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manner, and had turned my horse loose that he might graze at liberty, a
woman, returning from the labours of the field, stopped to observe me,
and perceiving that I was weary and dejected, inquired upon my situation,
which I briefly explained to her; whereupon, with looks of great
compassion, she took up my saddle and bridle, and told me to follow her.
Having conducted me into her hut, she lighted up a lamp, spread a mat
on the floor, and told me I might remain there for the night. Finding that I
was very hungry, she said she would procure me something to eat. She
accordingly went out and returned is a short time with a very fine fish,
which, having caused to he half broiled upon some embers, she gave me
for supper. The rites of hospitality being thus performed towards a
stranger in distress, my worthy benefactress (pointing to the mat and
telling me that I might sleep there without apprehension), called to the
female part of her family, who had stood gazing at me all the while in
fixed astonishment, to resume their task of spinning cotton, in which they
continued a great part of the night. They lightened their labour by songs,
one of which was composed extempore, for I was myself the subject of it.
It was sung by one of the young women, the rest joining in as a sort of
chorus. The air was sweet and plaintive, and the words, literally
translated, were these: ‘The winds roared, and the rains fell. The poor
white man, faint and weary, came and sat under our tree. He has no
mother to bring him milk, no wife to grind his corn. Chorus – Let us pity
the white man, no mother has he, etc etc.’ Trifling as this recital might
appear to the reader, to a person in my situation the circumstance was
affecting in the highest degree. I was oppressed by such unexpected
kindness, and sleep fled from my eyes.
Neither his benefactress nor her household had ever beheld a white
person before. And not only them but almost all the people that he met
along the way. In an earlier episode soon after he embarked on his
journey he was prevailed upon to visit the wives of a king so that they
might examine close-up this strange creature who had miraculously
appeared in their midst:
They rallied me with a good deal of gaiety on different subjects,
particularly on the whiteness of my skin and the prominency of my nose.
They insisted that both were artificial. The first, they said, was produced
when I was an infant by dipping me in milk; and they insisted that my
nose had been pinched every day till it had acquired its present unsightly
and unnatural conformation. On my part, without disputing my own
deformity, I paid them many compliments on African beauty.
The internal evidence of his journal suggests a man without
preconceptions. He relied on the evidence of his own eyes, and that
basic human sympathy which allowed him to take people as he found
them. Historically, of course, he preceded the imperial adventure and so
was untainted by the subsequent mythology of racial superiority that
came to see Africans as subject peoples who were essentially unfit to
rule themselves, although the trade in slaves, which Mungo Park
identified as easily the most valuable of all African ‘commodities’, had
been well underway for two centuries or more. He had himself previously
worked as a ship’s surgeon on the Middle Passage (one of the
qualifications that endeared him to the African Society) but even here he
evidently shared the growing unease of his compatriots about their
complicity in the trade in human cargo.
Throughout his journey he had ample opportunity to observe African
slavery at first-hand - ‘In the meanwhile, the poor wretches are kept
constantly fettered, two and two of them being chained together, and
employed in the labours of the field, and I am sorry to add, are very
scantily fed, as well as harshly treated’ – which was precisely what he
observed in the salve plantations of the Caribbean, the only difference
being that their slave masters were white, a fact which, from the
perspective of the slave, could only have been academic.
Worse again, perhaps, were the slave coffles he perforce had to travel
with, and which never ceased to distress him:
My fellow-travellers, having better horses than myself, soon left me, and I
was met by a coffle of slaves, about seventy in number, coming from
Sego. They were tied together by their necks with thongs of a bullock’s
hide, twisted like a rope – seven slaves upon a thong, and a man with a
musket between every seven. Many of the slaves were ill-conditioned,
and a great number of them women…
By his reckoning, slaves constituted ‘nearly in the proportion of three to
one to the freemen’, but what is inescapable is the complicity of the
Africans themselves, without whom the Atlantic trade would have been
impossible. Slavery was merely part of the natural order of things,
although in this Africa was hardly unique. It required a new way of
thinking – this was the period of the French Revolution and Thomas
Paine’s The Rights of Man – to apprehend what has become universally :
that human beings were endowed with the inalienable rights to ‘life,
liberty and the pursuit of happiness’, and that no ideology could vitiate
any of that. Mungo Park, a man of his time, understood this intrinsically,
which was why he was able to identify the great flaw in African society
which haunts us down to the present, and which he characterised thus:
‘A firm attachment to the customs of their ancestors makes them view
with an eye of prejudice everything that looks like innovation.’
Even the idea that a person would risk their life in the pursuit of
knowledge not merely for themselves but in order that they might be
useful to their ‘day and generation’ is dismissed as a form of madness,
for instance the response of one who, on learning that he was interested
in tracing the course of the River Niger, ‘naturally inquired if there were
no rivers in my own country, and whether one river was not like another’.
No, one river is not like another, which is presumably why we take pride
in the one we have, and why, if we don’t take it upon ourselves to map its
contours, somebody else will do it for us. The end result of those
exertions might be unpalatable in ways which Mungo Park couldn’t have
foreseen (or even wished for) but it is a fact nonetheless.
The easy dismissal of Mungo Park as the man who claimed to have
discovered the River Niger when he did no such thing is of a piece with
his telling observation that the bane of Africa was the ‘firm attachment to
the customs of their ancestors’. The received view of this lone, brave and
always human explorer is repeated ad nauseam as if it was an
established fact merely because somebody once upon a time said so. In
the process, we not only deprive ourselves of the deeper insights he
afforded us of what was then - and remains – largely unexplored territory,
but also does violence to the memories of those women whose own
corresponding humanity saw him through, and which need to be
continually celebrated.
woman, returning from the labours of the field, stopped to observe me,
and perceiving that I was weary and dejected, inquired upon my situation,
which I briefly explained to her; whereupon, with looks of great
compassion, she took up my saddle and bridle, and told me to follow her.
Having conducted me into her hut, she lighted up a lamp, spread a mat
on the floor, and told me I might remain there for the night. Finding that I
was very hungry, she said she would procure me something to eat. She
accordingly went out and returned is a short time with a very fine fish,
which, having caused to he half broiled upon some embers, she gave me
for supper. The rites of hospitality being thus performed towards a
stranger in distress, my worthy benefactress (pointing to the mat and
telling me that I might sleep there without apprehension), called to the
female part of her family, who had stood gazing at me all the while in
fixed astonishment, to resume their task of spinning cotton, in which they
continued a great part of the night. They lightened their labour by songs,
one of which was composed extempore, for I was myself the subject of it.
It was sung by one of the young women, the rest joining in as a sort of
chorus. The air was sweet and plaintive, and the words, literally
translated, were these: ‘The winds roared, and the rains fell. The poor
white man, faint and weary, came and sat under our tree. He has no
mother to bring him milk, no wife to grind his corn. Chorus – Let us pity
the white man, no mother has he, etc etc.’ Trifling as this recital might
appear to the reader, to a person in my situation the circumstance was
affecting in the highest degree. I was oppressed by such unexpected
kindness, and sleep fled from my eyes.
Neither his benefactress nor her household had ever beheld a white
person before. And not only them but almost all the people that he met
along the way. In an earlier episode soon after he embarked on his
journey he was prevailed upon to visit the wives of a king so that they
might examine close-up this strange creature who had miraculously
appeared in their midst:
They rallied me with a good deal of gaiety on different subjects,
particularly on the whiteness of my skin and the prominency of my nose.
They insisted that both were artificial. The first, they said, was produced
when I was an infant by dipping me in milk; and they insisted that my
nose had been pinched every day till it had acquired its present unsightly
and unnatural conformation. On my part, without disputing my own
deformity, I paid them many compliments on African beauty.
The internal evidence of his journal suggests a man without
preconceptions. He relied on the evidence of his own eyes, and that
basic human sympathy which allowed him to take people as he found
them. Historically, of course, he preceded the imperial adventure and so
was untainted by the subsequent mythology of racial superiority that
came to see Africans as subject peoples who were essentially unfit to
rule themselves, although the trade in slaves, which Mungo Park
identified as easily the most valuable of all African ‘commodities’, had
been well underway for two centuries or more. He had himself previously
worked as a ship’s surgeon on the Middle Passage (one of the
qualifications that endeared him to the African Society) but even here he
evidently shared the growing unease of his compatriots about their
complicity in the trade in human cargo.
Throughout his journey he had ample opportunity to observe African
slavery at first-hand - ‘In the meanwhile, the poor wretches are kept
constantly fettered, two and two of them being chained together, and
employed in the labours of the field, and I am sorry to add, are very
scantily fed, as well as harshly treated’ – which was precisely what he
observed in the salve plantations of the Caribbean, the only difference
being that their slave masters were white, a fact which, from the
perspective of the slave, could only have been academic.
Worse again, perhaps, were the slave coffles he perforce had to travel
with, and which never ceased to distress him:
My fellow-travellers, having better horses than myself, soon left me, and I
was met by a coffle of slaves, about seventy in number, coming from
Sego. They were tied together by their necks with thongs of a bullock’s
hide, twisted like a rope – seven slaves upon a thong, and a man with a
musket between every seven. Many of the slaves were ill-conditioned,
and a great number of them women…
By his reckoning, slaves constituted ‘nearly in the proportion of three to
one to the freemen’, but what is inescapable is the complicity of the
Africans themselves, without whom the Atlantic trade would have been
impossible. Slavery was merely part of the natural order of things,
although in this Africa was hardly unique. It required a new way of
thinking – this was the period of the French Revolution and Thomas
Paine’s The Rights of Man – to apprehend what has become universally :
that human beings were endowed with the inalienable rights to ‘life,
liberty and the pursuit of happiness’, and that no ideology could vitiate
any of that. Mungo Park, a man of his time, understood this intrinsically,
which was why he was able to identify the great flaw in African society
which haunts us down to the present, and which he characterised thus:
‘A firm attachment to the customs of their ancestors makes them view
with an eye of prejudice everything that looks like innovation.’
Even the idea that a person would risk their life in the pursuit of
knowledge not merely for themselves but in order that they might be
useful to their ‘day and generation’ is dismissed as a form of madness,
for instance the response of one who, on learning that he was interested
in tracing the course of the River Niger, ‘naturally inquired if there were
no rivers in my own country, and whether one river was not like another’.
No, one river is not like another, which is presumably why we take pride
in the one we have, and why, if we don’t take it upon ourselves to map its
contours, somebody else will do it for us. The end result of those
exertions might be unpalatable in ways which Mungo Park couldn’t have
foreseen (or even wished for) but it is a fact nonetheless.
The easy dismissal of Mungo Park as the man who claimed to have
discovered the River Niger when he did no such thing is of a piece with
his telling observation that the bane of Africa was the ‘firm attachment to
the customs of their ancestors’. The received view of this lone, brave and
always human explorer is repeated ad nauseam as if it was an
established fact merely because somebody once upon a time said so. In
the process, we not only deprive ourselves of the deeper insights he
afforded us of what was then - and remains – largely unexplored territory,
but also does violence to the memories of those women whose own
corresponding humanity saw him through, and which need to be
continually celebrated.