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. 

Butterflies & Barbarians quotes

Join the club