November 14, 2024 (***RESCHEDULED***)
Dr Katherine Arnold, Lecturer in Environmental History at University of Liverpool (UK)
Title: The Will of Welwitsch: African Botanical Collections and Ownership in the Late Nineteenth Century
Abstract:
Along the Atlantic coast of Namibia and Angola lies the Namib desert. Reported to mean ‘vast place’ and ‘an area where there is nothing’ in Khoekhoegowab, it contains some of the world’s driest regions and has been considered the oldest desert in the world. Amongst the Namib’s characteristic sand dunes, Austrian collector Friedrich Welwitsch became the first European to formally describe what would become one of the most famous plants ‘discovered’ in the nineteenth century - the Welwitschia mirabilis (Tumboa, n’tumbo [Angolan]). Welwitsch was so overwhelmed at first sight of the plant that he ‘could do nothing but kneel down […] and gaze at it, half in fear lest a touch should prove it a figment of the imagination’. The ‘discovery’ of Welwitschia made Welwitsch an overnight celebrity; European and colonial gardens vied for information and specimens from his unique Angolan collections. When he died in 1872, his will – written only two days before his death – threw European botany into chaos.
This paper will discuss the legal battle which ensued as a result of Welwitsch’s will, demonstrating how far European botanists would go to safeguard their power over the production of knowledge about plants and colonial environments. Though the will stated that a full set of his collections be left to the British Museum (Natural History), the expedition had been formally sponsored by the Portuguese government to investigate their colony of Angola. The King of Portugal (upon realizing their scientific value) brought a lawsuit against the British Museum in the English High Court. This became tangled by further extraneous animosities between the British Museum and Kew Gardens, as Sir Joseph Dalton Hooker eventually represented the Portuguese government’s side of the battle against the British Museum. This raises questions about what it meant to ‘own’ a collection, contributing to present debates about ownership in museums. This paper thus offers fascinating insights into what it meant to ‘control’ knowledge and the different actors and institutions who had a stake in that power in the nineteenth century.