Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-ndw9j Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-09T13:45:37.071Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

African Girls' Samplers from Mission Schools in Sierra Leone (1820s to 1840s)1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 May 2014

Silke Strickrodt
Silke Strickrodt*
Affiliation:
German Historical Institute London
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

In an article in this journal almost fifteen years ago, Colleen Kriger discussed the reluctance of historians of Africa to use objects as sources in their research. She pointed to the rich reservoir of objects “made by African hands” in museum collections around the world, which lies virtually untapped by historians. However, she also noted that while objects are “unusually eloquent remnants from the past,” they are problematic sources, presenting “special difficulties in evaluation and interpretation.”

The purpose of this article is to draw attention to the existence of a number of embroidery samplers that were stitched by African girls in mission schools in the British colony of Sierra Leone in the period from the 1820s to the 1840s. So far, I have found thirteen of these samplers, which are preserved in a number of archival, private and museum collections in Europe and the USA. To historians, these pieces of needlework are of interest because they were generated by a group of people for whom we do not usually have first-hand documentary material. Moreover, they represent the direct material traces of the activity of the girls who made them, and thus appear to offer the possibility of an emphatic insight into their experience.

However, these “textile documents” present serious problems of interpretation. What exactly can they be expected to tell the modern historian? In particular, how far, in fact, do they express the perspectives of the African girls who made them, as distinct from the European missionaries who directed their work? Careful source criticism and an examination of the purpose for which they were produced will help to clarify these issues.

Type
Critical Source Analysis
Information
History in Africa , Volume 37 , 2010 , pp. 189 - 245
Copyright
Copyright © African Studies Association 2010

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

1

I am grateful to the anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments. I also want to express my thanks for the help given by Jamie Banks, Jan Carlos Breitinger, Alexander Brust, Amy Finkel, Paul Jenkins, Barbara Frey Naf, Bernhard Gardi, Robin Law, Christina Oikonomou, the staff of the Special Collections, library of the University of Birmingham, particularly Philippa Bassett and Ivana Frlan, the staff of the Special Collections of the SOAS library, particularly Lance Martin, and the staff of the Sierra Leone Archives. I am pleased to acknowledge the support given by the German Historical Institute London that has enabled me to do this research. Permission to reproduce photographs of the samplers was kindly given by the Church Mission Society, M. Finkel and Daughter, the Museum der Kulturen (Basel) and the Victoria and Albert Museum (London).

References

Bibliography

Clabburn, Pamela, Samplers (Princes Risborough, 2002).Google Scholar
Comaroff, Jean, and Comaroff, John L., “Home-Made Hegemony: Modernity, Domesticity, and Colonialism in South Africa,” in: Hansen, Karen Tranberg (ed.), African Encounters with Domesticity (New Brunswick, 1992), 38–74.Google Scholar
Cox, Jeffrey, The British Missionary Enterprise since 1700 (New York/London, 2008).Google Scholar
Dentzer, LaRay, “Domestic Science Training in Colonial Yorubaland, Nigeria,” in: Hansen, Karen Tranberg (ed.), African Encounters with Domesticity (New Brunswick, 1992), 116–39.Google Scholar
Dunn, D. Elwood, and Holsoe, Svend E., Historical Dictionary of Liberia (Metuchen NJ, 1985).Google Scholar
Eltis, David, “The Diaspora of Africans Liberated from Slave Ships in the Nineteenth Century,” unpublished paper presented at the workshop “Liberated Africans as Human Legacy of Abolition,” University of California at Berkeley, 1-3 May 2008.Google Scholar
Fraser, W. Hamish, The Mass Market 1850-1914 (London/Basingstoke, 1981).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Fyfe, Christopher, “The West African Methodists in the Nineteenth Century,” The Sierra Leone Bulletin of Religion 3 (1961), 22–28.Google Scholar
Fyfe, Christopher, A History of Sierra Leone (London, 1962).Google Scholar
Fyfe, Christopher, “The Countess of Huntingdon's Connection in Nineteenth Century Sierra Leone,” The Sierra Leone Bulletin of Religion 4 (1962), 53–61.Google Scholar
Fyfe, Christopher, “The Baptist Churches in Sierra Leone,” The Sierra Leone Bulletin of Religion 5 (1963), 55–60.Google Scholar
Gordon, Beverly, “Review of Girlhood Embroidery: American Samplers and Pictorial Needlework, 1650-1850 by Betty Ring,” Winterthur Portfolio 29 (1994), 191–94.Google Scholar
Harris, Mary, Common Threads: Women, Mathematics and Work (Stoke on Trent, 1997).Google Scholar
Harvard, W.M., Memoirs of Mrs. Elizabeth Harvard, Late of the Wesleyan Mission to Ceylon and India: With Extracts from her Diary and Correspondence (London, 1825 [second edition]).Google Scholar
Humphrey, Carol, Samplers (Cambridge, 1997).Google Scholar
Jenkins, Paul, “The Church Missionary Society and the Basel Mission: An Early Experiment in Inter-European Cooperation,” in: Ward, Kevin, and Stanley, Brian (ed.), The Church Mission Society and World Christianity, 1799-1999 (Grand Rapids MI/Cambridge/Richmond, 2000), 43–65.Google Scholar
Jenkins, Paul, “Everyday Life Encapsulated? Two Photographs concerning Women and the Basel Mission in West Africa, c.1900,” Journal of African Cultural Studies 15 (2002), 45–60.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Konrad, Dagmar, Missionsbräute: Pietistinnen des 19. Jahrhunderts in der Basler Mission (Münster, 2001).Google Scholar
King, Donald, Samplers (London, 1960).Google Scholar
Kriger, Colleen E., “Museum Collections as Sources for African History,” History in Africa 23 (1996), 129–54.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kriger, Colleen E., Cloth in West Africa (Lanham MD, 2006).Google Scholar
Midgley, Claire, Women against Slavery: The British Campaigns, 1780-1870 (London, 1992).Google Scholar
Midgley, Claire, Women and Empire: Women Activists in Imperial Britain, 1790-1865 (Oxon/New York, 2007).Google Scholar
Music, David W., and Richardson, Paul Akers, ‘I Will Sing the Wondrous Story’: A History of Baptist Hymnody in North America (Macon, 2008).Google Scholar
Myers, Walter Dean, At Her Majesty's Request: An African Princess in Victorian England (New York, 1999).Google Scholar
Parker, Roszika, The Subversive Stitch: Embroidery and the Making of the Feminine (London, 1996).Google Scholar
Peterson, John, Province of Freedom: A History of Sierra Leone 1787-1870 (London, 1969).Google Scholar
Prochaska, Frank K., Women and Philanthropy in Nineteenth-Century England (Oxford 1980).Google Scholar
Register of Missionaries (Clerical, Lay, & Female), and Native Clergy, from 1804 to 1904 (London, n.d.).Google Scholar
Scott, Rebecca, Samplers (Oxford, 2009).Google Scholar
Sill, Ulrike, “Encounters in Quest of Christian Womanhood: The Basel Mission in Pre- and Early Colonial Ghana,” PhD dissertation (University of Basel, 2007).Google Scholar
Sumner, D.L., Education in Sierra Leone (Freetown, 1963).Google Scholar
Valentin, Peter, “Eine völkerkundliche Sammlung in Basel: Zur Geschichte des Missionsmuseums,” Regio Basiliensis 10 (1979), 213–20.Google Scholar
Ward, Kevin, “‘Taking Stock’: The Church Missionary Society and Its Historians,” in: Ward, Kevin, and Stanley, Brian (ed.), The Church Mission Society and World Christianity, 1799-1999 (Grand Rapids MI/Cambridge/Richmond, 2000), 15–42.Google Scholar

Archival Sources

Church Missionary Archive, library of the University of Birmingham, Birmingham:Google Scholar
CMS: G/Cl: Minute Books.Google Scholar
CMS: CA 1/E: Sierra Leone, early incoming and outgoing correspondence, 1805-1820.Google Scholar
CMS: CA I/O: Sierra Leone, missionary correspondence, 1820-1880.Google Scholar
CMS: CA 1/M: Sierra Leone, mission books, 1820-1880.Google Scholar
Methodist Missionary Society Archive, SOAS Library, London: West Africa Correspondence, Sierra Leone.Google Scholar
Sierra Leone Archives, Freetown: Liberated African Department Letter Books.Google Scholar

Periodicals

Church Missionary Record

Proceedings of the Church Missionary Society for Africa and the East

Missionary Register

Internet Sources

http://collections.vam.ac.uk/item/O70506/sampler (accessed 7 July 2010).Google Scholar
http://www.samplings.com/pastsales/turner-charlotte.html (accessed 7 July 2010).Google Scholar
http://www.worthpoint.com/worthopedia/antique-needlework-samplersigned-76393953 (accessed 21 May 2010).Google Scholar
Biographisch-Bibliographisches Kirchenlexicon: http://www.kirchenlexikon.de/b/barth_c_g.shtml (accessed 22 May 2010).Google Scholar
Voyages: The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade database: http://slavevoyages.org (accessed 7 July 2010).Google Scholar
47° Georgii III, Session 1, cap. XXXVI: An Act for the Abolition of the Slave Trade: http://www.pdavis.nl/Legis_06.htm (accessed 7 July 2010).Google Scholar