Claudius Dyonisius Holobah During
Claudius Dyonisius Holobah During
| Claudius Dyonisius Holobah During FRGS | |||||||||||
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| File:During, Claudius Dyonisius Holobah.jpg | |||||||||||
| Born | 1886 | ||||||||||
| Died | 1973 | ||||||||||
| Residence |
Hon. Society of the Middle Temple, 5 Powis Gardens, W [A63] Brass House, Wellington Street, Freetown, Sierra Leone Ethgrace, 15 Pultney Street, Freetown, Sierra Leone | ||||||||||
| Occupation | legal | ||||||||||
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Contents
Notes
Office Notes
House Notes
1911.05.23 nominated; proposed by H.S. Harrison, seconded by T.A. Joyce
1921.03.22 It was resolved ... that the following be removed from the list of Fellows: E.B. Betts, A. Morrison, B. Morley, G.F. Porter, W. Sheldon Ridge, Mr B. Williams, C.H. During, L.H. Ernst, C.W. Haywood, W. Kirkpatrick, H.N. Thomson
Notes From Elsewhere
Hotobah During (1886-1973), A Sierra Leonean Krio Collector
Claudius Dionysius Hotobah During, a Krio lawyer who travelled to London in 1908.
Claudius Dionysius Hotobah During was born on 16 September 1886 in Freetown. His father was licensed money lender and businessman called George Punshon During.
Little is known about George Punshon During's parents, but according to George Punshon During's grandson, Donald, he claimed Igbo ancestry, so George Punshon's father probably had Igbo origins.
He would have belonged to the population of Sierra Leone Liberated Africans or recaptives (or their descendants) who were Africans taken from slave ships in the Atlantic Ocean in a mission by the British after the latter abolished the slave trade. They were settled on the Sierra Leone Peninsular from 1808 until about 1864 and they formed the dominant stream in the creation of Sierra Leonean Krio identity. ...
Claudius Dionysius Hotobah During's mother was woman called Mami Dada who lived in the Brookfields quarter of Freetown. Although he was born out of wedlock, Claudius received a good start in life.
His father sent him to Freetown's Methodist Boys High School where he proved an able student. At the age of nineteen, in late 1905, Claudius took up a position as a clerk in the colony audit department in Freetown (The Sierra Leone Royal Gazette p.648, December 1905).
But George Punshon wanted his son to study law in Britain and, because he was a wealthy man, he was able to pay for his son's education.
Claudius gained a place at Middle Temple and travelled to London in early 1908. He must have travelled with a case full of 'ethnographic' artefacts because, on arrival in Liverpool, he made donations of African artefacts to the Liverpool Museums (now the World Museum) and in the same year he sold further Mende items to the Horniman Museum and Gardens.
While in London in 1911, before his return to Freetown, Claudius was elected both a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society and a Member of the Royal Anthropological Institute.
This suggests that his early donations to the museum in Liverpool and his contribution to the Horniman collections may have been made within an 'anthropological' frame and helped in his bids to become elected to the learned societies, membership of which would have boosted his standing in Freetown society circles. In fact, his memberships were announced in The Sierra Leone Weekly News.
Once he had returned to Freetown, to practice as a barrister in September 1911, Claudius continued making donations to the Liverpool Museum through Arnold Ridyard, a Chief Engineer with Elder, Dempster & Co shipping line, every year until 1915.
At the beginning of the 20th century, African material productions were described as "primitive" in museum displays and were contrasted with the "arts" of Europe in order to construct an ideology of European civilization and to frame European societies as "evolved" and "modern".
As a well-educated and cosmopolitan Krio law student in Britain from 1908 to 1911, Claudius Hotobah During would have been familiar with such museum displays and the ideas they were illustrating.
There is evidence that he later sought to subvert these ideas in a quite subtle way. The figure of the railway official and the copy of a European helmet that he collected and donated to the Liverpool Museums in 1913 (after his return from London) would have been considered inauthentic by most European collectors for their demonstration of European influences and African modernities.
Yet it was probably precisely these attributes that interested Hotobah During, and his interest in giving them to the museum in Liverpool may likewise have been for their potential to reframe Africa closer to his own experience, in a way that subverted the dominant museum-promoted ideology of the African continent as being inhabited by static, archaic and a-historical societies.
Claudius Dionysius Hotobah During died in Freetown on 26 April 1973, having pursued a legal career in Freetown as barrister and Notary Public.
Zachary Kingdon [Horniman website]
Publications
External Publications
House Publications
Related Material Details
RAI Material
Other Material
Liverpool museum; Horniman museum