Édouard Foà

Édouard Foà, born Aron Fortuné Emmanuel Édouard Georges Foà, (17 December 1862–29 June 1901) was a late 19th-century French explorer, photographer and travel writer. He is mainly known for two expeditions across southern and central Africa between 1891 and 1897. Following this, he published nine books on his travels between 1895 and 1901, most of them with photomechanical reproductions of his legacy of more than 500 photographs.

Through his publications, he enriched Western knowledge about Africa of the late 19th century with geographical, ethnographical, political and social descriptions, as well as documentary images. For this, he was awarded important distinctions by the French Geographical Society, the Académie Française and the highest order of merit of the French Republic, the Knight of the Legion of Honour.

Biography Early life and expeditions in Africa The son of a merchant from Marseille and the nephew of French writer Eugénie Foà, Édouard Foà spent his school years at Bône – modern-day Annaba – in former French Algeria, and in Tunis, the capital of the French protectorate of Tunisia. When his father died, he worked for the British consulate in Tunis as a young interpreter. At the same time, he held a job in the colonial postal service. At the age of 18, he enlisted as a volunteer in the French army of Africa. In his early 20s, he left the army with the rank of a non-commissioned officer in order to work for the colonial trading company Mante & Régis in Marseille.

In 1886, the same trading company employed Foà as manager of a trading post in Porto-Novo in the French colony of Dahomey, present-day Benin. From 1886 to 1890, Foà explored Dahomey and the neighbouring regions of the Gulf of Guinea. In 1890 he returned to France and was hired by a French financial company to investigate economic possibilities in southern and eastern Africa. Foá wrote two books about these experiences, titled Du Zambèze au Congo (From the Zambezi river to Congo) and Chasses aux grands fauves pendant la traversée du continent noir du Zambèze au Congo français (1899). The latter was published the same year in English as After Big Game in Central Africa. who during the Second Franco-Dahomean War (1892–1894) had defeated the Kingdom of Dahomey and destroyed the Royal Palace of Abomey. His last work Résultats scientifiques des voyages en Afrique. (Scientific Results of Travels in Africa) was published as a posthumous publication by his wife under the auspices of the French National Museum of Natural History in 1908.

Foà understood the publication of his explorations as benefitting "geography, ethnography, natural history, science, commerce, industry and colonization." Altogether, Foá travelled across Africa for seven years and published nine books, as well as several articles in scientific journals. Most of these were illustrated with photomechanical reproductions of his photographs that he included as visual records of his travels.

Distinctions

Grande Médaille d'Or des Explorations, 1898 Knight of the Legion of Honour, 1899 Montyon Prize of the Académie Française, 1897 and 1901

Publications

Dahomiens et Egbas. In La Nature no. 926, 28. February 1891 and no. 930, 28. March 1891. Territoires situés entre les fleuves Zambèze et Chiré, par Edouard Foa, 1891–1893.

Mes grandes chasses dans l'Afrique centrale. Paris, Firmin-Didot, 1895 (New editions: Paris, Plon, 1899; Paris, Montbel, 2006 ).

(New editions: Collection Classiques de la chasse, 76 illustrations by Roger Reboussin, Paris, Visaphone, 1963; and Paris, Montbel, 2006 ). English translation: After Big Game in Central Africa. Records of a Sportsman from August 1894 to November 1897, when crossing the Dark Continent from the Mouth of the Zambesi to the French Congo. London, A. & C. Black, 1899. Republished by Legare Street Press in 2022, L'invasion européenne en Afrique. Sa marche, ses progrès, son état actuel. Revue Scientifique, 4th séries, vol. XI : no. 18, 6. May 1899. À travers l'Afrique d'après Édouard Foà. Revue Scientifique, 4th series – vol. XIII : no. 6, 11. August 1900. Du cap au lac Nyassa. Paris, Plon, 1901, 381 p., with 16 prints after photographs by the author. Résultats scientifiques des voyages en Afrique. Publiés sous les auspices du Muséum national d’Histoire Naturelle. Préface de M. Edmond Perrier. Paris : Imprimerie Nationale, 1908. (Published by Mme. Édouard Foà)

Reception

Recognition of his travelogues Following his expeditions, Foá's travel writing and photographic output were published first in France and some of it also in the United Kingdom. Further, the Journal des voyages magazine of 11 November 1894 published an article by Raoul Jolly entitled Un voyage de M. Édouard Foà, followed by further sequels about Foá's travels.

For his travels and following accounts, he was honoured with the Grande Médaille d'Or des Explorations by the French Geographical Society, the world's oldest geographical society, in 1898. His travelogues Du Cap au lac Nyassa (1897) and Du Zambèze au Congo français: La traversée d’Afrique. Chasses aux grands fauves (1901) were both awarded the Montyon Prize by the Académie Française. For his services to France, he was further distinguished with the Knight's Cross of the Legion of Honour in 1899.

At the 1899 Universal Exhibition in Paris, a room about French scientific missions in Africa presented specimens from Foà's collections, the remains of large wild animals, as well as examples of the equipment, rifles, luggage and other instruments he used during his exploration campaigns.

Since 1905, the Société de Géographie has awarded the Édouard Foà Prize for geographical works on various parts of the world.

In an article about French colonial collections at the Getty Research Institute (GRI), the author called Foa's albums "perhaps the most remarkable" among the collections and added: "Intended primarily as ethnographic studies, Foà's photographs also capture historic events such as the crowning of a chief in Accra [...], and significant local architecture, as in an early view of the Salaga mosque [...]. Even the studio portraits Foà purchased in Zanzibar represent important visual documents [...]."

Apart from the photographs in the GRI, the French National Library in Paris has 48 historical photographs by Foà of Ashanti people in present-day Ghana and of scenes in Dahomey, Lagos and Abeokuta in modern-day Nigeria.

Gallery