Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
Kandt's house sits atop a suburban hill and is one of the few original colonial era build-
ings in the city. As we entered the museum, to be faced with racks of toy dinosaurs in
what passed for their 'Evolution Exhibit', I tried to picture it in the days when this was
the official German residence. That was the thing about the early African explorers -
many of them were officially appointed colonialists, traders, merchants, doctors and bur-
eaucrats. Some had long titles and family histories, while others were misfit chancers who
saw Africa as a way to make their name and, hopefully, pocket lots of cash on the way.
I was saying as much to Boston, but his eye had already been drawn to the racks of bad
taxidermy that surrounded the museum's prize exhibit. The crocodile certainly was huge,
and its glass eyes looked as callous as its man-eater reputation deserved, but there was
something almost pathetic about the way its body had been mangled in its preservation.
'Exploration's changed,' I thought, drifting through the exhibits. 'Now it's a pauper's
game.'
It wasn't, of course, the only way it had changed. Before I set out on this expedition I
had been asked, more times than I care to remember, about the idea of exploration. The
question of what it means in the modern world isn't so easy to answer. To some, the very
idea seems archaic - and, in a world of Google Maps, where every valley and hillside has
already been plotted, the traditional age of exploration is certainly gone. But exploration
has always been about more than pure discovery, or of being the first to do something. The
famous Victorian explorers were, of course, not the first into Africa; Africa is a continent
where mankind has lived for longer than any other, and when Stanley found Livingstone
he was doing so in a land where civilisations had existed for millennia. In the modern era,
it is more important than ever to acknowledge this fact. There is a certain romanticism at-
tached to the Victorian explorers, but the truth is that their motivations were not really so
clear-cut as we would like to think. Livingstone was, first and foremost, an evangelical
missionary, Stanley an egomaniac journalist and mercenary whose talents for self-publi-
city knew no bounds. John Hanning Speke was a glory-hunter with no reservations about
making bold and often unfounded geographical claims, while Richard Burton had more in
common with a 1970s hippie than a classical adventurer; his desire to immerse himself in
cultures was most often expressed in relentless fornication. Kandt himself was one of a
breed of explorers working at the behest of their governments. Their missions were offi-
cially sanctioned exploits - all part of what we would come to know as the Scramble for
Africa, as Europe's colonial powers sought to carve up the newly discovered parts of the
world.
As I wandered through Kandt's old residence, part of me knew I was on a different kind
of journey from the ones I had grown up reading about, but our journeys did have some
things in common. Like them, I was here exploring
people
. Constantly in flux, constantly
evolving, there is always something new to discover about people - and I was here to bring
