Ethnographic Appropriations: German Exploration and Fieldwork in West-Central Africa

Abstract

German voyages of ‘discovery’ and field research in that part of Africa which, politically or linguistically, has been subject to Portuguese influence in past centuries, and still is so—an area which therefore corresponds for the most part (and also sufficiently so) to present-day Angola—has so far received only sporadic attention in corresponding historical writings. Nor for the most part have they been taken into account as ethnographic sources, language barriers above all being responsible for this. This is hardly because they are negligible in terms of either their numbers or the information they contain. In the last third of the nineteenth century especially, west-central Africa, in which Portuguese had been alingua francafor centuries, became a special area of attraction for German travelers. Admittedly, the published results are far from even. One, Augspurger's, is interesting above all for the early date of his report. The scientific reputation of others, like the Jaspert brothers, is extremely dubious. For yet others, like Baum and Jessen, ethnographic documentation was of only marginal interest. The greater part of Wilhelm's sketches have been lost.On the other hand, one cannot write knowledgeably about the Loango coast without consulting Brun's and Pechuël-Loesche's reports. Any statement on northeast Angola in the last quarter of the nineteenth century will lose in value if one fails to use Pogge, Lux, Buchner, and Schütt. Studies on the Kisama without Mattenklodt or on the Cokwe without Baumann's great monograph would at best be a skeleton, at worst a distortion, in the context of what is possible.