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Projections of Empire: The Architecture of Colonial Museums in East Africa

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The MacKenzie Moment and Imperial History

Part of the book series: Britain and the World ((BAW))

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Abstract

As John MacKenzie highlighted in Museums and Empire, the architecture of the museum ‘came to evoke civic, colonial, national and imperial power’ and made ‘statements about the “progress” exhibited in the colony in relation to the rest of the world’. This chapter explores the construction and ideological intent of colonial museum buildings through an examination of museums built in Nairobi, Zanzibar, and Dar es Salaam between 1919 and 1939. The contrasting styles of these three museums, established relatively late in the imperial era, demonstrate the range of local and imperial architectural inspiration. This analysis situates the buildings within their local, regional, and global contexts to investigate the diverse influences of British officials, architects, museum progenitors, and local populations on these projections of empire in early twentieth-century East Africa.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    John M. MacKenzie, Museums and Empire: Natural History, Human Cultures and Colonial Identities (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2009), 6.

  2. 2.

    Jan Morris and Robert Fermor-Hesketh, eds., Architecture of the British Empire (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1986); Anthony D. King, The Bungalow: The Production of a Global Culture (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1984); and Thomas R. Metcalf, An Imperial Vision: Indian Architecture and Britain’s Raj (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989). Other early studies include Gavin Stamp, ‘British Architecture in India, 1857–1947’, Journal of the Royal Society of Arts 129 (1981), 357–79; and Philip Davies, Splendours of the Raj: British Architecture in India, 1660 to 1947 (London: John Murray, 1985).

  3. 3.

    Mark Crinson, Empire Building: Orientalism and Victorian Architecture (London: Routledge, 1996), 7.

  4. 4.

    G. A. Bremner, Imperial Gothic: Religious Architecture and High Anglican Culture in the British Empire, c. 1840–70 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013), xiii, 431–36.

  5. 5.

    G. Alex Bremner, ‘Stones of Empire: Monuments, Memorials and Manifest Authority’, in G. Alex Bremner, ed., Architecture and Urbanism in the British Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 86–87.

  6. 6.

    John M. MacKenzie, Orientalism: History, Theory, and the Arts (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995), 71.

  7. 7.

    MacKenzie, Orientalism, 71.

  8. 8.

    MacKenzie, Orientalism, 71 and 72.

  9. 9.

    MacKenzie, Orientalism, 104.

  10. 10.

    Quoted in Metcalf, AnImperial Vision, 82.

  11. 11.

    MacKenzie, Orientalism, xvii.

  12. 12.

    Quoted in P. J. Frankl, ‘Mombasa Cathedral and the CMS Compound’, History in Africa 35 (2008), 221.

  13. 13.

    Ann Laura Stoler, ‘Rethinking Colonial Categories: European Communities and the Boundaries of Rule’, Comparative Studies in Society and History 31 (1989), 137; Benedict R. Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, revised edn (London: Verso, 1991); and Bremner, Imperial Gothic, 1–20.

  14. 14.

    See Roger Summers, A History of the South African Museum, 1825–1975 (Cape Town: A. A. Balkema, 1975); and Sarah Longair, Cracks in the Dome: Fractured Histories of Empire in the Zanzibar Museum, 1897–1964 (Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate, 2015).

  15. 15.

    Michaela Giebelhausen and Suzanne MacLeod have addressed the question of museum architecture more broadly, drawing our attention to the particular requirements of museums, many of which, as we will see, were overlooked by architects working in the colonial world: Michaela Giebelhausen, ‘Museum Architecture: A Brief History’, in Sharon Macdonald, ed., A Companion to Museum Studies (Chicester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011), 223–44; and Suzanne Macleod, Museum Architecture: A New Biography (London and New York: Routledge, 2013).

  16. 16.

    See, for example, discussions over the appointment of a permanent curator for the Zanzibar Museum. Longair, Cracks in the Dome, 128–39.

  17. 17.

    Metcalf, AnImperial Vision, 96.

  18. 18.

    Metcalf, AnImperial Vision, 86.

  19. 19.

    Metcalf, AnImperial Vision, 86.

  20. 20.

    DSA Architect Biography Report: George Wittet, Dictionary of Scottish Architects, http://www.scottisharchitects.org.uk/architect_full.php?id=202059 [accessed 23 May 2017].

  21. 21.

    Metcalf, AnImperial Vision, 199.

  22. 22.

    Circular from the Deputy Commissioner, announcing founding of the Uganda Museum, 15 January 1908. Facsimile reproduced in the Uganda Museum. It was rebuilt in a modernist style in 1952–54 by German architect Ernst May. Alison Bennett, a Ph.D. student at University College London, is currently researching the early history of this institution. In 2006, when the Gaddafi mosque was constructed on this site, the old museum building was taken apart and rebuilt in a new location.

  23. 23.

    National Museums of Kenya Archive (NMK hereafter), 001/ADM/5/7/2/4, National Museum of Kenya Report for 1977–1979, 10.

  24. 24.

    For further discussion of memorials in the colonial sphere, see Robert Aldrich, Vestiges of the Colonial Empire in France: Monuments, Museums, and Colonial Memories (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005); and Dominik Geppert and Frank Lorenz Müller, eds., Sites of Imperial Memory: Commemorating Colonial Rule in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2015).

  25. 25.

    National Museum of Tanzania archive (NMT hereafter), AM101.D33 R46, English translation of G. K. Whitlamsmith, ‘Ukumbusho wa Marehemu King George V, Dar es Salaam’, Mambo Leo, 6 January 1941, 44–45.

  26. 26.

    Amy Woodson-Boulton, ‘Victorian Museums and Victorian Society’, History Compass 6 (January 2008), 109–46.

  27. 27.

    Zanzibar National Archives (ZNA hereafter), AB41/2, Management of the Zanzibar Museum, May 1934 to Sept 1936, handwritten document listing Public Subscriptions to the Peace Memorial Museum Hall.

  28. 28.

    Sarah Longair, ‘“A Gracious Temple of Learning”: The Museum and Colonial Culture in Zanzibar, 1900–1945’ (Unpublished Ph.D. thesis, University of London, 2012), 158–61.

  29. 29.

    Official Gazette of Zanzibar: Supplement to the Official Gazette XXVIII, no. 1431 (30 June 1919), 165.

  30. 30.

    ZNA AB41/1, Peace Memorial Buildings: Edward Northey, Zanzibar High Commission, to Winston Churchill, Secretary of State for the Colonies, 9 June 1922; ZNA AB 41/1, Peace Memorial Buildings, Memorandum on the Peace Memorial Research and Education Museum by Alfred Spurrier, 31 January 1923.

  31. 31.

    Royal Commonwealth Society Library (RCSL hereafter), RCMS 180, John Houston Sinclair, ‘Senex Africanus: Reminiscences of Early Days in England, Kenya, Zanzibar and Tangier’, n.d. [c. 1955], 10.

  32. 32.

    RCMS 180, 12.

  33. 33.

    Longair, Cracks in the Dome, 81–88.

  34. 34.

    Longair, Cracks in the Dome, 98–102. A similar arrangement can be seen on Truro Cathedral, a Pearson design that Sinclair may have known from his time in the offices there.

  35. 35.

    F. B. Pearce, Zanzibar: The Island Metropolis of Eastern Africa (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1920), 146.

  36. 36.

    Official Gazette of Zanzibar: Supplement to the Official Gazette XXXI, no. 1588 (3 July 1922), 381.

  37. 37.

    For further discussion of the source of this name, see Longair, Cracks in the Dome, 100, 149–52.

  38. 38.

    Official Gazette of Zanzibar: Supplement to the Official Gazette XXXIV, no. 1754 (5 September 1925), 322.

  39. 39.

    ZNA CA1/7, Spurrier personal papers: Spurrier to Museum Committee Chairman, 25 October 1929.

  40. 40.

    Crinson, Empire Building, 7.

  41. 41.

    NMK 001/ADM/5/7/2/4, National Museum of Kenya Report for 1977–1979, 10.

  42. 42.

    NMK 001/ADM/5/7/2/4, National Museum of Kenya Report for 1977–1979, 10.

  43. 43.

    Thomas R. Odhiambo, ‘Letter from the Chairman’, Kenya Past and Present, 1 (December 1971), 2.

  44. 44.

    Kenya National Archives (KNA hereafter), KW/24/40, Appeal for funds by Sir Edward Grigg, 11 February 1926.

  45. 45.

    KNA KW/24/40, Appeal for funds by Sir Edward Grigg, 11 February 1926.

  46. 46.

    NMK 001/ADM/5/7/2/4, National Museum of Kenya Report for 1977–1979, 10.

  47. 47.

    Maurice N. Amutabi, ‘Buildings as Symbols and Metaphors of Colonial Hegemony: Interrogating Colonial Buildings and Architecture in Kenya’s Urban Spaces’, in Fassil Demissie, ed., Colonial Architecture and Urbanism in Africa: Intertwined and Contested Histories (Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate, 2012), 328.

  48. 48.

    East African Standard, 31 March 1928, 11.

  49. 49.

    Grigg’s personal secretary at this time was Eric Dutton, later Chief Secretary in Zanzibar (1942–52), who took a great interest in architecture. See Garth Myers, Verandahs of Power: Colonialism and Space in Urban Africa (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2002).

  50. 50.

    Metcalf, AnImperial Vision, 247.

  51. 51.

    KNA 1/469, Minutes of Coryndon Memorial trustees meetings, minutes of meeting on 8 February 1928.

  52. 52.

    KNA 1/469, Minutes of Coryndon Memorial trustees meetings, L. G. Jackson to van Someren, 23 March 1929.

  53. 53.

    Paul Msemwa, From King George V Memorial Museum to House of Culture: Royalty to Popularity (Dar es Salaam, 2005), 3.

  54. 54.

    Clement Gillman and Ailsa Nicol Smith, ‘A Museum in Tanganyika: King George V Memorial Museum, Dar Es Salaam’, Museums Journal 41 (November 1941), 169.

  55. 55.

    B. S. Hoyle, Gillman of Tanganyika, 1882–1946: The Life and Work of a Pioneer Geographer (Aldershot: Avebury, 1987), 348.

  56. 56.

    NMT:AM101.D33 R46, Architects’ Report on Proposed Museum, July 1938. Lt Col C.M. Boys Hinderer had lived in East Africa since 1912, died 1953. He was part of Henderson and Partners, working in Nairobi, Mombasa, and Kampala. Journal of Royal Institute of British Architects 61 (1954), 207.

  57. 57.

    Gillman and Nicol Smith, ‘A Museum in Tanganyika’, 171.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Lincoln, Lincoln, UK

    Sarah Longair

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  1. Department of History, Clemson University, Clemson, SC, USA

    Stephanie Barczewski

  2. School of History, Newcastle University, Newcastle Upon Tyne, UK

    Martin Farr

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Longair, S. (2019). Projections of Empire: The Architecture of Colonial Museums in East Africa. In: Barczewski, S., Farr, M. (eds) The MacKenzie Moment and Imperial History. Britain and the World. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-24459-0_6

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