5. Science, Numbers and Colonialism in the African Great Lakes, 1820–1910

Society in the Great Lakes consisted of a complex web of polycentric cultural, political, and economic systems. European invaders heavily relied on Cartesian mappings to achieve their primary goals of expropriating economic resources, establishing political dominance, and claiming cultural superiority. Though colonial scientists constantly needed Great Lakes people for information and supplies, they had little regard for Great Lakes society. The numbers they generated originally omitted Great Lakes people. Later on, they applied mapping techniques to human bodies to legitimize exploitation and violence. Phrenology is now often dismissed as “pseudoscience”. But what is science? As recently as 2016, the American Statistical Association warned that statistical significance tests are widely misused across scientific disciplines. Colonial data acquisition caused brutal violence. Though colonial scientists were frequently embedded in military operations, structural features that made science complicit ran much deeper and included recruitment and training. Earlier maps reveal militaristic origins during violent episodes in Europe. From the mid-eighteenth century, military commanders had demanded large systematic land surveys and detailed topographic maps to control people within Europe.