Travels in West Africa by Mary Kingsley (review)

Towards the end of the nineteenth century, at which time West Africa was still dubbed the "white man's grave" because of high mortality rate among its European visitors, the region was still an unpopular destination for British officials working for the empire. This reality, coupled with the fact that the British colonial civil service was essentially all male, meant that European voyages to and narratives about Africa were the domain of men. Of the few European female explorers to make the journey to West-Central Africa, none made a greater impact on her writing than Mary Kingsley. Her sojourn into the region and, her observations and encounters formed the subject of one of the classic texts in African studies, Travels in West Africa.

The book's chapter organization follows the trajectory of Kingsley's mostly coastal 1894–95 sojourn into West Africa, beginning in Liverpool, England, with stops in Sierra Leone, Gold Coast, Fernando Po (Equatorial Guinea), Gabon, and finally ending in the Bay of Amboises, Cameroun. Unlike other travel narratives of the period, by visiting these five areas, Kingsley was able to give us a glimpse into the lives of the different peoples she encountered. Like the trajectory of her journey, every chapter is an exploration into the lives of coastal Africans, giving ethnographic insight into various peoples and cultures. The result is twenty-two chapters, many of which tackle different geographic parts of the region. Beyond simply being daring, the seeming ease and familiarity with which Kingsley moves across the West–Central African coast was facilitated by an earlier voyage to the region in 1893. Kingsley's familiarity with parts of the region comes across in her thick descriptions of the everyday practices and beliefs of the populations she encounters, especially in chapters 2 through 10.

As numerous historians have noted, the switch to legitimate trade led to social changes in these societies, a situation that greatly altered economic and gerontocratic structures. The timing of Kingsley's travels at the twilight of the nineteenth century coincided with vast changes that were taking place along the West African coast. Most important, Kingsley's text allows us to see the dynamics at work along the coast of West Africa following the abolition of the trans-Atlantic slave trade and the coming into being of "legitimate trade." Her account highlights the vast economic, social, political, and religious changes that had become part of West African life following contact with foreigners, both Africans and Europeans. It is strange, however, that despite her own portrayal of the dynamism that belied the stagnant view of Africa that many of her European counterparts held, Kingsley struggles to extricate herself from this point of view.

Among the strengths of the book is Kingsley's attention to the religious beliefs and practices, or fetish as it was called then, of West Africans. Much more than her descriptions of the land and waters she traversed, it is her depictions of the fetish that one gets a fuller sense of how religion interfaced with every aspect of African life, from the political to the social. Devoting as many as five chapters to the topic, she offers rich details of religious life, particularly among the Twi-speaking peoples of the Gold Coast, where she is guided by the work of E. B. Ellis, who had previously written about them. Perhaps the inordinate attention to the indigenous religious beliefs was in accordance with the popular colonial view that African life was primarily guided by the fetish.

Despite the depth and breadth of the text, there are some glaring omissions. Among the more curious omissions in Travels in West Africa is a discussion of European colonialism in West–Central Africa. At the time of her travels, when European powers were close to formally annexing their West–Central African colonies, a situation characterized by experimentation of governance policies and conflicts. Kingsley's engagement with and treatment of colonialism, however, was too cursory. Even in chapter...