala Losango society mask in the form of an antelope or buffalo, from the West Coast of Cameroon. Acquired by the museum in 1808 from James Harrison. 3.11.08.3.

Plate 4 Kongo ‘power figure’ or nkisi nkondi, named Mangaaka, from Cabinda (Angola). Donated by Hatton & Cookson trader Oscar Sonnenberg in 1900, through Ridyard. 29.5.00.21.

Plate 5 Kongo ‘power figure’ or nkisi nkondi, named Kozo, from Cabinda (Angola). Acquired by Ridyard from the Hatton & Cookson trader William Shawcross in 1898. 9.8.98.43.

Plate 6 Medicinal root sample collected in Sierra Leone by Ridyard. Manchester Museum, K 22745 (EM 550524) ‘Egboshie’ or Yellow Fever root (Sarcocephalus esculentus). Manchester Museum, University of Manchester.

Plate 7 Two-story frame and plank-clad house on raised masonry foundation, Liverpool Street, Regent Village, Sierra Leone. Photo: the author 2010.

Plate 8 Big Market, Wallace Johnson Street (formerly Water Street), Freetown, Sierra Leone. Photo: the author 2010.

Plate 9 Hat of plaited fibre trimmed with leather. Mande from Perai on the upper Gambia River, The Gambia. Presented by Mohammed Muyu Deen Savage in 1906 through Ridyard. 3.9.06.11.

Plate 10 Nineteenth-century Krio ‘tropical Georgian’ house built by Mohammed Muyu Deen Savage, Dan Street in Freetown’s Fourah Bay district. Photo: the author 2010.

Plate 11 Women’s beaded apron from Matadi, Congo Free State (now Democratic Republic of Congo). Presented by C. D. Hotobah During in 1908. 14.2.08.5.

Plate 12 Hausa-style plaited hat from Lagos decorated with Islamic protective symbols in coloured leather. Presented by C. D. Hotobah During in 1908. 14.2.08.1.

Plate 13 European stoneware flagon covered in ornamental leatherwork by Mande leatherworker. Presented by C. D. Hotobah During through Ridyard in 1906. 19.12.06.19.

Plate 14 Pair of female medicine association figures on a stand. Mende from Sierra Leone. Presented by C. D. Hotobah During through Ridyard in 1911. 27.11.11.12.

Plate 15 Wooden figure, probably representing a railway official, made by a Mende sculptor at Kenema, Sierra Leone. Presented by C. D. Hotobah During through Ridyard in 1913. 22.12.13.10.

Plate 16 King’s messenger sword. Akan from Anomabu, Gold Coast (now Ghana). Presented in 1904 by Omanhene Amonu V of Anomabu. 15.8.04.30.

Plate 17 Umbrella top of pyro-engraved wood in the form of a hen sheltering chicks. Effutu from Winneba, Gold Coast. Presented in 1907 by Omanhene Acquah II of Winneba. 8.7.07.11.

Plate 18 Umbrella top of wood in the form of a mythical sankofa bird. Effutu from Winneba, Gold Coast. Presented in 1906 by Omanhene Acquah II of Winneba. 19.12.06.6.

Plate 19 Umbrella top of wood in the form of a group of birds feeding on a millet stalk. Effutu from Winneba, Gold Coast. Presented in 1907 by Omanhene Acquah II of Winneba. 8.7.07.10.

Plate 20 Head of a spokesman’s staff in wood with symbols of the Ga state. Ga from Accra, Gold Coast. Presented in 1906 by Mantse Kojo Ababio IV of Nleshi (James Town), Accra. 19.12.06.7.

Plate 21 Earthenware water vessel covered with mica slip in the form of a chicken. Ga made in the village of Afuamang, Accra Plains. Presented in 1914 by Mantse Kojo Ababio IV of Nleshi (James Town), Accra. 12.5.14.5.

Plate 22 Earthenware decanter with stopper and linear decorations in mica slip from the village of Oblogo, Accra Plains. Presented in 1914 by Mantse Kojo Ababio IV of Nleshi (James Town), Accra. 12.5.14.6.

Plate 23 Female figure for the shrine of the lagoon deity ‘Koole’. Ga from Accra. Presented by Dr Edward Mettle in 1899. 27.11.99.36.

Plate 24 Cast brass lid for a gold dust currency storage box. Akan (Asante). Presented by A. R. Chinery in 1906. 24.5.06.36.

Plate 25 Accra Lighthouse, with James Fort to the right. James Town, Accra. Photo: the author 2009.

Plate 26 Zamble festival mask. Guro from Côte d’Ivoire. Purchased from Gallery 43, London, in 1966. 1966.373.1.

Plate 27 Nkishi power figure. Songye from Democratic Republic of Congo. Purchased from P. Goldman in 1966. 1966.373.2.

Plate 28 Personal shrine figure. Baule from Côte d’Ivoire. Purchased from Gallery 43, London, in 1966. 1966.109.2.

Plate 29 Reliquary guardian figure eyema byeri. Fang from Gabon. Purchased from Charles Ratton in 1967. 1967.113.2.

Plate 30 Figure of a seated hogon (priest) for a shrine. Dogon from Mali. Purchased from Charles Ratton in 1967. 1967.113.1.

Plate 31 Naidugubele diviner healer’s headdress worn during consultations. Senufo from Côte d’Ivoire. Purchased from Gallery 43, London, in 1966. 1966.218.4.

Plate 32 Diviner’s figure or spirit companion figure. Akan (probably Akye or Allangoa) from Côte d’Ivoire. Presented by J. T. Mensah through Ridyard in 1906. 3.9.06.36.

Plate 33 Liverpool Counterpoint 8. Polychrome lino print by Atta Kwami, with designs sketched from Ghanaian stools in the World Museum displays. Purchased with the assistance of the Art Fund in 2015. LIV.2015.51.8.

Plate 34 Liverpool Counterpoint 3. Polychrome lino print by Atta Kwami, with designs sketched from Asante cast brass gold weights and boxes in the World Museum collection used for storing gold dust currency. Purchased with the assistance of the Art Fund in 2015. LIV.2015.51.3.