Sourcing and shipping museum objects from East Africa to the Smithsonian, 1887–1891

Abstract

This article presents new research on the sourcing and shipping of museum objects from the Kilimanjaro Region, located in present-day Tanzania, to the Smithsonian Institution, located in Washington, DC. Through analysis of the personal letters of Smithsonian naturalist William Louis Abbott, who relied on protection from one particularly powerful leader in Kilimanjaro, Mangi Mandara, the article argues that the co-existence of formal economic exchange and informal gift-exchange were very much integral to the late nineteenth-century the late nineteenth-century East African transcontinental and maritime economy–even as this transcontinental trade was shifting from trans-Indian Ocean and Arabian Sea orientations toward Anglo-German and American ports, albeit briefly.

Keywords:

• East Africa
• Smithsonian
• museum artifacts
• Indian Ocean
• natural history

Introduction

In 1891, while Britain and Germany jockeyed for control of Tanganyika, the U.S. Museum of Ethnology in Washington D. C. finalized a shipment of museum objects from Mount Kilimanjaro to the Smithsonian Institution. On 5 March 1891, Smithsonian curator Otis Mason wrote that Philadelphia naturalist ‘Dr. Abbott had unpacked and presented to the museum a large and very important ethnological collection from the Wachaga’ who lived on the lower slopes of Kilimanjaro Mountain. Dr. Abbott himself had written about this collection in his personal letters to his family. ‘[I] will have a complete collection for the Smithsonian of utensils of every sort. I bought a native beehive yesterday, and I am now bargaining for a kibo or pombe (beer) tub’. In exchange for snuffboxes, shields, ceremonial garb, and miniature models of buildings he commissioned, Abbott traded ‘cloth, beads, wire, guns, powder, etc’. Abbott shipped most objects via Ropes Emmerton & Co., an overseas agent of the New York-based ivory importer, the Arnold, Hines & Company. To procure his goods, Abbott relied on porters from the East African coast, whom he paid about $3.60 USD monthly, and on Swahili-speaking caravan guides who knew the best routes between the coast and the interior.

During the months he spent encamped in the region of Kilimanjaro, Abbott sought the protection of the principal authority known locally as the mangi. ‘Mandara is crazy for a cannon’, Abbott wrote about one particularly powerful mangi. He ‘has one of the illustrated catalogues of the Army and Navy Stores in London and is going through it with great industry’ (William L. Abbott Papers, Smithsonian Archives). Mandara had conquered his rivals to the east and west and was actively seeking protection and weaponry from coastal traders. He flew the Zanzibari flag at his headquarters; had a bank account in Zanzibar; traded loyalties with the German East Africa Company whose officers in turn militarily defended him; and housed several British missionaries plus Abbott and other travellers in his land, whom he pressed for gifts and trade. Abbott wrote in a letter to his mother: ‘After several requests for utterly impossible objects, [Mandara asked for] two beautiful iron boxes – steel water-tight tanks he meant, so I have ordered these and also a working model of a locomotive’. Like Abbott, Mandara was an entrepreneurial spirit, seeking gain under changing conditions.

Interactions between Mandara and Abbott on Kilimanjaro Mountain, and between Abbott and Samuel Ropes of Ropes Emmerton & Co. in Zanzibar, provide a window into commodity trading conditions linking East Africa and the United States in the late nineteenth century. The Kilimanjaro region served then as now as a crossroads for trade. Located on a longtime caravan route connecting the African interior to the Indian and Arabian sub-continents, Kilimanjaro traders supplied food, fresh water, people, and raw materials to agents serving markets in Oman, Persia, India, Europe, and the Americas. What may have seemed to a new trader such as Abbott as a dusty intersection or a temporary marketplace on the mountain was more likely an historic old and culturally complex nexus on a longer commercial route connecting diverse people for centuries.

This article asks: What were the terms and conditions of on-the-ground trade connecting Kilimanjaro, Zanzibar, and the United States in the late nineteenth-century? How did people engage one another in trade, and what can we see of this trade through the personal letters of William Louis Abbott? Analysis of Abbott’s work, I contend, will add an important cornerstone to scholarship on the East African caravan trade because most of the classic historiography of the caravan trade focuses on southeastern African trade routes (Alpers, 1975; Rockel, 2006) and on Zanzibari oversight of caravan infrastructure and plantation agriculture (Cooper, 1977; Pawelczak, 2010; Sheriff, 1987). Focusing here on the northerly routes, and on the political-economic strategies of mangis, demonstrates the involvement of local leaders as agents in controlling global commodity chains spanning Anglo-German colonial territory and reaching from the interior to the coast and other continents. The Mandara-Abbott case suggests that Mandara and his peers used consumer goods and weaponry to centralize their power, and that they acquired these items in relation to the decline of ivory, the rise of certain well-armed chiefs, and the British backing of Omani-Zanzibar. After providing background on interior caravan networks and trade in museum objects, the article addresses the logics of exchange Abbott faced, the physical location and social organization of markets in Zanzibar and on Mount Kilimanjaro, and the calculations Abbott made with Mandara and through Ropes to ensure he could ship goods to the Smithsonian.

The East African caravan trade

People living on Mount Kilimanjaro were hardly isolated in the late 1880s. English and German missionaries lived year-round on church mission stations, and traders from the Indian subcontinent and the Swahili (west Indian Ocean) coast travelled regularly to upcountry local markets. With waves of migration coming from the Usambara, Taita, and Pare Mountains to Kilimanjaro extending back at least two centuries (Spear, 1997), and with years of trade and conflict involving people living on the savannah and communities moving from the coast, people living in the region of Kilimanjaro were part of a historically connected and complex economic region.

In the late nineteenth century, Zanzibar was home to several ivory trading companies. One of the most established from the United States was Arnold Hines & Company of New York. Arnold Hines chartered Ropes Emmerton & Company (a shipping firm based in Salem, Massachusetts) to haul ‘American kerosene and cotton sheeting’ from New England into East Africa and ‘African hides, rubber, ebony, copal, ivory, and cloves’ from that region to the Americas (Fee & Machado, 2017; Ropes Emmerton & Company Records, MSS 103). Although British and German companies also shipped ivory through the Suez Canal to Europe and further ports, American companies working in Zanzibar had a particular advantage because they were unaligned and could navigate between the two Eruopean powers.

During his East Africa tour (1887–1890), Abbott operated on the regulated British side of this nautical zone to organize his up-country excursions. Specifically, he relied on Samuel Ropes to provide him with personal introductions to Arab and Indian merchant houses as well as to the Zanzibari Sultan and British diplomats posted in East Africa. In turn, Arab and Indian merchants helped Abbott secure up-country connections with traders located in mid-markets. Mid-market traders, particularly those in Taveta, located thirty kilometers southeast of Mandara’s, would then introduced Abbott to local authorities such as Mandara on Mount Kilimanjaro. In this way, a chain of connections running through Arnold, Ropes, Abbott, Arab and Indian merchants and middlemen, to local authorities on Mount Kilimanjaro illustrates concretely what Prestholdt largely infers were the commodity chains linking East African consumers and producers, caravan leaders and porters, foreign agents in Zanzibar, and privately capitalized New England firms (Prestholdt, 2008, p. 63).

In 1890, the year Abbott departed from East Africa, Germany conceded Zanzibar and coastal waters to the British and focused its interests on the mainland. The Arab slave trade, which the British at least on paper had abolished in 1822, continued de facto until 1873 and resulted in a population of de jure liberated slaves whom ivory traders continued to employ and exploit as caravan porters (Pawelczak, 2010). These laborers served the rank and file of caravan larborers in Abbott’s day, while coastal traders served as cooks and headmen. Although the 1880s and 1890s were years of East African conquest by European governments, the day-to-day social conditions and personal relations enabling trade were highly diverse and situational.

Yet this is not to say that trade was entirely freewheeling and fluid. What may have appeared chaotic to first-time travellers was in fact a series of linked commercial zones under the influence of different groups. Even before Abbott’s time, there is a record that commercial routes and interactions connected the coast with the interior (Alpers, 1975; Bishara, 2017; McDow, 2008; Stahl, 1964). From the late fifteenth- to the mid-nineteenth centuries, coastal communities traded with Portuguese, Indian, and Arabic-speaking travellers. Ivory and slaves from the Great Lakes interior fetched high prices in distant lands. People living on Mount Kilimanjaro provided food and ivory to traveling caravans that, in turn, supplied Kilimanjaro’s mangi-leaders with beads, iron, cloth, and weaponry. By the mid-nineteenth century, hunting on the plains drove elephants off the savannah to the mountain (Gissibl, 2016), and the traffic of once enslaved but now, technically, liberated human labor expanded (cf. Mathew, 2016, chapter 2). Mount Kilimanjaro became a destination in itself, including for European missionaries. Regional mangis controlled transit zones and access to supplies and land. In 1849, the mangi of Machame, for example, detained a German missionary, Johannes Rebmann, who wrote in his diary,

I was obliged to remain on the bank of the river until a goat had been brought and the Kishongo ceremony gone through [involving the exchange of leather rings], without which no stranger can enter the country…. Next day, and again on the 8th of January I received visits from Muigno Wessiri, a Swahili who has lived in Jagga for six years and has been appointed by the king his medicine-man and sorcerer’ (quoted in Krapf, 1860, p. 251).

To focus solely on how nineteenth-century trading companies located at ports organized and regulated business across formally documented commodity chains would be to overlook the diversity of activities through which older markets and trading networks were already connected globally and controlled by mangis. At the same time, even though trade routes were well established, the kind of trade in which Abbott engaged was particular to, and expanding, in the late nineteenth century.

In particular, the museum industry was burgeoning in Abbott’s lifetime. Anthropologists in the United States were using materials such as those Abbott sent back to develop different theories about history and evolution. Physical anthropologists sought to use human remains to justify theories of biological evolution (Hrdlcka, 1914; McGee and Warms, 2013, p. 6), and cultural anthropologists sought to test theories of human migration and history.

For example, Otis Mason who commissioned Abbott and who had been hired as curator of Ethnology at the U.S. National Museum in 1884, used natural history taxonomies to organize collections from which he sought to infer the development of human creativity and invention (Isaac & Bell, 2013, p, 72). One of his collaborators and critics, Franz Boas, used some of Abbott’s Kilimanjaro materials to curate the ethnology section of the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair. This is not to say that Abbott was an anthropologist. Abbott collected East African materials situationally, that is, without an explicitly stated method or protocol for what he needed or wanted to collect; and he sourced and shipped artifacts with little knowledge or thought given to debates in the field of anthropology. However, understanding that ‘markets for art and artifact co-existed’ (Phillips & Steiner, 1999, p. 9) in the late nineteenth century is important for considering that the reasons for Abbott’s trip were multiple. European governments regarded the scramble for Africa as key to amassing political power. American foreign policy couched international involvement in terms of U.S. business interests. Wealthy travelers sought exotic gifts, while the less wealthy visited natural history museums. Within this context, the material objects Abbott shipped were blends of plunder, sale, barter, and commission. Abbott’s activities called into question clear distinctions between trafficking and commissioning, coercive extraction and free trade, and his role as collector versus as a savvy entrepreneur. Although Abbott did not reflect explicitly on these ambiguities of trade, his records clearly indicate that he was an opportunistic and savvy negotiator, looking to use all means possible to conduct his business.

William Louis Abbott

Born to a wealthy family in Philadelphia, Abbott received a medical degree from the University of Pennsylvania (1884) but never practiced medicine professionally. He used an inheritance from his father to self-finance his trip to East Africa (see Taylor, 2015 for a discussion of Abbott’s biography). As a medical doctor, Abbott was well equipped, professionally and with instruments, to gut and preserve animal specimens as well as to treat himself medically (which he did). As a self-financed adventurer, he was free to take personal safaris and go on hunting sprees, which he did more frequently in the early months of his time in East Africa, apparently tiring (as he put it in his personal letters) of spending most of his time seeking rather than shooting game.

In addition to publishing an 1891 ethnological report documenting the 247 cultural objects he sourced from Kilimanjaro, Abbott kept a journal of his East Africa travels from which he copied when writing letters to his mother and sisters. Sometimes he wrote several letters ascribing the same events to the same or different person and sent these letters separately, saying (he noted on at least one occasion) that he hoped the European fighting and East African caravan raids would not prevent all letters from arriving. He also curiously underlined seemingly random words, possibly suggesting an unarticulated message not to be easily parsed by a century-removed archival reader.

A chronological reading of Abbott’s records, such as I present in the next section, shows that he became more aware of (and/or willing) to articulate the political dynamics of commodity trading and trafficking in people and weapons than he was in his earlier months; that he worked within commercial trade and governmental networks but was not a commodity trader or diplomat himself; and that he inhabited various roles and social positions as he moved socially up and down the geographic trade routes and commodity value chains.

This article draws on Abbott’s handwritten letters from East Africa to his family, particularly to his mother and two sisters; on primary European colonial accounts of ivory trade and museum collecting (Meyer, 1891; New, 1874); and on the records of Ropes Emmerton & Company. Abbott’s letters are housed in the Smithsonian Archives, and his collection of East African objects is stored in the Smithsonian’s Suitland, Maryland location. The Ropes Emmerton & Company archives are housed at the Phillips Library in Salem, Massachusetts.

Abbott’s itinerary and objectives

Abbott’s record of his East Africa trip (1887–1890) illuminates a series of linked commercial zones under the influence of different authorities. A hand-drawn map he included with one shipment to the Smithsonian illustrates locations on his route. The coastal cities of Lamu, Malindi, Mombasa and Pangani, along with the urban centers of the islands of Pemba and Zanzibar, were port towns from which Indian Ocean trade flowed to and from the mainland. A middle zone, between the coast and Mount Kilimanjaro, was an area of brush and shrub (savannah), trafficked mainly by Waduruma and Wanyika pastoralists. The mountain clusters in this mid-region (Ugweno, Pare, Usambara, and Taita) were inhabited by farmers, and to the south and west of Kilimanjaro were zones under the influence of Waarusha, Wamaasai, and Wakuavi, people who herded cattle.

Even before his arrival, Abbott’s letters reveal a confluence of commercial interests in Africa. Writing from London, Abbott instructed his mother to send letters care of Smith, MacKenzie and Company, a British firm located in Mombasa, East Africa. ‘I have ordered my surgical instruments and medicine chest. I have a great deal of stuff of all kinds to take with me, nearly a half-ton of luggage’ (Sept 18, 1887). He then travelled by ship to Malta (skirting a cholera outbreak), then ported across the Mediterranean and through the Suez Canal, down the East African coast and eventually to Lamu, in present-day Kenya. Docked in the Indian Ocean, he wrote from the ship, ‘the crew are from Goa, sailors are Hindu, first men are Muslims, the quartermaster Malay, the carpenter is a China man, and the officers are British’ (November 23, 1887). This accounting illustrates a division of labor by nationality by which the company organized business at the end of the nineteenth century.

At Lamu, another American boarded the ship: Samuel D. Ropes of Salem, Massachusetts, of the firm Ropes Emmerton & Co. under the Arnold, Hines and Company, operating in East Africa. Rather than the Mombasa-based British company Abbott had named earlier, Abbott now instructed his mother to send letters via Ropes Emmerton & Co. in Zanzibar.

Abbott stayed with Ropes in Zanzibar and from him learned a great deal about the coastal war and Zanzibar’s international scene. To his mother, Abbott wrote that the Zanzibari Sultan’s palace ‘looks like an American summer hotel with its piazzas’, and he later described a fancy party he attended at an ‘Arab’s shamba (country home)’ hosted by the British Consul. Ropes introduced Abbott to an elite scene including business people from whom to hire caravan porters. Early in his letters, Abbott detailed his attempts to organize an expedition, and he enumerated to his family the zones of exchange running from the coast to the interior:

Goods [are] used as money in the interior, principally mericani–or American sheeting [cotton cloth]. Farther away from the coast one also has to carry beads and wire for trade. Money (copperpiece) will only pass about fifty miles from the coast. (Dec 3, 1887)

Abbott made his first trip to the interior quickly and informally, without permission, he noted, from the British consulate. That trip lasted thirty-nine days and involved nineteen men. Describing the event, he reported:

The marches were generally made between 5 in the morning & 12. & were about 10–18 miles…. The caravan on march travelled in following order… First, the guide carrying the American flag, then the head of the expedition, then the steward, and gun bearers, then the cook and his aids, followed by the rank and file of porters carrying the boxes and bales, and finally the caravan headman bringing up rear and keeping strugglers up…. I lost several men by desertion, one always does, & replaced them by natives. (Jan 15, 1888; this excerpt is also extracted in Taylor, 2015).

A few weeks later Abbott prepared to undertake a second, this time longer expedition. However, finding that a ‘Hindi’ had ‘cornered the market’ for caravan laborers in Zanzibar, he had to look for ‘a market’ in labour elsewhere. As a result, Abbott staffed and started this second excursion from Pangani, a port town west of Zanzibar.

By March 1888, Abbott had established himself at Taveta, a crossroads leading to coastal towns of Lamu, Malindi, and Mombasa, where he interacted with traders of many European nationalities (Hungarian, Russian, American, Maltese, German, British). ‘There is no sultan’ in Taveta, Abbott wrote, meaning no Arabic leader from the coast, but Taveta ‘[is] governed by an assembly of elders’ who controlled the local economy.

I was told by the elders that a present from me was a necessary preliminary business. So on receiving two pieces (about forty two yards) of [sheeting, coth], six Burras (waist clothes) and some beads, I was presented [sic] with a piece of land.

In Taveta, Abbott built a permanent house and began to collect and store objects and specimens. By the end of June, he had traveled then returned to Taveta from Kilimanjaro, where he had encountered British missionary collecting for the South Kensington Museum, indicating for purposes here that the hunt for museum specimens was a multinational affair.

In September, still in Taveta, Abbott recorded that ‘a desperate battle [had] occurred’ on the mountain and was preventing him from returning to the area… in Chaga [as the region was known locally] between Mandara, Marealle [another mangi] and allies on one side and Sina, chief of Kibosho on the other. Cattle and slaves are the prime causes of war in these regions’, he noted, referring to cattle and people taken from savannah pastoralists and then battled for by mangis’ groups. Although Abbott did not look into the cultural economy of Kilimanjaro (a German ethnologist named Bruno Gutmann later would do this, see Gutmann, 1932 [1958]), that cultural economy was rendered materially visible in the movement of items taken from enemies and redistributed, as a sort of insurance or investment in other groups.

With cattle, for example, people living in the region might marry by using animals for bride wealth (mahari). Relations between lineages could be secured by giving a series of temporally sequenced gifts of mahari to a woman’s family who would then, if matters proceeded as initially planned, concede to their own daughter’s marriage and relocation to her husband’s land. Within this model, a captured woman would make obtaining cattle for bride wealth less necessary than would a woman living in her family’s household, because the former would have no family desiring mahari and thus not require output in the form of cattle wealth. Moreover, she might in time carry further social value by producing marriageable daughters who in turn could bring cattle into a lineage, and sons whose children could live patrilocally. By extension, captured enemies fighting for other chiefs might be enslaved and exchanged along with ivory to caravan traders who in turn might provide weaponry more powerful than that of spears and shields taken from chiefs’ enemies.

As the caravan trade route moved up the mountain, and buyers and sellers came into closer direct contact with one another, mangis amassed greater arsenals; relied more on Swahili guards, as Sina did; and depended less for their own defense on age-sets of warriors who then lacked resources of cattle and goods from the mangi with which to marry. Many of the latter were then taken or sold to caravan traders or, later, drawn in to the mission church. This description is more normative than was ever likely happening on the ground. However, it illustrates succinctly how local concepts of wealth transitioned from one of cattle raiding in which chiefs took cattle and captives, to a system of chiefs’ control of regional trade in slaves and ivory and, increasingly, to a system in which chiefs and commoners became disconnected and some of the latter gained access to the mission school (Moore, 1977).

Perhaps not seeing this particular political economy but, again, sensing the potential for opportunity that would have flowed from Sina’s ravages, Abbott returned to Zanzibar in early March, 1889, where he stayed again with Samuel Ropes and prepared for another trip. From Zanzibar, he first shipped his batch of collections and began to arrange his last and largest trip. For several months he had been waiting for a rifle suitable for long-distance shooting to arrive, a request he had made in a previous letter to his mother. He had with him plenty of elephant rifles, and a revolver or two, but he lacked a weapon with long-range accuracy. In November that year he wrote from Taveta, the ‘rifle of course has not yet arrived’, but finally, from Zanzibar, Abbott was able to work around the blockade.

Through the [British] consul I have been allowed to take my arms etc up with me [to Kilimanjaro]. A Man of War will carry them to Mombasa and there hand them over to me.

On March 5, Abbott told his mother that Lieutenant Ehlers of the Austrian Navy had provided Abbott with ‘about fifty men including four Wachagga warriors sent by Mandara to the Emperor of Germany in full war costume. Also a large tusk weighing one hundred twenty-five pounds and some spears and shields’. These items are significant in showing how a Chagga chief in Mandara’s day might have thought about paying tribute to an enemy. Sending warriors may have been like sending a tribute to a chief. Advancing credit in the form of ivory or people may have been like paying mahari to a lineage or like fostering a child as a gift. The warriors returned but the ivory did not, suggesting, too, an interesting diversification of expendable resources and human capital.

In the next few weeks, Abbott spent some time in Zanzibar ‘engaged in packing up any specimens to send to the Smithsonian and in making arrangements for my new expedition’. From Zanzibar, he shipped the warriors and sold the tusk, which fetched ‘about $100 net after paying duty’. He then travelled to Kilimanjaro where he met Mandara, the most powerful mangi, in Abbott’s eyes as well as his contemporaries’ (e.g., Meyer, 1891; New1874). Mandara ruled an area called Moshi. Abbott recounted his first meeting with Mandara this way:

A large, stout man came forward wearing an old felt hat. He had only one eye. I immediately saw it was the famous Mandara. I told him I was the Merikani (my only name in Africa) and he grinned all over. He was in very good humor and very jolly…. He gave me some very good pombe–native beer–and some milk, which went very well after my hot walk, and sent out a large tub of pombe to my men who did justice to it.

Abbott visited Mandara again the following day, ‘taking as presents a Navy revolver, a bale of [unclear] red cloth, some silk muscat cloths, and a bottle of gin’. He noted that Mandara had ‘almost every conceivable present from his various and numerous European visitors’. The trade with Europeans was abundant, and Abbott was increasingly obliged to trade using Mandara’s terms.

By August of the following year, Abbott headquartered himself at Mandara’s, where he lived in a German-built house formerly occupied by Lieutenant Ehlers. ‘I expect to get along well with Old Mandara’, Abbott wrote (August 10, 1889). But Mandara was ‘very unwell and very anxious to have some ‘Pombe Ulaia’ (spirits, whiskey) as medicine, it is an article he is extremely fond of - mixed with sugar and claret to color it, he calls it weno’. Abbott promised to get Abbott weno and also asked what else he should get Mandara from Europe. ‘I almost took his breath away by asking [Mandara] what he wanted from Europe … He can’t decide’ (August 6, 1889); though above all, Abbott wrote,

Mandara is crazy for a cannon [with which] to kill Sina, chief of Kibosho, his great enemy. The latter has been raiding Machame lately, killing many people and selling many prisoners into slavery. My friend Marealle has been doing the same in Rombo and the slave traders have been doing a [unclear; bustling?] business. (August 10, 1889)

When Abbott visited another mangi, Salekia (one of the many petty chiefs on the mountain), to whom he gave a ‘Waterbury watch and some colored cloth’ in return for ‘a spear and a large billy goat’, Abbott found ‘a large crowd of Swahili slavers’. In Salekia’s area, ‘most of its inhabitants [had been] swept off’ and only their handicrafts and household items remained. Abbott did not want captives or ivory (though he may have traded the latter on occasion); he only wanted the household goods that raided peoples had left behind–items likely considered to be of little value to remaining people. Thus Abbott could receive initiation aprons, beer tubs, and cooking utensils–items in demand by the Smithsonian–in exchange for giving cloth and trinkets to ravaged peoples. Through this downward logic, Abbott could in effect trade ‘down’ the commodity chain in Kilimanjaro.

In a similar kind of exchange involving yet another petty chief, Lumba, Abbott received ‘two fine spears and a fat goat’ for which he gave ‘two snider rifles and a bale of red cloth’. Around this time, Abbott also wrote that ‘the finest spears the natives will not sell for less than a snider rifle apiece’ (Sept 8, 1889). Given the number of spears he shipped, Abbott must have had a sizeable supply of Snider rifles. Of the spears, he continued: ‘Every house in Zanzibar has a small one of the native weapons. But nothing compares with these gorgeous spears of the Wachaga. The blades are 3 feet long, and the [butt?], 4 feet. Only leaving a handle of 10–12 inches’. For purposes here, Abbott’s comments illustrate he was keeping an eye on private collectors’ items and thinking not only about the museum but about what he would later refer to as the ‘wants of certain friends’. The question arises: Toward the end of his stay, what and for whom was Abbott mainly focused on collecting?

With Mandara seeking European protection and Abbott making friends with any who would supply his collection, a struggle with Mandara was bound to happen. Sure enough, three months later, after receiving a letter from the U.S. National Museum requesting he send ‘small mammals such as rats, mice, squirrels etc… because these are the most valuable as being little known’, Abbott found himself in a ‘row with Mandara’.

One cause seems to have been that Abbott used children to collect specimens and make models of buildings. Children belonged to households that were themselves under the management of the mangi; they could not be taken easily, unless they were to have been sold or ‘exchanged’ in the slave market (on Chagga childhood, see Raum, 1940 [1967]). But even then, watumwa (captured persons) most often were children of commoners who would have returned a value directly to the mangi. In the cultural economy of the region, people considered (and still do) that gifts are children, and children are gifts. ‘Take the gift of my child and return something to me’ is a saying with wide resonance historically on Kilimanjaro, meaning in effect that this is something of value, a valuable person, who as a gift to you is like a promissory note (Stambach and Kwayu, 2013). Indeed, it was that idea of future gifting that likely, again, was behind Mandara’s decision to send warriors to Germany. Instead of repaying Mandara, it seems Abbott was employing children himself and paying them, not Mandara. He had gone against Mandara’s system.

Another factor leading to conflict with Mandara seems to have been that Abbott, like other foreigners, was cutting trees–trees having deep meaning and connection with the mangi (Stambach, 2017). For this, Mandara cut off Abbott’s water supply–a powerful show of Mandara’s force. The downhill flow of water from springs and rivers supplied mountain farms with plenty of water. Opening and closing waterways was a privilege directed by the mangi. Abbott passed on the blame for Mandara’s ire to the ‘lies of some of the natives’ and proceeded also to blame the Germans for introducing disorder to the territory. The Germans ‘have got Kilimanjaro in the territory at least on paper, and want to suppress slave trading within their limits. Now there is nothing to sell in this country but slaves and ivory’, implying that people and elephants’ tusks were reasonable commodities (October 6, 1889).

Writing from Moshi, again under Mandara’s watchful eye, Abbott noted in December 1889, Have got my house crammed with all kinds of native weapons, utensils, for taking to the coast. There are a lot of people there who want things and I have to pay off obligations to certain individuals. My walls are covered with spears and shields. Have the finest collection ever seen in these parts. But it will take a good number for supplying the wants of certain friends.

By ‘friends’ Abbott may have been referring to those who helped him evade the arms embargo and pay the owner whose ‘slave’ Abbott shot, but his letters give no direct evidence of this. Instead, his letters continue by describing his itinerary and finding other travellers heading to the locations he left.

Traveling toward the coast preparing to leave through Zanzibar, Abbott met an American representative of the Carroll and Case Company of Baltimore and Boston, who was himself carrying goods for another American, also stationed at Mandara’s. ‘I halted my caravan and took him [not to Mandara’s but] up to Marealle’s instead, as he wished to buy food for his caravan and he would be much better treated [by Marealle] than by Mandara’, Abbott decided. In addition, the representative had brought the two watertight iron chests Abbott had ordered from England for Mandara. ‘They were gorgeously painted in checkerboard pattern and pleased Old Mandara immensely’, Abbott wrote in one letter he posted from the Taita in January (1890). However, of the locomotion engine Abbott had ordered, Abbott decided not to deliver it, ‘arguing with the missionaries [also headquartered in Mandara’s Moshi] that it was a perfect sin to cast pearls before swine’, one of many offensive depictions Abbott conveyed in his letters to family.

From the eastern coast of Madagascar, now writing in February 1890, Abbott wrote, ‘the Academy of Nat. Sciences are trying to no purpose, it is useless to say, to get me to send my collection to them’. And he wrote earlier that he was already preparing to display his private collection in future world fairs. Abbott remained connected with Ehlers whom he had met at Mandara’s in Moshi and wrote in a letter, again from Madagascar, about Mandara’s fateful downfall:

Mandara’s people with those of Kilema and Uru surprised Marealle early one morning. Marealle resisted as long as possible in his stone boma, but it was eventually captured and an indiscriminate massacre took place of men, women, and children…. [By Mandara’s orders] hundreds or even thousands were killed in cold blood and the bodies mutilated…. My former station [at Marealle’s] burned. All the presents which I and others had given to the chief were carried off as trophies to Moschi.

Abbott was disappointed that his gifts to Mandara’s enemy, Marealle, were lost; but this was not the end of Abbott’s concern. Writing from the Seychelles in May 1890, he wrote, ‘I have further letters from Kilimanjaro. Ehlers came with the presents from the German Emperor for Mandara’. These would have been the presents the German Emperor sent in exchange for the warriors Abbott had taken on Mandara’s behalf to Zanzibar.

Mandara was much disappointed and called them (sotto voce) a bad word (in Kichaga) meaning very poor trash…. [Though still I] am glad to hear that my old friend Marealle is by no means finished yet; he had just swept off several hundred head of cattle belonging to Mandara. Old Mandara is very ill.

Finally, of the trade in arms for objects Abbott wrote, ‘I hear the Germans are very angry against me for having sold guns to the natives’ [underlining in original].

The zones of trade into which Abbott first entered, when he wrote in December of 1887, might have been described differently by the time he left. To the list of ‘goods used as money in the interior, principally mericani–or American sheeting [cotton cloth]’ Abbott might have added a list of the Snider rifles and revolvers he traded for spears, shields, and ceremonial garb. When he referenced Mandara’s taste for capturing cattle and slaves, he might have added that Mandara, like other mangis, valued cattle as a medium through which to mark political power through descent and affinity. He might also have mentioned that slaves on the mountain referred to many groups, including servants employed on caravans (such as those taken on by Abbott; indeed, Abbott calls some of his men ‘slaves’ at one point); children or women captured by mangis; and thieves auctioned in slave markets. Mandara would have regarded any and all to be traded for iron, wire, guns, and weapons; and he would have used such weaponry and hardware to launch additional raids.

U.S. business practices

Abbott’s observations are well supported through the memoirs and writings of his contemporaries. German geologist Meyer (1891) offers a similar account of linked trade routes from the coast to the interior, as do letters of several missionaries. Meyer, for instance, recounts that, like Abbott, he had encountered many ‘European travellers, missionaries, sportsmen, colonists, and adventurers who travelled from the coast to Kilimanjaro’ including several who stayed with Abbott on Kilimanjaro (1891, p. 258). British Missionary Reverend Charles New recorded some twenty years prior to Abbott’s travels that Mangi Mandara wore ‘a small piece of greasy Americani’ (calico cotton) and asked New to give him a salute fire. ‘Where are your guns?’ Mandara asked New, whose own guide, Sadi, was from the Swahili coast (1874, p. 371–376). British explorer H. H. Johnston, writing a scientific report on his findings from eastern equatorial Africa, noted, ‘the wealth in this country lies in its ivory, which is preferred to any other in the Zanzibar market. The elephant abounds in the neighborhood of Kilimanjaro to the extent of many thousands’ (1886, p. 541)

These and other European records affirm many of Abbott’s details; however, where these European records document how local indigenous and regional trade networks connected and integrated into European value chains, Abbott’s records uniquely demonstrate how these traditional and new imperial systems were coopted by U.S. trading companies, and in particular by Abbott himself. Abbott’s records show how he used value chains developed by local mangis and commodity traders to source artifacts instead of ivory.

Much as the museum industry had shifted the lines between art and artifact, and between artifact and commodity, Abbott’s work pushed at the limits of what constituted trade in the late nineteenth century. Abbott saw and wrote about a changing commercial system from chiefs’ cattle raiding among themselves to chiefs’ control of trade in slaves and ivory to a system in which chiefs were losing power to the Germans. He also saw and wrote about the Anglo-German war and Europeans’ undoing of the Arab-controlled East African caravan trade by supplying chiefs directly with Tower muskets. Abbott recognized that Europeans involved in the Allied squadrons’ arms blockade were ‘nearly worn out with the continual watching of officers and men complaining greatly’ (Abbott, March 5, 1889) and that the British East African Society had given ‘the leading Arabs of Mombasa $700 apiece for their influence upon their first arriving to Mombasa; but the Arabs have now spent that and are getting restless’. Economic exchange as seen in procuring and selling of ethnological objects between Mandara’s court and Abbott, and then shipped through Ropes to the Smithsonian, reveal the contrivances and exploitations in Abbott’s activities and in his own personally recorded story. Gun running, divide and rule, connections to slavery, arms race between local leaders who were also perhaps engaging in trading slaves: all of these appear to be perceived by Abbott as aspects to be exploited in the course of conducting business.

Whether Otis Mason and other anthropologists at the Smithsonian were aware of merchants’ exploitation of conscripted labor, or the institution’s profiting from violence, is possible but not documented in Abbott’s records. What is clear about museum presentations and anthropological analyses of cultural collections, however, is that historians and anthropologists who study the era recognize that ‘ambiguities in regulatory categories’ (Mathew, 2016, p. 14) co-existed at the margins of the capital market in this region as at other times and places (Bell, 2017; Bishara, 2017; Boast, 2011; Jacknis, 1985). More specifically, William Louis Abbott’s personal letters help us understand how late nineteenth-century commodities and commodity markets in this part of East Africa were fundamentally shaped by interactions of local leaders, traders, entrepreneurs, and middlemen including Abbott and Mandara in the interior, and Abbott and Ropes interacting on the coast. They illustrate changing alignments of political, economic, and social orders located at nodes on an East African trade route, where linked commercial zones were under the influence of different authorities. They also show that the co-existence of formal economic exchange and more informal gift-exchange were very much integral to the late nineteenth-century the late nineteenth-century East African transcontinental and maritime economy–even as this new global trade was shifting from trans-Indian Ocean and Arabian Sea orientations toward Anglo-German and American positions (if briefly).

Moreover, the points or nodes of commercial transaction operated as a single configuration, not as a formal versus informal commercial economy that clearly separated one market from another. Upcountry, individuals took advantage of their positions to enter into business deals and acquire goods whose attributes of value were both given and taken away through the overlapping projects of caravan trading, cattle raiding, and museum collecting. On the coast, state authorities collected taxes, licensed merchant houses, and re-expressed goods’ value numerically. Commercial trading houses that kept and archived records were both governmentally ordered yet a part of a system that was situational and fluid. By maintaining an analytic focus on how transactional orders overlay at the interface of zones of authority, this article has taken a nuanced view of mangis’ and trading companies’ changing political-economic strategies.

Finally, Abbott’s letters show how the work of an American government-backed institution, the U.S. National Museum, intersected with the work of a naturalist who operated in a dynamically shifting political East African situation to collect materials for museum anthropology. The art, science, and social science of collecting were all, in effect, boxed up with imperialist and colonial politics, as classic works on collecting and the history of anthropology illustrate (e.g., Redman, 2016; Reid, 2002; Zimmerman, 2001). My discussion here intervenes in that literature in showing how one line of commerce operated under the banner of museum collection within a heavily militarized zone. The Smithsonian Suitland Collection site today houses many of Abbott’s articles, including models of houses made by children (for some discussion of these objects and their multiple possible uses today, see Stambach 2018). In addition, its archives house a copy of the shipping label from Ropes Emmerton & Company bound for Boston via Madagascar and from Boston, to the ‘Director, National Museum, Washington DC’. However, what Abbott’s labels and collections do not directly indicate–but that I have emphasized here–are U.S. business practices and the terms of trade that went on behind the scenes and in relation to East African politics. Of course most scholars will agree that the history of museums and anthropology should be seen in the context of power differences and differences in the knowledge of markets and assumptions of value and risk. However particularly clear in the Mandara-Abbott case is that collecting was not a discrete enterprise, it was linked to local leaders’ own uncertain and transforming interests and to connected projects in the U.S. and overseas.

In later years, Abbott went on to collect in other parts of the world and became one of the largest-ever collectors for the Smithsonian. Mandara died in 1891. Nine years later, German soldiers hung his son and, according to stories still told in Kilimanjaro today (2019), sent his brain for research to Germany.

Acknowledgements

This paper benefited from discussions with Candice Greene and Paul Taylor that took place during the summer of 2017 at the Smithsonian Institution. I would also like to acknowledge the Tanzanian National Commission for Science and Technology for granting me permission to conduct research in Tanzania, and the anonymous reviewers of this journal for their helpful suggestions.

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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Funding

National Museum of Natural History