From my recent blogs you might
think a horrible death is part and parcel of exploration. Not so. On occasion
serious injury or circumcision will suffice, and sometimes just sometimes, you
can get away with falling down an elephant pit containing 12 inch long spikes to
be saved only by the thickness of your late Victorian skirts.
At 532 pages the original 1897 editions
of Mary Kingsley’s Travels in West Africa
are not the easiest of objects to travel with. The weight of knowledge and wit
accrued within the red leather covers by the self-taught British Museum
collector massively overshadows its weight in grams, as bacterial diseases like
typhoid kill far greater numbers of people than attacks by wild animals.
As the title of her book
suggests, Mary Kingsley travelled in West Africa. She travelled the relatively
well-trodden sea-route around the bulge of West Africa to the Bight of Biafra,
the coast of Cameroon and eastern Nigeria. During the sea journey, her wit
shone through, writing:
“Accra is one of the five West
African towns that look well from the sea. The others don’t look well from
anywhere.”
Accra doesn’t perhaps look quite so well from land today
What she had to say about the
predominantly shanty buildings of Ghana’s capital I shall leave for another
time. The acidity of the above statement seems to reinforce the general Victorian
European’s view of Africa as an ill-fated and ill-designed continent, a view
that clouds our thoughts on Africa today. But Kingsley did not share the
opinions of other travellers like Richard Burton (see Acting like his life depended on it). She respected
the black populace for their skills, even if they did keep asking her where her
husband was.
In Cameroon, she was dependent on
the local population to lead her to summiting Mount Cameroon (much as I was
over 100 years later). The mountain is the highest peak in West and Central
Africa, at 4090 metres (or 13,760 feet). It isn’t any easy climb even in modern
trousers let alone Victorian skirts. Added to Mary’s struggle was the fear of
being stood on an active volcano that could blow at any moment while climbing
the mountain via a route no European had succeeded in before.
At 500 years old Mount Cameroon’s magic tree may have witnessed
Kingsley’s ascent
as well as my own
The true aim of her African
expedition was to study the cannibal tribes of the Gabonese rainforest, and
collect fish specimens in the Ogooue River. Though little known outside of
Gabon, the Ogooue is the largest river between the Niger and the Congo and the
fourth largest in Africa.
The Ogooue River, inland at Lambarene, still a vital transport link for
Gabon
She left Africa for Britain only
to return as a volunteer nurse. Based at a hospital in Simon’s Town, close to
Cape Town, she treated troops injured during the Second Boer War for two months
before developing probable typhoid. She was buried at sea.
Okay, there’s quite a lot of
horrible death in exploration, but wearing a skirt seems to help.