Of ‘native skulls’ and ‘noble caucasians’: phrenology in colonial South Africa

This article traces the origins of racial science in South Africa back to the first half of the nineteenth century. Metropolitan racial theory attracted a substantial following among white settlers in British colonies and the Cape was no exception. Local scientific thinking about race focussed on phrenology, a popular science of character analysis based on the configurations of the brain and skull. But phrenology had differential appeal for British colonial intellectuals according to their broader political affiliations. While humanitarian liberals were critical of new‐fangled theories of cerebral determinism that might contradict their cherished belief in the immediate transformative powers of religion and education, anti‐liberal ideologues, and especially medical men, used the new racial science to buttress their hostile attitudes towards Africans. The Xhosa Wars of the 1830s and 1840s proved a particularly fertile terrain for sowing the seeds of scientific racism. Frontier violence generated both African skulls, the raw empirical materials that fuelled metropolitan racial science, and a hatred of the Xhosa that made the settler population increasingly receptive to theories of the innate inferiority of the African mind. This case study of phrenology in the early nineteenth century Cape Colony therefore explores the intersection of racial science with colonial politics, medicine and frontier violence.