Materialising Hygiene: Remedies, Commodities and Images

Abstract

This chapter shows that hygiene had profound practical and material consequences for people in both West Africa and Europe. Hygiene was more than a metaphor used to encode religious virtues, scientific imperatives, cultural values, social interactions and colonial anxieties. It was a practice that materialised itself in and on individual bodies, and crucially depended on material aids such as drugs, medical equipment, sanitary articles and specific clothing. The Basel Mission actively engaged with these tools of hygiene, from an early interest in natural remedies in West Africa to the establishment of a thriving commodity culture surrounding tropical hygiene around 1900. Remedies and commodities circulating through missionary networks shaped bodily practices, while images produced and propagated by the Basel Mission left a visual legacy that informs our understanding of purity, health and cleanliness to this day. Examined critically, these material and visual sources reveal the profoundly interactive nature of missionary encounters and testify to the conceptual, practical and material exchanges between people in West Africa and Europe.

Hygiene was more than a metaphor used to encode religious virtues, scientific imperatives, cultural values, social interactions and colonial anxieties. It was a practice that materialised itself in and on individual bodies, and crucially depended on material aids such as drugs, medical equipment, sanitary articles and specific clothing. The Basel Mission actively engaged with these tools of hygiene, from an early interest in natural remedies in West Africa to the establishment of a thriving commodity culture surrounding tropical hygiene around 1900. Remedies and commodities circulating through missionary networks shaped bodily practices, while images produced and propagated by the Basel Mission left a visual legacy that informs our understanding of purity, health and cleanliness to this day. Examined critically, these material and visual sources reveal the profoundly interactive nature of missionary encounters and testify to the conceptual, practical and material exchanges between people in West Africa and Europe.

1 Materia Medica

From their earliest Christianising efforts overseas, missionaries showed a particular interest in natural remedies, thereby enriching pharmacological knowledge.¹ Due to their prolonged stays abroad, they took a keen interest in finding effective remedies against their frequent health problems. With the help of local experts, they recorded, classified and codified medical plants and the contents of remedies or substances used in their ingredients.² The Basel missionaries, who had been on the Gold Coast since 1828, were familiar with African therapeutics and generally supportive of African natural remedies. The arrival of medical missionaries from 1885, however, threatened to devalue these plant-based preparations. The Basel missionary Adolf Mohr addressed a letter to the Committee, in which he expressed his fear over the impending insignificance of remedies used on the Gold Coast and highlighted the importance of their study:

In my opinion, it is not right to despise this country’s medicines ipso facto and to call them ‘quackery’. It would certainly not only be worthwhile but also interesting for a doctor to study the local herbs and barks etc. and to examine what they are all about.³

Although the Basel missionaries perceived their medical colleagues as being dismissive of medicinal plants, the mission doctors turned out to be rather inquisitive about West African remedies. Fisch, for instance, who created a garden for rare plants, observed that “barks or leaves or roots” usually came from four to eight key plants, which were cooked in a pot of one to three litres of water or palm wine “to extract the active substances.”⁴ His handbook Tropische Krankheiten contained a list of recommended medications, including a wide range of substances and preparations originating from South America, Asia, Oceania, the Americas, Europe and Africa.⁵ This illustrates that missionaries played a key role in the connected histories of colonialism, plants and medicine. Their encounters with new medical ingredients overseas fundamentally transformed pharmacology and medical theories at home.⁶

The various substances and preparations used in medical practice and treatment, coined materia medica, expanded and diversified rapidly from the seventeenth century. One of the earliest globally traded drugs was the bark of the cinchona tree, which was used as the main remedy against different kinds of fevers.⁷ The name of the medicinal tree, which originated in South America, was said to have come from the countess of Chinchon, the wife of a viceroy in Peru, who was cured of a fever by a local physician using the bark of the cinchona tree in 1638, and then supposedly popularised it even before botanists had identified and named the species.⁸ Another account assigned the introduction of the cinchona bark into European medical practice to a monk of the Augustinian Order, who had been informed about its medicinal qualities by Peruvians. Cinchona bark was first advertised for sale in England in 1658 and entered the London Pharmacopoeia in 1677.⁹

Europeans showed a growing interest in pharmacological plants on the supposed edges of civilisation while most accompanying customs were considered medically and scientifically irrelevant. Studying, classifying and experimenting with tropical plants became an important part of medical training in Europe in the eighteenth century. The Scottish doctor James Lind, an early advocate of naval hygiene, proposed the use of china bark as a malaria prophylaxis in his 1768 Essay on Diseases Incidental to Europeans in Hot Climates, with the Method of Preventing their Fatal Consequences.¹⁰ In 1820, two French chemists and pharmacists, Joseph-Bienaimé Caventou and Pierre-Joseph Pelletier, identified quinine as the active ingredient of cinchona and started producing quinine from tree bark found in Peruvian and Bolivian forests.¹¹

The appropriation and transformation of cinchona into quinine illustrates why the advent of scientific medicine in the 1880s did not put an end to the exploration of colonial and tropical plants, despite marking a new period in medical history. While the Basel missionaries feared that the increasing importance of laboratory medicine and chemical industries would undermine the standing of materia medica from the colonies, quite the opposite happened. The chemical and pharmaceutical industries that mushroomed in France, Germany and, most notably, in Basel in the late nineteenth century used active ingredients found in the tropics to manufacture drugs in Europe. The imperial expansion in Africa, therefore, coalesced with the rise of pharmaceutical chemistry in Europe, which started a new era of colonial bioprospection.¹²

Missionaries, botanists and traders, often supported by pharmaceutical companies, now searched for and established commercial monopolies over new and well-known materia medica. These were then sent to Europe as industrial raw materials to be converted into drugs through the identification and extraction of their active ingredients, which helped standardise the dosage and manufacture of pills in the laboratory. By transforming medicinal plants from the colonies into factory manufactured drugs, Europeans found a way of appropriating these remedies by putting a supposedly modern and scientific spin on them. Strophanthus, a plant that was used by West African healers both as a poison and medicine, offers a fascinating example of the colonial adoption of African materia medica into European pharmacological knowledge.¹³

Strophanthin, which people on the Gold Coast used in their poisoned arrows against the British, entered the British Pharmacopoeia in 1898, following a complex history of European interest in African medicinal plants. Laboratory experiments on the drug in Edinburgh had led to the discovery of its active ingredient in 1873, which was found to be a particularly effective cardiac drug. Following this discovery, British pharmaceutical companies, such as Burroughs Wellcome & Co, procured the plant in large quantities to produce the drug on an industrial scale.¹⁴ In 1905, with the establishment of a British military presence in West Africa, the colonial government outlawed the use of the plant in poisoned arrows. Concurrently, growing international pharmaceutical demand for Strophanthus seeds led to an export scheme from the Gold Coast during WWI. This coincided with the marginalisation of its use in African medicine.¹⁵

One of the remedies recommended in Fisch’s Tropische Krankheiten was the simaruba bark.¹⁶ The Basel missionaries first took notice of simaruba when the African pastor Carl Reindorf recommended it to them as a remedy against dysentery.¹⁷ Reindorf later sold his formula containing the ingredient to a missionary of the Bremen Mission for five pounds sterling, who introduced it into Europe. Hermann Gundert, a former Basel missionary in India and grandfather to Herman Hesse, praised the efficacy of the preparation in his diary.¹⁸ In 1904, Fisch also recommended simaruba as a therapeutic option for amoebic dysentery in a piece for the Archiv für Schiffs- und Tropenhygiene, thereby promoting the use of the African bark in scientific circles.¹⁹ The Basel Mission thus paved a way for medicinal plants from the colonies to enter European medical practice and scientific texts.

The Basel Mission doctor Karl Huppenbauer started a collection of African herbal medicines in 1914, which was lost during the course of the First World War.²⁰ At a time when the study of natural sciences and the practice of medicine in Europe was becoming an increasingly secular pursuit, based on laboratory experiments and chemical drugs, the Basel medical missionaries retained and even revitalised Christian spirituality in the exploration of nature and the art of healing. This enabled them to have closer contact with and insight into the communities with which they worked. The Basel Mission doctors were simultaneously looking for new therapeutic ingredients in West Africa, collecting information about African plants and their medical uses, and introducing new pharmaceuticals and scientific medicine into colonial Africa.

The Basel missionary Adolf Mohr observed in 1905 that “the indigenous possess effective juices of certain leaves, which produce breast milk once applied on the chest.”²¹ Friedrich Hey became interested in this natural remedy after a number of missionary wives had tried it on themselves. Although he left the Basel Mission in 1902, Hey returned to West Africa in 1904 to work for a German trading company and started examining the remedy for the stimulation of breast milk production more thoroughly. He found out that the plant used in the preparation was Crassulaceae Kalanchoe, a type of succulent flowering plant. Because of its scarcity, Hey used unripened fruits of the papaya tree as an alternative, which he had learned, worked in a similar way. He developed a preparation called “Dr. Hey’s Lacto-Generator,” which was marketed in Germany.²²

Even though Hey indicated that most physicians were critical of his natural remedy, the product was the first of a whole range of African medical preparations, which he developed and introduced to European consumers.²³ His pharmaceutical products, including a “Syphilis Elixir,” “Dr. med. Hey’s Regenerator” and “Dr. med. Hey’s Cholagogum,” were sold to pharmacies and direct to consumers through the companies Hermann Dahl & Co. in Hannover and Dr. Hey’s Lacto und Rad-Jo Versand von Vollrath Wasmuth in Hamburg, of which he owned half. Hey was particularly proud of his “preparation for women’s welfare (to facilitate birth),” which he had formulated during his time in West Africa “after many time-consuming and profound studies and experiments.”²⁴

The founder of the Archiv für Schiffs- und Tropenhygiene, Carl Mense, accused Hey of deception and greed for profit, commenting that the composition of his “natural product Lacto-Generator” was not specified and that it was excessively priced at “2 Mark a bottle!”²⁵ By suggesting that the mission doctor’s main objective was personal profit, to such an extent that it distracted from medicine’s real purpose, Mense’s critique resembled that of European doctors towards African healers. The question of remuneration arose the special interest of scientifically trained physicians, who feared for their economic well-being and professional status both abroad and at home. Competing healthcare providers such as naturopaths, homeopaths and balneologists posed a threat to allopathic practitioners by challenging their exclusive right to professional expertise and subsequent income.²⁶

Upon his return to Germany in 1907, Hey gradually moved further away from allopathic medicine and closer to naturopathy, which raised concerns among fellow doctors and political authorities.²⁷ His intrusive advertising in daily newspapers, leaflets and brochures with slogans such as “Cancer is curable!” alerted the Imperial Heath Department in Berlin. The supervisory authority led a detailed investigation into Hey’s preparations in 1913, upon which the former Basel Mission doctor was only allowed to distribute them through pharmacies and had to refrain from advertising his remedies with exaggerated claims. Nonetheless, Hey established his own factory for pharmaceutical preparations in the German town of Bückeburg in 1920, which he ran until his death forty years later.²⁸

Plants were vital commodities for European colonialists, who began venturing overseas in search of exotic spices and tropical plants and later derived great profits from growing these plants in colonial gardens and plantations.²⁹ However, there was more to this European engagement with tropical flora than the pursuit of commercial profit. The exploration, observation and exploitation of tropical plants and herbs by missionaries, naturalists and businessmen forged a new relationship between the natural world of the tropics and the medical world of Europe.³⁰ Tropical plants, including cinchona, sarsaparilla and opium, became widely used in European medical practice. Moreover, the rise of botanical and zoological gardens illustrates that tropical nature not only pervaded natural history, science and medicine but also popular culture.³¹

2 The Commodification of Hygiene

Tropical hygiene became a busy marketplace around 1900 with handbooks, advertisements and exhibitions promoting commodities for the tropics. Fisch’s Tropische Krankheiten included a list of suppliers for tropical travel pharmacies since, according to him, most pharmacists were unfamiliar with the climatic peculiarities of the tropics, especially in West Africa where many precautionary measures were required.³² Fisch thus compiled his own range of tablets together with the owner of the Berlin-based Oranienapotheke Dr. Kade, Franz Lutze, who gradually developed his pharmacy into a pharmaceutical factory. The medical chests put together by Fisch and Lutze came in two metal boxes, each weighing 65 pounds—equal to the load of a porter according to Fisch—and could be purchased from Dr. Kade’s pharmacy directly or, more conveniently, via the order form in Fisch’s book.³³

By endorsing, advertising and selling tropical commodities, the Basel Mission doctors participated in the commodification of the tropics around 1900. Clothes, in particular, played an important role in fashioning the body according to ideas of Christian decency, standards of tropical hygiene and cultural perceptions of civilisation. The medical missionaries offered extensive advice on clothing, including boots, socks, hats, raincoats and underwear, as the adequate protection of the European body in tropical regions became a foremost concern.³⁴ The type of tropical outfit recommended and advertised by the Basel Mission doctors for women and men is illustrated by two images printed on the inside cover of Friedrich Hey’s Der Tropenarzt in 1906, showing the mission doctor himself and his wife (Figs. 10.1 and 10.2).³⁵

Fig. 10.1

Friedrich Hey, Der Tropenarzt. Ausführlicher Ratgeber für Europäer in den Tropen, sowie für Besitzer von Plantagen und Handelshäusern, Kolonialbehörden und Missionsverwaltungen, 1st ed., Offenbach 1906, Inside Cover

Fig. 10.2

Friedrich Hey, Der Tropenarzt. Ausführlicher Ratgeber für Europäer in den Tropen, sowie für Besitzer von Plantagen und Handelshäusern, Kolonialbehörden und Missionsverwaltungen, 1st ed., Offenbach 1906, Inside Cover

Missionaries, explorers and settlers had long used specific gear that, they hoped, would improve their probability of surviving in the tropics. However, the increasing influence of tropical hygiene around 1900 spawned ever more detailed medical theories and sophisticated technical aids. Researchers in tropical medicine began arguing that actinic radiation, which forms part of the ultraviolet band of the light spectrum, might have adverse physiological effects on white-skinned people in the tropics.³⁶ In line with this concern, Fisch explained, in Tropische Krankheiten, why light-skinned Europeans were much more prone to heat accumulation and sunstroke than Africans with their dark complexion. He concluded: “It is clear that clothing for Europeans in hot zones is not only a matter of civility but also a concern for health in general.”³⁷

Proper functioning of the skin was one of the key topics in tropical prophylactics.³⁸ Medical manuals published in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries included chapters that focussed on the best type of material for tropical clothing to maintain equilibrium of physiological functions. They advocated the use of special items of dress to protect Europeans from the solar threat such as the flannel binder worn by Hey on the photograph, pith helmets, sunglasses, spine pads and a specially designed red fabric advertised under the trade name “Solaro” to shield the body from actinic rays.³⁹ By insisting on the need of elaborate equipment and very specific commodities, handbooks on tropical hygiene helped maintain climatic fears. They implied that to stay healthy, safe and civilised, Europeans had to consume commodities such as medical books, hygienic accessories and protective clothes.

Ryan Johnson noted that “there are few examples of advances in tropical medicine that do not come bound up with a great clutter of outfits.” He argued that it is this “associated paraphernalia that reveals most about how the British saw tropical people, places, health and hygiene.”⁴⁰ There can be little doubt that tropical commodities shaped and fuelled the imaginary space of the tropics, as Johnson suggested. But they did more than this. They also allowed people to form and express identities along the lines of race, class, gender and religion. Tropical paraphernalia were symbolic expressions of the conviction that social, cultural and racial boundaries were essential to the protection, privilege and power of colonial protagonists. With their exclusive and ritualistic use by Europeans, they helped to define and sustain those boundaries, to remind Europeans and Africans alike of the distance between one another.⁴¹

While most European observers recognised that Africans had their own methods of hygiene, they oftentimes refused to view African bodily practices in the same light as the hygiene guidelines recommended in European medical discourse. Ludwig Külz, for instance, noted that “natural peoples” evinced “an instinctively practised hygiene.”⁴² By insisting on the need for modern material aids to observe hygiene properly, tropical doctors tried to differentiate themselves from this “instinctively practised hygiene.” To avoid being exposed to harmful tropical conditions like the seemingly natural people living in the colonies, Europeans emphasised the importance of medical technologies and equipment.⁴³

The British were the first to recognise tropical outfitting as a commercial opportunity, producing a whole range of protective gear from tropical pyjamas and travelling bathtubs to cooling devices and tents, but the German industry soon rose to the challenge. At the 1907 German Army, Marine and Colonial Exhibition in Berlin, an entire section was devoted to the tropical outfitting industry.⁴⁴ The commodity culture around tropical hygiene upheld the image of the tropics as an alien space within which a strict attention to daily bodily conduct was essential to the maintenance of white health under the pressure of the sun and humidity. The obsession with protective gear created a clear delineation between European consumers and non-European people, who apparently lacked scientific progress, technological know-how and capitalistic innovation.

In her seminal study on the nexus between commodity culture, imperialism and racism, Anne McClintock assessed “a supplementation of the ‘elitist’ scientific racism by a popular ‘commodity racism’” in late Victorian Britain. She noted that the promotion of tropical products and their colonial contexts, such as teas, biscuits, tobaccos, tins of cocoa and soaps, stimulated the imagination of consumers to “beach themselves on far-flung shores, tramp through jungles, quell uprisings, restore order and write the inevitable legend of commercial progress across the colonial landscape.”⁴⁵ The tropical world was a cognitive space, evoking mental images and emotions, used to sell commodities, shape European identities, and promote colonial agendas.⁴⁶

Throughout colonial discourse, the tropics oscillated between the paradisiacal and the pathological, the site of pristine, luscious nature and luxurious abundance alongside primitiveness and danger.⁴⁷ Trading companies, colonial enterprises and mission societies used this ambiguous image of the tropical world to advertise and capitalise on tropical commodities. Fisch’s 1912 Tropische Krankheiten promoted the first colonial cookbook written in the German language, a frequent advertisement in missionary and colonial media of the time. This Kolonial-Kochbuch, branded as “indispensable for the stay in the colonies,” was published by the German Colonial Economic Committee in 1906. The advertisement read: “Below you will find several highlighted recipes, which best indicate how the conditions in the tropics have been taken into account.” The recipes in the colonial cookbook included “antelope pie,” “elephant heart,” “hippopotamus bacon” and “parrot goulash.”⁴⁸

However, the evidence on nutrition practices of both Africans and Europeans in West Africa suggests that these recipes did not reflect the cuisine in the colonies. The diet of the African population consisted mainly of beans, fufu—a staple food usually made from cassava—and fish or goat’s meat, when means allowed. It is also highly doubtful that these recipes were used by Europeans based in the tropics. Most missionary and colonial sources from this period describe a very basic diet. As the Basel Mission doctor, Alfred Eckhardt, wrote in referral to the Gold Coast in 1891, the non-existence of cattle, for instance, meant that the missionaries had “to order so-called condensed milk in cans from Europe, while the natives do not know dairy and butter at all.”⁴⁹

Similarly, Fisch noted: “Fresh milk can be obtained only in a few places, the strong coffee grown locally is usually drunk with Cham condensed milk.”⁵⁰ Cham, a town in the Swiss canton of Zug, was home to Europe’s first condensed milk factory. The American brothers George and Charles Page founded the Anglo-Swiss Condensed Milk Company in 1866. Farmers from Cham’s surrounding regions supplied up to 100,000 litres of milk a day, which was transformed into milk powder. The final product was packed in cans and exported worldwide, mostly to companies in the British Empire. The fast-growing company subsequently established factories all over Europe and eventually merged with Nestlé in 1905.⁵¹ The growing market for global consumer goods illustrates that the Basel Mission, and Switzerland more generally, stood at the heart of transimperial networks.

Next to clothing, advice on nutrition formed another major aspect of tropical hygiene, which was believed to promote both the physical and mental health of Europeans in the tropics.⁵² Livingstone College in London, which provided medical training to missionaries from 1893, offered a one-week course on tropical hygiene in March and December of every year, which was open to lay men and women. The course lecture not only dealt with a range of tropical diseases but also prominently addressed subjects such as clothing, food and cookery.⁵³ The importance attached to the diet of Europeans in tropical colonies is further exemplified by a letter sent by the Inspector of the Norddeutsche Missionsgesellschaft, Franz Michael Zahn, to Hermann Prätorius, the Basel Mission’s Inspector for Africa, just before Mähly’s medical research expedition in 1882–1883:

I am pleased that you can send out a physician. We will also benefit from this investigation. The tropical climate makes it hard for our brothers to find a suitable diet and the Wurttemberg cuisine, based on spätzli etc., is very unsuitable. A cookbook for African cuisine would be hardly less important than a medical book. Your observant doctor will certainly also look at the kitchen and cellar – i.e. beverages – and find sound advice.⁵⁴

The Basel Mission doctors, who succeeded Mähly in the following three decades, spent considerable time and effort debating the ideal diet for Europeans in tropical colonies.⁵⁵ Commodities in the realm of tropical hygiene, including canned milk, travel pharmacies and protective clothing, shaped how Europeans came to see the tropical world and themselves. Although the Kolonial-Kochbuch does not give any realistic insights into diet practices in West Africa around 1900, it is a useful source to analyse how a tropical diet, and the tropics more generally, were imagined. It was a commodity that captured the attention of a general public by representing the tropics not only as a dangerous place but also as an exotic and exciting one. The audience for this kind of popular colonial fiction stretched far beyond people who intended to travel or settle in the colonies. Colonial fantasies allowed Europeans to reframe their own identities.

Recipe books, materia medica, cacao, medical chests, clothes, Bible translations, condensed milk and many other commodities travelled back and forth through the Basel Mission’s networks.⁵⁶ The Basel Mission Trading Company, created in 1859, was the first European trading company to open trading posts in the hinterland of the West African coast in the 1870s, thereby competing with African merchants and their intermediate trade. The company, which supplied the Basel Mission stations with European goods and, in return, exported palm oil, cacao, rubber, cotton and other commodities from the colonies, employed 4304 people in West Africa and India, of which only 74 were European, in 1911.⁵⁷ Worldly matters mattered much more to missions than their rhetoric was prepared to acknowledge, as Birgit Meyer showed for the nineteenth-century Gold Coast.⁵⁸ This is especially true for the Basel Mission, whose influential patrician supporters had direct interest in the West African trade.

The history of the Basel Mission shows that despite Protestantism’s emphasis on the Word, material matters were not simply outward things subordinate to inward faith.⁵⁹ The civilising mission fundamentally relied on material culture and had consequences that were both cosmological and worldly. This becomes particularly evident when looking at the history of hygiene. In the name of improving purity, health and cleanliness in West Africa, the Basel Mission doctors introduced new medical equipment, chloroform, bicycles, protective clothing, quinine, handbooks, mosquito nets and architecture styles to both Europeans and Africans, thereby shaping the meaning of hygiene.

The Basel missionaries’ commodities, objects and technical novelties aroused considerable interest in West Africa. Brigit Meyer argued that in the nineteenth century on the Gold Coast, “Christian identity itself” was “to a large extent produced through the consumption of Western commodities.”⁶⁰ The Basel Mission’s trading posts offered a steadily expanding range of consumer goods to the population in West Africa around 1900. Household items, including tablecloths, cutlery, bed linen, towels, pillows and irons carried great weight as symbols and instruments of Christian domesticity. Other commodities for personal hygiene such as clothes, hand mirrors, umbrellas, toiletries and soap were seen as tools for remaking the body and the self in the Protestant image.⁶¹

By focussing on soap especially, Timothy Burke demonstrated that missionaries in Zimbabwe carved out a market for industrially produced care products.⁶² Soap represented not just a cleaning product but the superiority of industrial production over natural products, Christianity over African beliefs and whiteness over blackness. Moreover, Anne McClintock argued that the marketing of British-manufactured soap and the spread of cleanliness through the promotion of routines of personal hygiene was a means of imposing social order and control in newly colonised areas.⁶³ Studies analysing soap advertisements suggest that there was a widespread penetration of manufactured toiletry products into colonial Africa, which was achieved through advertising campaigns that associated cleanliness with whiteness and civilisation.⁶⁴

However, a closer look at sanitary practices in West Africa reveals a more nuanced picture than the one promoted through soap advertising. Reports in the Basel Mission archives suggest that both Africans and Europeans oftentimes used soap made from mimosa or anago samina—“black soap.” Originating in West Africa, this kind of soap was usually made by women using ash of locally harvested plants and dried peels, which gave the soap its characteristic dark colour. Although the Basel Mission imported soap from a factory in the Black Forest and thus contributed to the expansion of the European care product market in colonial Africa, it appears that many West Africans and missionaries continued to use natural, locally produced soap well into the twentieth century.⁶⁵

As the example of soap advertisement shows, colonial imagery not only shaped perceptions of race and cleanliness in the age of High Imperialism, but has also obstructed historical research into bodily practices during the colonial period. The power of colonial images is particularly tangible in the representation of African bodies, which have anchored perceptions of purity, health and cleanliness in public memory. As one of the oldest and most prolific organisations to print and distribute photographs from the colonial world, the Basel Mission crucially moulded these images of hygiene.⁶⁶

3 Beyond the Colonial Gaze

The Basel Mission doctors used diverse visual languages to document their medical mission in West Africa for various interest groups at home. Their photographs served different purposes; some were taken as private souvenirs, sent to family and friends, and never published. Others were used in the Basel Mission seminary to illustrate lessons and familiarise pupils with the natural and human environments of their future mission fields. Others again became highly publicised images, reproduced as postcards or displayed in popular exhibitions in order to generate attention and donations. These types of images have impacted our ways of seeing and persist in the visual language of many aid campaigns. The images taken by the medical missionaries and the diverse contexts in which they appeared make it possible to analyse the different strategies that were used in the visualisation of Africa and its people during the colonial period.⁶⁷

From as early as the 1880s, the Basel Mission doctors contributed to the creation of a colonial gaze of African bodies in European media. Their photographs appeared in scientific journals where they contributed to the visual representation of tropical diseases and African bodies as objects of investigation. Photography helped to expand the systematic documentation and scientific cataloguing of places and people around the world, which had been a preoccupation of Europeans ever since their earliest explorations. In 1909, the Archiv für Schiffs- und Tropenhygiene published an image of a leg affected by a filaria tumour. The corresponding article explained that the mission doctor Rudolf Fisch had removed the tumour from a woman on the Gold Coast and sent it to the Institut für Schiffs- und Tropenkrankheiten in Hamburg, where it was analysed and compared to filaria worms from other samples extracted on people in tropical Africa.⁶⁸

The Basel Mission doctors not only engaged with medical science, they also published anthropological papers, which contained photographs of the people they studied.⁶⁹ The end of the nineteenth century saw the emergence of anthropological images, such as the engraving printed in Alfred Eckhardt’s 1894 monograph Land, Leute und ärztliche Mission auf der Goldküste, captioned “Negro types from the Gold Coast” (Fig. 10.3).⁷⁰ People in the colonies were photographed as representatives of their assigned ethnic groups, described according to their physical features, ascribed certain characteristics and catalogued as ethnographic types in encyclopaedias. These images not only quenched scientific thirst but they also gradually found their way into everyday imagery through their widespread distribution. By printing postcards depicting “native types” publishers realised that they could “profitably appeal to the desire for exoticism, and often eroticism, under the guise of scientific knowledge,” as David MacDougall showed.⁷¹

Fig. 10.3

Alfred Eckhardt, Land, Leute und ärztliche Mission auf der Goldküste, Basel 1894, p. 11

In the name of medical research and scientific progress, the Basel Mission doctors photographed their patients, often naked, documenting the diseases affecting them. The fourth edition of Rudolf Fisch’s Tropische Krankheiten in 1912 contained 37 figures including statistical tables, magnified photographs of parasites under the microscope, drawings of disease vectors and, most prominently, photographs of patients in West Africa suffering from a range of illnesses. Some conditions such as elephantiasis, framboesia and yaws, which the medical missionaries had mistaken for syphilis for many years, led to severe physical changes and were thus particularly well suited for visual display. These images not only served as scientific documentation, but also satisfied the insatiable desire of the European public for curiosities from the colonies. The myth of the “Dark Continent,” already well established in Europe by this time, was further cemented through the constant representation of pathological bodies.⁷²

A major challenge in working with photographic sources is that their conditions of production are hard, or sometimes even impossible, to retrieve. Simultaneously, their fluid and equivocal nature means that these images were able to absorb different, partly contradictory, meanings depending on the settings in which they appeared. Visual sources comprise amalgamations and ambiguities, which disclose the fundamentally interactive fabric of missionary entanglements. By tracing these changing meanings, historians can expose inconsistencies in the dominant colonial and racist visual narrative. The visual language emerging in the colonial period left ample room for mixed messages and contradicting interpretations. Image captions offer one way of exposing photographs as cultural artefacts rather than truthful representations of Africa.

The Basel Mission’s popular exhibition touring through Switzerland, Germany and Alsace in 1912 contained an image of a “priest of the deities with amulets,” as the caption stated.⁷³ However, when Rudolf Fisch sent the photograph to Basel three years earlier, he wrote that it depicted an “African medicine man carrying his pharmacy on his head” (Fig. 10.4).⁷⁴ Fisch clearly identified the man in the picture as a medical man, acknowledging that he possessed certain medical knowledge, authority and remedies. Yet in the exhibition, the curators transformed him into a spiritual figure with charms, thereby entirely omitting his medical expertise and drawing the visitors’ attention to their campaign against superstitious practices instead. The Basel Mission’s publicity work focussed on conveying a clear and unequivocal message to supporters at home, often at the expense of the more informative and nuanced annotations of the medical missionaries in West Africa.⁷⁵

Fig. 10.4

Rudolf Fisch, African medicine man carrying his pharmacy on his head, 1885/1911, BMA, D-30.63.099

The images appearing in evangelical media offered seemingly clear-cut evidence for the positive impact of missionary work by juxtaposing pictures of what missionaries branded as traditional African society with pictures symbolising transformation in the Christian image. Thus, photographs of “witch doctors” appeared next to images of medical assistants, as was the case in the 1912 exhibition. The picture contrasting the “priest of the deities with amulets” showed “Dr. Fisch’s African assistants” (Fig. 10.5).⁷⁶ Although Fisch had identified them as Robert Asare and Henry Owusu in his original annotation, the popular display turned them into nameless auxiliaries who testified to the apparent success of the medical mission in West Africa. With their suits, white shirts, ties and a wedding ring, they embodied religious, medical and cultural change all at once. This two-fold narrative operated on a time-scale demarcating the old and new ways in which West Africans dealt with disease, dirt and deity.

Fig. 10.5

Rudolf Fisch, Dr. Fisch’s African assistants, 1885/1911, BMA, D-30.10.25

Medical assistants were a popular motif in the Basel Mission’s publicity work. They symbolised not only the possibility for individual change but also promised profound societal change, ranging from spiritual to material issues. Beyond their role as poster children for the medical mission, however, the medical assistants held considerable power over the medical missionaries, who heavily relied on their cooperation not only in administrating medical care but also in promoting the medical mission among the general population.⁷⁷ Some assistants sourced and sold their own medications, while others used their training to look for better employment opportunities, which angered the mission doctors.⁷⁸ Robert Asare and Henry Owusu, for example, left in 1905 and 1908 respectively for positions in the mining industry.⁷⁹

A recurring theme within the Basel Mission’s photographs published in colonial magazines showed Africans doing dishes and laundry. Some of these washing scenes took place within the mission setting, under the supervision of a missionary wife on the mission compound for example, and reinforced the message that the mission was responsible for cleanliness in the colonies. Others showed African washing practices and thus indicated that attention to cleanliness was to be found across the globe, regardless of missionary activities. Moreover, many pictures, such as the one taken by the Basel missionary Otto Schkölziger in Cameroon, indicated that washing was not the sole responsibility of women (Fig. 10.6).⁸⁰ Photographs depicting African men washing clothes and dishes contradicted bourgeois gender roles and thus emasculated them, adding to the ambivalent colonial narrative regarding African masculinity. The feminisation of African men in European media was contradicted by depictions of unregulated male violence and laziness.

Fig. 10.6

Otto Schkölziger, Laundry work in Cameroon, 1891/1909, BMA QE-32.030.0003

Although photographs certainly contributed to cementing Europeans’ imaginations of Africa and their sense of superiority over African people, photography did not simply work as a tool of empire. While the invention of photography coincided with the consolidation of colonial empires in Africa, this medium was not the monopoly of Europeans. Unlike any other technology, photography was appropriated across the world almost simultaneously.⁸¹ Africans quickly picked up the new technology, which circulated and flourished through local and global networks of exchange. Photographers, clients and images moved across West Africa often crossing political and cultural boundaries.⁸² Two of the first West Africans to operate a photography studio were George and his son Albert Lutterodt, who opened their business in Accra in 1876.⁸³

In one of the oldest portraits in the Met collection, dating from the early 1880s, the Lutterodts carefully staged the importance of their client with four men surrounding him striking a pose and displaying elaborate props (Fig. 10.7).⁸⁴ The Lutterodts not only operated in Accra but also travelled to train and work with apprentices in other regions of West Africa. One of them, Alex Agbaglo Acolatse, established his own studio around 1900 in neighbouring Togo. Like his mentors, he specialised in portraits of the upper class and documented the social and political life of the African elite in the German colony.⁸⁵ These photographers, their clients and the images they produced testify to the complexity of African societies during the colonial period. The history of photography shows that any simplifying assumptions contrasting modern, rational and science based Europeans to backward, superstitious Africans are inadequate.⁸⁶

Fig. 10.7

George Lutterodt/Albert George Lutterodt, Five men, 1880/1885, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1999.184.1, https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/512837 (last access: 22.07.2022)

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, most Europeans associated photography, which many of them encountered in magic lantern shows for the first time, with supernatural phenomena. After all, Fox Talbot, one of the prominent pioneers of photography, had called the technology “natural magic,” identifying in it “the character of the marvellous.”⁸⁷ Aware of its awe-inspiring appeal, the Basel Mission doctors in West Africa resorted to photography alongside other technologies, such as surgery, to demonstrate that a higher power was on their side. However, photography seems to have enriched African beliefs and cultures rather than devaluing them. Heike Behrend and Tobias Wendl pointed out that in many African languages the word for “photographic negative” was the same as for “ghost or dead spirit” and that photographs were commonly incorporated into ancestor veneration.⁸⁸

The Basel Mission doctors’ visual legacy demonstrates that their images adopted multiple layers of meaning that went beyond their own intentions and goals. Their images not only acquired new connotations in evangelical, scientific and colonial contexts but were, at their origin, products of negotiations, cooperation and, at times, violence in West Africa. By paying attention to the very creation of these photographs as material sources and taking seriously the notion that African people were active participants in this process, historians can both reconstruct and fragment the colonial gaze. The image of Fisch’s medical assistants, for example, shows that clothing was a feature of Christian culture that provided Africans with a tool to claim social status, as Kirsten Rüther has argued.⁸⁹

Clothes played a key role in negotiations on purity, health and cleanliness. They were central in fashioning Christian identity, an imperial market for tropical hygiene and the civilising mission. At the same time, clothes were also products of entanglements on the ground in West Africa, disclosing intimate and revealing details. They testify to the prolonged and tangible exchanges between the Basel missionaries and the people with whom they lived. Clothes are communicative symbols that are used to maintain religious purity, indicate social roles, display cleanliness, express cultural identity, denote economic status and serve as emblems for political power. West Africans attached great importance to clothing as a form of communication, which is reflected in this West African proverb: “A person without clothes is a person without language.”⁹⁰

The photograph of the Basel missionaries Jakob Keller and Gottlieb Spellenberg was taken by their fellow missionary Eugen Schuler in Bali-Nyonga, a state in the Cameroon Grasslands, in 1902 and reached Basel in 1911 (Fig. 10.8).⁹¹ The three Basel missionaries visited the Kingdom in November of 1902 as part of an exploration trip to the area. This image is part of a series of twelve pictures that show Basel missionaries wearing the clothes of the Bali people. To fully understand the value of these photographs, it is essential to keep in mind the importance attached to protective clothing for Europeans in tropical colonies as well as the pre-eminent role of missionaries in trying to reform the dress of the individuals they wished to convert.⁹²

Fig. 10.8

Eugen Schuler, The missionaries Keller and G. Spellenberg in Bali robes, 1902/1911, BMA, E–30.25.039

By covering their bodies in African cloth, the missionaries pushed the boundaries of purity, health and cleanliness. Historians have generally assumed that clothing worn by Europeans in the tropical world served the purpose of marking strict boundaries between colonisers and colonised, expressing and legitimising the rule of a few over many.⁹³ Ryan Johnson, for example, suggested that tropical attire did not only set the British apart from the population in the colonies but also separated them from their own locality.⁹⁴ Conversely, the pictures of the Basel missionaries wearing Bali clothes indicate that rather than sealing themselves off, they engaged with their social and material surroundings. By doing so, they not only breached medical recommendations but also transgressed cultural and racial norms.

The photographs of the Basel missionaries wearing African clothing originated from complex interactions and were highly polyvalent, symbolising intimacy, on the one hand, and arousing fears of too much assimilation or “going native” on the other. The fact that these pictures were held back by the missionaries in Cameroon and only arrived in Basel years after they were taken suggests that the missionaries recognised that they had broken a taboo by transgressing metropolitan sensibilities. At the same time, it underlines the value of photographic sources, which offer unique insights into social interactions, cultural exchanges and political negotiations on the ground in West Africa.

The clothes visible in the image of Keller and Spellenberg were given to them by Fonyonga II, the fon—ruler—of Bali-Nyonga. They were part of a mutual exchange of gifts, a diplomatic rapprochement between the Basel missionaries and Fonyonga II. In 1903, Eugen Schuler reported in the Evangelisches Missionsmagazin that towards the end of their stay in Bali-Nyonga, the fon had sent them local dresses with the royal badge via his spokesperson and had requested them to appear on the market square wearing them. The missionaries complied with the fon’s request, who, according to Schuler, seemed “very pleased” to see the missionaries in Bali clothes: “With the royal garment he wanted to honour us and was proud that he could present us to all the people present in this attire.”⁹⁵

While the missionaries perceived Fonyonga II’s presents as tribute to their presence in Bali-Nyonga, the fon pursued a long-term plan to strengthen his position vis-à-vis the colonial power by building a strategic partnership with the Basel Mission. The garments he had given to the missionaries were not ordinary clothes, but rather regalia of high office and status that could only be awarded by people of the same or higher status.⁹⁶ To be walking through the market square in this attire was considered an adequate inauguration into political office in Bali-Nyonga. Fonyonga II integrated the missionaries in his system of rule by dressing them in political clothes, accommodating them in his palace and presenting them to his people and foreign visitors.⁹⁷

The Basel Mission opened a station in Bali in May of 1903 and campaigned on behalf of Fonyonga II, helping him to gain political authority in the eyes of the German colonial authorities. Their negotiations with the German military assured that the Bali region was spared from raids by the Schutztruppe. The Basel Mission’s support of Fonyonga II eventually led to his official approval as Oberhäuptling—“big chief”—of the whole Bali region by the German colonial government in 1905.⁹⁸ In exchange, the fon supported the Basel missionaries by providing them with food, helping them with infrastructure and construction, commandeering porters for their expeditions and children for the mission schools. In Fonyonga II, the Basel Mission had an influential ally, who was now officially in charge of a considerable territory.⁹⁹

The fon’s dominant position in the Cameroon Grasslands, however, became increasingly problematic for the German authorities, who accused him of harbouring imperialist desires. The ruler of Bali-Nyonga had become too influential in the eyes of the colonial government and they began to curtail his power.¹⁰⁰ Disappointed by this development, the fon eventually ended his cooperation with the Basel Mission. Fonyonga II’s authority, his diplomatic skills and political strategy, which are often concealed in colonial accounts, are embodied in the clothes he gave to the Basel missionaries. Material and visual sources facilitate a better understanding of African experiences and actions during the colonial period. They form valuable sources for questioning hegemonic colonial narratives and testify to processes of entanglement between West Africa and Europe.