This entry about Mary Kingsley first appeared in a Dispatch, the updates sent to all Society members. You can join for free here.

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The following story is 100% true. It may sound like a video game or an old adventure novel, which is why we have presented it as such. But again, it is 100% true.

The Pitch:

Design a new action-adventure franchise.

We want something exotic and exciting, something with the same feel as an Indiana Jones film, a Tintin graphic novel or a Lara Croft video game.

Logline:

Kingsley: The Video Game. Visit the wilds of the world on this action-packed jaunt, where danger is around every corner.

Design notes (internal eyes only):

Producer: To fit into this genre, certain cliches and design elements need to be fulfilled.

Game Designer: Firstly, you’d need fabulous locations, perhaps starting in sooty Victorian England but then heading to steamy jungles filled with danger and snowy mountain tops. You might even throw in some raging rapids or spiked-filled pits to avoid. There’d be dangerous animals around every turn but more importantly, dangerous people. You might find yourself caught up in a war, or instead deal with crooked traders, secretive cannibals and imperious government officials.

Lead Writer: Secondly, to make it through, your character would need to be brave, charismatic and strong-willed, but with a good heart. Surviving more on their wits than on their brawn, they’d make it through their adventures by sheer courage and ingenuity. They’d need to be a writer, or a biologist, or a trader, or maybe a combination of all three. Archaeologist, journalist and treasure hunter have already been taken.

Producer: You know what? Although rare for the time period, let’s make our hero a woman. It would also help for her to have a recognisable costume, so of course being in the late 1800’s we’ll go with a cliched Victorian uniform of a long black English skirt, high necked blouse, matching cummerbund and small fitted hat. Yes, we know it isn’t seemingly practical, but would you prefer Lara Croft’s short shorts? At least the dress can conceal the knife she would carry.

Lead Writer: Finally, she needs a tragic and intriguing backstory. Lara Croft had a missing father. Indiana Jones had an emotionally absent father. The absent father and lonely childhood work. Let’s make her a neglected child, her only window to the outside world the books in her father’s library.

Producer: Yep, that’ll work. She also needs a name, something classic yet refined. Something that hints at her future greatness. We’ve been thinking: Mary Kingsley.

Act 1 – The tragic and intriguing backstory

Mary is born in 1862. The family is unconventional. Her father is a doctor and writer, works for a wealthy Earl and is frequently overseas.

Lead Writer: For a bit of colour, it might help to add something like her father narrowly avoids the massacre at Little Big Horn (aka Custer’s Last Stand) because he fell ill in the days before. This encounter with the treatment of Native Americans could give context to her belief in the proper treatment of local Africans?

Meanwhile, her mother is never welcomed into her husband’s world and in response she retreats into the house. She draws the shutters closed and bricks in the windows and suffers from ill health for the rest of her life. Whilst her father explores the world, Mary is almost housebound, taking full-time care of her mother and her sickly younger brother. She isn’t allowed to be educated as her father doesn’t think it is necessary for women. But she does have access to her father’s personal library. She ignores books expected of her (like Jane Austin) and instead devours anything involving explorers and their exploits.

Game Designer: This part is great for setting the mood. A dark and gloomy house, almost a slave to her family but a library to escape into.

When Mary is 29 years old, her father returns from a trip sick. Taking care of both her parents and running the household, they both pass away within six weeks of each other. With her brother now at college and a £500 a year inheritance, Mary suddenly finds herself with the one thing she never expected: freedom.

Sample dialogue: “The whole of my childhood and youth was spent at home, in the house and garden. The living outside world I saw little of, and cared less for. I felt myself out of place at the few parties I ever had the chance of going to, and I deservedly was unpopular with my own generation, for I knew nothing of play and such things. The truth was I had a great amusing world of my own (that) other people did not know or care about—that was the books in my father’s library.”

Roll opening credits

The first adventure

She heads immediately, overseas to the Canary Islands. Through her encounters with the visitors and locals, she hears stories of West Africa, the “White Man’s Grave”. She is white, but she’s a woman, so the grave surely won’t apply to her. She decides to head off to explore this region.

Lead Writer: After all, Africa was also a place, in all his absence, her father hadn’t been. Good motivation.

She offers to collect tropical fish for the British Museum, gets a license as an official merchant (and gets a supply of cloth, tobacco and fish hooks) and sets off for Freetown, Sierra Leone. Armed with a pen and paper, she plans to document everything she sees. Arriving in Sierra Leone, Mary does something different. Immediately taking a dislike to the missionaries of the area and their colonial arrogance, she heads to local native villages and spends time with them instead.

Game Designer: It’s here we walk the player through the basic mechanics of the game. She spends time with the locals and learns bushcraft, including survival skills and our paddling mechanics. She also learns to make fishing nets from pineapple fibre. All these mini-games will come in handy later. It’d be great to do it in montage, including her learning a few of the local languages rather than forcing them to learn English.

She makes her way through Gabon, Angola and the Congo on foot, and by canoe. Mary becomes quite an adept canoe paddler, but there are dangers to avoid. This includes a crocodile attack whilst crossing a river in Gabon. She is thrown out of the canoe but manages to grab a tree branch and avoid being dragged away by the crocodile. When it shows further interest, a rap on the nose with a paddle seems to send it away.

Sample dialogue: “It was my luck to grab that tree, and my thanks to the crocodile for not having bitten my arm off.”

She also gets caught in a tornado and seeks shelter in a little rocky outcrop. In doing so, she is face to face with a leopard also seeking shelter. As soon as the winds pass, the leopard flees. As she travels, she discovers multiple fish species using these handmade pineapple fibre nets. After five months learning about the locals, living and travelling amongst them, she heads home to England. Whilst home, she gets a book deal and uses it to return to Africa, less than a year later.

Act II – The second adventure

Producer: This act needs to ramp it up, with more danger and more adventure.

Sample dialogue: ”I saw more than enough during that voyage to make me recognise that there was any amount of work for me worth doing down there. So I warned the Coast that I was coming back again.”

She returns to the Congo area, into an area where only one white man has ventured before (and was never seen again). This time, she plans to explore the Ogowe River region.

She also nearly meets an end when they come across a huge set of rapids on the Ogowe River.

Sample dialogue: ”We went bumping down through the big waves, till we came to the very worst of all. I knew that we were all going to be drowned, and I felt quite resigned to it. However, I was determined not to be drowned until I had seen the worst of the rapids. So I clutched the bottom of the canoe with my legs, and hung on with both hands, and we went crashing and bumping down the slope of the hill of water. I saw the canoes following us bumping down, and the men in them all yelling with fear, and then I saw nothing but a wall of green water in front of me, and then we were out of the worst of the rapids, and safe.”

She uses her wits to survive dangerous encounters. Arriving at one village she realised that they were quite hostile. She ordered her interpreter to tell the chief that she heard the town was full of thieves but she would see for herself and then decide. The chief was shocked by the rumour and instead treated them all as honoured guests.

She has a close encounter with a leopard, which she sends away by throwing random items in its direction. A little later she encounters a man who has been attacked by a leopard. With the medical training she learnt from her father’s books and her supplies, she saves his life. The man recovers and becomes her travelling companion.

She also falls into more than one booby-trapped spike pit along the way but is saved by the long skirts she wears, with its likelihood to snag and the many layers of padding.

Sample dialogue: “It is at these times that you realise the blessing of a good thick skirt. Whereas, save for a good many bruises, here I was with the fullness of my skirt tucked under me, sitting on nine ebony spikes some twelve inches long, in comparative comfort.”

Producer: Love the costume integration.

On her way, she encounters previously unknown areas of Gabon and is the first European into these remote lands. If she isn’t first, then she is the first to take an interest in their customs and culture, all of which she documents in her journals. She treats everyone honestly and kindly, and they do the same with her. Her adventures also include spending time with the cannibals in Gabon, the feared Fang tribal group. Staying in a hut one night, she notices a particularly bad smell. Looking up she notices a bag hung from the roof containing a human hand, three big toes, four eyes, two ears and other human remains.

Sample dialogue: “The hand was fresh, the others only so-so”

Lead Writer: I don’t know if cannibals are ok in 2023? If so, can we see it as part of a larger context?

She doesn’t approach them with judgement and instead listens to it all with an open mind and respect and a genuine interest in their culture. She also learns the Fang language and once they overcome their surprise at seeing a white woman, she is welcomed into the tribe. They share more about themselves, from the history of their tribe and the belief system, including their use of a local hallucinogenic plant and their cannibalistic ways. They also take her to the sacred Okanda shrine on a pilgrimage, where she sees their rituals including the killing of a leopard and the drinking of its blood.

Sample dialogue: “A certain sort of friendship soon arose between the Fang and me. We belonged to that same section of the human race with whom it is better to drink than to fight.”

Producer: The river stuff is good, the cannibals are ok and I love the companion idea, but we need to ramp up the excitement. Can we have some action sequences?

Game Designer: Sure, see below.

Idea 1: Mary finds herself in a remote village that comes under attack in a civil war. She disguises herself as a man and escapes under the cover of darkness.

Sample dialogue: “I had no business to be there, and I got out of it by what seemed at the time a very excellent and ingenious plan.”

Idea 2: She encounters a massive snake whilst walking through the jungle.

Sample dialogue: “I was going along the bush path with my umbrella up, for the sun was very hot, when I nearly walked into a boa constrictor. He was coming down the path toward me, and as I was going up, there was no getting out of it. I stopped short, and so did he, and we stood for a moment looking at each other. I thought for a moment of putting up my umbrella and saying ‘No, I thank you,’ but I felt that might seem rude to the snake.”

Mary continues to explore, diving head-first into the environment. By trading goods, she self-funds her trips and travels lightly. She paddles canoes down rapids and past crocodiles, walks through thick jungles and travels with cannibals. Along the way, she encounters Mary Slessor, another uncommon European woman, who is there focused on stopping the practice of twin killing.

Producer: Twin Killing?

Lead Writer: Twin killing is the belief that one of the twins must have been created by the devil, and often resulted in the death of one (or both) of the twins. It has largely stopped, thanks to Mary Slessor and her respectful approach. Mary Slessor is a real person too.

Producer: Ok. Can we lighten it up? Are there any more adventures we can build into the levels?

Game Designer: We have more ideas.

More Ideas:

• She sails down the Rembwe River using a sail made from an old bed quilt.
• She also gets an aggressive hippopotamus to leave her alone by poking it with her umbrella.
• And, towards the end of the adventure, she climbs an active volcano and West Africa’s highest peak of Mount Cameroon, in Cameroon. She takes the difficult side up the 4,040-metre-high mountain, a route never before used by a European.

Producer: No one is going to believe one person did all this.

Act III – England return

Upon returning to England and publishing her first book, she becomes a celebrity. The book, “Travels in West Africa”, is a best seller (they reject her initial title “Log of a Light Hearted Lunatic”). The second one, “West African Studies” is too.

Lead writer: We need to show something here about how her perception of her home had changed and how she has returned a changed person.

Sample dialogue: “One by one I took my old ideas derived from books and thoughts based on imperfect knowledge and weighed them against the real life around me, and found them either worthless or wanting.”

She runs into trouble by speaking her mind, never short of an opinion and also challenging the held beliefs about Africans. Unlike many, she doesn’t believe Africa needs to be changed to resemble the homes of the visitors. She upsets the Catholic Church by speaking out against missionary work.

She sees missionary practise in Africa, the killing of a man’s soul to save his life, as inhumane. They also don’t like the way she says that missionaries never described the country itself, but rather “how it was getting on towards being what it ought to be.” It also doesn’t help that she defends polygamy as a local necessity, witch doctors, and other ‘shocking’ local practises.

Sample dialogue: “I fail to believe Christianity will bring peace between the two races, for the simple reason that though it may be possible to convert Africans en masse into practical Christians it is quite impossible to convert Europeans en masse to it.”

People don’t quite know what to make of her. Here was a woman, going to places that the military wasn’t able to, accomplishing things seasoned explorers couldn’t, and holding views counter to the current sentiment. Embarking on a national speaking tour, she praises the local African people and denies she discovered anything, as it was all known previously by the local people.

Sample dialogue: “A black man is no more an undeveloped white man than a rabbit is an undeveloped hare.”

The Temperance Society hates her views on alcohol when declares that the only reason Protestant missionaries decry it in Africa is as an excuse for their failings as missionaries. The Catholic church hates her view on all sinful activities. The establishment doesn’t know what to do with her when she says that they are “…stay at home statesman who think the Africans are awful savages or silly children…”. The Times even refuses to publish reviews of her books, but that doesn’t stop them from selling out. Her views are entirely modern and sensible, and yet almost heretic for the time. And yet, no one can deny her achievements. With this new regard, she is welcomed as a fellow in the Royal Geographic Society.

Producer: And we can end it there.

Lead Writer: Great. It’s better than the original ending I had.

Producer: What’s the ending?

Lead Writer: Disillusioned with the whole local debate, she volunteers to nurse soldiers in the Boer War in South Africa. After a few weeks after arrival, she falls sick and dies from typhoid. As per her request, she is buried at sea near Cape Town, aged 37.

Producer: Nah, let’s leave it open for a sequel.

Collectables and Trophies

Players can earn any of the following achievements/collectables as they progress in the story:

Discovery of previously unknown snake species

Discovered multiple new species of fish

Discovered eight species of insect

Multiple fish species named in her honour

Fellowship in Royal Geographical Society

Royal Scottish Geographical Society named award

Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine named medal

Named auditorium in Sierra Leone

A note from The Explorer Society team

As we said at the beginning, all of this is true. Whilst the Producer, Lead Writer and Game Designer characters are fictitious, the adventures are all true. The sample dialogue is all Mary’s, taken from her writing in “Travels in West Africa” and “West African Studies”. If you get a chance to read them, you should. She is a great writer, very funny with astute observations and a modern view of the world. It’s surprising for something written so long ago. Her non-judgemental curiosity about the people she encountered is evident, as is her fascination with all that she came across in her travels.

Mary spent barely two years in West Africa and yet accomplished so much. Two years to fundamentally change the way we viewed the treatment of the locals in British colonies abroad. Shortly after her death, various reform organisations were formed to help facilitate government change, as was the Fair Commerce Party. Whilst she isn’t as well-known generally as her forebears (Livingstone) or her contemporaries (Robert Scott, Ernest Shackleton), her contribution is enormous.

Her two books have remained in print for over 125 years.