The “Charm” of Objectivity

By Tricia De Souza

A child stands upright, arm extended with his hand holding gently but firmly to the neck of a snake coiled around his naked body. Beside him, an elderly man has brought his lips to a flute-like instrument, playing before an ensemble of men leant against a tiled wall composed of blues so remarkable it is hard to look away.

Through its vivid artistry, Jean-Léon Gérôme’s 1879 painting “The Snake Charmer” presented European and American audiences with a captivating but entirely contrived image of a region many of its viewers would most likely never visit: an amorphous Middle East steeped in exoticism, sensuality and exploitation.

Today, Gérôme’s painting has now been squarely placed within the genre of ‘orientalism’, a term coined by Palestinian and American scholar Edward Said in 1978 that refers to the ways in which European (and American) colonial powers have sought authority to define through imagery, literature and scholarship what “the Orient” is, and markedly, what it is not: the West.

While countries like France, Spain and England have been more steeply inculcated in this unequal production of power, Anita Frison’s open access book Africa in Russian Imperial Culture: Race, Empire, and Representation (1850–1917) unmasks how pre-Soviet Russia produced similarly exotifying portrayals of Sub-Saharan Africa all the while distinguishing itself as a benevolent actor– merely an explorer– in contrast to its violent and colonial counterparts in the West. Through a careful analysis of travelogues, literature, maps and museum collections, Frison begs to differ.

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“Abyssinia is a fairytale,” wrote the Russian military officer Petr Krasnov in his travelogue, Kazaki v Abissinii (1900). While documenting his time in Ethiopia, Krasnov spoke in detail of the world around him: the striking heat of the sun soothed only by the coolness of the night, far off blue mountains that enticed his curiosities, the domineering light of a full moon that was unlike anything he had witnessed before. Written in a euphoric state, he reiterated, “you feel that you are in a magical fairytale” (qtd. in Frison, 78).

Krasnov’s Kazaki v Abissinii was one of a plethora of writings on Africa by Russian travelers in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Another was a memoir by writer and diplomat Egor Kovalevskii who described the interior of this expansive continent as a place akin to the garden of Eden, where a multitude of unknown fruits seemed to spring forth from the ground without “need for ploughing or sowing” (qtd. in Frison 79). Like Krasnov’s depictions, Africa was a place of dreams.

These Russian explorers of Africa did not stop at writing about their experiences; they also transcribed them onto maps. Just like their reflections, these geographical renderings flattened cultural and political complexities.

Vladimir  Troitskii, a graduate of the Moscow Faculty of Natural Sciences, almost entirely erased Central Africa from his map; instead, he only provided details of his specific routes. Eduard Petri, vice-president of the Russian Anthropological Society, designed a school atlas that divided the African population into four ethno-racial groups all with their own “sub-species” (qtd. in Frison 63).  Petri, however, had never stepped foot into Africa. This did not stop him from requesting state funding to further his projects on the study of the “‘uncultured’ people” (qtd. in Frison 64)

In a country largely affected by high rates of illiteracy, cartography allowed everyday Russians to also engage in this “science of colonialism”  (qtd. in Frison 65). For example, The School Atlas of General Geography, published in 1859 by zoologist Iulian Simashko, was intended to be used in schools and gymnasiums. Simashko blended botany, geography and zoology by randomly placing colorful images of the native flora and fauna throughout the atlas. The geography of Africa remained obscure, divided primarily by European colonies. With swathes of land left empty, Russian pupils were encouraged to fill these spaces with their own imagination rather than engaging with accurate depictions of African nations and tribes (Frison 68). Thus, without even needing formal colonies, Russian explorers utilized maps to re-produce their colonial aspirations onto Africa.

This phenomenon is best represented through the words of Kovalevskii. Upon naming a region, “the Land of Nicholas,” he then went on to call a river “the Nevka,” a name “which would point to a European traveler having reached this place” (qtd. in Frison 57). Thus, Russian imperial actors not only saw themselves as individuals, they also understood that they were contributing to a larger project of nation-building and European expansion.

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By probing an oftentimes uncontested educational resource like maps, Africa in Russian Imperial Culture acts as an important reminder that stereotyping and dehumanization can be embedded in seemingly innocuous tools of knowledge.

It is through this revelation that one can better understand Said’s underlying argument, that “everyone who writes about the Orient must locate himself vis-à-vis the Orient; translated into … the kinds of images, themes, motifs that circulate in his text” that “add up to deliberate ways of addressing the reader, containing the Orient, and finally, representing it or speaking in its behalf” (Said, 28).

By incorporating this critical thinking into the information we both create and are given, we can begin to accept and interrogate the subjectivity of the objective.

Anita Frison's book Africa in Russian Imperial Culture: Race, Empire, and Representation (1850–1917) can be read freely online, or you can buy a copy: https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0504