The "Woman Traveler"... the first woman to climb the top of Cameroon and explore Africa
“I remember my long black dress being blown away by the wind, and the tremendous effort it took to climb the top of Mount Cameroon. The rocks were crumbling from under me and I almost fell more than once, but with a lot of determination and determination I reached the top. On this summit I feel like the Queen of Africa.”
With these words on the lips of the British Mary Henry Kingsley, the exciting presentation of the film "The Traveler Woman", which was shown by the documentary Al Jazeera, begins, and traces her adventures in the black continent, where she recorded, photographed and painted every new discovery she was exposed to along the way of her journey.
Between the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century, women in Europe began to travel alone, after it was forbidden for them. Among these was the British traveler Kingsley, who was the first woman to climb Mount Cameron in Africa.
Science
Mary was born on October 13, 1862, in North London, to a Victorian family, her father being the governor's private physician, and a world traveler. Historian Pilar Teguera states that her father married his maid, and she bore him Mary.
It was a custom in Victorian families not to send their daughters to school, so Mary learned to write and read from her mother. When her father noticed her passion for studying, he allowed her to attend lessons in German, where most of the scientific texts were written in it.
Mary was born on October 13, 1862, in North London, into a Victorian family
With the passage of time, Marie became helping her father in translating scientific, human, plant and animal texts written in German, and she would spend a long time with him in the library upon his return from his travels, and thus she grew up loving medicine and natural sciences and began writing her own research.
Women weren't going to college in the 1890s, says author Dia Birkett, so Mary didn't have a formal education. On the contrary, she "bred up in a dark, miserable, and sad house."
The sadness of the orphan and the joy of liberation
Her father died when she was thirty years old during one of his trips in 1892, and a few weeks later her mother died, causing her a mixed feeling, the pain of terrible loss mixed with a feeling of liberation, and she became more lonely after the departure of her only brother to China.
Meanwhile, she was receiving an annual income that made her able to determine her future on her own, so she became completely independent and was interested in scientific studies related to describing human races, and she followed her father's studies and wanted to be a traveler like him. She liked him even though he was limiting her freedom.
Despite the warning of friends, Mary decided to go to Africa
She decided to go to Africa, which her father had never visited, despite her father's friends warning her not to go because of the many diseases and dangers.
It was known at that time that West Africa was the cemetery of white men, and home to many diseases such as typhoid and malaria, there were travelers who went and did not return.
But one person encouraged and trusted her, zoologist Dr. Albert Kanther, who suggested that she collect different types of specimens of fish, beetles and insects.
to Africa
Mary began preparing herself for the trip and prepared packages and formalin to preserve these samples, and actually moved from Liverpool to the black continent in December of 1894 on a journey of exploration for new people, things and places, and before that she wanted to explore herself.
She reached the African border west of what is now Sierra Leone, and was intercepted and tried not to let her in because she was not accompanied on her journey, but she finally entered, and began to communicate with businessmen and white merchants in the Free Town area.
They knew the area well, and helped her put together a team to help her in her explorations. Fortunately for her, the head of the team spoke tribal dialects and knew a little English, so he became her interpreter as well as three porters.
She and her team boarded the vessel as far as the vessel could cross, then transferred to a local boat to continue its voyage on the Ougoue River in Gabon for fish sampling.
In the presence of cannibals
She had to learn to paddle such a local African boat, and it wasn't easy at all, especially in her long Victorian dress that hampers fishing and rowing.
The geographer Luisa Rossi says: Mary had to deal with the forces of nature to prove herself, which is the reason for her sailing in this river, and her long, thick dress was one of the most important reasons for protecting her from parasites and pathogens.
In the river, Mary encountered many types of animals, such as hippos and crocodiles, and continued her journey with strength and determination, without regard for the dangers contained in this area.
Historian Pilar Teguera mentions that all the tribes of this region were cannibals, and they were very interested in seeing this woman who roams the river in a canoe without fear. The impact of what Mary did was great on many women travelers and her great ability to adapt to these circumstances.
One of her strange experiences is that some local hunters were exposed to her in the forest, and tied her to a tree because of her strange dress and shape in an attempt to use her as bait to bring monkeys.
Mary spoke of cannibals on the banks of the river
Mary told stories and events stranger than fiction; She talked about cannibals on the banks of the river, and how a group of them were exposed to her, and they almost killed her and her team before one of the team members could talk to the leader of the group to save them from certain death.
She talks about how she slept that night in a hut, and when she was disturbed by the smell of a jet, she went to the hut and found human organs stored in bags for making amulets.
She was very interested and wrote about the traditions of the inhabitants of those regions of the cannibal tribes, and no one preceded her to that, as well as her great adventure in adapting to nature.
Mary recounts in her memoirs about the most difficult moment in her life when she was wandering alone in the woods, and encountered a predatory leopard near her, but she managed to tame and share the shelter with him.
grand adventure
In September 1895, Mary decided to embark on the greatest adventure in Africa, which is to ascend the summit of Mount Cameron with a height of 4,095 meters, which a woman has not done before.
Richard Francis was the only one who climbed this mountain in 1860. Mary tried to imitate him, but she did not follow his path, but a different path on the maps, and she hired a guide named Sasso with six men to help her in her travels.
Climbing the mountain was very difficult, and what was made even more difficult by the horror that possessed the whole team, when there was rumor about the settlement of evil spirits on the mountain.
All the tribes of the region to which Mary went are cannibals
Although three of the team did not complete the journey with her, she continued to climb, the last day of the climb was the most difficult, as the rise was very high and steep, and volcanic rocks fell from under her feet, and a hurricane attacked them from afar, which did not give them enough time to continue the climb.
The men of the team stopped but she continued, motivated by a strange inner strength, until she reached the top and fulfilled her dream.
Mary went further than any other white woman, and reached places in the West of the Black Continent that no white woman had yet reached.
adventures in diary
When she returned to London with the adventures, events and memories she collected with the samples she collected for Dr. Kenther, she began writing her memoirs about her journey, and filled her home with the incantations, plants, pictures and statues she had collected to inspire and remember her while writing about her journey.
In all her correspondence, she mentioned that she wanted to be dealt with seriously, and her memoirs were a great success, as a presentation was arranged for her at the Liverpool Geographical Society, and the Scientific Society opened its doors for her to receive a lecture about her experience and her journey, but she did not do it herself according to British traditions and customs at the time. And on her behalf, Sir James Evern, who read her memoirs to the audience of scholars and explorers in the Society, in which women were not allowed to obtain membership.
Mary decided to embark on the greatest adventure in Africa, which is to climb the top of Mount Cameron, with a height of 4,095 meters
Months after her return, her brother died when he returned ill from his travels, and she became completely alone in England, so a longing for returning to Africa grew in her heart, and she thought about it seriously. Therefore, during the war in South Africa between the British and the Boer tribes, she volunteered to work in military hospitals. She learned a lot of medicine at the hands of her father, and she left for Africa again as a nurse, because she found in that a convincing excuse to return again to the continent she loved.
On March 11, 1900, Mary was diagnosed with typhoid, despite all her precautions, and she was 38 years old, so her body was burned and scattered in the ocean to fulfill her last wishes.
So far, a number of fish species bear her name, and her name is associated in scientific books with the daring and adventurous ascent of Mount Cameroon, but the thing she is most proud of, she says, is that she learned to row like the Africans in the Oogwe River.
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