E3W Literature | University of Texas

Bernth Lindfors, ed.
Africans on the Stage: Studies in Ethnological Show Business
Bloomington: Indiana University Press/Cape Town: David Philip, 1999
300 pages
ISBN: 0253212456
Price: $19.95

Reviewed by Neville Hoad

The various essays in this anthology recover the long history of Africans on display in European and U.S. show business, with a particular focus on the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The place of these displays of African bodies and the representational work they accomplished in the wider ideological edifices of European imperialism are scrupulously foregrounded. Bernth Lindfors in his introduction offers the following paradoxical summation: “Ethnological show-business thus promoted and perpetuated racism, pushing whites and blacks further apart by placing them in closer proximity. Africans were put on stage to distance them from the rest of humanity”(xii).

The essays of Africans on the Stage are organized chronologically according to their historical reference, beginning with Z.S. Strother’s “Display of the Body Hottentot,” which tracks the history of the conventions for representing the Khoikhoi people of what are now the Republic of South Africa, Namibia and Botswana from the first moment of European contact in the late fifteenth-century through the famous case of the Hottentot Venus (a Khoikhoi woman named Sarah Bartmann, who was brought to Europe in 1810) to the present. This opening essay reveals the impossibility of any linear historical narrative of representing Africans in the cultural productions of Europe. The representations discussed reveal neither a growing liberal tolerance of African difference – an amelioration of racism over time, nor a deepening disgust over time. African difference is as much a problem and a thrill for the first Portuguese explorers in the 15th century as it is for the spectators at the Empire Exhibition in Johannesburg in 1936 – the subject of the final essay in the collection – but the logistical arrangements and political meanings of the embodied experience of racial difference for both those displayed and those who would observe them are profoundly historical.

What all the essays make apparent is that images of Africans continually have to be adapted to the representational conventions that have preceded them. The initial visual representations of Khoikhoi people draw on the traditions of pictorial representations of Judeo-Christian ideas of natural man – Adam and Eve in the garden of Eden. How different this rendering is from current attempts to locate in Africa the evolutionary origin of Man in the academic and popular paleontology of our present must remain an open question. The growth of European science over the course of the centuries covered by the anthology undoubtedly makes a difference in the representational possibilities of Africans, but the stubborn fantasy of representing Africa as the past of Europe either in the terms of European religious traditions or in Europe’s increasingly sophisticated scientific modes of thinking persists. Lindfors concludes his essay on Charles Dickens and the Zulus: “The Victorian notion lingers even today, fed by an entertainment industry...that deliberately emphasize[s] the exotic at the expense of the ordinary. In such media, one is far more likely to see resurrections of Tarzan than revelations of Tanzania. So powerful an ethnocentric compulsion to discover savages at every bend in the river, to define the “Dark Continent” as the benighted antithesis of the enlightened West, reveals that Dickens is not dead yet” (79). The idea of African racial difference as a powerful ideologically driven fantasy is equally apparent in the stories of the faux Africans, the hoaxes who lurk at the margins of this book and perform whatever the moment desires as Africanness. That Africans exist is no obstacle to continuing historical needs to invent them.

That authenticity is rarely seen in its own terms but is always brought in to buttress and capitalize on fantasy is further evident in many of the documenting images in the anthology. In his essay, for example, Veit Erlmann presents two extraordinary photographs of The African Choir, a choral group from South Africa who toured Britain and the U.S. (1891-3), which exquisitely capture the tension between the exotic and the quotidian, the fantasy of the authentic and the greater complexity of the lived experience of the people required to produce African in/authenticity for white audiences. The first photograph, “Africa Civilized,” shows the members of the choir in contemporaneous gender-appropriate “Western” attire. The second photograph, “Africa Uncivilized,” almost identical in pictorial composition to the first, shows the members of the choir dressed in what “in the imperial lexicon of the late nineteenth century, was taken for Africa” (132). In a virtuosic reading of the meaning of these costumes, Erlmann notes the paradox of industrially manufactured blankets signifying authentic African “folk costume” and how these blankets mark modernizing processes in terms of rural/urban, male/female, Christian/animist identities. Even in images produced out of a Western desire to fix and fetishize African difference, much more complex narratives emerge of the history of African encounters with Europeans and with each other.

Readers of this anthology will get a clear sense of the diversity of the personnel, agendas, and mechanics of a range of enterprises that brought Africans into the purview of Europeans and Americans in ethnological show business. Traveling choirs, world-fairs, circuses, museums, individual entrepreneurs, and authors are accounted for in vivid historical detail. While Africans were undoubtedly exploited in many of these enterprises, some were complicit in their own exploitation and others became shrewd managers of their exotic currency.

Reading the notes on contributors, one could gripe that there are not enough Africans representing the history of their own representation, but such a gripe would implicate one precisely in the desire for African authenticity and difference that the anthology convincingly and painstakingly outlines as a significant part of the anatomy of racism. Africans on the Stage is an important anthology for scholars of African history, historians of performance studies, and anyone interested in the persistence of the problem of racism.