The Ndebele, Frank Oates, and Knowledge Production in the 1870s

This open access book addresses a question fundamental to the histories of empire and Africa: at the point of the colonial encounter, how was knowledge made? How did different communities, with little or no prior contact, construct meaning about one another? Amidst huge changes in the politics and economics of a continent, on the cusp of almost complete colonization at the hands of European powers at the end of the nineteenth century, how do the specifics of personality and contingency affect knowledge production? An obvious challenge in addressing this sort of question is the frequent lack of African-produced source material; here, we must work within the ‘archives of oppression’ and read both along and against the colonial grain in an attempt to restore African agency to this process of knowledge production. Drawing on the previously never-used diaries of explorer Frank Oates, who travelled throughout Matabeleland in the 1870s, the use of a single traveller’s experiences in detail affords us the means to consider the fine details of the interactions between Europeans and Africans. Therefore, this study seeks to enhance existing work on race and empire of the nineteenth century by asking: what place do the fragilities, uncertainties, and contingencies of encounters between individuals have in our understanding of how knowledge is made?