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Mungo Park: - although West Africa lay outside Said’s ‘Orient’, Park was typical of ‘genre’ of travel writing he referred to - travelled on behalf of [paid by] London Association for the Discovery of the Interior of Africa – association of wealthy bankers, businessmen - aims: explore the Niger from source to ocean outlet; visit famed Timbuktu and ‘Houssa’ [Hausaland – didn’t realize not a city] - information was meant to assist British commerce, investment - account was meant to engage the public - written in ‘romantic’ style: Park the lone protagonist, struggling against Rousseau’s ‘natural man’ - Africa and Africans ‘uncivilized’ in sense of acting on natural instincts, untutored in politics, ‘rules’ of civilized society - Travels in the Interior… analyzed as literature ‘typical’ of Romantic style - except: when Park speaks of ‘the Moors’ - when he enters the land of the Moors (‘Mohammedans’), he encounters warring peoples, greedy kings and a ruler named ‘Ali’ who is the archetypal ‘despot’ (cruel and corrupt) - he is imprisoned; women torment him insisting on examining his naked body Excerpts: “I fancied that I discovered in the features of most of them [Moors], a disposition toward cruelty, and low cunning; and I could never contemplate their physiognomy, without feeling a sensible uneasiness. From the staring wildness of their eyes, a stranger would immediately set them down as a nation of lunatics. The treachery and malevolence of their character are manifested in their plundering excursions against the Negro villages”. Making much of Moors’ ‘fanaticism’, hatred of Christians and belief in their own superiority, Park wrote: “It is impossible for me to describe the behaviour of a people who study mischief as a science and exult in the miseries and misfortunes of their fellow creatures. It is sufficient to observe that the rudeness, ferocity and fanaticism, which distinguish the Moors from the rest of mankind, found here a proper subject whereon to exercise their propensities. I was a stranger, I was unprotected, and I was a Christian; each of these circumstances is sufficient to drive every spark of humanity from the heart of a Moor…. The Moors are rigid Mahomedans, and possess, with the bigotry and superstition, all the intolerance of their sect. …Cut off from all intercourse with civilized nations,… they are at once the vainest and proudest, and perhaps the most bigoted, ferocious, and intolerant of all the nations on the earth – combining in their character, the blind superstition of the Negro with the savage cruelty and treachery of the Arab. Mungo Park Map shows ‘travels’, indicated region in which he was held prisoner ‘Ludamar’ Captioned “Park’s Last Stand at Bussia Rapids” Imagined view of Park’s death on the Niger River: ‘the Civilized against the African’ in the Romantic style .

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Rufiji R Niger River
e cast out from the riverbank at dawn. Behind us, Mopti, one of the largest river ports in West Africa, is uncustomarily quiet. The ﬁ rst wooden pirogues of the day, ferrying ﬁ shermen and Wother human cargo, ease their way across the Bani River, waters which will soon merge with those of the Niger. RIVER Sounds are few: the distant racheting of a generator, songs, murmured greetings rippling across the river, the gentle lapping of wood on water. We drift out onto the river, which here at Mopti is sluggish and muddy brown; it carries us away from the AMONG shore, tending north in the accumulating daylight. Still within sight of Mopti, our boat gathers speed as we catch the current and the engine then springs to life, and we join the Niger bound for Timbuktu. The journey from Mopti to Timbuktu spans the RIVERS most celebrated section of the Niger, a river that is one Join Sahara lover Anthony Ham for of Africa’s grand epics. At almost 2600 miles in length and Africa’s third-longest river, the Niger derives its a trip into the desert on the waters name from the Tuareg words ‘gher-n-gheren’, which of the enigmatic Niger River. means ‘river among rivers’. From its source as an innocuous trickle in the Fouta Djalon highlands on the Guinea-Sierra Leone border to its outlet to the sea in the blighted oil-rich lands of Nigeria’s Niger Delta, the Niger carries along on its waters the history of West Africa. It was along the shores of the Niger that some of the greatest empires of African antiquity arose, among them Ghana, Mali and Songhai.
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Mungo Park- Surgeon and Explorer by H
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