"No Better than a Slave or Outcast": Skill, Identity, and Power among the Porters of the Emin Pasha Relief Expedition, 1887-1890
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The Emin Pasha Relief Expedition crossed central Africa in late 1880s. Many of its members were intent on maintaining or adopting distinctive identities.1 Its Sudanese strove to maintain a martial identity, its Manyema porters to create an ethnic and occupational one, and its Europeans to construct themselves as gentlemen, explorers, and successful imperial agents. This article focuses on creation of identity by Expedition's Zanzibar-based porters, which occurred on an individual basis, but also involved a collective effort to assert themselves as wangwana (freemen, gentlemen). The acquisition of particular skills and work strategies was one part of this identity creation, names were another. Porters both maintained and adopted names, a part of their process of identity creation that can be accessed through Expedition's unusual wealth of documentation. The Emin Pasha Relief Expedition and Its Records The Expedition's primary purpose was to provide assistance to Emin Pasha, governor of Equatoria, southern-most province in Egypt's Sudanese empire. It was threatened by Mahdist forces and by pressure from British administrators, functioning as the assignee[s] in bankruptcy of Egyptian government.2 The Expedition's other goals included establishing a new caravan route to Equatoria, laying foundation for Imperial British East Africa Company, and geographical discovery. Henry Stanley, Expedition's leader, also held a commission from Leopold II of Belgium to offer positions in Congo Free State to Emin Pasha and to Zanzibari merchant Hamed bin Muhammed el Murjebi, better known as Tippu Tip. The Expedition left Zanzibar in early 1887. It traveled by steamer via Cape Town to mouth of Congo River and then to head of navigation on Aruwimi River, one of Congo's northern tributaries. There, Stanley split Expedition. An Advance Column pressed on to Equatoria, while Rear Column with bulk of Expedition's
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".