Sambo as Ethnically Ambiguous – Little Black Sambo Exhibit

Content Warning: Due to the sensitive nature of these materials, as well as copyright issues, we have chosen to share only 3 or 4 images per text.

Reilly & Britton Co.’s 1905 version of *Little Black Sambo* depicts the boy as dark-skinned and blue-eyed.

In this exhibit we feature editions of Little Black Sambo that illustrate the boy and his family enigmatically in terms of their ethnicity and race. While the majority of these volumes tend to be by Helen Bannerman herself, there are also other illustrators like Pelagie Doane, Margaret Evans Price, and a handful of uncredited illustrators, that, tend to blur–in worrying ways–that race and ethnicity of these characters to the point its indiscernible if these illustrations depict one distinct ethnicity for Sambo, Jumbo, and Mumbo.

In Helen Bannerman’s original, for example, we are told that Sambo is a “little black boy”, and with Bannerman’s infamous caricatured art-style that calls to mind blackface, minstrelsy, and the Mammy stereotype, especially in the illustration of Mumbo and Jumbo’s clothes, a reader’s gut-reaction is to read Sambo and his family as African. Additionally, the names of the characters link them to a linguistic form of racism–Sambo, etymologically, was used to refer to any black youth, while the names “Jumbo” and “Mumbo” can be traced to the phrase “mumbo jumbo”, which allegedly the name of a West African god, but, more oftenly, used to describe the “meaningless practice or ritual” of African tribes. (Keep in mind that Helen Bannerman was a Scottish woman living in colonial India–upon publication in the United States, American publishers and illustrators would ‘re-racialize’ Sambo and his family as one of five things: African, African American, Indian, White, or a weird and ambiguously in-between.)

Yet, considering other aspects of Bannerman’s original, we are torn to read Sambo as a “black boy” from Africa. When we are first introduced to Sambo, he is wearing what might be a Kacchera–a Sikh-styled form of undergarment, similar to boxer shorts. Jumbo goes to the “bazaar” to buy his son his distinctive Green Umbrella and Purple Shoes with the Red Soles, a distinctive shoe style from Northern India called Jutti. However, children’s literature scholar, Sanjay Sircar, suggests suggesting that they are “nagaras, traditional unisex shoes of Muslim origin” in his article “Little Brown Sanjay and Little Black Sambo: Childhood Reading, Adult Rereading; Colonial Text and Postcolonial Reception” (146). The tigers, another distinctive aspect of the tale, are only found in Asia–not Africa. Finally, there is the memorable scenes of the tigers turning to “ghi”, the Indian word for butter, and Mumbo’s recipe for pancakes, which includes “flour and eggs and milk and sugar and butter”, is distinctly a British recipe rather than a traditionally Indian one which would be savory rather than sweet. (This last point of course, speaks to the colonial history that Bannerman herself was participating in.)

And although there were Africans in India, we do not think that Bannerman was illustrating her characters as distinctly Black or Indian. Rather, quite worryingly, this ethnic ambiguity of her drawings (and others that would follow suite) reflect an implicit (if unintended as some of Bannerman’s defenders claim) racial othering: the reduction or amalgamation of the non-White into a muddled perhaps-Black-perhaps-Indian-perhaps-both caricature that ultimately relies on this conflation and confusion to defend its inherent gross racism.

Some defend Bannerman’s work as not racist, but rather as a product of the times. Yet, this is a rather weak argument. Just because something was the product of racism does not excuse the racism inherent in the object. For instance, Rosemary Dinnage in a review of Sambo Sahib, a biography of Bannerman, writes: “The Sambo adventures… happen to never-never people in a never-never land that is neither India nor Africa nor–certainly–the American South; alas for Anglo-Indian Mrs. Bannerman, her head full of perfectly real exotic scenes, and real snakes and tigers, innocently coloring her figures black to suit the story” (84).

Although Dinnage may be right in stressing the fantasy aspect of Bannerman’s story, particularly with talking tigers that can–with enough revolutions around a tree–turn into butter, there seems to be a certain dismissiveness in her defense. To reduce this children’s story down to “never-never people” in a “never-never land”, despite the very-real experience and connection to the colonial enterprise that Bannerman was participating is a little too dismissive, just as much as is her dismissal of the issue at hand with unintended resonance an American audience has with a racialized “black” boy to produce hundreds of even more grossly caricatured adaptations. And while Bannerman initially composed the story for her own children, by literally drawing caricatures, using racist etymology for her character’s names, and forgetting that the author was both product and participant in British imperial project, dislocates the fantasy of her story back into the ‘realness’ of her time. The creation, writing, and illustrating of Little Black Sambo is only possible because of the convergence of these racist conditions of possibility, that, upon reception to audiences that predominately thought of themselves as racially superior, would set the stage for distinctly African or African American representations that would further demean and dehumanize Sambo and his parents.

View texts that depict Sambo as ethnically ambiguous:

Credits

Brandon Murakami