Travels in West Africa

I have never thought of myself as a squeamish traveler. I have overnighted in hotels that cockroaches would avoid, with stained sheets, stinking carpets with cigarette burns and toilets that look as if someone had a personal challenge to make them as disgusting as possible. I have traipsed around rainforests at night in torrential downpours, avoiding snakes and thorny, aggressive plants and strange invisible bugs that fall out of trees and deliver a painful bite to rival a Box jellyfish.

Yes indeed, until this point I have had an overrated opinion of my capacity to weather hardship, scoffing at squeamishness as if it showed unacceptable weakness and cowardliness. I’m really a joy to be around.

But such haughty, self-congratulation has recently been shattered. I have just finished reading a book by an Englishwoman, Mary Kingsley, who travelled into the depths of West Africa on her own in 1895. Compared to her, my traveling travails seem, quite frankly, pithy.

Her goal was to collect botanical species, and she had contact with tribes rather fond of human flesh and others whose behavior was unpredictable. Through it all, she maintained a wonderful sense of humor with the florid Victorian language masking biting wit and superb observation.

She spent a good deal of time with the Fans, a tribe known for its fierceness and cannibalism. But she did not fear them since,

“The cannibalism of the Fans, although a prevalent habit, is no danger, I think, to white people except as regards the bother it gives one in preventing one’s black companions from being eaten.”

She had hired a group of men to accompany her and was constantly having to curb truant or lascivious behavior. In one village she,

“chaperoned my men while among the ladies of the Esouai, a forward set of minxes, with the vigilance of a dragon and decreed, like the Mikado of Japan, ‘that whosoever leered or winked, unless connubially linked, should forthwith be beheaded.’”

Pages and pages were devoted to describing the various juju and fetishes that seemed to play a large role in many of the tribes with whom she cavorted. Most of these spirits are quite malevolent and much time is devoted to appeasing them. She claims that more Africans died as a result of some juju than anything else.

She also detailed many of their customs, which for one tribe included the habit of dressing up like a crocodile. But she wryly remarked that,

“I doubt whether any native would chance himself inside a crocodile skin and swim about in the river among the genuine articles for fear of their penetrating his disguise mentally and physically.”

She faced unbelievable hardship and showed an unbelievable courage and determination. In one room of a hut where she was spending the night, she had to clear from the wooden plank on which she was to sleep a bag containing several severed fingers and hands. The tribe believed that evil spirits could be placated by throwing human limbs into the forest.

She fell into a trap where her extensive crinolines saved her from lethal perforation by the spears that lined the bottom of the hole. She navigated through hostile vegetation, one vine she described vividly:

“It is covered with short, strong, curved thorns. It creeps along concealed by decorative vegetation, and you get your legs twined in it and of course injured. It festoons itself from tree to tree and when your mind is set on the other things, catches you under the chin and gives you the appearance of having made a determined but ineffectual attempt to cut your throat with a saw. It whisks your hat off and grabs your clothes and commits other iniquities too numerous to catalogue here.”

But she describes these numerous privations and physical discomfort matter-of-factly and without a whiff of self pity.

“My face and particularly my lips are a misery to me, having been blistered all over by yesterday’s sun and last night I inadvertently whipped the skin all off one cheek with the blanket and it keeps on bleeding and, horror of horrors, there is no tea until the water comes.”

The last part of her journey was an unsuccessful attempt to reach the summit of the Great Peak of Cameroon, an arduous task and one thwarted in the end by rain and wind. Before the final ascent, they had found a camping spot but she had sent her men out to look for caves for,

“I am not thinking of taking out a patent for our present camp site.”

Her ear for dialogue was well tuned and she relates wonderfully the way they expressed themselves.

One of her crew members, complaining about the cold, said to her,

“Oh, ma! It be cold, cold too much, Too much cold kill we black men, all same for one as too much sun kill you white man. Oh, ma!”

Or when her men were talking among themselves about one of their companions who had amassed some money:

“He gets plenty money, but he no have none no time. He go frow it away on woman and drink, he no buy clothes.”

Another replies, “What can a man buy with money better than them thing he like best.”

Her attitudes toward Africa and Africans were obviously Victorian in the sense of believing them to be an inferior race and mostly savage. But clearly she loved the continent and greatly enjoyed the company of her men, many of whom she admired and respected. This dichotomy is evident in many of the descriptions of European travelers of the time whose genuine affection for the ‘natives’ whether in Asia, South America or Africa was always within the context of the innate superiority of the Europeans.

This would no doubt raise the ire of those self-anointed defenders of the repressed who would condemn the moral fiber of such people as Mary Kingsley. Yet it is clear from her experiences that she would rather be in Africa than anywhere else.

“The charm of West Africa is a painful one: it gives you pleasure when you are out there, but when you are back here it gives you pain by calling you….Come back, come back, this is your home.”

Alas, Africa would be the end for our intrepid traveler. Volunteering as a nurse during the Boer war, she was dead within two months of Typhoid fever. And while the European colonial powers were crassly carving up Africa for themselves (helped immensely by the stark divisions and mistrust within many African societies) a voice with great sympathy for the Africans was forever quieted.