
Our first blog of the year comes from stipend holder Rinella Cere, Emerita Professor at Sheffield Hallam University. Rinella visited us last autumn and here she discusses her research on imperial progaganda through magic lantern slides, focusing on collections telling the story of David Livingstone in Africa.
Information:
This blog contains historic images of enslaved people and colonial exploitation.
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My time at the archive of the Bill Douglas Museum was originally planned as an initial search for colonial and empire-related lantern slides and instruction manuals, which I knew were part of the collection from visiting the website prior to the research visit. What I had not calculated, as it is often the case with archival research, is that a ‘morphic’ effect would take place and what had originally been envisaged as a discrete search turned into a much bigger enterprise, with many more considerations beyond the Victorian-related colonial and imperial slides. The varied collection ranged from avowedly racist Junior Lecturer Series, ‘Dissolving Views’ and children’s rhymes to the set of The Mayflower and the Pilgrims Fathers, and many more to mention here. Details of these slides are now neatly catalogued in my own writing files, undoubtedly worthy of further study and critical interpretation.
However, amongst the wealth of visual and textual material looked at, I have decided to write here about the full set of 40 colour tinted pictorial lantern slides about the life and ‘exploits’ of David Livingstone (EXEBD 99256) as an example of both popular visual entertainment of the Victorian era and of imperial ideology. There is however another reason for this blog’s choice, the accidental encounter with visual ‘fact’ (photographic slide) and ‘fiction’ (pictorial slide), perhaps not new to seasoned scholars of magic lantern’s slides, but a direct visual-inspired finding for me to unpack the mythmaking narrative about a man that was described, without any sense of irony and paradox at least in the Victorian mind, as both missionary and explorer, both at the service of God and the ‘civilising mission’ of the British empire. The title and subtitle thus ran: ‘The Life and Work of David Livingstone. Missionary and Explorer’ published on behalf of the London Missionary Society.
Front page of the Lecture’s booklet and the list of the 40 slides
Lantern slides’ sets were often accompanied by booklets and/or instruction manuals, the latter short publications with technical details about how to use them, at times incorporated into the booklets with a narrative description of the slides themselves as well as additional commentaries to drive the message home, whether religious or pseudo-scientific. Looking at the extensive list of slides tell us that this would have been quite a lengthy ‘lecture’ but honing down on the details tell us even more about the complicity between religion, colonial expansion, commercial interests and imperial power. All this, shrouded in the mythologising of David Livingstone, the man, from his humble beginnings to his heroic, quasi-saintly status, and premature death.
The mythology surrounding David Livingstone has received short shrift from many studies over the years but what was a real surprise looking at this particular set of coloured slides is that some of them had their origins in real life photographs, exact pictorial descriptions, which were part of a different and miscellaneous slides set, while others were clearly drawings based on fictional stories promoted by himself and others. The finding as mentioned above was accidental; once I had completed looking at the David Livingstone’s slides and consulted the accompanying lecture booklet, I thought I look at the miscellaneous set titled ‘Stanley and Livingstone’ (EXE BD 95536) partly intrigued by slide 33 of the set which depicted pictorially the encounter between the two men in Central Africa; another much mythologised event albeit a verifiable one, as Henry Morton Stanley, a Welsh American journalist and explorer, did indeed go on an expedition to rescue Dr Livingstone who had gone missing during his search of what he thought was the origins of the Nile (which turned out to be the Congo River); although much doubt has been cast on the famous sentence: ‘Dr Livingstone I presume’, but nonetheless much reprised in popular culture to this day.
Photographs/pictorial slides
In the Stanley and Livingstone set I found six photographic slides that were reproduced pictorially in the David Livingstone set, in what appear to be an early case of ‘intermediality’ (Gaudreault, 2011). The six photographic slides in question were described in the lecture slides as: ‘Home in which he was born’ (slide 2), a rather striking building and birthplace of David Livingstone (today it has been restored and has become the David Livingstone Birthplace Museum).
‘Bechuana Congregation’ (slide 7) with him visibly playing on what appears to be a musical instrument, possibly a small organ.
‘Almond tree at Kuruman’ (slide 9), this particular slide shows him sitting under an almond tree between two women, all engaged in reading, with one of the women identified as the prospective wife, Mary Moffat (also the daughter of a well-known missionary) in the lecture’s description: ‘Under this almond tree he popped the question, and they joined hands in travels and toil for many years’. From what we know now, Mary Moffat’s life was far from idyllic, and the romance turned very sour indeed when left at home back in Britain bringing up their six children in poverty.
The photograph/pictorial slide called ‘The Fetish’ (slide 16), again reproduced faithfully, is of a village scene with a local spiritual artefact used to ward off malevolent spirits, and in the background a group of unidentified people outside their home. The usual description is rendered, comparing African people beliefs in ‘evil spirits’ to those of ‘children [who] speak of a bad fairy’.
‘Ivory and Carriers’ (slide 19) equally faithful to the original photograph, with very detailed copied drawing of the piles of elephants’ tusks on the ground, has a rather confusing narrative about ivory traffic, enslavement and ‘Arab’ perpetrators. The figures standing in European dress may not be white, but they are certainly not identifiable in the photographic slide or the pictorial equivalent as Arab men. The stereotype about Arab traders of ivory and enslaved people has often been used to exculpate the white colonial project. If it is true that by the time Livingstone left for his first journey to Africa in 1840, the act for the abolition of enslavement had been passed (1 August 1838), nonetheless, the British economic and civilisational imperial project was at its height and David Livingstone’s life and work with its mythic aura was instrumental to what came to be known later as the ‘scramble for Africa’ (Jeal, 2013).
The last slide copied from a real life photograph is slide 26, with the simple title in the lecture’s booklet ‘Hippopotamus’. At the centre of the narrative as expected is Livingstone himself rather than the hippopotamus, alongside the description of the butchering of the animal (it is not evident whether the animal is dead in the photograph but I imagine it to be so) and the extraordinary imperial claim that ‘Although it would not be selected by an Englishman in preference to other meat, it is highly esteemed by the natives, who prefer quantity in this matter to quality’.
Colonial pictorial fantasies
Significantly, the slides depicting David Livingstone heroic gestures are exclusively drawings, no photographs are available of these ‘extraordinary’ gestures (perhaps understandably?), such as fighting with a lion, tackling African warriors (described as cannibals) or freeing enslaved people. The pictorial slides appeared very much to be the same from both sets, clear evidence of the beginning of mass reproduced slides from the same original artist’s work; the only difference being that the David Livingstone series is in colour and the Stanley and Livingstone series is in black and white and in a slightly larger format, probably to be used with a different lantern manufacture.
I have selected five examples from the David Livingstone’s slides set and textual description which are particularly central to the construction of the hero and which as far as I know have no record in photographic evidence except from his own writing, from the other members of his expeditions or subsequent extensive rewriting, for example from the likes of Henry Morton Stanley and in the form of numerous biographies.
In the impressive study of Justine Livingstone[i] (2015) it is argued that even as recently as 2003 in the book by Martin Dugard’s Into Africa: The Dramatic Retelling of the Stanley–Livingstone Story (2003), David Livingstone is portrayed ‘as a figure of heroic mettle journeying through the obstacle-ridden African terrain’ (Livingstone, 2015, p.126). And low and behold, over a century later the lion attack gets a re-mention not so distant in content from slide 12, ‘Livingstone and the Lion’: ‘He survived a lion attack “with a preternatural calm” and “set the bone and sutured the eleven puncture wounds himself, without anaesthetic”. A paradigm of fortitude, Livingstone left writings that “were often flecked with blood or stained by drops of sweat”’. (Dugard cited in Livingstone, 2015, p.126). There is no mention of the absence of anaesthetic in this slide’s narrative but more ‘popularly’ is the tartan jacket that fulfils that role!
Note the description of the tartan jacket as anaesthetic!
In this lantern lecture, slide 12 merits a longer narrative of well over a page of the booklet, unlike other slides with less heroic content, which only merit a few lines.
Similarly, in the ‘The Manyuema Ambush’ (slide 27) when Livingstone and his team was attacked by the Manyuema (today referred to as Manyema) depicts Livingstone being reached by an arrow; the description, an especially ‘fabled’ tale of anti-slavery sentiments, heroic antics and bravery. And even more fabled, in the description of the Manyema people: ‘The Manyuema country in which he soon found himself was 150 miles north-west of Tanganyika and its people were cannibals’. Except, there is no recorded evidence by anthropologists or anyone else of them being cannibals![ii] (Zöller, 2019).
Three slides in particular, although purporting to have a serious message about slavery and its abolition come across as hagiographies of Dr Livingstone, but also of other members of the missions and of the British colonial efforts as a whole. For example, slide 20, 21 and 22, respectively depicting a ‘Slave Dhow’, The Slave Gang’ and ‘Liberating a Slave’.
Justin Livingstone (no relation I imagine) has argued that on occasions Livingstone (and subsequently the myth) was put to the service of a critical stance on British colonialism and imperialism:
For the most part, Livingstone was engaged for triumphalist purposes, yet at the same time he had the capacity to serve as a resource to provide some critique, however limited, of imperial transgressions. Those rare occasions in which Livingstone served an oppositional function are conspicuous enough to be considered counter-hegemonic constructions (Livingstone, 2015, p.115).
But in these three slides (and in many other popular culture forms)[iii] the text which accompanies them, is not an exercise in counter-hegemony but rather an obfuscation of the history of slavery, because in what it describes as ‘four hundred years [that] this shameful traffic grew unchecked’, no questions are asked who was directing this traffic and what/where was the destination. A traffic abstracted from the perpetrators, with the final line glorifying Livingstone himself: ‘He made way for liberty by unveiling of the gaze of Europe the whole scene of horror’, (slide 21). Full circle with the description of the first slide which sets the scene (which I am yet to mention): ‘Portrait of Livingstone’ with its apocryphal introduction; it narrates the heroic gestures of Arnold von Winkelried, a Swiss soldier against the Austrian Army in 1386, who singlehandedly breached the ranks of the Austrian army with the motto ‘Make way for liberty’ and dying in the process.
As a final refection I want to mention one particular slide which at least on the surface sets it apart from all the other 39. It is the reproduction of what I imagine was a portrait photograph (in the same way as Livingstone’s portrait that begins this blog) of Khama, ‘a Christian ruler of great wisdom and determination’. Livingstone’ association is not in fact with Khama himself but with his father, who in fact never converted. Khama is cited as having said that ‘his father had a great admiration for Livingstone and might have become a Christian if the missionary had been able to remain longer with him.’ How that took place in relation to his son, it’s not mentioned or forthcoming in the slide description. The text for the slide does however centre on the praises to Khama for having stopped the brewing and consumption of beer and hence implying adherence to the values of the Congregational Church to which they both belonged. In slide 8, the pictorial portrait of Khama is very similar to that of Livingstone in slide 1, and it is the only exception to a visual and textual narrative dedicated to Livingstone ‘the hero’.
There are many more fictional pictorial slides in the set which would warrant different critical approaches, for example another myth surrounding Livingstone was his love and respect for animals (slide 30, Elephant Protecting her Young). Additional archival search may also throw up more real-life photographs reproduced in the pictorial slides either in the BDM archive itself or in other photographic and cinema museums archives. This would help further in untangling myths and counter-myths which were central to the British empire, but which have survived well into the twentieth century, even if not quite into the twenty-first.
References
Jeal, Tim (2013) Livingstone: Revised and Expanded Edition. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Gaudreault, André (2011) Film and Attraction, from Kinematograph to Cinema. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.
Kelly, Alexandra C. (2021) Consuming Ivory: Mercantile Legacies of East Africa and New England. Seattle: University of Washington Press.
Livingstone, Justin D. (2015) Livingstone’s Lives. A Metabiography of a Victorian Icon. Manchester: Manchester University Press.
Rapp, Dean and Weber, Charles W. (1989) ‘British Film, Empire and Society in the Twenties: the 'Livingstone' film, 1923–1925’. Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, Vol. 9, No. 1, pp. 3-17.
Zöller, Katharina (2019) ‘Crossing Multiple Borders: “The Manyema” in Colonial East Central Africa’. History in Africa , Vol. 46 , pp. 299 – 326.
Acknowledgements
A big thank you to Phil Wickham and all the members of the team for the assistance in accessing the archival material as well as for their friendliness and care throughout my visit. I had never visited the Bill Douglas Cinema Museum or its unique archive, much to my shame as a researcher of film museums, therefore I am doubly indebted for the offer of the Visiting Researcher Stipend which made it possible.
[i] For a comprehensive study of Livingstone’s biographies see Livingstone’s Lives. A Metabiography of a Victorian Icon.
[ii] This colonial myth about the Mayema being cannibals is also spoken by the David Livingstone character (Cedric Hardwicke) in a scene with the Stanely’s character (Spencer Tracy) in the 1939 film ‘Stanely and Livingstone’, directed by Heny King and Otto Brower, a 20th Century Fox Production.
[iii] For example, in the 1925 silent film ‘Livingstone’, produced, directed and starred by M.A. Wetherall in the title role with a hagiographic story line about his missionary zeal and his endeavours to bring slavery to an end.