The Blighted Territory

“Sight is the sense elevated above all others in apprehending the world. Not being able to see clearly is tantamount to ignorance, and since early modernity the ignorance of the West had been projected onto Africa – the heart of darkness, the dark continent, the blighted territory.”

 -Saidiya Hartman, Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route 

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A silhouette exalts contour at the cost of context, ceding interior detail to the careful definition of a perimeter. The gesture of a single line communicates both artistry and information, virtuosic in its ability to illuminate the edges of the very thing it obscures.

Just as the features of a face blend together into a profile, the characteristics of a landscape combine to form a horizon, distinct – identifiable, even – in its points and planes. The panoramic sketches of George Goldsmith, a British naval officer born in 1807, might be thought of as coastal fingerprints, documenting the silhouette of a landscape in order for future sailors to navigate unfamiliar shores. In a sketch of “St. Thomas, March 31st,” the identity of the horizon is marked not only by the place name scrawled above the illustration, but also by the detailed contours of the painted coast’s crests and valleys. Lieutenant Goldsmith, later appointed Admiral, recorded these images while journeying along the coast of West Africa from 1834 to 1838 on the brig-sloop Childers, patrolling the seas as a member of the West African Squadron. The two sketchbooks joined Oberlin’s Anti-Slavery Collection not only because of their geographic relevance, but also because of the circumstances of their creation: in the 60 years following the 1807 Slavery Abolition Act, Britain’s Royal Navy was deployed to enforce the ban, shutting down slave trade routes and seizing slave ships while at sea.

Coastal views cover most of the pages in both of Goldsmith’s sketchbooks. A thick blue line marks the presence of the ocean, quickly fading into the empty lower half of the page. This figurative body of water provides the base for the outlines of the land, confined grey masses marked by varying levels of opacity. The coastal profiles in the two sketchbooks all take a similar form – shadowy shapes in watercolors and graphite, whose toothy outcroppings poke into the sky – yet these are only one category of Goldsmith’s many subjects. Other drawings are more fantastical in nature: a final page contains the minutely copied watercolor of an 1836 engraving of Viola, the heroine of Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, another page holds the full body portrait of a “Woman of Dutch Accra.” Detailed studies of ships and their sails, pastoral scenes framed by lush foliage, and pencil sketches of architectural structures interrupt the seemingly scientific watercolors. In the pages between silhouettes, Goldsmith fills in the contours of a place with his colorful observations-cum-imaginings.

As a whole, these sketchbooks serve a dual purpose: part navigational record, part personal artist’s book. Regardless of what the different images depict, their creator remains a constant, revealing the extent to which Goldsmith’s sight and his ensuing watercolors were all subject to a degree of imagination.

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Somewhere between a utilitarian silhouette and an exercise in speculation, the watercolor landscapes which contain both physical buildings and profiles of the coast provide a case study for examining Goldsmith’s way of seeing. In one scene, an enormous ship dominates the left-hand page. The water on which the ship floats curves around into the lowest corners of the page, where it arches into a fisheye, as if seen through a telescope. On the facing page, at a point along the same coast, Goldsmith has chosen to center a massive white building, echoed in the distance by a similar structure on the crest of a hill. In the foreground, neat boxes form rows of small buildings, and picture book trees poke above the bright green horizon. The inscription above the drawing reveals the subject of this painting: Elmina Castle, located on the coast of present-day Ghana, a so-called “Slave Castle,” where captives would be kept until being forced to embark on the Middle Passage.

In this painting, and in the series of other portraits of forts such as Cape Coast, Goldsmith’s sight hinges on the historical. Elmina Castle, originally named Castelo de São Jorge da Mina (Castle of Saint George of the Mine), was constructed by the Portuguese in 1482, after negotiation with amanhin, or paramount chief, Kwamina Ansah. The region, which the Portuguese called “Mina de Ouro” (the Gold Mine), was already the hub of a trade network between locals and Arab and Berber traders. The Dutch took over the Portuguese castle in 1637, and built another fort, just inland of St. George’s: Fort Coenraadsburg on St. Iago’s Hill, which is also visible in Goldsmith’s painting. As the Dutch empire expanded, Elmina Castle became a key location, eventually turning into the headquarters of the Dutch West Indies company, which soon began to supply the New World with their most rapidly growing demand: labor. Storerooms became dungeons, and the fort’s purpose turned to holding individuals captured in the interior and sold by Asante or Fante middlemen to traders.  By 1872, years after Goldsmith’s visit, the Gold Coast and its many forts would be in possession of the British.

The Elmina watercolor portrays an actual place, but Goldsmith’s image is also rife with evidence of speculation: the rows of trees manicured and neatly presented, the presence of boats and people tucked in behind bright blue waves. Goldsmith must have, in observing this location, imagined his own legacy as an actor in the suppression of the slave trade, rendering its structures, consequences, and his own role in its aftermath by relying, at least partially, on his mind’s eye.

Goldsmith’s surveillance of the African shore is reflected in the very structure of the building he portrays. Strategically positioned atop a cliff, Elmina Castle allowed those in power to look outward at the sea, as well as down into the fort’s holds of captives. Vision was both a form and symbol of control. Goldsmith’s gaze, though motivated by the political and supposedly humanitarian ambition of suppressing the slave trade, and aimed towards these shores years after cessation of the fort’s official activity, had imperial implications as well – the consequences of an expanded naval presence gradually manifested themselves in the convenient and devastating expansion of colonialism in Africa.

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Slave castles such as Elmina were fundamental to the infrastructure of slavery, but their function was far from static. Louis P. Nelson describes the forts as “products of the British imagination, changing as their intended function changed and changing relative to other institutional architecture,” linking them to evolving systems of surveillance and reform in other parts of the world. Their mythos is apparent in Goldsmith’s watercolors, which are similarly rooted in imagined spaces, evidence of a Western consciousness both reflected by and projected upon the idea of Africa. The works of art fall in line with a tradition of documenting coastal profiles as navigational tools, mechanisms for movement and travel. But their position in an artist’s book marks them as products of a different kind of transportation: creative invention. These images show places, but also act as pathways to them, which any observer of Goldsmith’s drawings follows him down. When we join the ranks of those doing the gazing, our sight, too, becomes subject to the whims of preconception.

If looking is inherently transportive, then evidence of sight often serves as the entry point to a journey. “The importance of the map,” writes Nicholas Mirzoeff, “is not as an object but as a medium of communication,” acting to “[extend] the human sensorium beyond its physical capacities and [integrate] itself with it.” Maps prove their creator’s surveillance and speculation, while promising their viewer the possibility of movement. “A technical prosthesis,” a map is “a place where ocular vision and the ‘mind’s eye’ meet.”

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Like Goldsmith’s drawings, which fuse observation (‘ocular vision’) with imagination (‘the mind’s eye’), Joseph Cooper’s 1875 map of Africa is a projection of his own perspective. Forty years after Goldsmith sailed on the Childers, Cooper published The Dark Continent, Or Slavery and the Slave-trade in Africa, whose frontispiece map takes a different approach to outlining Africa. “AFRICA,” proclaims the map’s title, naming the continent on display, though room has been made to squeeze much of Europe into the frame. In the lower left-hand corner of the page lies the following inscription: “The dark shade indicates those parts where Slavery and the Slave-trade more or less prevail – The uncoloured parts where freedom exists.” The majority of the continent is bathed in the “dark shade,” shadowing the entire, sparse interior. By contrast, much of the coast is lined with labels, and select regions are graced with the neutrality of being “uncoloured,” including a portion of the Western Coast of Africa. Ironically, this is the very region home to the slave castles in Goldsmith’s sketchbooks, one of which – Cape Coast Castle – is marked on Cooper’s map. As a medium of communication, a map makes claims to objectivity, but in equating cartographic precision with the abstract nouns of “freedom” and “slavery” (and the equally abstract shapes on the map), Cooper leaves these terms unquestioned, with no sense that they may be contingent upon perspective.

In the first chapter of his book, Cooper reveals the conceit behind this coloring, introducing his “careful reader” to what they may notice in the pages to come: 

He will not fail to observe that by the exertions and self-sacrifice of enterprising travelers a flood of light had from time to time been shed over many of the dark places of Africa, and that well-intended, long-sustained, and noble efforts had in consequence been made to bring about a better state of things.

It seems that Cooper and his fellow members of the London Society for the Mitigation and Gradual Abolition of Slavery saw their role as such. Once slavery had been suppressed in West Africa and legal enslavement abolished in the United States, the British anti-slavery movement turned its attention to the rest of the African continent, aiming, among other things, for the end of Arab and Portuguese slaving in East Africa. By writing this book, Cooper seems to have seen himself as one of those people shedding light on the dark parts of the continent, or else as someone able to spread the word about the “well-intended, long-sustained, and noble efforts” which had accomplished the same. Yet these sentiments, like the map on display, showcase the ironies of emancipation – only where white people had the most visible impact could a white outline be established once the slave trade was legally removed.

In ‘flooding Africa with light,’ Cooper has projected his ignorance onto the continent (to borrow a phrase from Saidiya Hartman). What we see as a result is a silhouette, a reductive profile of the landmass. But where Goldsmith looked on from the sea, Cooper has adopted the vantage point of the sky, using the contours of the coast to define the canvas of his cultural imagination. Precise but delusional, his approach to emancipation is as illuminating as it is obstructive.