'Yoking West Africa to the chariot of progress': The Gold Coast, Nigeria, and Sierra Leone at the British Empire Exhibition, 1924--1925

The British Empire Exhibition was the largest of the great imperial pleasure parks, built to celebrate a faith that victory in World War One meant a strengthening of imperial connections and the hope that an expanding empire would continue to play a large role in British and world affairs in the future. European exhibitions were public events at which the colonized were present and themselves historical agents, both actors and acted upon, and provide a vehicle for analyzing imperialism's multiple meanings. Taking the British Empire Exhibition seriously means contesting traditional historical interpretations that characterize the 1920s as a period of imperial decline. The British Empire Exhibition helped to establish Africa as a referent of British culture and to incorporate Africa into British politics at the same time that the political staff of the Colonial Office proposed radical plans for reorganizing tropical Africa as a project of British civilization.;The British Exhibition reflects a moment in the mutual reconstruction of the colonizer and colonized. White supremacy, warrior manliness, and imperial motherhood came together in a theme park that dominated the cultural landscape of mid-1920s Britain. The British Empire Exhibition sought to rekindle a faith in “progress,” damaged by the destructiveness of the war, by associating “progress” with white supremacy and the incorporation of imperial frontier zones, including recently conquered regions of the West African interior. The British Empire Exhibition contained the largest and most thorough exhibition of tropical African products, resources, and peoples presented to a Western audience. The apparent reproduction of British civilizational patterns among Africans, displayed in a “native village” setting, provided a powerful vehicle reinforcing ideas of bourgeois manhood within a trope of British racial dominance. The privileging and exclusions of selected colonialist ethnic groupings of West Africans at the exhibition provided a barometer of colonialist inequality and the lasting destructive impacts of Western control over West Africa. The exhibition was also a site where British control was contested through the consequential actions of West African craft workers and West African students resident in London during the exhibition.