Travels into the Interior of Africa

by Mungo Park

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. 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. He ends up in his Y-fronts at the end of his first journey and has to hitch a ride home on a merchant ship.