Domville-Fife’s Savage Life
DOMVILLE-FIFE, Charles William.
Savage life in the black Sudan. An account of an adventurous journey of exploration amongst wild & little-known tribes inhabiting swamps, dense forests, mountain-tops & arid deserts hitherto almost unknown, with a description of their manner of living, secret societies & mysterious & barbaric rites …
London, Seeley, Service & Co., 1927.
8vo, pp. 284, [12 (advertisements)]; half-title, 31 monochrome photographs on plates, 2 foldout maps, illustrations in text, publisher’s advertisements at front (verso of half-title) and rear; very good in original tan cloth, spine lettered in black, vignette in black to upper cover; some wear to extremities and light marks to spine and covers; old photograph glued to front pastedown.
Added to your basket:
Savage life in the black Sudan. An account of an adventurous journey of exploration amongst wild & little-known tribes inhabiting swamps, dense forests, mountain-tops & arid deserts hitherto almost unknown, with a description of their manner of living, secret societies & mysterious & barbaric rites …
First edition of Charles William Domville-Fife’s account of the wildlife and indigenous peoples of Sudan, complete with maps and photographs taken by the author himself.
An inveterate traveller who went on to publish numerous books on his expeditions to South America in particular– as well as a number of major works on submarines – Domville-Fife reached Khartoum in the winter of 1925 and spent much of the next year exploring Sudan. His narrative of the expedition is part adventure-story, part anthropology study: ‘the native races’ writes Domville-Fife, ‘are among the most unique and often fierce, suspicious and witch-bound in the world, and will continue to present, for many years to come, a subject of unqualified interest to the student. Here, also, the seeker after adventure, if he is of the active variety, has unlimited scope’. As such the content alternates: at one moment Domville-Fife is describing the tribal dances of the ‘blood drinking Dinkas’ and the peculiar shape of the stabbing spear of the ‘savage Shilluks’, and in the next he is narrowly avoiding said spear during a drunken revel gone wrong, in the appropriately named chapter ‘a wild night orgy’.
