Victorian Field Notes from the Lualaba River, Congo

ISSN： 1470-2541

Source： Scottish Geographical Journal, Vol.129, Iss.3-4, 2013-12, pp. : 210-239

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Abstract

This article examines nineteenth-century British documentation on the Central African village Nyangwe and its inhabitants produced by the three British explorers (David Livingstone, Verney Lovett Cameron, and Henry Morton Stanley) who visited this settlement in the 1870s. In doing so, the article has four principal objectives. First, the article extends recent work on nineteenth-century African urbanization to consider how such urban history might be written with recourse to representations of Nyangwe in the archive of Victorian exploration. Second, the article highlights some of the issues inherent in using the archive for this purpose. Third, the article argues for a new methodology that uses recent historical, anthropological, and linguistic scholarship to link Victorian exploration literature to the local African circumstances out of which that literature emerged. Finally, the article draws on this new methodology to examine Victorian explorer representations of the Wagenya, an African tribe inhabiting the Lualaba River in the vicinity of Nyangwe, and to consider the broader influence of this tribe on the development of Victorian geographical representation and knowledge.