Christopher L. Bennett

Hist 462: Travel, Exploration and Empire

The View from In Between:

Mary Kingsley as Cultural Intermediary

The View from In Between: Mary Kingsley as Cultural Intermediary

Early in her 1899 monograph West African Studies, the Victorian explorer-ethnographer Mary H. Kingsley turns ethnographic convention on its ear. Discussing her voyage to Africa on the British trading vessel Batanga, Kingsley observes, ASome one really ought to write a monograph on the natural history of mariners. They are valuable beings, and their habits are exceedingly interesting. I myself, being already engaged in the study of other organisms, cannot undertake the work; however, I place my observations at the disposal of any fellow naturalist who may have more time, and certainly will have more ability.@ She proceeds to describe the Ametamorphic@ stages in the life cycle of this creature, as well as the characteristic behavior of each stage and, in a slight mixing of metaphors, the animistic tendencies of the tribe.^{^[1]} This passage contains the distinctive elements of Kingsley=s writing style: the dry wit, the deadpan absurdism, the offbeat, subversive viewpoint, and the satirical presentation of herself and her profession. But as is usually true with Kingsley=s voice, it reflects a deeper meaning than humor alone. In this passage, Kingsley looks on her fellow Englishmen (or at least Europeans) as if from an outsider=s point of view, regarding them as she would an exotic culture or an alien species.

Mary Henrietta Kingsley was indeed nearly as much an outsider from Victorian society as from African. A barely legitimate child of a society doctor and a Cockney domestic, she was never truly incorporated into either parent=s culture. As a girl in a male-dominated society, she received virtually no formal education. Her father was generally absent, accompanying his extremely healthy patients on their world travels. Her mother, taken out of her own class but without a husband present to bring her into his, existed in a psychologically erosive limbo, able to teach Mary little about life or the role of a Victorian woman. Kingsley spent most of her childhood in a darkened house, nursing her sickly mother, with her father=s library her only real source of knowledge about the world. Even Victorian society was something she read about rather than inhabiting, little more immediate to her than the far-flung lands explored by Cook, Burton, Livingston and her father. Her identity was the sum of her parents and her books.

So when her parents died within two months of each other in 1892, Kingsley was left adrift. Desperate to escape her confined existence, she determined to leave at her earliest opportunity for the West African lands charted by her explorer heroes. There she found something to give her life meaning: understanding African cultures, explaining them to the British, and advocating their interests against the pressures of imperialism. She fell in love with Africa (though it was perhaps something of an abusive relationship), and felt closer to its people and religions than to her own ancestral ones. Yet she retained Victorian dress and propriety, at least in the persona she presented back home, along with a largely Victorian point of view.

A student of both cultures but an integral member of neither, Mary Kingsley was a creature of the middle ground.^{^[2]} Though this was a difficult and lonely position for her, it enabled her to function as an effective educator and advocate on African issues. Since she was not locked into Victorian ideas, she was able to appreciate African culture as a valid alternative, rather than a degenerate state to be absorbed into conformity; and yet her familiarity with British culture let her explain African ways in metaphors the British could grasp. She retained prejudices which are jarring to the modern reader, but which are minimal next to those of her contemporaries, and which she brought to bear in unexpected ways. Kingsley=s attitudes and attributes -- her respect for African culture, her disdain for Christianity and its missionaries, and an adventurous spirit incompatible with expected feminine behavior -- were downright shocking to Victorian norms. Yet through the ways in which she presented herself to the public, wryly subverting her own most subversive attributes, Kingsley managed to win great popularity and acceptance in spite of said attributes. As I will argue, her very detachment from Victorian society was what enabled her to navigate its expectations and present her eccentricity in terms it could accept.

Kingsley was outspoken in her opposition to missionary efforts and assimilationist rule, insisting that British interests could be better served through relating to the Africans as trading partners and leaving their culture as it was, governing indirectly through mutually profitable alliances with local authorities. Her advocacy laid the groundwork for later policies of indirect rule.

Modern historiography has not closely explored Kingsley=s intermediary status or its relevance to her achievements in cultural mediation. Generally coming from a feminist perspective, it seeks to position Kingsley within the clash between exponents of conventional Victorian female roles and the burgeoning feminist movement of the era. Her failure to fit neatly into either group is presented by historians such as Dea Birkett^{^[3]} and Lila Marz Harper^{^[4]} as a paradox which they seek to resolve by categorizing her as one, the other, or some chimerical blend of both. This emphasis on gender issues tends to neglect the issues of greatest importance to Kingsley herself: the ethnographic study of African culture, the education of the British public in its findings, and the use of it to further improved relations between the two societies. This paper concentrates more on Kingsley=s roles as a researcher, educator and cultural mediator, and examines her life, her writings and her public persona to illustrate her existence on a cultural boundary and how that position served these roles. Although the issue of gender relations is not one I seek to examine in depth, I intend to define Kingsley=s position between genders as an extension of her in-between status in other areas. Rather than attempting to subvert existing gender categories, she found a middle ground in which she could function as a bridge between them, bringing fresh insights to the scientific field. As a creature of the middle ground, Kingsley possessed unusual flexibility, receptiveness to new ideas, and the ability to move and interpret between cultures.

Formative years

Mary Henrietta Kingsley=s entire life was defined by the tension between categories, beginning with the very circumstances of her birth. She arrived on October 13, 1862, exactly four days after the wedding of her father, society doctor and professional dilettante George Kingsley, and her mother, Cockney domestic worker Mary Bailey -- placing her on the borderline of legitimacy as well as that of social class.^{^[5]}

Securing legitimacy for their child was apparently the primary reason for the Kingsley=s marriage, for George spent little time with his wife and children (Mary=s brother Charles, named for his noted uncle the novelist, arrived in 1866). Instead he spent most of his time travelling abroad, driven by an intense curiosity and wanderlust -- as Mary put it in her introduction to a posthumous collection of his writings, Aloving to be in the wild heart of Nature, far away from the clamour and turmoil of crowded cities, listening to the lore of the forests or the voices of the sea.@ Since George mostly followed this yearning, Mary described him as Acertainly the happiest of the three [Kingsley] brothers.@^{^[6]} As much as she romanticizes his wanderlust, her portrait is not entirely flattering. After quoting extensively from his letters, she diplomatically insinuates, AHis devotion to his wife the letters I have quoted faintly show.@ Later on the same page she states quite bluntly: ABut I am fully convinced his taking this view of life really caused the illness which killed my mother. For months at a time she was kept in an unbroken strain of nervous anxiety about him.@^{^[7]}

Indeed, as Frank argues, it is unlikely that Mary Bailey was even literate, suggesting that Mary Kingsley acquired her literacy entirely on her own, teaching herself from the eclectic range of books in her father=s library.^{^[9]} These books, covering science, history, ancient languages, travel, sport, religion and the like,^{^[10]} were highly atypical reading for a Victorian girl, placing her on the boundary of conventional gender roles as well as social classes. On those infrequent occasions when her father was present, he fought with his daughter more than he guided her. In her memoir of her father, Mary devotes eight pages to his fiery tantrums, generally in response to the faults he frequently perceived in his daughter -- her inability to control her pet fighting-cocks, her tendency to decorate the fireplace grate with willow-shavings (potentially disastrous when he threw in his still-lit matches, but he always placed the blame solely on Mary), and, most often of all, her competition for the same books he was in the middle of reading.^{^[11]} But it cannot be doubted that he was the principal role model in her life, for she inherited most of his tastes and values: an eclectic love of learning, a craving for danger (Mary said George envied no one but Athe man who had an extra good chance of being killed by a grizzly bear of superior size@^{^[12]}), a repudiation of Christianity in favor of a general sense of divine immanence in nature (Mary uses Goethe=s term Erdgeist in reference to George=s sentiments^{^[13]}), and an abiding faith in the superiority of the British.^{^[14]} In her memoir to him she sings his praises, yet still spells out his faults, often in extensive detail -- suggesting a great ambivalence toward the man. She states there was Aone man only in his generation... George Kingsley can be likened to -- I mean Sir Richard Burton.@^{^[15]} Certainly Burton was one of Mary Kingsley=s own role models;^{^[16]} but one may wonder if she was aware of Burton=s own wife/biographer=s efforts to erase her husband=s dark side from history,^{^[17]} and if the comparison thus held a deliberate double meaning.

Throughout Kingsley=s formative years, she was caught between contradictions: upper and lower classes; male and female roles; her father=s remote dynamism and her mother=s nearby fragility; the exciting, boundless world of her books and the cramped, dreary confines of her everyday life. She was left to find her own balance on these borderlines of identity, and thrived in her own way, becoming one of the great autodidacts of her age; but still she yearned for an escape, for the kind of freedom which made her father, in her eyes, the happiest of the Kingsley clan.

Travels in West Africa

Kingsley=s liberation came through tragedy -- the death of both her parents within three months of each other. Each died as they had lived: George from complications of a fever he had suffered on his travels,^{^[18]} Mary Bailey simply by completing the long wasting-away process which had defined her married life.^{^[19]} No sooner were the funeral arrangements completed than Mary Kingsley began preparing to journey abroad. Africa was her target from the outset, though there have been conflicting theories as to the reason for this -- most of them laid down by Kingsley=s own pen. In her first book, Travels in West Africa, she characterizes it as a whim:

It was in 1893 that, for the first time in my life, I found myself in possession of five or six months which were not heavily forestalled, and feeling like a boy with a new half-crown, I lay about in my mind... as to what to do with them. AGo and learn your tropics,@ said Science. Where on earth am I to go, I wondered... so I got down an atlas and saw that either South America or West Africa must be my destination....^{^[20]}

In a later lecture she claimed, AMy reason for taking up this study was a desire to complete a great book my father... had left at his death unfinished.@^{^[21]} Such a book never existed, except as a vague ambition loosely unifying a mass of scattered notes. Her biographer Frank favors an explanation Kingsley offered in an intimate letter to a friend: A...feeling no one had need of me anymore when my Mother and Father died..., I went down to West Africa to die. West Africa amused me and was kind to me and scientifically interesting and did not want to kill me just then -- I am in no hurry. I don=t care one way or the other for a year of so [sic].@^{^[22]} But the explanation of her journey as an overcomplicated suicide plan is no more satisfying than the others, for like them it fails to take into account Kingsley=s lifelong study of the exploits of the great explorers, particularly Burton and Paul DuChaillu, who had focussed specifically on the area Kingsley chose to explore, the Congo Français. It also fails to take into account Kingsley=s ironic, self-deprecating and often morbid sense of humor. Always modest, she would have rather dismissed her journeys as a form of suicide than acknowledged them as an effort comparable to those of her explorer heroes. Kingsley=s specialty was the African people known as the Fan or Fang, a reputed cannibal tribe of the Ogowé River region. Burton had been fascinated by these people and sought to study them himself, but in the end had spent no more than a day among them.^{^[23]} If Kingsley was motivated to fill in the gaps in any other explorer=s work, it was more likely Burton than George Kingsley -- although, as suggested above, she apparently identified the two with each other. Certainly the deadliness of West Africa was part of its excitement and mystery to Victorian culture, played up by all the explorers to aggrandize their own feats; it is just like Kingsley to take that trope and subvert it at her own expense.

In any case, whether she sought death or not, going abroad was what brought her truly to life. Her first taste of lands and vistas beyond England moved her profoundly, inspiring prose of great beauty:

On the 30th we sighted the Peak of Teneriffe early in the afternoon. It displayed itself, as usual, as an entirely celestial phenomenon. A great many people miss seeing it. Suffering under the delusion that El Pico is a terrestrial affair, they look in vain somewhere about the level of their own eyes, which are striving to penetrate the dense masses of mist that usually enshroud its slopes by day, and then a friend comes along, and gaily points out to the newcomer the glittering white triangle somewhere near the zenith.... The superb cone this afternoon stood out a deep purple against a serpent-green sky, separated from the brilliant blue ocean by a girdle of pink and gold cumulus, while Grand Canary and Lanzarote looked as if they were formed from fantastic-shaped sunset cloud-banks that by some spell had been solidified.^{^[24]}

The Acelestial@ imagery here is no accident. The natural world gave Kingsley a sense of the numinous which churchgoing never could. She had inherited her father=s Erdgeist.

Although Kingsley was inspired by such explorers as DuChaillu and Burton, and in many ways followed in their footsteps, she nonetheless rejected much of their approach, and in her writings brought a subtle yet scathing satire to bear on the conventions they laid down. The stereotype of the African explorer was a bold, masculine hunter, sallying forth to confront fearsome beasts and natives, fighting them tooth and nail, and coming back home with numerous samples of wondrous new species, all suitably stuffed and mounted for display. Kingsley dryly satirized this convention, referring to both the headhunters and packrats she encountered on her travels as Afellow collectors.@^{^[25]} She herself never Acollected@ as aggressively as her forebears, preferring to watch live specimens rather than shoot them. This afforded her insights missed by naturalists such as DuChaillu, who saw every new species as a fearsome aggressor needing to be felled in mid-charge (or at least described them that way afterwards to justify shooting them down). DuChaillu, the first European on record as observing a (temporarily) live gorilla, created the stereotype of the primate as a vicious mankiller, even ascribing fangs to the herbivorous species.^{^[26]} Modern primatology tells us that his descriptions of gorilla aggression are technically accurate, but that if he was attacked, he must have provoked them first. Kingsley merely observed gorillas from hiding, and reported much less bellicose behavior; indeed, when startled by her African guide=s sneezes, the gorilla band retreated swiftly rather than attacking. Kingsley reported wryly, AAfter this sporting adventure, we returned, as I usually return from a sporting adventure, without measurements or the body.@^{^[27]} However, she returned with far more accurate behavioral data, anticipating Dian Fossey by generations. Kingsley always presented her choice to observe wildlife rather than killing it as a shortcoming, a failure to live up to correct naturalist techniques; but the depth of her observations made the subtle point that perhaps a gentler approach had its own strengths.

Instead of riding in a sedan chair on the backs of African bearers or lecturing from a pulpit, Kingsley went among the Africans alone, on foot, as a trader. The West Coast merchants were disdained by British society, but Kingsley bore them great affection and proudly counted herself among their number, believing that presenting herself to Africans as a trading partner was a more effective way to interact with and learn from indigenous peoples than lording it over them as a missionary or conqueror. As she told a lecture audience, Athere is something reasonable about trade to all men... when you first appear among people who have never seen anything like you before, they naturally regard you as a devil; but when you want to buy or sell with them, they recognize there is something human and reasonable about you.@ Significantly, she illustrated this example by asking her British audience to reverse their expected cultural roles, and imagine an exotic African traveller Asuddenly arriving in a village hereabouts. After the first thrill of excitement his appearance gave passed away, and he was found anxious to sell something, anything, say bootlaces, he would be taken much more calmly than if he showed no desire to do business at all.@^{^[28]}

Kingsley=s ability here to imagine an African as an agent of cultural interaction rather than a passive recipient exemplifies her exceptional respect and understanding for African peoples and cultures. Certainly her views were not devoid of racial stereotypes and ethnocentrism; she routinely referred to Africans as Asavages@ and described their capacity for technology as intrinsically inferior to other races.^{^[29]} Indeed, she embraced the theory that Africans and Europeans represented separate evolutionary tracks: AI feel certain that a black man is no more an undeveloped white man than a rabbit is an undeveloped hare....@^{^[30]} But while this theory is racist by modern standards, Kingsley actually used it to challenge elements of the racism of her time, to reject the perception of Africans as degenerate beings in need of cultural assimilation and instead argue for their culture=s worth and right to exist. She wrote that AIn mental and moral affairs the African is by no means so strikingly inferior as he is in handicrafts; he has both a sense of justice and honour, not much worn by daily use, and very easily eliminated by a course of Christian teaching; but it is there, and if you know the way, you can rouse it, and make it work.@^{^[31]} She contended that African values and practices, however immoral they might be for Europeans, were practical and necessary in the conditions of Africa and should not be replaced by overzealous missionaries. Conversion, she argued, Aeliminates those parts of the native fetish that were a wholesome restraint on the African,@ while the Christian doctrine meant to replace it could not be wholly embraced by those raised in a fundamentally different tradition, making it ineffectual as a moral guide.^{^[32]} She considered polygamy an economic necessity for Africans due to the extensive labor needed to maintain the household (although she argued this was due to the Africans= Adilatory@ nature and did not apply to Europeans).^{^[33]} She defined African religion or AFetish@ not as mere superstition but as a religion belonging to the same pantheistic track as Hinduism and Shinto, a parallel course to the Arevealed@ Semitic religions -- a course in which divinity is experienced as a part of all things in nature rather than a separate, elevated plane.^{^[34]} Essentially she defined the Africans= alleged technological inferiority not as a mark of overall inferiority but simply of a different range of virtues, and in so doing she attempted to set aside the question of African material culture and focus attention on those aspects of their culture that deserved appreciation. As Julie English Early puts it, AKingsley=s work was certainly framed by a racist superstructure; once inside the frame, however, her interest focused on discerning the coherence and integrity of a cultural system.@^{^[35]}

Kingsley felt the other ways in which imperialists sought to impose their culture on Africa were just as invalid as their missionary work. She criticized the vocational training of the mission schools for focussing their curriculum on Atrades which... Africa is not yet in urgent need to be taught,@ such as tailoring and bookbinding, rather than more useful agricultural skills.^{^[36]} And once back in England, she used the cachet of her popularity to campaign vigorously against the 1898 Ahut tax@ imposed by the British governors of Sierra Leone, recognizing that in African law Athe thing that you pay anyone a regular fee for is a thing that is not your own... therefore... it is the property of the Government;@^{^[37]} and that the Africans would therefore interpret it as a confiscation of their property and essentially an act of war. The British officials, lacking her ability to see the African side of things, ignored these arguments and retained the tax.^{^[38]} Kingsley persisted in her advocacy, developing a model for a trade-rule system which Frank describes as Aone of the earliest expressions of the idea of indirect rule,@^{^[39]} the principle of governing through existing local authorities and structures. Harper adds, Aher influence has been linked to the use of indirect rule in Nigeria and the Congo Reform Movement as well.@^{^[40]}

In addition to politics, Kingsley made a strong impact in anthropological circles, contributing significantly to the ethnography of West Africa, challenging not only racist assumptions among the general public but scholarly theses as well. Her extensive study of West African AFetish@ led her to question the universality of Sir James Frazer=s influential theories of religious development.^{^[41]} Although she was essentially an amateur in an embryonic field, her observational approach was often quite modern. Dorothy Middleton says she Aanticipated modern exploration in being more concerned with the intensive study of a small and unfrequented region than with tracing long routes on a known map.@^{^[42]} Frank downplays her ethnological work, seeing it as secondary to being Ain quest of herself,@^{^[43]} but she does acknowledge Kingsley=s detailed discussion of the Bubi people in Chapter 3 of Travels in West Africa as a Amodel ethnographic study of a little-known ethnic group.@^{^[44]} Some of Kingsley=s observations presage modern theories of cultural anthropology. In explaining the custom of African traders to take a wife in each village they trade with, she observes: AThis system of judiciously conducted alliances, gives [sic] the black trader a security nothing else can, because... all his wife=s relations on the mother=s side regard him as one of themselves, and look after him and his interests.@^{^[45]} This reflects the fundamental importance of kin ties in non-agrarian societies: in order to be allowed to interact with a kin-based culture, one must establish a real or fictive kin relationship.^{^[46]}

Regrettably, Mary Kingsley=s career was extremely short-lived. After a few brief years of fame from her lectures, books and political advocacy -- not to mention her eccentric self-presentation -- Kingsley=s longed-for return to her beloved Africa came, not as a scholar, but as a volunteer nurse at a South African hospital during the Boer War. There she succumbed to typhoid on June 3, 1900.^{^[49]} Kingsley=s significance as an ethnologist is generally considered to arise mainly from the influence of her findings on British colonial policy^{^[50]} -- as George W. Stocking, Jr., puts it, Ashe in fact advocated giving anthropologists a voice in colonial affairs; but any role she might have had in organized anthropology was cut short by her death....@^{^[51]} But her insights suggest that if she had lived longer, she might have had a profound impact on the basic science itself.

Kingsley=s public persona

Mary Kingsley did not fit in to conventional roles, attitudes and expectations, and she was well aware of this fact. Certainly her lack of a place to belong was awkward and lonely for her; as she once wrote to a friend, AI cannot be [both] a bushman and a drawing roomer and so I get worried and bored.@^{^[52]} Yet at the same time, Kingsley turned her eccentricities to her advantage, even embracing them outright in her public presentation. Her cultivated oddness helped her to catch and hold her audience=s attention.

A pair of cartoons drawn by an audience member for an 1899 lecture highlight the contrasts in Kingsley=s image. As Harper explains:

Labeled AAnticipation@... the first shows a young woman in military attire and short skirt, a pistol in one hand and a saber in the other, suggesting an unconventional and aggressive ANew Woman@ explorer, consistent with the view of Kingsley which a reader might form from her activity in Africa. The second figure, ARealisation@... is a sketch of an old bespectacled woman engaged in specimen collecting, hunched with a butterfly net over her shoulder... and wearing an ankle-length skirt.

The latter image was one Kingsley deliberately cultivated to offset her unconventional activities. Her wardrobe at these events was studiously out of fashion, and she was known to introduce herself to audiences by saying, AI expect I remind you of your maiden aunt -- long since deceased.@^{^[53]}

Kingsley also cultivated an uncultivated air to her speech and writing. She wrote in mock apology about her Aliberties with... the Queen=s English.... It is I who have declined to ascend to a higher level of lucidity and correctness of diction than I am fitted for.@^{^[54]} Yet she affected the use of old-fashioned, flowery chapter headings, such as ALAGOS BAR: Which the general reader may omit as the voyager gives herein no details of Old Calabar or other things of general interest, but discourses diffusely on the local geography and the story of the man who wasted coal.@^{^[55]} In person, this respected, refined-looking scholar startled audiences when she opened her mouth and addressed them in the Cockney accent she had acquired from her mother. As always, she was self-deprecating about it, once expressing the wish that a newspaper would go easy on her for dropping her terminal g=s Awhen I am trying so hard to hold onto the >h=s.=@^{^[56]}

But this self-deprecation was a way of softening her eccentricity and making it more acceptable to her audiences. Kingsley did not use her contradictions to shock or disturb audiences, but to amuse them. She was an extremely witty, entertaining writer and lecturer, sometimes compared to Mark Twain. Her humor made her unconventional qualities appealing and safe to audiences, giving her a trickster=s license to defy convention and shake up sensibilities.

By confounding her audience=s expectations, Kingsley challenged them to question their assumptions and consider new possibilities: Can a woman be strong and adventurous yet still feminine? Can African cultures be lawful and civilized without being British, or truly spiritual without being Christian? The mind is never so open to new possibilities as when it is confused, and Mary Kingsley embraced the confusion she could create in the public=s minds.

Kingsley did have some limited success at changing attitudes. As mentioned above, her advocacy and ethnological insights were influential in persuading the British after her death to enact a policy of indirect rule.^{^[57]} However, her career was too short for her influence in other areas to be more than fleeting. Although it was something she claimed not to want, her example inspired others to campaign for the inclusion of women in scientific societies; yet after a few years these opportunities were closed off by an increasingly formalized, masculinized scientific establishment.^{^[58]}