Travels in Southern Africa, Vol. 2 (review)

Perhaps the most telling moment in this book occurs when Adulphe Delegorgue, having set sail on a British ship from Cape Town to London in 1844, visits St. Helena. There, midway between the two continents of his adult life, Africa and Europe, Delegorgue sees the tomb of Napoleon Bonaparte and describes his compatriot as the "colossus of glory" (284). Through his homage to Napoleon some twenty years after his death, Delegorgue fixes his historical moment and identifies the model by which he fashioned his persona as intrepid explorer, great white hunter, meticulous naturalist (remembered in the names of various species including a type of butterfly, Lycaena Delegorguei), and lover of animals. In this self-depiction, Delegorgue is above all a man of destiny who lives the "dangerous life" (213) and savors the freedom offered by southern Africa, unlike the colonial Boers and English whom he sees as hopelessly unimaginative and domesticated. The Boers are slightly superior to the English, he admits, but only because they were unmatched as oxen-drivers and were not the persecutors of Napoleon.

This volume completes the translations of Delegorgue's memoir into English begun in 1990. Fleur Webb offers a readable, neutral prose with enough anachronistic touches to remind us that Delegorgue was a nineteenth-century romantic and not a twentieth-century follower of Hemingway. Stephanie Alexander and Bill Guest supply a useful introduction as well as appendices and indices that give the reader access to the full range of topics covered by Delegorgue: the habits of big-game animals, especially elephants, lions, and hippos; the colonial skirmishes between Boers and English in the early 1840s (when "white newcomers were tearing each other apart against the background of virgin nature," 47); the practices and beliefs of the various peoples living in southern Africa, especially the Zulu; the bad faith of Christian missionaries, most notably those from England; the virtues and defects of various high-powered hunting guns; the numerous species of birds previously unrecorded by European naturalists; etc., etc.

It is a measure of Delegorgue's nineteenth-century complexity to say that some of his most memorable passages are celebrations of massacring elephants (all the more celebratory because he views the elephant as his noblest adversary) and precise descriptions of the birds he admires (all the more precise because he boasts of being the first European to study them). About this contradiction, Delegorgue admits: "I was perfectly conscious of the mischief I was doing but I was a hunter first and foremost" (4). And this from a man who has just admitted that the value of the elephant's ivory is small when compared to its worth as a living animal.

Delegorgue's essential and perhaps unredeemable mixture of violent hunter and admiring naturalist can make him seem very remote for us. So does his racism. Like many who claim moral superiority over Africans as a whole, he is quick to sentimentalize, even rhapsodize those Africans who served him faithfully as gun bearers. The fraternity of blood sport seems to have run deeper for him than beliefs about race. Delegorgue can appear so thoroughly a European of his time that it may seem unnecessary to read his memoir to know him. Though understandable, this response is not at all fair, for his writing is often sufficiently precise and evocative to rise above the conventions and limitations of his time and culture. Toward the end, Delegorgue distances himself from all the travel liars who have written about Africa by claiming of his book: "errors are possible, but no calculated mistakes" (274). When he tells us what he has observed and studied on his travels, Delegorgue becomes something more memorable than a little Napoleon set on decimating the wildlife of southern Africa.