A Tswana man holding an ostrich feather fan ('Boosh-wana'), 1820

Samuel Daniell (1775 - 1811)

RA Collection: Art

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This image depicts a man from the Tswana indigenous people, seated on the ground and holding a fan made from ostrich feathers, used for fanning fires. He sits in an enclosed area around his hut dwelling. The Tswana are a Bantu-speaking ethnic group living in areas of what is now Botswana and South Africa.

This etching is an illustration from a book titled Sketches representing the Native Tribes, Animals and Scenery of Southern Africa (1820), originally drawn by Samuel Daniell and published posthumously by his brother William Daniell RA. The book was part of a British colonial tradition of ethnographic research and demonstrates deep inherent racial prejudice, seeking to categorise indigenous groups into a Western-imposed knowledge structure. Samuel Daniell based this drawing on his encounters with indigenous people when he travelled to South Africa between 1799 and 1802. This expedition was only possible due to colonisation of the land and peoples by Dutch and British forces.

The caption ‘Boosh-wana’ is an historic English-language version of the word Tswana. In the 19th century, the labelling of indigenous people according to Western groupings was a form of colonial control that sought to categorise complex and varied cultures present among the populations of southern Africa.