Travels into the Interior of Africa

"I loved this book. Park comes from a pre-racist Europe, and he’s travelling along the 16th parallel – the sort of watershed between ‘Animus’ Africa and Islamic Africa. And a lot of the cultures he moves through, in terms of literature and mathematics and astrology, are equal to or more advanced than what he’s used to at home. It was a very interesting period. It’s not even part of the language of the age – assumed white European superiority. He’s a gloriously open traveller, and also there’s a sort of whimsical incompetence about him. I mean, he dies there in the end. He ends up in his Y-fronts at the end of his first journey and has to hitch a ride on a merchant ship. Then he goes back to Stirlingshire, where he was a surgeon, and doesn’t do anything for ages until he sets off again. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . The other thing is that it’s the search for the mouth of the Niger river, rather than the source. A sort of backwards journey. In the final episode he disappears in rapids under a hail of arrow bolts. In one version there’s an epilogue by whoever edited the book – he got from local sources a description of how Park and his companion are ambushed on the river in a hail of arrows, and they stood up, embraced and jumped overboard together in each other’s arms. Isn’t that the most beautiful image? Which is why the attackers thought to record it – they thought it was a rather good way to go. Whoever wrote the edition I read had found the accounts of his death in the archives in Timbuktu. Mungo Park has always been my principal explorer hero because of his openness and his lack of racism. It was not an exploration with any kind of conquest or any kind of mercantile interest. He was there on a whim, really."