Looking for a River, or, Travelers in Africa

Missionary Excursion into the Blue Mountains, by Thomas Arbousset. Ed. and trans. David Ambrose and Albert Brutsch. Morija, Lesotho: Morija Archives, 1991. 219 pp.

Water Music, by T. Coraghessan Boyle. c 1981. New York: Penguin, 1983. 437 pp.

Out of Our Minds: Reason and Madness in the Exploration of Central Africa, by Johannes Fabian. Berkeley: U of California P, 2000. xv + 320 pp.

Travels in the Interior Districts of Africa, by Mungo Park. Ed. and intro. by Kate Ferguson Marsters. Durham: Duke UP, 2000.vii + 407 pp.

Voyages de découvertes en Afrique: Anthologie 1790-1890, ed. Alain Ricard. Paris: Robert Laffont, 2000. xxvii + 1059 pp.

In a laconic sentence, deflating all that can make travel writing imperialistic and self-aggrandizing, Mungo Park tells of a guide he hired in West Africa "who, when he was told, that I had come from a great distance, and through many dangers, to behold the Joliba river, naturally inquired, if there were no rivers in my own country, and whether one river was not like another" (199). To which one immediately responds, as both traveler and reader, that not all rivers are alike; the ones we know at home tend to look much the same, while those we read about seem infinitely alluring. And yet this sentence, appearing a little more than halfway through Park's Travels in the Interior Districts of Africa is intended to remind us that its author is a sober, scientifically inclined traveler in search of facts that, while commonplace knowledge among the inhabitants of sub-Saharan Africa, had long eluded European geographers. To reduce the motives for Park's travels to a single question--does the Joliba or Niger flow in an easterly or westerly direction--strips his Travels of much that makes it so compelling: its remarkably precise description of the people, flora, and fauna he observed on his journey; its unsparing depiction of the most brutalized form of the slave trade; its record of sheer human perseverance in the face of disease, cultural hostility, bad luck, and most every other obstacle one can imagine. This new edition of the Travels reprints the second edition of 1799 and is most welcome for coming with an illuminating introduction and highly useful notes by Kate Ferguson Marsters. Fully informed in recent work on postcolonial theory, especially as it relates to travel writing, Marsters makes certain necessary points (in the wake of Mary Louise Pratt and others) about the ways Park's Travels can be read as an early manifestation of the "imperial eye" that would soon colonize and exploit all that it beheld. Yet Marsters is also alive to the sheer adventure of Park's Travels; she understands why it stirred the restlessness of later generations of readers and made them into travelers to Africa and elsewhere.

None of these later travelers had quite the same chance as did Park to resolve a mystery that had tantalized the geographical imagination of Europe since the time Herodotus first wrote about a river in the west of Africa. This river would have many names: the common form among those who lived near it was Joliba or "the Great Water, or great river"; the form favored by Europeans, both ancient and modern, was the Niger or River of the Black People or Ethiopians; the one used by Moors and Arabs was "Neel Abeed, the River of Slaves" (all discussed by Major Rennell in his essay on Park's geography; in Marsters 319: n.1). That one river could have so many different names suggests why European travelers saw it as an object of desire, for by none of them was it like any river at home.

When Park learned one day that he would finally see the Joliba or Niger on the following morning, he spent a sleepless night kept awake by the thought his desire was about to be fulfilled and by the "troublesome buzzing of musketoes...