Tippu Tib Comes to America: Runaway Objects, Mobility, and History’s Narratives

In the Africana collection at the American Museum of Natural History is a pair of inscribed sandals gifted in 1889 from Tippu Tib to the sculptor Herbert Ward. A slave dealer, clove plantation owner, trader to New England ivory merchants via the American consul in Zanzibar, and Henry Moreton Stanley’s guide in the Belgian Congo, Tippu Tib’s sandals register both micro-and macrohistorically the ways mobility is tied to social and economic relations predicated on the enslavement and circulation of objects and people.

While he remains largely unknown to most Americans today, Tippu Tib name was familiar enough in the early 1890s for impersonator Borneo Muskego to use it as one of his many aliases. Pretending to be Tippu Tib, Muskego gained access to universities and churches across the United States, robbed valuables from his hosts’ homes, and, claiming he was raising money to Christianize Zulus, fleeced audiences from the midwest to the eastern seaboard.

This paper examines two artifacts associated with Muskego/”Tippu Tib”—a book of “Zulu hieroglyphics” Muskego read for his audiences as part of his performance of “Africanness” and mosquito net robes he purportedly wore over “Western” clothes. The book helped lead to his arrest in New Haven, CT, in 1893, when a Yale Divinity School student raised by his missionary father in Zululand exposed Muskego and the text as a fake, while the robes helped conceal his origins as the son of a washerwoman from Muskego, Wisconsin. I read the fugitive nature of both objects, neither extant, against Muskego’s fugitive status as a legal subject to argue that material culture and its methodologies usefully and singularly inform our narratives of race and empire, particularly when we consider how the intimacy of objects and their travels enact and make history both legible and illegible.