Women's Voices on Africa

In traditional European circles, female identity was viewed in relation to the husband and his status in society. Most of the western women travelers to Africa were either divorced or spinsters. Forging an independent identity meant accomplishing something unique and exclusive. While they were different from their female peers, they were recognized in the larger sphere of society for their adventures abroad.
For women travelers, the accent was on detail: intensity of individual experiences, empathy for some people, criticisms of others. The personal nature of their experiences distinguishes the women from their equally adventuresome male colleagues. They viewed African women differently from most nineteenth-century male writers. Yet, as Patricia Romero explains, these women were also typical of their time, race, and class, and shared some of the same privileges, virtues, and prejudices of their male counterparts.
The texts are compiled from books published in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and mostly unavailable outside rare book collections; articles from the African newspaper The Kenya Post of 1939; and an unpublished essay written especially for this book by Jocelyn Murray, a missionary to the Kikuyu, who was in Kenya during "The Emergency."
Other themes covered in Women's Voices on Africa are the difficulties and challenges for a white woman traveling "alone." (The help of African servants and interpreters did not count in the nineteenth century when, for example, Mary Hall traveled from Cape Town to Cairo, visiting missionary stations and local rulers along the way.) Rosita Forbes and Katherine Fannin were adventurers, discoverers, and journalists who traveled to unknown areas of Ethiopia. Forbes later produced a film about her trip; Fannin spied for England. Forbes appears rather modern and open-minded from today's point of view, compared even to Mary Kingsley, who in the mid-1890s was considered the most enlightened traveler of her time. Included in Women's Voices is a little-known lecture by Kingsley that deals with the pseudo-scientific racism which characterized her time. The selection of texts also provides an overview of the ways in which the working conditions of, and attitudes toward, white women in Africa evolved over the period 1850-1950. Besides the general introduction, all selected texts are introduced by Patricia Romero to illuminate their socio-political contexts.