This week we have another project profile on the MEG blog, Theo Borgvin-Weiss (Project Research Associate & PhD Candidate, University of
Cambridge) has written about [Re:]Entanglements. If you would like us to profile a project you are working on then please email web@museumethnographers.org.uk
Between 1909 and 1915 the British
Colonial Office in London despatched Northcote Thomas, a Cambridge history
graduate and folklorist, to Southern Nigeria and Sierra Leone to conduct a series
of surveys of the region’s people and ‘customary laws’. Thomas’ tours were conducted
against a background of colonial anxiety over how best to govern the region, so
were intended to inform British policies of indirect rule. At the same time, Thomas’
close and prolonged engagement with local people proved to be an important (albeit
controversial) moment in the development of academic anthropology. The
significance of Thomas’s work, including the extensive ethnographic archives
that he and his local assistants amassed, has, however, remained largely
unexamined until now.
[Re:]Entanglements, an ongoing 3-year
project led by Paul Basu of SOAS and part of the AHRC-funded ‘MuseumAffordances’ project, aims to better understand the material legacies of
Thomas’s surveys – comprising photographs, sound recordings, artefacts, botanical
specimens, fieldnotes and reports – and to rethink their significance today. The
project involves participants from Nigeria, Sierra Leone and the UK, each bringing
different perspectives to bear on the collection. In doing so, the aim is to explore
both what functions Thomas’ collecting and documentation activities were
intended to perform at the time of their creation and, crucially, what value such
a rich but colonially-implicated archive might have in the present – within modern-day
Nigeria, Sierra Leone and Britain. By confronting the problematics of this collection,
the project explores whether, as a resource, it nevertheless contains latent possibilities
for decolonisation and repair.
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Phonographic sound recording, Agila, Present-day Benue state, Nigeria. Photograph by Northcote Thomas, 1913
MAA P.32756 |
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| [A selection of flutes collected by Northcote Thomas during surveys of Edo- and Igbo-speaking communities in the collections of the University of Cambridge Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology.] |
Given that Thomas was the first
Government Anthropologist appointed by the British Colonial Office to study
Africa, his three expeditions to Southern Nigeria (1909-13) and final tour in Sierra
Leone (1914-15) represent early experiments in government-sponsored ethnography
and reflect ongoing negotiations between the production of knowledge and power.
His expeditions were important test-cases, establishing what practical
application the nascent academic discipline of anthropology might have for
colonial governance. But they also reveal ongoing tensions between Colonial
Office policy makers in London and the colonial governments in West Africa, in
which the latter were often strongly resistant to outside interference. As
things turned out, the information produced by Thomas’s surveys was not easily translatable
into practical action and the experiment was widely perceived as a failure. As
a result, this rich archive drifted into relative obscurity.
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| Mask collected by Northcote Thomas
in Ibillo, Nigeria, in 1910. MAA Z 26531. |
During 55 months of fieldwork
over 6 years, Thomas and his assistants recorded both the artistic and everyday
– often capturing intimate aspects of local life. He and his team amassed vast
amounts of information - making thousands of photographs, producing hundreds of
wax-cylinder phonograph recordings, and collecting botanical specimens as well
as both ceremonial and everyday objects – acquired mainly via purchase and
direct commission. Thomas published his findings in a series of multi-volume reports
and academic articles. Today, this fascinating multimedia archive is dispersed
across numerous institutions, including the University of Cambridge Museum of
Archaeology and Anthropology (MAA), the British Library, the Royal
Anthropological Institute, and the National Museum Lagos, among others – all
partners in the project.
The first stage of the [Re:]Entanglements
project catalogued and researched the collection itself, bringing the widely-scattered
sound, image and object collections together for the first time in over 100
years. Collections-based research has generated several specific studies, covering
subjects such as the Igugu masquerades of southeast Nigeria, Thomas’ documentation
of a wrestling festival in the North Edo town of Otuo, and modern-day facial
scarification (Ichi) ceremonies in
Anambra State – all reported on the project blog. In the UK, UCL Museum Conservation
students are currently preparing objects from the collection for exhibitions at
SOAS’s Brunei Gallery (2020) and the University of Cambridge Museum of
Archaeology and Anthropology (2021). Meanwhile, the collections-based research is
also informing current fieldwork activities in Nigeria and Sierra Leone.
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| Postdoctoral researcher George Agbo and traditional Igbo carver Chief Anaemena discuss photographs of wood carvings collected by Northcote Thomas in 1911 |
[
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| Traditional wood carver, Felix Ekhator, in his workshop in Sakponba Road, Benin City. |
]
An important aspect of the project,
now in its second year, is engaging with communities in areas where Thomas
worked more than a century ago. Given the range of technologies utilised by Thomas
and the precision of his fieldnotes, it has often been possible to pinpoint
specific source locations. Consequently, Paul Basu and postdoctoral research
assistant George Agbo have been retracing Thomas’ itineraries, sharing photographs
and recordings made by Thomas with local people. This has produced interesting
results. For instance, with musical instruments – where recordings made in the
early 20th century have been played to current Sierra Leonean
musicians, prompting discussion of change and continuity in style and instrumentation.
A further study considered developments in wood-carving technique through
discussions with carvers from Benin City, who responded to examples collected in
the region over a century ago.
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| Impromptu exhibition of Northcote Thomas’s photographs in Musaia, northern Sierra Leone. Photograph by Paul Basu. |
In its third and final year, [Re:]Entanglements
will explore its key themes through exhibition experiments, art and film in
order to engage with the collection directly and to capture contemporary
responses to it. So far, the British-Nigerian artist Chiadikōbi Nwaubani has offered a series of poignant responses to Thomas’ photographs. Workshops
have taken place in Benin City, Nsukka and Freetown, where artists are currently
producing work in response to the archives and collections. In the UK, a filmproject entitled Faces|Voices records the reactions of members of African heritage communities in the UK to
‘physical type’ photographic portraits made by Thomas, capturing powerfully the
varied – and often surprising – responses that contemporary voices can bring to
bear on ethnographic collections, their colonial entanglements and their
potential legacies.
To follow the [Re:]Entanglements
project and or to get involved with discussions see the project blog or join the project’s Facebook group .
