The Strong Brown God: The Story of the Niger River

A popular history of the European (largely English and French) exploration and exploitation of the Niger River written by a veteran of the Algerian War, The Strong Brown God is an entertaining read generously seasoned with amusing, distressing, or disgusting anecdotes (viz. one ship's surgeon drinking off at a draught a glass of black vomit collected from a fatally ill crew member in the name of improving the ship's morale; p. 212) and afflicted with a too-liberal use of the adjective "Victorian" as shorthand for certain traits of the Englishmen who ventured to West Africa (particularly before and immediately after Victoria even ascended the throne...) and too-pat conclusions (such as de Gramont's contention that the "Victorian" belief show more "in the obligation of a superior society to help inferior peoples...was in fact necessary to justify the expansion required by the industrial revolution in its search for new markets;" p. 193). Despite these flaws, and despite certain other shortcomings (Captain Sir Richard Francis Burton is mentioned only twice, despite the fact that he served as the British consul to Fernando Po and spent much of his assignment exploring West Africa, obtaining enough material for four books), this is a book that anyone at all interested in the region or in 19th century English and French history will want to read. De Gramont's conclusions that the English stumbled into their West African empire in the search for trade, and that the French stumbled into theirs thanks to several French officers' dreams of Napoleonism, seem more sound than some of his other, more facile ones.

As a further note of interest to Burtonophiles, the armchair geographer James McQueen (variously styled "M'Queen" and "MacQueen") gets a brief mention here as having deduced the correct source of the Niger (p. 176); McQueen of course helped stoke the fires of the origin of the Nile controversy in which Burton and John Hanning Speke played their part.

Sanche de Gramont has since changed his name to Ted Morgan. show less