The Spatial Poetics of Artefacts

In this paper I will explore how artefacts and texts used together can evidence the unarticulated narratives of African women in the expeditions of David Livingstone (1813-1873). I will show how reading available manuscripts, documents and artefacts as palimpsests, seeing them as variable renderings of a specific location, makes it possible to present alternate narratives of exploration. Using two items acquired in 1859 by David Livingstone, specifically a lip ring from a Mang'anja woman and a bracelet from Kafue in present day Zambia, I will show how using digital humanities techniques and mapping tools can illuminate women whose narratives have been obfuscated from the historical record.

Little is known about these items. Did women remove them to give or sell? Were they taken without consent? Were they made specifically as souvenirs to sell to passing trade? For years they have sat in a museum display case in Scotland, relics of a different space. Part of the weight of material taken back to the UK and re-made as specimens and artefacts that show the supposed alterity of Africa and its people.

It is in engaging with these items digitally, against the grain of the traditional repository, that it becomes possible to uncover the appropriation of local knowledge, the interactive processes of intellectual production, and other material-based contributions that are embedded in white European male-authored accounts of 19th century exploration and appropriation in Africa. In this paper I will reappraise the collected artefact to provoke the identification of previously obfuscated voices in the historical data