17
Ngami refusing to be photographed because he was not
suitably attired and bartering his consent for items of
the explorer’s clothing.
Since the 1798 publication and subsequent transla-
tion of Scottish explorer Mungo Park’s (1771–1806)
best-selling book about his travels on the Gambia River,
the courageous adventurer had become a familiar and
romantic fi gure in nineteenth-century European popular
imagination. From the late 1870s travellers capitalised
on this existing taste for tales of the ‘Interior’ by pub-
lishing photographically illustrated personal accounts
and memoirs in books, contemporary newspapers and
magazines. Henry Morton Stanley’s (1841–1904) pho-
tographs from his second Central African expedition of
1874, which were probably the earliest produced by the
dry-plate process in sub-Saharan Africa, contributed to
the illustration of his Through the Dark Continent (1878).
Photography was also employed by the numerous
missionaries who came to Africa. Taking advantage
of local unfamiliarity with the technology, they made
show-like photographic demonstrations to impress and
gain infl uence in often volatile political climates. In
1862 William Ellis (1794–1872) of the London Mis-
sionary Society and author of the photographically
illustrated Three Visits to Madagascar (1858) was em-
broiled in a political scandal surrounding the attempted
assassination of the island’s King Radama II. Another
British missionary Henry Aaron Stern’s (1820–1885)
Wanderings Among the Falashas in Abyssinia (1862),
an account of his conversion of Jewish Ethiopians illus-
trated by his photographs of the country and its people
offended Emperor Theodore II (1818–1868) during a
critical period for Anglo-Ethiopian relations. In 1863
Stern was arrested, beaten and imprisoned at Gondar
and later Magdala.
Photography also served missionaries as a teaching
and conversion aid. Lantern-slide shows of photographic
images, created or borrowed by missionaries, were used
to demonstrate the benefi ts of conversion and to teach
biblical, moral and other educational stories. Shows
were even used to compete with and distract from
‘heathen’ activities such as tribal dancing. Publicity,
support and fund-raising for their missions in Europe
were furthered by juxtaposed, staged photographs of
naked and dirty, clothed and orderly ‘natives’ before
and after conversion. Missionaries also contributed to
the dissemination of photography on the continent by
passing on their techniques and equipment to African
assistants and friends. German administrator, Heinrich
Klose, recorded teaching Meppo, a young Togolese boy
to develop fi lm in 1897.
Photography was also employed for ethnographic
studies. The founding of Ethnological Society of Lon-
don in 1843 was symptomatic of a growth in European
interest in human races and their classifi cation through
the study of distinguishing external features and in-
herent characteristics. In Africa and elsewhere travel-
lers and missionaries photographed native people to
provide ‘scientifi c’ proof for the emergent disciplines
of anthropology and ethnography. In 1866 the Royal
Geographical Society, London appointed photographer
and travel writer John Thomson (1837–1921) to instruct
explorers in photography to improve the accuracy and
professionalism of their visual records. Three years
later the British Colonial Offi ce ordered governors to
collect and send to London photographs documenting
the empire’s various native races. Travellers took bust
and full-length photographs in profi le, back and front
of nude indigenous people. French explorer and archae-
ologist Claude- Joseph- Désiré Charnay (1828–1915)
produced a study in this style of the ethnically mixed
population of Reunion in 1863, which is now held in the
island’s Natural History Museum. In Hamburg between
1873–1874, Carl Dammann (died 1874) gathered im-
ages of peoples of the world, sent by missionaries and
travellers. Portfolios like Dammann’s Anthropologisch-
Ethnologisches Album in Photographien (1873–1876),
organised portraits according to nationality and race and
presented them in a grid-like chart that facilitated pseudo-
scientifi c observations of ‘racial’ characteristics and the
creation of taxonomies of ethnographic types. European
categorization of ‘natives’ conveniently justifi ed their
subjection to authoritarian and colonial powers.
Photography was integrated into colonial administra-
tion, both aiding and documenting European expansion
in sub-Saharan Africa. Applied to surveying, map-mak-
ing and the reproduction of plans, it greatly increased
European knowledge of the terrains into which they
ventured. The usefulness of the medium for recording
military operations was recognised early on in Britain
where the War Department appointed Charles Thurston-
Thompson (1816–1868) ), Superintendent of Photogra-
phy at the South Kensington (later Victoria and Albert)
Museum, to train the Royal Engineers in photography in- During the Abyssinian Expedition of 1868, they
photographed their camp, soldiers and their activities
along the 400 mile journey inland from Zula, Eritrea to
the mountain citadel Magdala. The photographs are in
the Victoria and Albert Museum, London. The Anglo-
Zulu wars of 1879–1884 and the British expedition to
Benin in 1897 were also documented. George T. Ferney-
hough, who was the fi rst non-military professional pho-
tographer to accompany the British troops in the fi eld,
covered the Anglo-Zulu wars and published his work
in an album of views. War photojournalists correspond-
ing for newspapers were rare until the early twentieth
century. Filippo Ledru, who reported the Italian landing
in Massawa in 1885 was one early exception.