Peter Pels

LeidenASA Research Leave by Peter Pels: Global Africa: Hidden Dimensions of a Public Image

For as long as the word exists, there has been an Africa of the global imagination. While early images of Africa have been the object of study from the inception of African studies, contemporary images – of a continent teeming with large wildlife, riddled by disease, devastated by war, riddled by witchcraft and other superstitions, to name just the most disturbing stereotypes – are more often regarded by Africanists as dangerous illusions that misrepresent real life on the continent. However justified this assessment is, it means we often do not know where these images come from and how they played into historical developments in and beyond Africa in their own rights. It can, for example, not be doubted that the invention of the global notion of “safari” by the likes of Frederick Lugard, Theodore Roosevelt and Denys Finch Hatton has decisively affected the course of history (and the gross national products) of countries like Kenya, Tanzania and South Africa; nor that the global popularization of the image of the Zulu warrior in nineteenth-century Europe has directly determined the content of the early global film industry, and held South African historiography hostage for at least a century. Images of Africa have to be generated and maintained like any other brand name, and therefore hide a backstage of production that often stands in uneasy friction with the image itself: thus, the decision of UNESCO to declare a heritage of “slave routes” in Tanzania and Ghana may have more to do with the desires of an African diaspora than with the inhabitants of those countries; and the strong emphasis on religion of the current exhibits of the Afrika Museum in the Netherlands has more to do with the Catholic missionary origins of the museum than with anything peculiarly African. The safari, the White Man’s Grave, the Zulu warrior, and the witch Gagool, all have their direct descendants today, but the genealogies and effects of these images deserve much more study in a global context.

Peter Pels intends to use the research leave granted by LeidenASA  to work out two particular aspects of the phenomenon of Global Africa: firstly, he hopes to organize a small film festival during Leiden University’s Africa year of 2020 about the theme of the Zulu Warrior. Secondly, he is working with the Research Center for Material Culture (RCMC) of the National Museum of World Cultures and the library of the African Studies Centre (ACSL) to see to what extent it is possible to bring the mission history of the Afrika Museum (now part of the National Museum) more into the open.The collaboration with the ASCL is meant to ascertain to what extent the materials collected for this study  can be opened up for a global audience. This will involve collaborating with other museum researchers familiar with the CSSp’s African collections elsewhere in Europe. It will in any case present findings about the missionary history of the Afrika Museum to an international conference of museum professionals (at the Rautenstrauch-Joest Museum in Cologne in July 2019), including comparisons with Catholic missionary materials from South Africa.