Mary Kingsley: Traveled solo through Africa in Victorian garb

 
During the Victorian era, a time when British women were expected to carry out their lives in the domestic sphere, Kingsley defied society’s expectations and traveled extensively on her own throughout West Africa, where she studied the customs of local tribes and was the first European to visit certain remote areas. Born into a middle-class English family in 1862, Kingsley had no formal education and spent many years caring for her invalid mother. It was only after her parents died, within a short period of each other in 1892, that the unmarried Kingsley was able to escape her domestic duties and leave home. Starting in 1893, she made two extended trips to West Africa, where she got around by canoe and by foot (all while decked out typical female Victorian garb: high-necked blouses and long skirts); came in contact with cannibals and dangerous wildlife; collected fish specimens for the British Museum (three types of fish later were named for her); and scaled 13,000-foot-high Mount Cameroon. She went on to pen two influential books, including “Travels in West Africa” (1897) and became a celebrity in England, where she spoke out against British colonial policies in Africa. Kingsley contracted typhoid while serving as a nurse to Boer War prisoners and died in South Africa in 1900.