Experiences in the Rediscovery of Mission Photography Paul Jenkins
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Much More Than Illustrations of What We Already Know: Experiences in the Rediscovery of Mission Photography Paul Jenkins hanks to a numberoffoun mented series of between 50 and T da tion s and other spon 200 historical phot ographs, in sors, the Base l Mission Arc hive in some cases eve n more. For each the last ten years has been enabled location the Basel Mission Archive to document its collection of his is probabl y the only so urce of an to rical photographs and other organized body of historical pho types of image. Both the size of the tographs cu rre n tly availa ble . collection and the age of the oldest Basel' s archivists have also struc photographs we re surprising. In tured the collection's fuzzy bor all, the archive houses about50,000 d ers, indicating w hic h phot o images crea ted before 1950. The gra phs we re taken in a specific archiv e's oldest pho tographs taken region, eve n w hen the exact site of in Europe date back to about 1850, origin is uncertain. the oldest in Africa and Asia to Individual catalogi ng, how 1860or perhaps a little earlier.' The eve r, also presents imme diately institution s that financed the cata evide nt problems. First, it takes loging showe d intere st in a pilot time and therefore costs money. project tha t would address prob Second, when catalog ing of the lems of access as we ll as conserva Basel Mission collection was be tion . The arc hive tackled bo th is gun, I m yself and the people I was sues, concentrating on a body of in touch with cert ainl y underesti 28,000 p ho tographs and ot he r mated the number of holdings of types of image, half of them from photogr aphs in the world and the before 1914, with 80-90 percent of volume of photographs in those the m taken in Africa or Asia. The holdings. It is not hard now to find result is an interac tive sys tem that statistics that seem to rule out al allows da tabase searches of select together the idea of individua l images stored in an electro nic im catalogi ng . An important Euro age ban k. The images then appear pean conference on wo rk with col on-scree n. This image bank be lection s of historical pho tographs comes available for public use Rev. Johann Mosi. held in September2000 confronted through a Web site in lat e October Photograph by W. Zurcher. Courtesy of the Basel particip ants with the di smayin g 2002." Mission Arch ive. Reference number £-30.86.229. figure that in Swede n, a country This essay is not the place to witha relatively small population, give an account of the ten-year project.' Instead, one fundame n photographs are being taken at an average of one million per day.4Of tal an d problema tic issue in the Basel Mission's arc hival policy course, situa tions vary. Situa tions w here photographic docu with old ph otogr aphs will be raised , and the results that the me ntation is ra re-for exa mple, the West African coast in the policy enables will be illustrated by refere nce to a pho tograph of 1860s-contrast starkly with situa tions w here its bulk is over Pastor John Mosi (see photo above). The point at issu e is the w helming . Not much imagin ati on is need ed to sup pose, how postulate, built into the mission's arc hival policy, that proper ever, that the known photographs of the non-Western wo rld archiva l and research wo rk wi th old ph otographs requires that before 1914 in organized collection s, plus the number of pho to they be cataloged individually, that is, treated as separate, indi graphs no doubt existing in forgotten cu pboards , wo uld qu ickly vid ual docume nts.We have followed this principle in wo rk done swamp the resources that archivists have for work in this field . on the 28,000 photographs the arc hive now has "unde r con tro l." Anyone who has worked for any len gth of time with histori Creating Value cal photographs will im mediately reco gni ze the controversies that this policy can generate. At one level the postulate is easy to For this reason I we lcome the opportunity to write ab outcatalog defend. For people hungry for visual reso urces for the social ing and abo ut the wider impact tha t visua l sources from mission history of Africa and Asia, wha t the archive has d one is clearly arc hives can have in the cultural and social sciences . Individual important and jus tifiable. For man y places in southern Ghana, catalogi ng of historical photographs is va lua ble in itself-or Ca meroon, Sou thwest Ind ia, South China, and Borneo, w here perha ps better, taking up a phrase fashionable in cen tral Europe, Basel mission aries worked in the "classic" period of Western it creates value. My experience as archivist for the Basel Mission mission outreach, the arc hive presents a coordinated and docu- has convi nced me that individ ua l cataloging of photographs int roduces a new quality int o discussions of the past an d should Pau lJenkins is Archivist forMissiol121 /the BaselMission SocietyandLecturer enable new forms of discourse about the past to d evelop . Using in AfricanHistory at the University of Basel, Switzerland. visua l sour ces correctly and wi th the necessary rigor and accuracy October 2002 157 could have as revolutionary an impact as working with oral Chapter 2: Incorporating New Research sources had in African history a generation ago. Properly cata loged photographs should also be the basis for "schools for In 1999 Richard Fardon, professor of West African anthropology seeing," in whichreflective studyof photographs helps people to in the School of Oriental and African Studies in London, visited perceive the deepermeanings and varied significancebehind the the Basel Mission Archive. In his early fieldwork he had studied historical and contemporary images used by modern mass me an ethnic group called the Chamba on the Nigerian side of the dia merely for their immediate impact. Nigeria-Cameroon border, in the region south of Maiduguri,? A Trying to prove these assertions in the abstract is unreward numberof groupsin theCameroonGrassfieldsclaimnineteenth ing. Instead, I increasingly draw on experiences with specific century Chamba origins, not least the kingdom of Bali Nyonga photographswhenattemptingto evaluatewhathas beenachieved (see "Chapter4" below). Fardon hadbeenextending his research in Basel. I would thus like to present a kind of "cataloging to include these Cameroonian groups, looking especially at biography" of photograph E-30.86.229, "Rev. John Mosi" (first questions of cultural dynamics as probably relatively small photo), in six short "chapters." They show how an individual groups of people brought their beliefs, customs, and social image, subjected to the attention of individual cataloging, can move from being one anonymous item among thousands of others to gain an individual profile and, even as a single photo John Mosi was pastor of graph or as one of a small group of photographs, to offer unexpected information and point our thinking in new direc the Grassfields church, tions. but it was not clear from The clothing of the subject is, as a general style, traditional among the people of the region known as the Cameroon our cataloging what he Grassfields, a highland area around the city of Bamenda, where was doing or why. more than a dozen ethnic groups live in a mode of ongoing competition that has been appropriately called an informal hier archy." Some ethnic groups are organized as kingdoms, and structures into the quite new cultural context of the Cameroon others are more egalitarian. Although there is a fairly lengthy Grassfields. Duringhis 1999visit he studiedcarefullythe archive's bibliography about the Presbyterian Church (formerly the Basel Bali Nyonga photographs, focusing on anthropological-histori Mission Church) in this region, from the viewpoint of a historian cal information. of Africa, a satisfactory social, cultural, and intellectualhistory of Fardon pointed out that the archive has a few photographs thechurchin terms of regionalsocialandculturaldynamicsis yet of people celebrating the accession in 1940 of Galega II, the new to be written." fon (king) of Bali Nyonga (photographs E-30.86.224-27; see sec Having established this background, we turn to the portrait ond photo). Three of these photos (nos. 224-26) had in fact of Pastor Mosi. already come to catalogers' attention because they raised a translation question that could not be easily answered. The Chapter 1: Creating the Database original German captions refer to die Gemeinde Grasland. This phrase means literally "the Grassfields community" or "the During the initial cataloging process in the mid-1990s, taken as Grassfields congregation." Neither of these made sense. The the first step toward creating the database, the photograph itself question, Why would "community" or "congregation" qualified wasinspected. The caption and the name of the probable photog by "Grassfields" be in the singular and not in the plural? had no rapherwere enteredin thedatabase. Theresults read, "'Rev.John satisfactory answer. Mosi.' Photographer:WilhelmZurcher,between1932and1945." A second question concerned a basic ambiguity in the word It was clear that John Mosi was a pastor of the old Basel Gemeinde itself. In the usual Basel Mission language the term Mission Church in the Grassfields. The photograph could be Gemeinde refers to a Christian congregation. In German, how dated to the 1930s or 1940s, given the presence of the photogra ever, it can also mean the basic local unit of government, espe pher in Cameroon during those years.