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One Dry Season
The author traces the footsteps of the nineteenth-century travel writer Mary Kingsley through equatorial Africa, witnessing the effects of a century of haphazard modernization
283 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2012
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122 people want to read
About the author
Caroline Alexander
46 books199 followersCaroline Alexander has written for The New Yorker, Granta, Condé Nast Traveler, Smithsonian, Outside, and National Geographic. She is the curator of "Endurance: Shackleton's Legendary Expedition," an exhibition that opened at the American Museum of Natural History in March 1999. She lives on a farm in New Hampshire.
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Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews
January 26, 2018
To Be a Pilgrim
He who would valiant be
'Gainst all disaster
Let him in constancy
Follow the Master.
There's no discouragement
Shall make him once relent
His first avowed intent
To be a pilgrim.
(English hymn of 1906, based on John Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress)
What inspires us to make pilgrimages? This is what was foremost in my mind as I read Caroline Alexander's lyrical travel memoir. Alexander follows ostensibly in the footsteps of famed African explorer Mary Kingsley, but along the way her fellow travelers (separated by decades and centuries) also include the Italian-French explorer Pietro Savorgnan di Brazzà, Albert Schweitzer, Dr. Robert Hamil Nassau (founder of the Talagouga mission in Gabon), Paul B. du Chaillu, and Trader Horn. She immersed herself in the literature of the explorers and missionaries of the region, yet, to her credit, her research never overwhelms her account.
Alexander is acutely aware of the futility of replicating Kingsley's journey, but she persists, motivated by... well, this is the question, really. The motivations of pilgrims are complex. We cannot recreate the original journey and are bound to be disappointed in any deviations or differences from it, yet the pilgrim follows "the Master" (in Alexander's case this is Kingsley) as a way to pay homage to an admired predecessor but also as a route to self-discovery.
The demon the Alexander wrestles with most frequently is a fear of being a mere tourist, of being an unworthy successor to the pioneering spirit that was Mary Kingsley. At one point, while visiting a primate research station, she reflects, "I was revisited with the uneasy sensation of being merely a tourist.... I suddenly felt vague and insubstantial. Once again, I seemed to be skimming over the surface of someone else’s deeper experience.”
And yet Alexander does far more than skim. She renders vivid descriptions of the people she meets and the landscapes she traverses. In one particularly poignant passage, she visits an abandoned mission and enters its ruined cathedral:
I approached the cathedral, whose heavy double doors surmounted with great bosses stood closed with an air of finality, as if they had been sealed shut irrevocably and forever; yet they swung easily open when I pushed them. I stepped into the cavernous cathedral nave, which, stripped bare as it was of all pews and of every scrap of decoration, resembled a medieval dining hall more than it did a church. Dangling eerily on its broken chain above the choir loft was what appeared to be, but surely could not have been, a censer, spotlit by the weak light that entered through the large porthole windows immediately behind it. All along the high side walls, the jungle had come peering in each window, groping with its sinuous tendrils into this private darkness, and leaf by leaf consigning it to a forgotten secrecy, like that enshrouding Sleeping Beauty’s palace. Impossible to describe the feeling of desolation harbored in this grandiose and gutted structure, standing at the end of the long line of successive abandonments that I had wandered through that day!
In another tell-tale passage, she comes to grips with her self-perceived inadequacy in comparison to Mary Kingsley:
What would Mary Kingsley have done at Onga. Would she have inquired as to how the chief’s wife had prepared the manioc? Investigated the nature of the spirits that almost certainly haunt the Djoué river? I had none of her inquiring, anthropological passion. Are Bateké women allowed to eat antelope? Do they rejoice or despair at the birth of twins? I would not know what to do with such knowledge.... In fact, I did very little inquiring at Onga, but found myself being absorbed passively into its rhythm of life.
Ah, but there's the rub. There's much to be gained by this "passive absorption," haphazard as it may seem.
For one thing, it gave her a useful perspective as she makes friends (and the occasional enemy) along her way -- the Sisters at the mission in Lambaréné, the faithful boatman Jean, even the overbearing chief of Four Place. They are portrayed with a fond and detailed vividness that makes Alexander's paucity of "fresh ideas" seem irrelevant.
Mary Kingsley, of course, set high marks for more than industry and insight. Her humor and wry appraisal of the difficulties she faced are what draw many of us to her narrative. Caroline Alexander, however, has her own sense of humor, less acerbic and marked, but right on target. There is, for example, the account of the comically mismanaged Hotel Cascades in Booué.
My room was filthy, with grimy green walls, ancient wasps’ nests, tattered curtains, and a powerful smell of mildew. This, I soon discovered, was the very least of difficulties a guest faced at the Hotel Cascades, which was a kind of Gabonese Fawlty Towers, a masterpiece of awfulness, a monument of chaotic madness of such colossal and magnificent proportions that after prolonged experience anger subsided into a kind of awestruck admiration.
But it is while confronting the passage of time and coming to grips with her own moods and feelings that I was most drawn to Alexander's account. Time and again she makes a trek to a now-abandoned church or takes in a view eulogized by Kingsley, only to find something quite different and to despair at a lack of resonance.
I had embarked on this abbreviated version of Kingsley’s trip [to a church outside Libreville] with the awareness that the most I could expect was to see the same scenery as had Kingsley, but that I would have no approximation of her experience. Still, this was my last trip within Gabon – in two days’ time, I would be back in Europe – and I now realized that I had after all looked forward to some kind of emotional climax. Standing in the entrance of the blackened church, I tried to imagine Mary Kingsley climbing up to the verandah, being offered wine and bread by the friendly, isolated priests – but try as I did I could make no connection; there was nothing evocative on this scorched and desecrated site, where even the view of the sea and western horizon was obscured by the overgrowth of grass.
But what bravery there is in this confession! She was, like all good pilgrims, looking for something that cannot be found. The successful pilgrim comes to value what is found in its place.
Discussed this book, along with Kingsley's Travels in West Africa in a Reading Genres book club meeting in June 2017 devoted to the theme "A Love Story: With a Twist," my take being that Kingsley was in love with Africa
He who would valiant be
'Gainst all disaster
Let him in constancy
Follow the Master.
There's no discouragement
Shall make him once relent
His first avowed intent
To be a pilgrim.
(English hymn of 1906, based on John Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress)
What inspires us to make pilgrimages? This is what was foremost in my mind as I read Caroline Alexander's lyrical travel memoir. Alexander follows ostensibly in the footsteps of famed African explorer Mary Kingsley, but along the way her fellow travelers (separated by decades and centuries) also include the Italian-French explorer Pietro Savorgnan di Brazzà, Albert Schweitzer, Dr. Robert Hamil Nassau (founder of the Talagouga mission in Gabon), Paul B. du Chaillu, and Trader Horn. She immersed herself in the literature of the explorers and missionaries of the region, yet, to her credit, her research never overwhelms her account.
Alexander is acutely aware of the futility of replicating Kingsley's journey, but she persists, motivated by... well, this is the question, really. The motivations of pilgrims are complex. We cannot recreate the original journey and are bound to be disappointed in any deviations or differences from it, yet the pilgrim follows "the Master" (in Alexander's case this is Kingsley) as a way to pay homage to an admired predecessor but also as a route to self-discovery.
The demon the Alexander wrestles with most frequently is a fear of being a mere tourist, of being an unworthy successor to the pioneering spirit that was Mary Kingsley. At one point, while visiting a primate research station, she reflects, "I was revisited with the uneasy sensation of being merely a tourist.... I suddenly felt vague and insubstantial. Once again, I seemed to be skimming over the surface of someone else’s deeper experience.”
And yet Alexander does far more than skim. She renders vivid descriptions of the people she meets and the landscapes she traverses. In one particularly poignant passage, she visits an abandoned mission and enters its ruined cathedral:
I approached the cathedral, whose heavy double doors surmounted with great bosses stood closed with an air of finality, as if they had been sealed shut irrevocably and forever; yet they swung easily open when I pushed them. I stepped into the cavernous cathedral nave, which, stripped bare as it was of all pews and of every scrap of decoration, resembled a medieval dining hall more than it did a church. Dangling eerily on its broken chain above the choir loft was what appeared to be, but surely could not have been, a censer, spotlit by the weak light that entered through the large porthole windows immediately behind it. All along the high side walls, the jungle had come peering in each window, groping with its sinuous tendrils into this private darkness, and leaf by leaf consigning it to a forgotten secrecy, like that enshrouding Sleeping Beauty’s palace. Impossible to describe the feeling of desolation harbored in this grandiose and gutted structure, standing at the end of the long line of successive abandonments that I had wandered through that day!
In another tell-tale passage, she comes to grips with her self-perceived inadequacy in comparison to Mary Kingsley:
What would Mary Kingsley have done at Onga. Would she have inquired as to how the chief’s wife had prepared the manioc? Investigated the nature of the spirits that almost certainly haunt the Djoué river? I had none of her inquiring, anthropological passion. Are Bateké women allowed to eat antelope? Do they rejoice or despair at the birth of twins? I would not know what to do with such knowledge.... In fact, I did very little inquiring at Onga, but found myself being absorbed passively into its rhythm of life.
Ah, but there's the rub. There's much to be gained by this "passive absorption," haphazard as it may seem.
For one thing, it gave her a useful perspective as she makes friends (and the occasional enemy) along her way -- the Sisters at the mission in Lambaréné, the faithful boatman Jean, even the overbearing chief of Four Place. They are portrayed with a fond and detailed vividness that makes Alexander's paucity of "fresh ideas" seem irrelevant.
Mary Kingsley, of course, set high marks for more than industry and insight. Her humor and wry appraisal of the difficulties she faced are what draw many of us to her narrative. Caroline Alexander, however, has her own sense of humor, less acerbic and marked, but right on target. There is, for example, the account of the comically mismanaged Hotel Cascades in Booué.
My room was filthy, with grimy green walls, ancient wasps’ nests, tattered curtains, and a powerful smell of mildew. This, I soon discovered, was the very least of difficulties a guest faced at the Hotel Cascades, which was a kind of Gabonese Fawlty Towers, a masterpiece of awfulness, a monument of chaotic madness of such colossal and magnificent proportions that after prolonged experience anger subsided into a kind of awestruck admiration.
But it is while confronting the passage of time and coming to grips with her own moods and feelings that I was most drawn to Alexander's account. Time and again she makes a trek to a now-abandoned church or takes in a view eulogized by Kingsley, only to find something quite different and to despair at a lack of resonance.
I had embarked on this abbreviated version of Kingsley’s trip [to a church outside Libreville] with the awareness that the most I could expect was to see the same scenery as had Kingsley, but that I would have no approximation of her experience. Still, this was my last trip within Gabon – in two days’ time, I would be back in Europe – and I now realized that I had after all looked forward to some kind of emotional climax. Standing in the entrance of the blackened church, I tried to imagine Mary Kingsley climbing up to the verandah, being offered wine and bread by the friendly, isolated priests – but try as I did I could make no connection; there was nothing evocative on this scorched and desecrated site, where even the view of the sea and western horizon was obscured by the overgrowth of grass.
But what bravery there is in this confession! She was, like all good pilgrims, looking for something that cannot be found. The successful pilgrim comes to value what is found in its place.
Discussed this book, along with Kingsley's Travels in West Africa in a Reading Genres book club meeting in June 2017 devoted to the theme "A Love Story: With a Twist," my take being that Kingsley was in love with Africa
January 13, 2021
2.3 stars. God, I so WANT to like Alexander. I really really really do. She's important and I think she's a genius but her tone?? Just doesn't click with me. I need to be in the right frame of mind to absorb any of her content. I'm sorry Alexander. I adore you as a person, but this isn't for me. I refused to DNF though. I gave this a proper and thorough shot.
PT: travelogues, reading around the world: Gabon, by extension: greek and roman myth (Caroline Alexander), Africa
What I Liked
1) Thorough. If nothing else, this was thorough in its account of Gabon's environment and history. That's no small feat. This is the primary reason this earned its 2 stars.
2) Sprinkling of humor here and there. Despite my comments in WIDL, Alexander DID have a few moments of good humor. Those were great.
What I Didn't Like
1) Academic tone. Much as it pains me to say, there is (kind of) a time and place for academic tones. Sure, I can acknowledge that. But this?? This was excessive. Too academic for my blood by a long shot. I wanted more of a witty personal account grounded in realism and humor. This was not that.
2) Mary Kingsley. See, I knew going into this book that Mary would probably feature heavily in the story because Alexander was following her trail, but nothing could've prepared me for JUST how much Kingsley was in the story. My goodness, it was a lot. Too much. This whole thing felt more like an essay on Kingsley's experiences than a travelogue of Alexander's own adventures. I understand the intellectual desire to lean towards depending on someone else's work as an outline for your own story, which makes sense, but if I wanted to hear Kingsley's story, I would've just read her book. I wanted Alexander's take on Gabon, and unfortunately, this didn't especially fulfill that want.
3) Historical database. Further on intellectual leanings: this read like an index of historical individuals of the area at times. While I think it IS important to establish context and maybe throw in a few notable characters here and there for intrigue's sake, Alexander's approach was too dry for me. There was nothing that particularly stood out as exciting or enchanting about the people of the area, despite the POTENTIAL they had to be set up as exciting. I think Alexander's style just doesn't sit well with me. Not my cup of tea.
4) Nothing happened? Where was the excitement? The fun? The danger?? Even the most dangerous moments felt tamped down by the academic tone of it all. Alexander was on an adventure, but it read like a cookbook list of instructions; she was just checking off the activities on her journey, not living them fully. Maybe that's not fair of me to say. Maybe she was really living them fully, but every chapter's chance at emotion felt stifled by academia.
PT: travelogues, reading around the world: Gabon, by extension: greek and roman myth (Caroline Alexander), Africa
What I Liked
1) Thorough. If nothing else, this was thorough in its account of Gabon's environment and history. That's no small feat. This is the primary reason this earned its 2 stars.
2) Sprinkling of humor here and there. Despite my comments in WIDL, Alexander DID have a few moments of good humor. Those were great.
What I Didn't Like
1) Academic tone. Much as it pains me to say, there is (kind of) a time and place for academic tones. Sure, I can acknowledge that. But this?? This was excessive. Too academic for my blood by a long shot. I wanted more of a witty personal account grounded in realism and humor. This was not that.
2) Mary Kingsley. See, I knew going into this book that Mary would probably feature heavily in the story because Alexander was following her trail, but nothing could've prepared me for JUST how much Kingsley was in the story. My goodness, it was a lot. Too much. This whole thing felt more like an essay on Kingsley's experiences than a travelogue of Alexander's own adventures. I understand the intellectual desire to lean towards depending on someone else's work as an outline for your own story, which makes sense, but if I wanted to hear Kingsley's story, I would've just read her book. I wanted Alexander's take on Gabon, and unfortunately, this didn't especially fulfill that want.
3) Historical database. Further on intellectual leanings: this read like an index of historical individuals of the area at times. While I think it IS important to establish context and maybe throw in a few notable characters here and there for intrigue's sake, Alexander's approach was too dry for me. There was nothing that particularly stood out as exciting or enchanting about the people of the area, despite the POTENTIAL they had to be set up as exciting. I think Alexander's style just doesn't sit well with me. Not my cup of tea.
4) Nothing happened? Where was the excitement? The fun? The danger?? Even the most dangerous moments felt tamped down by the academic tone of it all. Alexander was on an adventure, but it read like a cookbook list of instructions; she was just checking off the activities on her journey, not living them fully. Maybe that's not fair of me to say. Maybe she was really living them fully, but every chapter's chance at emotion felt stifled by academia.
May 20, 2013
In One Dry Season, Rhodes Scholar and New Yorker Caroline Alexander travels “in the footsteps” of Mary Henrietta Kingsley who journeyed—entirely alone—to West Africa in the 1890s in search of fish and fetish. Kingsley later wrote the classic Travels in West Africa published in 1897.
I admit to a fascination with the enigmatic Kingsley since my university days when I wrote an essay about her for my British Imperialism course. Since then I have read everything I could find about Kingsley, lived in West Africa, and even named my publishing business after her. This pales in comparison with Alexander’s passionate absorption with Mary Kingsley, who responded to Kingsley’s words: “If you go there, you will find things as I have said.” The result is One Dry Season published by Alfred A. Knopf in 1990. (I love the woodcut illustration on the matte dustjacket of this first edition hardcover, which I discovered at Powell’s in Portland.) To fully appreciate the book it helps to have a keen interest in the life of Mary Kingsley. If you do, this is a tale to savour.
Alexander came across Travels in West Africa while researching the African country of Gabon, where most of the events in Kingsley’s book took place. Alexander had long wished to visit Gabon, and the book inspired her to finally do so. However, she does much more than retrace Kingsley’s steps and compare her experiences to Kingsley’s famous descriptions. One Dry Season offers Alexander’s personal exploration of the country as she travels in the spirit of Kingsley and beyond. In the process, she explores this eccentric Victorian woman as well as (part of) equatorial Gabon. She offers new ways of thinking about the life of Mary Kingsley and details of what it is like to travel as a woman alone, then and now, in this part of Africa.
Caroline Alexander takes a few longish segues into Dr. Albert Schweitzer and Dr. Robert Hamill Nassau, and I would have appreciated an index. That said this book is a keeper, replete with memorable characters and scenes. I know I will read and refer to it again and again.
One Dry Season: In the Footsteps of Mary Kingsley
I admit to a fascination with the enigmatic Kingsley since my university days when I wrote an essay about her for my British Imperialism course. Since then I have read everything I could find about Kingsley, lived in West Africa, and even named my publishing business after her. This pales in comparison with Alexander’s passionate absorption with Mary Kingsley, who responded to Kingsley’s words: “If you go there, you will find things as I have said.” The result is One Dry Season published by Alfred A. Knopf in 1990. (I love the woodcut illustration on the matte dustjacket of this first edition hardcover, which I discovered at Powell’s in Portland.) To fully appreciate the book it helps to have a keen interest in the life of Mary Kingsley. If you do, this is a tale to savour.
Alexander came across Travels in West Africa while researching the African country of Gabon, where most of the events in Kingsley’s book took place. Alexander had long wished to visit Gabon, and the book inspired her to finally do so. However, she does much more than retrace Kingsley’s steps and compare her experiences to Kingsley’s famous descriptions. One Dry Season offers Alexander’s personal exploration of the country as she travels in the spirit of Kingsley and beyond. In the process, she explores this eccentric Victorian woman as well as (part of) equatorial Gabon. She offers new ways of thinking about the life of Mary Kingsley and details of what it is like to travel as a woman alone, then and now, in this part of Africa.
Caroline Alexander takes a few longish segues into Dr. Albert Schweitzer and Dr. Robert Hamill Nassau, and I would have appreciated an index. That said this book is a keeper, replete with memorable characters and scenes. I know I will read and refer to it again and again.
One Dry Season: In the Footsteps of Mary Kingsley
November 7, 2025
enjoyable as smoothly written and conversational and wonderful portrait of what seems to be unending hospitality to the traveller by the people of Gabon.
November 19, 2025
Gabon, Africa
July 9, 2015
I haven't read Kingsley's book, but admire Alexander's planning in following the literary trail she left behind. Still, if you're expecting historical footsteps as the primary focus here, it doesn't quite work that way. Roughly half of the book is a modern travel narrative, having little or nothing to do with Kingsley, which was fine by me, but that writer's fans may find the footsteps angle a bit thin. Also, Alexander spends a fair amount of time on a side story of a missionary physician whom Kingsley had met on her journey. Overall, a pleasant read, where not much really happens of note - no wildly challenging monkey wrenches typical of other African adventures: she goes places (some Kingsley-related, others not), meets people, reports what she finds, and moves on to the next location. Lecat's narration came across as a bit more ... patrician, and seems a bit more mature, than I'd expected of Alexander herself, giving the story the air of a Womens' Institute talk from local gentry; however, as there aren't really any truly dramatic moments, that wasn't such a bad fit.
January 31, 2015
This book was OK, but the author spent way too much time talking about all the people Mary Kingsley met in Gabon, and not nearly enough time on people she herself met. The best part of the book was when she went to places and did things that Ms. Kingsley didn't - then she seemed to allow herself to experience the country as it is now, rather than trying to fit it into a 19th century box.
July 19, 2011
This seemed a little slow and wondering to me. Usually that's okay in a travel book, but somehow this writer never seemed to resolve ANYTHING, which got a little boring after a while. Perhaps I was influenced by having read Kingsley's wonderfully witty narrative first.
Want to read
May 5, 2010Victorian explorer, Mary Kingsley
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