A Celebration of Black Science

In this letter, Alexander Gordon Laing, Scottish explorer and colonial lieutenant, details the necessity of gaining geographical knowledge from indigenous travellers such as the Alexandrian Mahamed Misrah or an individual from Yawori (Yauri), an emirate in Nigeria. Here, he introduces Misrah.

Misrah provided detailed information on the Niger river and sub-Saharian Africa.

The manuscript gives us a glimpse into the process of erasure, as Laing himself proclaims how useful the knowledge of indigenous travellers was for foreign colonial explorers, and yet it is Laing who is described in generic accounts as somewhat successfully mapping the source of the Niger river.

According to references in Charles Darwin’s autobiography and correspondence, the formerly enslaved Guyanese man, John Edmonstone, tutored the young Darwin in taxidermy during 1826. In a letter to Susan Darwin in January of that year, he describes his plans to learn bird stuffing ‘from a blackamoor’, and says ‘it has the recommendation of cheapness, if it has nothing else.’ In his autobiography, however, Darwin describes Edmonstone as working ‘excellently’, and as ‘a pleasant and intelligent man.’

Darwin’s taxidermic knowledge was significant to his studies of flora and fauna during his H.M.S. Beagle voyage of 1831, leading to his work on the Galapagos Finches and his collections and specimens. These were crucial to the development and expansion of the theory of evolution.

A Gentleman’s Magazine article from May 1771 states that Williams attended meetings at the Royal Society...

...but was refused as a Fellow because of the colour of his skin.

Williams became a member of Lincoln’s Inn although there is no evidence that he became a practising lawyer. At this time young men of status commonly attended the Inns of Court as a kind of ‘finishing school’.

Details of Williams’s life continue to be debated, demonstrating the frequent difficulty in uncovering biographical details of Black people in the history of Western science, and in history more generally. Edward Long denigrated Williams in his History of Jamaica (1774), using him as part of his argument against the intellectual equality of the Black and white ‘races’. Long’s description of Williams’s education as a social experiment by the Duke of Montagu has recently been suggested to be a rhetorical device by scholar Cara Glatt (2019), but this narrative continues to be purported.

The Royal Society holds a letter describing how Onesimus, an African-born enslaved man in New England, introduced the practice of inoculation in 1716. He had been gifted to Cotton Mather, a Puritan minister in 1706, to whom he described the method.

In 1721, Boston experienced a terrible outbreak of smallpox and Mather, armed with this newly acquired knowledge, was able to trial inoculation in the general population.

Onesimus had undergone inoculation during his childhood in his homeland, where this was a common practice. The method included rubbing the pus of an infected person into a wound on a non-infected person, who would then experience an immune response.

No further information on Onesimus himself is known, except for the fact that he was able to partially buy his freedom through giving money to Mather to purchase another enslaved person.

The story of Onesimus demonstrates how ‘traditional’ knowledge could be obtained and used by European scientists, and contributed to modern scientific knowledge.

The outcry produced by the method however also demonstrates the simultaneous suspicion against traditional methods of healing, even when they had long histories of effective use.

Kwasi Graman (also known as Quassi, Gramman Quacy and Kwasimukamba) was a man originally from the Guinea coast, who was enslaved and forcibly moved to Suriname in the early eighteenth century. A healer and ‘obeah’ man, Kwasi was credited by Carl Linnaeus as discovering the medicinal properties of a plant which became his namesake, Quassia amara.

The Quassia amara plant was made famous by Kwasi for its uses on stomach-related ailments and fevers. Only after thirty years did the healer reveal the source of his medicine to Carl Gustaf Dahlberg, a Swedish soldier, who in turn enlightened Carl Linnaeus. Linnaeus’ publicisation of the plant and its potential led to it becoming a significant export from the Dutch colony.

Kwasi is unusual in his representation in the historical record, being a skilled and entrepreneurially savvy healer and spiritual worker. John Gabriel Stedman described him as essentially tricking the other free Black men and women into buying his charms, leading them to an unfounded sense of confidence in battle which would ultimately be beneficial to the colonial power. Kwasi did lend his assistance to the Dutch in opposing and repressing uprisings by Maroons (groups of escaped enslaved people). The memory of Kwasi amongst the Saramaka Maroon descendants of Suriname is one of a traitor.

While Kwasi’s medicinal knowledge was depicted as exceptional in the records of European commentators, it is likely that it was the result of collaboration and a culture of information sharing among the numerous healers of African and indigenous descent in the 18th century and earlier, who have not been named in the historical record.

One woman, Joanna, is another exception to the largely anonymous record.

She was named and described at length, in John Gabriel Stedman’s work Narrative of a five years expedition against the revolted negroes of Surinam, in Guiana (1806). The two met in Suriname in 1773 when she was aged about 15.

Joanna was born to an African enslaved woman and a Dutchman. Stedman describes her use of African traditional practices to remedy him of multiple diseases and illnesses.

Joanna became the subject of fascination not only for Stedman, but also for abolitionists such as Isaac Knapp, who in 1838 published an edition of Stedman’s work focusing on Joanna.

Both works include purported quotes from Joanna herself. However, Stedman and Knapp had an editorial agenda, which means we should question how far we can actually reconstruct her voice and life from the archive.

In the 19th and early 20th centuries, a pandemic of the fatal disease African trypanosomiasis (sleeping sickness) occurred throughout Tanzania, Sudan, Uganda and the Congo.

The Royal Society dispatched a number of Sleeping Sickness Commissions, which reported between 1903 and 1919, in response to a 1901 epidemic in Uganda. While the names printed on the reports are those of European scientists, the images from an album in our collections shows the central role of indigenous Ugandans, most notably as laboratory assistants.

Ludlow Moody was a distinguished Jamaican physiologist and recipient of the Warneford scholarship, the Warneford Prize, the Todd Prize for Clinical Medicine and the Huxley Prize for physiology. He studied medicine at King’s College London before returning to Jamaica where he was the government bacteriologist between 1920 and 1925, and eventually set up a private practice.

In 1930, the Royal Society’s Tropical Diseases Committee discussed news from the Filariasis Commission in the British West Indies, including the approval of paying for sending a bacteriologist from Jamaica to St. Kitts. It is likely that Moody was the bacteriologist in question as the government bacteriologist for Jamaica at this time A. W. Grace is already mentioned by name in the minutes.

Despite his prestige and previously held government position, the fact that he may not be mentioned by name highlights the erasures and silences so common in these histories.