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In Anders Sparrman's Southern African Travelogue South African Historical Journal ISSN: 0258-2473 (Print) 1726-1686 (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rshj20 Southern Darkness, Northern Light: ‘Civilisation’ and ‘Savagery’ in Anders Sparrman’s Southern African Travelogue Mathias Persson To cite this article: Mathias Persson (2019) Southern Darkness, Northern Light: ‘Civilisation’ and ‘Savagery’ in Anders Sparrman’s Southern African Travelogue, South African Historical Journal, 71:1, 1-20, DOI: 10.1080/02582473.2019.1600000 To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/02582473.2019.1600000 © 2019 The Author(s). Co-published by Unisa Press and Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group Published online: 24 May 2019. Submit your article to this journal Article views: 534 View related articles View Crossmark data Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at https://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=rshj20 South African Historical Journal, 2019 Vol. 71, No. 1, 1–20, https://doi.org/10.1080/02582473.2019.1600000 Southern Darkness, Northern Light: ‘Civilisation’ and ‘Savagery’ in Anders Sparrman’s Southern African Travelogue Mathias Persson * Uppsala University Abstract This article interrogates how the entangled concepts of civilisation and savagery were envisioned and brought into play in the globetrotting Linnaean disciple Anders Sparrman’s (1748–1820) southern African travel account, how far and along which lines the dichotomy between them was tempered and challenged, and to what extent exposure to a foreign continent encouraged critical and destabilising introspection. The analysis deals with his representations of the inhabitants of Africa in the form of colonists, slaves, and Khoisan, as well as with his renderings of the Europeans. The investigation sheds further light on the erudite construction and employment of ‘civilisation’ and ‘savagery’ at the threshold between early modern and modern. It also provides a fresh take on Sparrman himself, while addressing the scholarly debate on his human-related conceptions and proposing a new approach to them. Keywords: Anders Sparrman; savagery; civilisation; travel writing; Cape colony; Khoisan; slavery; Carolus Linnaeus; eighteenth century Introduction Between 1772 and 1776, the globetrotting natural historian and Linnaean disciple Anders Sparrman (1748–1820) undertook a four-year journey of exploration to Africa and the South Seas. His impressions of the Southern Hemisphere were conveyed in a voluminous trilogy, published gradually and translated into a number of languages. The first volume is devoted to southern Africa, the second and the third to the Pacific. Aside from botanical and zoological data, the books contain a plethora of remarks on the humans and human communities he encountered, which are the focus here. This article interrogates how the entangled concepts of civilisation and savagery were envi- sioned and brought into play in Sparrman’s account of southern Africa, how far and along *Email: [email protected] ISSN: Print 0258-2473/Online 1726-1686 © 2019 The Authors. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, and is not altered, transformed, or built upon in any way. http://www.tandfonline.com 2 MATHIAS PERSSON which lines the dichotomy between them was tempered and challenged, and to what extent exposure to a foreign continent encouraged critical and destabilising introspection. The analy- sis deals with his representations of the inhabitants of Africa in the form of colonists, slaves, and Khoisan, as well as with his renderings of the Europeans. The Xhosa (‘Kaffirs’) were afforded little room in the travelogue and are therefore almost entirely left out of the article. The investigation does three things. First, it sheds further light on the erudite construction and employment of ‘civilisation’ and ‘savagery’ at the threshold between early modern and modern, a juncture at which scientific travel became institutionalised and grew ever-more utilitarian in tune with European colonial expansion.1 Sparrman is a suitable object of study in this respect due to both his interest in humans and his international renown; at the time of its release, the southern African volume catapulted him to European fame.2 Needless to say, the goal is not to craft or regurgitate any essentialising binary between Eur- opeans and non-Europeans, but to elucidate a ubiquitous conceptual pairing in eighteenth- century Europe. Second, the analysis provides a fresh take on Sparrman himself, who has previously been studied mostly with regard to travel literature and the Linnaean school of natural history. Third, it addresses the scholarly debate on his human-related conceptions and proposes a new approach to them. The southern African travelogue has been the battleground for radically divergent interpretations of Sparrman’s views on peoples and cultures. Raoul J. Granqvist styles him as an unadulterated friend of the Africans and a full-fledged detractor of the colonists, whom he supposedly cast as the real ‘savages’. According to Granqvist, the Swedish travel- ler-scientist played angry dichotomous tricks. ‘Savage/savagery’ was not the synonym for the mythic connotations of static otherness; it was a factual description of contemporary colonial practices in the white Dutch Cape colony.3 As this article aims to demonstrate, this reading falls short of doing justice to Sparrman’s mul- tifaceted outlook. At the other end of the gamut, Mary Louise Pratt portrays Sparrman as a scientific imperialist, in keeping with her appraisal of natural history as an instrument of Euro- pean expansion. Pratt maintains that Sparrman toned down dissension and violence, and that he wrote the landscape as devoid of humans, thereby resolutely marginalising its autochtho- nous as well as its white dwellers. Even so, the former were objectified, biologised, and deter- ritorialised, represented as silent and naked bodies without culture or history, whereas the images of the latter were saturated with ‘the beloved bourgeois scenario of the rough and humble peasant gladly sharing his subsistence with the enlightened man of the metropolis’.4 1. A.E. Martin and S. Pickford, ‘Introduction’, in A.E. Martin and S. Pickford, eds, Travel Narratives in Trans- lation, 1750–1830: Nationalism, Ideology, Gender (New York: Routledge, 2012), 12. 2. K. Nyberg, ‘Anders Sparrman: Konturer av en livshistoria’, in G. Broberg, D. Dunér and R. Moberg, eds, Anders Sparrman: Linnean, världsresenär, fattigläkare (Uppsala: Svenska Linnésällskapet, 2012), 24; R.J. Granqvist, ‘Fieldwork as Translation: Linnaeus’ Apostle Anders Sparrman and the Hottentot Perspective’, Cross/Cultures, 168 (2013), 168. 3. Granqvist, ‘Fieldwork as Translation’, 156–159. 4. M.L. Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (London: Routledge, 1992), 38–39, 51–53, 55–57. Not surprisingly, Granqvist is a vocal opponent of Pratt’s reading. See Granqvist, ‘Fieldwork as Translation’, 156, 172–173. SOUTHERN DARKNESS, NORTHERN LIGHT: ‘CIVILISATION’ AND ‘SAVAGERY’ 3 IN ANDERS SPARRMAN’S SOUTHERN AFRICAN TRAVELOGUE Pratt’s reading has been criticised and revised by a number of researchers – William Beinart, Carina Lidström, Kenneth Nyberg, and Nicole Ulrich. All of them have directly or indirectly called attention to the ambiguities and intricacies in the southern African travel narrative. For instance, Beinart states that its author did not fashion himself primarily as patriarchal or dominant, yet combined superciliousness and hierarchical differentiation of ‘savagery’ with ‘an explicitly humane position on some of the social ills of the [Cape] Colony’, i.e. slavery and the conduct of the colonists towards the indigenes.5 To give another example Carina Lidström points out that Sparrman advocated the plasticity of human behaviour, but also that he pitted European Enlightenment against heathen dark- ness.6 However, none of Pratt’s critics offers a comprehensive scrutiny of Sparrman’s think- ing about humans. The criticism of Pratt can be related to a more general problematisation and nuancing of the attribution of an ‘imperialist gaze’ to European traveller-scientists. This reconsideration likewise complicates the picture; not least, it has been argued that such actors were often dis- advantaged and unable to exercise much power in extra-European settings. That being said, there is no denying that the genre of travel writing was as a whole, to speak with Paul Smethurst, ‘supportive of empire, trade and the landowning classes’.7 Adding to these interrelated strands of revision, the current article takes a wide grip of the human-related comments in Sparrman’s southern African travel narrative, as opposed to sin- gling out representations of a particular group, which would only give one piece of a grander puzzle. The scope could of course have been extended to include the Pacific volumes, but this would effectively have made any in-depth investigation impossible. The analysis recognises the multilayeredness of Sparrman’s vision of the human world, but also suggests a new way to tie together its core thematic elements. The introduction is followed by one section on the dichotomy of civilisation and savagery and one on Sparrman and the southern African venue, after which the
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