Mary Kingsley 1896–1899

This chapter explores how Mary Kingsley believed the British merchants and traders in West Africa were better placed than missionaries or colonial officials to understand West African beliefs, laws and social practices; she supported the liquor trade. It looks at her two major books, Travels in West Africa and West African Studies, analyzing Kingsley’s literary style and the challenges her observations and arguments posed to the British colonial authorities and the Colonial Secretary Joseph Chamberlain. In this chapter we see the emergence of Kingsley as a political campaigner for the rights of Africans, as she campaigns against the Hut Tax that was imposed on the people of Sierra Leone in 1898. The South African War offered her an excuse to leave England and return to the Africa she loved.

Rudyard Kipling, Cape Town and Bloemfontein

This chapter follows Rudyard Kipling in his travels around South Africa: he visited those wounded at the Battle of Spion Kop, travelled on a hospital train to pick up the wounded from the Battle of Paardeberg, and then went to Bloemfontein in the Orange Free State, where for ten hectic days he worked as an editor on The Friend, came under fire for the first time at Karee Siding, and observed the early days of the typhoid epidemic. It looks at Kipling’s romanticization of the colonial troops, and his portrayal of them in poems and stories, his growing disgust at what he saw as the treachery of the Cape rebels, and his criticism of the rigidity and snobbery of the British officer class, and in particular their folly in relation to the outbreak of typhoid.

Voyaging Out

This chapter takes the reader through the months immediately preceding the departure to South Africa of the three protagonists of the book, Rudyard Kipling, Arthur Conan Doyle and Mary Kingsley, in, respectively, January, February and March 1900. We see Rudyard and Carrie Kipling enduring their first Christmas without their daughter Josephine, and Kipling’s belief in the necessity and the good of war in South Africa, despite the military reversals of its early months; we see Conan Doyle throwing himself into war preparations and being inoculated against typhoid during the voyage; we see Mary Kingsley giving her last lecture in London at the Imperial Institute, and, on board ship, writing a critique of Christianity and a plea in favor of African nationalism, stressing the link between African land ownership and freedom from Western interference.

Arthur Conan Doyle 1894–1899

This chapter shows Arthur Conan Doyle busy on many different fronts: looking after his tubercular wife Touie; the setting up of a large household in Surrey; adventures as a journalist with the British army in Egypt; always writing. He struck a deal with American actor/playwright William Gillette for a stage version of Sherlock Holmes, which was hugely successful and lucrative. While Touie was confined to a sick room, Doyle fell in love with a much younger woman. When war broke out with the Boer Republics, Doyle championed the uitlanders, the foreigners in the Transvaal. His sense of fair play and his patriotism motivated a desire to enlist; turned down for soldiering, he secured a post as physician with Langman’s Field Hospital.

Introduction

The introduction provides a contextualizing synopsis of the involvement of the three protagonists, Kipling, Kingsley and Conan Doyle, in the Anglo-Boer War, and flags up the experiences that they would share – fatal in the case of Kingsley – of the typhoid that would account for over half of British fatalities. It places the war within the historical context of Queen Victoria’s long reign and the growth of the British Empire. It suggests that the motives of all three protagonists were mixed: that while they were all public figures in Britain, their personal histories nonetheless made them see themselves as social outsiders. It introduces the idea that all three had personal reasons for leaving England, as well as being drawn towards the war in South Africa by more abstract notions of duty, patriotism or imperialism.

Rudyard Kipling

This chapter explores the period of creativity Kipling entered into on his return from South Africa in 1900, and in particular the farewell stories he wrote to – and about – his daughter Josephine, who had died in 1899. The reader is shown how, at the same time, Kipling was becoming increasingly embittered with the South African War, and how angry he was made by the Treaty of Vereeniging in 1902. The chapter analyses the stories that came out of the war, and argues that with a few exceptions Kipling failed to find inspiration in South Africa and was turning instead to England, its landscape and pre-history. The chapter ends with an examination of Kipling’s famous poem ‘If–’.

Rudyard Kipling 1897–1899

This chapter opens with the involvement of Cecil Rhodes in the failed Jameson Raid of 1895; on Kipling’s second visit to South Africa in 1898 he saw a great deal of Rhodes, travelling with him to the diamond mines at Kimberley, and on to the newly-acquired territory of Rhodesia, a journey that inspired two at least of the Just So stories. He became an ever-keener imperialist, and wrote, ‘The White Man’s Burden’. Mary Kingsley particularly disliked it. In this chapter Sir Edward Burne-Jones dies and six months later the Kiplings travel to New York, where Rudyard and Josephine, his beloved daughter, fall ill with pneumonia; Josephine dies. When war is declared in October 1899, Kipling leaps at the distraction from his profound grief, and rushes out a poem – ‘The Absent-Minded Beggar’ – to raise money for the servicemen being sent to South Africa and their dependents.

Rudyard Kipling to 1897

This chapter covers Rudyard Kipling’s birth and early childhood in Bombay, how he was sent to England aged five where he was bullied and abused for the next six years before escaping to happier schooldays and a return, aged 16, to India, where for seven years he worked as a journalist, first in Lahore and later Allahabad. The chapter explores his formation as a writer and looks at his early work and early fame. It describes his first visit to South Africa in 1891 and the seeds of his later imperialist vision. It covers his marriage to Carrie Balestier, the period they spent in Vermont, the births of their three children, their return to England and setting up home in Rottingdean, next door to Kipling’s aunt and uncle, Georgiana and Edward Burne-Jones.

Arthur Conan Doyle

This chapter traces the experience of the South African War on the later life and work of Arthur Conan Doyle, charting his agitation for military reform and for preventive health measures, especially for typhoid inoculation to be mandatory in the armed forces. It shows him defending the behavior and actions of the British troops in South Africa, and follows his involvement in various causes: the miscarriage of justice in the Edalji case; the Congo Reform Association, for which he wrote The Crime of the Congo; and his increasing proselytizing for spiritualism, in which he was encouraged by his second wife. This chapter argues that Doyle’s real achievements, as well as what he hoped to be remembered for, are overshadowed by the extraordinary vitality and adaptability of his fictional creation Sherlock Holmes.

Mary Kingsley

This chapter looks at Kingsley’s post-mortem legacy: most immediately how her concern for Boer POWS was translated by her friend Alice Stopford Green into an investigation of the dire conditions in which exiled Boers were held on St Helena. Journalist E. D. Morel was a great admirer of Mary Kingsley and her ideas on indirect rule lay behind his creation of the Congo Reform Association, which campaigned vigorously against the atrocities visited on the people of the Congo by the regime of Leopold II of Belgium. Kingsley’s friends Alice Stopford Green, John Holt and Roger Casement were also closely involved with the Congo Reform Association. Kingsley’s critique of cultural imperialism was the inspiration for the African Society, which promoted the kind of ethnology she had championed, while her researches into the terrible mortality of Europeans in West Africa inspired the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine’s Mary Kingsley Medal.