Africa and Europe during the age of mutual exploration: a Swahili traveler's description of 19th century Germany.
The late modern period that began in the early 19th century was the height of mutual exploration on a global scale in which African travelers were active agents.
In the preceding period, Africans had been traveling and occasionally settling across much of the old world since antiquity; from China and Japan to India, Arabia, and the Persian Gulf, from Palestine and Armenia, to Istanbul and the Roman world, and from Iberia to Western Europe. Their activities contributed to the patterns of global integration that eventually led to the production of travel literature during the late modern period.
The travel literature produced by these intrepid African explorers provides a rich medium to study different perceptions of foreign cultures and exotic lands. The African authors consistently compare the unfamiliar landscapes, people and fauna they encountered to those in their own societies. They describe foreign curiosities, eccentricities, and beliefs that inspire personal reflections on humanity and religion, using the language of wonder to express the strangeness of foreign customs.
The 1856 account of the Hausa traveler Dorugu for example, contains many comparisons between the culture, places, and rituals of the people of England and Germany, with those of his own community near the city of Zinder in modern Niger. Dorugu included many interesting anecdotes about his hosts such as the Germans' penchant for smoking, and the curious dining traditions of the English, whose meals he considered as good as Hausa cuisine.
The tobacco college of King Friedrich Wilhelm I, German engraving ca. 1878. "I have never seen a country where people like to smoke as much as they do in Germany. You can even meet a young boy about twelve years old with a tobacco pipe stuck in his mouth." Dorugu, 1856.
The 1896 account of the Comorian traveler Selim Abakari through the Russian Empire provides an even more detailed account of the many different places and cultures he encountered. Selim meticulously reproduces his observations of the unfamiliar landscapes, peoples and fauna for which he struggled to find equivalents in the Swahili language. He was pleasantly surprised upon meeting "white Muslims" in such a 'remote' region and was fascinated by the nomadic practices of the Kalmyks whom he compares to the Maasai of Kenya and Tanzania.
Kalmyk camp near Astrakhan, southern Russia. early 20th century. “They sleep in small tents made of thick fabric and do not stay in the same place for more than two days, they are like Maasai, they follow their herds —goats, sheep, and horses— in search of pastures.” Selim Abakari, 1896.
The book-length travelogue of the Ganda traveller Ham Mukasa who visited England in 1902 provides what is arguably the most detailed account of foreign lands written by an African traveler from this period. Like the other travelers, Mukasa relied on a familiar vocabulary and set of concepts from his own society of Buganda, in Uganda, as a transcendental point of reference to describe the unfamiliar landscapes and objects of England, as well as in the way he characterized the different groups he met along the way; such as the Germans, Jews and Italians.
A model of a torture rack in the Tower of London and a 19th-century engraving of a Torture Rack. “... he took us to the fort of the kings of England from old days, which is called the ‘Tower’, and when we arrived there we saw many relics of all kinds from the time of their ancestors… We were also shown how they fastened their women to strong trees and stretched them like a cowskin is stretched, and the trees tore them in half.” Ham Mukasa, 1902.
Many of these travelogues were written on the eve of colonialism and can thus be read as inverse ethnographies, utilising a form of narrative inversion in which the African travellers reframe and subvert the dominant political order. They travel along well-known routes, rely on local guides and interpreters, and comment on cultural differences using their own conceptual vocabularies.
An excellent example of this is a little known travel document written by an East African traveller Amur al-Omeri who visited Germany in 1891. Written in Swahili, the document relates his puzzlement about the unfamiliar landscape and curiosities he witnessed that he consistently compares with his home city of Zanzibar; from the strange circuses and beerhalls of Berlin, to the museums with captured artefacts, to the licentious inhabitants of Amsterdam.
The 19th century travelogue of Amur al-Omeri is the subject of my latest Patreon article, please subscribe to read about it here;
Storming of the Bastille Prison and the ‘July Column’ which replaced it. “… We reached Paris, the capital of France… We saw also a tall pillar they had put up, with the figure of a man on the top standing on one leg, with wings and with a sword in his hand… This pillar was put there as a memorial to remind people of the prison into which their king used to put them (Bastille); when they removed the prison they put this pillar up, and wrote on it all about what happened at that time, as a memorial”. Ham Mukasa, 1902.