ABSTRACT
Mungo Park's expedition to determine the course of the Niger and to know more of the region's lands and peoples began on 2 December 1795. It lasted until May 1797. Park was accompanied by only two other persons: Johnson, a freed slave, who acted as interpreter, and Demba, a servant. Park's records of his travels are a mixture of personal adventure, commentaries upon the trading networks of the interior and ethnographic descriptions of the locals, notably of the Mandingo people. These were, he wrote, of a mild, sociable, and obliging disposition'. Mungo Park, Travels in the Interior Districts of Africa. He comments upon the slave trade. He was himself an object of ethnographic wonder. By the later eighteenth century, the Niger was a 2,000-year-old two-part geographical problem. The first part concerned the course of the river: did it flow east-west as some hypothesized, or west-to-east as others argued? The second part concerned where the river ended.
