ABSTRACT
This chapter describes the work of Victorian explorer Samuel White Baker. It discusses a genealogy of the key intercultural encounters documented by Baker during his 1863– travels in southern Sudan and Bunyor. The chapter explores the relevant segments of Baker’s unpublished diary alongside his published narratives in order to outline the impact of the encounters and of non-western cultural and material realities in which the encounters occurred on Baker’s texts. It describes a new multilayered, multidirectional model of expeditionary discourse production. Travel with the slave traders, however, does have one benefit. Such travel places Baker at the edge of intercultural encounter in Central Africa. In Baker’s case, the determining discursive role of this material conflict becomes even more pronounced. Baker’s narratives document an intriguing series of events in nineteenth-century Central Africa. Arriving in Bunyoro just over a year after Speke and Grant left, Baker met with a rather different reception.
