African Travel Writing

18
African Travel Writing

rebecca jones
Africa has long been a continent of mobility, traversed by traders, scholars,

religious leaders, and migrants, among others.1 Achille Mbembe describes
centuries of African ‘mixing, blending and superimposing’, meaning that ‘the
cultural history of the continent can hardly be understood outside the
paradigm of itinerancy, mobility and displacement’.2 With long-standing
connections across the Indian Ocean as well as trade links with Europe,
some Africans in the precolonial era, especially those literate in Arabic,
such as Moroccan traveller Ibn Battuta in his Rih·la (c.1355), produced accounts
of their travels into the African continent and the rest of the world.3
African oral texts have also, for centuries, narrated tales of travel, fre-
quently crossing the boundaries between history and fiction. Daniel Kunene
shows that the motif of the journey, particularly the journey into exile, is
deployed in numerous African epics, such as the semi-historical Epic of
Sundiata in the thirteenth-century Mali empire, in which Sundiata gains
wisdom as he travels through foreign kingdoms during his exile.4 In many
such epics, according to Mildred Mortimer, the journey represents ‘an
intellectual and emotional initiation to maturity’, and an opportunity ‘to
acquire the knowledge and/or power that will allow him or her to rejoin the
community and to enjoy a heightened status’.5 Thus while these fictional or
semi-historical epics might not be considered travel writing in the
1
Stephanie Newell, West African Literatures: Ways of Reading (Oxford University Press,
2006), pp. 12–13.
2
Achille Mbembe, ‘Afropolitanism’, trans. Laurent Chauvet, in Simon Njami (ed.), Africa
Remix: Contemporary Art of a Continent (Johannesburg: Jacana Media, 2007), pp. 26–9 (at
p. 27).
3
Ibn Battuta, Travels in Asia and Africa 1325–1354, ed. and trans. H. A. R. Gibb (London:
Broadway House, 1929).
4
Daniel P. Kunene, ‘Journey in the African Epic’, Research in African Literatures, 22/2 (1991),
205–23 (at p. 211).
5
Mildred Mortimer, ‘African Journeys’, Research in African Literatures, 22/2 (1991), 169–75 (at
p. 171).
283
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rebecca jones
conventional Western sense, they nonetheless embody similar notions of

wisdom, witnessing, and experience to those found in some more conven-
tional travel writing.
However, few of these histories and stories of African travel were known
to European travellers when they arrived in Africa from the fifteenth century.
While the travel writing they produced in subsequent centuries was not
always straightforwardly pro-imperialist, it nonetheless often developed
what Mildred Mortimer calls ‘fictionalized stereotypes’ about Africa, centred
particularly on primitivism and darkness.6 This chapter begins by exploring
how the images of Africa that Europeans, particularly the British, shaped
through travel writing from the fifteenth to twentieth centuries coalesced
into some of the authorising images of the African continent in Western eyes,
meaning that, as Simon Gikandi argues, ‘the figuration of the [African]
continent as the site of difference is itself one of the most powerful inventions
of European modernity’.7
The second half of the chapter, however, challenges the notion that travel
writing about Africa has been a one-sided affair. Contributing to the growing
scholarly literature on African-authored travel writing, it focuses on showing
how southwestern Nigerian writers from the nineteenth century onwards
have used travel writing to articulate the nascent colonial, and then indepen-
dent, nation of Nigeria.
Europe Writing Africa: Encounters with Difference

on the ‘Dark Continent’
Africa was not entirely unknown to Europe before Europe’s ‘Age of
Discovery’ began in the fifteenth century; as well as Old Testament stories
of Egypt and Ethiopia, there were descriptions of Africa (some second-hand)
in classical sources such as the writings of Herodotus, Pliny the Elder,
Ptolemy, and the Arab geographers.8 The travel compendium The Travels
of Sir John Mandeville (c.1356) – supposedly an account of its author’s travels in
Ethiopia and Egypt as well as elsewhere – was also highly influential in
shaping early modern European perceptions of the world.9 As Michael
6
Ibid., p. 172.
7
Simon Gikandi, ‘Theory, Literature, and Moral Considerations’, Research in African
Literatures, 32/4 (2001), 1–18 (at p. 4).
8
Taiwo Adetunji Osinubi, ‘West Africa’, in Jennifer Speake (ed.), Literature of Travel and
Exploration: An Encyclopedia, 3 vols. (New York: Fitzroy Dearborn, 2003), vol. i i i , pp.
1270–6 (at p. 1270).
9
See Chapter 3 above.
284
E. Brooks notes, ‘no single text has exhibited greater effects on the evolution
and continuance of the Prester John legend’. The lost Christian kingdom of
the East ruled by the priest-king Prester John was thought at first (and in
Mandeville’s text itself) to have been in India or Central Asia, but was later,
from the early modern period especially, often located in Ethiopia.10
The first known account of Africa to emerge in Europe during the
sixteenth century was written not by a European, but by the Berber
Andalusi (then, ‘Moorish’) scholar now generally known as Leo Africanus (c.
1494–1552). His Italian- and Arabic-language Descrittione dell’Africa (1550),
published in English translation as A Geographical Historie of Africa (1600),
describes the Barbary coast, Egypt, and the kingdoms of West Africa. Leo
Africanus’s account – while not entirely accurate – was widely regarded as
authoritative, and it sparked European interest in the riches of the kingdoms
of West Africa.11
Early modern European travel accounts about the North African coast,
concerned chiefly with naval adventures and Barbary pirates, remind us
that, as Carl Thompson suggests, Europe’s encounters with Africa were
not always ventures into the unknown but, in some cases, representative
of centuries of contact across the Mediterranean and with the Ottoman
empire – with Europe sometimes in a position of vulnerability rather
than imperial might.12 However, such accounts also had lasting implica-
tions for racial classifications used by Europeans, such as that between
the ‘tawny Moors’ of North Africa and the ‘blackamoors’, ‘Ethiopians’, or
‘Negroes’ of North and sub-Saharan Africa.13
From the seventeenth century onwards, many European powers raced to
‘discover’ Africa through trade and, subsequently, imperial conquest. Thus
although the present discussion focuses on English-language travel accounts,
travel narratives of Africa were published in many European languages,
10
John Mandeville, The Travels of Sir John Mandeville, trans. C. W. R. D. Moseley (London:
Penguin, 2005); Michael E. Brooks, ‘Prester John: A Reexamination and Compendium of
the Mythical Figure who Helped Spark European Expansion’, PhD thesis (University of
Toledo, 2009), p. 86.
11
Leo Africanus, A Geographical Historie of Africa, written in Arabicke and Italian, trans.
John Pory (London, 1600). See also Natalie Zemon Davis, Trickster Travels: A Sixteenth-
Century Muslim Between Worlds (New York: Hill & Wang, 2006); Osinubi, ‘West Africa’,
p. 1270; Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation, 2nd edn
(New York: Routledge, 2008), p. 70.
12
Carl Thompson, Travel Writing (London: Routledge, 2011), p. 153. See also Barnaby
Rogerson, ‘North Africa: The Mediterranean Maghreb’ in Speake (ed.), Literature of
Travel and Exploration, vol. i i , pp. 865–7 (at p. 865).
13
Lillian Gottesman, ‘English Voyages and Accounts: Impact on Renaissance Dramatic
Presentation of the African’, Studies in the Humanities, 2/2 (1971), 26–32 (at p. 27).
285
rebecca jones
particularly Portuguese and Dutch.14 Of the English writers, Mungo Park,

who undertook expeditions in West Africa in 1795–7 and 1805, was one of the
first explorers commissioned by the African Association, founded in 1788.15
As Mary Louise Pratt documents, Park’s Travels in the Interior Districts of Africa
(1799) sold 1,500 copies in one month, and was translated into French and
German, demonstrating the European reading public’s appetite for works of
African exploration.16 Meanwhile, European exploration of East Africa began
in earnest during the nineteenth century; in 1856, the Royal Geographical
Society (founded in 1830) sponsored Richard Burton’s explorations of East
Africa.17
Scientific, naturalist, and ethnographic expeditions also began to prolifer-
ate from the eighteenth century, as Africa became the object of an
Enlightenment-era desire to classify the living world.18 As Larissa Viana
suggests, travel narratives describing such expeditions often positioned them-
selves as establishing objective truth about the world through faithful eye-
witness observation and evidence.19 Yet these seemingly disinterested, not
explicitly imperial, expeditions nonetheless often mobilised rhetorical figures
that manifested mastery and conquest of the landscape, leading Mary Louise
Pratt to term such narratives ‘anti-conquest’ narratives, in which ‘European
bourgeois subjects seek to secure their innocence in the same moment as
they assert European hegemony’.20 The sentimental ‘non-hero’ figure of the
traveller who focuses on personal adventure, danger, and tribulation also
emerged during this era, thrilling readers with tales of daring and peril: ‘Worn
down by sickness, exhausted with hunger and fatigue, half naked and without
any article of value by which I might procure provisions . . . I was
convinced . . . that the obstacles to my further progress were insurmounta-
ble’, writes Mungo Park.21
14
For instance, on Portuguese, German, Swedish, and French travellers and travel narra-
tives in southern Africa, see Laura E. Franey, ‘Southern Africa’ in Speake (ed.), Literature
of Travel and Exploration, vol. i i i , pp. 1110–14; Pratt, Imperial Eyes, pp. 41–57.
15
Osinubi, ‘West Africa’, p. 1270.
16
Mungo Park, Travels in the Interior Districts of Africa (London: W. Bulmer, 1799); Pratt,
Imperial Eyes, p. 74; Osinubi, ‘West Africa’, p. 1271.
17
Roy Bridges, ‘East Africa’, in Speake (ed.), Literature of Travel and Exploration, vol. i ,
pp. 355–60 (at p. 356).
18
Larissa Viana, ‘The Tropics and the Rise of the British Empire: Mungo Park’s Perspective
on Africa in the Late Eighteenth Century’, História, Ciências, Saúde-Manguinhos, 18/1
(2011), 33–50 (at p. 39); Pratt, Imperial Eyes, pp. 38–68.
19
Viana, ‘Tropics’, p. 38.
20
Pratt, Imperial Eyes, p. 7.
21
Mungo Park, Travels in the Interior Districts of Africa (1799; London: Wordsworth, 2002), p.
195, cited in Viana, ‘Tropics’, p. 40. On the ‘anti-conquest’, the sentimental ‘non-hero’,
286
‘Anti-conquest’ positions can also be detected in some Christian missionary

travel writing about Africa, which was increasingly published from the seven-
teenth and eighteenth centuries. For instance, the North American Baptist
missionary William H. Clarke declared himself pleasantly surprised to find the
Yoruba region of West Africa ‘fair, productive, beautiful and healthy’ in
the mid nineteenth century.22 Nonetheless, he maintained a hierarchy between
the Yoruba people and the ‘civilised and enlightened nations of Europe and
America’.23 The paternalistic reversal of racialised stereotypes of Africans was
echoed in some of the humanitarian writing of slavery abolitionists in the
eighteenth century, such as Anthony Benezet who, as Geraldine Murphy
shows, delighted in Africans’ ‘innocent simplicity’ in Some Historical Account
of Guinea (1762).24
In other cases, particularly in the high imperial era of the late nineteenth
century, travel writers sought to affirm supposed European cultural super-
iority by representing Africans in explicitly hostile and racist terms of
‘technological deficiency and mental incapacity’, as Tim Youngs puts it,
and denouncing scenes of apparent witchcraft, savagery, and cannibalism.25
The insidious notion of Africa as ‘heart of darkness’, as it was memorably
framed by Joseph Conrad in his novella of that name (1899), gripped the
Western imagination.26 Conrad’s novella has been read, notably by
Nigerian novelist Chinua Achebe, as drawing on and reinforcing the
archetypal racist European image of primitivised Africa – but also, by
others, as locating the ‘heart of darkness’ simultaneously in the European
colonisers.27
and the rhetorical figures of ‘imperial eyes’ and ‘monarch-of-all-I-survey’, see Pratt,
Imperial Eyes, pp. 38–85, 201–8.
22
William H. Clarke, Travels and Explorations in Yorubaland, 1854–1858, ed. J. A. Atanda
(Ibadan: Oxford University Press, 1972), p. 35.
23
Letter from Clarke quoted in J. A Atanda, ‘Editor’s Introduction’, in Clarke, Travels and
Explorations, pp. xi–xxxvii (at p. xxii).
24
Anthony Benezet, Some Historical Account of Guinea: Its Situation, Produce, and the General
Disposition of its Inhabitants, with an Inquiry into the Rise and Progress of the Slave Trade, its
Nature, and Lamentable Effect (London, 1762), cited in Geraldine Murphy, ‘Olaudah
Equiano, Accidental Tourist’, Eighteenth-Century Studies, 27/4 (1994), 551–68 (at pp.
559–60).
25
Tim Youngs, Travellers in Africa: British Travelogues, 1850–1900 (Manchester University
Press, 1994), p. 65.
26
Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness (1899; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973).
27
Chinua Achebe, ‘An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness’ (1977), in
An Image of Africa (London: Penguin, 2010), pp. 1–21 (at p. 19); see also Tim Youngs,
‘Africa/the Congo: The Politics of Darkness’ in Peter Hulme and Tim Youngs (eds.),
The Cambridge Companion to Travel Writing (Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp.
156–73.
287
rebecca jones
Egypt followed a different trajectory, registering in Europe not as a place of

‘darkness’ but as somewhere relatively well known through the classical and
Christian sources. Deborah Manley describes how European pilgrims had
long visited Egypt’s Christian sites, but by the eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries a more diverse body of European and North American travellers
were arriving, their perceptions framed by a long history of contact.28
As Derek Gregory shows, travellers and, increasingly, tourists in Egypt
read about the country before they left and took libraries of travel literature
with them. Travellers retraced familiar routes and tropes – now, not only
those of the classical sources and the Bible, but also those of fellow tourists,
travel writers, and guidebooks.29 Even in the late twentieth century, Lucie
Duff Gordon’s Letters from Egypt was sold in ‘almost every bookshop up and
down the Nile’.30
While less prominent in the popular imagination of the imperial traveller,
working-class Europeans also travelled to Africa as traders, servants, and
employees.31 Frank Emery’s anthology of letters from British soldiers serving
across Africa between 1868 and 1898 contains letters by private soldiers and
non-commissioned officers, published in provincial British newspapers. Their
travel writing was intimately tied up in ‘the harsh business of imperial
action . . . intervention against native polities, land-grabbing, exercising
influence, and punitive actions’.32 But their letters also describe the danger,
hardship, and poor labour conditions the soldiers endured: ‘My clothes are
worn to rags and I have not a boot to my feet, and God knows when I shall
get any. I have drawn no pay since the 16th of January, and don’t know when
I shall’, writes Private George Morris from South Africa in 1878.33
Although the rhetoric of masculinity dominated exploratory and imperial
travel writing, ‘many hundreds’ of British women also travelled to Africa
from the nineteenth century.34 Although many travelled as missionaries,
28
Deborah Manley, ‘Egypt, Western Travellers’ in Speake (ed.), Literature of Travel and
Exploration, vol. i , pp. 386–93 (at p. 386).
29
Derek Gregory, ‘Scripting Egypt: Orientalism and the Cultures of Travel’, in
James Duncan and Derek Gregory (eds.), Writes of Passage: Reading Travel Writing
(London: Routledge, 1999), pp. 114–50 (at pp. 117–18).
30
Katherine Frank, Lucie Duff Gordon: A Passage to Egypt (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1994),
fn. 322.
31
Stephanie Newell, ‘Dirty Whites: “Ruffian-Writing” in Colonial West Africa’, Research in
African Literatures, 39/4 (2008), 1–13 (at pp. 2–3).
32
Frank Emery, Marching Over Africa: Letters from Victorian Soldiers (London: Hodder &
Stoughton, 1986), pp. 13–14.
33
Ibid., p. 54.
34
Sara Mills, Discourses of Difference: An Analysis of Women’s Travel Writing and Colonialism
(London: Routledge, 1991), p. 2.
288
some travelled for exploration or leisure, such as Mary Kingsley, who

travelled to West Africa between 1893 and 1895, or Lucie Duff Gordon,
who described life in Egypt in her letters from that country (1865).35 Sara
Mills shows how some women travel writers were critical of aspects of
imperialism, and adopted an ambivalent, ‘tentative’ subjectivity, while
upholding other aspects of imperial discourse.36 Mary Kingsley, for instance,
undercuts the typical heroic explorer narrative with what Mills describes as
a ‘self-mocking, ironic tone’, but also imposes a civilisational hierarchy
between African and European: ‘I do not believe that the white race will
ever drag the black up their own particular summit in the mountain range of
civilisation’, Kingsley writes.37
Western travel writing and the distinctive, if varied, images of Africa it has
produced have had long-lasting effects. In 2006, Kenyan writer Binyavanga
Wainaina published ‘How to Write about Africa’, a satire of Western dis-
course about Africa. ‘Always use the word “Africa” or “Darkness” or “Safari”
in your title’, the piece begins:
Never have a picture of a well-adjusted African on the cover of your book, or
in it, unless that African has won the Nobel Prize. An AK-47, prominent ribs,
naked breasts: use these. If you must include an African, make sure you get
one in Masai or Zulu or Dogon dress.
In your text, treat Africa as if it were one country. It is hot and dusty with
rolling grasslands and huge herds of animals and tall, thin people who are
starving. Or it is hot and steamy with very short people who eat primates.38
Wainaina suggests that Western writing about Africa is a literature of repeti-
tion, and indeed, some writers who have travelled in postcolonial Africa have
nostalgically retraced canonical journeys or routes, with varying degrees of
self-reflexivity.39 As Carl Thompson argues, while contemporary Western
travel writing now generally (although not always) avoids explicit racism,
35
Lucie Duff Gordon, Letters from Egypt, 1863–1865, ed. Sarah Austin (London: Macmillan,
1865).
36
Mills, Discourses of Difference, p. 3.
37
Ibid., p. 154; M. H. Kingsley, Travels in West Africa: Congo Français, Corisco and Cameroons
(London: Macmillan, 1897), p. 680.
38
Binyavanga Wainaina, ‘How to Write about Africa’, Granta, 92 (Winter 2005), 92–5 (at
p. 92).
39
For instance, Paul Theroux, Dark Star Safari: Overland from Cairo to Cape Town (London:
Penguin, 2003); Tim Butcher, Blood River: A Journey to Africa’s Broken Heart (London:
Chatto & Windus, 2007), which follows in the footsteps of H. M. Stanley; Tim Butcher,
Chasing the Devil: The Search for Africa’s Fighting Spirit (London: Chatto & Windus, 2010),
which retraces the Liberia and Sierra Leone journey in Graham Greene, Journey Without
Maps (London: Heinemann, 1936); Ryszard Kapuściński, Travels with Herodotus (London:
Allen Lane, 2007).
289
rebecca jones
and is sometimes celebrated for its cosmopolitan ethos, nonetheless it has

been criticised for its continued assumptions of authority to represent Africa,
and its use of tropes of power, paternalism, and darkness.40 Simultaneously,
though, some travel narratives have attempted to engage directly with the
continent’s colonial and postcolonial history and politics, such as Michela
Wrong’s In the Footsteps of Mr Kurtz (2000), based on the author’s time as
a foreign correspondent in the former Zaire.41 The establishment of
European settler societies in colonial southern and eastern Africa has pro-
duced, decades later, travel narratives that attempt to understand settler and
colonial history and their descendants’ place in postcolonial Africa.42
African-Authored Travel Writing

The weight of these tropes and images of Africa – and the growing scholar-
ship on European travel writing about Africa – gives the impression that the
continent is saturated with Western imagery. Zimbabwean writer Petina
Gappah observes that ‘Missing from the bestseller lists, from any list, is the
internal gaze, a book about travel in Africa by a black African.’43 Tabish Khair
et al. note that ‘[Non-European] travellers often appear to have left nothing or
little in writing. Hence, the feeling grew – and it persists in the present – that
until recently non-Europeans did not travel or hardly travelled.’44 Indeed,
African travellers rarely enjoy high visibility, whether in bookshops or in
scholarship on travel writing.
Yet Africans have certainly been travelling and writing about the African
continent and the world beyond, and scholarship is now beginning to
recognise the wealth of travel writing they have produced, sometimes in
ways that coincide with the Western genre, and sometimes in quite different
forms. One of the first interventions in scholarship on African travel writing
was a set of analyses of accounts of former slaves read as travel narratives,
such as Olaudah Equiano’s well-known The Interesting Narrative of the Life of
40
Thompson, Travel Writing, pp. 154–5; Debbie Lisle, The Global Politics of Contemporary
Travel Writing (Cambridge University Press, 2006).
41
Michela Wrong, In the Footsteps of Mr Kurtz: Living on the Brink of Disaster in the Congo
(London: Fourth Estate, 2000).
42
For instance, Alexandra Fuller, Scribbling the Cat: Travels with an African Soldier (London:
Picador, 2005).
43
Petina Gappah, ‘Not Yet Uhuru’, review of Dark Continent, My Black Arse by Sihle
Khumalo, African Writing Online, December/January 2008, www.african-writing.com/
holiday/webpages/petinagappah.htm.
44
Tabish Khair et al. (eds.), Other Routes: 1500 Years of African and Asian Travel Writing
(Oxford: Signal, 2006), p. 6.
290
Olaudah Equiano (1789). While, like many travel narratives, the veracity of
some of these accounts has been challenged, they nonetheless offer an
important alternative perspective on the subjectivity of those captured as
slaves and on their societies.45
Such accounts also challenge us to consider the history and significance of
travel in other contexts where voluntary, leisured travel may be scarcely
available, as was also the case for black South Africans in apartheid South
Africa, for instance.46 Even in circumstances of much greater freedom,
Africans’ travels are sometimes restricted; for instance, global visa restrictions
mean that Africans often do not experience the freedom to travel that their
Western counterparts may take for granted. Nonetheless, plenty of Africans
have travelled voluntarily; although from the late twentieth century, many
middle-class Africans have engaged in tourism and leisure travel, historically,
other forms of travel have been more common, such as for trade, education,
labour migration, or religious purposes.47
Relatedly, Aedín Ní Loingsigh argues that scholarship on travel writing has
tended to examine how non-Western subjects ‘participate in, and reconfig-
ure, eurocentric modes of travelling, seeing and narrating’, rather than
recognising how African travellers have produced travel writing on their own
terms.48 Khair et al., too, note the ‘interventionist’ nature of their work
on African and Asian travel writing, which is ‘sometimes informed by
European discourses even as it sets out to map their limits’.49 Thus, some
innovative studies of African-authored travel writing seek to challenge the
generic and formal frameworks through which we read travel writing. Ní
Loingsigh, for instance, admits both fiction and non-fiction in her study of
francophone African travel writing, while Carli Coetzee suggests reading
South African Sihle Khumalo’s African travel book Dark Continent, My Black
Arse (2007) in dialogue with the burgeoning South African self-help literature
market.50 Janet Remmington shows how travel and witnessing are at the
45
Vincent Carretta, Equiano the African: Biography of a Self-Made Man (Athens: University of
Georgia Press, 2005).
46
David Newmarch, ‘Travel Literature’, in Eugene Benson and L. W. Conolly (eds.),
Encyclopaedia of Post-Colonial Literatures in English (London: Routledge, 1994), pp. 1586–98
(at p. 1598), cited in Loes Nas, ‘Postcolonial Travel Accounts and Ethnic Subjectivity:
Travelling through Southern Africa’, Literator, 32/2 (2011), 151–72 (at p. 154).
47
Musisi Nkambwe, ‘Intranational Tourism in Nigeria’, Canadian Journal of African Studies,
19/1 (1985), 193–204.
48
Aedín Ní Loingsigh, Postcolonial Eyes: Intercontinental Travel in Francophone African
Literature (Liverpool University Press, 2009), p. 2.
49
Khair et al. (eds.), Other Routes, pp. 13–14.
50
Ní Loingsigh, Postcolonial Eyes; Carli Coetzee, ‘Sihle Khumalo, Cape to Cairo, and
Questions of Intertextuality: How to Write About Africa, How to Read About Africa’,
291
rebecca jones
heart of Solomon Plaatje’s investigative book Native Life in South Africa (1916)
and novel Mhudi (1930), constituting a means of ‘political assertion’ and
‘creative expressions of agency’ during white rule in South Africa.51
Travel writing by African authors thus constitutes a heterogeneous body
of writing. It ranges, to name but a few examples, from early twentieth-
century Swahili habari – part-travelogue, part-history, part-autoethnography
– to an autobiographical travelogue by pseudonymous Gold Coast clerk
J. G. Mullen, who was trapped in Cameroon during the First World War;
from Togolese author Tété-Michel Kpomassie’s memoir An African in
Greenland (1983), to Ivorian writer Véronique Tadjo’s account of her journey
to post-genocide Rwanda, The Shadow of Imana (2002); from Sweden-based
Nigerian travel writer and photographer Lola Akinmade Åkerström’s online
narratives and global travel book Due North (2017), to the trans-African travel
writing and photography project ‘Invisible Borders’.52 Rather than attempt to
encompass this great variety, the next section of this chapter traces selected
examples of southwestern Nigerian travel writing.
Travel Writing and Colonial Intellectual Culture in

Southwestern Nigeria
Accounts of journeys, both historical and fictional or semi-fictional, have
been encoded in Yoruba-speaking southwestern Nigeria’s oral genres and in
travellers’ personal reminiscences, but with no oral genre dedicated purely to
accounts of travel, travel writing is not usually seen as an ‘indigenous’ genre
in the region. However, the region also has a lively Yoruba and English print
and literary culture, stemming from the codification of Yoruba as a written
language in the mid nineteenth century, largely through the work of
Research in African Literatures, 44/2 (2013), 62–75; Sihle Khumalo, Dark Continent, My Black
Arse (Cape Town: Umuzi, 2007).
51
Janet Remmington, ‘Solomon Plaatje’s Decade of Creative Mobility, 1912–1922:
The Politics of Travel and Writing In and Beyond South Africa’, Journal of Southern
African Studies, 39/2 (2013), 425–46 (at p. 426); Solomon T. Plaatje, Native Life in South
Africa (1916; Johannesburg: Picador Africa, 2007); Solomon Plaatje, Mhudi, ed.
Stephen Gray (1930; London: Heinemann, 1978).
52
Thomas Geider, ‘Early Swahili Travelogues’, Matatu, 9 (1992), 27–65; Stephanie Newell,
‘An Introduction to the Writings of J. G. Mullen, an African Clerk, in the Gold Coast
Leader, 1916–19’, Africa, 78/3 (2008), 384–400; Tété-Michel Kpomassie, An African in
Greenland, trans. James Kirkup (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1983); Véronique Tadjo,
The Shadow of Imana: Travels in the Heart of Rwanda, trans. Véronique Wakerley (Oxford:
Heinemann, 2002); Lola Akinmade Åkerström, Due North: A Collection of Travel
Observations, Reflections, and Snapshots Across Colors, Cultures, and Continents
(Stockholm: Geotraveler Media Sweden, 2017); Invisible Borders – the TransAfrican
Project, http://invisible-borders.com.
292
missionaries. Encounters with Christianity also created the conditions for

some of the earliest known written travel accounts by a person of Yoruba
origin: Samuel Ajayi Crowther (c.1807–91), a former slave and the first African
bishop of the Anglican church. Crowther was a missionary for the Church
Missionary Society (CMS). His journals, published in CMS reports which also
contain the accounts of European missionaries, describe his travels around
the Yoruba region and elsewhere in West Africa during the mid-nineteenth-
century Niger expeditions.53 The journals were written, as Michel
Doortmont argues, in ‘the tradition of early nineteenth-century [European]
travellers’.54 Claudia Gualtieri suggests that, like other ‘Afro-Englishmen’,
Crowther ‘endorsed the perspective of liberal Englishmen, used colonial
stock images of the African, showed a strong adherence to the Bible, and
took great care with writing in English for a British audience’.55 However,
P. R. McKenzie contends that Crowther’s travels also increased his knowl-
edge of the Yoruba region, as he encountered varied religious and social
practices. Alongside his missionary writings, Crowther wrote several of the
earliest Yoruba vocabularies and a translation of the Bible; his travel writing
could thus be read as part of this broader project of Yoruba knowledge
production and intellectual culture.56
Travel writing continued to be part of the repertoire of a number of
Yoruba intellectuals in Lagos in the early twentieth century; as the region’s
print culture developed rapidly, travel narratives were published by African-
owned newspapers. Amidst a climate of Yoruba cultural nationalism in the
early twentieth century, a number of Lagosian writers published travel
narratives that sought to document the history and culture of Yoruba
towns. In other cases, travel narratives expressed the writers’ sense of being
‘civilised’ Lagosians, distinct from both the Yoruba hinterland in Lagos’s long-
standing imbrication with European culture and Christianity, and from colo-
nial European culture. For instance, shortly before the British colonial
53
For example, Samuel Crowther, The Gospel on the Banks of the Niger: Journals and Notices of
the Native Missionaries Accompanying the Niger Expedition of 1857–1859, by Samuel Crowther
and John Christopher Taylor (London: Church Missionary House, 1859). For more by
Crowther, see the Bibliography.
54
Michel R. Doortmont, ‘Recapturing the Past: Samuel Johnson and the Construction of
the History of the Yoruba’, PhD thesis (Erasmus Universiteit Rotterdam, 1994), pp. 39,
42–3.
55
Claudia Gualtieri, Representations of West Africa as Exotic in British Colonial Travel Writing
(Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 2002), p. 205.
56
Peter Rutherford McKenzie, Inter-Religious Encounters in West Africa: Samuel Ajayi
Crowther’s Attitude to African Traditional Religion and Islam (University of Leicester,
1976); Doortmont, ‘Recapturing the Past’, p. 48.
293
rebecca jones
unification of the northern and southern protectorates of Nigeria in 1914,

a travel narrative by a pseudonymous writer called ‘Special Correspondent’
uses a rhetoric of primitivism and naturalisation to characterise northern
Nigeria, implicitly distinguishing it from Lagos:
Scanning the plains to the right and left one sees a network of mud huts,
grass-roofed, conical in shape and suggestive of Primitive men emerging
from the dawn of civilization . . . Philosophically considered, they inspire you
with a sublime love for the Simple Life and attune your soul to the plain
melodies of mother Nature.57
Travel narratives were also published amid Yoruba literary experimenta-
tion. At least sixteen lively and personalised travel narratives were published
in the Yoruba-language Lagos newspapers Akede Eko, Eleti-O·fe·, and Eko Akete
in the 1920s and 1930s.58 Often written as letters to the newspapers’ readers,
these were mostly regular serialised narratives, the longest totalling over
10,000 words. They describe their writers’ journeys around the Yoruba-
speaking region, but also farther across the southern Nigerian coast, and
occasionally into distant northern Nigeria. The most prolific travel writer was
I. B. Thomas (c.1888–1963), editor of the Akede Eko, who frequently travelled
to cultivate newspaper readerships. Other writers included E. A. Akintan
(1890–1957), editor of Eleti-O·fe·, and A. K. Ajisafe (1875–1940), a prominent local
historian, as well as several pseudonymous writers. These travel writers may
have borrowed some rhetorical and formal conventions from Western travel
writing; the Lagos newspapers occasionally printed foreign-authored travel
writing about West Africa, and the travel writers may have known of the
works of earlier missionary writers, which were available in Lagos.59
However, the travel narratives can also be seen as the product of a culture
of literary experimentation in the Yoruba press; I. B. Thomas’s travel narra-
tives, for instance, share rhetorical features with another of his serialised
newspaper narratives, Ìtàn Ìgbésí Aiyé Èmi Sè ̣gilo·lá, published in 1929 and now
recognised as the first Yoruba novel.60
57
Special Correspondent, ‘A Trip to Northern Nigeria and Back’, Lagos Weekly Record,
2 August 1913.
58
Rebecca Jones, ‘Writing Domestic Travel in Yoruba and English Print Culture,
Southwestern Nigeria, 1914–2014’, PhD thesis (University of Birmingham, 2014),
pp. 39–49.
59
Doortmont, ‘Recapturing the Past’, pp. 41–7.
60
Rebecca Jones, ‘The Sociability of Print: 1920s and 1930s Lagos Newspaper Travel
Writing’, in Derek Peterson, Stephanie Newell, and Emma Hunter (eds.), African Print
Cultures (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2016), pp. 102–24; Karin Barber (ed.
and trans.), Print Culture and the First Yoruba Novel: I. B. Thomas’s ‘Life Story of Me, Se ̣gilo ̣la’
and Other Texts (Leiden: Brill, 2012).
294
Although the present discussion focuses on travel writing within Nigeria, it

is important to note that Nigerians also published accounts of overseas
travels since at least the late nineteenth century; Lagosian J. A. Payne, for
instance, published an account in the newspaper Eagle and Lagos Critic of
a journey to England via Sierra Leone, Senegal, and South America for the
Colonial and Indian Exhibition of 1886.61 As opportunities for international
travel increased in the mid twentieth century, overseas travel accounts
proliferated: from soldiers who wrote letters home during World War II
and journalists’ accounts of overseas trips, to students and other travellers in
Europe and the USA, including renowned Yoruba novelist D. O. Fagunwa.62
Travel Writing Unifying the Nation

Following the Nigerian civil war (1967–70), the urgent desire to unify the
country’s many ethnic and linguistic groups was reflected in a travel memoir
by Babatunde Shadeko called The Magic Land of Nigeria (1980), an account of
Shadeko’s travels across ‘all the nooks and corners of Nigeria while working
as a Federal Government Surveyor’ between 1969 and 1975.63 Illustrating
Shadeko’s concern that Nigerians should identify themselves with the nation
rather than by ethnicity, Part One is titled ‘How to be a Detribalized
Nigerian’, followed by Part Two, ‘Probes into our Common Bonds and
Origins’, and Part Three, ‘The Challenges of Unity in Diversity’. Shadeko
explains that his travelogue was ‘inspired by my quest for and sincere belief in
the unity and stability of Nigeria’; he hopes that it will enable Nigerians to
‘appreciate each other’s virtues and foibles in the spirit of unity and frater-
nity’, and to become ‘detribalised’, just as Shadeko says he has become
through his travels.64
Yet alongside its Nigerian nationalism, the book also inserts itself into the
discourse of colonial travel writing. Shadeko describes how he makes the
61
Nozomi Sawada, ‘The Educated Elite and Associational Life in Early Lagos Newspapers:
In Search of Unity for the Progress of Society’, PhD thesis (University of Birmingham,
2011), p. 232.
62
David Killingray with Martin Plaut, Fighting for Britain: African Soldiers in the Second
World War (Woodbridge: Boydell & Brewer, 2010); Kwame Osei-Poku, ‘Agwa’s London
Diary’, presentation at African Travel Writing Encounters conference, University of
Birmingham, 9 March 2016; Nnamdi Azikiwe, My Odyssey: An Autobiography
(New York: Praeger, 1970); Jones, ‘Writing Domestic Travel’, pp. 267–70;
D. O. Fagunwa, Irinajo, Apa Kini (London: Oxford University Press, 1949).
63
Babatunde A. Shadeko, The Magic Land of Nigeria: A Surveyor’s Scintillating and
Thoughtprovoking Account of his Wanderings in Nigeria (Lagos: Nationwide Survey
Services, 1980).
64
Ibid., p. xiii.
295
rebecca jones
traditional explorer’s gesture of a ‘visual survey’ of new terrain and ways of

life he encounters on his travels, and he characterises surveyors as the
postcolonial inheritors of exploration discourse:
For his work begins where the roads end. The main and minor paths are his
routes. When he has left behind all contacts with means of communication
and transportation, the surveyor is usually alone with the elements.
As pathfinder on the frontiers of knowledge, he heads for the wooded virgin
and untrodden land to complete, if he can, the unfinished task of a ‘Discovery
of Africa’.65
A concern with national unity has remained important in some more recent
travel writing. Since the turn of the millennium, the rise of the online space
and accessible self-publishing technology has enabled Nigerian writers to
publish travel writing in formats ranging from e-books and blogs to pieces
in online journals and magazines, and even social media posts. Lagos-based
travel writer Pelu Awofeso has published travel writing and guidebooks
about Nigeria since 2003.66 Awofeso initially envisaged an international
audience for his travel writing, but many of his readers have proven to be
fellow Nigerians who follow his progress via social media. Echoing Shadeko’s
concern with Nigerian unity but with emphasis on Nigeria’s ‘multiplicity’
rather than ‘detribalisation’, Awofeso writes, he says, ‘with the hope that
Nigerians would [through travel] see the value of the multiplicity of our
different cultures and fight for [Nigeria’s] continued unity’. The promotion of
Nigerian tourism, and thus the generation of income for Nigeria, is also
unashamedly part of Awofeso’s agenda; he makes little of the distinction
between tourism and travel that is found in some contemporary Western
travel writing.67
African Travel Writing ‘through Western eyes’?

The travel narratives discussed above demonstrate how southwestern
Nigerian travel writing has been produced for Nigerian audiences, to address
Nigerian concerns, and has been implicated in Western travel writing tradi-
tions and discourse. The growing presence of African diaspora writing about
Africa further complicates distinctions between African- and Western-
65
Ibid., p. 89.
66
For example, Pelu Awofeso, Tour of Duty (Lagos: Homestead Publications, 2010). For
more by Awofeso, see the Bibliography.
67
Rebecca Jones, ‘Nigeria is my Playground: Pelu Awofeso’s Nigerian Travel Writing’,
African Research and Documentation, 125 (2015), 65–85.
296
authored writing.68 For instance, British-Nigerian travel writer Noo Saro-

Wiwa’s Looking for Transwonderland (2012) describes her journey across
Nigeria, including her late father Ken Saro-Wiwa’s village in Ogoniland. Saro-
Wiwa’s travelogue plays with the ambiguity surrounding the diaspora retur-
nee’s relationship with Nigeria; Saro-Wiwa writes, she says, as ‘part-returnee
and part-tourist, with the innocence of the outsider’.69 Unconvinced by this
attempted liminal position, reviewer Adewale Maja-Pearce contends that Saro-
Wiwa writes ‘largely through western eyes’.70 He thus rightly draws attention
to the fact that Saro-Wiwa grew up mostly in Britain, was published in Britain,
and is explicit about seeing Nigeria in Western tourism terms, as ‘this final
frontier that has perhaps received fewer voluntary visitors than outer space’.71
Yet the phrase ‘through western eyes’ may also underestimate the complex
history of travel and shared textual cultures between Africa and the West.
This dichotomy between African and Western travel also plays out in
assumptions about who may travel. Nigerian travel writer Lola Akinmade
Åkerström describes how her ‘motives for travel were deeply questioned’ by
numerous immigration officers: ‘Why was I traveling? There had to be
a more sinister reason beyond the need to explore and enrich my life through
experiencing other cultures.’ Travelling through Eastern Europe, she was
frequently singled out amid a bus full of EU and US passport holders, and had
to explain to immigration officers ‘this unbelievable concept of a Nigerian
traveling for the sole purpose of enjoyment’.72 This assumption that Africans
do not travel for travel’s sake means that Africa is again figured as a ‘site of
difference’, as Gikandi argues. Clearly, travel writing by African authors can
function as a liberatory genre by centring African mobility and African views
of the world. But, simultaneously, what Janet Remmington calls ‘the perva-
sive politicization and racialization of travel’ persists to the present day;
opportunities to travel and the power of the traveller to describe the world
remain uneven, as they were in the precolonial and colonial eras.73
68
For examples of other African diaspora travel writing about Africa, see the Bibliography.
69
Noo Saro-Wiwa, Looking for Transwonderland: Travels in Nigeria (London: Granta, 2012),
p. 9.
70
Adewale Maja-Pearce, review of Looking for Transwonderland: Travels in Nigeria by Noo
Saro-Wiwa, Guardian, 6 January 2012, www.theguardian.com/books/2012/jan/06/look
ing-transwonderland-saro-wiwa-review.
71
Saro-Wiwa, Looking for Transwonderland, p. 8.
72
Akinmade Åkerström, Due North, pp. 17–19.
73
Janet Remmington, ‘“It’s a passport!” my inner voice yells’, review of Lola Akinmade
Åkerström’s Due North, Africa in Words, 15 June 2017, https://africainwords.com/2017/06/
15/its-a-passport-my-inner-voice-yells-review-of-lola-akinmade-akerstroms-due-north.
297

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18

African Travel Writing

Africa has long been a continent of mobility, traversed by traders, scholars,

conventional Western sense, they nonetheless embody similar notions of

Europe Writing Africa: Encounters with Diﬀerence

particularly Portuguese and Dutch.14 Of the English writers, Mungo Park,

‘Anti-conquest’ positions can also be detected in some Christian missionary

Egypt followed a diﬀerent trajectory, registering in Europe not as a place of

some travelled for exploration or leisure, such as Mary Kingsley, who

and is sometimes celebrated for its cosmopolitan ethos, nonetheless it has

African-Authored Travel Writing

Travel Writing and Colonial Intellectual Culture in

missionaries. Encounters with Christianity also created the conditions for

uniﬁcation of the northern and southern protectorates of Nigeria in 1914,

Although the present discussion focuses on travel writing within Nigeria, it

Travel Writing Unifying the Nation

traditional explorer’s gesture of a ‘visual survey’ of new terrain and ways of

African Travel Writing ‘through Western eyes’?

authored writing.68 For instance, British-Nigerian travel writer Noo Saro-

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