To whom are scholars loyal? Answers to this question are never obvious, but they are especially complicated in the multivalent, polyglot, and trans-imperial space of colonial South Africa in the long nineteenth century. This paper posits ethnographic collecting as central to European knowledge production. I investigate relationships that developed between collectors and their informants, interpreters, and guides—interactions that acquire new meaning when examined through the lens of loyalty.
Conflicting loyalties emerge in the books and unpublished notes of European investigators. Clear expressions of political and social loyalty changed markedly over time, from deference to financial patrons common in eighteenth-century German and Dutch accounts to presumptions of British imperial privilege evident in late nineteenth century texts. More complicated evidence of multiple allegiances began to emerge, however, starting in the middle of the nineteenth century.
English, Scottish, French, and German collectors worked in territories governed as British colonies, independent Boer republics, and African polities. In some cases, their loyalties to knowledge production, framed as science, eclipsed political allegiances; the work flowed across linguistic communities, imperial rivalries, and local chiefdoms. A more careful reading of the objects and texts produced by European ethnographers reveals more subtle loyalties: missionaries whose compassion for their subjects led to conflict with doctrine; missionaries facing sectarian divisions; scholars whose interests in their informants’ welfare was interpreted by colonists as a betrayal of white settler interests.
While the loyalties of ethnographers are methodologically available to us through inference, the perceptions of the informants in these relationships are even more opaque. Reading colonial texts against the grain for hints about informants’ sense of loyalty to inquiry, or their obligation to an employer, provides a more holistic perspective on the many facets of loyalty at work in the creation of Western stereotypes about African ethnography.
