BOOK REVIEW : Following a Kindred Spirit’s Footsteps Through Africa

ONE DRY SEASON: IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF MARY KINGSLEY by Caroline Alexander KNOPF $18.95, 290 pages

“Tourism,” observed Paul Fussell, “is to travel as plastic is to wood.”

The distinction is nicely illustrated by Caroline Alexander, a scholar of the classics and an intrepid world traveler, in “One Dry Season,” an account of her journey through Gabon in what was once a French colonial domain in West Africa. To borrow Fussell’s metaphor, “One Dry Season” is a vessel of memory, insight and observation that has been lovingly wrought by hand out of the richest ebony.

The theme of Alexander’s travels in Gabon--and the narrative thread of her book--is the retracing of a similar expedition in the late 19th Century by Mary Kingsley, author of “Travels in West Africa.” Kingsley and her book are constantly invoked by Alexander in “One Dry Season,” but it is much more than a literary device. The women are kindred spirits--sturdy, independent, courageous, not merely curious about Africa but more nearly bewitched by the very idea of it.

Indeed, Alexander slips back and forth between Kingsley’s travels and her own, and some of her most intriguing stories in “One Dry Season” are told about the men and women of a century ago who were drawn to Africa out of passion, obsession, goodness of heart or a combination of all three.

She introduces us to the yarn-spinner Trader Horn, Le Grand Docteur Schweitzer, the conquering explorer Count de Brazza and the ill-fated American missionary Robert Nassau, among others, and Alexander allows us to understand that her travels were essentially a pilgrimage to the holy sites that are still haunted by their ghosts: the rapids and waterfalls visited by Kingsley, the mission house where Nassau watched his wife bleed to death during childbirth, the old hospital where Schweitzer ministered to the bodies and souls of his African patients.

Even the account of Alexander’s travels in contemporary Gabon has an odd, dreamlike quality. We meet Pygmies and giants; we go in search of elusive and faintly mysterious grottoes. But somehow Alexander gives us the sense that she never quite finds what she is looking for.

And the people that Alexander encounters and describes are sometimes comical, sometimes benighted, sometimes magical but always slightly strange.

A pastor who has become an admirer of Zionism refers to his less enlightened fellow Africans as “the goyim in the forest.” A pair of feuding Peace Corps volunteers, the secular equivalent of 19th-Century missionaries, are the only Americans in a remote village but utterly refuse to speak to one another. The Mother Superior of a mission where Alexander has taken lodgings is blessed with a worldly wise manner as if “the Almighty (had) swept her up to heaven to view the human comedy from a divine perspective and allowed her to return to earth with secret insight into the ways things really were.”

Alexander’s prose is leisurely, reflective, invariably graceful and elegant.

Still, she is capable of shattering the stillness of some quaint and exotic scene with a lightning bolt of thoroughly modern anxiety.

For example, she gives us a moment of terror during a trip by river boat at night. The boat suddenly docks at a pumping station in the middle of the forest, and she sees floodlights, soldiers in fatigues, a queue of passengers waiting for “a ticket check.” To the late-20th-Century traveler, it is a scene of obscure danger.

“The images of horror offered by the modern world could not have been guessed at by the traveler of Kingsley’s day,” Alexander writes, “the brutal pulling out of the patient line, the interrogation in the yellow light, the detention witnessed by the black river and the indifferent forest.”

Alexander quotes Trader Horn on Mary Kingsley:

“A clever woman and inquisitive to the way of things as they appear on the surface, but very little edge on what she had to say. A book must have Edge.”

Alexander, too, is clever and inquisitive, but “One Dry Season” has an edge that cuts sharply and deeply into the very grain of Africa.