MARY KINGSLEY'S AFRICA

One of the benefits of having a blog is that in the course of research I occasionally stumble on something really interesting that I would never have known about otherwise. Such is the case with Mary Kingsley, an influential but today little-known African explorer of the late 19th Century. I'm reading her book, "Travels in West Africa" right now and it's the best book on that continent that I've come across in years.

I'm guessing that Kingsley was the prim and proper Victorian model for Catherine Hepburn's character in "African Queen." She traveled for a while with an Irishman who its tempting to imagine was a bit like Humphrey Bogart. A coincidence? I don't know.

When Kingsley was a middle-class little girl in Victorian England her well-traveled father used to tell her stories about what was regarded as "Darkest Africa." Kingsley was so excited by these stories that she saved her money and threw herself on the continent as soon as she was able. That was a brave thing to do since West Africa was known as "The White Man's Burial Ground" due to the prevalence of disease and hostile natives. Another English woman who preceded her had her hands chopped off and was left for dead by guides who stole her supplies. Nevertheless, Kingsley was undaunted.

Kingsley had her own take on Africa. She believed in self rule for the Africans but also believed that they needed Britain's indirect guidance.  She disliked many of the village huts she saw which she regarded as unaesthetic. She was even critical of African birds which didn't tuck their wings firmly against their sides as Victorian birds should but were unkempt and slovenly.

It's fun to imagine what the natives must have thought of her. Lots of them had never seen a white person before. I picture her emerging unannounced from the leaves, arrayed in Victorian finery, and casting disdainful looks at the birds and huts she saw.

She talked about the "fan" who were nomadic tribes who were thrown off their traditional land by hostile neighbors and were forced to settle on some other tribe's land in order to survive. As you can imagine the different tribes sometimes hated each other. In order to survive men took wives in different nearby tribes in order to have friendly contacts there and meals that could be safely eaten without poison. For people in that position European monogamy must have seemed like a formula for suicide.

She met different traders, many of them town-influenced blacks, who had European goods to trade, but theirs was a dangerous profession. To raise the price of an item, regardless of the difficulty in obtaining it, was to invite a massacre. When the time for trading was near lots of tribesman came to the trader fort and just hung out for days, sneaking magical trading powder (a guess: lion's dung?) into the traders food and sometimes squatting on the dinner table and looking longingly at the trader's meal. He could shoo them away but he had to be careful not to offend lest he invite bloodshed.

I hope the reader will forgive me for writing about the negatives, which are always more fun to read about. She certainly encountered a lot of beauty and kindness as well. That's reflected in the last paragraph of the book, which I'll quote here: