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 theo ry attracted a substantial following among white settlers in British c olonies 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 t heir broader political affiliations. While humanitarian liberals were critical of new-fangled theories of cerebral determinism that might co ntradict their cherished belief in the immediate transformative powers of religion and education, anti-liberal ideologues, and especially me dical men, used the new racial science to buttress their hostile attit udes 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 m aterials that fuelled metropolitan racial science, and a hatred of the Xhosa that made the settler population increasingly receptive to theo ries of the innate inferiority of the African mind. This case study of phrenology in the early nineteenth century Cape Colony therefore expl ores the intersection of racial science with colonial politics, medici ne and frontier violence.