1 OCTOBER 1932, Page 23

Mary Kingsley

THE charming memoir of Mary Kingsley, written from per- sonal knowledge by Mr. Gwynn, should revive for the younger generation the name and fame of that truly remarkable woman. Her public career was brief. Until she was thirty she lived quietly.at home in Highgate, Bexley and Cambridge, helping her mother and acting as secretary to her father, George Kingsley, traveller and ethnologist, who had something of the talent of his brothers Charles and Henry, the novelists. When her parents died in 1890 she kept house for her brother, but in 1892 visited the Canaries. On this, her first serious journey abroad, she heard much about West Africa and resolved to go there in order to study African religion, of which her father knew little. She made two long tours in the interior of West Africa, especially in French Congo, between 1893 and 1895, travelling alone as a trader with a few native porters and living on native fare. In these difficult and dangerous journeys she acquired an intimate knowledge of the African mind, and she poured out that knowledge in two fascinating books, Travels in West Africa of 1897 and West African Studies of 1899, which were the delight of the general public and won the admiration of experts. She became involved in a sharp controversy with the Colonial Office, which had imposed a hut-tax in Sierra Leone contrary, as she maintained, to African tribal law, and she failed to induce Mr. Joseph Chamberlain to remedy the grievance. When the South African War broke out she went to Cape Town, and there, while nursing Boer prisoners, caught typhoid from them and died in 1900. .

Hers was a brief career, but Mr. Gwynn surely errs on the side of caution when he hesitates to .emphasize her enduring influence for good on our West African dependencies. They are now regarded as model tropical colonies. It has become common to contrast them favourably with Kenya, for example. - We hear little or nothing of them because they prosper and are free fiothinternal troubles. Things were very different forty years ago. when Mary Kingsley travelled in West Africa. Then the. old-Eashioned and inelastic Crown Colony system was in force; Native usages were not under- stood nor inquired into. Officials might sometimes consult the missionaries but contemned the white traders. Unrest was endemic and had to be repressed by costly little wars, as in the hut-tax episode in Sierra Leone. If nowadays Mary Kingsley's main principles are followed, if serious efforts are made to rule the natives through their own chiefs and to frame laws that will not violate native notions of property and the like, we may surely infer that her books and lectures have had something to do with the very salutary change. The Spectator may confess to a very special interest in Mary Kingsley's life, for. it was in these columns that she first took up her pen in defence of the African Negro, in reply to an article questioning the possibility of elevating him, and it was here that she pleaded earnestly in the years 1897-99 for a justertieatment and a fuller understanding of the Africans under our rule. She formed a cordial friendship" with Mr. St. Loe Strachey, who was then editor of the Spectator, and some of her private letters to him, printed by Mr. Gwynn, are illuminating for her character and opinions. She was independent, in her views and fearless in her expression of them, so that she did not fit into any groove. She respected the hard-working missionaries, who strove to understand the natives, but she had nothing but contempt for missionaries of the sentimental or dogmatic type who seemed to despise their flocks. She had a strong liking for the hard-living European traders of the West Coast, whom it was the fashion for officials and missionaries alike to condemn. She did not see anything morally wrong in the sale of spirits to the natives, whom she refused to regard as grown-up children. What she desired from the colonial administrations was judice guided by knowledge ; and, in her opinion, it was not forthcoming.

FrOm the public standpoint Mary Kingsley made the West African not only interesting but also extremely amusing. Her narrations of her travels are as racy and uncommon as the tales of the old buccaneers and pirates in which she delighted. She had many narrow escapes but she made light of danger, whether it was from crocodiles or from cannibals. She had a lively and whimsical sense of humour, and a completz dis- regard for the ordinary conventions of dress and deportment. In.London and tropical Africa alike she wore the same black Victorian gown, with a long skirt, and she used to argue that her skirt had saved her more than once from serious injury when she fell onto the spikes-in a leopard trap while charitably letting the animal escape. She made fun of herself as well as of the natives, and in her light-hearted way made the reader feel that the African was a HUM and a cousin—perhaps not a brother—with a very definite set of laws and beliefs and traditions, and above all with a strong sense of -a spirit world always about him. Mary Kingsley talked and often wrote in a peculiar vivacious slang, odd indeed in a young lady from London suburbs and Cambridge. But she was widely and deeply read, and when she liked she could write the most eloquent and picturesque prose, as some of Mr. Gwynn's many quotations from her books show. Those who know her books will be delighted to meet some of their favourite pas- sages again ; to those who do not know her work Mr. Gwynn's memoir will be a revelation, for Mary Kingsley as a writer of travel is unique.