The Many Uses of Forgeries: The Case of Douville's Voyage au Congo

Abstract

A forged travel account reminds me of a raffia palm in central Africa, because there is a use for every part of such a palm: the wine (sap), the nuts (edible), the raffia (for textiles), the other leaves (for roofcovering), the branches (for furniture), its pith (for making various articles), and lastly the grubs inside the pith (also edible). Nothing is wasted. In the same way a forged travel account can be deconstructed until all its parts down to the very last sentence or proper name can be used as evidence for one or another kind of history. The considerable interest fraudulent travel accounts can have for the historian of Africa is usually far underrated because once they are exposed as forgeries they tend to be summarily dismissed and henceforth to be avoided like the plague. At most, it is conceded that sometimes part of a forged account rests on the author's observations and experiences at the time and in the place where his (the known forgers seem to have been all male) narrative placed them and may therefore actually be genuine.The usefulness of forgeries as evidence goes well beyond this, however, and rests on two arguments. First, a narrative forgery is never totally the product of a person's imagination, if only because it strives to achieve the verisimilitude required to be passed off as genuine. A good part of any such forgery must therefore rest on valid observations made by someone, somewhere. If one can discover from where and when such elements stem, they add new evidence to the record about that where and when. Secondly, the very choice of topics and themes; raised in a forgery is historical evidence in its own right, for it tells us much about the expectations of both the social milieu in which the work was written and its intended audience at the time (not always the same social aggregates). To develop and illustrate these points, there may well be no better instance than the notorious book whose unmasking raised a great geographic furor in the earlier nineteenth century—the notorious Douville forgery.