Fictional Representation and Factual Reality in European Exhibitions of Asante People, 1870s–1920s

Abstract

Over recent years much has been written on the widespread practice of exhibiting living imperial subjects to metropolitan European publics in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. For the most part this literature has been produced by scholars chiefly concerned with the range of ideological and cultural attitudes then prevailing within European societies themselves. This is of course an intellectually valid topic of research but, if only by default, it acts to prolong the historic objectification and marginalization of African people themselves. This article seeks to offer a corrective to this enduring imbalance. It is centered around the experiences of those individuals who were taken to Europe and exhibited there as representatives of an Asante culture that already possessed an almost mythic status among Europeans. By the later nineteenth century Asante was (mis)construed by Europeans as a quintessential incarnation of African barbarism, bloodletting, military aggression and fabulous wealth in gold. In fact, most of those individuals exhibited at this time as being Asante people were nothing of the sort. They were drawn from a range of contiguous cultures more readily accessible to European entrepreneurs and commonly chosen for their availability as black African recruits whose color, places of origin, languages and customs offered a marketable approximation to the Asante. Their role was to perform being Asante for a European public that paid to see them. With the firm embedding of colonial rule in the early twentieth century authenticity became an issue for those who now took a paternal interest in colonial African subjects, and so some elected to display real Asante people in a European context. Throughout this article and as far as it is possible, due attention is paid to the individual experiences of those who first acted the part of being Asante, or who later were actual Asante, in successive European exhibitions.