As John Pinkerton's Modern Geography (1802) indicates, "the central parts of Africa" remained one of the last unwritten spaces in Europe's atlas of inhabited places, and was consequently a topos for modern, scientific exploration and composition. Pinkerton credits the African Association, founded in 1789 by Joseph Banks and others, with pioneering this inquiry, especially the travels and travel writings of Mungo Park. For his part, Park regarded his purpose as twofold: to render "the geography of Africa more familiar to my countrymen," and to open "to their ambition and industry new sources of wealth, and new channels of commerce." These imperatives allow Park not only to discover but to recover lands that have contained native populations for centuries, and to rhetorically position the African native as consumer, labourer, or even commodity (e.g. of the slave trade). But this is complicated when Park finds that the unknown has already been "discovered" by a hostile competitor; in North and Central Africa, the Islamic Moors compete with the Christian European for commercial and cultural spoils. Park's mapping over of the interior thus becomes a mapping over of the interior of this other and involves strategies of substitution and erasure, as Park attempts to supplant the Islamic other and to commercialise the natural and the native that seem to be left over.
Drawing on theoretical work by Homi K. Bhabha (The Location of Culture [1994]) and David Spurr (The Rhetoric of Empire [1993]), this essay locates sites of resistance to this proto-colonial enterprise within the structures and rhetoric of Park's travel writings (Travels into the Interior of Africa [1799]; Journal of a Mission to the Interior of Africa, in the Year 1805 [1815]). In particular, the essay focuses on Park's repeated attempt to colonise consumption itself, for which his eucharistic/baptismal drinking of water from the Niger River provides the central example. In this instance, drinking baptises the mouth in the otherness of the waters of the Niger cum Jordan, and becomes the condition for the prayer to the "great ruler" for leading Park to his "great object". Substituting the Guide for his guides, Park sanctifies the Niger as a free-flowing place of transaction, translation, and commerce, predicated on otherness as natural, unprocessed, available to all. Not surprisingly, it is within the Moorish economy that Park suffers most from hunger and thirst -- a situation that Park underscores with Biblical famine allusions (in which locust excrement replaces life supporting rain from heaven), matched by a coming-out-of Egypt abundance once he is delivered from his captivity at the hands of the chieftain, Ali ("I returned thanks to that gracious and bountiful Being whose power had supported me under so many dangers, and had now spread for me a table in the Wilderness").
But despite Park's confidence in his ability to remotivate and sanctify consumption, situations of the meal become "situation[s] of writing" (Barthes) that as often resist his authority, revealing Park himself as, in the words of his subjects, "a Dummulafong, a thing to be eaten" (Journal, 227). In attempting to efface the cultural conditions of others in the name of natural economy, Park succeeds only too well, drawing himself and his own culture into the net of erasure.
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