Name: Butterflies & Barbarians
ISBN: 9780852559840

Patrick Harries

A complex and layered analysis of the impact of Swiss missionaries on the ordering and understanding of the African continent.

Swiss Missionaries & Systems of Knowledge in South-East Africa

Butterflies & Barbarians

Laurence Favre

Institutions such as the Sunday school, the museum and the botanical garden introduced the Swiss -a people without colonies or a population of slave-descent to this exciting new world. I stress in this chapter that they also created the cultural conditions for the normalization of imperialism.l5

 The missionaries' inability to see the African landscape was a product of a visual estrangement that partly explains how they saw, or failed to see, the occupants of that land. However, as they explored the country and subjected it to a new gaze, these Aufklärer reduced it to the manageable proportions and familiar outlines of a map. At the same time, they carefully collected and classified animals and plants and engaged in meticulous meteorological studies. Once they had established a cognitive control over the land, the missionaries were able to view the African popula- tion in new and more empathetic ways. 

 He developed a deep respect for indigenous powers of observation and an admiration for the indigenous system of classification. He also had a high regard for the way in which local people exploited plants for qualities that were at once medicinal, magical, sartorial and nutritional in edible or liquid form. He was intrigued by the way trees were associated with deities and spirits, and plants and animals were employed in rituals as talismans, objects of taboo, or as a means of divination.

 By emphasizing natural processes as well as taxonomic structures, Junod gave more immediate agency to nature and history than to God. This meant that, as the missionary-scientist reiterated his belief in the powers of the creator, he was also disengaging the hand of God from the order of nature.

This chapter suggests that the division of scientific knowledge into racial categories helped portray the seizure of other peoples lands as a natural process, even a benevolent duty. In this chapter I attempt to show how research in the natural sciences rested on an unequal encounter between different ways of naming, organizing and understanding nature.

The racialized concept of 'science', I believe, accompanied and informed the deliberate, rational decisions, taken on the basis of political and economic criteria that informed the logic of imperialism. But science also supplied individuals suchas Junod with the methodology needed to study society and, at the same time, provided indigenous scholars with some of the intellectual capital needed to secure their posi. tion as a political élite.

By cataloguing and classifying plants, animals and min- erals according to modern' criteria, or by collecting meteorological statistics, they convinced themselves of their ability to understand their world and exercise some control over its development. 

This activity gave men of science and letters a new source of intellectual and social capital and a very personal stake in the identification of science with progress. 124

This path had been visibly trodden in Europe where the remnants of pagan practices provided tangible proof of the need for men of science and letters to complete the modernization of society. 'In all civilized countries, the peasantry or the less cultivated portion of the town population' still adhered to the vestiges of an age of magic and animism. The culture of reason and religion carried by 'the enlightened classes' had yet to conquer the final redoubts of ignorance in Switzerland. Junod saw the incomplete nature of this struggle in the botanical knowledge of European peasants, which he considered less thorough than that of Thonga tribesmen. Even in places like La Chaux-de-Fonds, one of the industrial centres of modern Switzerland, witchcraft was still to be found. In this watchmaking centre in the canton de Neuchâtel, Junod had seen the heart of a goat or sheep pierced by a woman with at least fifty big pins in an attempt to injure her enemy. Animistic beliefs were still current in other parts of western Switzerland where peasants talked to their bees in the same manner as Thonga tribesmen talked to their pigeons.

In the early part of the nineteenth century, scientific and secular ideas associated with the Enlightenment were altering the way in which the Swiss related to their environment and to each other. Romanticism and waves of religious revival added to the chaos of comprehension as people and communities attempted to provide their tumultuous world with order and understanding. Their notion of space was trans- formed as much by the telescope and microscope as by new geographical discoveries. At the same time, advances made in geology, glaciology and palaeontology hurtled the age of the world backwards. As the Swiss struggled to orientate themselves in space and time, their views of everything from religion to landscape and politics underwent a rapid and shifting transformation. 

In the following chapter I examine the ways in which the missionaries looked at an unfamiliar landscape.6 I suggest that their view of the land in Africa was produced by conventions of seeing that were, like their practice of Christianity, the result of a long history in Switzerland. The missionaries' inability to see the African landscape was a product of a visual estrangement that partly explains how they saw, or failed to see, the occupants of that land. However, as they explored the country and subjected it to a new gaze, these Aufklärer reduced it to the manageable proportions and familiar outlines of a map. At the same time, they carefully collected and classified animals and plants and engaged in meticulous meteorological studies. Once they had established a cognitive control over the land, the missionaries were able to view the African popula- tion in new and more empathetic ways. 

6. (a) Zunod's Swordtail. In 1891 one of Junod's assistants brought him a large, fast-flying butterfly. The man had caught the insect in the Morakmene forest on the Nkomnati River and FJunod quickly sent the magnificent specimen to Roland Trimen, the entomologist who served as director of the South African Museumn in Cape Town. In 1893 Trimen described the butterfsy as a nem species and gave it the name Papilio junodi (a 'Swallomtail'). The butterfly was later reclassified in the genus Graphium and is today known as Graphium junodi (Trimen, 1893). Its common name is Junod's Swordtail'. This photograph shoms the original specimen sent by Junod to Trimen. Iziko South Afrcan Museum, Cape Town. (b) Paralethe dendrophilis junodi (Van Son). See pp. 134-5.

There was a closed finality in the faith Junod attached to both creeds, ranging light against darkness and reason against ignorance. The contribution of his representation of science to the constitution of power became clear when he described the temple of science' as the home to the 'scientific truth that 'rules the whole of the civilized world'. Or when he wrote that the light of knowledge will certainly, in the course of a long time, dissipate all those shadows of animism from the native soul. In an age preceding mechanized and atomic warfare, industrial genocide, HIV/AIDS and the destruction of the environment, Junod felt that to work for science is noble, science has never opposed the betterment and ennoblement of humanity'. At times, he personified science as a living thing. Junod's faith in science led him to believe, like Buxton and Livingstone, that enlightened thought and religion were the keys to progress and the means to regenerate Africa's intellectual energies and inventive faculties.

The glorification of God through the examination of his handiwork was only one of the reasons for Junod's interest in the natural sciences. By ordering the world of plants and animals, Junod seemed to bring an element of domestication to the amor- phous and chaotic world that surrounded the mission. Through his entomological and botanical studies, he was able to explain the local environment in terms of a system of understanding that he and others qualified as universal. But this understanding was built on a hierarchy of knowledge that, as this chapter will reveal, created and encouraged imperialism. Local people were excellent observers and collectors of data, had their own ideas about classification and contributed in important ways to 'scien- tific' knowledge; but ultimately Junod felt that they were unaware of the true system underlying the organization and understanding of nature.

This system of naming, using Latin binomials, was an integral part of the process of taking hold of the land, for it embraced and assimilated the local in a way that made the foreign familiar and domesticated the disorderly for the European scientist.

Junod found the indigenous people had a great deal to teach European scientists about the utility of plants. On several occasions he invited natives to his museum where they supplied him with the local names and uses of plants in exchange for a shilling. He never seemed to consider that this source of commercial gain might inspire informants to exaggerate or embellish their accounts. Junod recognized that diviners (who predicted the future) and gobelas (skilled in exorcizing unwelcome spir- its) possessed an intricate knowledge of the animals and plants used in the pursuance of their professions. He particularly admired old women and nangas, or specialist medicine-men, whose knowledge of the medicinal, nutritional and magic properties of plants constituted a rough form of classification. The nanga were familiar with 'real, powerful drugs' which they administered in conjunction with therapeutic prac- tices."" In a way that indicates a genuine desire to coax medicinal cures from local plants, Junod assembled a Ronga pharmacopoeia in the ethnographic museum in Neuchâtel and sent plants to Geneva for analysis." 

At a time when biologists seldom mentioned the names and achievements of their native assistants, Junod made a point of drawing attention to the work of these individ- uals and on one occasion he photographed his three major collectors.® Elias Libombo or Spoon', a local diviner who sold thatching grass, and whose wife had joined the mission, proved a particularly adept butterfly collector. 

To succeed in this field, a collector has to be aware of the short life span of the but- terfly, its selective feeding habits and its sensitivity to ecological and climatological change. An expert like Elias Libombo had to catch the high-flying, swooping charaxes as well as skippers flitting from plant to plant. He needed to recognize the larval host plants of different species of butterfly and he had to know where on these plants the female would lay her eggs. He needed to identify when, and for how long, adults would emerge and fly, the places favoured by males searching for mates, and the kind of food preferred by both male and female adults. To achieve these ends he had to be able to distinguish in particular the coloration, shape and design according to which butterflies were situated in genera, species and varieties. Because of his abilities as a collector, Junod entrusted Spoon with a net, bottles, ether, and numerous paper cones in which to capture, kill and store his specimens. He was frequently sent on expedi- tions to the butterfly collectors' Eldorado' on the lower Nkomati. On at least one occasion Junod sent Spoon on an extended trip of several days to the terra incognita to the bend in the Nkomati.

To put this another way, when Junod and his colleagues looked at the land, their gaze was shaped by a very particular, European aesthetic experience. It was only through their cognitive (re)organization of the land that the missionaries gradually took charge of their environment.

Butterflies & Barbarians Swiss Missionaries & Systems of Knowledge in South-East Africa

Popular highlights