The unthinkable. The unknowable. The hidden. The explorations of Sir Richard Burton….
Burton married Isabel Arundel in 1861, in an almost secret ceremony in the Bavarian Catholic Church. “We will have no show,” Burton insisted, “for a grand marriage ceremony is a barbarous and indelicate exhibition.”
Marriage brought to Richard Burton a wife who adored, admired, and defended him all her life, but who also worked strenuously to tame him. He repaid her with lasting devotion and respect, but he also escaped from her for long periods. Their marriage has been described repeatedly as one of the great enduring Victorian romances; Ouida, who knew them well, called it “a love-marriage in the most absolute sense of the word.” Early in the marriage Richard ran the risk of wrecking it altogether by hypnotizing Isabel, daily, if we are to believe her biography, in an effort to find out what she was thinking. “He used laughingly to tell everybody,” she wrote, “it’s the only way to get a woman to tell you the truth.” Later he boasted that he could hypnotize her from a distance of many miles and maintain a kind of telepathic communication.
—One of its objects was to give a trustworthy account of the negro character and to point out the many mistakes that well-intentioned Englishmen had made in dealing with it. To put it briefly, he says that the negro is an inferior race, and that neither education nor anything else can raise it to the level of the white. After witnessing, at the Grand Bonny River, a horrid exhibition called a Juju or sacrifice house, he wrote, “There is apparently in this people [the negroes] a physical delight in cruelty to beast as well as to man. The sight of suffering seems to bring them an enjoyment without which the world is tame; probably the wholesale murderers and torturers of history, from Phalaris and Nero downwards, took an animal and sensual pleasure in the look of blood, and in the inspection of mortal agonies. I can see no other explanation of the phenomena which meet my eye in Africa. In almost all the towns on the Oil Rivers, you see dead or dying animals in some agonizing position.”—Read More:http://www.gutenberg.org/files/4315/4315-h/4315-h.htm image:http://burtoniana.org/books/1856-First%20Footsteps%20in%20East%20Africa/1856-FirstFootstepsVer2.htm
No British consul in any African post ever utilized his time and opportunities as well as Richard Burton during his four years at Fernando Po. He made repeated journeys into the interior of West Africa and wrote three absorbing volumes describing his experiences: Wanderings in West Africa from Liverpool to Fernando Po (1863), and A Mission to Gelele, King of Dahome (1864). The last, an account of the kingdom of the Amazons, is reputedly one of the best of the pioneer studies on African customs.
—To the genuine natives or Bubes he was distinctly attracted. They lived in sheds without walls, and wore nothing except a hat, which prevented the tree snakes from falling on them. The impudence of the negroes, however, who would persist in treating the white man not even as an equal, but as an inferior, he found to be intolerable. Shortly after his arrival “a nigger dandy” swaggered into the consulate, slapped him on the back in a familiar manner, and said with a loud guffaw, “Shake hands, consul. How d’ye do?” Burton looked steadily at the man for a few moments, and then calling to his canoe-men said, “Hi, Kroo-boys, just throw this nigger out of window, will you?” The boys, delighted with the task, seized the black gentleman by his head and feet, and out of the window he flew. As the scene was enacted on the ground floor the fall was no great one, but it was remarked that henceforward the niggers of Fernando Po were less condescending to the Consul. —Read More:http://www.gutenberg.org/files/4315/4315-h/4315-h.htm image:http://boingboing.net/2011/09/26/women-warriors-of-west-africa.html
Burton was fascinated with the spectacle of 2,500 women warriors who, he said, though “too light to stand a charge of the poorest troops in Europe,” and who maneuvered “with the precision of a flock of sheep,” nevertheless fought with great ferocity. Their battles consisted largely of raids on neighboring tribes for slaves, a practice Burton had been commissioned to discourage. He had small success in this. “You are a good man,” King Gelele told him patronizingly, “but too angry.”
ADDENDUM:
(see link at end)…The negro race is mostly untainted by sodomy and tribadism. Yet Joan dos Sanctos418 found in Cacongo of West Africa certain “Chibudi, which are men attyred like women and behaue themselves womanly, ashamed to be called men; are also married to men, and esteem that vnnaturale damnation an honor.” Madagascar also delighted in dancing and singing boys dressed as girls. In the Empire of Dahomey I noted a corps of prostitutes kept for the use of the Amazon-soldieresses. Read More:http://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/b/burton/richard/b97b/afterword4.html
—but no place attracted him more than the Cameroon country; and his work Two Trips to Gorilla Land 199 is one of the brightest and raciest of all his books. The Fan cannibals seem to have specially fascinated him. “The Fan,” he says “like all inner African tribes, with whom fighting is our fox-hunting, live in a chronic state of ten days’ war. Battles are not bloody; after two or three warriors have fallen their corpses are dragged away to be devoured, their friends save themselves by flight, and the weaker side secures peace by paying sheep and goats.” Burton, who was present at a solemn dance led by the king’s eldest daughter, Gondebiza, noticed that the men were tall and upright, the women short and stout. On being addressed “Mbolane,” he politely replied “An,” which in cannibal-land is considered good form. He could not, however, bring himself to admire Gondebiza, though the Monsieur Worth of Fanland had done his utmost for her. Still, she must have looked really engaging in a thin pattern of tattoo, a gauze work of oil and camwood, a dwarf pigeon tail of fan palm for an apron, and copper bracelets and anklets. The much talked of gorilla Burton found to be a less formidable crea
than previous travellers had reported. “The gorilla,” he, says, in his matter-of-fact way, “is a poor devil ape, not a hellish dream creature, half man, half beast.”—Read More:http://www.gutenberg.org/files/4315/4315-h/4315-h.htm image:http://allkindsofhistory.wordpress.com/2011/09/23/amazons-the-king-of-dahomeys-all-woman-army/
(see link at end)……She had one very anxious time; it was when Burton was sent on a special mission to the King of Dahome, to impress upon that potentate the importance the British Government attached to the cessation of the slave-trade, and to endeavour by every possible means to induce him to discontinue the Dahoman customs, which were abominable cruelties. Burton succeeded in some things, and his dusky majesty took a great fancy to him, and he made him a brigadier-general of his Amazons. When the news of this unlooked-for honour reached Isabel, she became ” madly jealous from afar,” for she pictured to herself her husband surrounded by lovely houris in flowing robes mounted on matchless Arab steeds. Burton, however, allayed her pangs by sending her a little sketch of the chief officer of his brigade, as a type of the rest. Even
Isabel, who owns that she was influenced occasionally by the green-eyed monster, could not be jealous of this enchantress. Read More:http://archive.org/stream/romanceofisabell00burtuoft/romanceofisabell00burtuoft_djvu.txt
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