Mary Kingsley

British explorer

• Born: October 13, 1862
• Birthplace: London, England
• Died: June 3, 1900
• Place of death: Simonstown, near Cape Town, Cape Colony (now in South Africa)

Kingsley was a rare woman explorer who made several hazardous trips to tropical Africa almost entirely on her own to collect specimens for the British Museum and observe African cultures and belief systems. She wrote several popular books about her travels and advanced the then controversial view that missionaries and colonial officials should develop greater knowledge of, and respect for, native cultures.

Early Life

Mary Kingsley was born into an English literary family. Her father, George Kingsley, and his four brothers were all writers. The most famous brother was Charles Kingsley, a poet, novelist, and theologian. George Kingsley and his wife, Mary Bailey, were somewhat estranged from the rest of the family for several reasons. They questioned the Christian faith of other family members, Mary Bailey came from a lower social class, and their first child, Mary, was born suspiciously soon after their wedding. Mary’s father was a private physician for a wealthy man who traveled frequently, so he was often away from his family. He traveled through most of the world—apart from Africa—and sent home exciting letters describing his adventures.

At home, Mary’s mother was left alone to manage her, her younger brother, Charles, and a large household—often with insufficient money. Both mother and son were frail and unstable, so young Mary assumed most of the day-to-day responsibilities for running the home. In addition to chores traditionally regarded as female, she taught herself to repair pipes and do other maintenance work by reading the magazine English Mechanic.

Mary had no companions and spent her free time working through her father’s library of science textbooks, natural history, and geography. Aside from some tutoring in the German language, she had no formal education, as it was not considered appropriate for even the brightest and most curious girls; however, her brother, George, was sent to college. When George returned home, Mary helped him with research for his own scholarly projects. In 1888, sixteen-year-old Mary assumed the care of both her parents, who were too ill to live alone. She nursed them for four years, until both died within a period of several weeks in 1892. Through the rest of her own life, Mary looked after her brother, arranging her own career around his needs.

Life’s Work

In August, 1893, twenty-nine-year-old Mary Kingsley set out on her first trip to West and equatorial Africa. In fact, it was her first long trip anywhere, and all she knew about surviving in a hostile environment she had learned from reading her father’s travel books and listening to his stories. The primary purpose of her journey was scientific; she had persuaded the British Museum to allow her to collect fish specimens for its collection. Being a naturalist with an approved project made it possible for her to set out without the condemnation that Victorian society reserved for women traveling alone.

Kingsley traveled aboard a cargo steamer, on which she easily made friends with the rough traders who shared what they had learned about the African people and landscapes. With only a few porters to help carry her gear, and access granted by the various European trading companies scattered along the African coast, she trekked inland into the Congo. Always wearing a long skirt and a high collar as protection against insects and thorns and carrying a sharp knife, Kingsley mastered canoeing, climbing, fishing with nets, and hiking during a trip that lasted only a few months. Along the way, she survived a tornado and a crocodile attack.

Kingsley returned to Africa again in 1893 and then several more times, and continued to collect fish, lizards, snakes, and insects for the British Museum. Among her finds was at least one previously unknown fish, which was named after her. She also undertook a study of fetishes in African religions and tried to learn what she could about rumored cannibalism.

Her travels took her across several parts of equatorial Africa not previously explored by Europeans, and she became only the second European to climb a mountain called Mungo Mah Lobeh. A shrewd trader, she packed tobacco and cloth to bargain with local communities for whatever she needed. Kingsley described her adventures and her discoveries in two highly successful books, Travels in West Africa (1897) and West African Studies (1899). She also worked over her father’s notes and diaries from his years abroad and published them in 1900 as Notes on Sport and Travel .

While staying in England between her African journeys, Kingsley took care of her brother and embarked on a career as a public speaker and writer of political articles and essays. Her exploits were already well known to readers of newspapers, and she was a dramatic speaker, describing her travels with vivid detail and humor. In articles published in leading journals, she argued that traders, not government bureaucrats, should take the lead in administering the African lands being absorbed into the British Empire. She also argued that Christian missionaries did more harm than good in trying to eradicate traditional African cultures, and that Africans should be seen as sophisticated and intelligent, not as children who needed European assistance to become “civilized.”

Kingsley resisted attempts to portray her as a feminist. She argued that women should not be granted the vote because they were not sufficiently intelligent or informed to vote wisely. She pointed out that everything that she herself had accomplished had been done with the guidance of men.

In March, 1900, Kingsley began her last journey to Africa—this time to South Africa, where Great Britain was engaged in the South African (Boer) War. She wanted to collect more fish specimens but instead volunteered as a nurse in a prisoner-of-war hospital in Simonstown near Cape Town. An outbreak of enteric fever was devastating both prisoners and nurses when she arrived there, and she contracted the fever herself. On June 3, 1900, she died of the fever in Simonstown. Following her own wishes, she was buried at sea.

Significance

Kingsley is now remembered chiefly as a pioneering woman, a feminist heroine, a role at which she would have scoffed. In traveling on her own into tropical Africa—a place considered the most dangerous on Earth—in climbing mountains and canoeing through rapids—and doing it all in long wool skirts—she demonstrated that women could accomplish physical feats that seemed impossible in her day. However, she was not a feminist; she did not believe that women were the intellectual or physical equals of men, and she argued against woman suffrage.

Kingsley’s significance may reside in her rejection of all labels and categories, which allowed her to connect with the African peoples she met on their own terms. In her modes of travel, in her dress and language and manners, in her writing style, in her politics, Kingsley steered a middle course. By refusing either to align herself with the expectations for women in the Victorian period or to fit into twenty-first century notions of early feminists, she expanded both groups. She thus remains as controversial in the twenty-first century as she was in the nineteenth century.

Bibliography

Blunt, Alison. Travel, Gender, and Imperialism: Mary Kingsley and West Africa. New York: Guilford, 1994. A poststructural analysis that uses the example of Mary Kingsley to examine the particular role in imperialism of white women traveling alone, rejecting an approach that focuses on “heroic” women travelers as feminist emblems.

Frank, Katherine. A Voyager Out: The Life of Mary Kingsley. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1986. An accessible and dramatic presentation, for the general reader, of Kingsley as a Victorian heroine, torn between her duties as a daughter and her wish for adventure. Includes photographs, maps, and liberal quotations from Kingsley’s published and unpublished writings.

Gates, Barbara T. Kindred Nature: Victorian and Edwardian Women Embrace the Living World. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998. Discusses Kingsley’s life and works as one example among many of women whose writing contributed to the study and preservation of nature at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth centuries.

Harper, Lila Marz. Solitary Travelers: Nineteenth-Century Women’s Travel Narratives and the Scientific Vocation. Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2001. In a chapter titled “Mary H. Kingsley: In Pursuit of Fish and Fetish,” the author focuses on Kingsley’s contributions to biology and anthropology and on Kingsley’s struggles to interpret the conflicting roles of scientist and domestic in Victorian female society.

Kipling, Rudyard. Mary Kingsley. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, Doran, 1932. Memoir by a Nobel Prize-winning writer and adventurer who, like Kingsley, accepted British imperialism as inevitable and glorious. Kipling met Kingsley a few times, admired her courage, and wrote a memorial poem about her upon her death.

Stevenson, Catherine Barnes. Victorian Women Travel Writers in Africa. Boston: Twayne, 1982. A chapter of some seventy pages deals with Kingsley, focusing on her literary accomplishments in the form and style of travel writing. Self-taught as a writer and an ethnographer, Kingsley nevertheless crafted beautiful and accurate prose.