Knowing Africa by Looking Through a European Lens: Research on African Zoology at the Natural History Museum of Lisbon (1866-1895)

Description

This paper focuses on the role played by zoological research conducted at the Natural History Museum of Lisbon in providing information about African territories in the context of the nineteenth-century “Scramble for Africa”. Since at least the 1870s, various European countries showed an interest in the unexplored resources of the African continent and promoted expeditions in order to occupy specific regions. This imperialist impetus collided with the Portuguese claim for historical authority over regions that had been discovered in the late 15th and early 16th centuries. Several initiatives were taken to safeguard Portuguese interests in Africa, most notably the creation of the Geographical Society of Lisbon, and expeditions were planned to explore the continent and promote the Portuguese colonial agenda. Explorers such as Serpa Pinto, Hermenegildo Capelo and Roberto Ivens covered vast regions in the late 1870s and published the accounts of their expeditions with references to African geography, meteorology, anthropology, fauna and flora. But previous expeditions had already been made by José de Anchieta. Since 1864, this explorer travelled extensively for more than thirty years collecting hundreds of zoological specimens which he shipped back to the National Museum of Lisbon. Barbosa du Bocage, the Museum’s Director, and other naturalists studied these collections and published their findings in scientific journals since 1866, gathering a considerable amount of data about African fauna. In fact, the study of African specimens played a significant part in zoological research conducted at the Museum since 1866 due to Anchieta’s continuous collaboration. This long-lasting collaboration provided the basis for Bocage’s major works Ornithologie d’Angola (1881) and Herpétologie d’Angola et du Congo (1895), which summarized the existing knowledge in each subject. Bocage not only described African species, but also presented their zoogeographical distribution to give a global picture of each region. Zoological research conducted at the Museum thus provided information about Portuguese colonial resources and could be used for the evaluation of their richness.

Period	15 Jun 2012
Event title	8th Congress Iberian of African Studies
Event type	Conference
Location	Madrid, PortugalShow on map
Degree of Recognition	International