The Surface of Things: A History of Photography from the Swahili Coast

Author context

American - Professor of Art History NYU
Ph.D. 2007 (History of Art), Harvard University; M.A. 2000 (History of Art), University of Iowa; B.A. 1996 (Art History), University of Florida

Notes

My argument is that Swahili coast users of photography were not concerned with overcoming or rejecting the North Atlantic world’s visual economy. They never saw themselves in terms of colonizer versus colonized, and they had little interest in countering misrepresentations created by Europeans in the metropole. Rather, they cared about photography’s artifice and mobility. (Meier 16)

INDEX

Al Busaidi dynasty

German East Africa
British East Africa
Oman

Zanzibar
Mombasa

TIME

1860s

In the 1860s, photo cartes and pictorial chromolithographs first arrived as trade imports in Zanzibar Town, likely shipped in from Bombay and sold in local markets wit other cargo, such as textiles, housewares, and decorations destined for the realm of bodily display or to beautify interiors. (Meier 9)

1850s

By the mid-1850s glass-plate negatives, allowing for the printing of several versions, made collecting photographs a leisure activity across the world. (Meier 7)

1846

A French naval officer named Charles Guillain arrived on Zanzibar Island with a camera, photo plates, and processing chemicals. His daguerreotypes show diverse peoples, especially elite men and many enslaved persons, all of whom participated directly or indirectly in the expansion of the region’s Indian Ocean networks. (Meier 1)

1830s

While Oman had ruled Zanzibar since ousting the Portuguese in 1698, the relationship fundamentally changed under Sultan Said bin Sultan (Seyyid Said). Captivated by its economic prospects, Said spent much of the late 1820s and 1830s on the island, culminating in his decision to officially move the capital of the Omani Empire from Muscat to Stone Town, Zanzibar (Google summary - needs source)

Already in the 1830s, the US and the Hanseatic ports of present-day Germany had signed commercial treaties with Zanzibar’s Busaidi sultans, who worked with South Asian financiers to invest in the ivory trade and slave-based cash-crop plantations. (Meier 21)

SITES, WORKS, REFS

Reflections on Western Sahara's struggle for self-determination

French North Africa: The Maghrib Between Two World Wars

Tony Hodges - Western Sahara: The Roots of a Desert War (see 1973)