Tanja Hammel’s book on Mary Elizabeth Barber is coming soon and will be open access
Shaping Natural History and Settler Society: Mary Elizabeth Barber and the Nineteenth-Century Cape
The politics and production of history on the birth of archaeology at the Cape (1827–2015)
This chapter analyses the contributions of Thomas Holden Bowker and James Henry Bowker to the early settler endeavours to create archaeological collections and knowledge. It discusses the social history of archaeology, to an entangled history of the micro-politics of knowledge as well as the emerging field of South African Empire Studies, all part of a wider endeavour to rethink South Africa’s past. Since 1835 Thomas Holden Bowker had been concerned with 1820 settlers’ compensation claims for Frontier War losses and had been known in Albany under the cognomen of “Compensation Bowker”. Screen memories are inaccurate reconstructions that obscure what really happened or depict compromises between ‘an unconscious recognition of the importance of an experience and an equally unconscious desire not to recognize the experience at all’. One who sent stone implements from Cape Colony to metropolis was James Henry Bowker. He was mainly interested in Lepidoptera and over the years became probably the leading collector of butterflies in South Africa.
Mary Barber’s Expedition Journal: An Experimental Space to Voice Social Concerns
Thinking with Birds
My first journal article has just been published and allows interested readers to learn more about Mary Elizabeth Barber, the first woman ornithologist in South Africa and her contributions to ornithology. At the same time, I argue, she supported sexual selection as she saw it as a liberating theory for her sex. At the same time, she developed a feminist ornithology and through descriptions and depictions of birds advocated for gender equality.
Thinking with Birds: Mary Elizabeth Barber’s Advocacy for Gender Equality in Ornithology, Kronos: Southern African Histories 41:1 (2015), 85-111.
The Politics of Nature and Science in Southern Africa
I have co-organised an international workshop on ‘The Politics of Nature and Science in African History’ in 2014 (see conference report). My colleague and two senior experts have been editing a forthcoming collected volume that shall most likely be published in June.
Book summary: This book brings together recent and ongoing empirical studies to examine two relational kinds of politics, namely, the politics of nature, i.e. how nature conservation projects are sites on which power relations play out, and the politics of the scientific study of nature. These are discussed in their historical and present contexts, and at specific sites on which particular human-environment relations are forged or contested. This spatio-temporal juxtaposition is lacking in current research on political ecology while the politics of science appears marginal to critical scholarship on social nature. Specifically, the book examines power relations in nature-related activities, demonstrates conditions under which nature and science are politicised, and also accounts for political interests and struggles over nature in its various forms.
The ecological, socio-political and economic dimensions of nature cannot be ignored when dealing with present-day environmental issues. Nature conservation regulations are concerned with the management of flora and fauna as much as with humans. Various chapters in the book pay attention to the ways in which nature, science and politics are interrelated and also co-constitutive of each other. They highlight that power relations are naturalised through science and science-related institutions and projects such as museums, botanical gardens, wetlands, parks and nature reserves.
Editors: Maano Ramutsindela, Professor of Environmental & Geographical Science at the University of Cape Town, South Africa.
Giorgio Miescher, Carl Schlettwein Research Chair of Namibian and Southern African Studies at the Centre for African Studies, University of Basel, Switzerland.
Melanie Boehi, history PhD student at the Basel Graduate School of History and Centre for African Studies Basel, University of Basel, Switzerland.
My chapter is entitled: “Racial Difference in Mary Elizabeth Barber’s Knowledge on Insects”.
Bibliography
Mary Elizabeth Barber has been mentioned in articles and books. Here is a list of references (1904-2015) that is constantly updated. Please share references, if you can:
Encyclopaedia entries
Gutsche. Dr T. 1971. “Mary Elizabeth Barber” in Dictionary of South African Biography Vol II, 26-7.
‘Barber, Mrs. F. W. (née Mary Elizabeth Bowker) (1818-1899) in Gunn, M. & Codd, L.E. 1981. Botanical Exploration of Southern Africa. An illustrated history of early botanical literature on the Cape flora. Biographical accounts of the leading plant collectors and their activities in southern Africa from the days of the East India Company until modern times. A.A. Balkema, Cape Town, pp. 87-88.
Cohen, Alan. “Barber, Mary Elizabeth (1818-1899″ Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004; online edn, May 2010
Harvey, Joyce and Marilyn Ogilvie, eds. “Barber, Mary Elizabeth (Bowker)” in The Biographical Dictionary of Women in Science: Pioneering Lives from Ancient Times to the Mid-Twentieth Century. (London: Taylor & Francis 2000), Volume 1, p. 78.
Strohmeyer, Renate, Lexikon der Naturwissenschaftlerinnen und naturkundigen Frauen Europas. Verlag Harri Deutsch, p. 34.
Short online introductions
South African History
Biodiversity Explorer
Darwin Correspondence Project
English Wikipedia entry
German Wikipedia entry
Articles on her
F. Way-Jones, R. Lubke, F. Gess, Mary Elizabeth Barber (1820[!]-1899), Annals of the Grahamstown Historical Society, 40: 14-21.
Articles with Passages on Barber
Selected articles from the Cape Monthly Magazine (new series 1870-76). Van Riebeeck Society II(9): 159.
Books with chapters on Barber
Hilton-Barber, David (2014). The Saint, the Surgeon and the Unsung Botanist: A tribute to my remarkable ancestors (Footprints Press)
Mitford-Barberton, I. (1970). Chapter 7, Mary Elizabeth Barber, Comdt. Holden Bowker. An 1820 Settler book including unpublished records of the Frontier Wars. (Cape Town, Pretoria, Human & Rousseau), pp. 223-256.
Mitford-Barberton, I. (1934), The Barbers of the Peak: A History of the Barber, Atherstone, and Bowker Families (Oxford: Oxford University Press).
Mitford-Barberton, I. and R. Mitford-Barberton (1952). The Bowkers of Tharfield (Oxford, Oxford University Press).
Mitford-Barberton, I. and White, V. (1968), Some Frontier Families. Biographical Sketches of 100 Eastern Province Families before 1840. Cape Town/Pretoria: Human & Rousseau.
Articles and Books that mention her
Dubow, S. (2006), A Commonwealth of Knowledge: Science, Sensibility, and White South Africa (New York/Oxford: Oxford University Press), pp. 95, 106, 108.
Eve, J. (2003), A Literary Guide to the Eastern Cape. Cape Town: Double Storey Books, p. 185-187.
T. Gianquitto, Botanical Smuts and Hermaphrodites: Lydia Becker, Darwin’s Botany, and Education Reform, Isis 104:2 (2013), p. 263.
Harries, P. (2007), Butterflies & Barbarians: Swiss Missionaries & Systems of Knowledge in South-East Africa (Oxford etc.: James Currey etc.), p. 142.
Lester, A. (2001), Imperial Networks: Creating identities in nineteenth-century South Africa and Britain (London, New York: Routledge), pp. 74-75.
Rall, M. (2002), Petticoat Pioneers: The History of the Pioneer Women who Lived on the Diamond Fields in the Early Years. Kimberley: Kimberley Africana Library, p. 15.
Short introduction
Who was Mary Elizabeth Barber? You may ask yourself. This is a very legitimate question, as she is not well known. She was a British-born, South Africa-based naturalist who as a two-year-old arrived near Grahamstown, on the eastern frontier of the Cape Colony with the 1820 settlers. Reading Irish botanist William Henry Harvey‘s Genera of South African Plants (1838, second edition 1868), she became interested in plants. She corresponded with Harvey and provided him with more than thousand specimens at the Trinity College Dublin Herbarium. This made the curator and later professor acknowledge her in his Flora Capensis (3 vols co-authored with German botanist Otto Wilhelm Sonder, 1859-1865) and his accompanying Thesaurus Capensis (1859-1863). When Harvey’s health deteriorated, she established contact with Joseph Dalton Hooker (1817-1911), director at the Royal Botanic Gardens Kew, London, who named Brachystelma barberae after her in 1867, corresponded with her and supported the publication of some of her articles and forwarded some of her information to Charles Darwin. At the same time, she described and depicted birds for Edgar Leopold Layard, curator of the South African Museum in Cape Town who was working on The Birds of South Africa (1867, new edition 1875-84). She was the only woman he quoted, the first British South African ornithologist and certainly one of only few women at the time working on birds to such an extend. At the same time, Barber was in close contact with entomologist Roland Trimen, curator of the South African Museum. He made her a member of the South African Philosophical Society in 1878 and published her articles in the society’s transactions. Her correspondence became part of Trimen’s and her brother James Henry Bowker’s South-African Butterflies (1887-1889). She was also contributing to archaeology and geology. Her ca. 100 watercolours, sketches and illustrations testify her artistic talent and observational skills and her ca. 50 published poems in The Erythrina Tree and Other Verses (1898, example) show her interest in literature and her versatility. She grew up near Port Alfred, later lived on various farms in the Eastern Cape with her husband, their two sons and daughter. They spent the 1870s in Kimberley witnessing the diamond rush. She returned to the area of Grahamstown, helped her sons ostrich farming and accompanied them to Witwatersrand for the gold rush in 1886. After more than a decade separated from her husband, who was in England, the family joined him and travelled in England and on the Continent, before returning in 1891. Her husband Frederick William Barber died shortly afterwards in Grahamstown (1892). She alternately lived at her sons’ and at her brother James Henry’s in Malvern near Durban and died at her daughter’s in Pietermaritzburg on 4 September 1899. Just to give you a very brief introduction.