QI The Book of the Dead

performance.’ On the other hand, she had never seen anything so ugly. She admitted to a ‘feeling of horrible disgust that an old gorilla gives on account of its hideousness of appearance’.
    She turned her adventures into two books, Travels in West Africa (1897) and West African Studies (1899). Models of great travel writing, they are witty, full of robust opinions and vividly observed. If you want to know what a python tastes like, re-live a locust attack or learn how to survive a tornado, Mary Kingsley is your woman. She makes Peary’s work read like a railway timetable. Particularly appealing is her tone of voice – what one reviewer called her ‘light, chaffy style’ – forthright, unpretentious and delivered with jolly-hockey-sticks enthusiasm. Here she is on African insects:
    Undoubtedly one of the worst things you can do in West Africa is take any notice of an insect. If you see a thing that looks like a cross between a flying lobster and the figure of Abraxis on a Gnostic gem do not pay it the least attention – just keep quiet and hope it will go away – for that is your best chance; you have none in a stand up fight with a good thorough-going African insect .
     
    The books were best-sellers and are still in print. Apart from her gifts as a storyteller, they present a remarkably rounded view of African life. Mary’s close study of the Fang people of Gabon had led her to respect a way of life she found preferable, in many ways, to the ‘second-hand rubbishy white culture’ of the colonial administrators and missionaries. She had learnt, she said, to ‘think in black’, enabling her to look on the bright side of cultural practices such as polygamy, even cannibalism. Once, when staying in a Fang hut, a ‘violent smell’ alerted her to a bag suspended from the roof. Emptying the contents into her hat, she found ‘a human hand, three big toes, four eyes, two ears and other portions of the human frame’. She showed no squeamishness: ‘I subsequently learnt that the Fang will eat their fellow friendly tribesfolk, yet they like to keep a little something belonging to them as a memento.’
    She saw a future for Africa that was based on developing trade, not colonial control: ‘Officialdom says it won’t have anything but its old toys: missionaries, stockbrokers, goodintentions, ignorance and Maxim guns. We shall see.’ Her refusal to accept that Africans were less intelligent or less well behaved was far ahead of its time. ‘You see more drunkenness in the Vauxhall Road on a Saturday night,’ she pointed out, ‘than in the whole of West Africa in a week.’ As she wrote to her friend Alice Stopford Green in 1897, ‘These white men who make a theory first and then go hunting travellers’ tales to support the same may say what they please of the pleasure of the process. Give me the pleasure of getting a mass of facts and watching them.’
    Adding to her ‘mass of facts’ about West Africa was to take up the rest of her short life. Africa had become her raison d’être . Surveying the damp English winter of November 1895 only confirmed her desire to get back there as soon as she could. She missed life in the forest with a passionate intensity: ‘If you do fall under its spell, it takes all the colour out of other kinds of living.’ She tried to make up for it by turning up the heating in her brother’s Kensington flat to tropical levels and by going shopping with a monkey perched on her shoulder. Her more regular public appearances were at her lectures, which she gave, accompanied by magic-lantern slides, to a huge array of admirers – geographical societies, gatherings of academics, students, nurses, boys’ clubs in city slums – and she was the first woman ever to address the chambers of commerce at both Liverpool and Manchester. Attendances of over 2,000 were not uncommon. Tall, angular and very thin, with her matronly black outfits and her hair pulled severely back and pinned under her cap, she looked much older than a woman of thirty-five. The combination of her old-fashioned, no-nonsense appearance and her wonderfully crafted funny stories allowed Mary to be thoughtful, controversial and entertaining all at once, and audiences loved it. So did she,playing up to her slightly antiquated image: ‘I expect I remind you of a maiden aunt – long since deceased,’ she began one talk.
    When the Daily Telegraph reported her return from Africa under the title ‘The New Woman’,