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THE FULANI RESEMBLE EAST AFRICANS
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[QUOTE]Originally posted by Alive-(What Box): [QB] ^Well, since someone sane/real is comenting on the stripe thing, might as well add to this: [QUOTE]Next up was John Ledyard, who came to the attention of the association when he was arrested and expelled from Russia for apparently trying to walk to Canada without the proper permits -- this seemed the right sort of spirit. Ledyard, however, perished in Cairo before he ever got to the desert, apparently of an overdose of self-prescribed medications. Next the association hired an Irish major called Daniel Houghton, who duly set off up the Gambia. There he was promptly robbed by a Mande ruler, inflicting a wound on himself when his gun misfired. He kept going but was never heard from again. Finally, the association hired a young ship's surgeon called Mungo Park. He had some pretensions to being a naturalist (his treatise [i]Eight Small Fishes from the Coast of Sumatra[/i] had commended him to the Linnaean Society), and he claimed some linguistic ability (he had apparently picked up some Mande while staying with a trade mission on the Gambia River). He offered his services to the African Association in 1793, and his offer was accepted. His task, he said in his [i]Travels[/i], was "to pass on to the Niger and ... to ascertain its course and, if possible, the rise and termination of that river," as well as "to visit the principal towns in the neighborhood, particularly Timbuktoo and Houssa." (Shabeni had described "Houssa" or "Hausa" as a city "as large as London, with a palace whose walls were eight miles long," though he didn't have a clue where it actually was; it was probably Kano.) [b]Park seemed to get on well with the Africans he met, though he was subjected to a good deal of suspicion and, in some cases, bewilderment. The women of a Fulani king, he reported, "rallied me with a good deal of gaeity in different subjects, particularly upon the whiteness of my skin and the prominency of my nose. They insisted that both were artificial. The first, they said, was produced when I was an infant, by dipping me in milk; and they insisted that my nose had been pinched ever day, till it had acquired its present unsightly and unnatural configuration."[/b] As David Mountfield pointed out, "Park was himself no mean hand at this kind of raillery ... at one of his worst moments, when a captive of the Moors, he agreed to their demand that he should prove himself to be uncircumcised provided he was allowed to demonstrate the fact to the pretties girl present." His relations with the Tuareg were very different. With them, he bristled with hostility. It is difficult now to sort out fault. He was convinced they were simply barbarians. "It is sufficient to observe that the rudeness, ferocity and fanaticism which distinguished the Moors from the rest of mankind found here a proper subject on which distinguished the Moors from the rest of mankind found here a proper suject on which to exercise their propensities. I was a [i]stranger[/i], I was [i]unprotected[/i], and I was a [i]Christian[/i]; each of these circumstances is sufficient to drive ever spark of humanity from the heart of a Moor, but when all of them, as in my case, were combined in the same person, and teh suspicion prevailed that I had come into their country as a [i]spy[/i] [all these italics are Parks's own], the readers will easily imagine that in such a situation, I had everthing to fear." But there is another side to the story. Later explorers discovered that the locals were as little fond of Park as he had been of them. [...][/QUOTE]The rest is very entertaining :D From: [i]Timbuktu: The Sahara's Fabled City of Gold[/i] by Marq De Villiers & Sheila Hirtle It's a nice read. [/QB][/QUOTE]
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