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- Percy Amaury Talbot
- Also known as
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Percy Amaury Talbot
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primary name: Talbot, P Amaury
- Details
- individual; anthropologist; official; academic/intellectual; collector; British; Male
- Life dates
- 26 Jun 1877-28 Dec 1945
- Address
- 67 Cambridge Mansions, Battersea Park (in 1905)
Bishopton, Stratford-on-Avon (1931)
- Biography
- British colonial officer in southern Nigeria between 1902 and 1931, botanist, anthropologist, author. Exhibitioner of University College, Oxford. A trained surveyor and map-maker. Despite his importance in Nigerian history, there is no published biography of Talbot (he is not in the ODNB), and what follows is pieced together using his publications and the Colonial Office LIsts.
1902-3: assistant commissioner on the commission to establish the Sierra Leone/Liberia border.
1904: accompanied as surveyor Lt. Boyd Alexander, his brother and Gosling on their exploration along the Benue as far as Lake Chad.
1905 returned to England; probably in England mid 1905-later 1906.
1907-11: Assistant District Commissioner, South Nigeria, where he established a new station at Oban in Ekoi country (see his book of 1912).
1911-12: he and his wife and her sister made an expedition up to Lake Chad to assess the possibility of creating a road or railway to open up that area: in the latter part they were joined by Olive Macleod on her expedition across Africa to Boyd Alexander's (her fiancé’s) grave (see his article in Journal of the Royal African Society, July 1912)
1912: Assistant District Commissioner in Southern Nigeria (stationed in the Eket district ie. Ibibio country, for 10 months: see his lectures in Journal of the Royal African Society April 1914, & in the Geographical Journal September 1914, and his gift of Ibibio material to BM in same year [in 1913 at the head of the Asst.DC list]
1914 to 1916: 2nd class District Officer Southern province [based in Degema area (Port Harcourt) in Kalabari / Igbo country], returning to England in the War in 1916.
1919 1st class District Officer, Southern Province
1920: Census Commissioner for 1921 Census of Southern provinces of Nigeria
1921: Ist class, grade 1, in Administrative Service, S Nigeria
1921-1931: Resident (Provincial Commissioner) in S. Nigeria (the senior officer in the service)
He and his wife and her sister (all three were in Nigeria together) gave to the BM some 4,000 samples of natural history (botanical and zoological). He gave in his own name the following ethnographic objects:
Af1905,1209.1 to 57, from the boundary commission in Liberia of 1902 and the Chad exploration of 1904
Af1914,0616.1 to 27, a series from the Ibibio (collected in 1912)
Af1950,45.1 to 891, a very large group from the Niger Delta region collected 1907-11 from the Ekoi and in 1914-16 from the Igbo, Ijo and others: see below)
Af1931,0409.1 to 33, a series of stone celts from Ogoja
His gift in 1916 remained on deposit for many years awaiting a description that never came. See H J Braunholtz, British Museum Quarterly, 18 1953 p.119, fn.13: ‘Incorporation of this last and biggest collection was suspended until 1950 in the expectation, unhappily not realised, of receiving fuller information from the donor'. It was eventually registered by W B Fagg in 1954-5 with the register numbers Af1950,45.1 to 891; these inevitably lack any certainly about which objects came from which ethnic group, and the information on the database has been derived from his publications. Talbot's career makes it clear that the Ekoi objects were collected in 1907-11; the Ibibio objects in 1911-12; and the Igbo objects in 1914-16.
Talbot also gave African objects to the Pitt-Rivers Museum in 1916 and 1922. He was awarded the silver medal of the Royal African Society in 1923; he was a member of the Royal Anthropological Institute. His wife Dorothy established the Percy Amaury Talbot prize for African Anthropology, under the auspices of the RAI.
- Bibliography
- (wrote)
Boyd Alexander, 'From the Niger to the Nile', 1907 (chapters 4 to 6 were written by Talbot and describe his mapping along the Benue on the Chad expedition)
In the shadow of the bush, 1912 (on the Ekoi)
Life in Southern Nigeria : the magic, beliefs, and customs of the Ibibio tribe, 1923 (based on 10 months of residence in 1912-13; the foreword is dated 1914, the long delay before publication being due to the War)
The peoples of Southern Nigeria, a sketch of their history, ethnology and languages, 3 vols, 1926 (vol.II on ethnology)
Some Nigerian fertility cults, 1927 (on the Igbo and Ijo)
Tribes of the Niger Delta, their religions and customs, 1932 (the preface states that the material in the book had been collected between 1914-16, and that it covers the Degama (Degema) Division in the Niger Delta, centred on Degama and Port Harcourt; and stretching from the coast some fifty miles inland: this was primarily occupied by the Okrika, Calabari, and Igbo)
See also his article in the Journal of the African Society, XV pp.305-19, which gives an account of the fanatical Elijah II in Kalabari whose iconoclastic campaign of late 1915 destroyed much local culture, and gives the rationale for Talbot's own collecting.
OBITUARIES
C. K. Meek, Obituary of Amaury Talbot: ‘Man’, 1947, no.5, pp.13-14.
Talbot, Percy Amaury, (26 June 1877–28 Dec. 1945). WHO'S WHO & WHO WAS WHO.
(articles)
Dmitri van den Bersselaar, ‘Establishing the facts: P.A. Talbot and the 1921 Census of Nigeria’, in ‘History in Africa’, 31, 2004, pp.69-102