Anthology of Africa
IT was a bright idea to make the story of the great African travellers better known to the wider public—and perhaps it is evidence of the interest nowadays taken in things African that a publisher is willing to back the venture. The discoverers them- selves and the things they saw and did and suffered were worthy of a memorial more easily accessible than their own stout volumes. If the editors have chosen passages for inclusion in their Anthology chiefly by the test of " readability," they are so far justified that they have provided good reading in good variety. The personalities of the discoverers stand out quite remarkably from the few pages devoted to any one of them. The character of the Africans thel visited could hardly be equally clearly portrayed in any such selection. But while making no bones about the darker side of the African picture—they have included, for example, Speke's un- sympathetic and unimaginative picture of savageries practised at the court of -Mtesa in Uganda—the editors are fully justified also in their claim to have brought out the better side. Africans were
on the whole, astonishingly tolerant of their strange, defenceless, busybody visitors, often touchingly kind and human.
It is a comment rather than a criticism that having done so much the editors might profitably have aimed at making their selections a more connected record. African discovery was, after all, con- tinuous, and most of the discoverers were carrying on where others left off. Mining prospectors even in this century relied a good deal on the records of Livingstone in their quest for the Copper Belt, and on these of Heinrich Barth in their penetration of Northern Nigeria (so that, incidentally, a few of the presumably less merely " readable " foreigners should have been represented). It is true that the excerpts from Mungo Park and his successors, Clappenon, the Landers and Baikie give a very clear picture of the gradual unravelling of the mystery of the Niger in West Africa. But this only shows what could be done. Between them all, the scattered fragments chosen from Speke, Burton, Baker and Livingston; together with Stanley's account of the finding of Livingstone, give no such impression of the more complex story of discovery in Central and East Africa. It would have helped to include some- thing at least about Stanley's first great Congo journey—and it would have been only just. It is academic and most arbitrary so to define a " classical " age of African discovery as to exclud the mapping of the Congo.
The story of the Congo journey would have helped also to bring out more dearly the dominant fact in the whole situation. The cruelly difficult physical characteristics of Africa itself explain the struggles of the discoverers, znd even the backwardness of the African peoples. The moving last pages of Livingstone's "Journals" are evidence in support ; but in these the unquenchable spirit of the man, observing and recording to the very end, triumphs over and almost obscures the conditions with which he had to wrestle. It was a pity to miss any opportunity of reinfdrcing the lesson that Nature herself is the most formidable single obstacle to the advance
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