A review by cmjustice
Travels in West Africa by Mary Henrietta Kingsley

3.0

This was one plucky lady. Mostly excellent narrative of her adventures in locations from a time long past. Her observations and opinions from extensive visits into the interior and along the coast remain a record of the attitudes, beliefs and expectations of an imperialist culture convinced of it's own superiority. Her scathingly pithy, sometimes complimentary reflections on the local characters she met give good insight into the person she was and the folks who lived and visited west Africa. Much has altered yet the geography continues to rule.
Once past the dreadful preface she occasionally produced some lovely commentary:

" The day closed with a magnificent dramatic beauty. dead ahead of us, up through a bank of dun-coloured mist rose the moon, a great orb of crimson, spreading down the oil-like, still river, a streak of blood red reflection. Right astern, the sun sank down into the mist, a vaster orb of crimson, and when he had gone out of view, sent up flushes of amethyst, gold carmine and serpent-green, before he left the moon in undisputed possession of the black purple sky"

and

" Before boiling the water you can carefully filter it if you like. A good filter is a very fine thing for clearing drinking water of hippopotami,crocodiles, catfish etc., and I daresay it will stop back sixty per cent. of the live or dead African natives that may be in it; but if you think it is going to stop back the microbe of the marsh fever - my good sir, you are mistaken."

"Next in danger to the diseases come the remedies for them."
A bit of a slog to get through, this edition is missing 9 chapters and 3 appendices possibly to make it more palatable. I might have enjoyed reading about the Orthoptera, Hymenoptera, and Hemiptra. The collection of which was, after all, why she went there in the first place.