miasma of malaria
CARDINALL, Allan Wolsey.
In Ashanti & beyond. The record of a resident magistrate’s many years in tropical Africa, his arduous & dangerous treks both in the course of his duty & in pursuit of big game, with descriptions of the people, their manner of living & the wonderful ways of beasts & insects …
London, Seeley, Service & Co., 1927.
8vo, pp. 288, [8]; with half-title, 24 photographs on 16 plates, including a frontispiece, and 1 folding map; a little light foxing; very good in original red cloth, spine lettered in gilt, gilt vignette of ‘A Kussasi Actor’ (cf. frontispiece) to upper cover; spine ends and corners slightly bumped.
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In Ashanti & beyond. The record of a resident magistrate’s many years in tropical Africa, his arduous & dangerous treks both in the course of his duty & in pursuit of big game, with descriptions of the people, their manner of living & the wonderful ways of beasts & insects …
First edition, a very nice copy, one of a number of books by the colonial administrator in Africa and later governor of the Falkland Islands Sir Allan Wolsey Cardinall (1887-1956) describing his time in the Gold Coast and Ashanti, present-day Ghana.
Educated at Winchester and Heidelberg, Cardinall joined the West African Administrative Service in 1914 and spent the next eighteen years on the west coast of Africa, many of them as British commissioner of the Gold Coast. His study of the region is part anthropology (Cardinall was responsible for sending several artefacts to the Pitt-Rivers Museum in Oxford), and part hunting narrative. ‘While hunting in the forested zone of the country, he bagged duiker and other small game, and unsuccessfully stalked bongo. In the northern open region, he hunted lion and elephant, the two most sought after trophies in the country’ (Czech).
Cardinall later served in the Caribbean and, during the Second World War, as governor of the Falklands. One wonder’s whether they came close to the west coast of Africa, which in Cardinall’s reckoning ‘stands second to none in this realm of romance. Guinea! The very name itself speaks of gold coins, slaves and spices – pirates as well! – mangrove swamps, fever, fetish. The very miasma of malaria enshrouds the coast with the mystery of the unknown’ (p. 17).
Czech, p. 32.
