The Intimate Politics of Ornithology in Colonial Africa

Abstract

A tendency in studies of science in colonial Africa is to focus on the "big politics" of resource extraction, environmental control, and the governmentality of subject bodies. As a result, we now recognize that colonial science was a highly political enterprise in which the pursuit of knowledge was infused with the dynamics of starkly exclusionary societies and extractive regimes. Scientific improvements in medicine and agriculture yielded benefits that underwrote colonial projects 1 and the construction of authoritative knowledge in medicine, racial biology, and social science created disciplinary power over Africans as scientifically objectified colonial subjects. 2 It has been observed that the failure of science to heed indigenous knowledge led to a "misreading" of the landscape and inappropriate intervention. 3 Recently, some historians have attempted to mitigate overly stark depictions of colonial science, making good cases that the practice of scientific ecology, agronomy, and medicine in colonial Africa had motivations and effects beyond the service of extraction and governmentality. 4 They have rightly informed us that the assessment of applied sciences in colonial Africa cannot be reduced to their role in European domination. Clearly, these are critical issues that merit attention. Yet the focus on ways science did (or did not) support various colonial agendas may have impeded the development of a more representative understanding of Euro-American scientific pursuits in African colonies. Non-instrumentalist sciences such as ornithology, lepidoptery, and noneconomic botany ranked high among scientific pursuits in Africa, but as Acknowledgments: Archival materials held at the Ornithology and Rothschild Library of the Natural History Museum, Tring, U.K. are quoted and reproduced here by permission of the Trustees of the Natural History Museum. Materials from the R. E. Moreau archive are used with permission of the Oxford University Library Services, Alexander Library, Oxford. Every effort has been made to secure necessary permissions to reproduce copyrighted material in this work, though in some cases it has proved impossible to trace copyright holders. If any omissions are brought to our notice we will be happy to include appropriate acknowledgments on reprinting in any subsequent edition.

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