Scenes of Amani, Tanzania: Biography of a postcolonial landscape

Abstract

In this paper an architect, two social anthropologists, and an architecture historian assess the postcolonial landscape of Amani Hill research station, a once highly productive and century-old site of scientific research. Rather than an ‘objective’ description of the overall site, this is done through six ‘scenes’ composed of photographs, drawings, and short essays that each highlight particular aspects of the ‘biography’ of this landscape. The mapping is accompanied by two reflections. Starting from cultural geographer John Wylie’s observation that ‘landscape is tension’, we discuss some frictions embedded in the inquiry of such a mundane postcolonial landscape. Subsequently, we engage with the work of mapping as ethnographic experiment, examining the unanticipated effects that our architectural survey produced within the local community. Together, the three parts of the article underscore the inevitability of tactical engagement with the material elements that make up the postcolonial landscape, even in seemingly detached survey work.

• Tanzania
• postcolonial landscape
• landscape biography
• mapping
• ethnography

Acknowledgements

The research project ‘Memorials and Remains of Medical Science in Africa’ was supported by the ESRC (ORA grant no. RES-360-25-0032). The Wellcome Trust funded reunions of former Amani-based staff in Tanzania and in the UK (GR 102603/Z/13/Z and 107011/Z/15/Z). Thanks to research assistant and guide Aloys Mkongewa, and to all local informants, in particular John Mganga, Bernard Borchardt and Emmanuel Damas, who advised Astrid Ghyselen. Dr. William Kisinza, the Director of the Research Centre that Amani now belongs to, Dr. Robert Malima the Director of the Amani Station, and staff at Amani gave us vital support. Rene Gerrets shared his views on the site and info during the preparatory phase of the fieldwork. A final thanks to NIMR’s Chief Research Scientist, Dr. Mboera, for advice, and to the Director of NIMR for permission to publish this paper.

Notes

1 ‘Africanization’ (Adedeji 1999: 406) was commonly used in administrative and political discourse across Africa, between the 1950s and 1970s, denoting the departing colonial powers’ initiatives to train a future African civil service, and nationalist politicians’ demands for the replacement of European officers with ‘Africans’, which here usually referred to ‘black’ Africans. With its inherent conflicts and ambiguities, the concept aptly describes the very gradual process of decolonization after political sovereignty.

2 The research project ‘Memorials and Remains of Medical Science in Africa’ was funded under the Open Research Areas in Europe scheme, by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) of the UK (grant RES-360-25-0032), by the French Agence Nationale de la Recherche (ANR)(grant ANR-AA-

ORA-032), and by the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NOW)(grant 464-10-021). The Wellcome Trust funded reunions of former Amani-based staff in Tanzania and in the UK (GR 102603/Z/13/Z and 107011/Z/15/Z).

3 Ghyselen wrote the evocative descriptions of the six scenes using the historical data gathered during the previous phases of the larger research project, as well as information collected by talking to over thirty, mostly local, informants.

4 As such, future work on Amani might benefit from extending to (post)colonial landscapes the Marxist reading of the production of a landscape forwarded by a scholar like Don Mitchell or by drawing on André Corboz’s notion of the territoire.

5 In the Amani Institute library is a cupboard in which hundreds of maps have been sedimented without intentional order. The map collection includes numerous standard printed topographical maps of regions in which (presumably) institute staff had carried out surveys during the mid-twentieth century. Other maps, presumably drawn for planning purposes, depict parts of the research station housing stock, but without dates or explanations. A large number of maps is about drainage projects and environmental hygiene, probably mostly related to malaria control in the 1950s; the latter maps are mostly blueprints produced in the research station. The blueprint of the original German vegetation map was found among these maps.

6 The idea that one not only has to ‘read’ but also needs to ‘write’ the landscape, when investigating it, is drawn from the work of André Corboz (Corboz 2001).

7 For the affinity between walking and ethnography, see Ingold and Vergunst 2008.

8 To be precise, this is a three-way process involving the object or landscape, the inhabitant living with the object, and the scholarly observer chronicling the affective engagements of the first two through her own affective entanglement. This three-way constitution of ruination will be explored in a different paper.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Astrid Ghyselen

Astrid Ghyselen works as an architect and urban designer in Ghent. She obtained her Master in Architecture and Urban Design from the University of Ghent in 2014. Her Master’s thesis, ‘De voorstad verbeelden. Een introductie van een collective landschap (‘Imagining Suburbia: An Introduction to a Collective Landscape’), jointly written with four colleagues, received the faculty’s Charles Vermeersch Prize for Urban Design and Planning. Currently she works for L.U.S.T. architects in Ghent.

Paul Wenzel Geissler

Paul Wenzel Geissler is Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Oslo. Before social anthropology, he studied history and zoology. Current research concerns the ethnography of science, initially focusing on political economy and ethics, later on history, memory, and relations between temporality and the material, in African scientific sites. Among his books are The Land Is Dying: Contingency, Creativity and Conflict in Kenya (2010), with Ruth Prince; Evidence, Ethos and Ethnography (2011), with Catherine Molyneux; Para-states and Medical Science: Making Global Health in Africa (editor, 2015); and the co-authored volume Traces of the Future: An Archaeology of Medical Science in Twenty-First-Century Africa (2016).

Johan Lagae

Johan Lagae is a professor at Ghent University, where he teaches twentieth-century architecture history with a particular focus on the non-European context. Current research concerns colonial and postcolonial architecture in (Central) Africa, African urban history, colonial photography, and colonial built heritage. He has published widely in international journals, co-authored two books on the architecture and urbanism of Kinshasa, and was involved as (co-)curator in several Congo-related exhibitions. He is co-editor of ABE-journal, a peer-reviewed, open access journal that focuses on nineteenthand twentieth-century architecture beyond Europe.

Peter E. Mangesho

Peter Ernest Mangesho is a medical anthropologist and principal research scientist with the Tanzanian National Institute for Medical Research, and currently a postdoctoral fellow with the Southern African Centre for Infectious Disease Surveillance at Sokoine University of Agriculture, Tanzania.