Otuo wrestling festival, July 1909

Excerpt from N. W. Thomas’s typed-up notes describing Otuo’s ‘Ukpesoda’ wrestling festival, 12-13 July 1909.
The first phase of the [Re:]Entanglements project has been focusing on researching the archives and collections assembled during Northcote Thomas’s anthropological surveys in Southern Nigeria and Sierra Leone. After the surveys, the collections were dispersed and they are now scattered across many institutions, including the University of Cambridge Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, the Royal Anthropological Institute, the British Library Sound Archive, the UK National Archives, and National Museum, Lagos. One of the exciting aspects of this research is to reassemble the disassembled documents, photographs, sound recordings and artefacts relating to a particular event that N. W. Thomas documented.
Here, for example, we bring together photographs, sound recordings and an object that can be associated with an account of a wrestling festival that Thomas attended on 12-13 July 1909 in the North Edo town of Otuo (spelled Otua by Thomas). This written account was found in a bundle of typed up notes from his first tour, perhaps fragments of an early draft of his
Anthropological Report on the Edo-speaking Peoples of Nigeria
.
At Otua I witnessed a wrestling festival called Ukpesoda, said to have been ordered by Osa.
At 8.30 in the morning the road to the market but not the market itself was swept by boys who had not yet joined otu
[an age-set]
; then they plucked leaves from any tree on the road & headed by two boys carrying brooms marched through the town & back to the square.
Uninitiated children sweeping the road to the market before the start of the festival, Otuo. NWT 817b, RAI 400.17082.
In the afternoon a sacrifice was offered to the ground, euelekpa, by four of the king’s company, while the other chiefs looked on. The main share in the ceremony was borne by Eidevri (A) & Omorigie (B). A said: I salute the whole town; now is the time for our feast; B replied: the whole town thanks you.
A said: The king gets more fufu than others. The king replied: I thank you for seeing that it is all right. The fufu was provided by the king & three chiefs.
Distributing sacrificed fufu and meat to the king and chiefs on the first day of the festival, Otuo. NWT 816f, RAI 400.17075.
A & B then washed their hands & stood on either side of the stone of sacrifice. B brought water & put the dish on the ground; A washed his hands over the stone; B brought fufu & handed it to A & then put soup & four pieces of meat in the fufu dish. A put it on the ground close to the stone & they repeated this operation four times, once for each set of fufu. Then A & B stood aside, saying: We have finished, come & eat.
Then small boys lined up some ten yards away, rushed in, seized the fufu & took it away from the square to eat.
On their return A & B began to divide the fufu for the different companies. A cut the fufu horizontally, leaving some in the bottom of the calabash for the chief who provided it & putting the other slices on leaves on the ground. Then he took a knife & cut the fufu on the leaf & B gave to each company. The head took it & summoned the others. The people who are not yet in a company also get a portion, which is handed to the firstcomer after the order is given.
The meat was then cut up; the four chiefs got a piece each & A took the remainder home; it was divided on the following day.
The sacrifice over, the women began to dance & sing for joy; two performed to the song of the others; then all raised their hands & shouted.
Women singing on the first day of the festival, Otuo. NWT 816l, RAI 400.17080.
http://re-entanglements.net/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/Otua_womens_song_July_13_1909_NWT_0169_re-entanglements.net_.mp3
‘Otua women’s song, July 13th 1909’. NWT 169, BL C51/2449.
On the following morning three drummers appeared on the square at 7.30 AM with three kinds of drums called alukpe, ozi & adoka.
Drummers playing on the second day of the festival, Otuo. NWT 817a, RAI 400.17081.
http://re-entanglements.net/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/Otua_drum_NWT_0156_re-entanglements.net_.mp3
Drumming recorded by N. W. Thomas in Otuo, July 1909. NWT 156, BL C51/2268.
As soon as the people collected the wrestling began. Men hopped round the circle as a challenge & the victor hopped around afterwards.
Wrestling scenes during the second day of the festival, Otuo. NWT 818c2, RAI 400.17084; NWT 818c3, RAI 400.17085; NWT 818c4, RAI 400.17086.
Anyone familiar with Chinua Achebe’s
Things Fall Apart
will recall the significance of wrestling in southern Nigerian society. We might imagine the scene in Otuo as being not unlike that evoked by Achebe:
The drummers took up their sticks again and the air shivered and grew tense like a tightened bow … The wrestlers were now almost still in each other’s grip. The muscles on their arms and their thighs and on their backs stood out and twitched. It looked like an equal match. The two judges were already moving forward to separate them when Ikezue, now desperate, went down quickly on one knee in an attempt to fling his man backwards over his head. It was a sad miscalculation. Quick as the lightning of Amadiora, Okafo raised his right leg and swung it over his rival’s head. The crowd burst into a thunderous roar. Okafo was swept off his feet by his supporters and carried home shoulder-high. They sang his praise and the young women clapped their hands.
Since the N. W. Thomas collections are in different physical locations, it is only through digital technology that we can bring them together in one space, reuniting sound, image and object. Bringing together these materials seems simple enough, but actually involves painstaking archival and collections-based research. Each institution has accessioned these materials using its own numbering system, and it has been necessary to reunite them using Thomas’s own original numbering systems, relying on the scratched numbers on the edges of photographic negatives, Thomas’s spoken ident at the beginning of sound tracks, and associating Thomas’s collection numbers with his object catalogues. This is further complicated by the fact that there is no straight-forward documentation of Thomas’s itineraries, recording what he did where, and what he collected, photographed and recorded.
‘Alukpe’ drum collected by N. W. Thomas in Otuo in 1909. If this is not the actual drum in the photographs of the wrestling festival, it is very similar. NWT 2048, MAA Z 13384.


Meeting themselves again. An object-oriented perspective?

Maiden spirit mask, recorded by Northcote Thomas as ‘Isi abogefi’, collected in either Agukwu-Nri or Nibo in present-day Anambra State, Nigeria, in 1910-11. Thomas noted that this spirit (manwu) would dance each dry season at the feast of Anuoye. (MAA Z 13689; Photograph by N. W. Thomas MAA N.78430.)
In an essay, ‘The buzz of displacement’, in the book
The Inbetweenness of Things
(Bloomsbury, 2017),
Sandra Dudley
draws upon the concept of an object-oriented ontology and conducts a thought-experiment to imagine how museum objects themselves might experience senses of displacement and liminality. Dudley considers the perspective of a
carved wooden bee
that once adorned the throne of
King Thibaw
in the
Mandalay Palace
in Burma, which has been caught in the liminal space of the
Pitt Rivers Museum
collection in Oxford since 1889. For the bee, the museum may be regarded as a liminal space where it is isolated from the contexts which originally animated it; the object yearns for reincorporation into that lost social and material world from which it is exiled. On the other hand, however, the museum is a space in which possibilities for incorporation into new social worlds abound as the bee forms relationships with other people and things. Dudley mentions, for example, the intimate relationship formed between the bee and a contemporary wood carver who was inspired by the bee to create a replica.
Ethnographic museum objects may be said to be displaced both spatially and temporally. As we have been
rediscovering the collections
of artefacts that
Northcote Thomas
assembled during his anthropological surveys in Nigeria and Sierra Leone, we have also been experiencing this sense of the objects’ dislocation, but also the possibilities for reconnection in the present. The idea of reconnection and re-entanglement with the ethnographic archive is, of course, at the heart of the
[Re:]Entanglements
project. However, we have been struck especially by the temporal reconnections brought about in our approach to collections-based research in the museum store too – especially through our use of Thomas’s original field photographs.
Shrine vessel, recorded by Northcote Thomas simply as ‘Pot for Olokun’, collected in Benin City in 1909. Such ‘akh olukun’ were made by women from river clay, symbolic of the cycle of life and the worlds of earth and water, human spirit. (MAA Z 12112; Photograph by N. W. Thomas MAA P.29327.)
Thomas did not systematically photograph all the objects he collected prior to dispatching them to what was then the
University of Cambridge Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology
. In fact, only a small percentage of the collection was photographed either in the field or at the Museum at the time. Those photographs of ‘specimens of native manufacture’ that Thomas did take in West Africa are therefore especially valuable, and have been one of the starting points for us as we have been exploring the collections in stores. In most cases, it is only through painstaking archival research and detective work that we have been able to locate these objects today. But how thrilling when one is able to identify such objects and reunite them with their historical photographic portraits!
[Re:]Entanglements team member, Katrina Dring, updating the Museum record of the Olokun shrine vessel, comparing the Northcote Thomas’s field photograph of the pot with the object today. The vessel has evidently been badly damaged at some point in its biography and has been repaired.
From the objects’ point of view, we wonder what the experience of being brought ‘face-to-face’ with themselves in this way must be like? Seeing their younger selves, as it were, from nearly 110 years ago, when they had newly been brought into being through the skills of artists and craftspeople in the areas in which N. W. Thomas was working. The exchange of gazes between historic photograph and object presences other times, places and people, most particularly the very moment in time when, in West Africa, Thomas clicked the shutter on his Videx camera, capturing the reflected light from these objects in the emulsion of his glass plate negatives, which we, in turn, have pored over and digitized, and used in our quest to discover those same objects in the anonymous wooden crates in which they are now housed in Cambridge. The museum affords such possibilities for presencing these temporal and spatial journeys. And this, we hope, will be just the beginning of these journeys and possibilities as we invite others to reconnect with the collections and the histories they are entangled in, both virtually, through the internet, and when we physically travel back to the locations where the objects were made with copies of Thomas’s historical photographs and the photographs we are now taking.
Recreating Thomas’s field photograph of two masks, labelled as ‘Ibonodike’ and ‘Wonodike’, collected in Fugar, in present-day Edo State, in 1909. (MAA Z 12252; Photograph by N. W. Thomas RAI 400.17528.) Thomas collected a large number of masks in Fugar; it seems likely that he commissioned a carver to produce various types of mask typical of the area.


Rediscovering Northcote Thomas’s artefact collections

Detailed documentation photographs of a basket (nkata) collected by Northcote Thomas in Awgbu in present-day Anambra State, Nigeria. Note the various different accession numbers recorded on the label. MAA Z 13945.
Over the coming months, we shall be exploring the artefact collections assembled by
Northcote Thomas
during his anthropological survey work in Nigeria and Sierra Leone between 1909 and 1915. The collection of ‘ethnological specimens’ was very much a part of anthropological fieldwork in the early twentieth century, and part of a broader project of ‘salvaging’ what was perceived to be the last vestiges of ‘primitive society’ before they were made extinct by the incursion of colonial ‘civilization’. Thomas had written about the need for making such collections long before he conducted any fieldwork himself and, in 1909, he echoed his earlier sentiments when justifying his collecting activities to the Colonial Office: ‘I regard the making of these collections as important. … The opportunities which I have may not recur, every year European goods are ousting native products more & more’.
Judging from correspondence with
C. H. Read
and
T. A. Joyce
at the
British Museum
, it appears that Thomas purchased most of the objects he collected at markets or else commissioned them to be made. This is in stark contrast with the looting of antiquities and treasures that accompanied colonial campaigns, such as the notorious
Punitive Expedition
to Benin City in 1897. Thomas initially anticipated that the collections would be acquired by the British Museum. However, Read, who was then Keeper of Ethnological Collections, declined the collections from his 1909-10 tour, partly due to a misunderstanding about funds available, partly because Thomas insisted that the collection be kept together in its entirety, but partly also because many of the objects were indeed made especially for Thomas. As Read wrote, ‘I am by no means sure that I want these modern things made to order as it were’. Today, paradoxically, Thomas’s collecting methods would be considered highly ethical.
During his 1910-11 tour in what was then Awka District, Southern Nigeria, Thomas photographed his collections prior to dispatching them to the Museum of Archaeology & Ethnology in Cambridge. As part of our collections-based research, we are identifying these objects in the museum stores. The numbers correspond to Thomas object numbers 338 to 350. MAA P.31169.
Thomas subsequently offered the collection to the University of Cambridge’s
Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology
. A draft letter by the museum’s curator,
Anatole von Hügel
, to the University’s Antiquarian Committee, which was responsible for the museum, survives in which he recommends acquiring the collection. Von Hügel notes that there are some ‘2500 objects, now lying in forty cases at the Colonial Office’, and ‘Mr Thomas is very anxious that the collection shall be kept together and is prepared to hand it over to our Museum at cost price’. He adds that ‘Mr Thomas procured what he believes to be the last examples of genuine native workmanship in many villages’. The sum of £100 was raised from one of the Museum’s regular patrons,
Professor Anthony Bevan
of Trinity College Cambridge, and the collection was duly acquired.
Draft letter from Anatole von Hugel to the Cambridge University Antiquarian Society, proposing the acquisition of Northcote Thomas collection in 1910. MAA archives.
Having acquired the collection he assembled during his first tour in Edo-speaking areas of Southern Nigeria, Thomas was then given a grant by the Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology ‘for collecting purposes’ during his subsequent tours among Igbo-speaking communities (1910-11, 1912-13), and it appears that Thomas donated the collections he assembled in Sierra Leone (1914-15). Together the ‘Thomas Collection’, as it was known, provided a comprehensive representation of ‘native manufactures’ of Southern Nigeria and Sierra Leone. The size of the collection was such that the gallery in which they were stored at the Museum was assigned as a dedicated ‘African room’.
Documenting and caring for a collection of this scale also presented challenges, especially since a large number of the objects had been damaged in transit from West Africa to Britain. The Museum’s Annual Reports in the years following the initial acquisition often mention the work of ‘cleaning, mending and restoring’ the objects; while Thomas himself assisted in the work of classifying and labelling the collections. Indeed, the work of accessioning, cataloguing and documenting the collection has continued sporadically over the decades. This work was carried out by individuals who went on to become established figures in the study of African Art, including
G. I. Jones
in the late 1940s and Malcolm Mcleod in the early 1970s. In the late 1980s, a project was led by Cambridge students, Roger Blench and Mark Alexander, to re-examine the collections, and today, of course, we are engaging with them again in the
[Re:]Entanglements
project.
[Re:]Entanglements team members (Katrina Dring, George Agbo and Paul Basu) working with the Thomas collections in the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology stores in Cambridge.
Despite this occasional attention, the collections have rarely been seen. Today, only a handful of the objects are on display in the Museum’s permanent galleries. Through the
[Re:]Entanglements
project, for the first time we will be taking photographs of the collections back to the places from which they were collected. Thomas’s documentation of the collections is relatively limited, and we have much to learn about them. We are also interested in how the descendants of those who made or used these objects perceive them today. What craft skills and continuities in design and materials exists in these places now? And what inspiration might these collections provide for contemporary artists and craftspeople in Nigeria, Sierra Leone and beyond? Our intention is to commission new works and to display this newly-commissioned work alongside Thomas’s historical collections in our [Re:]Entanglements exhibition that will be staged in 2020.
A page from the catalogue of Northcote Thomas’s collection from his first tour, 1909-10. Historical museum documentation has a palimpsest-like quality as different people have added notes and queries over the decades. Collections-based research is like archaeological excavation, as one deciphers the layers of knowledge and ordering systems that have accumulated.
Thomas photographed some of the objects he collected ‘in the field’, prior to having them packed in crates and shipped to Britain. Our starting point as we work through the collections is to identify and locate these same objects in the Museum stores, to photograph them in detail, and to enhance the Museum’s catalogue record of each. You can follow our progress by joining the project’s
Facebook Group
, and, indeed, you can make your own discoveries by searching the MAA’s
online catalogue
.


Panoramic photography and photographic excess

Panoramic photograph made by N. W. Thomas using the Kodak No.1 Panoram camera, Nigeria, 1910-13. Print from the University of Cambridge Museum of Archaeology & Anthropology, P.39431.
Northcote Thomas
used a number of different cameras during his four anthropological surveys in West Africa between 1909 and 1915. During his first tour, in Edo-speaking areas of Nigeria, his equipment list included a Hunter & Sands Tropical camera and a Goerz camera. On his three subsequent tours, in Igbo-speaking areas of Nigeria and in Sierra Leone, however, his photographic kit included three cameras: an Adams Videx camera, a Stereoscopic camera, and a Kodak Panoram camera. The majority of Thomas’s photographs were taken on quarter plate glass negatives on the Videx, but it is clear that Thomas experimented with both stereoscopic photography, also using quarter plates, and panoramic shots using the Kodak Panoram, which used 105 format roll film.
Through the
[Re:]Entanglements
project, we have been systematically digitising all of N. W. Thomas’s photographic negatives and prints with our partners at the
Royal Anthropological Institute
and
University of Cambridge Museum of Archaeology & Anthropology
. Until recently, we believed that only Thomas’s quarter plate glass negatives and corresponding prints had survived. However, we were excited to discover quite a number of his panoramic prints in the collections in the Museum of Archaeology & Anthropology. On a recent research visit to the
National Museum in Lagos
, Nigeria, we were also delighted to find a number of these panoramic prints mounted in one of the photograph albums produced during Thomas’s surveys.
Page of panoramic photographs from one of the albums produced during N. W. Thomas’s anthropological surveys in Southern Nigeria. Originally deposited in the Colonial Secretariat in Lagos, the albums are now in the care of the National Museum, Lagos.
The Kodak No.1 Panoram camera, which Thomas used, was manufactured between 1900 and 1926. The camera had a swinging lens, which took 3.5 x 12 inch exposures across a 112 degree arc on 105 film stock. An advertisement of the time asserts that ‘The pictures taken by these instruments have a breadth and beauty not attainable with the ordinary camera. The wide scope of view makes the Panoram excellent for taking landscapes, as it can cover a wide area without the distortion incident to the use of wide angle lenses’. There is an excellent article on the Kodak No.1 Panoram at
Mike Eckman Dot Com
.
Kodak No.1 Panoram camera. The picture on the right shows a close-up of the Panoram’s ‘swing lens’, which turned 120 degrees when the shutter was released.
The more we explore Northcote Thomas’s fieldwork photography, the more we learn how innovative he was for the time. For example, during his 1910-11 tour in what was then Awka District, he experimented with using two cameras simultaneously to photograph a scene from different angles. This technique would, of course, become an important technique in cinematography. (The earliest known example of a two-camera set up in cinema was the 1911 Russian film
Defence of Sevastopol
.) In the example here, we can see that Thomas and his assistants simultaneously photographed what is described as the Ogugu ceremony at
Agulu
, south of Awka, using both the Adams Videx and Kodak Panoram cameras.
Ogugu ceremony, Agulu, Southern Nigeria. Photographed by Northcote Thomas in 1910-11 onto quarter plate glass negative using the Adams Videx camera. Print from the University of Cambridge Museum of Archaeology & Anthropology, P.30566 (NWT 2170).
In the resultant sequences of photographs there is a further intrigue, which speaks of the ‘excess’ of the photographic image, and particularly the
peripheral presences
that creep into the frame without the photographer’s awareness. Of over 7,000 photographs in the archive, there are perhaps only three or four that intentionally show something of the process of Thomas’s anthropological survey work. It is only through this photographic excess that we catch glimpses of the endeavor.
To date, then, the only photographs we have seen in which we glimpse Northcote Thomas
behind
the camera are the reverse shots of the Ogugu ceremony at Agulu taken by one of his assistants on the Kodak Panoram. In the background of the panoramic shot we see Thomas stood behind the tripod mopping his brow together with three of his assistants and items of his kit strewn around. A rare insight into the anthropologist-photographer at work.
Ogugu ceremony, Agulu, Southern Nigeria. ‘Reverse angle’, photographed by one of Thomas’s assistants in 1910-11 using the Kodak Panoram camera. Note Thomas, behind the camera tripod, and assistants caught in the background (see detail). Print from the University of Cambridge Museum of Archaeology & Anthropology, P.39450.

fieldwork assistants
Agulu
National Museum Lagos
panoramic photography


‘Fire Brigade’, Benin City, January 1909

Photography played an important part of N. W. Thomas’s work as Government Anthropologist in Southern Nigeria and Sierra Leone. During the 55 months between 1909 and 1915 that he spent conducting fieldwork, Thomas took approximately 7,000 photographs on quarter plate glass negatives. Although these photographs were made as part of an anthropological survey, today they form a remarkable historical record of the localities in which he worked.
The first surviving photograph from Thomas’s anthropological surveys, made soon after he arrived in Southern Nigeria in January 1909, shows a chain of three men passing pots of water between them to put out a house fire in Benin City. Thomas captions the photograph ‘fire brigade’ in his photographic register. It is one of a sequence of shots of a house fire and its aftermath.
Thomas individually numbered each of his photographs and subsequently categorized them under geographical and thematic headings, such as Topography, Houses, Daily Life, Decorative Art, Technology, Ceremonies and so forth. He also kept a photographic register, in which he – or an assistant – made a brief note about each photograph as they were taken.
Excerpt from the
Report of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, 1912
. This shows a report of the Association’s Committee on Anthropological Photographs, including a catalogue of the photographs from N. W. Thomas’s first tour, classified by location and theme.
Over the course of the
[Re:]Entanglements
project we will be researching this unique photographic archive alongside Thomas’s sound recordings and artefact collections and will regularly post about our discoveries. Please share these posts and add any comments you may have.

Excerpt from theReport of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, 1912. This shows a report of the Association’s Committee on Anthropological Photographs, including a catalogue of the photographs from N. W. Thomas’s first tour, classified by location and theme.


A Government Anthropologist sets sail for Lagos

On this day, January 9th, in 1909, the Government Anthropologist, N. W. Thomas, set sail on the
S. S. Burutu
from Liverpool. Travelling on this
Elder Dempster & Co.
steam ship, he was bound for Lagos and his first experience of anthropological fieldwork in West Africa.
It was a more a matter of chance than design that N. W. Thomas’s became the first Government Anthropologist to be appointed by the British Colonial Office. A few years earlier, in 1905, the Chief Magistrate of the Gambia, A. D. Russell, had proposed distributing a questionnaire to colonial administrators in Britain’s West African territories in order to collect information about the ‘customary laws’ of local populations. It was thought that this information would be useful for those colonial officials who were responsible for ‘administering justice’ in the context of indirect rule. The proposal was adopted and over the following couple of years a large amount of material amassed at the Colonial Office.
Excerpt from one of the reports compiled by colonial officers on West African customs and laws reviewed by N. W. Thomas. These pages are concerned with ‘tribal marks’ in the Central Province of Southern Nigeria. RAI Manuscripts & Archives.
At the same time, the academic discipline of anthropology was fast establishing itself in Britain. The first qualification in the subject was, for example, introduced at Oxford in
1906
, and a first generation of professional anthropologists had been lobbying government for the establishment of an
Imperial Bureau of Anthropology
modelled on that already existing in the USA. In 1908, when the Colonial Office began considering publication of the information about customary laws in West Africa, it was decided that the job of editing the material should be entrusted to an anthropologist. On the recommendation of
E. B. Tylor
, N. W. Thomas was approached to take on this task.
Thomas’s review of the questionnaire material was, however, damning. He reported that the quality of the information gathered was extremely variable, and found fault both in the design of the questionnaire and in the methods used in gathering the data. Such research, he argued, needed to be undertaken by an expert ‘familiar with modern anthropological methods’ rather than by colonial administrators – adding that, if so desired, he would be prepared to take on such a task. Thomas’s report shook the confidence of officials in the Colonial Office, and they took Thomas’s recommendations seriously. Following further consultation with senior anthropologists, including
J. G. Frazer
and
C. H. Read
, Thomas was duly engaged to carry out ‘an investigation of an experimental character into native law, custom, &c.’ in West Africa.
Of the governors of Britain’s West African territories, it was
Sir Walter Egerton
, Governor of the
Colony and Protectorate of Southern Nigeria
, who was most receptive to the idea of supporting the initiative to engage a professional anthropologist. It was thus agreed that the first ‘experimental’ anthropological survey should take place in Southern Nigeria. If the survey proved successful, it was agreed that the initiative would be extended, perhaps to other territories. It was important to note that Thomas was given little direct instruction either from the Colonial Office or colonial government in Southern Nigeria. Rather than focusing narrowly on specific problems or issues, Thomas embarked on a general ethnographic survey, following the guidance set out in the methodological handbook,
Notes and Queries in Anthropolog
y
.
It is likely that Thomas chose Southern Nigeria’s Central Province as the focus of his initial tour due to his acquaintance with
R. E. Dennett
and H. N. Thompson, respectively the Deputy Conservator and Conservator of Forests in Southern Nigeria, who were ordinarily based in Benin City, the provincial headquarters. The companionship of Dennett and Thompson would, no doubt, have eased Thomas’s entry into what were, for him, the unknown worlds of both West Africa and the Colonial Service. Indeed, when his appointment was confirmed, Thomas requested that his departure for Southern Nigeria might be delayed until January 1909, so that he might travel out with Thompson, who had been on leave in England. The passenger list on the S. S. Burutu thus lists both N. W. Thomas and H. N. Thompson among its first class customers.
Passenger List of the S. S. Burutu, departing from Liverpool, 9th January 1909. Highlighted are the names of H. N. Thompson and N. W. Thomas, both bound for Lagos.
Further details about N. W. Thomas’s biography and career can be found in the article ‘
N. W. Thomas and colonial anthropology in British West Africa: reappraising a cautionary tale
’,
Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute
22: 84-107.

Southern Nigeria
Colonial Office
scarification
N. W. Thomas
Notes and Queries on Anthropology
Benin City
S. S. Burutu