Moving Dangerously
By Janelle Rodriques
‘Only Me’: The death of the author in Mary Kingsley’s Travels in West Africa
While she insisted that she was ‘not bent on discoursing on [her] psychological state,”[1] Mary Kingsley confided to a friend that she ‘went to West Africa to die.’[2] Written and published at the height of European colonial expansion into Africa, Travels in West Africa (1897) was a refreshing contrast to contemporary discourse of exploration, which relished in demonising the Dark Continent. While she was influenced by, and eventually became part of, Victorian colonial conversation, she took great pains to distinguish herself within it. She wrote ‘only on things that [she knew] from personal experience and very careful observation,’[3] and insisted on an informal, ‘unscientific’ style of prose. When she does appear in her narrative, it is mostly as a comic figure, not as lord of all she surveys.
Travels in West Africa by Mary Kingsley
Travels in West Africa changed the way Africa – and Empire – was written. Kinglsey’s irony, self-parody and humour subverted the trope of ‘Spinster Abroad,’ and attacked imperial ideology’s supposed moral and religious justifications for conquest as dishonest and dishonourable. The protagonists of her travelogue are West Africans, not an exaggerated heroine of her own imagination. Kingsley challenged the canon by sacrificing herself to the narrative.
Imperial authority had always been a masculine pursuit, but had become so dominant to be accepted as universal. Kingsley highlighted the hypocrisy of that rhetoric, which did not speak for women, and excluded Africans almost completely; proving to us that the ‘civilising mission,’ was fundamentally misguided.
Janelle Rodriques is a first-year PhD candidate for the School of English Literature, Language and Linguistics, University of Newcastle (UK), researching representations of Obeah (an African-inspired Caribbean religious system) in twentieth century West Indian fiction. Her interests include African/Caribbean religious expression, the conflicts between orality and textuality in cultural production, resistance literature and literature of the Diaspora.
