This wonderful book follows a strange character, Richard Lynn Garner, from the American Appalachian Mountains to the rainforests of Gabon. A cantankerous Southerner born in 1848, Garner fashioned himself into a scientist able to analyze the language of chimpanzees. For this, he abandoned his family and sailed to Gabon in 1892, equipped with a wax cylinder phonograph. His first book, published after a year in the field, The Speech of Monkeys, made a sensation but did not earn him recognition from the scientific community. Garner returned to Gabon in 1894, this time to earn a living by providing American zoos with wild animals. Settling in the Fernan Vaz coastal region, Garner traveled back and forth across the Atlantic, bringing his pet monkey Susie to the United States and giving occasional lectures on the communication of apes. His work for the Bronx Zoo led to many more expeditions between 1911 and 1919. Jeremy Rich reveals that from 1917 to 1919, Garner sent over 2,000 animal specimens to the Smithsonian. In the meantime, he failed in winning the support of New York socialite Ida Vera Simonton, who he dreamed of installing as the Queen of the Nkomi tribe, in the hope that she could vanquish the rule of French colonialists.

The cover picture shows a small chimpanzee dressed as a toddler, sitting studiously at a desk under the gaze of a boy and a portly white man. Bringing together key elements in the imperial imagination of the time, it deploys the domesticated fantasy of benevolent patriarchy towards two kinds of children, the pet ape playing here the role of barrier against and bridge with Africans. And yet the photograph entirely erases Garner's African collaborators and the rainforest environment that provided him with animals and scientific knowledge. Jeremy Rich superbly fills the gap by putting Garner's Atlantic career at the nexus of colonialism in Africa, the history of the New South during the Progressive Era, Western consumption of wild animals, and Atlantic histories of science. Strategically, Rich reconstructs Garner's reliance on Gabonese expertise and his insertion in local patronage networks, and shows how the Gabonese enlisted Garner in their own struggles over the encroachment of concessionary companies and the French state.

Rich's intimate knowledge of African history enables him to shed light on the major political and social shifts that occurred in southern Gabon region during Garner's lifetime. The first chapter examines the power vacuum left on the southern coast of Gabon by the collapse of the Nkomi monarchy and the progressive loss by the Gabonese of their environment and natural riches. The rest of the book is organized around the main historical issues exposed by Garner's career. Chapter Two analyzes the rise of the animal trade across the Atlantic and big game hunting in the colonies. Chapter Three interrogates the uneasy battle that Garner fought to assert his old South masculinity against family failures and the disdain of scientists. He tried (and failed) to combine intellectual recognition with the gentlemanly protection of his pet apes, and of the bohemian feminist Simonton who he invited to Gabon in 1906. In Chapter Four, Rich moves to race and examines how Garner's representations of African Americans at home helped him, like many other white Americans, build a universalizing theory of white superiority in Africa. Chapter Five looks at Garner's relations with animals. Rich argues that keeping pets that they perceived to be tame, teachable, and compassionate helped white men to create a distance with Africans (accused of brutality against animals), while reflecting Social Darwinist theories. Chapter Six turns to the Gabonese responses to Garner and the technological objects he hoped would amaze and tame them. In fact, the Gabonese assimilated Garner's phonograph into existing ideas of spiritual agency and mobile power objects. Conversely, the chapter reveals that Garner underwent initiation in a healing cult (mpago) and attended bwiti ceremonies, the syncretic cult that was sweeping the work camps of central Gabon. Chapter Seven travels back to the US and the Bronx zoo to look at the depictions of apes and animal exhibits in the popular press.

Rich's book contributes to the history of equatorial Africa and colonialism, not only by recentering Garner's career in the local context, but by bringing Gabonese history back into the history of Atlantic exchanges. Although Rich does not devote much attention to Garner's central project, deciphering the speech of apes, he cogently argues that Garner's life shows the transatlantic dimensions of evolutionary ideas and of animal science. Because Garner worked at the periphery of multiple intellectual, scientific, and political currents that linked North America, Europe, and equatorial Africa, Rich also reveals how the major shifts affecting Gabonese communities at the time can be fruitfully examined through a transatlantic perspective.