Women Who Made a Difference: Mary Kingsley, Early Africa Explorer

In a dark jungle of West Africa, Mary Kingsley rescued a leopard from a snare. When the beast began circling her, she stared right back and said, "Go home, you fool."

During the time of prim and proper Victorian ladies demurely batting their eyelashes behind hand held fans, Mary Kingsley was whacking alligators on the snout with her umbrella.

A Nigerian historian wrote, "Mary Kingsley helped to change in a profound way the attitude of European colonial administrations towards their African subjects."

Mary Kingsley's father spent time in West Africa collecting specimens for the British Museum. Ms. Kingsley looked after her Mother, who took to bed whenever her husband went away. Mary Kingsley did not receive a formal education but taught herself, reading books from her Father's extensive library. When her Father became ill she helped him prepare his travel notes for publication. Both of her parents passed away within six weeks of each other in 1892. Mary Kingsley was thirty years old and left on her own for the first time in her life.

Mary Kingsley decided to travel to West Africa to complete some of her Father's work. Known as the 'white man's grave' the Sierra Leone region of West Africa was full of wild animals and cannibal tribes. This unexplored, inhospitable land was certainly not the place for a pale, thin, and grieving woman. Mary Kingsley was a pioneer and could be considered the original 'survivor'. A woman traveling alone in the wilds of Africa, she was lucky to literally keep her head on her shoulders.

She headed to Africa with only one black, waterproof bag. She took along cloth and tobacco to trade, and wore the same clothing in the African bush as she would have worn back home in England. She trudged through the mucky swamp in a long, black skirt. Once Mary Kingsley traded a group of cannibals her neck for twelve blouses. She laughed whenever she retold this story, picturing the men in her frilly shirts. Her rare sense of humor and fortitude carried her through many dangerous trials.

She got so tired of hearing from European traders and African tribesmen, "Where is your husband?" She finally began replying, "I'm looking for him."

After seventeen months in Africa, Kingsley returned to England with eighteen species of reptiles and sixty-five fish. Two species were previously undiscovered and named for Mary Kingsley. She published two best-selling books and lectured on her travels. She loved to tell riveting tales of gorilla encounters and countless brushes with death in the French Congo.

Mary Kingsley spoke of what she learned about the native customs of African tribes. She disapproved of the Christian missionaries trying to enforce their strict rules on the Africans. She said the missionaries themselves didn't follow their own rules. She did not believe the natives with their own long-practiced religion needed the white patron rule. Mary Kingsley said the British only belonged in Africa as merchants not rulers. She wasn't always able to convince the colonials in charge but they did listen to her opinion. Her book, Travels in West Africa, published in 1897, can be downloaded for free and is a wonderful read of a free spirit.

Mary Kingsley returned to Africa in 1900. This time she journeyed to South Africa to volunteer as a nurse in the Boer War. In Cape Town, she caught typhoid fever and died three months after her arrival. Mary Kingsley was 38 years old, and buried at sea at her own request. Her short-lived career only lasted eight years but the story of her bravery lives on today.

Women Who Made a Difference, Malcolm Forbes, 1990, Simon & Schuster