Imagining Imperial Modernity in British Colonial West Africa: Gerald Spencer Pryse's Work for the Empire Marketing Board
2015; Oxford University Press; Volume: 38; Issue: 5 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1111/1467-8365.12145
ISSN1467-8365
Autores Tópico(s)Hispanic-African Historical Relations
ResumoDetail from Gerald Spencer Pryse, A Street in Kano, 1927 (plate 10). The posters commissioned by the Empire Marketing Board (EMB), ‘a departmental advisory committee’ established by the British government in 1926 to promote and stimulate trade within the empire,1 ‘gave no space’, recent scholarship claims, ‘to anti-colonial criticism or to any other inconvenient truths that may have detracted from their message’.2 The records of the EMB's Poster Section, held at the National Archives, gives merit to this claim, as they confirm that imagery produced by the Board's commissioned artists was indeed in many instances stringently regulated, its content requiring committee approval before final publication to ensure that the EMB's message was expressed in the manner they desired.3 This article, however, argues conversely that some EMB imagery may be read as negatively critiquing aspects of Britain's imperial vision in the late 1920s.4 Until its abolition in 1933, the EMB sought ‘to create in the public mind a convincing picture of imperial realities in every corner of the world’.5 Amongst its activities, the Board financed scientific research into increasing the production of empire food, but its most publicly visual attempt to convey ‘imperial realities’ was through the posters it displayed on purpose-built hoardings across Britain that projected the empire as a unified trading entity whose members actively and willingly participated in a modern imperial economy. This configuration of empire was, however, only one of a number on offer in the late 1920s and in other visual mediums – painting, film, photography, and product advertising – other imperial identities were forged. This article reflects specifically upon the formation of identity in Britain's West African colonies in the 1920s, but its main focus falls upon images of the region created for the EMB by the established poster artist Gerald Spencer Pryse (1882–1956) in 1927/28.6 In the context of the EMB's output these are significant works for they reveal colonial West Africa as a site of industrialized modernity; a region more typically represented by the Board as technologically undeveloped.7 But their greater significance is that pictorially they reveal tensions concerning the construction of West Africa's imperial identity in the 1920s; tensions that revolve around coexisting configurations of the region as indigenously exotic, but also as imperially and indigenously modern. In the early 1920s the newspaper West Africa issued a call for Western cultural producers – both painters and writers – to visit Britain's tropical colonies in West Africa and draw upon their life and atmosphere as material for their work.8 A series of articles, including a front page editorial eulogizing the natural features of Gold Coast (present-day Ghana) run under the banner, ‘The Most Picturesque Colony in the Empire’, was published in September and October 1921. The editorial informed any potentially visiting artists of the subject-matter to which they should attend, and it listed an extensive array of picturesque natural scenes – deemed to be ‘the true field of the artist’ – that awaited depiction: ‘the rolling surf’, ‘the black luminous darkness of the starlit night’, and ‘the forests with their sombre depths broken by shafts of sunlight’.9 Krista Thompson, in her analysis of touristic photographs of the Caribbean dating from the early twentieth century, outlines the differing criteria that deemed whether images were identified at the time as picturesque or tropical. She details that ‘more tamed and ordered’ views were considered picturesque whilst images that ‘reinforced the idea of … wild, overly abundant, and even uncontrolled … nature’, that expressed traits of ‘fertility’ and ‘exoticism’, were defined as tropical.10 West Africa’s choice of ‘picturesque’ to convey West Africa's tropicality, suggests, however, that such terms also had a more fluid, perhaps less ideological, quality when used to evoke the aesthetic characteristics of imperial landscapes and cultures in the 1920s. Indeed, when Spencer Pryse described West Africa he did not define it specifically as ‘picturesque’, ‘exotic’, or ‘tropical’, but considered only that there ‘aesthetic perceptions predominate to an astonishing degree’.11 In this instance it therefore may be less fruitful to search for any ideological subtext in the terms employed to describe West Africa in the 1920s. Instead, it is perhaps safer to argue that articles such as the West Africa editorial helped facilitate the tropical empire's decontextualization by permitting it to be perceived as uncontaminated by history, reduced to a mere assemblage of timeless aesthetic views to which artists could selectively respond. In the view of the editorial, it was, however, not just landscape that served this purpose, for, artists were alerted, the indigenous population in their ‘brilliant Native costumes’ are also prized for their picturesque value. Moreover, the editorial's comparison of Ghanaian male dress to togas worn in Roman times, alongside talk of ‘sword bearers’, had the potential to inflict the same sense of stasis upon the population as it imposed upon the natural environment.12 Many of Spencer Pryse's images of West Africa echo the configuration of the tropical empire as an exotic entity. His deployment of the exotic constitutes a manifestation of exoticism, defined by Chris Bongie ‘as a nineteenth-century literary and existential practice that posited … the space of [the] Other [as] outside or beyond the confines of a “civilization” that, by virtue of its modernity, was perceived … as being incompatible with certain essential values’.13 Although a late florescence of exoticism (apropos Bongie's definition), ‘the exotic’, as Peter Mason has argued, ‘is always up for renegotiation [and] always open to reinvention’; a conception that grants it a more enduring centrality when used in historical analysis.14 Thus, the exoticized images of West Africa that Spencer Pryse produced fit within an exoticist discourse that, in the 1920s and 1930s, idealized and positively contrasted the authenticity of some non-Western societies with their contemporary European and North American counterparts.15 Consequently, as manifestations of the exotic, Spencer Pryse's images are, as Frederick Bohrer generally argues, ‘about … the Western societies in which they circulate at least as much as any extrinsic culture they claim to represent’.16 The one hundred watercolours Spencer Pryse painted during a three-month tour of Gold Coast and Nigeria financed by the EMB, ‘went’, as he acknowledged, ‘beyond the immediate needs of the Marketing Board’.17 Exhibited in the late 1920s and early 1930s in London, Liverpool, Manchester, Copenhagen, and Toronto, the paintings highlight West Africa's intrinsic aestheticness; an aesthetic that Spencer Pryse believed was derived not only from the natural landscape but also from the heightened aesthetic perception of its indigenous population for ‘whom living remains an art’ and from whom ‘an industrialized world has possibly something to learn’.18 It was an aesthetic that some contemporary commentators saw as potentially threatened by the industrialization that had been introduced into West Africa under British imperial rule and which Spencer Pryse recorded. For example, the Manchester Guardian, when reviewing an exhibition of his watercolours in Manchester in May 1930, described some as ‘rather grim pictures of Western industrialism impinging on the primitive’.19 Comments such as those contained in the Manchester Guardian review would have undermined the EMB's positive projection of empire as a unified ‘family’ of modernizing, trading nations; a conception adopted by the Board to dispel notions that Britain selfishly exploited her colonial territories. It was a vision of empire that the EMB promoted through the use of slogans such as ‘The Empire is One Large Family’ and ‘Keep Trade in the Family’,20 and it was part of a wider attempt in the 1920s to redefine empire as a peaceable and cohesive trading union, and distance it from its late-nineteenth-century more militaristic characterization.21 Significantly, the exoticism that imbues many of Spencer Pryse's watercolours also permeates his posters of West Africa: deemed by the EMB to positively convey imperial modernity.22 This, perhaps, was not unsurprising. Images depicting indigenous West African exoticism existing alongside imperial modernity may have reinforced a belief held by the imperial authorities that the empire's West Africa colonies had sustained their authentic character despite a period of major social and economic upheaval. So when Spencer Pryse depicted native chiefs exotically dressed in traditional robes of Kente cloth in an EMB poster, Native Chiefs in Palaver (plate 1), there was more invested in the picturesque or exotic than merely its role in the production of aesthetically pleasing, timeless images, as West Africa had proposed in 1921.23 In this instance the exotic served wider imperial objectives by pictorially validating an aspect of Britain's administration of its West African colonies: the system of Indirect Rule through traditional local chiefs.24 For here, as James Epstein has argued, the British authorities found a ‘hierarchically ordered society’ that mirrored their own ideological identification of ‘a ruling elite … with landed wealth’.25 Photo: © Manchester City Galleries. Spencer Pryse's representation of the exotic indigenous culture of Gold Coast as not only continuing under British administration, but, furthermore, being accorded respect (he portrays an equally exotic figure dressed in the white ceremonial uniform of a colonial Governor meeting native chiefs), meant that his poster would have suited the EMB's promotion of Britain's imperial rule as respectful and ‘non-destructive’ of existing indigenous cultural practices.26 In this instance, though, his imagery fails to fully convey the complexities of the region's life; West Africa is imagined only through a limited exotic indigenous/imperial binary. Although such a conception served the purposes of the EMB, the contemporaneous presence in colonial West Africa of locally produced modernities – and the pictorial neglect of them by Spencer Pryse – means images that project the region primarily as an exotic entity in the 1920s need to be considered not only in the light of whose purposes such a construction served, but whose identity it denied. By the 1920s an authentic – effectively, unmodernized – and exotic characterization of colonial West Africa had been undermined by modernities imported by imperial powers, but also by those produced indigenously. By this date, a British university-educated West African elite operating within a public sphere that incorporated London and Accra, the capital of Gold Coast, had forged, or were developing, modernities that appropriated and rejected certain aspects of imperial modernity. Their political ambitions in Gold Coast thwarted by an administrative system that left them marginalized, this elite instigated alternative, independent forums that included student organizations formed in London, newspapers published in West Africa, and debating and social clubs established in Accra through which they could express their own ideas regarding political modernity.27 Also part of West Africa's elite in the 1920s was an established mercantile class described as ‘the first capitalists of West Africa in the sphere of industry’.28 In March 1923 West Africa published a photograph of two of its affluent members – a Mr and Mrs E. K. Adisi – pictured, standing alongside their children, on the steps of their impressive home in Accra, in front of which is parked Mrs Adisi's luxury car (plate 2). A week after its appearance West Africa published a reader's letter that complimented the newspaper for giving ‘both in its reading matter and more particularly in its pictures, a reliable account of what is happening in West Africa’.29 For the correspondent, the photograph showed a continent where Africans now ‘carry on great enterprises, have fine houses, and use some of the most expensive makes of British motor-cars and other articles’.30 Yet for other commentators in the 1920s, Westernized Africans, such as the Adisis, were viewed more negatively. Hugh Wyndham vindictively described the Westernized African ‘as a highly trained mechanic, dancing in evening clothes, and in the intervals whispering pan-African politics’, but whose ‘mental and spiritual being is all the time in its primitive state.’31 Photo: © British Library Board, LON148, p. 305. The colonial authorities in West Africa did not consider elite West Africans ‘primitive’, but neither did they place great value on a group whose principal professional occupations as barristers, journalists, or traders meant they were often regarded by the authorities as disruptive, or non-beneficial, to the imperial project.32 For colonial governments, seeking to construct an imperially modern West Africa on, what it considered, traditional cultural foundations, a Western-educated elite, guilty in the view of some imperialists for breaching ‘clearly definable boundaries’,33 ‘could no longer claim an authentic African identity and culture’.34 Unsurprisingly, some elite West Africans railed against an imperially imposed notion of ‘authentic African identity’. In West Africa in May 1924, C. F. Hayfron-Benjamin, educated at Kings College, London and then President of the Society of Students of African Descent, offered an alternative version of West African identity in the 1920s. Describing the West African Section of the British Empire Exhibition then being staged at Wembley, Hayfron-Benjamin considered that a ‘casual visitor … is introduced to only one side of African life … the tribe gathered around their chief, arrayed in Native dress … [and] would hardly gather that the African is quite accustomed to the use of such amenities as the motor-car, telephone, [and] electric light.’35 He hoped that the modern technology of the cinema would produce a correspondingly modern conception of colonial West Africa.36 And indeed a film shown in an on-site cinema at Wembley, the Greville brothers’ The Gold Coast Today, shot in the colony in 1923, went some way in achieving this as it included a scene of an African barrister at work in Accra interviewing clients and leaving for court in a car.37 As representations of West African identity in the 1920s, the photograph of the Adisi family, Hayfron-Benjamin's account, and the Greville brothers’ film stand in stark contrast to an imperially designated authentic identity, exotically conveyed by Spencer Pryse in Native Chiefs in Palaver. It was, though, not only through mediums such as film and photography – ‘vested with a particular authority … to see and record’ – that an alternative conception of Britain's tropical West African colonies emerged: their limited, exoticized configuration was also challenged in some British art.38 A portrait exhibited by Beatrice Bright at the Daily Express Women's Exhibition at Olympia in 1922, which was reproduced in West Africa on 26 August 1922, also offered a differing account of colonial West African identity. The subject of the painting, Miss Dove-Edwin of Sierra Leone, was studying in London when Bright portrayed her in ‘African costume’ of ‘vivid colourings’.39 The casting of Dove-Edwin as a generic ‘exotic’ African is, however, somewhat mitigated by the fashionable Western ‘bob’ haircut that she also wears, which firmly positions her as an African woman familiar with the cultural minutiae of metropolitan life. The portrait thus reveals evidence of the cultural intermingling that had long constituted the life of elite West Africans, and it highlights that imperially produced conceptions of the ‘authentic’ West Africa as a timeless entity were both limiting and inadequate; failing, as they did, to take account of the ‘autonomous spaces’ in which West Africans constituted modern cultural and political identities at this time. Yet for all the attempts of a West African elite to define and declare their modernity, and despite that modernity being on occasion visually acknowledged in photographs, film, and paintings, visual constructions of West African identity remained, in the 1920s, multifarious. Bongie has argued that with the spread of colonialism, Western purveyors of the distantly located exotic were faced with a dilemma. They could either honestly record the ‘new world of colonialism’ to be found in locations previously configured as exotic, but which to a greater or lesser extent was a version of the ‘old world’ whence they had come, or they could continue to disingenuously conceptualize these sites as exotic but only ‘by relying on by-now clichéd visions’.40 Evidence of the continuing imagining of West Africa as a purely exotic entity is found in work shown in London less than two years after Bright's hybridized portrait of Dove-Edwin was seen there. In March 1924 an exhibition of paintings of Sierra Leone by a French artist, Rose Chicotot Stinus, opened at Brook Street Galleries. Stinus’ paintings were reviewed in The Times and, based upon this account, the exhibition comprised landscapes, judged to ‘convey with intensity the glow and the luxuriance of Africa’, and studies of the indigenous Sierra Leonean population, which were praised for evoking ‘the subject of place’. One of the latter, Back from Fishing (plate 3), was considered by the reviewer ‘a sympathetic appreciation of dignity and mystery proceeding from race’,41 yet although a degree of individuality is evident in the two figures, the sparsely-clad fishermen could in 1924 equally have been viewed more generically as exotic Africans personifying the exotic tropical empire. Photo: © British Library Board, LON112, p. 215. However, such were the conflicting visual constructions of West African identity then in circulation that immediately following Stinus’ exhibition another show of work in London offered an alternative account of life in the region. As part of its display at the British Empire Exhibition, the colonial government of Gold Coast exhibited paintings that it had commissioned from a British artist, Edith Cheesman, which depicted aspects of the colony's economic and social transformation.42 In conveying Gold Coast amidst the throes of imperial modernization, Cheesman was often required to paint visually dull subject-matter, such as Boys on Parade (plate 4), a depiction of one of the trade schools established by the colonial government to provide training in manual trades. This nondescript image would, nonetheless, have served the requirements of the Governor of Gold Coast, Sir Gordon Guggisberg, in relaying to a domestic British audience evidence of how Britain was helping to ‘civilize’ the colony. For in addition to teaching technical skills, the trade schools had a supposedly ‘civilizing’ role. They inculcated ‘character training’ and students were expected to display behavioural traits of cleanliness, obedience, and respect for parents and institutions: qualities that may be ascribed to the boys seen in the picture.43 The painting can, however, also be read as serving an additional, less transparent, propaganda purpose. Surrounding the open expanse of the school-ground – an example of the type of ‘desirable [colonial] space in which bodies [are] changed into … orderly, docile and disciplined subjects’ – Cheesman depicts a number of neat and tidy whitewashed school buildings.44 They form a barrier between the manmade and prosaic landscape – an outcome of imperial modernity – and the native forest that looms large in the background of the painting and which symbolizes an untransformed and, hence, still potentially exotic Africa. Here, though, the concept of the exotic functions merely as background nature thereby lacking in ‘significance [and] narrative potential’.45 In Cheesman's painting, an imperial vision of modernity has replaced exoticism as the dominant narrative of British colonial West Africa in the 1920s. Photo: © Royal Commonwealth Society Library, Cambridge University Library. Although marginalized (and, ideologically, Guggisberg would surely have welcomed this), Cheesman's limited expression of West Africa's exoticness still held value for him. He admitted he felt sorry for her ‘having to tackle a subject so lacking in artistic possibilities as a tidy, well-swept, school-ground’, but considered that her ‘skilful introduction of the harmattan mists in the great forest in the background’ elevated what he feared was dull subject-matter into the status of art: ‘The Scouts on parade and at work, the buildings they had built, were all I wanted – Miss Cheesman has given us a picture.’ 46 Guggisberg's seizing upon the exotic element in Cheesman's painting suggests that an evocation of an exoticized tropical empire still retained significant cultural capital, however partial the expression of that exoticism was.47 Even though it was beneficial for an imperialist, such as him, to have, for short-term political and economic purposes, art that conveyed a temporally specific notion of a modernizing empire, it was as important, for long-term needs of historical endorsement – what the artist and cultural historian Kenneth Coutts-Smith has called ‘the freezing of concepts’ – that this art, too, was validated.48 Bohrer has outlined the dynamic, evolving role that the viewer has played in the reception of ‘representational transformations’ of the exotic.49 Boys on Parade would potentially have challenged an established and still prevailing art-historical configuration of the tropical empire as timelessly exotic – a configuration to which Stinus’ work contributed – but the exotic veneer that embellishes Cheesman's depiction of imperial modernity in Gold Coast nonetheless granted the work, for Guggisberg (and, presumably, he hoped, for other viewers), a degree of cultural authenticity. I have watched long lines of camels from Sokoto and Zinder, their Tuareg proprietors perched high on piled-up bags, shrouded in indigo draperies, each with a great cross-handled sword slung at his side. I have seen them again in the white African moonlight mysteriously set against the sky. I have watched groups of women in twilight interiors, waiting for their loads of groundnuts to be weighed out, sumptuous and sombre groups that might inspire new essays in art. I have seen men with the proportions of Greek athletes racing all day up and down the beach when a steamer has been loading … Such images as these have replaced what I took with me to Africa. In those pre-conceived monotonous lines of carriers it is hard to recognize the diversity and amplitude of the reality.54 Here, then, in this retrospective account, we have a summation of the exotic material that awaited Spencer Pryse's paintbrush. But as an artist commissioned by the EMB his objective was to produce posters that fulfilled a contemporary political need. Annie Coombes has argued that the representation of Africa was never ‘fixed’ but ‘eminently … variable, depending on the political exigencies of any specific historical conjuncture’,55 and in this instance the imagining of West Africa centred upon a contemporary political need to promote a modern economically self-sufficient empire less vulnerable to foreign competition.56 Spencer Pryse, in recording the effects of imperial modernity in West Africa, faced the challenge of how to make art out of often more prosaic material; the cranes, machines, and newly constructed harbours that were radically altering a landscape and culture, so often perceived in Western imagination as timelessly exotic. Confronted with the same problem, Cheesman had resolved it by marginalizing the exotic, confining it to an atmospheric, background role. For Spencer Pryse, though, judging by the effusive aesthetic descriptions that permeate his account, three years after Cheesman's visit, the exotic could not be so easily subjugated: for him, it continued to define West Africa. His EMB commission resulted from protracted negotiations with the Poster Section sub-committee that began in June 1927 when he discussed with sub-committee member Frank McDougall the possibility of receiving a commission from the Board ‘to visit Africa with the object of making a series of original sketches for posters’.57 In August this request was granted and he was offered a fee of up to 1,000 guineas to design two sets of lithographs featuring colonial East and West Africa.58 Later that month, he accepted a revised fee of 1,100 guineas for two sets of five colour lithographs depicting scenes in West Africa that were to be derived from ten stipulated subjects.59 Ultimately, a Gold Coast set was scheduled for display in March or April 1928 comprising three large posters, titled Gathering Cocoa Pods, Takoradi Harbour, and Sorting Manganese Ore measuring 101.6 cm by 152.4 cm, interspersed by two smaller posters, titled The Talking Drums and Native Chiefs in Palaver, measuring 101.6 cm by 63.5 cm. In common with other artists employed by the EMB, Spencer Pryse's objective was to design posters that met the Board's aesthetic and ideological requirements.60 That meant, as far as the latter objective was concerned, an ideological representation of the tropical colonies as ‘the empire's gardens’,61 a rich source of food and raw materials, but, due to their technological undevelopment, also as the repositories of British manufactured goods.62 Indeed, a set of posters designed by Edward McKnight Kauffer for an early EMB series entitled ‘One Third of the Empire is in the Tropics’ conformed to this ideological conception.63 Two of Kauffer's posters depict the harvesting, by hand, of bananas and cocoa whilst another incorporates within its design a set of statistics that register the growing mutual trade between Britain and her tropical African colonies, and draws attention to the notion of complementary economies – an imperial vision dating back to the late nineteenth century and Joseph Chamberlain.64 Although the themes of Takoradi Harbour and Sorting Manganese Ore conform to the typical configuration of the colonial empire in EMB posters as a primary producer, they are distinguished by their depiction of a tropical colony's modern transportation and industrial infrastructure. The transportation of colonial produce – the theme of Takoradi Harbour – may have been selected by the EMB as suitable subject-matter for Spencer Pryse due to the importance the colonial authorities attached to the construction of the British-designed harbour at Takoradi which opened on 3 April 1928 just as the posters were on display in Britain. Guggisberg, when reviewing his achievements as Governor, had prioritized the modernization of the colony's transportation infrastructure, especially the construction of a deep water harbour at Takoradi, believing that this would assure ‘the safety of … trade’, and thus ‘assurance of our revenue – the sinews of war for our campaign of education and progress’.65 Similarly, the representation of the colony's manganese ore production may have been due to a combination of its historic imperial importance – by 1916 the Nsuta mine was exporting some 30,000 tons of ore a year to Britain where it was used in the production of steel helmets – and its use of advanced modern technology – when Spencer Pryse visited, the mine was being run by the African Manganese Company, a subsidiary of the American company, Union Carbide, who, after acquiring the mining concession in 1923, had introduced labour-saving machinery to stabilize production costs and deal with the labour shortages that frequently occurred in Gold Coast's mining industry.66 Spencer Pryse's reaction to this incursion of industrialized modernity was, however, more ambiguous. On one occasion, echoing Guggisberg, he commented, supportively, that the harbour's construction had greatly reduced the transportation costs of Gold Coast produce,67 yet on another, he expressed broader reservations about industrialization's seemingly inexorable domination. Europeans, Spencer Pryse argued, were ‘inclined to worship’ industrialism as though in itself it marked ‘some sort of culmination’. ‘It took’, he believed, ‘that sinister screen picture Metropolis’, which ‘only the other day … sent a shudder through Western Europe’, to affirm that ‘though industry must lie at the foundation of all achievement, it may never be the apex’.68 His reference to Metropolis is worthy of note. When it opened in Britain on 21 March 1927 at the Marble Arch Pavilion, the film was acclaimed in the film industry trade journal, The Bioscope, as ‘the greatest screen achievement ever seen’,69 and comments in the popular press were equally effusive: ‘Amazing – superb. Unparalleled in film history’, considered the Daily Mail; ‘A film to be seen again and again’, thought the Daily Express.70 Lang's film proffered a bleak and nightmarish image of industrialized modernity encapsulated in a contemporary review in The Times which considered ‘the fear of machines and of what they represent is one from which no modern community can easily escape. They appear as the enemies of … individuality [and] are recognized by many as the symbols of a process of standardization which may extend, and is perhaps extending, from things to men.’ 71 Another contemporary review thought Metropolis offered a ‘vision of a world shortly before midnight, the dance on a volcano, a minute before it erupts’.72 Lang's dystopian vision clearly had critical resonance,73 as well as popular appeal (the film played to packed houses on its opening in London),74 and his dark expression of modern industrial life can be seen as contributing to a conception of the inter-war years as ‘an age of anxiety, doubt
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