Voyage dans l'intérieur de l'Afrique

Description

… entrepris par l’ordre et sous la direction de la Société d’Afrique, dans les années 1795, 1796 et 1797. Traduit de l’anglais, par M. l’Abbé Du Voisin, 2 Bände. Fauche et Compagnie, Hambourg et Brunswick 1800.

both volumes not trimmed, thread-stitching, bound in boards (green), 20.8 cm x 12.8 cm

Synopsis [AbeBooks]: In 1795, the African Association of London sponsored a 24-year-old Scotsman with “medical training and knowledge of nature” to explore the interior of Africa. This young Scotsman is called Mungo Park. What he sees today upstream of the Gambia River in Senegal and Mali, no other person will ever see again; and therefore his account of this journey remains both a unique document of the beginnings of British and American trade slavery and an irreplaceable ethnographic legacy. As he moved inland, Park discovered an industrial, commercial and sovereign Africa made up of countless independent and suspicious states; a dense and prosperous historical space that the colonial presence would tragically distort by disrupting trade between the kingdoms, dismantling trade, abandoning or diverting agriculture, displacing indigenous peoples. It is this once active and sovereign Africa, this unsuspected Africa of small monarchies, which have become bitter slaves by the circumstances, that Parks journey sceptically returns.