#And this from a girl whose people were entirely colonised by the British.

[rahabs]

I looked through the tags on that Black Sails post and yes, that's pretty much what I thought they'd be and also exactly why I stay away from that fandom.

[isayeed-blog]

Masculinity and Indian Fascism

1857, the year of the Sepoy Mutiny, was a watershed period in South Asia. Despite the civilising efforts of the evangelicals and the Utilitarians, the Indians persisted in and insisted on barbarism. The (alleged) sexual violence against “the angel in the house”, the defenceless British woman, around a sexualised and racialised hatred of the dark-skinned Hindus and Muslims. After the Mutiny, some 50 novels were written on the subject in the century. The novels focused on the mutineers' desire for white women for the harem: The harem served to symbolise the lack of masculine restraint among orientals. The “treacherous” massacre at Kanpur, where the well had been stuffed with the mutilated bodies of British women and children despite a promise of safe passage, was a sign of the unmanly character of the natives (Peter Van Der Veer, Imperial Encounters (Delhi: Permanent Black, 2006), p 86 - 87).   

For Flora Annie Steele, author of On the Face of the Waters (1896), the brutal suppression of the Mutiny was “the epic of the British race”. According to The Guardian, Charles Dickens said: “I wish I were commander-in-chief in India ... I should proclaim to them that I considered my holding that appointment by the leave of God, to mean that I should do my utmost to exterminate the race.” 

At the time, the Mutiny was viewed as a satanic uprising against the forces of justice. Public opinion howled for blood, and it paved the way for hanging prisoners and blowing them away from the mouths of cannons without trial. The earlier Christian view of war as God’s punishment changed to one where war was regarded as rightful action for a just cause.

In short,  divine violence. 

Evangelicals were not inclined to hero-worship or the glorification of war, which they regarded as divine retribution for sin. This opened them to charges of disloyalty during the French revolution. They located their heroes in missionaries like Livingstone, instead of men like Nelson. The latter were objects of nationalist hero-worship by the Victorians. However, the evangelical temper became more bellicose over the course of the nineteenth century. “Like the rest of the British nation, they came to see warfare as a kind of police action, to quell unrest, to prevent injustice (p 85).” Christian heroism came to be celebrated in the Crimean War and the Indian Mutiny.  The latter gave rise to the image of the brave Christian soldier, especially in the person of General Henry Havelock. Havelock, Edwardes, and the two brothers John and Henry Lawrence were all devout evangelical Christians. Havelock attributed British victory to British artillery and “to the blessing of Almighty God on a most righteous cause, the cause of justice, humanity, truth, and good government in India”. 

Even before the Mutiny, the charge of effeminacy was being levelled against Indians - and the most Westernised, and most loyal of them, the “babus”, the  brown, Anglicised gentleman (indeed, in Bengali today, babu is used both for infants and the delicately refined). Thomas Babbington Macaulay wrote in his essay on Warren Hastings (1843): “The physical organisation of the Bengalee is feeble even to effeminacy. He lives in a constant vapour bath. His pursuits are sedentary, his limbs delicate, his movements languid. During many ages he has been trampled upon by men of bolder and more hardy breeds. Courage, independence, veracity, are qualities to which his constitution and his situation are equally unfavourable. His mind bears a singular analogy to his body. It is weak even to helplessness for purposes of manly resistance ....”

Hindus lacked world-ordering, masculine rationality. According to Hegel, Hindus were guided by “feminine fantasies and imagination rather than by masculine reason” (van der Veer, p 95).  Their very subjugation by Muslim tribesmen and then by the British testified to their effeminacy. Ultimately, however, the test of the “real” man came to the question of “honour” - which in British India, meant loyalty to Britain. The pan-Islamic Muslims failed the test, as did all Indians, whose languages, according to Robert Baden-Powell had no equivalent for the word - “izzut” was dismissed by Baden-Powell. “When in India I asked one or two Scouters what word they used for ‘Honour’ in teaching their boys character and they said ‘Izzut’. I asked two or three other men what was the Hindustani for ‘Honour’ and they could only suggest ‘Izzut’. But Izzut does not convey the idea of Honour (p 94).” When Baden-Powell remained intransigent on the matter, in 1937 the Boy Scout Association of India broke with the mother organisation. The writer observes: “That ‘Izzut’ was the central concept in Indian masculinity could not have escaped him in the years he had been an officer in the colonial army in India. This denial of the masculinity of the colonised was a central theme in British colonialism. Indians were seen as effeminate and weak in character.” Notions of British masculinity went hand in hand with the feminising of the colonised. However, muscular Christianity echoed in the rise of muscular Hinduism. 

The firestorm of protest around the Age of Consent Act revealed the threatened masculinity of the Indian psyche. In 1891, the age of consent was raised from 10 to 12 years for Indian girls (and from 13 to 16 by the Criminal Law Amendment of 1885 for British girls). No other piece of colonial legislation in the nineteenth century so roused public opinion as this law. It was a dead letter, thanks to the strenuous opposition of the antireformists, who argued that it was an interference with Hindu religion and custom. “The law’s real effect was a reassertion of Hindu patriarchal control over the domestic sphere as a nationalist cause (p 96).” The reformists were accused of being Westernised. 

The British regarded premature sexual intercourse as a sign of effeminacy. It was held to lead to masturbation and diabetes, among other things: A guiding notion behind the law was an eugenic one, namely, to improve the Indian race. The opponents described and decried the law as a deliberate British attempt to emasculate Hindu men. What riled them even more was the marital rape clause, which argued that sexual intercourse without the wife’s consent was rape - especially when the law in Britain gave the husband sexual access to the wife, always. Even reformist nationalists regarded this as an attack on the honour of the Indian man.  

That there was a striking difference in discussion and debate about the twin laws in the metropole and the colony is due to the secure self-perception of the British regarding their masculinity and the precarious self-consciousness of Indians in this regard: the latter, reeling from accusations of femininity, were resolute to at least stay master in their own house. 

Bankim Chandra Chatterjea asked and answered thus: “Why are Bengalis not courageous? The reason is simple: the physical is father to the moral man (1874).” The charge of effeminacy had been particularly galling for the Bengali elite, who sought redress in martial arts and physical culture. “It is paradoxical that both the colonosing British and the colonised Bengalis saw ‘Westernisation’ as a main cause for this emasculation (p 98).”

Most of the educational institutions were in the hands of Christian missionaries, whose aim was not the strengthening of the Hindu race, but its proselytisation. In response, Hindus, Mulsims and Sikhs initiated their own educational institutions, within an Anglicised curriculum. A similar trajectory of physical activity marked both the metropole and the colony. Football and cricket were eagerly taken up. “Cricket was a quintessentially masculine activity and expressed the codes that were expected to govern all masculine behaviour: sportsmanship, a sense of fair play, through control over the expression of strong sentiments by players on the field, subordination of personal sentiments and interests to those of the side, unquestioned loyalty to the team (Arjun Appadurai, quoted by van der Veer).”

Nationalist masculinity required the morphing of martial ascetics into fervent sportsmen. Traditionally, ascetics were mercenaries as well as traders and moneylenders. Prior to British colonial expansion in the second half of the nineteenth century, they dominated trade and money-lending in North India. The Fakir-Sannyasi Rebellion (circa 1770 - 1780)  saw the end, under the Pax Britannica, of the world of the migrant ascetic trader-soldiers who serviced a network of pilgrimage-cum-trading centres.  The advent of roads and railways transformed trade. In the subsequent half-century, the militant asceticism was laicised into martial arts and wrestling. 

Lay wrestlers follow in the religious footsteps of the fighting ascetics. For instance, their mutual devotion to Hanuman, the monkey-god, is based on a connection between divine power (shakti) and physical strength (bal). Hanuman’s divine power stems from his devotion to the god Rama and his wife Sita. Shakti is feminine power that men can acquire through celibacy. The disciplines of wrestling and celibacy lead to self-control and the realisation of inward feminine power, enabling them to attain another female capacity: selfless devotion.  “With Hanuman, this is a selfless devotion to the divine couple, but this devotion can, for fighting ascetics and wrestlers, be transformed through nationalist discourse into a selfless devotion to the cause of the nation (p 100).” 

The British preoccupation with national degeneration has its equivalent in India. However, here the preoccupation is focused on the body, bodily fluids and food intake. The degeneration of the Indian people, according to the wrestlers, is due entirely to Westernisation and the decline of India’s ancient martial arts. 

“It is especially the articulation of the notions of gender and sexuality with notions of race that strike me as typical of this period,” writes the author. “In the early twentieth century the articulation of physicality and morality under the aegis of nationalism develops into fascist forms of xenophobia both in Europe and India (p 101).”

Unlike in Britain, where masculine notions were interwoven with empire and the German threat, Hindu discourse on masculinity focused on the Muslim threat to Mother India (“the rape of the motherland”). Muslims were perceived as excessively masculine and militant. Being able to have four wives seemed extravagantly pleasurable and aroused masculine envy. The threat of “Muslim lust” to Hindu women appeared magnified during the age-of-consent controversy when  Hindu masculinity felt threatened. 

Race came to play a major part in this “paranoid nationalism”. From Europeans, Hindu ideologues took up the idea of the “Aryan race”, “to racialise the Hindu community and make the religious difference between them and Muslims into an immutable, racial one (p 101)”.  The militant Aryans were extremely masculine and appealed to the need for national regeneration. The idea of a common Hindu race would serve to unify a disparate society. “As in Germany and Britain we find in India in the 1920s the combination of an ideal masculinity and a racial superiority connected to a heightened nationalism and an extreme fear of a minority within the population.” 

The most disturbing culmination of the focus on youth, masculinity and militant nationalism was the founding of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), the National Volunteers Corps,  in 1925 by K. B. Hedgewar. “This is Hindu India’s most violent youth organisation with an ultra-nationalist and strongly anti-Muslim message (p 102).” Nathuram Godse, Mahatma Gandhi’s murderer, was a former RSS member. In his statement to the court in 1948, Godse explicitly stated his fear that Gandhi’s ideas “would ultimately result in the emasculation of the Hindu community”. On several occasions the RSS was banned by the Indian government, led by the Congress Party, for its alleged role in communal violence.

Like the wrestlers and fighting ascetics, the RSS also espouses a religious emphasis on masculine celibacy and Hanuman as the paradigm of selfless devotion and physical strength. However, unlike the former, the RSS is a centralised organisation with an overt political purpose, the remaking of multicultural India into Hindu India.  

Hedgewar’s influence was the writings of the Hindu nationalist ideologue Vinayak Damodar Savarkar (aka Vir - great hero). He coined the term Hindutva in his book, written in prison, called Hindutva: Who Is A Hindu? (1923). Today, Hindutva is a major nationalist ideology.

Savarkar was implicated in the murder of Gandhi, but he was acquitted in his subsequent trial because of insufficient evidence. It is not surprising that Savarkar was strongly attracted to European fascism and that he admired Hitler.

The battle against Muslims displaced the battle against the British - and long before the departure of the latter. “The myth that Hindus lost their masculinity “under foreign occupation” first by Muslims and later by the British underlies much of Hindu nationalist discourse (p 104).” The excessive Other are two-fold: the hedonistic Westerner and the lustful, wily and hedonistic Muslim. 

“They are fantasies produced by a lack of self-esteem.” 

The Economist article Orange evolution: Narendra Modi and the struggle for India’s soul, with the suggestive subtitle How India’s prime minister uses Hindu nationalism, notes that in return for throwing its full weight behind Narendra Modi’s electoral campaign, Modi has inserted RSS men, or like-minded ones, into every part of Indian politics. The accompanying chart shows the level of infiltration as of February 2019: the president (Ram Nath Kovind), vice-president (Venkaiah Naidu), prime minister (Narendra Modi), speaker of lower house (Sumitra Mahajan), cabinet (12 of 25), other ministers (11 of 49), state governors (15 of 33), state chief ministers (8 of 31). “But RSS influence also extends to university deans, heads of research institutes, members of the board of state-owned firms and banks (including the central bank) and, say critics, ostensibly politics-proof promotions in the police, army and courts.”

[titoslondon-blog]

New Post has been published on Titos London

#Blog New Post has been published on http://www.titoslondon.co.uk/connecting-the-dots-between-race-politics-fashion-and-emotions/

Connecting the dots between race, politics, fashion and emotions

I read an editorial piece by one of my favourite writers Lauren Sherman in The Business of Fashion couple of days ago—a succinct round-up of the recently concluded New York Fashion Week titled “New York Fashion Week’s Got the Blues”. She states that “there are few designers showing here who have a sense of what they stand for or why they need the platform of fashion week. It doesn’t have to be that way.” No, it doesn’t, indeed.

If fashion designers are struggling to focus on what they stand for, I say, look no further than last week’s epochal event at the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery —the unveiling of the official portraits of former US President, Barack Obama, by Kehinde Wiley and First Lady Michelle Obama, by Amy Sherald—that reignited our collective dialogue on race, class, power, politics, and what this reinvention of classical portraiture tells us about our contemporary world, including the world of fashion (read about the Smithsonian exhibition here).

Baltimore-based artist Amy Sherald’s portrait of the first lady, wearing a sweeping Mondrian-like dress inspired by a gown designed by Michelle Smith’s spring 2017 Milly collection, had a poignant role to play. Smith told Washington Post that that season, she was inspired by a “desire for equality, equality in human rights, racial equality, LGBTQ equality,” she says. One of the recurring elements in the collection were various forms of lacing and ties; the details were meant to suggest a “feeling of being held back. . . that we’re not quite there yet.” Whilst lacing and ties in fashion have played symbolic roles of power and exploitation in varying measures, the couture-like dress made of cotton poplin was the feature that made my mind and heart race. Cotton in American history has been pivotal in the African-American struggle for freedom and equality. This cotton poplin—a no-fuss fabric used by working class folks in America, was as much a symbol for the fight for dignity, as was Khadi, the frugal hand-made, hand-spun cloth from India, eulogised by Gandhi as a symbol of India’s Freedom Movement from British colonisation.

Cloth has been a tool of protest throughout history. And here, I am not talking about just spraying a slogan on a T-shirt. It is also about the production and distribution of raw materials that became tools of exploitation, a symbol of political and social disenfranchisement. Cotton—the farmlands of which became the battlefields of racial conflict in American history, made “cotton picking” the subject of generations of African-American blues and jazz songs—heart-wrenching musical renditions of the injustices done to them especially between 1920s and 1940s. At the height of the Khadi Movement in India, Gandhi beseeched millions of ordinary Indians—weighed down by heavily-taxed clothes from English mills—to burn the factory-made clothes, and instead, take up the spinning wheel to weave their own. Clothes have played such significant roles in the political narrative of entire nations, it is important to revisit them to remind ourselves that beyond the glare of hi-voltage fashion shows, clothes tell stories of displacement, cultural alienation, appropriation and financial exploitation.

At the Smithsonian unveiling, the significance of this particular moment was not lost to Obama—a black woman in a couture-like dress in a museum, run by, and filled with, white people on its walls for aeons. “I’m thinking about young people, particularly…girls of colour who will come to this place and they will look up and they will see an image of someone who looks like them on the wall,” she said.

Like works that adorn walls in museums, on our bodies are canvases of our inner toils and tribulations. “What if clothes were not simply reflective of personality, indicative of our banal preference for grey over green, but more deeply imprinted with the ways that human beings have lived: a material record of our experiences and an expression of our ambition?” asks the prolific lecturer Shahidha Bari in her piece “What do clothes say?”. It’s time we all asked ourselves the same question.

Former president Barack Obama’s 7×5 feet portrait was painted by Kehinde Wiley, whose extraordinary oeuvre is painting ordinary black men from the streets, but in the style that mimics Western classical artists. In a Time magazine editorial, writer Maya Rhodan describes the portrait and the setting against which the beloved president is ensconced:

“Wiley stripped away the trappings of office in order to depict the former President’s life journey. African blue lilies are a nod to Obama’s father’s home country of Kenya. Chrysanthemums are the official flower of the city of Chicago, where Obama met his wife Michelle and started both his family and political career. Pikake, or Arabian jasmine, thrives in Hawaii, where the President spent much of his youth. These botanicals are a challenge to viewers to grapple with the improbability of Obama’s rise. The way the president appears to lean toward the viewer, his collar unbuttoned, exudes a level of openness not seen in some of the other portraits, says Taína Caragol, who curated the Wiley commission for the Portrait Gallery. It’s “indicative of the values of his presidency,” she says, “And the notion of a democracy that works from the bottom up instead of from the top down.”

Kehinde Wiley’s penchant for subtext is extraordinary. And as bold and bright his paintings are, his artistic reflections are nuanced and inquisitorial.

In 2012, Sean Kelly Gallery opened an extraordinary exhibition: “An Economy of Grace” by Wiley who collaborated with Ricardo Tisci, creative director of Givenchy at the time (see the exhibition here). Wiley, who usually focused on black African-American men in contemporary wear, but painted them in Baroque, Rococo or other neoclassical western art styles, focused solely on women this time. African-American women. Tisci and he chose paintings from the Louvre (Paris)—poses based on historical portraits of society women by Jacques-Louis David, Thomas Gainsborough and John Singer Sargent, among others. They served as inspiration for a series of portraits of Africa-American women in couture gowns. Wiley asked Tisci to make custom dresses for the sittings. “Couture is a symbol of wealth and excess, and that’s what art has been” said Wiley in a 2012 interview with WSJ Magazine. “I think one of the things that must happen in the work is for it to become class conscious.” ‘Grace’ portrayed through the gentrified pose, and stance, the opulence of couture dresses—makes one thing as stark as midday sun—the gap of black women in the history of art.

Wiley questions this notion of grace through clothes—is “grace” merely a commodity that can be bought or painted? Like royalty, power, nobility—can couture ‘manufacture’ a persona? And this is why fashion is important. It is the visual trajectory of our deeper-seated needs and desires as human beings.

At the Smithsonian unveiling of the president’s portrait, Wiley, overwhelmed to be the first African-American artist to paint the first African-American, president, said, “This is about who we decide to celebrate, it is our humanity, this is our ability to say I matter, I was here”. This momentous occasion allowed him to go beneath the clothes and touch the skin of the wearer. Fashion designers should try that too.

The post Connecting the dots between race, politics, fashion and emotions appeared first on VOGUE India.

[gododdinman-blog]

Sir John Kirk and the Resonance of Slavery

Slavery as a tangible fact is not something one would particularly associate with Angus, more than any other part of the British Isles, though the county of course had its connections with that trade. Interesting and little-known material about the decent and doubtless God-fearing lairds who quietly owned slaves far away, back in the day, can be unearthed through web sites like Legacies of British Slave Ownership, and though it may seem churlish to name and shame those associated with that business after all these years (people who in themselves doubtless led complex and rich lives), it can still be instructive as an eye-opener.

  Among the interesting data is that concerning former slave owners who claimed compensation from the British government when slavery in the British Empire was abolished and they were financially disadvantaged. A cursory search through the records reveals the follows Angus folk as former slave owners:  David Langlands of Balkemmock, Tealing, Alexander Erskine of Balhall, David Lyon of Balintore Castle, George Ogilvie of Langley Park, James Alexander Pierson of The Guynd, Thomas Renny Strachan of Seaton House, St Vigeans,  Mary Russell of Bellevue Cottage, David McEwan and James Gray of Dundee, the 7th Earl of Airlie.

There is more information surrounding the Cruickshank family, who lived at Keithock House, Stracathro House and Langley Park.  Alexander Cruickshank of Keithock was born in 1800 and married his cousin, Mary Cruickshank of Langley Park (formerly Egilsjohn or - colloquially - Edzell's John).  In the middle of the 19th century Alexander unsuccessfully attempted to claim compensation for the loss of slaves owned on the Langley Park estate on the island of St Vincent.  The whole family's fortunes were inextricably linked with slavery.  Patrick jointly owned the estates of Richmond, Greenhill and Mirton in St Vincent with his brother James who was compensated £23,000 by the government following slavery abolition in 1833. The St Vincent estates had more than 800 slaves.  Originally from Wartle in Aberdeenshire, the money to buy the Egilsjohn estate in Angus came from a fortune made in the Caribbean; its name was even changed to commemorate the St Vincent estate name of Langley.  The Angus estates of Stracathro and Keithock followed.  But we are told (Baronage of Angus and Mearns, p. 64) that Alexander Cruickshank's 'affairs eventually got embarrassed - and he returned to Demerara, where he shortly afterwards made his demise, leaving a son and daughter.'

  Emigration to the colonies was by no means a passport of quick riches to those who went there with slender means to begin with.  John Landlands, son of a tenant farmer from Haughs of Finavon, went to Jamaica in 1749 and found that his promised employment did not exist, though he was helped to secure another post at the vividly named Treadways Maggoty estate.  In time he acquired his own coffee plantation, complete with valuable slaves.  On his death he provided for his mistress/housekeeper and his natural son born to her, but the estate of Roseberry was burdened by debt and had to be disposed of by his cousin back home in Angus.

  There was less known commercial speculation in the slave trade in Angus ports than in other places, though there are records held in Montrose Museum of a business deal from 1751 concerning the ship Potomack, whose master Thomas Gibson struck a deal with merchants Thomas Douglas and Co to travel with cargo to Holland and thence to west Africa and there pick up slaves for the North American market. Researchers reckon that some 31 Montrose vessels were engaged in human slave trafficking, though records survive for only four ships (the other three being the Success, the Delight, and the St George).

  One Montrose family of the 18th century who went on to great things financially were the Coutts family, ancestors of the private banking dynasty which migrated to London later and dealt with the fortunes of royals and the nobility.  John Coutts (born 1643) was Lord Provost of the Angus burgh five times between 1677 and 1688 (having been made a councillor in 1661).  the family were involved in the Virginia tobacco trade and doubtless incidentally involved to some extent in slave ownership.  John's third son Thomas went to London and was one of the promoters of the 'Company of Scotland, trading to Africa and the Indies', better known as the company who initiated the doomed Darien Scheme.  A grandson of the first John Coutts was another John (son of Patrick), among those in the family who left Montrose for business opportunities further south.

John Kirk - Doctor! Botanist! Knight! Our Man in Zanzibar!

  There were few places as strange to the intrepid foreigner in the mid 19th century as Zanzibar, even in an age when the whole continent of Africa held a jewel-like fascination for Europeans.  The island was just off the continental coast but was truly a place apart.  It had in effect been colonised and annexed before any Western interest in the place by an Arab dynasty from the north. The ruler of Oman, Seyyid Said, made the African island his capital in 1838 and brilliantly maintained his power through diplomacy with the British East India Company and a cannily managed business acumen.  The Arab management of African slaves more than matched the newer European-sponsored slave trade operating in west Africa.  Throughout Seyyid Said's rule it continued unabated and Zanzibar was its unashamed fulcrum, dispatching human cargo and attendant misery across the Indian Ocean.  Alastair Hazell states that the mid-19th century population of the island was possibly 100,000, or which around half were slaves.  Said had personally transformed his new centre of operations 'from a mere backwater, a slave market with a fort, to the largest and most prosperous trading city of the western Indian Ocean'.

  Gold, ivory and gum copal were other products which flowed out of the continent via the island, but it was the process of the oldest institution on Zanzibar, the slave market outside the Customs House, which was the most outstanding element of that market place to outsiders; here described by the English traveller Sir Richard Burton.  It was a place, he said:

where millions of dollars annually change hands under the foulest of sheds, a long, low mat-roof, supported by two dozen tree-stems... It is conspicuous as the centre of circulation, the heart from and to which twin streams of blacks are ever ebbing and flowing, whilst the beach and waters opposite it are crowded with shore boats.

  The slave market was in the centre of town and here every year many thousands of bagham, untrained slaves, were tethered and publicly auctioned.  In the mid-1850s, Hazell tells us, able-bodied young men could be bought for $4-$12 - 'about the prince of a donkey'.  Girls and women were sold for sex, passed on many times  via different owner/abusers.  A premium was paid for 'exotics' from India or fair haired unfortunates from as far afield as the Caucasus.

                 The Boy from Barry

Step up John Kirk.  The latest biographer of John Kirk - Alastair Hazell - makes the fundamental mistake of stating that Kirk was born in Barry, in Fife!  This is a shame because his book, The Last Slave Market, is a well-researched account of this important figure who did much personally to end the intolerable anomaly of Zanzibar's slaving in a time when many cynically turned a blind eye to it. John was the third of his name in succession, following his grandfather (a baker) and father, who was born in St Andrews in 1795 (which perhaps explains Hazell's error).  The Rev. Kirk was appointed minister of Barry in June 1824 and transferred to nearby Arbirlot in 1837.  In the religious turmoil of the times he joined the Free Church and was minister of the Free Church in Barry from 1843 until his death in 1858.  The minister was 'a man of cultivated mind, of a deportment becoming his high calling, and of a conversation that savoured of the things of Christ'.  His wife was Christian Guthrie, daughter of the Rev. Alexander Carnegie, minister of Inverkeilor.

John Kirk as a young doctor.

  The youngest  John was he second of four children, born  19 December 1832  and must have inherited much of his iron-clad morality from his parents. The only other sibling who seems to have attained any prominence was his elder brother, Alexander Carnegie Kirk, born in 1830.  He became a noted naval engineer, but unlike John did not take part in any kind of public life, dying in Glasgow in 1892.

The explorer's eldest brother.

Early Career and Into Africa

  Kirk qualified as a doctor and went on to serve in the Crimea War in 1855.  (His interest in botany was  evident in Edinburgh, where he studied in the faculty of arts at first before switching to medicine.)  Learning Turkish, he travelled widely in the Middle East, mainly pursuing botanical interests. His most significant appointment was that of a naturalist accompanying the famous David Livingstone on an expedition to east Africa in 1858.  This second expedition of Livingstone's, exploring the Zambesi region, did not go entirely smoothly.  Livingstone was no great communicator and preferred either his own company or that of native Africans.  His brother Charles was also part of the party and was a more petty character than David, arguing with colleagues and dismissing some of them.  Kirk generally got on tolerably well with Livingstone - both were doctors and of course Scots - and also accepted his plans and decisions even when these looked ill-judged and even foolhardy.  But Livingstone, driven by instinct and his own demons, was at times looked upon as a madman by his younger colleague.  On 18 April 1874 he was one of the pall-bearers who carried Livingstone's coffin into a funeral ceremony in Westminster Abbey.  (This was despite the fact that Livingstone's chief mythologiser, Henry Morton Stanley, tried his damnedest to blacken's Kirk's name on the false basis that the doctor had not done all he could to assist the great man in his last expedition.)

  John Kirk returned to Britain in 1863, but three years later he was back in a different part of Africa, appointed as a medical officer in Zanzibar.  He soon became Assistant Consul and then Resident.  He had been appointed Consul in 1873, succeeding Henry Adrian Churchill, who had been actively working towards the abolition of the slave market on the island.  Churchill's health broke down to such an extent that Kirk advised him to return to the U.K. in 1870.

  The final defeat of the slave trade in the island was accomplished by Kirk's astonishing guile and nerve. While the years in which he served primarily as a doctor in the consulate were quiet and he took no active part in public life or against slavery, there was one incident which marked him out as a risk taker.  This was in 1866 when he joined in the successful attempt to smuggle the sultan's sister out of the territory.  Seyidda Salme had become pregnant by a German and was at risk of death if she had remained in Zanzibar.  For much of the time, Kirk pursued his own interests in Africa, collecting information about botany, trade, slavery, in an even handed and non-judgemental fashion.  More of a pragmatist than the strange visionary Livinstone, he was caught between the rock and hard place of the British government and the East India Company, which often had differing ideas about slavery and much else.  In 1873 he was put in an invidious position of receiving two contradictory instructions from London.  The first ordered him in no uncertain terms to give the Sultan the ultimatum that he should close the slave market and cease all trade in slaves, or else the British government would blockade the island.  The second order warned Kirk that no blockade was to be enforced, for fear that it would drive the territory to crave the protection of the French.  Kirk only showed the first communication to the Sultan, with the result that Barghash caved in within two weeks and the slave market was closed forever.

  Despite the best efforts of Kirk and his successors, slavery actually surreptitiously survived the closure of Zanzibar's public slave market. Special Commissioner Donald Mackenzie visited the island and its neighbour Pemba in the last decade of the 19th century and found that slavery was still flourishing in the agricultural estates:

In Zanzibar a good many people had been telling me how happy and

contented the Slaves were in the hands of the Arabs; in fact, they would

not desire their freedom. At Chaki Chaki I walked into a tumble-down

old prison. Here I found a number of prisoners, male and female,

heavily chained and fettered. I thought surely these men and women

must be dreadful criminals, or murderers, or they must have committed

similar crimes and are now awaiting their doom. I inquired of them all

why they were there. The only real criminal was one who had stolen a

little rice from his master. All the others I found were wearing those

ponderous chains and fetters because they had attempted to run away

from their cruel masters and gain their freedom— a very eloquent commentary on the happiness of the Slaves!

The British Consulate, Zanzibar.

Kirk's Later Years and Legacy

Kirk returned to Britain finally in 1886, settling in Kent. His awards included the K.C.M.G., G.C.M.G., K.C.B., plus the Patron's Gold Medal of the Royal Geographical Society. The welfare of Africa still concerned him and in 1889-90 he attended the Brussels Africa Conference as British Plenipotentiary.    In later years John Kirk grew progressively blind but he maintained his interest in the natural world. He died at the age of 89 and was buried in St Nicholas's Churchyard in Sevenoaks.  Among the tributes paid to him was one by Frederick Lugard, Governor General of Nigeria:  'For Kirk I had a deep affection which I know was reciprocated.  He was to me the ideal of a wise and sympathetic administrator on whom I endeavoured to model my own actions and to whose inexhaustible fund of knowledge I constantly appealed.'

  Substantial records survive concerning Kirk, including the journals he kept on the expedition with Livingstone,  Apart from that there are his contributions and discoveries in zoology, biology, a substantial corpus of photographs(over 250).  He maintained close connection with Kew Gardens until his death. The Kirk Papers have been secured for the future in the National Library of Scotland.  As far as I know, there is no memorial to Sir John Kirk at Barry, but if not,  there definitely should be.

Sultan of Zanzibar, Sayyid Sir Barghash bin Sa'id (ruled 1870-1888).

Selected Sources

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Kirk_(explorer)

John Langlands: An Aberlemno Slave Owner

C. F. H., 'Obituary:  'Sir John Kirk,' Transactions of the Royal Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygeine, volume 15, issue 5-6 (15 December 1921), p. 202.

Hazell, Alastair, The Last Slave Market:  Dr John Kirk and the Struggle to End the African Slave Trade (London, 2011).

Low, James L., Notes On The Coutts Family (Montrose, 1892).

MacGregor Peter, David, The Baronage of Angus and Mearns (Edinburgh, 1856).

Mackenzie, Donald, A Report on Slavery and the Slave Trade in Zanzibar, Pemba, and the Mainland Protectorates of East Africa (London, 1895).

McBain, J. M., Eminent Arbroathians (Arbroath, 1897).

Scott, Hew, Fasti Ecclesiae Scoticanae (volume 5, new edition, Edinburgh, 1925).

Wild, H., 'Sir John Kirk,' Kirkia, volume 1 (1960-61), pp. 5-10.