1.5 stars. Absolutely the most self-centered author I have ever come across. He likes nothing. Everything is sub-par. I couldn't read the whole book. It's too bad, because this could have been a great catalog of the way Africa was in the 1860's. ( )

1.5 stars. Absolutely the most self-centered author I have ever come across. He likes nothing. Everything is sub-par. I couldn't read the whole book. It's too bad, because this could have been a great catalog of the way Africa was in the 1860's. ( )

This was not only one of the books I was required to read for a seminar I took on "Adventure, Empire, and Escape," it was the one I ended up writing my seminar paper on. Yet I was unable to finish reading the book until two months after said seminar paper was due! That, perhaps, is the clearest indicator of the quality of the book: slow, uninteresting, and repetitive. Surely a travelogue of West Africa at a moment of transition ought to be fascinating, but Burton has a pedant's love of minutiae-- and a near-complete inability to make it interesting. There are very few of his own personal experiences recorded here on his journey from Liverpool to Fernando Po to take his position as consul there; mostly he relates history or customs he seems to have learned from books. Or, even more commonly, he relates why the history or customs he's learned from books are wrong, and tells you the real truth that he knows, always failing to explain on what authority his version is actually correct.

There's probably a fascinating paper to be written in the weird way that Burton usually privileges the British imperialist perspective yet occasionally lets through a glimmer of a more cosmopolitan worldview. My paper isn't it, as I got tired of writing about the book at fifteen pages, yet had another five to come up with. Burton says in his preface (though the book was published anonymously as the work of "A F.R.G.S." on its original publication, and he always refers to "the Consul" in the third person) that he wants to "lay down what a tolerably active voyager can see and do," but if so, one has to wonder why there's a chapter that isn't about the journey at all, but simply everything Burton knows about the presence of gold in West Africa. Which is, as you might imagine, thoroughly dull.