Customer Reviews

First Footsteps in East Africa; Or, an Exploration of Harar (v. 1 & 2)

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Sir Richard F Burton is one of the most famous of unread authors. Nearly everyone can tell you about his scandalous doings with native women, his marriage to an ultra-Catholic Englishwoman, and the latter's destruction of the author's private papers after his death.

Ever since I read Fawn Brodie's excellent biography, THE DEVIL DRIVES, I have collected some 20 different Burton books and read most of them. If you make allowances for Burton's diabolical thoroughness (involved footnotes, appendices, foreign language quotes, tables, etc.) and his Victorian circumlocutions in dealing with taboo subjects, he is a truly wonderful read.

Although FIRST FOOTSTEPS is not his most famous book, it is probably the best one to start with. The action is not only more focussed, but Burton did feel he needed quite so much of a scholarly carapace to report back to the scholarly organizations back in Britain. And it finishes up with a stirring postscript about an attack on Burton's camp by Somalis in which the author barely escaped with his life.

Perhaps this is a book that Presidents Bush and Clinton should have read before committing U.S. troops to the region: Burton shows us that not much has changed in the region in 150 years. He was in constant danger, and survived only because his knowledge and guts were more than an a match for his enemies.

This is an exciting book and deserves to be better known.

The reviews of some of Richard Burton's books, as well as those of other 19th century explorers, strike me as hilarious. It's as if people expect that these books to be written in a style that would make for some blockbuster Hollywood movie. This is the REAL DEAL people! Burton didn't write this or other books with the idea in mind of entertaining 20th century couch potatoes starved for action. Apparently people's attention spans get seriously taxed when detailed observations about a country's people and culture are brought into play. When in fact, what could be more important in a first hand account of previously unexplored (at least by Europeans) regions? If you want action at every turn and tailor made story lines then stick with Tom Clancy novels or some such. Maybe faketion turns some would be adventurers on, but not me. This book is a truly incredible account of a larger than life adventure!

Richard Francis Burton is one of the great unknown figures in history. And what people do know unfortuantely are the scandals of his private life. This is an account of what should have been at the time an impossible trip. Burton should never have attempted it and the odds were against him surviving it.

What you get in the book is an extraordinary document of travel into one of the blank areas on the map by a true renassanice man. Its a true adventure story about how far a man can go on a combination of intellect and raw courage. This book is Burton the adventurer and explorer at his best.

Perhaps it was my high expectations before starting, or Burton's unscrupulous and merciless exposition of topics dear to him, but while he seemed lost many times during his journey, he lost me every time he made some anecdotal observation on some obscure point, now lost in total oblivion, which is perhaps where Burton rescued it from in the 1850s. Perhaps he should have left it there.

Perhaps this is too harsh. There were occasions leading to his visit to Harar, the forbidden city of Somali-land, where I indulged a hearty chuckle, but this only lasted long enough to bring me upright in my sleeping chair, formerly a reading chair. Not until he reached Harar did he seize my interest and full attention, yet as he was not permitted pen and paper while there, for 10 full days the description relies on his memory. In comparison to the journey there (the entire first volume, over 200 pages), he writes with exacting prose every time his wayfarers or guides resisted the mission, and every other sundry related to the journey.

The descriptions of Harar, its culture, its people and Burton's condition are excellent, but unfortunately are too brief, almost marginal in a work that contends mainly with desert travels. I enjoyed hearing about the lions visiting camp, the difficulties on the route, and other jokes made against his guides, yet I thought I was about to absorb a more entertaining exposition on the forbidden city, rather than an exhausting diary of a mission that perpetuates in a cloud between the send-off and the return.

Just to show that I paid attention, I noted with disapproval that Burton repeats twice the datum that "red pepper" is THE condiment of East Africa (I was satisfied on this particular the first time.) Prepare for a thick shell for a core subject Burton laid on too thinly.