African Travel Narratives
I've been thinking of The Traveler's Africa; the view from the Torrid Zone. Some readings beyond Equiano's Travels taken from my bookshelf (oh, and a playlist...)
Classics of the Genre
- The Modern Traveller by Hilaire Belloc
- Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad
- Travels in West Africa by Mary Kingsley
- Black Mischief by Evelyn Waugh
- Travels with my Aunt by Graham Greene
Hilaire Belloc's satirical eye is sublime. Nothing escapes his immaculate rendering of the essence of thousands of travel narratives. From antiquity to, say, the great explorers tomes (Mungo Park's travels in the interior) to near-contemporaries like Stanley and Livingstone. All that and more are highlighted in The Modern Traveller.
He dismantles the kind of writing lionized in the prose of empire by Kipling and others. Where we'd now say God, Gold and Glory, Belloc straightforwardly put it as Blood and Sin in vicious light verse. The cover by Basil Blackwood is apt. All the tropes of travel writing about Africa are outlined, the mystery at its heart, and all that made it evocative. Writing at the height of empire in the wake of the British victory at the battle of Omdurman in 1898, there is much to deflate in Victorian triumphalism and he sets about it avidly. The Modern Traveller is his early masterpiece.
The Journalistic Impulse
The journalistic impulse weighs heavily on travel narratives and Africa gives great material for the genre.
The travel writer ofen emerges jaded from the encounter with Africa despite the initial optimism. The people steal your heart but also destroy you. You might start to merely document but hallucinations often follow, such is the burden of the heart of darkness. Joseph Conrad, of course, had great influence on popular perceptions of Africa, and for good reasons: metaphors and urgent storytelling will always strike a chord.
It would take more than half a century and Chinua Achebe's own urgent storytelling to begin to change the perspective and to show that African voices need not be drowned out in the travel narratives and treated as mere backdrop. Indeed, they can lead the way.
A Burnt Out Case is probably Graham Greene's most focused entry, a lush hatchet job of the Conrad template, but Travels with my Aunt is his purest distillation of travel writing. An entertainment, perhaps, it captures the fecklessness and the roving eye. The kind of observed behavior that Evelyn Waugh savages with vicious fun in Black Mischief.
Contrast with the relatively sober yet similarly roving eye of Mary Kingsley. Hers is rooted in her search for botanical specimens but there is a richness to what she uncovers in the process. She was genuinely interested in the place she traveled to and the culture of the people she encountered. Her observations make for a treasure trove for historians and sociologists alike.
In a more literary bent in the 1920s, consider André Gide's Travels in the Congo and a delightful memoir Then I Saw the Congo by Grace Flandrau. The book covers tend to follow a distinct pattern.
- The Shadow of the Sun by Ryszard Kapuściński
- Report in Africa by Oden Meeker
- Call Africa 999 by John Peer Nugent
- Stringer by Anjan Sundaram
(I hesitate to brand Kapuściński as a journalist, he was so much more. The journalistic impulse is, rather, what I'm getting at when it comes to the tenor of his writings. Denis Johnson in Seek treads much of the same terrain as Kapuściński but with a stronger punch).
How to take to the tropics is a delicious survey of travel writing in Africa by Oden Meeker. His and John Peer Nugent books are recent discoveries, wide ranging as befits these restless souls. Anjan Sundaram's Stringer follows Conrad by way of investigative journalism, archetypal of the mold of journalists that have had to report on conflict (e.g Fergal Keane).
African Perspectives
The Wife has long taught an African Travel Narratives course; we, each, have our favorites and trade new finds as we discover them. Our modern canon:
- An African in Greenland by Tété-Michel Kpomassie
- By the Sea, Desertion and Paradise by Abdulrazak Gurnah
- Everyday is for the thief by Teju Cole
- A Stranger's Pose by Emmanuel Iduma
An African in Greenland is revelatory, Tété-Michel Kpomassie's story is so engaging, he grabs you with the force of his personality, his curiousity and his drive.
Abdulrazak Gurnah, of course, in his brilliant body of work inverts the perspective and the frame that Conrad may have set and, with this freedom, makes it his own. I've lost count of how many copies of By the Sea I've had to buy as I keep recommending and gifting it to others. I'm thankful that the academy have rightly rewarded him and I no longer need to be on the street team.
A novel like Tayeb Salih's Season of Migration to the North contains a lot travel observations but doesn't read as a traditional travel narrative and indeed there is far more sophistication in it.
Our blog era has produced two perfect little books in the genre. Teju Cole aims for close observation in Everyday is for the Thief while Emmanuel Iduma goes for the poetic in A Stranger's Pose. They are both lyrical writers with dauntingly sharp eyes.
It's fun exercise to contrast, say, The Moor's Account by Laila Lalami with Mimi and Toutou's Big Adventure: The Bizarre Battle of Lake Tanganyika by Giles Foden. The one written from the ground up and periphery, the other taken with main character energy.
And the narratives ripped from archival material carry a heavier burden that the typical travel dispatch, I'm thinking of The Two Hearts of Kwasi Boachi by Arthur Japin or say Ama: A Story of the Atlantic Slave Trade by Manu Herbstein - there's no lightness to be found in the slave trade or the earlier patterns of exchange in the colonial era.
I never quite got into the former Peace Corps memoirs although I keep reading them for what they reveal despite themselves (and George Packer's clear-eyed Village of Waiting - and Central Square which I loved, doesn't excuse his later hubris see: Iraq war).
Still I much prefer Packer over Paul Theroux's Dark Star Safari. And in the same vein, I favor Graham Greene over V.S. Naipaul.
I also can't resist missionary and explorer narratives, even as I read them in the same vein, mostly for what is left unsaid or for the people that linger in the background. Sometimes, however, you find gems in second hand bookstores: Cowboy Boots in Darkest Africa by Dr Bill Rice is an all-time favorite. But that one, like Belloc's Modern Traveller, deserves its own tale.
There's all that and more in The Traveler's Africa. And to close, a cautionary note to the would-be readers of travel narratives; not all is as it seems:
T
for the Genial Tourist, who resides
In Peckham where he writes Italian Guides
Moral
Learn from this information not to cavil
At slight mistakes on books on foreign travel
— A Moral Alphabet by Hilaire Belloc
What are your favorite Africa travel narratives?
African Travel Narratives, a playlist
A soundtrack for this note (spotify version)
- Traveling by Burning Spear
- Africa by D'Angelo
- Traveling Miles by Cassandra Wilson
- Vasco Da Gama by Hugh Masekala
The chorus goes "He was no friend of mine" - Congo by Amel Larrieux
- Torrid zone by Nucleus
- River Niger by War
- Explorations by Lonnie Liston Smith
- Africa by Toto
- The natives are restless tonight by Horace Silver
- Afrodisia by Kenny Dorham
- Africa by Abbey Lincoln & Max Roach
- Travelin' light by Shirley Horn
- River Niger by Roy Ayers
- Tropical zone by Angel David Mattos
- Columbus by Burning Spear
Cheating here perhaps, but one can never have enough Burning Spear - Torrid zone by The Afro Soul-Tet
- Great explorer by Louis Smith
- Torrid zone by Andre King
- Dr Livingstone, I presume by Moody Blues
- Torrid zone by Timmy Thomas
- Great explorers by David Burns
Bonus beats: Searching by Roy Ayers
See also Types and Faces and The Stereotype
File under: travel, writing, storytelling, literature, review, appreciation, culture, observation, perception, Africa, history, Observers are worried, toli
Writing log: November 2, 2025
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