ABSTRACT
Postcolonial scholars have argued that the structuration of western academic knowledge was itself complicit with colonialism and, indeed, remains neo-imperialist. The simultaneous effect was to obliterate all evidence of the agency of the colonized, both in terms of their part in the making of their histories and in terms of the construction of imperial knowledges about colonized countries. In addition to going some way towards revealing subaltern agency in the production of geographical knowledges by white women travellers, a deconstruction of their narratives can reveal subaltern resistance to European imperialism and the presence of Europeans in west Africa. The ways in which those different local knowledges were appropriated by individual European explorers contributed to the differences and confusions in the geographies they produced. Women such as Kingsley were products of a culture that defined womanhood in very prescribed ways, and being more open to ‘hearing’ indigenous knowledges fits into the set of dominant ideas that defined femininities at the time.
