Review of Travels Into the Interior of Africa by Mungo Park

*Travels into the Interior of Africa* by Mungo Park. Published by Eland in 2004.

One of the many great pleasures of being a graduate student in an interdisciplinary humanities program is that I am forced outside of my comfort zone quite a bit, even when I particularly don’t want to be reading XYZ on a Saturday night.

One of my core graduate seminars I’m taking this semester is a literature-based course called The Traveler, which essentially is a class looking at forced migration and traveling in the context of the African diaspora and the slave trade.

A ton of the books we’re reading this semester are incredibly fascinating to look at because of their content, and almost everything we’re reading is nonfiction.

To kick off the start of the semester we began with Travels Into the Interior of Africa, which is a travel narrative written by Mungo Park in the late 1700s.

As the introduction to the book explains, Mungo Park was sent to figure out the river systems in Africa and explore around, and the dude felt compelled—and was paid—to write about his experiences wandering.

He’s quite the cheeky lad, as he doesn’t really bring much to Africa. The core components are his compass and umbrella, which he somehow manages to lose both.

Anyways, let’s get into this review.

Mungo Park’s accounts on his first journey to Africa.

So Mungo Park was first sent to Africa when he was 24, and his job was simply to try and figure out the course of the Niger River in Africa. The person who was originally sent to do this died in the process, so Mungo decides he’s the right guy for the job.

He prepares to go off into Africa, and ends up on the journey of a lifetime. Supposedly he kept his notes in his hat, even when everything was stolen off of him, and he seems like the kind of guy who really shouldn’t have survived this throughout the narrative.

He published this book of his notes in England, and it was a massive hit. He would die not too long after this though on another trip to Africa.

Park’s account is an interesting one to look at when it comes to narrative building, as one of the important observations he tends to make about his journey are firsthand accounts about interactions between Africans.

One of the major discussions we kept having throughout classes was digging up his biases, as if you look closely throughout the book, you can tell when Park is using harsher language to describe certain groups and tribes in the African interiors.

He often has translators and guides to help him throughout his journey, and one of the more fascinating sections I looked at in the book was how he included the local languages.

If you look closely at these accounts of language, which he then admits he doesn’t know much about, you’ll see they’re untouched by European concepts at this point in time.

One of my Kenyan classmates raised this point in class, as the counting systems for one of them is in fives, not ones like the white way. When Park was having his little journeys around Africa, the Europeans hadn’t come full force in yet. His book actually inspired the colonization of Africa—that’s your fun fact for the day.

But one of the most interesting details and scenes to extrapolate from this text is when Park ends up joining a march full of slaves.

This isn’t the European slave trade one is thinking about in—it’s the African slave trade across the Sahara. These are Africans kidnapping and enslaving their own people to use as currency and barter with them.

There’s a woman in this group of people who can’t keep up, and she is eventually left for dead after being treated harshly. Park spares us some of the finer details of her demise, but it wasn’t pretty at all.

As Mungo Park travels through the tribes, he also shows a disregard for Muslims and local traditions. He sees Muslims as potentially traitorous at some points in the recollections, which sometimes leads him to group them in the bad category of how he depicts certain people.

Granted, this also includes the people who robbed and almost killed him, but when there are lowkey racist undertones to it all, then there’s more to think about.

Overall Thoughts

I would have never read this if it weren’t for class, and I think I’m glad that I read it, but I wouldn’t revisit it unless I had to in an academic sense.

Mungo Park’s writing style and thoughts were just too difficult for me to plough through at some times, and several of my classmates and I were agreeing upon how this was a tough read.

But this book is a valuable resource for understanding the time because Mungo Park is a white man going into Africa and trying to observe as how he sees it.

His biases, from a contemporary standpoint, are glaringly obvious at times, but others are subtle. His perspective is still important, giving a lens into a popular text when he released it that lead to justification of colonialism.

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