Call number
916.604 KIN
Collection
Publication
National Geographic (2002), Edition: Reprint, 384 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.
Subjects
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
Show More
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. Show Less
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
Show More
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. Show Less
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
Show More
judgmentalism than most of her contemporaries. Her style is witty and often self-deprecating. Show Less
LibraryThing member mnicol
“One thing about Negro and Bantu races is very certain, and that is their lives are dominated by a profound belief in witchcraft and its effects” Chapter Ten: The World of the Spirit – page 178
The book combines accounts of unbelievably arduous forest, river and mountain journeys (which she
Her account is lively, amusing and often self-deprecating although I was disturbed that she found the murderous colonial governor of Cameroon, Herr von Puttkamer “exceedingly good company”.
The book combines accounts of unbelievably arduous forest, river and mountain journeys (which she
Show More
made in sole charge of her local bearers and guides) with disturbing comments on cannibalism, witchcraft and the fate of twins born in West Africa. She died aged only 38 – of enteric fever from nursing Boer prisoners of war – and was (at her earlier request) buried at sea off Simon’s Town.Her account is lively, amusing and often self-deprecating although I was disturbed that she found the murderous colonial governor of Cameroon, Herr von Puttkamer “exceedingly good company”.
Show Less
Pages
384
ISBN
0792266382 / 9780792266389