PORTRAITS OF AKAN AND CAMEROONIAN GRASSFIELD KINGS AND CHIEFS

Portraits of Akan and Cameroonian
Grassfield Kings and Chiefs in
the Basel Mission Archive
PAUL JENKINS, FORMER ARCHIVIST, BASEL MISSION;
LECTURER IN AFRICAN HISTORY, UNIVERSITY OF BASEL
Introduction
n 1990 and 1994, David Henige published two early interpretative essays about pho-
tographs in the Basel Mission archive.1 His quick acceptance of these papers had a use-
ful impact for us in Basel. At that time work with photographs as sources for African
history was still very new, and few people realized that mission archives would have
much to contribute. In Basel we were looking for finance for a first effort to open to public
access a body of photographs whose size, quality, and chronological depth were surpris-
ing us. Christraud Geary had already given the collection prominence by including Basel
Mission materials in her 1988 Washington, D.C. exhibition on German colonial photogra-
phy at the court of King Njoya.2 With the two essays published by David Henige, we had
real gravitas when we approached potential sources of support. Now, two decades later, as a
direct result of the grants which were secured for work with the Basel Mission picture archive
from that time, almost 30,000 catalogued images from this collection are accessible online.
They are part of the 50,000 images from seven different European and American mission ar-
chives on offer in the International Mission Photography Archive (IMPA), one of the digital
archive collections run by the University of Southern California. Of these, roughly half are
photographs taken in Africa.3
With these developments in mind, this essay applies the study of photographs to a his-
torical analysis which is not primarily about the history of photography, but about a theme
in cultural and social history in two regions of West Africa. The focus is on the way portraits

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