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Eine Lektüre der Reisebeschreibungen von Dorugu und Ham Mukasa

Abstract

Travelogues about other cultures, including accounts of Europe in different centuries, have been told or written about in many societies throughout the world. Recently anthropologists and historians have become aware of these. In contrast to the well-established genre of Lettres persanes they offer a genuine perspective for an interpretation of Europe from the outside. Moreover, travelogues about Europe have heuristic value in understanding a specific hermeneutic situation, namely readings of foreign travelogues and ethnographies about one's own or one's ancestral culture in general, also being an aspect of crucial importance for the study of globalisation in the longue durée.
I take two African travelogues as examples. Ham Mukasa, a literate, English-speaking citizen of Buganda who visited England in 1902 to witness the coronation ceremony of Edward VII, experienced Europe as a spectacle his hosts had staged to impress, among others, guests from the colonies. But Mukasa also expected something miraculous from the outset, using phrases and images from the New Testament which het thought fitted the occasion. The second example, a story told by Dorugu, an illiterate Hausa boy brought to Germany and England by Heinrich Barth in 1856, shows us Europe from below from the perspective of a servant. Both reports are correct as far as the facts are concerned, but the sense expressed is not the sense Europeans had or have of themselves, or of things European. It might be tempting to attribute the impression these reports make on Europeans – the facts are correct, while the sense is missed – to the naivety of these African travellers. Could such a finding be a quality of all transcultural descriptions? At least, this is suggested by three Trobriand readings of Malinowski's professional ethnography.