Stories by English Authors: Africa (Selected by Scribners) — Key Ideas to Explore

Narrative Frames and Unreliable Tellers

Several stories employ a frame narrator who addresses a listener directly. In Doyle's tale, the speaker invites his audience to 'fill up your glass again, and light another cigar' before launching into a yarn he insists is 'true, sir, every word of it.' This device creates intimacy but also raises questions about reliability—the narrator admits to a 'wildish' past and financial desperation. Similarly, in 'Ghamba' by William Charles Scully, the protagonist Whitson extracts a confession from a cannibal chief through a series of pointed questions, turning the story into a quasi-interrogation. The frame allows the authors to present extraordinary events—diamond discoveries, man-eating clans—as plausible recollections, while the narrators' own biases and limitations color the account.

The Mechanics of Survival: Thongs, Revolvers, and Cartridges

In 'Ghamba,' the cannibal chief explains his family's hunting technique: they catch victims with thongs thrown over the arms, rendering them unable to shoot. The chief describes how he practiced walking up a path repeatedly while his sons threw the thong over him. This attention to practical detail—the removal of cartridges from a revolver, the use of green wood to smoke meat—grounds the horror in mundane logistics. The story's tension arises from the mismatch between the protagonists' expectations (a supernatural legend about Umhlonhlo) and the grim reality of a family that has survived for years by eating human flesh, including their own children. The excerpt's clinical tone, with Whitson asking 'Why not?' about the preference for white flesh, underscores the unsettling rationality of the killers.

Colonial Anxieties and the Supernatural

The catalog subject 'Exploration, Survival & Adventure Tales' aligns with the stories' focus on white men navigating unfamiliar terrain, but the excerpts also reveal deeper anxieties. In Doyle's story, the narrator's luck hinges on a mysterious valley and a 'fairy story' that proves true, blending rational explanation with the inexplicable. Haggard's 'Long Odds' (not excerpted) likely continues this vein. The cannibal tale in 'Ghamba' inverts the colonial adventure: instead of heroic discovery, the protagonists stumble into a trap baited with a false legend. The chief admits he used the story of Umhlonhlo to lure victims, preying on the very curiosity that drives exploration. These stories thus reflect both the thrill of the unknown and the fear of being consumed—literally and figuratively—by the continent.

Readers approaching this collection should attend to the narrative frames and the tension between the exotic and the quotidian. The stories reward attention to how characters justify their actions and how the authors balance adventure with unease. The excerpts suggest that the Africa depicted here is as much a stage for psychological drama as for physical peril.

These African tales brought back my grandfather’s worn copy of King Solomon’s Mines, the smell of dust and adventure. That longing for unexplored places felt so vast. Later, reading Their Silver Wedding Journey — Volume 3 — A Closer Reading, I found the same quiet strangeness in a familiar Europe—distance isn’t always miles, sometimes it’s just time passing.