The Journey of Major Rayne on the Banks of Turkwell River: Silent Political Assignment and Travel Writing
I
When I read The Ivory Raiders, I was intrigued by the plot of the story, the intention of the author, Major Henry A. Rayne, to document the intricate process of political assignment and colonial intervention in the "lawless chaos" of wild African landscape and make it accessible to European readers. The encounter transpired on the banks of the Turkwell River in northern Kenya Colony, bordering the western shores of Lake Rudolf (Lake Turkana), where Rayne triumphantly captured the fugitive Mahomadi bin Abdullah, an Arab from Muscat, for engaging in illicit ivory trade. The narrative plot into which the colonial encounter cast itself surfaces in the first 25 pages of the book, and the story of Major Rayne's encounter with Mahomadi bin Abdullah is fascinating.
The Ivory Raiders is essentially a memoir written like a novel, with scenes and dialogues that suit the "conventional narrative expectations" (Morrison 1992:vi) of the colonial literature (Pratt 1992; Fabian 2000). There are well-placed descriptive passages and strategically-placed detailed dialogues and actions, which necessitate and legitimate Rayne's rather risky intervention. The very context of the plot presupposes the "imperially correct outcome" as the risk-taking colonial officer wins the battle and tells the story from his own point of view, in Mary Lois Pratt's (1992:87) sense of the term. Clearly, through his narrative strategies Rayne tells of his fascinating but risky engagement in the midst of a wild African landscape, which seems to be familiar to the author. His association [End Page 271] of Africa with the pleasure of adventure and heroism is coupled with the images of loathsome feminine Africans and Arabs.1
In depicting the powerfully repellent feelings that the presence of Africans and Arabs evokes in him on the banks of the river, Rayne feminizes and otherizes both Mahomadi bin Abdullah and his African servant and accomplice Juma. As the narrative plot unfolds from the beginning of the journey from Mbali in Uganda Protectorate to its end on the banks of Turkwell river, near Lodwar in Turkana land, we see how Rayne disdains the Arabs and the Africans, while still engaging in controlled and limited relationships with them. In his perspective, the Arabs and the Africans are the symbolic configuration of "nonwhiteness" in Morrison's sense of the term (1992). These imageries take shape and fully develop in the narrative climax which culminates with Rayne's anticipated triumphant encounter with Mahomadi bin Abdullah.
On the banks of the dry river bed, rhetorical gestures of Rayne's conquest and the associative language of his disdain towards the Africans and the Arabs, accompanied by the image of nonwhiteness, powerfully evoke and enforce signs of racial superiority. The narrative of the encounter invites reading and interpretation of Rayne's imagination, which produced the interesting encounter episode. Here I discuss how embedded the assumptions of orientalist language are in Rayne's literary enterprise.2 The narrative of the encounter on the banks of the Turkwell River presents a rich text for exploring the conventions of colonial representation. When these are taken seriously as agency, the narrative of encounter found in The Ivory Raiders offers unprecedented opportunity to comprehend the force of imaginative acts in colonial texts as delineated by Pratt (1992) and Fabian (2000).
II
How could references to Rayne's punitive expeditions by historians dismissive of his encounter? How could the history of this region be complete [End Page 272] without the analysis of the encounter? Failure to examine the encounter makes it possible for scholars to evade the responsibility of looking carefully at the conceptual significance of the encounter. This paper can be described as a study in travel writing genres, as well as a critique of the ideology on the conventions of representation regarding colonial encounters, such as the one...
