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Out of Our Minds: Reason and Madness in the Exploration of Central Africa

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Fabian works industriously to get behind the "Indiana Jones"-type figures who opened Africa up to European enterprise. His general thesis is obvious if correct: that explorers were not the rational beings who used scientific reason to conquer the wild African landscape and the wilder Africans. They were scared, drunk, pompous, open to seduction, tied to creature comforts ... . They resemble the late 20th-century American who cannot imagine living without civilization. What makes the book entertaining is the encyclopedia of sensual experiences that Fabian offers: how they saw, herd, felt Africa, how they interacted with people and the world, how they established their authority and leadership. Fabian thereby produces an extensive and detailed image of the personalities of explorers as they worked their way across Africa. Perhaps the most amusing image is of heavy phonographs and bottles of wine carried along jungle paths that they followed rather than discovered and the extent they relied on native Africans as guides, porters and interpreters to learn about the "dark" continent. Some sense of Central African exploration might help, but it is by no means necessary.