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The Roving Reader Files category of blog posts is produced by Alison Newby (under the pseudonym The Roving Reader) in collaboration with Hannah Niblett (Collections Access Officer, Ahmed Iqbal Ullah Race Relations Resource Centre). The former provides the text and the latter normally provides the images. The Ahmed Iqbal Ullah Race Relations Resource Centre is an open access University of Manchester facility, and The Roving Reader Files are designed as public engagement materials. The intention is to introduce research skills and terminology to the general user/reader in an entertaining yet informative manner by revealing hidden stories, making unusual connections and sharing insights into using the Centre's collection for research. The post "Massacre of the Missionaries" is part of a series exploring the links between items held by other institutions/collections and the race relations theme/holdings of the Centre. Here, I gained the permission of the archivist of Special Collections at Manchester Metropolitan University to reproduce images of two remarkable Baxter prints held in that archive, allowing me to discuss and contextualise their race-related subject matter. The two prints depict the murder of the missionary Reverend J Williams by indigenous people in the Pacific region in 1839. This caused an outcry in the western Christian world, and Williams' friend George Baxter used his skills in colour print production to present his own impressions of how the sad events might have unfolded. In doing so, he set the tone for innumerable later visual and media representations of so-called 'native savagery' which continue to influence our unconscious inherited attitudes to other cultures and peoples to this day. Other blog posts in this series are: "Day in, Day out: Reminiscence work in Monsall" ; "The Devil Man Springs to Life" ; "Tennyson Makiwane comes to London - but how?" ; "Meeting Daisy Makiwane..." |
