and has edited or co-edited three others. An emeritus professor of history and international affairs at George Washington University, he has served as Director of the National History Center and President of the North American Conference of British Studies and he has been awarded Guggenheim and National Humanities Center fellowships.
Kennedy applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Mungo Park's Ghost: The Haunted Hubris of British Explorers in Nineteenth-Century Africa, and reported the following:
What a reader will find on page 99 of my book, Mungo Park’s Ghost, is an account of the crisis that confronted Captain Thomas Campbell, commander of the expedition the British sent into the West African interior in 1817 to trace the course of the Niger River, only three weeks after he and his men had set out on their journey. The horses, donkeys, and other pack animals they used to carry the caravan’s supplies, arms, and gifts were dying off at an alarming rate, slowing their progress to a crawl. Campbell tried to recruit African porters to meet the expedition’s needs, but this wasn’t possible without the permission of the local almamy (ruler), whose suspicions of the expedition’s intentions caused him to prohibit their hire. As a result, it dawned on Campbell that “our situation… is very perilous.”Learn more about Mungo Park's Ghost at the Cambridge University Press website.
Several of the book’s main themes can be discerned from this page. One is the logistical challenges that confronted so many British explorers in Africa. Both iterations of this expedition—the first under Campbell’s leadership, the second under the command of Major William Gray—were reliant on large teams of pack animals, and both ground to a halt when those beasts of burden succumbed to diseases, predators, and poisonous plants. The other theme that page 99 reveals is the power wielded by African rulers. While stock losses exposed the expedition’s vulnerability, the almamy actively exploited it. Implicit in this outcome is a third theme—this expedition, like so many of those that preceded and followed it, failed to achieve its objectives. Each of these themes runs through the book, which recounts the fate of Campbell’s (and Gray’s) Niger expedition and its sister expedition up the Congo River.
It would be simplistic, of course, to claim that a single page (or, in this case, a half-page, since an image takes up the top portion of page 99) can reveal the intentions of an entire book. Other important themes run through Mungo Park’s Ghost. One is evoked by the title itself: Mungo Park’s pioneering journeys through West Africa transformed him into a romantic hero whose reputation haunted many of the British explorers who followed in his wake. Another theme is the enduring impact that slavery and the slave trade exerted on these explorers’ efforts to penetrate the African continent. And a third is Britain’s imperial ambitions, which spurred it to expend many lives and much treasure in Africa in its pursuit of power and profit. While the annals of exploration invariably highlight the adventures of Mungo Park, David Livingstone, and a few other famous explorers, the obscure expeditions of forgotten figures like Thomas Campbell may offer the most revealing insights into this overly romanticized subject.
--Marshal Zeringue
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