'My Sable Ingramina': queering colonial gender roles in Mary Kingsley's Travels in West Africa

In Mary Kingsley’s Travels in West Africa (1897)one is most often reminded of her femininity - of her potential vulnerability and the precariousness of her situation - through her encounters with Europeans, not Africans. A typically gendered exchange with a European takes place, for example, when she attempts to travel along the rapids of the Ogowé River; having recruited compliant African guides, she is obstructed by a French official:

I explain I will not hold any one responsible but myself, and I urge that a lady has been up before, a Mme. Quinee. He says “Yes, that is true, but Madame had with her a husband and many men, whereas [. . . you are] alone and have only eight Igalwas and not Adoomas, the proper crew for the rapids, and they are away up river now with the convoy.”
“True, oh King!” I answer, “but Madame Quinee went right up to Lestourville, whereas I only want to go sufficiently high up the rapids to get typical fish. And these Igalwas are great men at canoe work, and can go in a canoe anywhere that any mortal man can go” - this to cheer up my Igalwa interpreter - “and as for the husband, neither the Royal Geographical Society’s list, in their ‘Hints to Travellers,’ nor Messrs. Silver, in their elaborate lists of articles necessary for a traveller in tropical climates, make mention of husbands.” (87)

With her characteristic wit, she defies the French official’s expectations of the proper role and scope of unmarried women, literally and figuratively travelling outside the prescribed, gendered domestic bounds of nineteenth-century European culture. She places herself in a tradition of female explorers, and when she finds this doesn’t persuade him, she appeals to her identity as a scientist: she does not want to travel along the river to be the first woman to do so, but ‘to get typical fish’ for her biological study. Crucially, her freedom to identify as a scientist and to travel outside the typical realm of most single British women, rests on the submission and compliance of her African crew, as well as her allegiance to Western ethnography and her invocation of the colonial lexicon of the British Royal Geographical Society. Though this scene is underwritten by imperial rules of trade and mobility, traditional colonial roles are here subverted by Kingsley’s humor. She aligns herself with her crew, mocking the French official’s idea that she is alone, and his apparent claim to be more knowledgeable about the river than her Igalwa companions, positioning her Igalwa interpreter as in on the joke.