West African Studies

+to know there is someone who cares for facts, without theories disguising original: "draping" them.

I will merely add that I am still grateful to all my own West Coast The coastal regions of West Africa where Kingsley conducted her research friends. If you ever come across anyone who says I owe them much, you may assume that I do, although in all my writing I have most carefully cited my sources original: "ticketed its source".

I now turn briefly to an explanation and apology for this book. I do not apologize for its literary style. I am not a professional writer original: "literary man"; I am only a student of West Africa. I am not proud of my imperfections in English. I would write better if I could, but I cannot. I find that when I try to write like other people, I fail to say what seems true to me, and thereby lose any right to say anything at all.

I am more convinced the more I learn of West Africa—and my education is continuous and never interrupted by holidays—that it is a difficult subject to write about. This is particularly true when you are a student hampered on all sides by masses of unorganized original: "inchoate" material, unaided by a collection of great authors whose opinions you can reference, and addressing a public that is not interested in the things that interest you so keenly and that you regard as so deeply important.

In my previous book, I very carefully confined myself to facts and arranged those facts with as little personal opinion as possible. I was anxious to see what kind of opinions they would generate in the minds of the educated experts here in England—not out of mere "feminine curiosity," Kingsley often used self-deprecating humor regarding her gender to navigate the male-dominated scientific circles of the 1890s but from a lack of confidence in my own ability to build theories. On the whole, this method has worked well. Ethnologists Social scientists who study and compare different cultures and peoples of various theories have been able to use these facts as they saw fit. However, one of the greatest ethnologists has grumbled at me—not for failing to provide a theory, but for omitting...