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Fish and Fetish:Mary Kingsley's Studies of Fetish in West Africa Ulrike Brisson (bio) When Mary Kingsley got stuck in a mangrove swamp infested with crocodiles during her exploration of the West African coast in 1893, she was wondering why she had come to West Africa and why she was "being such a colossal ass as to come fooling about in mangrove swamps" (Travels 89). The explanation she left for posterity was that she wanted to "go puddling about obscure districts in West Africa after raw fetish and fresh-water fish" (Travels 8). Kingsley had not come to West Africa as a missionary wife to Christianize the natives or as a colonialist to cultivate foreign soil but to do scientific fieldwork, an activity which stood in stark contrast with the more traditional image of a woman's place in the Victorian home. A number of women, especially women travelers such as Flora Tristan, Ida von Hahn-Hahn, Isabella Bird-Bishop, or Gertrude Bell, however, have always dissociated themselves from the ideal of domestic womanhood, albeit not without conflict and ambiguity. In order to explore the way these kinds of women balanced ideals of femininity with their interests in science, this essay concentrates on the nineteenth-century woman traveler and travel writer Mary Kingsley, who broke traditional gender rules and adhered to ideals of femininity at the same time. This text focuses especially on her study of fetishism in West Africa as a way to explore the ways in which women in the nineteenth-century invented themselves, [End Page 326] contrary to traditional role models, as scientists and travelers. Moreover, this essay not only addresses issues of women's travel writing but also touches upon the gendering of scientific discourse as inherent in the tradition of male travel writing. Through travel and subsequent writing, women travelers expanded their own range of possible activities, reinvented their subject positions as women in a male dominated society, and created an audible public voice. In order to address these various aspects, this analysis looks at Kingsley's texts Travels in West Africa (1897) and West African Studies (1899). I will especially focus on Travels in Africa, referred to as Travels throughout this essay, on two different levels. First, I investigate her works within the male writing conventions of ethnography of her time, and, second, I explore the effects of her writing about fetishism on her gendered subject position after she had returned to England. In situating Kingsley's publications into a wider socio-historical context, we find that her sympathy with African fetish customs and for Africans in general was not purely philanthropic, and scientific efforts were not exclusively for science per se but emerged out of a political consciousness regarding Britain's colonial policies. Her overall agenda was to strengthen British imperial power by supporting trade, minimizing missionary influence, and reducing government rule. Her travel accounts thus serve as key texts for discussing the gendering of scientific discourses and of travel writing along with its effects on the audience and the author at home. When Kingsley arrived in West Africa in 1893, nearly all of Africa was in the process of becoming absorbed by colonial rule. By the year of her death in 1900, almost the entire continent was under colonial dominion; only Liberia and Ethiopia remained independent (Boahen 122). Kingsley's first trip to Africa was relatively short. She left England in August 1893 and returned to London in December of the same year with a monkey on her shoulder and other specimens she had collected, having mainly toured the coastal line of the Gulf of Guinea. In Dea Birkett's words, "she traveled as a tourist, sticking to the coast and never venturing inland, yet West Africa was far too uncomfortable to be considered a tourist destination," and neither was Kingsley an explorer, "because she was tracing well-known trade routes" (Spinsters 20). Perhaps the lack of adventure on her first voyage determined her to revisit West Africa. In December 1894, she set out again, this time for almost an entire year to study fish and fetishes. [End Page 327] She returned to England in November 1895. This second journey was...
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