Spuren der Begegnung

Before the era of (high) imperialism, a journey into the African interior was a risky undertaking for Europeans. Nonetheless, from the middle of the eighteenth century a number of learned travelers ventured into the 'unknown' parts of Northeastern, Western and Southern Africa in order to accurately describe them to an educated public back home. They published comprehensive travel narratives that were intended as contributions to multiple fields of knowledge production. Individual travel experience with its specific moments of physical and epistemological insecurity formed a narrative thread, to which a variety of findings and speculations were attached. Anke Fischer-Kattner is tracing back some of the paths precolonial travelers chose as they turned their journeys into knowledge-producing publications. Even in their published texts traveling Europeans never exerted full control over their perceptions and experiences. Socio-cultural preconceptions and previous travel publications offered certain themes, of which a traveler might compose individual variations. Moreover, African 'others' in the narratives were not merely objects of European imagination, as is demonstrated in particular by three in-depth case studies of travels into the Ethiopian highlands. Africans appeared in pre-colonial travelogues as personalities with potentially unsettling agency. Archival documentation of the journeys allows further glimpses into the practices employed by travelers as they turned experience into socially acceptable knowledge. In a theoretically inflected interpretation of the array of documentary traces left by travelers, this study foregrounds their attempts to come to terms with the fundamental insecurities of encounters.

Dr. Anke Fischer-Kattner ist Wissenschaftliche Mitarbeiterin am Historischen Institut der Universität der Bundeswehr in München.