SOME AFRICAN WALKING

The caricature below, by ‘Ape’ from Vanity Fair, shows Verney Lovett Cameron (1844 

1894) and is captioned (if you can make it out) ‘He walked across Africa.’

 

And you know, he more of less did, in 1874-5.  In fact he arrived in Africa intending to assist Dr. Livingstone, but by the time he got there Livingstone was dead, so Cameron pressed on, intending to explore the main stream of the Congo river but he couldn’t obtain canoes on acceptable terms so he continued on foot.  

He was certainly the first European to cross Equatorial Africa from sea to shining sea – Zanzibar in the east to Benguella in the west (sometimes spelled Benguela).  However, it wasn’t absolutely straightforward.  His diary from April 1873, extracted in his book Across Africa,  reads as follows, ‘I was suffering such pain, that I could neither walk nor ride but was carried in a hammock.’  In other words he didn’t absolutely walk all the way across Africa.

 

Thinking about Cameron, leads a person also to think about Ewart Scott Grogan, born 1874, who, newly graduated from Cambridge, fell in love and wanted to marry Gertrude Watt, the sister of a Cambridge friend.  But Gertrude’s stepfather wasn’t sure that Grogan had the right stuff.  So Grogan said, ‘What if I walked from Cape Town to Cairo?’ a thing nobody had ever done, and the stepfather said, ‘All all right then.' So off he went, in 1898, looking like this:

         He made it, but again he needed some help.  In his book From The Cape to Cairo he 

writes,

‘I was suffering from slight fever, and …the fever brought on a very bad foot; I had rubbed all the skin off the heel with elephant-hunting, and had been walking on it ever since; and owing to the poisonous influence of the fever, it swelled to a great size, and was in such an unhealthy condition that when I pushed my finger into the swelling it left a cavity which did not swell out again for some minutes. As it was impossible to stop in the country, I had to make arrangements to be carried, and all the time that I was in camp, sat with my foot in a basin filled with a strong solution of permanganate of potash, applying a poultice of Elliman's Embrocation at night.’

 

 

I first read about Grogan in photographer Peter Beard’s book, The End of the Gamepublished in 1965 -  and it contains this image of Grogan - strange how a man can change his look over 60 odd years:

 

Grogan lived until 1967.  It’s even stranger to think that a man who fought in the Matabele Wars, lived long enough that he could have listened to Sgt Pepper, though I can’t swear that he did.

 

       Somewhere I have a photograph or two of me walking, not across Africa, but definitely in Africa, in Egypt and Morocco.  Having failed to find them, here’s a photo I took, in which you can, just about, see a man walking somewhere in Africa, not far from the pyramids.  No hammock or carriers – but one or two cars.  

And here, for people who like that kind of thing, are some walking maps: