Travels in West Africa [Folio Society]

by Mary H. Kingsley

Other authorsElspeth Huxley (Editor)

Hardcover, 1976

Status

Available

Call number

916.604312

Genres

Collection

Your library

Publication

Folio Society (1976), Edition: 1St Edition, Hardcover, 276 pages

Description

History. Multi-Cultural. Travel. Nonfiction. HTML: Supported by a family inheritance that gave her �500 a year, Mary Henrietta Kingsley traveled to Africa to complete the book her father had started. The subject was the culture of Africa and Kingsley stayed with local people while she learned to survive in the African jungles, studied cannibal tribes, discovered new species of fish, and climbed Mount Cameroon by a route untouched by any European before her. Kingsley's ideas greatly influenced European ideas about Africa and the African people and her 1897 account, Travels in West Africa, quickly became a best-seller..

User reviews

LibraryThing member billsearth

This book is a great source of the culture of the native Africans in the Congo during the late 1800s. The book is exciting as it describes many mini-xpecitions into the unknown where white people were not known by many natives. The main tribes encountered were cannabals and difficult to move

through safely. The forests and hills and swamps are well described. The author has considerable humor, often traveling without any other white person but with a band of black men of mixed tribes. This is a good adventure book and it enlightens the reader of the way fo life and the values of the native people back then.

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LibraryThing member amerynth

What Mary Kingsley did was pretty incredible.... in 1893, she decided -- skirts and all-- to travel to West Africa to explore, collect fish and learn more about the religion of native people. Her account "Travels in West Africa" follows her adventures as she traipses through the jungle, paddles

down rivers in canoes, and hikes up a mountain in the Cameroons in a storm. Her spirit of adventure and pluck is incredibly admirable and pulls together a wide ranging story, as she travels across the country and battles mosquitoes and leeches, is stalked by wild animals and meets with tribes who are shocked to see a white woman emerge from the forest. Sometimes the book gets a little bogged down in detail (...it could use a bit of an edit...) but otherwise it's an amazing tale of the adventures of an amazing woman.

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LibraryThing member kaitanya64

Kingsley is possibly unique in her perspective as a single white woman traveling alone in Africa in the late 19th century. While her views on race and culture are more narrow than ours, I think she conveys considerably more respect for the Africans she works with and considerably less Victorian

judgmentalism than most of her contemporaries. Her style is witty and often self-deprecating.

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