Mary’s father was Sir George Kingsley, a physician and amateur scientist. Her mother was one of his kitchen staff, whom he made pregnant by accident. They married just four days before Mary was born. Although Mary had avoided the stigma of illegitimacy, her childhood hardly differed from that of a servant. Her mother was an invalid and Sir George was rarely there: He worked for wealthy patrons who felt they needed a doctor in attendance as they toured the world. Leaving the house within weeks of Mary’s birth, he was sometimes away for years at a time, writing sporadic and alarming letters home, giving his address as “Abroad.” When Mary was fourteen, he casually wrote to say that a last minute change of plan had narrowly avoided his accompanying Custer to certain death at the Battle of the Little Big Horn.
The conditions in which Mary found herself meant no school and hardly any social life—the only people she met were domestics. As a result she had a strong cockney accent and the vocabulary of a builder. Her earliest memory was of her father on one of his whistle-stop visits, carrying her downstairs to her mother and bellowing, “Where does this child get her language?” When she was old enough, Mary ran the household, nursing her mother and bringing up her brother Charley. She was fiercely intelligent, teaching herself to read and working her way through all the literature in the house, mastering Latin, German, physics, and chemistry and losing herself in the lives of renowned explorers. As she later wrote: “I had a great amusing world of my own other people did not know or care about—the books in my father’s library.” Soon she was acting as her father’s assistant, cataloging the scientific and anthropological specimens he sent back from his travels. Though physically rooted in north London, Mary’s imagination was traveling the world.
While her contemporaries went to dances and got engaged, she stayed home and studied. By 1887 her mother needed constant nursing. Mary consoled herself by learning Arabic and Syrian. Then in one six-week period in 1892 her whole life changed. Her father died suddenly of rheumatic fever and her mother followed soon afterward. Mary, at thirty years of age, found herself without any obligations for the very first time.
What she decided to do with that freedom was to go to West Africa—the most dangerous and mysterious place on earth—entirely on her own. She planned to fund her travels by trading in ivory and tobacco, eating the local food, and staying in the houses of native people. For a young Englishwoman of limited means, this was brave bordering on reckless, but Mary was determined. She sent letters of introduction to traders, government officials, and missionaries and solicited advice from everyone she could find. One old Africa hand gave it to her straight: “When you have made up your mind to go to West Africa the very best thing you can do is to get it unmade again and go to Scotland instead.”
Mary refused to be put off. The reason for her journey was “the pursuit of fish and fetish.” The fishes were for Dr. Gunther of the British Museum and the fetishes were to enable her to complete her father’s study of primitive religion. Her extensive reading had prepared her well for what awaited her. One story that made a particular impression was that of the Dutch explorer Alexandrine Tinne (1835–69), who had set out twenty-five years earlier to become the first European woman to cross the Sahara—but she got drawn into a vicious tribal altercation among the Tuareg and ended up with her hands chopped off and left to die by her guides. This persuaded Mary she needed to travel light and to be properly equipped. She landed in Africa in August 1893 with one suitcase, a holdall, a large bowie knife, and a revolver.
As for attire, she made no concession to the climate: She had always worn black silk and saw no reason to change. In her voluminous, high-collared, cinch-waisted dresses and little black hat, she looked as though she was about to take a hansom to the West End rather than a dugout up the Ogooue River. This worked to her advantage: Wherever she went she was instantly recognizable. Businesslike, humorous, and unflappable in the face of danger, she would march into remote jungle villages with a cheery “It’s only me!” In a canoe on the Congo River a crocodile reared up over the boat’s stern. She whacked him on the snout with a paddle and sent him packing. Confronted by a leopard about to pounce, she coolly lobbed a large earthenware pot, which “burst on the leopard’s head like a shell.” Her friend Rudyard Kipling shook his head in wonderment. “Being human,” he said, “she must have been afraid of something, but one never found out what it was.”
Her two long journeys in 1893 and 1894 explored what are now Nigeria, Sierra Leone, and Gabon. She became the first woman to climb the active volcano Mount Cameroon (4,095 meters or 13,436 feet). To her deep disgust, the summit was wreathed in thick cloud, robbing her of her main object in going up it, which was “to get a good view.” Of more than a hundred fauna samples she collected for the British Museum, there were eighteen species of reptile and sixty-five species of fish, seven of which were new to science and three of which have since been named after her. She was also one of the first Europeans to see the mythical gorilla with her own eyes. “Never have I seen anything to equal gorillas going through the bush; it is a graceful, powerful, superbly perfect hand- trapeze 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,
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 bestsellers 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 “secondhand rubbishy white culture” of the colonial administrators and missionaries. She had learned, 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 learned 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, good intentions, 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 travelers’ 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’etre. 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 more than two thousand 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
