Plant knowledge at the cape: A study in African and European collaboration

International Journal of African Historical Studies

Volumn 36, Issue 2, 2003, Pages 367-392

  Musselman, Elizabeth Green ^a  

^a NONE

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 33746036619     PISSN: 03617882     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.2307/3559388     Document Type: Review

References (110)

1. Frank M. Snowden, Blacks in Antiquity: Ethiopians in the Greco-Roman Experience (Cambridge, Mass., 1970)
2. Mary Lefkowitz, Not Out of Africa: How Afrocentrism Became an Excuse to Teach Myth as History (New York, 1997)
3. Daniel R. Headrick, Tools of Empire: Technology and European Imperialism in the Nineteenth Century (Oxford, 1981)
4. Michael Adas, Machines as the Measure of Men: Science, Technology, and Ideologies of Western Dominance (Ithaca, N.Y., 1990)
5. Thomas A. Bass, Camping with the Prince and Other Tales of Science in Africa (Wakefield, R.I., 1997)
6. Richard Drayton, "Science, Medicine, and the British Empire," in Robin W. Winks, ed., Historiography, Oxford History of the British Empire (Oxford, 1999)
7. By contrast, the interaction between Indian and European natural knowledge has attracted considerable attention. For example, see David Arnold, Science, Technology, and Medicine in India (Cambridge, 2000)
8. Kapil Raj, "Colonial Encounters and the Forging of New Knowledge and National Identities: Great Britain and India, 1760-1850," Osiris 15 (2000), 119-34
9. Gyan Prakash, Another Reason: Science and the Imagination in Modern India (Princeton, N.J., 1999)
10. Zaheer Baber, The Science of Empire: Scientific Knowledge, Civilization, and Colonial Rule in India (Albany, 1996)
11. Deepak Kumar, ed., Science and Empire: Essays in Indian Context (1700-1947) (Delhi, 1991)
12. For example, see Helen Verran, Science and an African Logic (Chicago, 2001)
13. Paulin Hountondji, ed., Endogenous Knowledge: Research Trails (Dakar, 1997)
14. Hans J. Heinz, "The Bushmen's Store of Scientific Knowledge," in Philip V. Tobias, ed., The Bushmen: San Hunters and Herders of Southern Africa (Cape Town, 1978)
15. Claudia Zaslavsky, Africa Counts: Number and Pattern in African Culture (Boston, 1973)
16. For the Cape, see Saul Dubow, ed., Science and Society in Southern Africa (Manchester, 2000)
17. idem., Scientific Racism in Modern South Africa (Cambridge, 1995)
18. Harriet Jean Deacon, "Midwives and Medical Men in the Cape Colony before 1860," Journal of African History 39 (1998), 271-92
19. Harriet Deacon, "Cape Town and 'Country' Doctors in the Cape Colony During the First Half of the 19th Century," Social History of Medicine 10 (1997), 25-52
20. Brian Warner, Astronomers at the Royal Observatory, Cape of Good Hope: A History with Emphasis on the Nineteenth Century (Salem, N.H., 1979)
21. A methodologically dated, but still useful resource, is A. C. Brown, ed., A History of Scientific Endeavour in Southern Africa (Cape Town, 1977)
22. For example, see Andrew Cunningham and Bridie Andrews, eds., Western Medicine as Contested Knowledge (New York, 1997)
23. Luise White, "'They Could Make Their Victims Dull': Genders and Genres, Fantasies and Cures in Colonial Southern Uganda," American Historical Review 100 (1995), 1379-1402
24. Jean Allman, "Making Mothers: Missionaries, Medical Officers and Women's Work in Colonial Asante, 1924-1945," History Workshop Journal 38 (1994), 23-47
25. F. Koerner, "La Protection Sanitaire des Populations à Madagascar (1862-1914)," Revue Historique 291 (1994), 439-58
26. Nancy Rose Hunt, "Negotiated Colonialism: Domesticity, Hygiene, and Birth Work in the Belgian Congo (Zaire)" (Ph.D. thesis, University of Wisconsin, 1992)
27. Robert Ross, Status and Respectability in the Cape Colony 1750-1870: A Tragedy of Manners (Cambridge, 1999), 174-75
28. Russel Viljoen, "Aboriginal Khoikhoi Servants and Their Masters in Colonial Swellendam, South Africa, 1745-1795," Agricultural History 75 (2001), 38
29. Letter from Georg Krebs (Ludwig's brother) to Heinrich Lichtenstein, 13 December 1834, quoted in Pamela Ffolliott and Richard Liversidge, Ludwig Krebs: Cape Naturalist to the King of Prussia 1792-1844 (Cape Town, 1971), 86-87
30. Clifton C. Crais, White Supremacy and Black Resistance in Pre-Industrial South Africa: The Making of the Colonial Order in the Eastern Cape, 1770-1865 (Cambridge, 1992), 45
31. Leonard Guelke and Robert Shell, "Landscape of Conquest: Frontier Water Alienation and Khoikhoi Strategies of Survival, 1652-1780," Journal of Southern African Studies 18 (1992), 803-823
32. Nigel Penn, "Land, Labour, and Livestock in the Western Cape During the Eighteenth Century: The Khoisan and the Colonists," in W.G. James and M. Simons, eds., The Angry Divide: Social and Economic History of the Western Cape (Cape Town, 1989)
33. John Lambert, Betrayed Trust: Africans and the State in Colonial Natal (Scottsville, Natal, 1996)
34. Crais, White Supremacy and Black Resistance, 76-86
35. David J. Webster, "The Political Economy of Food Production and Nutrition in Southern Africa in Historical Perspective," Journal of Modern African Studies 24 (1986), 455
36. William J. Burchell, Travels in the Interior of Southern Africa, 2 vols. [1822-24] (Cape Town, 1967), II, 7
37. O. F. Raum, "The Culture Historical Significance of the Xhosa Spade," Tools and Tillage 3, 2 (1977), 99-110
38. William F. Lye and Charles Davidson Bell, eds., Andrew Smith's Journal of His Expedition into the Interior of South Africa, 1834-36; an Authentic Narrative of Travels and Discoveries, the Manners and Customs of the Native Tribes, and the Physical Nature of the Country (Cape Town, 1975), 110
39. Leonard Guelke, "Freehold Farmers and Frontier Settlers, 1657-1780," in Richard Elphick and Hermann Giliomee, eds., The Shaping of South African Society, 1652-1840 (Middletown, Conn., 1988)
40. Anthony Pagden, "The 'Defence of Civilization' in Eighteenth-Century Social Theory," History of the Human Sciences 1 (1988), 33-45
41. J. M. Coetzee, White Writing: On the Culture of Letters in South Africa (New Haven, Conn., 1988), 28-31
42. Joseph Priestley, Experiments and Observations on Different Kinds of Air and Other Branches of Natural Philosophy, 3 vols. (Birmingham, 1790)
43. quoted in Linda E. Merians, Envisioning the Worst: Representations of "Hottentots" in Early-Modern England (Newark, Del.:, 2001), 200
44. These attitudes, usually brought to the colony as preconceptions and "confirmed" by experience, had a long history. On Dutch "laziness," see Simon Schama, The Embarrassment of Riches: An Interpretation of Dutch Culture in the Golden Age (New York, 1997)
45. On English perceptions of the Khoikhoi, see Merians, Envisioning the Worst
46. Andrew Sparrman, A Voyage to the Cape of Good Hope, Towards the Antarctic Polar Circle, and Round the World: But Chiefly into the Country of the Hottentots and the Caffres, from the Year 1772, to 1776, 2 vols. (London, 1785), I, 12, 201, 219
47. [C. G. Curtis], An Account of the Colony of the Cape of Good Hope, with a View to the Information of Emigrants (London, 1819), 96-97
48. Additional manuscript (Add. ms.) 33980, ff. 176-77, British Library (hereafter BL)
49. Quoted in Percival Robson Kirby, Sir Andrew Smith, M.D., K.C.B.; His Life, Letters, and Works (Cape Town, 1965), 78
50. J. B. Peires, The House of Phalo: A History of the Xhosa People in the Days of Their Independence (Berkeley, 1982), 103-108
51. Mathias Guenther, Tricksters and Trancers: Bushman Religion and Society (Bloomington, 1999), 134, 214-15
52. Jean Comaroff and John Comaroff, Of Revelation and Revolution: Christianity, Colonialism and Consciousness in Southern Africa, I (Chicago, 1991), 144-45
53. Heinz, "Bushmen's Store," 149
54. H. J. Heinz and B. Maguire, The Ethno-Biology of The !Kō Bushmen: Their Ethno-Botanical Knowledge and Plant Lore (Gaborone, 1974)
55. Quoted in Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (London, 1992), 31-32
56. Lisbet Koerner, "Carl Linnaeus in His Time and Place," in Nicholas Jardine, J. A. Secord, and E. C. Spary, eds., Cultures of Natural History (Cambridge, 1996), 146, 152
57. Rowland Raven-Hart, Cape of Good Hope, 1652-1702: The First Fifty Years of Dutch Colonisation as Seen by Callers, 2 vols. (Cape Town, 1971), I, 22
58. Pratt, Imperial Eyes, 43-49
59. Ludwig Pappe, Florœ Capensis Medicœ Prodromus; or, an Enumeration of South African Plants Used as Remedies by the Colonists of the Cape of Good Hope, 2nd ed. (Cape Town, 1857), v
60. William Paterson, A Narrative of Four Journeys into the Country of the Hottentots and Caffraria, in the Years 1777, 1778, 1779, 2nd ed. (London, 1790), 46
61. D. O. Wijnands, M. L. Wilson, and T. Toussaint van Hove, eds., Jan Commelin's Monograph on Cape Flora: Drawings and Descriptions of the Plants That the Hon. Simon Van Der Stel, Governor at the Cape of Good Hope, Found on His Great Journey, 1685 (Cape Town, 1996)
62. Sparrman, Voyage to the Cape, II, 94-95
63. Francis Masson, "An Account of Three Journeys from the Cape Town into the Southern Parts of Africa; Undertaken for the Discovery of New Plants, Towards the Improvement of the Royal Botanical Gardens at Kew," Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London 66 (1776), 292
64. Dugald Carmichael, Descriptions of Cape Plants, n.d., 9, Carmichael MSS., Botany Library, Natural History Museum (London). Gunnera propensa is also known as iphuzi-lomlambo in Xhosa, uxobo in Zulu, river pumpkin or wild pumpkin in English, and wilde ramenas in Afrikaans. See the Medical Research Council of South Africa's Traditional Medicines Database, URL: http://www.mrc.ac.za/Tramed/ , accessed 7 April 2003
65. Burchell, Travels, I, 35-36
66. Burchell, Travels, II, 558-59
67. Burchell, Travels, I, 460-61, II, 54-55
68. Anne Fausto-Sterling, "Gender, Race and Nation: The Comparative Anatomy of 'Hottentot' Women in Europe, 1815-1817," in Jennifer Terry and Jacqueline Urla, eds., Deviant Bodies: Critical Perspectives on Difference in Science and Popular Culture (Bloomington, 1995)
69. But also see Zine Magubane, "Which Bodies Matter? Feminism, Poststructuralism, Race, and the Curious Theoretical Odyssey of the 'Hottentot Venus'," Gender & Society 15 (2001), 816-34
70. Kirby, Sir Andrew Smith, 43-49
71. Saul Dubow, "A Commonwealth of Science: The British Association in South Africa, 1905 and 1929," in Dubow, ed., Science and Society in Southern Africa
72. Saul Dubow, "Earth History, Natural History, and Prehistory at the Cape, 1860-75" Comparative Studies in Society and History 36 (2004), forthcoming
73. Cape of Good Hope Agricultural Society, Annual Report of the Cape of Good Hope Agricultural Society (Cape Town, 1866), 9
74. J. C. Byrne, Emigrant's Guide to the Cape of Good Hope, 2nd ed. (London, 1848), 52-55
75. F. W. Reitz, Cape Agriculture: In Two Lectures; Delivered at the Cape Town Mechanics' Institute on the 1st and 15th of May, 1857 (Cape Town, 1857), 14-22
76. R. W. Murray, A Full Account of the Western Province Grand Agricultural Exhibition, Held at Swellendam, March 1, 2 and 3, 1864 (Grahamstown, 1864), 15
77. "Natural History," Cape of Good Hope Literary Gazette 2, 1 (1832), 232-33
78. Also see "Colonial Science," Cape Monthly Magazine 3, 2 (1858), 65-79
79. Ludwig Pappe, "Botanical Geography, and Distribution of South African Plants," Cape Monthly Magazine 8, 4 (1860), 237-49
80. Andrew Smith to Benjamin D'Urban, 17 September 1834, "Border Tribes, Treaties and Miscellaneous Papers," GH 19/4, Cape Town Archives Repository
81. For example, see Susan Newton-King, Masters and Servants on the Cape Eastern Frontier (Cambridge, 1999), 217
82. Robert Ross, "The Kat River Rebellion and Khoikhoi Nationalism: The Fate of an Ethnic Identification," Kronos 24 (1997), 91-105
83. Andrew Smith, Memoranda, Vol. A: Notes on Tswana, Sotho..., 73; South African Museum
84. William Henry Harvey, The Genera of South African Plants, Arranged According to the Natural System (Cape Town, 1838)
85. idem., Nereis Australis, or Algae of the Southern Ocean (London, 1847-1849)
86. Thomas Cooper, Miscellaneous Letters and Papers, 1859-62, Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew (hereafter Kew), especially ff. 15, 17, 23
87. E.L. Layard to A.H. Layard, 18 January 1863, BL Add. MS. 58153
88. Peter MacOwan, Plants That Furnish Stock Food at the Cape (Wynberg, 1887), 98, 113-14
89. Mary Gunn and L. E. Codd, Botanical Exploration of Southern Africa: An Illustrated History of Early Botanical Literature on the Cape Flora, Biographical Accounts of the Leading Plant Collectors and Their Activities in Southern Africa from the Days of the East India Company until Modern Times (Cape Town, 1981), 105
90. Richard H. Grove, "Scottish Missionaries, Evangelical Discourses, and the Origins of Conservation Thinking in Southern Africa, 1820-1900," in his Ecology, Climate, and Empire: Colonialism and Global Environmental History, 1400-1940 (Cambridge, 1997), 104-108
91. John Croumbie Brown, "Cape of Good Hope - Report of the Colonial Botanist for 1863," Miscellaneous Reports, South Africa, Botanists, 1859-96, Kew
92. Also see John Croumbie Brown, Crown Forests of the Cape of Good Hope (Edinburgh, 1887), 96-97
93. Brown, "Cape of Good Hope"
94. idem., "Cape of Good Hope - Report of the Colonial Botanist for 1865," Miscellaneous Reports, South Africa, Botanists, 1859-96, Kew
95. Grove, "Scottish Missionaries," 115
96. [Letter to the editor], The Cape Standard, 31 July 1866
97. "The Colonial Botanist and His Circulars," Het Volksblad, 5 March 1866
98. P. J. Venter, "An Early Botanist and Conservationist at the Cape: The Reverend John Croumbie Brown, Ll.D., F.R.G.S., F.L.S.," Argiefjaarboek vir Suid-Afrikaanse Geskiedenis 2 (1952), 279-91
99. Peter MacOwan, The Olive at the Cape (Wynberg, 1897), 1, 3, 9
100. Peter MacOwan, The Life History of the Phylloxera (Wynberg, 1886), 10. This pamphlet was a reprint of a 16 January 1886 Wynberg Times article
101. Also see Lance Van Sittert, "Making the Cape Floral Kingdom: The Discovery and Defence of Indigenous Flora at the Cape ca. 1890-1939," Landscape Research 28 (2003), 113-29
102. Michael A. Osborne, "Acclimatizing the World: A History of the Paradigmatic Colonial Science," Osiris 15 (2001), 135-51
103. On acclimatization as a synonym for cultivation, see R. H. Compton, Kirstenbosch: Garden for a Nation; Being the Story of the First Fifty Years of the National Botanic Gardens of South Africa 1913-1963 (Cape Town, 1965), 33
104. Mia C. Karsten, The Old Company's Garden at the Cape and Its Superintendents; Involving an Historical Account of Early Cape Botany (Cape Town, 1951), 12
105. On temperate colonial spaces as "Neo-Europes," see Alfred W. Crosby, Ecological Imperialism: The Biological Expansion of Europe, 900-1900 (Cambridge, 1986)
106. Dubow, Scientific Racism, 24-25
107. Patrick Harries, "Field Sciences in Scientific Fields: Entomology, Botany and the Early Ethnographic Monograph in the Work of H.-A. Junod," in Dubow, ed., Science and Society in Southern Africa
108. Koerner, "Carl Linnaeus," 159
109. See Robert A. Stafford, "Scientific Exploration and Empire," in Andrew Porter, ed., The Nineteenth Century, Oxford History of the British Empire (Oxford, 1999)
110. For an important challenge to certain aspects of this view, see William Beinart, "Men, Science, Travel and Nature in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth-Century Cape," Journal of Southern African Studies 24, 4 (1998), 775-99