A TRIBUTE TO MISS MARY KINGSLEY.
Journo2 of the African Society. (Macmillan and Co. 6s.)—It is seldom perhaps that a memorial takes the form which would have appealed most to the person commemorated. The African Society, "founded in memory of Mary Kingsley," "that quietly heroic woman," as one of her friends aptly styles her, is an exception to the general rule. For the aims and objects of the Society as stated on p. 21 of their Journal, the investigation and study of the native question in Africa, are those which that much-travelled African traveller had most at heart. Although her actual wanderings were chiefly confined to West Africa, yet the interests of the aboriginal African races as a whole were ever uppermost in her thoughts. Her wonderful powers of sympathy and understanding the needs of others were not only lavished on the blacks, but extended to her personal friends, and to all whose troubles she could share or alleviate ; and her remarkable faculty for undertaking distasteful tasks from which others shrunk is illustrated by the fact that she actually met her death, not, as she had often dreamt, on the Dark Continent surrounded by her dusky friends, but while nursing the fever-stricken Boer prisoners, a race peculiarly notorious for their treatment of the natives. The first number of the African Society's Journal begins, as is most fitting, with an appreciation of Mary Kingsley from the pen of her friend Mrs. J. R. Green. Starting with an eloquent tribute to Miss Kingsley's noble character, the rest of the article embodies in clear and concise language the aims which she had most at heart,—her studies of native life and native laws, of fetish and magic, of commercial problems; of, in a word, the native question generally, which is destined in the future, when Boer and Briton, Afrikander and Dutchman, are welded into one white population, to rouse the attention of the whole Empire and call loudly for solution. Yet the somewhat aggressive tone of the article with regard to the white man and his civilisation, and inci- dentally to Imperial ideas in general, does not recall, to the present writer at least, the spirit of that large-hearted, wide-minded woman here commemorated True, she fearlessly exposed the defects ui our system of government in the Crown Colonies, often in unoompromising and unpopular terms ; but she did not herself belittle her country and her country men, or the benefits of civis ligation, whatever evils it brings in its train, although so ardent an upholder of all that was good in the native customs and ways of life. For the very reason perhaps that her soul was con- progress in the advance of the white man, and could honour, even sumed with a burning zeal for justice and truth, she could see where she most disagreed with them, well-meant if misdirected efforts to change the standards and ideals of the black races. The trader—as we knew from her own lips, and see again in the letters quoted by the Journal before us—the much-abused government official, and the missionary, were amongst those West African friends of whom she spoke with no less warmth than of her black followers ; but it is needless to enlarge here, where her personality and ideas are familiar, on the sympathy she gave to white and black alike ; a sympathy and interest extended, as Mrs. Green points out, to lower forms of animal life,—witness her ardour in collecting rare fishes (besides her love of tickling - trout in English streams), or the huge lizard which she brought back from Africa in triumph, and conveyed on the top of a four- wheeled cab to the "Zoo," where, alas ! it soon pined away in the foggy London winter. Colonel Stopford's interesting article on" Glimpses of West African Law and Custom" reminds us of her intimate knowledge with regard to these intricate subjects, and recalls one of her favourite stories, that of the enforced halt in a cannibal village, where for five and half hours she palavered with the chief, bringing forth point after point of that involved and difficult native law of hospitality to a stranger, which she carried as it were at her fingers' ends, in the effort to save one of her bearers, whose family was guilty of a blood feud with the villagers. The bearer clung round her knees while she and the chief talked, the other followers meantime somewhat brutally imploring " Missy " to continue their journey and give the fellow up, he no good, he bad man." In the end, however, "Missy's" knowledge of native lore and prejudices saved the man from a • grisly death, and the whole party went on their way rejoicing. Miss Kingsley's lectures are alluded to by Mrs. Green ; one illustrating her knowledge not only of native law, but of the domestic life, may be recalled to the memory of those few persons privileged to be present. The address was given in a private house to a small society of ladies, where, with only members of her own sex present, Mary Kingsley put before them in her racy an picturesque style the whole position of African women, leaving her hear srs convinced not only that the African woman was the better man of the two, but also that women's rights had existed on the Dark Continent long before they were even dreamed of by civilised white races. One touching proof of her black friends' confidence in her probity was given by a native woman who confided all her savings, about 12 10s., to Miss Kingsley, with the commission to buy a trousseau in Europe for her husband ;. the trousseau consisted of a tall silk hat, a pair of trousers, and a blue tie. Space forbids more than a passing reference to the other interesting _papers in this Journal, notably to Sir H. H. Johnston's most practical and useful "Notes on African Subjects- of Special Interest."
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