Africa and the Anthropologist: Isaac Schapera, Felix Bryk, Meg Gehrts-Schomburgk

Anthropological Photography in Africa

In what way does the academic discipline of anthropology partake of what Patricia Hayes describes as "emerging colonial photographic rituals marking subjugation and power"? (Hayes 141). In this paper, I will examine the work of two anthropologists who both did work in Africa, and whose work was published with extensive photographic documentation. The first is Isaac Schapera, one of the most reputable (and long-lived) academics to emerge from the Social Anthropology movement based in London. In 2009, Francoise Ugochukwu would still praise Schapera for his "open mind and interest in social change and cultural hybridity" while also claiming that Schapera's anthropological photographs displayed "a very personal bond between him and the Tswana, consisting of a mixture of trust, respect, and familiarity" (Ugochukwu 628-9). This would seem to indicate by the twenty-first century's standard of criticism for underlying assumptions in earlier anthropological work, Schapera nonetheless is considered by at least one African anthropologist as a model of empathetic impartiality, the sort of ideal disinterested interest that should be brought to anthropological field work. But I would like to compare Schapera and his photographs to the work of his rough contemporary, the comparatively unknown Felix Bryk. In particular, I would like to treat one work by Bryk as a sort of anthropological artifact in itself, to be subjected to critical examination. This is Bryk's 1944 English-language publication Dark Rapture: The Sex-Life of the African Negro. To bring the work of these two different anthropologists (both originally operating in Africa within the same basic time period) is intended not to belittle Schapera, but instead to contextualize him alongside a much more troubling counter-tradition within anthropology itself. I hope to demonstrate that, in certain crucial regards (most particularly with regards to sexuality), anthropology does indeed partake of certain aspects of the colonial discourse of which it should ostensibly be free.

In what way does anthropology reflect the biases of its time? One fascinating element of Isaac Shapera's late interviews with Adam Kuper is the revelation that academic politics among early twentieth-century anthropologists essentially mimicked the larger geopolitics of colonialism:

But that was typical of anthropology in those days. It was what you now call in English NIMBY: not in my back yard. Firth, I believe, would have liked to go to the Trobriands. Malinowski said no. That is anyway the gossip among friends. [The attitude was:] Because I've been there nobody else must go. (Schapera and Kuper 2002, 15)

Malinowski, in other words, had staked a territorial claim to the Trobriand Islanders. For someone else to go there, even to confirm Malinowski's basic observations, was considered bad form at the very least. However, it is worth approaching Schapera's discussion here with the sensitivity of an anthropologist. For a start, his description of territoriality is domesticated: his use of the term "NIMBY," which he indicates some cultural unfamiliarity with by noting that it is "what you now call in English," is somewhat inaccurate here. "NIMBY" usually refers to suburban residents who do not want a garbage dump or nuclear power plant built in their immediate vicinity -- it is not customarily applied to the sharp elbows of academics engaged in turf wars. Schapera is also careful to shade his account of a possible rivalry between Firth and Malinowski in doubt ("I believe," "gossip among friends") so as to not make anthropology seem unprofessional. But the simple fact is that this territoriality on the part of Europeans regarding far-flung countries has a more precise analogue in the actual colonial movement in the nineteenth century. Schapera might just as well compare the process of academic specialization here to the Berlin Conference of 1884, with Malinowski in the role of Otto von Bismarck. What is of course most strange about this is that it directly contradicts the largely scientistic approach that is generally claimed by anthropology: the idea that no-one might return to the Trobriand Islanders simply to confirm Malinowski's observations about them seems to contradict the most basic scientific principle of confirming observations through repeated approaches.

It might also be worth noting that this tendency in anthropology is persistent, and indeed some of the most memorable public disputes in the discipline (e.g., the posthumous attack by Derek Freedman on Margaret Mead's ethnographic work in Samoa) essentially hinged on the question of whether a solitary anthropological observer was sufficient to get accurate data. Insofar as anthropologists fill a cultural niche as an actor or agent in the production of knowledge about the "Other," this questionable assumption from the early years of the discipline -- namely that Bronislaw Malinowski could be relied upon to be a one-man scientific method, and that his work in the Trobriand Islands should not be infringed upon by permitting Firth to research in the same place -- raises a large troubling question about the adoption of scientism by anthropologists tout court. From the vantage of the early twenty-first century, we can now see that many figures emerging from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries who presented their work under the mantle of "science" were really engaged in nothing of the sort: Sigmund Freud provides perhaps the most notorious example. To a certain degree, the pretense of scientism would appear to serve the function of allowing otherwise dangerous or subversive knowledge about the "Other" to enter the hegemonic culture within a sort of cordon sanitaire, as it were. Freud's discussions of sexuality -- however wildly speculative and unfounded on any empirical evidence they may seem to us now -- were able to alter public discourse simply by using the mantle of science to permit Western cultures to discuss matters that had previously been taboo.

This process is interesting to consider when we turn to the anthropological and photographic work of those two very different ethnographers, Isaac Schapera and Felix Bryk. Although this might seem to be an unusual linkage -- as Schapera's work is still considered academically valid, and Bryk's is, in Gulizia's words, "almost completely forgotten" (and might be regarded as little more than pornography if it were known) -- there is interesting precedent for this connection between the two (Gulizia 2013). Both Felix Bryk and Isaac Schapera are cited as authorities on the anthropology of sex within the famous "Kinsey Report," Alfred C. Kinsey's large scale American survey on Sexual Behavior in the Human Male, first published in 1948. Indeed just as Isaac Schapera's Married Life in an African Tribe is cited several times in the Kinsey report, so is Felix Bryk's Dark Rapture (Kinsey 769). I will return to this suggestive connection in due course, but at the very least it may indicate that the standard of review for anthropological sexology was not precisely rigorous in the middle of the twentieth century, as Bryk had no academic background within anthropology. Instead, Felix Bryk was (like Alfred C. Kinsey himself) originally trained as an entomologist. (Bryk was a lepidopterist specializing in the subfamily Parnassinae, while Kinsey studied gall wasps.) Kreinik describes Bryk as an "entomologist and ethnographer" who also overlapped with the Weimar artistic world through the "Romanisches Cafe in Berlin," and in particular Kreinik describes Bryk's collaborative friendship with the painter Christian Schad. Bryk had apparently modeled for several of Schad's paintings (posing for the patient being operated on in Schad's "Appendectomy in Geneva"), and according to Kreinik "Schad was deeply interested in Bryk's work which involved a trip to Africa during the 1920s" (Kreinik 67). And like Isaac Schapera, who would turn later in his career to editing historically-important works by the Africa-based missionary David Livingstone, Felix Bryk had a substantial antiquarian interest in the legendary Swedish naturalist Carolus Linnaeus, and (in Gulizia's words) "curated Linnaeus's manuscripts" about an unpublished naturalistic expedition (Gulizia 2013). Indeed Gulizia finds the origins of Bryk's African ethnographic expedition as based solely on the fact that "Bryk firmly believed…Linnaeus was a sexualist" (Gulizia 2013). And therefore Bryk's ethnographic survey of African sexual practices was supposedly intended as an extension of his original entomological researches, combined with the artistic ferment of Weimar Germany.

The photographs that accompany the English-language publication of Dark Rapture, however, were not taken by Bryk himself. Instead, these were taken by another interesting fringe figure -- indicating a substantial amateur presence in supposed anthropological study in the earlier half of the twentieth century -- the German film actress Meg Gehrts-Schomburgk. With her husband Hans Schomburgk, Meg Gehrts-Schomburgk would make a number of what they described as "ethnodramas" -- that is, dramatic narrative films that were shot on location in Africa. Thus within the German colonial holding of Togoland -- i.e., present-day Ghana -- Meg Gehrts-Schomburgk would star in her husband's 1913 film Weisse Gottin der Wangora, "The White Goddesss of the Wangora" presumably a reference to the Soninke Wangara, whose Mande-speaking descendants were still located in Ghana (Gehrts 29). For an example of the sort of "Africa" that was constructed in these "ethnodramas" we may examine some of the photographs included by the actress in her memoir of filming (Figure 1). As depicted here, the other female actresses in the film -- played by actual Africans -- are naked above the waist. The white actress is not. Indeed, the lower photograph depicts Gehrts-Schomburgk reclining on a leopard skin rug, while a topless native woman fans her with an elaborate fan made of feathers. The ludicrous excess of the colonialist fantasy could not be more evident here.

Yet this actress is the same woman whose "anthropological" photographs would be included in the English-langugage publication of Felix Bryk's Dark Rapture. As a result of the photographer's own strange backstory, Meg Gehrts-Schomburgk's photographs of Africa occupy a rather unique place: although some are included in her early memoir of the "ethnodramas" -- whose English-language version (published in 1915 in Philadelphia and London) was entitled A Camera Actress in the Wilds of Togoland -- they would be collected by themselves in 1930 under the title Negertypen Des Schwartzen Erdteils, or "Negro Types of the Dark Continent," indicating an ethnographic survey but also an intrinsic artistic interest (at a period in time when African native art was well-established with the European avant-garde as having its own particular aesthetic). It is these 1930 photographs -- now credited to "M. Gehrts-Schomburgk," to elide the photographer's gender (and possibly her earlier celebrity) -- that accompany the 1944 publication of Felix Bryk's Dark Rapture. As a result of this complicated history, the same set of photographs has essentially served several different cultural functions for its target audience. As an accompaniment to Schomburgk's "ethnodramas," Meg Gehrts-Schomburgk's photographs of African natives taken by the white star ingenue of the films would basically qualify as straight-up colonialism: a native product (in this case, authenticity) was being packaged and sold in the normal commercial processes within Europe, as the 1915 memoir is clearly intended to accompany the marketing of the films (and the films were intended to pay for Schomburgk's own African expeditions). By 1930, the photographs have become art, and a sort of dilettante's ethnography. By 1944, for the English language audience, the veneer of ethnography is important, but in essence the work -- along with Bryk's work -- is now being sold under the dubious category of "erotica," i.e., as something little better than pornography. Although neither Gehrts-Schomburgk's photographs nor Bryk's book are particularly salacious or prurient, the hint as to the book's intent is provided by the fly-by-night publishing venture that issued them, "Juno Books" of Forest Hills, New York -- which seems to have issued no other recorded publications at all. The 1944 publication of Bryk's text and Gehrts-Schomburgk's photographs seem to indicate a climate in which titillating material was frequently issued under the guise of "scientific" validity, because scientific utility was harder to censor than something obviously intended to be pornographic. But to a certain degree, Meg Gehrts-Schomburgk's ethnographic photographs of Africa were already to a certain extent contaminated by her fame as a film star making silent film melodramas about the German colonial enterprise. The actual photos -- while they may depict topless women -- are hardly intended to titillate, but at the same time the captions indicate a vast condescension which is hardly appropriate for professional anthropology: we may see this in Gehrts-Schomburgk's plate 3 (depicted in Figure 2 at the end) whose caption reads "Mangbetu woman. She wears no hat. She does not need one, with that imposing edifice of hair." (Bryk, ix). While there is some utility to the caption -- the woman depicted in the photo has an elaborate hairstyle that resembles a hat -- nonetheless this ends up sounding like a condescending version of Vogue magazine.

How does this somewhat preposterous work that passes for anthropology bear upon the work of someone like Isaac Schapera? First, as noted earlier, Alfred Kinsey accorded Schapera the same status as Bryk when assessing anthropological work on the sexual habits of African tribes -- then again, Kinsey was not really an anthropologist himself, although he too was essentially making up a scientistic paradigm for himself as he collected ethnographic information. (It is perhaps no accident that Kinsey's own pioneering report has come under the same harsh critique that has also been leveled against Margaret Mead, Sigmund Freud, and others.) From the standpoint of contemporary twenty-first century anthropology, certainly no-one would want to place Schapera in the same category as Felix Bryk, whose work may not have been intended to titillate, but whose dedication to "exoticism" was sufficient that the work could easily serve that purpose when packaged for an English-language readership. Yet the basis of Schapera's work is, as Ugochukwu has noted, a willingness to observe cultural hybridity. Schapera's basic break with Malinowski and the others was to observe that, in the field, the anthropologist would frequently observe churches, stores, etc., but that these were seldom mentioned in the ethnographies. The fact of those churches is precisely relevant here. Schapera himself notes that his status as a Jew put him at a slightly odd angle to the prevailing culture anyway: yet as an editor and serious critic of the earlier Christian missionary Livingstone, Schapera is clearly willing to pay attention to the ways in which the European Christian presence in Africa may have already begun to affect the daily life of Africans. Schapera's own work on Livingstone emphasizes the way that the missionary stood up for the essential humanity of the natives: he notes that Livingstone's "hostile" criticism of the Boers in South Africa was due to the fact "that they were opposed to the spread of the gospel among the Africans, whom they considered as little better than baboons" (Schapera 145). If we in the twenty-first century are inclined to suspect Christian missionaries of a vast condescension toward the populations they seek to convert, Schapera (who is not a Christian) nonetheless points out that the Christian missionary had the greater concern for the inherent dignity of these natives. Yet there were ways in which the missionary enterprise did otherwise resemble the colonial enterprise. For example, Jean and John Comaroff describe the missionary elements of the English colonial enterprise in terms of a process whereby "the savage would, by careful tending, be elevated into something like the late British yeomanry; many of the evangelists…spoke quite openly of creating a society of independent peasants…in speaking thus, they relied heavily on horticultural metaphors, evoking the recreation of the spoiled English garden in Africa's 'vast moral wastes'." (Comaroff and Comaroff 1991, 80). As a result, the idea of an ethical and social waste was propounded, in which Christian practices could be established. These observations are important because, when we contrast Schapera with Felix Bryk, we are forced to observe the way in which the "exotic" sexual practices of Africans might already have been affected by the rather strong approach taken by Christianity to specifically sexual morality. For example, Kuper reports that in the 1960s even Africans who had converted to Christianity had "set themselves up as guardians and critics of morality, but not from the essentially foreign perspective of mission churches….Some churches banned polygynists, but not all; and the current sexual permissiveness was in general taken for granted" (Kuper 1987, 159). This would seem to indicate that -- despite the general belief that Christian missionaries stand for a restrictive and conversative sexual discourse (which to this day gives us the commonly-used phrase "missionary position") -- the reality of sexual discourse even in Christianized Africa was vastly more complex. In other words, Schapera's general approach -- of recognizing the "hybridity" of such cultures -- is precisely relevant even when considering sexual mores.

Yet this is where a consideration of Schapera's photography becomes interesting. In the large number of ethnographic photos collected by the Comaroffs in the posthumous published edition, there is not a single photograph by Schapera that depicts the interior of an African dwelling. This fact is significant insofar as Schapera's work deals significantly enough with the sex lives of Africans that it was used by Dr. Kinsey, yet Schapera himself may have been dealing with the subject at a certain remove. In his late interviews with Adam Kuper, Schapera makes comments that indicate to a certain extent that the sexual mores of Christian missionaries may have already had some effect on the Africans:

IS: Tshekedi started off well, but after…for instance, when it came to sexual seduction

AK: Not a particularly Tswana custom!

IS: No. Well, he was a prude. He didn't think that this was law and custom. (Schapera and Kuper 2001, 4)

This same line of argument -- in which Schapera suggests that the local chief Tshekedi was possessed of prudish sexual morality -- is expanded upon further in the second part of Schapera's interview with Kuper:

AK: Although didn't you get into a bit of trouble when Married Life in an African Tribe came out? The trouble was that it dealt not only with marriage, but more generally with sexual relations, which upset some of the more puritan chiefs.

IS: No. Tshekedi was the chief of Bangwato and he had a legal adviser, Buchanan, in Cape Town….Married Life in an African Tribe appeared in 1940. Buchanan, as Tshekedi's legal advisor, read everything that appeared on Botswana. He read the book. He was horrified, and he called in the Archbishop of Cape Town and showed him certain passages. The Archbishop was horrified. They went to the head of the university, who then sent a telegram to me…Professor Schapera from the Principal, University of Cape Town: 'Serious complaints have been made on account of your book. Will you please come back to answer them.' So I sent a telegram to a friend of mine who was a lawyer, Stanley Field, to look into this, find out what it's all about…Field consulted Buchanan and Buchanan's complaint was this: according to my description of ssexual intercourse among the Kgatla, it was very much like the way the civilized, Europeans committed sex. There was nothing exotic about this. That's what annoyed him, what annoyed the serious crowd in Cape Town. (Schapera and Kuper 2002, 15-6)

Schapera oddly seems to be having it both ways. He had indicated earlier in the interview that he found Tshekedi to be prudish about sex, but he also suggests that the actual complaints about his work on African sexual mores did not derive from Tshekedi himself, but from his European legal adviser, whose complaint was that the sexual mores described were not "exotic" enough. Yet it is also worth noting that -- among Schapera's photographs collected by Comaroff, Comaroff and James -- is one depicting his chief informant in Tshekedi's tribe, Sofonia Poonyane. The text accompanying the photograph describes Schapera's reliance on Poonyane:

Poonyane, a young missionary printer, became Schapera's research assistant soon after he began his work among the Kgatla in 1929. Schapera spoke of him with great fondness and respect. Recall the comment from his field report: 'a good interpreter and an invaluable informant. He soon came to realize what I was after, and began to make independent inquiries on my behalf….' Some of the most detailed accounts published by Schapera on sex and marriage were based heavily on material collected by Poonyane." (Comaroff, Comaroff and James, 110).