I’ve been whiling away the empty hours by turning to an online version of The Secret Museum of Mankind.
It’s been put online by one Ian Macky, who sounds like a heckuva guy. According to his website he lives in northern California, drives a Triumph TR6, and is interested in succulents and Tesla Coils among other things.
Macky describes The Secret Museum this way, ‘Cannibals. Fakirs. Crime and punishment. Rituals. Slaves, cults and customs. Warriors and weapons. Equestrians and equilibrists. Musicians and mendicants. Dance, dress, undress and body modification. Structures, conveyances, beasts, and more breasts than you can shake a stick at! This is The Secret Museum of Mankind.’ It wasadvertised and sold as the ‘World's Greatest Collection of Strange & Secret Photographs.’
All of this is sort of true.
However, much of the book is scurrilous, imperialist, probably white supremacist avant la lettre. Its capacity to find the non-white races simultaneously savage, disgusting and comical, is so extreme that it is in itself comical, though that doesn’t make it any less forgivable. And of course the problem is all in the captions, since the images don’t quite speak for themselves. Interpreting images from other and little known cultures is always tricky and never neutral, but The Secret Museumreally doesn’t try.
Still, the images remain fascinating, and I was interested in the pictures relating to food in Africa, of which there are a good few, as you see below. Africa incidentally is conceived of here as just one big undifferentiated landmass. Names of places and tribes are thin on the ground in the text. I’ve omitted the more glaringly offensive parts of the captions, which probably makes me guilty of post-colonial revisionism, but here as you see:
WOMEN GRINDING THE CORN THEY HAVE GROWN
These two wives are painfully grinding Indian corn for their husband's repast. How little can be ground at a time is shown by the few seeds on the nether stone.
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Women of the Kavirondo tribe, inhabiting the north-east end of Lake Victoria, are most enterprising. They pursue agriculture, herding, hunting, and fishing with their menfolk, and are their tribe's only ‘medicine-men.’ The flesh of some wild animals is greatly esteemed by the Kavirondo, particularly that of the wild cat and leopard; plucky and dextrous hunters, the fiercest hippopotamus and largest elephant invariably succumb to their traps and spears.
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Meat is dear to the heart of every African native, and best of all he likes it red and raw from the animal just after it has been shot. He will gorge himself on meat grilled or fried, minced or chopped, or cut into strips and dried in the sun …
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Rice is the staple food of all the Malagasy tribes, and appears at every meal. Manioc root, potatoes, and other vegetables also form part of the ordinary dietary, with a little meat or fish. Other things eaten as a relish with rice are snails, locusts, certain kinds of caterpillars, moths, and a heterogeneous collection of creatures dredged from shallow water and including shrimps, water-beetles, and insect larvae, so that a certain variety is ensured to this otherwise vapid food.
Vapid? I mean, really.
Meanwhile I have been moving on, reading more Barbara Pym. You’ll see how this ties in. Less Than Angels, published in 1955, is set among anthropologists and their co-workers in London. Various (mostly male) characters are always going off ‘into the field,’ though the action of the book never leaves England.
Here are some characters at a suburban party for anthropologists and civilians, and Pym did work at the International African Institute so this adds some authenticity to what might otherwise seem to be some unlikely dialogue.
‘What do people eat in Africa?’ asked Mabel earnestly.
‘The Hadzapi tribe will eat anything that is edible except the hyena,’ declared Alaric precisely.
‘Oh well …,’ Mabel spread out her hands in a hopeless little gesture.
‘Our butcher wouldn’t offer you hyena, anyway,’ giggled Phyllis.
‘Most Africans are very fond of meat when they can get it,’ said Tom.
‘Yes, and many of them relish even putrescent meat,’ said Alaric solemnly
‘Do they understand the principles of cooking as we know it?’ asked Rhoda.
‘Oh yes, a good many of them do,’ said Alaric, ‘In some very primitive societies, though, they would just fling the unskinned carcase on the fire and hope for the best.’
Here is a picture of a youthful Hadzapi (they’re a hill tribe in what is now Tanzania) sinking his teeth into something or other, definitely not hyena, though hard to tell whether or not it’s putrescent. The picture comes from the flickr feed of Possum Inc.
You can find Ian Macky and The Secret Museum online here:
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