Name: Shaping Natural History and Settler Society
Author: Tanja Hammel

Front matter

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Shaping Natural History and Settler Society

Mary Elizabeth Barber and the Nineteenth-Century Cape

Preface

‘Probably the most advanced woman of her time in South Africa’! created the illustration on the cover of this book. A woman who is hardly known. On 13 November 1864, the Cape-based botanist, entomologist, archaeologist and ornithologist Mary Elizabeth Barber wrote to the Irish botanist William Henry Harvey about a ‘curious little plant’ that her brother Henry had found:

growing upon a sandy hill side, in an isolated spot of not more than 9 or 10 yards square, nearly all of them, 8 in number, were in blossom, & he searched the neighbourhood in vain, for more of them, none were to be found. How curiously a group or two of these little plants seem to stand alone in isolated spots, as if they were the last of their species quietly finishing their course in this world.’

She felt similarly isolated from the world and believed Harvey to be the only botanist truly interested in Cape flora. It was perhaps in 1865 that Barber made a watercolour painting of the plant and sent further specimens to Dublin. These were mounted by Harvey and can be traced in the herbarium today. They are labelled ‘806 Tsomo River on flats [Tsomo River Valley in the former Transkei] — new Brachystelma’. And on the sheet, Harvey pencilled ‘Brachystelma barberiae MS.’

Harvey could not publish about the plant as by that time he was seriously ill and no longer able to work regularly. He died in May 1866, and Barber had to find a new authority who would publish ‘her discovery’. She sent ‘a drawing of curious Brachystelma’ to the botanist Joseph Dalton vii vill © PREFACE

Hooker, the director of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, London.* In her accompanying letter, Barber described the desolate state of Cape Botany without Harvey. Her strategy worked: Hooker published a hand-coloured lithograph and description of it in Curtiss Botanical Magazine. The description derived entirely from the painting, as he had never seen the plant alive or dead. At Trinity College Dublin Herbarium (TCD), there is one herbarium specimen which in its broad outlines resembles the drawing, and could have served as the model for Barber’s watercolour. The species was called Brachystemla barberiae Harvey ex Hooker fil.

Thanking Hooker for the copy of the magazine she had received, Barber stated that ‘all drawings’ came ‘far short of the original, with its beautiful arches and purple blossoms’. In an apologetic manner, she then continued describing that this plant had an ‘abominable’ scent, which was ‘only appreciated by the “blue bottle” flies’.° It is salient that Barber initially only reported on her visual perception and neglected the plant’s scent—one of its key features. Most likely, she had only seen her brother’s dried specimens or she might have omitted her olfactory experience due to vision being the preferred sense in science and culture, with the former explanation being the more likely. She did additional research on the plant after sending her specimens to Harvey. With its ‘marvelous appearance’ and ‘strange scent’, Brachystelma barberiae perfectly matched Barber’s botanical research interest which she once described as ‘the marvelous [sic] and the strange, either in appearance or in habits’.”

Yet, the question arises what the type of now-called Brachystelma barberae actually is, as correspondence between two botanists of TCD and Kew from the mid-1980s stored at TCD shows. The type could be the illustration in Curtis’s Botanical Magazine, the somewhat similar specimen at Dublin (which Hooker never saw), the plant from which Barber made the illustration (if different from the one in the herbarium, no longer extant). The fact that the description was made from a drawing and not from an actual plant raises a problem the two botanists had never encountered before. Thus, the botanist at Kew argued that Barber’s original painting ‘should be designated holotype’, the reproductions of it were ‘isotypes’ and the specimen at TCD a ‘typotype’.®

According to the botanist S. P. Bester of the Pretoria National Herbarium, Brachystelma barberae is ‘without doubt the most spectacular species in the genus’.? The colour and odour of the plant remind of decaying carcasses. Today, it is not but its occurrence depends on its use by people and animals. In rural areas when food is scarce, tubers are eaten as

PREFACE ix a food supplement. San use it as a daily food supplement. Porcupines, baboons, rodents and certain insects are fond of the tubers as well. The tubers serve as a source of water in dry habitats where the plant occurs. No specific medicinal use is known, but many tuberous brachystelmas are used for headaches, stomach aches and colds in children.!°

This short history and contextualisation of Brachystelma barberae in many ways serves as a prolepsis to what follows in this book. The woman who is commemorated in its name, who has provided the first herbarium specimens and first watercolour of the plant is at the centre. The Haitian scholar Michel-Rolph Trouillot in his seminal book Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History rejected ‘both the naive proposition that we are prisoners of our pasts and the pernicious suggestion that history is whatever we make of it’. ‘History’, according to Trouillot, ‘is the fruit of power, but power itself is never so transparent that its analysis becomes superfluous. The ultimate mark of power may be its invisibility; the ultimate challenge’ for historians, ‘the exposition of its roots’.'! In this vein, this book narrates a history of a neglected woman scientist in the Cape and makes power relations in science and society visible. Power relations had a deep impact on whether Barber’s words and illustrations were published, praised, criticised, plagiarised, neglected, ignored, silenced, kept and later archived, destroyed, remembered, forgotten or analysed / written about.

Zurich, Switzerland Tanja Hammel NOTES 1. (Glen and Germishuizen 2010, 88). 2. TCD, 806 Brachystelma barberiae MS. 3. TCD, 806 Brachystelma barberiae MS. 4. Cover, Kew Library, Art and Archives (KLAA), Brachystelma barberiae, watercolour on paper by Mary Elizabeth Barber, preparatory illustration for plate 5607, volume 92, Curtis’s Botanical Magazine, 1866, with permission from the Royal Botanic Gardens Kew, all rights reserved.

5. (Hooker 1866). For an open access version of a reproduced hand-coloured lithograph see: https://www.biodiversitylibrary.org/item/14368#page/ 286/mode/1up accessed 2 December 2018.

X PREFACE

6. KLAA, Director’s Correspondence (DC), Volume 189, Barber to Hooker, Highlands, 26 December 1866, Letter 112. 7. KLAA, DC, V. 189, Letter 113, Barber to J. D. Hooker, Highlands, 26 December 1866. 8. Correspondence stored at TCD. Letter by David A. Webb (TCD) to R. K. Brummitt (Kew), 25 January 1984; Telegram from R. K. Brummitt to D. A. Webb, 10 February 1984. TCD, 806 Brachystelma barberiae MS. 9. S.P. Bester, Brachystelma barberae Harv. ex Hook.f., September 2008 http://pza.sanbi.org/brachystelma-barberae, accessed 2 December 2018. 10. S.P. Bester, Brachystelma barberae Harv. ex Hook.f., September 2008 http://pza.sanbi.org/brachystelma-barberae, accessed 2 December 2018. 11. (Trouillot 1995, xix).

Glen, Hugh Francis, and Gerrit Germishuizen. 2010. Botanical Exploration of Southern Africa. 2nd ed. Strelitzia 26. Pretoria: South African National Biodiversity Institute.

Hooker, Joseph Dalton. 1866. Brachystelma barberiae, Mrs. Barber’s Brachystelma. Curtis’s Botanical Magazine 92: tab. 5607.

Trouillot, Michel-Rolph. 1995. Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History. Boston: Beacon Press.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

‘Akukho Ntaka Inokubhabha Ngephiko Elinye [No Bird Can Fly on One Wing] is a proverb (amaghalo) in isiXhosa which comes from birdcatchers who argue that without or with lopsided preparations, the result will be flawed.’ Being a bird with one wing, I wrote this book with the support of a number of people, each one of them being a feather for my second wing—some bigger, some smaller.

The late Patrick Harries proved an enthusiastic supervisor who was passionate about the project, opened many doors for me and introduced me to inspiring scholars, research topics and literature. For his help, I am immensely grateful. Originally having been trained as a European cultural historian, particularly in what is called ‘Historische Anthropologie’ in German, African History, New Imperial History and the History of Knowledge and Science were new fields to me. Without Julia Tischler, this book would not have been published. She has been supporting me ever since her arrival in Basel and kindly offered to supervise me after Patrick’s sudden passing. I thank her for her keen interest, encouragement and faith in my abilities as a junior colleague. Rebekka Habermas has crucially contributed to the outcome by her own research, in conversation, by introducing me to literature and commenting on my drafts and articles before publication. Christine Winter and Kirsten McKenzie enabled me to spend three stimulating months as an affiliate researcher at the University of Sydney, where I met many brilliant historians, wrote the two best chapters—the heart of the book—and learnt more about Australian historiography. Christine Winter’s constructive criticism enriched this book.

xi xii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This book is the main outcome of project number 146259 (‘Mary Elizabeth Barber (1818-1899): A History of Knowledge, Gender and Natural History’) funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF). I am very grateful to the SNSF for their generous financial support and particularly the open-access grant which allows for the book’s wider distribution, under the grant number 10BP-2_186623. I am also grateful to the Basel Graduate School of History, the Swiss-South African Joint Research Programme, the Gesellschaft fiir Europäische Uberseegeschichte (GUSG), the Basellandschaftliche Kantonalbank and the Freie Akademische Gesellschaft Basel for their financial support. I thank the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences of the University of Basel for the 2018 award for the best dissertation in the humanities and social sciences, sponsored by the L. & Th. La Roche-Foundation. For a thriving intellectual environment, I thank the interdisciplinary Centre for African Studies and eikones, The National Centre of Competence in Research Iconic Criticism, at the University of Basel as well as the Departments of History at the University of Basel and the University of Zurich.

The list of archivists and helpful persons I encountered while doing archival research in South Africa, Australia and Europe is long, so I will limit myself to the most important: I thank Lin Andrew, Cecilia Blight, Julia Buckley, Elaine Charwat, Alan Cohen, Liz de Wet, Tony Dold, Sheree Fourie, Victor Gacula, Geoffrey Gray, Leslie Hart, Linda Ireland, Alan Kirkaldy, Laurel C. Kriegler, Winnie Madikizela, Lindinxiwa Mahlasela, Valerie McAtear, Angela Mitford-Barberton, Mbuleli Mpokela, John Parnell, Jeff Peires, Roberto Sala, Barry September, Cornelius Thomas, Amy van Wezel, Fleur Way-Jones, Roberto Zaugg, Gcobisa Zomelele, the Basler Afrika Bibliographien team and all the librarians in the university libraries I consulted.

I thank Susann Baller, Benjamin Briihwiler, Lawrence Dritsas, Saul Dubow, Martin Dusinberre, Jim Endersby, Carolyn Hamilton, Dag Henrichsen, Nancy J. Jacobs, Gesine Krüger, David N. Livingstone, Arno Schubbach, Cassandra Mark-Thiesen, Giorgio Miescher, Anna Vögeli, Kim A. Wagner, Ousmane Seydi and Tizian Zumthurm who have all provided valuable feedback on papers and chapters at workshops and on other occasions. My colleagues Melanie Eva Boehi and Flavia Grossmann proved particularly helpful over the years. Thanks to Zamira Angst, Ursula Burger, Madeleine Gloor, late Priscilla Hall, Dag Henrichsen, Stefanie Marolf, Lea Pfaffli and Julia Streicher who all read parts of this book and provided

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS xiii valuable advice. Patrick Meredith Grogan proved a wonderful editor who improved this book considerably. I also wish to particularly thank Andrew Bank, Nigel Penn and William Beinart who provided immensely valuable criticism. Thanks to the editors Molly Beck and Maeve Sinnott, the project manager Mahalakshmi Mariappan as well as to the series editors Saul Dubow and Richard Drayton for their enthusiasm, understanding and infinite patience.

I am grateful to my grandparents whose passion for nature was infectious, to my family (particularly my parents) and to my friends for their constant encouragement, love and support. My deepest gratitude is owed to Balz for his support, optimism and patient understanding. Yet without the arrival of our son and his demanding more and more of our attention, this book would have been published much later, if at all.

NOTE

REFERENCE

Bradford, Helen. 2008. Akukho Ntaka Inokubhabha Ngephiko Elinye (No Bird Can Fly on One Wing): The ‘Cattle-Killing Delusion’ and Black Intellectuals, c1840-1910. African Studies 67: 209-232.

Praise for Shaping Natural History and Settler Society

“Tanja Hammel has performed a remarkable service in bringing the redoubtable, intelligent and complex character, and the multiple contributions, of Mary Elizabeth Barber into sharp focus. Barber’s shadowy presence in many of the emerging environmental sciences in Southern Africa has long deserved detailed examination. While Barber is shown to be multifaceted and talented, Hammel also employs her life and work to analyse and understand the intricate colonial and imperial world of the nineteenth century.”

—Jane Carruthers, Emeritus Professor, University of South Africa, South Africa

“This book is not just a detailed study of Mary Elizabeth Barber, an important woman naturalist, but is an important contribution to the histories of women and science in colonial settings. By analysing the complex power dynamics of gender, science and colonialism, Hammel shows that these three did not merely coexist, but produced, reinforced and modified each other. The result is a rich, thought-

provoking study that should be read by scholars in many different fields.” —Jim Endersby, Professor of the History of Science, School of History, Art History and Philosophy, University of Sussex, UK (author of Imperial Nature: Joseph Hooker and the practices of Victorian Science (2008))

“Stereotypically, science in the nineteenth century was an activity of prosperous white men resident in the metropolis. In contrast, the subject of this book, Mary Barber, was a colonial woman, who nevertheless was able to make significant contributions to natural history, especially botany. Hammel shows how Barber’s struggle as an outsider shaped both her botany and her socio-political views, as a feminist avant la letter. A truly fascinating and important study of a remarkable

woman.”

—Robert Ross, Professor Emeritus in African Studies at the Leiden University Institute for History, the Netherlands

“This book exposes a complex politics within nineteenth-century imperial science. As a member of the Cape elite, Mary Elizabeth Barber interacted with the English establishment from the provincial margins. As a woman, she confronted experts who inevitably treated her as a subordinate. As a white person in colonial Africa, she inhabited a racialized hierarchy that devalued indigenous naturalists’ knowledge while exploiting their labor. Hammel deftly shows how Barber negotiated these

intersecting identities through her Darwinian understandings.” —Nancy J. Jacobs, Professor, Department of History and Institute for Environment and Society, Brown University, USA

“Tanja Hammel’s painstaking years of labour in recovering the hidden and suppressed archival traces across three continents of the life history and scientific labours of Mary Barber does reveal her to have been a truly remarkable Cape frontierswoman who contributed significantly to Victorian and South African science. Above all, the book exposes the multiple levels on which a mythologised narrative of the progressive development of knowledge by liberal men of science and conservation, here of the modern field sciences, has marginalised the contributions of women and Africans to knowledge production. It is a refreshing and all too rare celebration of the historian’s craft of the close reading of archival sources.” —Andrew Bank, Associate Professor in History, Faculty of Arts, University of the Western Cape, Cape Town, South Africa

Contents

1l Introduction

Part I African Experts and Science in the Cape 2 African Farmers and Medicinal Plant Experts

Part II From Providing Data to Forging New Practices and Theories

4 Gender, Class and Competition 5 Proving and Circulating the Theory of Natural Selection i xvii xviii © CONTENTS Part III Negotiating Belonging Through Science 221

7 Arguing with Artefacts, Biofacts and Organisms: Barber’s Advocacy for 1820 Settlers’ Supremacy and Land Rights 223

8 Barber’s World of Birds As a Space of Gender Equality 259 9 Colonial Legacies in Post-Colonial Collections 311 10 ‘The fragments that are left behind’ 325 Correction to: African Farmers and Medicinal Plant Experts Cl Bibliography 347

ABBREVIATIONS

Cory Library, Rhodes University, Grahamstown

Cape Monthly Magazine

History Museum, Albany Museum Complex, Grahamstown Kew Library, Art and Archives, London

National Herbarium of Victoria, Melbourne, Australia National English Literary Museum, Grahamstown Natural History Museum, London

Royal Entomological Society, St Albans

Trinity College Dublin Herbarium

Transactions of the South African Philosophical Society University of Cape Town

Xix

Fig. |

Fig.

2.2

2.3

2.4

3:2

4.1

LIST OF FIGURES

‘Portrait of Mary Elizabeth Barber, Eastern Cape naturalist and writer’, developed from glass negative. (© Western Cape Archives and Records Service, Van der Riet Collection (VDR) 178, no date. All rights reserved)

Mosarwa saves Holub, in: Holub, Seven Years in South Africa, Vol. 1, 360-361

An elegantly dressed African next to a horse drawn carriage, a portable dark room tent and presumably William Guybon Atherstone’s wife in the Howieson’s Poort Valley near Grahamstown in 1864. (© Van der Riet Collection, HM, Accession Number: AM3816. History Museum, Albany Museum Complex. All rights reserved)

Early photograph of a Xhosa diviner, sex not clear. (Collection of Sir George Grey. © National Library of South Africa: ALBX 19, 15,611)

Portrait of the Khoekhoe collector Stoffel Speelman. Burchell, Travels in the Interior of Southern Africa, Vol. 1, Fig. 2, facing page 167

John Edmonstone and Charles Darwin preparing birds. ‘In the Workshop of Taxidermist’ by Viktor Yevstafiev, 1948. (© State Darwin Museum, Moscow)

Mary Elizabeth Barber: Duvernoia adhatodoides 1867, watercolour, pencil-ink drawings, SP 57. (© Linnean Society of London, photographed by Tanja Hammel, February 2012)

xxii LIST OF FIGURES

Mary Elizabeth Barber: On the fertilisation and dissemination of Duvernoia adhatodoides, Journal of Linnean Society (Botany) 11 (1871), 470, woodcut, +13x16 cm

Mary Elizabeth Barber, probably Thomas Holden Bowker, and James Henry Bowker ca. 1880. (Photographer not known, taken ona — bias! lilies, sep as bees as geological artefacts in the

Barber, Pai

395, Flowers of Grahamstown: Buphane lum, Stapelia bufonia, Orchid, Satyrium istees of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew.

The Ner Ta Public Tt hice, Lenox al í Foundations)

Coracias garrula, Roller, Gould’s The Birds of Great Britain, 1862-1873, hand-coloured lithograph. (© Rare Books Division,

The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden

Introduction

Ghosts ‘are a haunting reminder of an ignored past’, Banu Subramaniam, professor and chair of women, gender and sexuality studies at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, asserts in her exploration of the politics of science. It is our duty as historians to render these ghosts visible by ‘confront[ing] the past, or [else] the dead never go away, history never sleeps, the truth can never be erased, forgotten, or foreclosed’.' Shaping Natural History and Settler Society: Mary Elizabeth Barber and the Nineteenth-Century Cape addresses a number of interconnected ‘ghosts’, or ‘ignored pasts’, specifically women’s contributions to science, the involvement of the South in global knowledge networks and the role of knowledge production in colonial dispossession.

This is a demythologisation of the male-dominated practices of Victorian science and of ‘colonial knowledge’. It is a reconstruction of the scientific work of British-born and Cape-raised scientist Mary Elizabeth Barber (née Bowker) and her associates. Barber serves as a prism to explore Victorian natural history and to demonstrate the ways it changed throughout the course of her career from the 1840s to the late 1880s. It is an exploration of her compatriots’ and metropolitan colleagues’ negotiations and interrelations of gender, race and class in science. The British historian of science, Jim Endersby, has reconsidered three themes which dominate the understanding of Victorian science: the reception of Darwinism, the spread of colonialism and the birth of science as a profession.? This study adds gender, settler colonialism and

South-North engagement in the making of modern science to the exploration. It illuminates the social, political and economic circumstances which shaped Barber’s career and determines the nature of the impact which Darwin’s books, on the one hand, and the theories and practices forged at the Cape, on the other, had on natural history and society. It correlates these to topics which have generally been studied in isolation from each other: the historical reception of natural history and science in Europe, the British Empire and beyond.

It contributes to the history of science in Southern Africa and the historical reception of Darwinism at the Cape.* By focusing on an early botanist, ornithologist and entomologist, this book wishes to contribute to a dynamic recent literature on the role of women scholars as collectors, illustrators and authors in the field sciences in Southern Africa.* Despite developing a strong interest in animal and plant studies and environmental humanities, this study follows an understanding of history as the study of human beings within their temporal and spatial contexts.

When writing about Mary Elizabeth Barber’s career, it is important to bear in mind that the word ‘scientist’ did not exist before the British philosopher and historian of science, William Whewell (1794-1866), coined the term in 1834. Interestingly, he introduced it in a review of a publication by Scottish science writer and polymath, Mary Fairfax Somerville.‘ There were very few women scientists like Somerville, and most of them devoted themselves to a single field of expertise. The kind of career Barber was constructing for herself had no precedents. From the 1830s to the 1880s, the lines between what was considered an amateur and who was regarded a professional scientist were still being drawn. Indeed, there were very few individuals who could claim to earn a living from science at the time, and those who did, enjoyed only a low social standing in a scientific community which was still dominated by unpaid gentlemen-scientists such as Charles Darwin.

Mary Elizabeth Bowker was born in 1818 in the village of South Newton, some four miles South of Stonehenge, in Wiltshire, where her parents were farming. Desiring a better future for his eight sons and single daughter than the one he foresaw for them in economically depressed Britain, Barber’s father, Miles Bowker, sought a move to the US, British Canada or Australia. However, prospects for gentlemen-farmers in the newly advertised settlement at the Cape suddenly became attractive. In 1819, the British government offered hundred acres of land to any British man older than eighteen, who was prepared to immigrate to the Cape

Colony.® The Bowker family did so and arrived in May 1820 among the so-called 1820 Settlers—parties of white British colonists which were granted land by the British government and the Cape authorities and settled in the eastern part of the Cape Colony in 1820. Henceforward, young Mary Elizabeth would find herself growing up in the second richest floristic region in Southern Africa, on an extended farm near the Kleinemond River, about thirteen kilometres east of Port Alfred, on the eastern frontier of the Cape Colony. She would spend the rest of her life in the Cape.

As a child, Barber soon began to explore her environment. She is said to have been an autodidactic genius who taught herself to read and write when she was four.’ Her father set up a farm school for all his children and those of his employees. Her parents’ or teachers’ enthusiasm for botany, natural history and natural philosophy may indeed have been contagious?’

She would ultimately paint many more than the one hundred watercolours of plants, butterflies, birds, reptiles and landscapes that remain to this day.’ Sixteen of her scientific articles as well as a volume of poems were published.'° To achieve the publication of her articles, she corresponded with some of the most distinguished British experts in her fields, such as the entomologist Roland Trimen, the botanists William Henry Harvey and Joseph Dalton Hooker, and the ornithologist Edgar Leopold Layard. In doing so, she contributed not only to botany but also to entomology, ornithology, geology, archaeology and palaeontology. While her letters to these experts at the institutions they held an official position at have survived, their letters to her unfortunately have not.

Yet, the remaining sources provide insights into her scientific practices: her many gardens which served as laboratories, where she could observe, paint and experiment with plants and animals, and the collecting and observing of all the natural objects she encountered wherever she went. In her correspondences, Barber emphasised that she did everything in her power to obtain specimens. For example, she reported how, in an effort to procure blossoms from what she thought was the largest aloe species in the world, she began ‘shooting off their stems with a rifle bullet!’, a method which she considered to be ‘rather a novel way of gathering flowers’, and which she felt distinguished herself markedly from women collectors.'! Perhaps, fittingly, this particular aloe specimen did turn out to be the largest yet found in Africa, with a height of up to fifteen metres. The tree aloe was eventually named Aloe barberae (now Aloidendron barberae) in her honour—one among at least ten botanical specimens, genera and butterfly species which were named after or ‘discovered’ by her.’

During the early years of her scientific career, from 1853 till 1868, Barber lived and worked on the farm Highlands, situated on a long ridge about twenty-four kilometres West of Grahamstown (Makhanda),'* which was the second highest point in the Albany district, and thus particularly well-suited for sheep farming. This remote farm allowed her to focus on her scientific pursuits and provided little distraction. She could immerse herself in the surrounding nature, observe and experiment for long periods of time. The family then lived on the diamond fields in Griqualand West in the 1870s and then moved to the Vaal River. In the 1880s and 1890s, Barber stayed at Junction Drift near Cradock, in Grahamstown, in Malvern near Durban, in Pietermaritzburg and in various other locations in Albany and the Eastern part of the Cape Colony. She also resided in Cape Town for several brief periods, and once, when she was 70, she travelled to Britain and Europe for a short visit (Fig. 1.1).

Barber shaped key issues concerning the status of nineteenth-century natural history. For example, the acknowledged botanist and entomolo-

Fig. 1.1 ‘Portrait of Mary Elizabeth Barber, Eastern Cape naturalist and writer’, developed from glass negative. (© Western Cape Archives and Records Service, Van der Riet Collection (VDR) 178, no date. All rights reserved)

gist was one of the first Cape-based supporters of Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection and opened the practices of ‘gentlemanly science’ to professionals, amateurs and women. As a shaper of scientific practices and a forger of new theories, Barber’s career offers a telling prism through which to explore trends in the development of science and society in the nineteenth-century Cape.

By exploring the impact of the colonial ‘periphery’ on scientific disciplines, a valuable corrective is provided to the hitherto dominant and Eurocentric approaches, which have viewed modern science as having emerged from the global North before disseminating itself throughout the South.'* The Cape, like other Southern colonial settings, has not yet been recognised as ‘a source of refined knowledge’, but rather, as Jean and John Comaroff—both professors of African and African American Studies and of Anthropology at Harvard University—have argued, as a ‘reservoir of raw fact: of the historical, natural, and ethnographic minutiae from which Euromodernity might fashion its testable theories and transcendent truths, its axioms and certitudes, its premises, postulates, and principles’.!®

Barber also offers a prism to assess the role of women in natural history and society in a settler colonial setting. Women were accepted as collectors and illustrators, roles in which they acted as helpmates to men naturalists without invoking any personal scientific ambitions. Ambitious women, such as Barber, who wanted to be recognised as naturalists in their own right, thus faced numerous obstacles and difficulties. The complexities of their marginalisation and other challenges which women academics faced are explored throughout this book.

This study of Barber focuses on Europeans in Europe, in the Cape Colony and other colonies. It is concerned with how Barber constructed herself as a ‘white African’ in her ‘imagined community’ of Anglophone Cape Colonials to legitimise her claim of belonging in her adopted homeland. Barber had internalised the discourses of settler colonialism, which reinforced her conviction in a white ‘civilising’ presence on the African continent, which, in turn, stood for ‘progress’ and ‘modernisation’.!® The emergence of her ideas from both the context of the times and her own life experiences, and how these evolved in conjunction with her endeavours in the emerging fields of botany, entomology, ornithology and archaeology are of particular interest. A special focus lies on her construction of systems of knowledge to give meaning to the changing world around her. The narrative and artistic practices which Barber employed to depict Africans and their environment are also closely analysed.

This book hence lies at the intersection of colonial studies, the social history of science and women’s history, and is an analysis of the intertwined relationship between natural history, gender and settler colonialism. To make the connections between these topics visible, certain concepts are used and adapted, which are introduced in the following sections.

THE HISTORY OF SCIENCE IN A COLONIAL CONTEXT

Studies on the history of science have focussed on scientific practices that allowed historians to transcend the externalist-internalist divide in science. Historians of science had for a long time distinguished between internal factors and influences that shaped science (e.g. objectivity, experimentation) and external ones (e.g. politics, religion and economy), and had either concentrated on one or the other in their studies.!” In recent decades, historians of science have been aiming to transcend the dichotomy between hagiographic and ‘cynical’ studies. The former celebrate scientific achievements, such as so-called paradigm shifts and inventions, as detached from their social context. The latter reduce the creation of knowledge to a maintenance of social hegemony without analysing the various struggles and social constraints which different scientists face in its production.'® By concentrating on the social aspects of the negotiation of knowledge, this study aims to move beyond these two divides. The complexities involved in the struggle for symbolic capital are explored. Who co-operated with whom, at what time, in what manner and for what reason are key concerns. At the same time, I am interested in the way boundaries between amateur and professional, colonial and metropolitan, man and woman, as well as European and African experts were drawn and how permeable they were.

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Shaping Natural History and Settler Society

About this book

Front matter

Preface

Part II From Providing Data to Forging New Practices and Theories

Introduction

The end

Shaping Natural History and Settler Society

About this book

Front matter

Preface

Part II From Providing Data to Forging New Practices and Theories

Introduction

The end

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