Ibid.inial Economies

by zunguzungu

I have transformed the footnotes from my messiest word file draft of my chapter(s) into a blog post. It is not to be taken seriously as representative of anything, but it does achieve a sort of baroque obliqueness that I’m already charmed by, and also by footnote 169, which must have been a note to an earlier reader. This is it:

1. The fact that a thinker as far across the ideological spectrum from Kenyatta as Frantz Fanon could also extol the anti-colonial traditionalism of veiled Algerian patriot women, for example, only illustrates how broad this sweep of anti-colonialist culturalist rhetoric, theory, and polemic has been, how taken for granted the notion that anti-colonialism and traditionalism were synonymous historical movements has been.
2. Indeed, his claim that the more important factors were African organization around issues of labor and the problem posed for the colonial order by Africans who made good on the colonial mission to civilize and demanded to be treated as such is one of the most important arguments of his Decolonization and African Society.
3. Mahmood Mamdani’s After Culture and Rights Talk is a good exploration of this question; the participants take a variety of approaches to the question, but their common presumption is the extent to which talk about rights and culture have taken the place of (and thereby prevented) political reform of economic violence.
4. radical green books
5. Citizen and Subject, p.20-21. Interestingly, Mamdani has argued both sides of this question: while he has held South Africa’s democratic achievement as an example to be emulated in Sudan — arguing that peace there was achieved by bringing the guilty and innocent to the bargaining table and agreeing to let the past be passed by — he has also, quite cogently, argued that this kind of negotiated peace has foreclosed the kind of real land reform that would be necessary for South Africato avoid the fate of Zimbabwe next-door, another settler colony in which political reform took the place of land reform, with (as he argues) disastrous results (the former argument in Saviors and Survivors, the latter in LRB ??? 2009)
6. Ochieng’ and Atieno-Odhiambo, Decolonization and Independence in Kenya, 1940-1993, xiii
7. Claiming history: colonialism, ethnography, and the novel
8. Illiffe1979, p324 Mamdani 1986??
9. modernity essay, Colonialism in Question

10.   Clifford, Writing Culture etc

11.   Though Leakey was born in 1903, it seems at least as pertinent that this was the year large scale white settlement began in Kenya (then the British East Africa Protectorate).

12.   As a white settler who, having grown up in Kenya, self-identified as Gikuyu, Leakey was not only a political rival but a direct competitor with Kenyatta for the right to ethnographically speak for the Kikuyu ( as Lonsdale/Berman illustrates in ???).

13.   “I am in so many ways a Kikuyu myself” preface KK and MM

14.   Stocking, After Tylor, 241-2

15.   As Bruce Berman puts it “Before a group of three dubious whites — a judge, a retired colonial official, and a settler — [Kenyatta and the KCA] found their testimony and memorandum undermined…and ultimately ignored as representing only the biased interests of certain segments of a contentious and faction-ridden people.”

16.   A reference to the Gikuyu proverb that “wealth is an unanswerable argument”; see, for example, John Lonsdale, “Ornamental Constitutionalism in Africa: Kenyatta and the Two Queens”

17.   If we are more familiar with this move as Derrida’s critique of Levi-Strauss, then (blahblah deconstruction’s colonialist genealogy)

18.   Anthropological locations: boundaries and grounds of a field science

1. I will employ a masculine pronoun for “the” ethnographer, both for reasons of convenience and as a reminder both of how firmly gendered his scientific gaze always seems to be as it pierces to the very core of a passive, native culture and how basically this structures the terms in which it becomes possible for “him” to write about gender in traditional culture. Pioneering female ethnographers like Margeret Meade or Ruth Benedict are, in fact, not merely the exceptions that prove the rule; they are actually
2. Anthropology and the Colonial Encounter.

21.   Facing, 26. He uses the “every inch” formulation several times, as in “While the whole tribe defended collectively the boundary of their territory, every inch of land within it had its owner,” p22. That the Gikuyu were not communists was an especially important point to make for Kenyatta personally as well; having accepted an invitation to Soviet Russia in ????, British suspicion that he was a communist or a Soviet pawn would shadow him for years (and was doubtless a large part of why the British detained him under the suspicion that he was the mastermind behind Mau Mau).

22.   John Lonsdale “Moral Ethnicity”

23.   That the mistranslation is from Gikuyu into Swahili is symptomatic in its own way, as I will address further down. In this context, swahili signifies as a detribalized language of administration, instead of an African “tribal” language in its own right.

24.   facing p141

25.   “Matunda ya Uhuru, Fruits of Nationalism: Seven Theses on Nationalism in Kenya” in Mau Mau and Nationhood: Arms, Authority, and Narration

26.   All those critiques!

27.   Facing, 167

1. Poachers, p68
2. Lonsdale’s “Moral Economy of Mau Mau”

30.   Creative Writing

31.   The Southern Kikuyu Before 1903. The problem that there are no authoritative accounts of the “authentic” Gikuyu tradition is only to be solved by not looking for one. And while Leakey’s account is equally eccentric in its own way, it is more or less representative of the mainstream that Kenyatta was creatively adapting and departing from; his account of the origin story is by no means the consensus version, but its key points are much more consistent with other accounts than is Kenyatta’s.

32.   Louis Leakey, The Southern Kikuyu Before 1903

1. “Ornamental Constitutionalism in Africa: Kenyatta and the Two Queens” John Lonsdale
2. (brainstorming the name with his friend ???, who would recall that they chose it because it sounded African)
3. People like Jomo Kenyatta, Kwame Nkrumah, Leopold Sedar Senghor, Nnamdi Azikiwe, and Julius Nyerere.
4. I do this in two slightly distinct senses, asking both how and why the distinction emerges in the texts which I am examining and using that distinction as a way of justifying the argument which my choice of these texts represents in the first place. In other words, I am using “historicize” to describe two different critical moves: while historical context helps explain how and why Stanley and Roosevelt employed these different narratives of location in describing Africa, I am also using the fact that they did to argue that these two figures represent thesis and antithesis of the dialectic that informs the mainstream of American writing about Africa. In this sense, asking how and why Stanley and Roosevelt deploy these different narratives of location in describing Africa is a way of reframing the broader question of what Americans see when they go to Africa and what Africans have seen when they see Americans looking at them.
5. In Darkest Africa (1890: 72)
6. Patrick Brantlinger
7. In a letter to his wife (from Jeannette Eileen Jones “In Brightest Africa”: Naturalistic Constructions of Africa in the American Museum of Natural History, 1910-1936).
8. Michel de Certeau, The Practices of Everyday Life, “Spatial Stories,” p117
9. Global Shadows.
10. These competing notions of the natural have had remarkable staying power. If we compare the Africa of Tarzan of the Apes to the Africa of The Lion King, for instance, we find a familiar distinction in both regionalist and theoretical terms: while the former tells a Stanley-an story of the penetration of a dark jungle (which only illustrates the dark un-fitness of Africa to be penetrated), the latter frames the continent by an East African vision of syncretic collaboration, situating the primitivism of Africa by reference to the modernity with which the imperative is to have intercourse.^# As did Stanley’s, Tarzan’s white skin shines all the more brightly against the dark background of the central African jungle, indicating that  — like Stanley — his ultimate destiny (reproductive and otherwise) is elsewhere and that human beings sojourn in Africa only as pretext to creating a home elsewhere. And just as The Lion King’s musical numbers celebrate an Africa taken straight from the pages of East African tourist brochures (or vice versa),^# this welcome is expressed in the same inversion of the late Stanley’s terms as was Theodore Roosevelt’s, who first and most influentially imagined the continent by reference to an East African settler destination understood as the salvation of the white race, instead of the site of dangerous miscegenation.
11. Achille Mbembe Postcolony, 2001, p2
12. In fact, as I have already argued, even Stanley’s How I Found Livingstone was far from ex nihilo, having itself revived a (pre-abolition) abolitionist celebration of the continent’s noble savagery to argue against the rationality of the slave trade. In this sense, not only has the conversation remained remarkably stable and consistent over the last century or so, but it took its vocabulary and metaphoric idiom from an even more prior political conversation over the morality of slavery.
13. Scott, Conscripts of Modernity, p4
14. Philip Curtin’s 1964 The Image of Africa, Achebe, Mphaphlele
15. Roosevelt‘s assertions that, for example, “a Westerner, far better than an Easterner, could see the possibilities of the country” and that “the settler who makes a success in similar parts of our own West, can do well in East Africa” are symptomatic.
16. Actual titles here
17. I take, here, Mamdani’s distinction between the de-racialization of the state in Africa and its democratization (see Citizen, p.20-21), and share his focus on the manner in which the manner in which the former has occurred has not only not implied the latter, but has actively impeded it.
18. This is especially true when we consider how basically Roosevelt-ian are writers like Ernest Hemingway and Edgar Rice Burroughs when they write about Africa; though their visions of the continent aren’t reducible to his, of course, they would be the first to admit that their own writings would be unthinkable without his.
19. It is worth noting, for example, that the set of touristic practices which he popularized when he went to Kenya now form — in a very real sense — the basis of the formal economy in much of East Africa, an economic sector whose language remains very Rooseveltian. People come to see the “big five” big game animals (elephants, lions, rhino, hippo, and buffalo) and they supplement it with trips to see the Maasai, who the tour guides counterfactually describe as “natural” people living in nature. At the same time, the Tanzanian government (which doesn’t have a ministry of the interior, but a ministry of “tourism and natural resources”) can move the Maasai around as they see fit (like kicking them out of nature preserves) by first citing conservationist imperative and then by using the fact of their status as “natural” to justify the paternalistic authority the government wields over them. TR saw (explicitly) conservation as a logic of governance, and these are exactly the terms in which the Tanzanian government operates when it comes to treating people as natural resources.
20. “In 1900, only 480 Europeans resided in all of Kenya, including twenty farming families. Between 1903 and 1906, the arrival of 800 Boers from South Africa spearheaded a growth of from 790 to 1,800 Europeans. The ensuing eight years witnessed major increases, so that by 1914 the European community totaled 5,400, about 3,000 of them settlers.”Kenya: the quest for prosperity By Norman N. Miller, Rodger Yeager, p14 an increasing percentage of that number comprised permanent farming families (instead of temporary colonial functionaries)
21. Eliot believed in settling BEA with a variety of small free-holders, in opposition to the efforts by many in London to build large estates using non-settler labor, both African and Asian. He resigned his position in 1904, in fact, over a conflict with London on these principles, one the first important conflicts between the settler interest and the metropolitan.
22. cited, p15, Kenya: the quest for prosperity, Norman N. Miller, Rodger Yeager
23. His pro-settlement tract, The East African Protectorate, was published after he left the colonial service, and was at least partially an attempt to vindicate his vision of colonial settlement, which he felt colonial bureaucrats had traduced.
24. Dean Kennedy Islands of White
25. Not only did a variety of doctors provide studies showing the sun to be of no demonstrable harm, there are a variety of accounts from white farmers of uninterrupted good health while living their entire lives under the tropical sun. Islands of White p116
26. islands p111:
27. Churchill’s story of settler disappointment in the “I am blessed never to have owned land” section
28. islands p46
29. citation p4 islands of white
30. Economic or political systems in which land can only be owned by one person or state make the difference difficult to conceptualize, since a suzerainty presumes the absence of sovereignty which those systems tend to take for granted. Yet both Hardinge’s sense of the British presence in BEA and the concrete system of indirect rule (which would be pioneered by Lugard in Uganda) have to be seen as suzerainties, since the land would be jointly owned by both its native occupants and the absentee British.
31. The Kenya Pioneers, p99
32. letter to the Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs
33. In this vein, Churchill’s fantastically untrue claim that the Uganda railway was already paying for itself is at least indicative of where his central concern is (in fact, the railway was moving very little cargo at this point and the 5.5 million pounds spent building it showed no signs of ever being paid back, and weren’t). For him, the railroad is an engine of profit, a means of moving cargo between the places it is produced and the places where it is traded. It is, in other words, explicitly not an engine of incorporation or development: it is an adjunct to capitalist systems already in place rather than the means by which new ones will be developed.
34. The example of Sol Plaatje in South Africa, arguing against Boer settlers (and land alienation) by assuming the voice of British Civilization, enunciated through Shakespeare.
35. Crisis and Control in Colonial Kenya
36. The point is not, of course, that decolonization simply happened because Britain voluntarily gave up power, though the story of how they became willing to do so is an important part of it. As Frederick Cooper tells the story on a continent-wide level, Europe became increasingly open to changing their approach as African resistance and labor unrest made old ways of doing business less and less viable. On the other hand,
37. As Berman puts it, “The Emergency had shown that the settlers and the established structures of colonial domination could only be maintained at a high cost to the metropole, while the growth of African commodity production and consumption of manufactures increasingly demonstrated to corporate capital ‘that it was the prosperity of agriculture, not settlers, that mattered.’”
38. John Lonsdale’s essays
39. Decolonization and Independence in Kenya, 1940-1993, xiii
40. The historiography on the issue continues to be debated, between Marxists like Berman, Cooper
41. Citizen and Subject
42. Lonsdale “The Conquest State, 1895-1904” citation
43. McDermott was not unmindful of the potential of these regions, but he saw this potential as lying in the future; as he put it “these resources are potentially great owing to exceptional conditions of natural fertility, climate, and general accessibility,” but since “the value of the coast depended, and still depends, in a large measure on the commerce of the distant interior” (by which he primarily meant Uganda, “by far the most powerful state in Central Africa, and by far the most civilized”), he argued that “Paramount influence over this powerful nation standing in the way of, and commanding the line of access to the equatorial Nile provinces, was an object of the keenest interest to the European powers established on the East Coast.” British East Africa; or, Ibea: a history of the formation and work of the Imperial British East Africa Company
44. , as such, it was only a particular example of Britain’s larger drive to protect lines of access to both Egypt and India. William Roger Louis  arguemtn about protecting from encirclement not land hunger ; Africa and the Victorians
45. Rinderpest epidemics, drought, smallpox, pleuro-pneumonia, jiggers, and sleeping sickness
46. lonsdale p21,Muriuki History of Kikuyu 94f, D.M. Feldman ‘Christians and the origins of the Kikuyu central association in northern Morang’a 1890-1930” 45f
47. pp. 31-33
48. The East African Protectorate, pp.1, 7
49. ibid, pp.3
50. Originally derived from an Arabic term meaning “to unveil,” the root word “-safiri” produces a variety of related terms in Kiswahili: Kusafiri (to travel), msafiri/wasafiri (traveler/s), and safari (trip).
51. John MacKenzie describes the decimation of Southern African animal populations in The Empire of Nature, and Roosevelt’s shock at discovering the desolation of the Dakotas is well described in Edmund Morris’ The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt, chapter ??.
52. The Empire of Nature, p298-300
53. Steinhart 2
54. Out in the Noonday Sun: Edwardians in the Tropics, 157
55. (Steinhart p113)
56. See, for example, American Big-game Hunting: the Book of the Boone and Crockett Club By Theodore Roosevelt and George Bird Grinnell. Also, When Trumpets Call, p68.
57. Roosevelt’s relationship? (wrote intro to )
58. The Game of British East Africa, 1913, preface
59. Central African Game and its Spoor, 34-39
60. 76
61. 1913 Hunting the Elephant, p208
62. 1913 Hunting the Elephant, preface
63. As Conrad’s Marlowe puts it in defense of Kurtz (a dream-worked version of Stanley sent out to find Livingstone), [how better to approach a darkness than blind?]

96.   Mudimbe’s The Invention of Africa is the most obvious point of reference, but only as a representative statement within the larger group of texts. If such accounts are patterned after Edward Said’s Orientalism (as I suspect they are), then one criticism which can be made of his original intervention is appropriate here too: just as there is no singular and monolithic “The West” (rather,  a broad conversation — even argument — over what constitutes the West being the only thing characteristic of it), neither is there a singular “Africa” as anti-West, but only a broad spectrum of invented Western fantasies of the continent, which, as displacements of “Western” problems and projections of “Western” desires, are themselves as heterogeneous as those desires and projections themselves.

97.   Mbembe’s assertion that “Africa as an idea, a concept, has historically served, and continues to serve, as a polemical argument for the West’s desperate desire to assert its difference from the rest of the world” is a common version of this claime (Achille Mbembe Postcolony, 2001, p2)

1. The supreme irony, then, (as I will explore) is that these very words aptly characterize the central ambiguity in Kenyatta’s own project, one which political opponents like Oginga Odinga would use against him. After all, if the rabbit has become a poacher, does this act not, in some sense, legitimate a “poaching” that is illegitimate by definition? Or, to put it another way, positioning oneself as successor to the colonial hunters of Africans makes someone like Kenyatta, in turn, a hunter of his countrymen, and vulnerable to a response like Odinga’s Not Yet Uhuru.
2. Lonsdale’s “Moral Economy of Mau Mau”
3. Poachers, p68
4. Lonsdale’s “Moral Economy of Mau Mau”
5. Most significantly, perhaps, in looking to education as the solution to the circumcision controversy.
6. Brinkley’s new book, which (symptomatically) almost completely ignores Roosevelt’s hunting trips abroad, providing a vision of his naturalism that is completely (and myopically) derived from his experiences in the continental United States.
7. While John MacKenzie’s The Empire of Nature, for example, shows how big game hunting was a means of practicing and theorizing the imperial “habit of mind” in a general sense, Edward Steinhart’s Black Poachers, White Hunters: A Social History of Colonial Kenya usefully translates this argument into a much more specifically Kenyan idiom.

105. As Poachersguy demonstrates with reference, for example, to Askell-Hardwick’s 1903 text, An Ivory Trader

1. 106.        As he would write in his autobiography, “My grandmother…taught me the only Dutch I ever knew, a baby song of which the first line ran, “Trippe troppa tronjes.” I always remembered this, and when I was in East Africa it proved a bond of union between me and the Boer settlers, not a few of whom knew it, although at first they always had difficulty in understanding my pronunciation—at which I do not wonder. It was interesting to meet these men whose ancestors had gone to the Cape about the time that mine went to America two centuries and a half previously, and to find that the descendants of the two streams of emigrants still crooned to their children some at least of the same nursery songs.”
2. 107.     Lee Baker, From Savage to Negro

108. See, for example, Jean Francois Bayart’s The State in Africa: Politics of the Belly, Mahmood Mamdani’s Citizen and Subject, and Frederick Cooper’s “Africa and the World”

109. Some exceptions here; pratt

110. David Scott

111. good work being done quote

112. Partly this is because the kinds of influences that are worth thinking about — like the broad question of how American writing about Africa influenced African writing about Africa — are so broad as to be unanswerable, while the more answerable questions — like how Theodore Roosevelt influenced Jomo Kenyatta — become answerable precisely as a function of the very specificity which restricts the extent to which they actually help us with generalizations like “America” and “Africa.” It is also unclear to me what is actually at stake in determining whether or not one group of thinkers influenced another. Especially when one emphasizes (as I do) the extent to which every thinker or writer revises and refashions the material backdrop of his or her cultural makeup — and this is particularly the case with the writers I am addressing — the important point is far less what is retained than what is refashioned.

113. Most concretely, through the influence derived from Europe’s post-war debt and reliance on Marshall Plan reconstruction.

114.  big book, 173

115.

1. 116.     By this I mean the implication that the anthropological problem of primitives is their transformation into full citizenship, a definition of modernity in terms of political maturity and full franchise, and a definition of the primitive, therefore, in terms of its resistance to being assimilated. For both Stanley and the DuBois (like Boas), the status of primitive cultures is problematized by the extent to which           Their explicit anti-racism might lead them to dispute the most egregious forms of anti-primitivism, but their basic assimilationist imperative means they could never explicitly articulate the

117. See, for example, chapter 3 “The Redemption of Africa” in Ralph Luker’s The Social Gospel in Black and White.

118. bib for this

119. As Robert Jamieson’s An Appeal to the Government…Against the Proposed Niger Expedition makes clear, for example, Liverpool’s traders who were at that time making good trade on the coast of West Africa, saw nothing but trouble in Buxton’s schemes of settlement and colonization; it made much better business sense to trade with Africans than attempt to transform their methods of production.

120. Robinson and Gallagher, p10

121. Indeed, Robinson and Gallagher have argued that Britain’s “Scramble for Africa” was far less driven by a desire for new territory as such than by a defensive effort to prevent hostile powers from encircling and surrounding the territories which had to be retained.

122. The discovery of quinine is only the most dramatic example.

123. For Mbembe, for instance, “Africa” represents “the very figure of what is null, abolished, and, in its essence, in opposition to what is: the very expression of that nothing whose special feature is to be nothing at all.” Yet while he emphasizes the negativity of this categorical understanding of the continent, such absence is a perverse one, and actively so, which is to say, an active negativity rather than simply an absence.

124. Mudimbe would not say so, of course, but the mythical “outside” or “other than” in which this class of theory locates its hope for change is theoretically attractive at the price of being practically incoherent.

125. Mudimbe p1

126. As, for example, does Homi Bhabha in The Location of Culture, who, as such, is still representative of a broad current within postcolonialist criticism.

1. Mbembe, Mamdani on the centrality of force for social reproduction
2. All quotes from his Central Problems in Social Theory

129. It is excusable hyperbole to say that Roosevelt “invented” African big game hunting since he popularized at a global level the core elements of what would be a long-running and coherent tradition running into the present. “The annus mirabilis of East African hunting was 1909,” as V. Pakenham puts it (Out in the Noonday Sun: Edwardians in the Tropics, 157), because Roosevelt would “introduce and sanctify by celebrity example” what Edward Steinhart calls the evolving ritual and drama of the African hunt. Steinhart identifies “the three key elements” as the extravagance of death and luxury living on safari, the circumscribed roles and identities of the local guide and the professional white hunter, and the veneer of scientific respectability which would give the entire exercise a conservationist rationale.

130. Edward Steinhart Black Poachers, White Hunters: A Social History of Hunting in Colonial Kenya

131. Stephen J. Rockel “’A Nation of Porters’: The Nyamwezi and the Labour Market in Nineteenth-Century Africa.”

132. Since the Swahili coast is a millenium old hub on the even older Arabian Sea trading network that, for centuries, linked together India, the broader Middle-East, the East African coast, and the numerous islands dotting the interior, it becomes ridiculous to discuss its “globalization” as anything other than its Europeanization. Not only is Swahili very specifically the trade language developed as the linguistic lubricant for the broad coastal society stretching from what is now southern Somalia to northern Mozambique (though centering on what is now Zanzibar), a trade language for a merchant people who mediated between the ocean and the inland, but the very idea of the Swahili presumes its own global integration: as early as the first century AD, documents already note the existence of an already basically “mixed” coastal society, apparently of indigenous descent but under Arabian suzerainty, already a cultural “hybrid.”

133. Representing a moral contract as a transaction is, of course, another venerable colonialist tradition that extends into the neo-liberal era: while patronage economies not only imply significant client autonomy and obligations on the part of the patron, the bourgeois notion of the gift is almost always an explicit argument that not such social relation is implied: either the giver has purchased something or there are no strings attached, and in either case, the transaction is at an end.

134. The word comes from the swahili kusafari (to travel), and while Roosevelt was not the first to use it (Stanley uses it), it was Roosevelt that transformed it into a household cliché with the particular connotations that it still has (as claimed by D. Holman, for example, in his 1970 Inside Safari Hunting with Eric Rundgren, 42). “The annus mirabilis of East African hunting was 1909,” writes V. Pakenham (Out in the Noonday Sun: Edwardians in the Tropics, 157) because it was Roosevelt who would “introduce and sanctify by celebrity example” what Edward Steinhart calls the evolving ritual and drama of the African hunt, “the three key elements” being the extravagance of death and luxury living on safari, the circumscribed roles and identities of the local guide and the professional white hunter, and the veneer of scientific respectability which would give the entire exercise a conservationist rationale.

135. Sarah Watts’ Rough Rider in the White House

136. John MacKenzie The Empire of Nature and Edward Steinhart Black Poachers, White Hunters: A Social History of Hunting in Colonial Kenya

137. “On Ethnographic Authority” in Clifford’s The Predicament of Culture

138. In practical terms, after all, the civil war’s resolution both established the US as a unified power and removed from the table the single issue that had dominated the question of expansion for decades, radically transforming the political imperatives that would drive American foreign policy’s address to Africa. More specifically, the broader problem space of “reconstruction” transformed the manner in which the presence of Africans would register on the American ideological landscape: instead of “natives” blending into the landscape as natural expressions of place, the abolitionist tenor of Unionist triumphalism both emphasized government’s moral imperative to emancipate and liberate enslaved masses — detaching them from their places in order to set them into spaces of circulation — and made this the basis of governmental legitimacy.

139. In the sense which James Scott distinguishes between “public” and “private” transcripts of resistance.

140. Decolonization and African Society

141. For example, global economic declension coupled with the loss of American cotton producers in the wake of the civil war would make Africa abruptly more attractive to Great Britain as a source of both producers of raw cotton to be woven into cloth and new markets to sell that cloth.

142. The Invention of Decolonization: The Algerian War and the Remaking of France

143. David Blight Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory

144. “Traveling Cultures” in Clifford’s Routes

1. 145.         James Clifford “Ethnographic Allegory” in Writing Culture
2. 146.         Akhil Gupta and James Ferguson Anthropological Locations

147. However speculative it may be to say so, his biographers almost uniformly connect the fact that Roosevelt had spent the majority of his adult life preparing to be president with the fact that he ceased to be president at the relatively young age of fifty to produce an image of him enduring a post-presidential career marked by a very particular kind of existential loss. After having dedicated his life to public service with almost indescribable zeal, custom had, in 1909, condemned him to a life deprived of the calling according to which he had organized nearly every aspect of his life. And as illustrated in When Trumpet’s Call, Patricia O’Toole’s biography of the post-presidential Roosevelt “thrashing in the cage of his powerlessness,” the problem of what to do with himself was one which he never adequately solved (404).

148. TR wrks VII.108

149. that amazing passage from true americanism

150. As he wrote during his time in Missouri, “We have all, whether we be French, or English, Spanish or Russian, German or Italian, gone through the same mill. It was gradual with ourselves, and in the nine cases out of ten, came out of slavery”

151. Mbembe characterizes the fundamental stasis of “Africa” as its “facticity” and “arbitrariness,” taking Hegel’s statement that “the thing is; and it is merely because it is” as paradigmatic for this underdetermined ontology of self-referentiality and the manner in which it gets imposed on the continent from without. The continent therefore becomes “the very figure of what is null, abolished, and, in its essence, in opposition to what is: the very expression of that nothing whose special feature is to be nothing at all.” His project therefore attempts to recover a sense of African societies’ “relation to nothing other than themselves.” On the Postcolony, p3-5

1. 152.     Said, for example, has been criticized for apparently eliding the difference between a timeless Occidental image of the Orient which stretches back millenia and one which is more firmly located in the structures of the period of formal European colonial control of the “oriental world.” And it is just as true that the short story of colonialist “Africanism” exists within a much longer (and ongoing) story of Europe’s experience of Africa, but one to which it is not reducible.
2. 153.        Out in the Noonday Sun: Edwardians in the Tropics, 157
3. 154.        Poachers guy, 116; “the three key elements” being the extravagance of death and luxury living on safari, the circumscribed roles and identities of the local guide and the professional white hunter, and the veneer of scientific respectability which would give the entire exercise a conservationist rationale.
4. 155.        TR wrks VII.108
5. 156.     1998 book on Roosevelt and Race
6. 157.     Not only did he start no wars, his major accomplishments were things like brokering peace between Russia and Japan and his construction of the American system of parks and conservation areas.
7. 158.        Out in the Noonday Sun: Edwardians in the Tropics, 157
8. 159.        Poachers guy, 116; “the three key elements” being the extravagance of death and luxury living on safari, the circumscribed roles and identities of the local guide and the professional white hunter, and the veneer of scientific respectability which would give the entire exercise a conservationist rationale.
9. 160.        Baden-Powell’s Boy Scouts, for example, articulated (and practiced) an imperialist world view in which the conquest of nature mediates the simultaneity of recovery and domination of innocence.
10. 161.        TR, Letters, Vol 6, 1060
11. 162.        When Roosevelt had lost his mother and wife in the same day, he had found the solace that had eluded him in civilization in a hunting trip to the Dakota wilderness, a ritual he would repeat periodically, and particularly in East Africa years later (and again in Brazil).

163. 517 sold, MB

164. As with Malinowski, Kenyatta’s disinterest in “culture” as a useful term is significant: while “culture” tends to imply a textual and discursive model of social reality (of which Geertz’s models of culture are supreme manifestations), a functionalist model of social reality proceeds not according to a society’s meta-commentary on itself, but considers reproduction in economic terms: while Geertzian “culture” implies that texts are determinative of practice, functionalism derives cultural practice from an underlying economic determinism. Neither model is sufficient by itself, of course, but recognizing this basic difference allows us to see ethnological methodology as a choice correlated with the necessities of the particular argument being mounted. For Geertz, for example, culture is a text which changes nothing and, as such, is a fundamentally conservative force of social reproduction. For Kenyatta, on the other hand, this model of culture would get in the way of his argument for Gikuyu social dynamism: his textual constitution is a document which lives and breathes.

1. 165.        The fact that he named himself “Kenyatta” in the thirties is indicative of the extent to which he intended to pose himself as the paradigmatic representative man of Kenya.

166. the belief that he had settled permanently

1. 167.        A distinction between organic unity and conceptual unity, the difference between …
2. 168.        For example, in “Being There: Anthropology and the Scene of Writing“ and “I-Witnessing: Malinowski’s Children,” both reprinted in Works and Lives: The Anthropologist as Author.

169. This refers to a piece of writing in chapter one you haven’t seen yet, but that I’m going to emphasize much more in the next draft, the very weird way that Stanley manages to make an argument for the priority of the Ego (noting that he will use the “I” pronoun a lot) and then — in that very sentence — he places “Ego” in the third person. The weirdness of this move was actually pointed out to me by someone on the internet!

170. The injunction to “see from the native point of view” (originally from Argonauts) is so identified with Malinowski that Geertz’ essay “‘From the Native’s Point of View’…” and many like it employ the quotation marks and allude to Malinowski without bothering to cite their source.  I will do so in a similar manner.

171. He also notes the “plasticity” of the Slavonic character which may make it easier for a Pole like himself to “go ashore for a howl and a dance.”

1. 172.        The standard critical reference for the “anthropology-as-fieldwork” paradigm is Akhil Gupta and James Ferguson’s Anthropological Locations: Boundaries and Grounds of a Field Science.
2. 173.        I’ll take for granted Gupta and Ferguson’s claim that this is true, p.1, ibid.

174. The analogy is useful not merely because they traveled to the same place at the same time and were (??? vlose to the same age) but because they occupy relatively analogous positions on the political spectrums of their respective nations (reformers who took imperial expansion as precisely what necessitated reform)

175. “What we properly understand by Africa, is the Unhistorical, Undeveloped Spirit, still involved in the conditions of mere nature, and which had to be presented here only as on the threshold of the World’s History.” (Hegel, The Philosophy of History, 99)

176. one of those damning quotes on Nairobi settlers

177.It is worth remembering that Roosevelt was Turner-ian before Turner was; while Frederick Jackson Turner may have systematized (or improved upon) Roosevelt’s vision of the West, The Winning of the West was a “frontier thesis” when “The Significance of the Frontier in American Civilization” was still a glimmer in its author’s eyes (and Turner read Roosevelt‘s epic while constructing his own more humble thesis).

178. Two of Roosevelt’s least favorite people.

179. As he (somewhat infamously) wrote, “The rude, fierce settler who drove the savage from the land lays all civilized mankind under a debt to him. American and Indian, Boer and Zulu, Cossack and Tartar,  New Zealander and Maori — in each case the victor, horrible though many of his deeds are, has laid deep the foundations for the future greatness of a mighty people.” ibid 57-8

180.An “oldness” as imaginary as the “youth” of America, given that it was roughly the same political “moment” which gave birth to the United States as a nation that made the European nation-states conceptually possible as nationalities with citizens in the modern sense (rather than imperial subjectivities).

181.Albert Sarraut, for example, could legitimize colonialism as “the right of the stronger to aid the weaker” because “the true right of the stronger is the generous right that he assumes to help, assist and protect the weaker, to be his guide and his guardian.” Yet he makes this connection by glossing “strength” in parental terms, arguing that it is “a family and filial bond that binds the colonies to the mother country.”

182. In “Zunis and Brahmins: Cultural Ambivalence in the Gilded Age” in Romantic Motives, ed. George Stocking.

1. 183.        An emptiness intuitively linked to the clearing of the West of its inhabitants; after all, a West defined by hostile Indians would be a heart of darkness, while narratives like the “closing of the frontier” and the “winning of the West” envision a West essentially emptied of resistance to settlement.
2. 184.        As in his most influential essay, “Public Parks and the Enlargement of Towns,” Olmstead’s goal was to  reorganize society according to different commonalities than the inherently explosive stratifications of class.
3. 185.        In fact, when he would make the gorilla a figure for the innocence of mankind’s primitive past, Akeley was simply following in the footsteps of Paul de Chaillu, another hyphenated American whose vision of Africa as Eden would largely be forgotten by a Victorian public more interested in Kurtzian visions of a dark continent.
4. 186.        Roosevelt once expressed deep disappointment that none of his sons had done athletics. And just as Roosevelt followed the convention of aligning hunting with war, and using war to define and demarcate masculinity, the same line of allegorizing connects football first to war, and then (in turn) to masculinity again, Roosevelt’s particular key to all mythologies. Or, it might be simpler to note that Roosevelt understood hunting and football as analogous forms of sport more directly (a quote I can’t seem to find at the moment)
5. 187.        Mbembe’s point; (Fabian 154).
6. 188.        La Mise en Valeur
7. 189.        the fact that the railroad was the british effort to “push India into Africa” Imperial connections By Thomas R. Metcalf
8. 190.        In a comparison which he especially emphasizes is “not fanciful,” (2).

191. There were, as it happened, some hiccups in Roosevelt’s funding situation, which he carefully ignores in his narrative (Rockefeller’s intervention)

1. 192.         Even when this leads him to make ludicrous overstatements, such as his claim that the killing of predators (any predator) is a net improvement to the local ecology. Even TR could not be that naive.
2. 193.         In the final lines of the preface, for example, he writes that “…there are no words that can tell the hidden spirit of the wilderness, that can reveal its mystery, its melancholy, and its charm. There is delight in the hardy life of the open, in long rides rifle in hand, in the thrill of the fight with dangerous game. Apart from this, yet mingled with it, is the strong attraction of the silent places, of the large tropic moons, and the splendor of the new stars, where the wanderer sees the awful glory of sunrise and sunset in the wide waste spaces of the earth, unworn of man, and changed only by the slow change of the ages through time everlasting.”
3. 194.         In this sense, while Ernest Hemingway might be more firmly identified with the practice of big game hunting in Africa (it is his books which fill the tourist sections of bookstores in Arusha, TZ, for example), even he was clear to note that “????” in A Moveable Feast.
4. 195.         One of the central arguments of The Winning of the West, which Frederick Jackson Turner replicated in his slightly later but more famous essay on “The Significance of the Frontier in American History” (though both were long preceded by a variety of Jeffersonian thinkers, with James Fenimore Cooper being perhaps the most influential example).
5. 196.        The title of James Sleeman’s From Rifle to Camera: The Reformation of a Big Game Hunter is a good example.
6. 197.        See, for example, American Big-game Hunting; the Book of the Boone and Crockett Club By Theodore Roosevelt and George Bird Grinnell. Also, When Trumpets Call, p68.
7. 198.        As Paul Landau, illustrates at some length. For example, to take a “snap-shot” was the same as to “snipe”; in both cases, it meant to shoot a moving target. Indeed, the fact that two words have developed out of one is itself an apt illustration of the process I am describing, by which photography sought to forget its historical origin as a ballistic technology.
8. 199.        David Livingstone’s brother Charles took photographs of “representative types” of Africans, at his brother’s request, for “ethnographic purposes.” And Stanley was the first person to bring a dry-plate apparatus to tropical Africa, in 1875-6 on his second voyage. Invented in 1871, this process both required a significantly shorter exposure time and allowed plates to be prepared in advance, rather than needing to be immediately developed. Stanley’s first photographs were not printed, but were used in preparing the illustrations for Through the Dark Continent.
9. 200.        The book’s dedication is “To Kermit Roosevelt, my Side-Partner in our ‘Great Adventure’”
10. 201.        Even Hemingway acknowledged big game hunting as T.R.’s thing (in A Moveable Feast).
11. 202.        Lonsdale, What was Mau Mau
12. 203.        the radicalism quote
13. 204.        If Gramsci is the prophet of “Permanent Revolution,” Roosevelt is the prophet of “Permanent Reform.”
14. 205.         p61 Poachers in Kenya guy; with citations to other writers
15. 206.     CENTRAL AFRICAN GAME  AND ITS SPOOR.
16. 207.         Central African Game and its Spoor
17. 208.         As Poachersguy demonstrates with reference, for example, to Askell-Hardwick’s 1903 text, An Ivory Trader
18. 209.        For example, when Oginga Odinga, Jomo Kenyatta‘s primary political rival in the early years of his presidency, launched his presidential campaign by publishing an autobiography (Not Yet Uhuru) that is obsessively concerned with combating Kenyatta’s literary persona, it is safe to say that Jomo Kenyatta’s first book remained a powerful symbol and signifier of the manner in which the political persona of the Mzee presidency was established and maintained.
19. 210.         Poachers, p68
20. 211.         As Poachersguy demonstrates with reference, for example, to Askell-Hardwick’s 1903 text, An Ivory Trader
21. 212.         Central African Game and its Spoor
22. 213.        V Pakenham Edwardians in the Tropics, p157
23. 214.         Even when this leads him to make ludicrous overstatements, such as his claim that the killing of predators (any predator) is a net improvement to the local ecology. Even TR could not be that naive.
24. 215.         In the final lines of the preface, for example, he writes that “…there are no words that can tell the hidden spirit of the wilderness, that can reveal its mystery, its melancholy, and its charm. There is delight in the hardy life of the open, in long rides rifle in hand, in the thrill of the fight with dangerous game. Apart from this, yet mingled with it, is the strong attraction of the silent places, of the large tropic moons, and the splendor of the new stars, where the wanderer sees the awful glory of sunrise and sunset in the wide waste spaces of the earth, unworn of man, and changed only by the slow change of the ages through time everlasting.”
25. 216.         In this sense, while Ernest Hemingway might be more firmly identified with the practice of big game hunting in Africa (it is his books which fill the tourist sections of bookstores in Arusha, TZ, for example), even he was clear to note that “????” in A Moveable Feast.
26. 217.         One of the central arguments of The Winning of the West, which Frederick Jackson Turner replicated in his slightly later but more famous essay on “The Significance of the Frontier in American History” (though both were long preceded by a variety of Jeffersonian thinkers, with James Fenimore Cooper being perhaps the most influential example).
27. p61 Poachers in Kenya guy; with citations to other writers