1862-1900 |
By Jenni
Gate
The woman who follows the crowd will usually go no further
than the crowd. The woman who walks alone is likely to find herself in places
no one has ever been before.
Albert Einstein
Mary
Henrietta Kingsley traveled paths few in history had ever explored in a time
when women never traveled alone. Her journeys within West Africa expanded Europe’s knowledge of the region. Despite the inherent
racism of colonialist England
during the Victorian era, she became an advocate for the people of West Africa, often suffering ridicule as a result.
Ignoring popular opinion and the expectations of society, Mary Kingsley paddled
up little-known estuaries, walked through jungles, endured insects and
reptiles, climbed mountains, and stoked fires on steamships. She met and
befriended cannibals and missionaries alike, though it would be fair to say she
preferred the former to the latter. She collected specimens of fish wherever
she went, and took copious notes of her experiences. Her life was extraordinary
but short.
Although
she had no formal education, Mary Kingsley grew up in a house full of books
about science and memoirs of explorers. Her father, a doctor and writer,
traveled extensively throughout his own life. He contracted rheumatic fever on
his last journey and returned home where his daughter cared for him until his
death. She had nursed her mother for years. Coincidentally, both parents died
within a few weeks of one another. Mary Kingsley, then age 30, decided to
travel. She had a few academic connections through her brother, who was in law
school at that time. Mary read what was known about Africa,
asked her acquaintances for advice about traveling there and was roundly told
not to go. She was repeatedly warned that it was too dangerous to go to West Africa.
Ignoring
all advice, in 1893 she headed to Liverpool and boarded a ship for the Canary Islands,
then pushed on to Sierra
Leone. She arrived in West
Africa with few possessions other than her high-necked shirts and
floor-length skirts. Traveling the coastline by steamboat, she made her way
past the oil rivers of Nigeria
and on to Angola.
Region traveled by Kingsley |
It was the
Victorian era, and women did not travel alone. Her shipmates assumed she was a
missionary, and they were scandalized to find her still on board the ship after
all the other missionaries disembarked at the Canary
Islands. Even in Africa, local
women continually asked where her husband was. She frequently went into
dangerous areas alone, but most often journeyed with African men who helped
her by cooking, translating, making camp, and finding
pathways.
On her
second journey to West Africa a year after the first, Kingsley traversed the
rivers of the French Congo and climbed Mount Cameroon
(the first English person to climb it). She met and befriended the Fan (or Fang
as some sources name them) people, who were known to be cannibals. Exploring by
steamboat and dugout canoe, paddling the swamps and streams of the Ogooué River
in Gabon, she collected fish
from the rivers and lakes to take back to the British Museum
as specimens for study. She was thrilled to have this work taken seriously by
the zoologist who helped sponsor the trip, Dr. Albert Gunther. At least three
previously unknown species of fish were named after her.
Mary
Kingsley documented travels on the rivers throughout West
Africa. Her writing is evidence of a humorous and curious mind. In
Travels in West Africa, she described the
dangers of paddling through the tidewaters of African rivers in dugout canoes:
Now a crocodile drifting down in deep water, or lying asleep
with its jaws open on a sand-bank in the sun, is a picturesque adornment to the
landscape when you are on the deck of a steamer, and you can write home about
it and frighten your relations on your behalf; but when you are away among the
swamps in a small dugout canoe, and that crocodile and his relations are awake
– a thing he makes a point of being at flood tide because of fish coming along
– and when he has got his foot upon his native heath – that is to say, his tail
within holding reach of his native mud – he is highly interesting, and you may
not be able to write home about him – and you get frightened on your own
behalf.
About
encounters with insects in West African
Studies, she wrote:
But it’s against the insects ashore that you have to be
specially warned. During my first few weeks of Africa,
I took a general natural historical interest in them with enthusiasm as of
natural history, it soon became a mere sporting one, though equally
enthusiastic at first. Afterwards a nearly complete indifference set in, unless
some wretch aroused a vengeful spirit in me by stinging or biting. I should
say, looking back calmly upon the matter, that 75 per cent of West African
insects sting, 5 per cent bite, and the rest are either permanently or
temporarily parasitic on the human race. And undoubtedly one of the many worst
things you can do in West Africa is to take
any notice of an insect. If you see a thing that looks like a cross between a flying
lobster and the figure of Abraxas on a Gnostic gem, do not pay it the least
attention, never mind where it is; just keep quiet and hope it will go away –
for that’s your best chance; you have none in a stand-up fight with a good
thorough-going African insect. …
Of course you cannot ignore driver ants, they won’t go away,
but the same principle reversed is best for them, namely, your going away
yourself.
And later in the same work:
While in West Africa you
should always keep an eye lifting for Drivers. You can start doing it as soon
as you land, which will postpone the catastrophe, not avoid it; …it may be just
as well for you to let things slide down the time-stream until Fate sends a
column of the wretches up your legs. … The females and workers of these ants
are provided with stings as well as well-developed jaws. They work both for all
they are worth, driving the latter into your flesh, enthusiastically up to the
hilt; they remain therein, keeping up irritation when you have hastily torn
their owner off in response to a sensation that is like that of red hot
pinchers.
After her
second trip to West Africa, Kingsley toured England and spoke widely of her
travels. She lectured on diverse topics from opening trade to Europeans in the
region to the harm caused by missionaries converting native people and
destroying whole ways of life in the process. Her opinions, formed from personal
experience and observation, were controversial, sometimes creating a backlash
in the press. Yet her work was influential in establishing perceptions of West
Africa in Europe, and many of her observations
are still relevant.
Volunteering
as a nurse for the Second Boer War, Mary Kingsley returned to Capetown, South Africa
in the late 1890s where she died of typhoid on June 3, 1900. In England between
journeys, she had met Rudyard Kipling, striking up a friendship of mutual
respect and admiration. In her work, Kingsley often quoted Kipling. At her
death, Kipling gave her eulogy before her burial at sea with full military honors.
About her
own writing, Mary Kingsley was humble and humorously self-deprecating, as the
following story illustrates:
Alas! I am hampered with bad method of expression. I cannot
show you anything clearly and neatly. I have to show you a series of pictures
of things, and hope you will get from those pictures the impression which is
the truth. I dare not set myself up to tell you the truth. … It is a repetition
of the difficulty a friend of mine and myself had over a steam launch called
the Dragon Fly, whose internal health was chronically poor, and subject to bad
attacks. Well, one afternoon, he and I had to take her out to the home-going
steamer, and she had suffered that afternoon in the engines, and when she
suffered anywhere she let you know it. We did what we could for her, in the
interests of humanity and ourselves; we gave her lots of oil, and fed her with
delicately-chopped wood; but all to but little avail. So both our tempers being
strained when we got to the steamer, we told her what the other one of us had
been saying about the Dragon Fly. The purser of the steamer thereon said “that
people who said things like those about a poor inanimate steam launch were
fools with a flaming hot future, and lost souls entirely.” We realised that our
observations had been imperfect; and so, being ever desirous of improving
ourselves, we offered to put the purser on shore in the Dragon Fly. We knew she
was feeling still much the same, and we wanted to know what he would say when
jets of superheated steam played on him. He came, and they did; and when they
did, you know, he said things I cannot repeat. Nevertheless, things of the
nature of our own remarks, but so much finer of the kind, that we regarded him
with awe when he was returning thanks to the “poor inanimate steam launch”; but
it was when it came to his going ashore, gladly to leave us and her, that we
found out what that man could say; and we morally fainted at his remarks made
on discovering that he had been sitting in a pool of smutty oil, which she had
insidiously treated him to, in order to take some of the stuffing out of him
about the superior snow-whiteness of his trousers. Well, that purser went off
the scene in a blue flame; and I said to my companion, “Sir, we cannot say
things like that.” “Right you are, Miss Kingsley,” he said sadly; “you and I
are only fit for Sunday school entertainments.”
Mary
Kingsley wrote two books, Travels in West
Africa, published in 1897, and West
African Studies, published in 1899, and she published several articles. Her
writing was descriptive and full of detail about the surroundings and
observations of the people she encountered. The humor infusing her writing makes
reading her work still a joy today.
Jenni, what a fascinating post. Imagine her travels in those long skirts! Thanks for giving us a slice of history not covered in textbooks.
ReplyDeleteThanks, Patricia. I first read her books about 15 years ago and was fascinated by the fact that she turned her life on its head, threw out expectations about a woman's place, and held her own with the men she encountered. And those long skirts saved her when she fell into a pit with spears for catching game. Amazing!
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