Travels in West Africa

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 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...) show more but otherwise it's an amazing tale of the adventures of an amazing woman. show less

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 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.

She shows a lot of courage and curiosity. She taught herself to handle both large and small canoes, learned and enjoyed piloting both a cargo ship downriver, and a sailing ship offshore. She negotiated a peaceful solution to several altercations between show more cannabals she was travelling with and those of other canabalistic tribes they encountered.

Her explorations were in what is now Gabon and were in the lowland portion, except for one episode climbing a Cameroon mountain.

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

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 judgmentalism than most of her contemporaries. Her style is witty and often self-deprecating.

En este segundo viaje, cuyas increíbles peripecias narra con humor, Mary Kingsley remontó en canoa el río Ogowé, en Gabón, hasta el país de los caníbales fang, para lo cual tuvo que atravesar pantanos, a veces a nado, y enfrentarse, sombrilla en mano, al peligro de los cocodrilos. Donado por César Pescador Galindo

> Babelio : https://www.babelio.com/livres/Kingsley-Une-odyssee-africaine/197699

> Voyageuse perspicace et efficace.
—R. Kapuściński