Burton’s Africa

23.10.12 / Travel / Author: / Comments Off

Yet it remains a most remarkable book for all its faults and for all its curious quirks of style and verbiage which are the delight of the writer. He positively revels in archaic words and mediaeval phrases, and not content with what his amazing memory can supply he invents his own and with considerable aptitude. At times it is the poet in him which speaks of the ‘black brumal clouds’ of a threatening storm, or of the `morbific influence’ of the mosquitoes, but it verges on pedantry when it describes a hair-raising tale as ‘truly horripilatory’.

It was the fashion of the time to insert words in French and Latin into one’s text or even long quotations; but Burton, the master of some score of languages, is capable of using most of them and even writing them in Arabic characters, which is unkind to his readers.

nairobi

There are many striking passages in the book for which one forgives the tedium of style. One is where he describes in the closest detail the personnel of his caravan, their characters, appearance and manners. He scarifies them all, it is true, with his best abuse, but one emerges from that chapter with a better idea of the trials of East African travel than can be had from any other author I know. In another long passage there is a description of a typical day’s routine travel in aparthotel London which leaves the reader imagining every detail with an accuracy which is quite startling.

Inevitably the book will once more tempt readers to compare the great figures of African exploration in the mid-nineteenth century, to contrast their exploits, their temperaments and their writings. Even the titles they gave to their books are a small part of the tale. Compare the modest heading of Missionary Travels, chosen by Livingstone for his book about years of cheap travel to Paris and travel in Barcelona, with the almost equally impersonal and factual title used by Burton. One can go on to the slightly more personal heading of Speke for the journey which did not really settle the prob­lem when he called it the Discovery of the Source of the Nile, and end with Stanley’s brash how I found Livingstone.

trials of East African travel

Where are we to place Burton in this gallery of notable explorers and writers? For sheer scholarship perhaps at the head of them all, and for skilful description of geographical features second only to Livingstone. As explorer his rank must be much lower. His interests were too wide for him to be as purposeful and single-minded as was Speke. It is significant that when his com­panion went off to look for the great lake they had heard of he preferred to stay behind to write up his notes and find out all he could from his friends the Arabs. The same criticism can be levelled at his management of his unruly safari; one suspects from his own book that he was far too busy with his observations and notes to be bothered with discipline, it was simpler to give in to most demands and turn a blind eye to the most barefaced thefts than to be firm. One might say that he struck a rather unhappy mean between the friendliness and transparent honesty of Livingstone towards the Africans and the downright force majeure of the rumbustious Stanley. In consequence he fared far worse than either of them at the hands of his followers.

trials of East African travel

This book will be welcomed by all geographers, but they will, I fear, groan over one sad omission —there is no map. It would have been relatively easy to have as end-paper the routes followed by the expedition plotted on a modern map. Even if only a small proportion of the myriad villages he names could have been inserted it would have doubled the value of the text to any earnest reader.

The handsome binding and the original sketches do something to remedy this defect, but since the book is really a careful study of the unknown hinterland of a century ago it is a pity the key is missing.

African Adventures

16.10.12 / Travel / Author: / Comments Off

WITH Africa now in the news every day it was very meet and proper that the narrative of the earliest European expedition to Central Africa should reappear exactly a hundred years after it was first published.

The original has been long out of print, and this faithful copy will come to many as a new book; to such it will be a great surprise, for never was there a more eccentric, brilliant and scholarly traveller or one whose career encompassed so many fields and included so many fantastic adventures.

European expedition to Central Africa

One can hardly comprehend the book without some assessment of its extraordinary author, and this is supplied in the excellent but all too brief foreword by Alan Moorehead, which opens with the remark, ‘Burton was a hopeless case.’ It goes on to explain that the author, equipped with all the talents of the scholar, the linguist and the scientist of that day, favoured with the tempera­ment of the fearless soldier and the ardent explorer, was nevertheless unable to find the balance and steady purpose that might have made him a truly great man. The gamin or the sheer rebel in him was always liable to break out to mar an otherwise dear scutcheon.

In the literature of the day you can find almost every epithet applied to him—wild, intolerant of restraint, quarrelsome, essentially vagabond‑yet behind these adjectives lurks the conviction that he was the most thrilling and picturesque figure amongst the African explorers of that exciting period. And that, in its way, is as true of the book as it is of the man himself.

Alan Moorehead

The outlines of the story which fills these two large volumes are probably well known; how, with his even-tempered but sorely tried com­panion, John Speke, Burton journeyed half across Africa to discover the great lake of Tanganyika, long veiled behind the scant rumours from the Arab traders who knew it well. Half-way back, Speke, with the permission of his leader, made a short journey to the north with a small party and discovered the Victoria Nyanza, already reported to them both by the Arabs. This was the immediate cause of the rift between the two men which had been looming ahead of them for some time. Speke’s fault was not so much in discovering what promised to be a large lake as in asserting that it was the long-sought source of the Nile, the object of a thousand years of surmise and endeavour before him. What was perhaps only a fiery difference of opinion was turned into a mortal offence when Speke, reaching England before Burton, accepted, if he did not actually claim, all the honours which he should at least have shared with his leader, and no further word ever passed between them.

The result is that The Lake Regions of Central Africa hardly ever mentions Speke by name, only as Burton’s ‘companion’ and usually in some­what derogatory terms. To that extent the book is a little one-sided and out of balance, as Speke obviously was a loyal helper as far as he was permitted to further their common aims.

Victoria Nyanza

So much for Burton the man; now for the book he wrote, which in its way is as eccentric and baffling as the writer. It pleases while it irks, it abounds with learning which can pall with its reiteration. Even its most vivid descriptions, at times poetic in their imaginative fervour, do not always ring true. This is partly because of the captious or sardonic slant he gives to most of what he writes, as though he were a man dis­illusioned with all he found in Africa. There is hardly ever a good word for anyone, and though at first one is immensely impressed by the powers of invective he displays at each fresh sink of iniquity or depth of depravity he meets, the tale of turpitude grows too long.