a bean orgy
DUNDAS, Anne.
Beneath African glaciers. The humours, tragedies and demands of an East African government station as experienced by an official’s wife: with some personal views on native life and customs …
London, H.F.& G. Witherby, 1924.
8vo, pp. 238, [2 (ads)]; with half-title, photographic frontispiece, 48 photographic illustrations on 27 plates; occasional foxing; good in original blue cloth, spine lettered in gilt with gilt vignette; upper joint split at foot, a little wear to extremities.
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Beneath African glaciers. The humours, tragedies and demands of an East African government station as experienced by an official’s wife: with some personal views on native life and customs …
First edition, an account of the years spent in Africa by Anne Dundas, wife of an African colonial official.
Dundas accompanied her husband to East Africa in 1921. Beneath African Glaciers recounts her experiences there and includes narratives of daily life in the station, a safari game drive, and visits to local missions, as well as interesting observations on local customs and beliefs. Dundas was primarily writing for European audiences back home who wished to know something about the ‘life of those European exiles who have tasted the bitter and the sweet of tropical Africa’, and her work therefore contains valuable information regarding the status and life of women in a world of colonial administration and exploration almost wholly dominated by men.
Nowhere is this more apparent than in her account of an attempt to ascend Mount Kilimanjaro: although Dundas reached a height of some 15,200 feet with little ill-effects of altitude or exhaustion, the men in her party refused to let her go any higher – or, to put it in her words, ‘I was debarred by my sex from participating … by the family head and four companions bent on permitting nothing to interfere with the successful negotiation of the ice-crowned summit’ (p. 151). Suffering from altitude sickness partly brought on by poor organisation and insufficient experience (the group included ‘a young auditor of accounts who had never climbed anything higher than a palm-tree’, a ‘local inspector of police, whose belief in his prowess as a hardy mountaineer was to be rudely shaken’, and ‘the local doctor, a young and cheerful medical debutant, who attached himself temporarily to the party as invited guest, and only remained until a famous apple-tart had been consumed at the first rest-camp’), the party made it no further than 17,000 feet before being forced to retreat: although the eventual collapse of the family head may have had less to do with the altitude and more with his indulging of ‘several untouched portions of Mr. Heinz’s celebrated “baked beans”’, in what Dundas later christened the ‘bean orgy’ (pp. 151-152).
