Mary Kingsley

This chapter looks at Kingsley’s post-mortem legacy: most immediately how her concern for Boer POWS was translated by her friend Alice Stopford Green into an investigation of the dire conditions in which exiled Boers were held on St Helena. Journalist E. D. Morel was a great admirer of Mary Kingsley and her ideas on indirect rule lay behind his creation of the Congo Reform Association, which campaigned vigorously against the atrocities visited on the people of the Congo by the regime of Leopold II of Belgium. Kingsley’s friends Alice Stopford Green, John Holt and Roger Casement were also closely involved with the Congo Reform Association. Kingsley’s critique of cultural imperialism was the inspiration for the African Society, which promoted the kind of ethnology she had championed, while her researches into the terrible mortality of Europeans in West Africa inspired the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine’s Mary Kingsley Medal.