“Africa was an unusual hobby for a young woman in the late 1920s,” Mickey recalled in her memoir Times and Places, “and, as I had learned by painful experience, most men didn’t understand my ambition to go there.”1 Her family, friends, and even the ticket officials of the company in London on whose ship she booked passage were dismayed by her eagerness to visit “Darkest Africa,” let alone to save £20 by traveling third class rather than second. After all, there was nothing in Africa but heat, disease, wild beasts, and “uncivilized native hordes,” as the wife of one intrepid traveler writing in National Geographic magazine put it.
But it was precisely because of all these dangers and because it was not “a proper thing” for a lady to do that Mickey was determined to travel to Africa on her own. Those who had known her at university would have understood as much. They might also have understood that in the beginning, at least, even Mickey must have had second thoughts about the course she had charted for herself. Her doubts were never stronger than on Christmas Day 1930 as her ship steamed out of cool, foggy London bound for the French port of Bordeaux, just across the Channel. Despite the festive mood on board, Mickey was a forlorn figure. Tears rolled down her cheeks as she watched the lights of the great city fade from view. Soon there was only the rumbling of the ship’s engines and the plaintive moan of its foghorn to intrude upon thoughts of family, friends, and home half a world away.
While Mickey passed two days waiting for the departure of the ship to Africa, Bordeaux’s glum weather did nothing to lift her spirits. Nor did the surly porters who chided her for the weight of her tin trunks, each of which was to carry no more than thirty pounds—the approved weight for an African bearer. Her outlook improved on the evening of December 28, when she boarded the Brazza, a French passenger ship, to discover that, despite the fears of the ticket agents, third class was “perfectly clean and comfortable.” She was surprised to discover that there was also a fourth-class area. It was packed with African troops and chickens.
Third class was filled with noncommissioned French army officers on their way to the French Congo. They were “swarthy, undersized men from Marseille and Corsica, with deep voices and five-o’clock shadows,” as Mickey wrote. “They were polite to me but often quarreled with each other, and most nights were noisy after I had gone to bed.”2
Mickey was put in a sparsely furnished four-bunk cabin so far down in the ship that the hull sloped in to meet the floor, and condensation dripped constantly from the bulkheads. Mercifully, there were no bugs, and Mickey was on her own for the three-week voyage. That was just as well; during the first two days at sea she was deathly seasick. She lay in her bunk unable to eat and barely able to function. It was not until December 30 that she recovered enough to go to the ship’s galley, where she sat and wrote a letter to her mother. “I have been SICK. For two days I lay moaning (I think, but I don’t remember),” she said.3
Within a few days, Mickey’s spirit returned. So did her charm. A little sergeant began taking a special interest in her, offering her lemonade when she was ill and appearing at her cabin door on New Year’s Eve with a phonograph and some records. A crowd gathered when the music started. Another young woman with a baby appeared, as did a cheerful older woman, a pimply youth, and a baleful soldier. All of them began dancing and singing with great enthusiasm.
Life aboard the Brazza settled into a lazy routine. Days began with morning coffee in pajamas at seven-thirty. Mickey found that the food served in the two meals each day was plentiful and better than she had eaten in second class aboard British ships. Mickey passed her days reading, writing, or up on deck. She leaned on the railing staring at the waves for long hours and watching a lone shark that had trailed the ship. If she wanted conversation, Mickey tried talking to the little sergeant or his colleagues, who flirted ceaselessly with her. They were hard put to restrain their curiosity about this attractive, single American woman. Because she was traveling to Africa solo, and in third class, some assumed she was a prostitute, others that she was on her way to join her husband who was obviously in Africa already. After all, why else would any woman go to such a place? Mickey’s French being limited, she did not tell them.
Mickey posing with French soldiers aboard the Brazza, en route to Africa, January 1930.
Courtesy Emily Hahn Estate
On January 5, after nine days at sea, the ship arrived at Dakar, capital of the West African nation of Senegal. Although it was midnight, Mickey and a couple of the soldiers disembarked. They did some sightseeing, checked out the night spots, and had a few drinks. They arrived back at the ship several hours later feeling contented, but tired after having walked for miles. It had felt good to be back on dry land.
Giddy at finally being in Africa, Mickey went ashore again the next day with a Corsican adjutant named Martini. When he suggested they have a drink, Mickey agreed, on condition that she buy. Martini was aghast. “If anyone should see, they would think that you were a woman who …” he insisted, his voice trailing off.
“Oh, hell!” Mickey responded, motioning to him to sit down.
The Corsican shrugged. As they sat down and began talking the conversation got around to the other women on the ship. They had been sleeping with the sergeants, Mickey’s companion informed her in a hushed voice. When she asked how he knew, Martini smiled knowingly as he explained he had seen one of them coming out of a soldier’s cabin early one morning. Mickey laughed; she suggested that perhaps the woman and her friend had simply been talking. Martini was exasperated. They could have talked on deck, he insisted. Mickey countered by charging he had “bad thoughts.” When she announced she was bored by this talk, the Corsican became indignant.
“Then I should not make love to you?” he said.
“I wouldn’t consider it an insult if you didn’t,” Mickey snapped.4
Back at the ship, they shook hands. Mickey had made her point, while Martini, sadder but wiser, had learned a lesson about women—or at least about this headstrong young American. His attitude toward her changed after that. He grudgingly conceded they were just friends. The following evening, Mickey was the special at a party in honor of Napoleon, that most famous Corsican. Martini and five other Corsicans celebrated in the ship’s galley with champagne, cake, and gramophone music. Mickey whirled about the floor, dancing polkas with each of them in turn.
Seeing that Mickey loved to party and could hold her liquor with the best of them, one of the soldiers jokingly challenged her to a drinking contest. He was taken aback when she accepted. The spectacle occurred a few days later, before a crowd in the galley. Mickey and her challenger downed drink after drink, Pernod being the weapon of choice. They each had five before the liqueur ran out. When it did, they switched to cocktails of champagne, cognac, and “God knows what else,” as Mickey recalled. Afterward, she made her way to bed feeling bleary-eyed but victorious. Although there was no shortage of volunteers to accompany her, Mickey insisted on being left alone to sleep it off, and they reluctantly agreed. Looking back on the experience, and on the entire voyage, Mickey later told Hannah, “In a funny way, I enjoyed every minute of it.”5
The ocean portion of Mickey’s journey ended January 19, 1931, when the ship arrived at Boma, the port near the mouth of the Congo River. A Belgian customs official perused Mickey’s travel papers and curtly announced, “You haven’t enough money to get in.” The law was that a traveler needed at least 50,000 Belgian francs in the bank or 10,000 in hand to be admitted to the colony. Although Mickey had neither, she had been assured by shipping company officials in London that this requirement was only a formality. In a fit of exasperation, Mickey pointed to her travel documents.
An argument ensued. It ended with the official agreeing to wire his superior for instructions. When there was no immediate response, Mickey was obliged to stay aboard the ship when it arrived upriver in Matadi later that day. There was a good deal of what Mickey termed “the usual Latin confusion” as she was “waited upon by a committee of fat Belgians with badges.”6 While the other passengers disembarked, she spent several anxious hours waiting for the situation to be resolved. Mickey sweated and worried that customs officials would search her belongings, where they would find a handgun one of the Corsicans had given her for protection. She knew this would cause trouble. Belgian colonial customs officers in the Congo were notoriously fastidious.
Fortunately, they bothered Mickey no further. The impasse was resolved unexpectedly and amicably when an official from a multinational trading company intervened on her behalf. The man, whom Patrick Putnam had asked to watch out for her, vouched for Mickey. It was fortunate that he did. Officials in Boma had already issued orders that Mickey was not to be allowed to purchase a train ticket to Kinshasa, the jumping-off point for boats that took passengers and cargo upriver.
Mickey was thrilled, but suddenly fearful of the dangers involved in such a journey. Even before it could begin, she faced a fourteen-hour overnight train ride that was the only way to get to Kinshasa, 225 miles away. The narrow-gauge railway, poorly maintained and subject to frequent derailments, had been built in 1900 on orders from King Leopold of Belgium. The line skirted rapids at the mouth of the Congo River, just one of a series of natural obstacles that rendered the river unnavigable in places. The French writer André Gide, who rode the Matadi–Kinshasa railway in 1929, observed that “The Congo would be a natural outlet for the riches of the interior if it were not that the river traverses a mountainous region not far from the coast and ceases to be navigable at Matadi.”7
In Kinshasa, Mickey found haven in a steamy, but comfortable, hotel room. Kinshasa was a bustling port and trade center with a European population of about 2,500 and at least five times as many natives. Mickey wrote to her mother to say that it was unlikely anyone at home would hear from her for several weeks, postal service to the interior being slow. “This place is fascinating, but not pleasant,” she said.8
Mickey kept busy for four days while she waited for the departure of the boat to Stanleyville. She did her laundry, toured the town with the wife of a local businessman, an English-speaking woman who befriended her, and wrote in her room. “I feel smug and virtuous today because I finished another long story and got it off in the mail this morning, although I had to be rude all day yesterday and say to people who stopped at the door, ‘Do you mind going away? I’m awfully busy.’”9
Mickey also went out dancing with three young American men she met. “The music was listless,” she reported, “and when I danced I had a horrible vision of rows and rows of fat glistening faces staring … out of bulging pale blue eyes … at me and the few other white women dancing round and round and pretending not to know what the men were thinking about. And how civilized and polite they all look in their white suits.… I’m not in the least terrified, but I’m impatient to get away from here.”10
She did so on January 28. The boat for Stanleyville, the Micheline, reminded her of the steamboats she had seen plying the Mississippi River during her childhood in St. Louis. Several of the stern-wheelers operating on the Congo at the time had actually been transplanted from the Mississippi. Their new owners had disassembled them and shipped them to Africa, where their shallow drafts made them ideal for shuttling goods and cargo to the scattered settlements along the Congo and its tributaries. With few roads and only limited air service, these boats were the principal means of transporting goods and passengers.
The Micheline left Kinshasa on its two-week trip to Stanleyville carrying a load of priests, nuns, and medical aid workers—what Mickey irreverently termed “new mosquito-fodder from Belgium.”11 Despite the crowded conditions, she again had a cabin all to herself. For this, she could thank a woman she had met in Kinshasa, who had bribed a ticket agent on Mickey’s behalf. Mickey welcomed the privacy because tsetse flies, mosquitoes, and other biting insects drove her to distraction. It was also as hot and humid as a sauna, particularly after dark. The engine was shut off when the boat dropped anchor to avoid the hazards of nighttime river navigation and to take on wood for fuel. Without the engine, the electric lights and ceiling fans went dead. “Last night … it was so hot that I thought I would rather die than lie there any longer,” Mickey wrote, “but even my desire for death was languid and unpassionate. It’s the first time in my life that I grew slippery with perspiration just lying in bed.”12
In daylight, the tropical sun beat down incessantly. Progress against the river current was slow—seventy miles on a good day—and the hours passed in slow motion. Mickey tried to sleep or she sat around worrying about the hideous tropical diseases and infections she was sure she would catch. Sometimes she escaped the heat by sitting with the captain up in the wheelhouse, where it was breezy. The man, a gruff but good-natured Belgian named Roger Baillon, welcomed the company of an attractive young white woman. “I’m learning a lot about navigation because I spend a good deal of time up ahead with the captain,” Mickey reported to her mother. “Whenever he starts to make love I ask him an intelligent question about the boat—he can never resist answering in full detail, which saves me a good deal of trouble.”13
Mickey’s fear of illnesses was valid. A native woman on board died one evening from an undiagnosed illness, and Mickey spent the next day trying to figure out which of her fellow passengers was now missing. Afterward, she became obsessed with scouring her cabin for tsetse flies. She knew the tiny insects carried sleeping sickness, an often fatal affliction that causes insomnia, lethargy, headache, convulsions, and coma. Death always seemed perilously close in this cruel place, and Mickey’s nights were filled with bizarre, fearsome nightmares, which left her trembling in a cold sweat. In one, she dreamed of awakening to find her intestines spewing out onto the pillow beside her.
Each evening as the boat dropped anchor it was besieged by locals who made their living from fishing or trading. They came with fish or palm oil to sell. Sometimes, if the Micheline was close enough to the riverbank, in the blackness Mickey could make out the inhabitants of the settlements. They gathered in the jungle clearings, like ghostly shadows around their campfires. The sight of them stirred in Mickey a curiosity that was tempered by primal fear; these were rooted in a youth filled with tales of the dangers of African jungles. Her imagination had been fired by Edgar Rice Burroughs’s Tarzan books, British explorer Mary Kingsley’s 1897 best-seller Travels in West Africa, Joseph Conrad’s classic novel Heart of Darkness (1902), and by thrilling popular accounts of the adventures of Sir Henry Morton Stanley, the former St. Louis newspaperman who had achieved worldwide fame in 1871 by finding the Scottish missionary and explorer—David Livingstone. “I knew as much as I could read about Stanley,” Mickey recalls, “and of course, Conrad—‘Mistah Kurtz, he dead.’”14
Like most young Americans of the time, Mickey was profoundly influenced by a simplistic and highly romanticized image of Africa. Such mythology was an inescapable part of the intellectual baggage that she, and many others, carried to Africa. The scenes of everyday life that Mickey witnessed from her vantage point at the ship’s railing did nothing to dispel the stereotypes.
Many of the local women were bare-breasted and had elaborately curled hair; the men were naked but for tiny loincloths. Wrote Mickey, “At night, with their eyes shining and the ridges of tattooing on their foreheads standing out strongly and their brown bodies almost glistening in the lamplight from the boat, they make me wonder uneasily why we’re all intruding in this country anyway. What do they think about? It shouldn’t be so hard to tell.” Mickey’s words, hopelessly racist by today’s standards, spoke volumes about the prevailing white attitude toward African blacks in 1931. “They are animals, but articulate animals,” Mickey continued. “And their eyes—I never noticed their eyes till yesterday. Some of them are narrow and bloodshot, startlingly intelligent and fierce, especially when they are quarreling.”15
Mickey felt uneasy about her fears and about engaging in this sort of racial stereotyping, but it came so shamelessly and naturally in this place that it was difficult to avoid or debate it. Being new to Africa, she reasoned, she did not understand “the system.” Nonetheless, in her own mind Mickey struggled to draw a distinction between the African Americans she knew back home and those she now encountered in the Congo. The attitude among whites in the African colony was that the natives were lazy at best, downright stupid at worst. Observing the treatment afforded blacks by Europeans had moved André Gide to write, “The less intelligent the white man is, the more stupid he thinks the blacks.”16
Mickey would have agreed with Gide’s observation. It was not unusual to see a white man whipping black workers, although it was generally riverboat captains—Captain Baillon being an exception—or the Belgian colonial district commissioners who attempted to beat enlightenment into the savages. “It shocked me gravely; I never got used to it,” Mickey said.17
For now, she watched and listened. She did not yet dare to object to what she saw, for she realized that by implication she was now part of the “system.” The captain usually acted as an ersatz judge in disputes between his crew and the locals. However, when these quarrels did not occur on board, Baillon refused to get involved, and the natives began asking Mickey to do so. For a twenty-five-year-old, the sense of power was intoxicating and more than a little intimidating. In the eyes of the natives, her skin color and the fact that she sometimes sat in the wheelhouse with the captain conferred upon her “official” status.
The Micheline docked on February 10 at Stanleyville (now known as Kisangani) a bustling trade and administrative center established a half century earlier by Henry Stanley. Mickey was the guest of the local Belgian consul. Like other colonial officials, he believed that she was an American journalist on her way to interview Patrick Putnam. The consul informed Mickey that the Belgian Red Cross had transferred Patrick from Wamba, Mickey’s original destination, to the even more remote settlement of Penge. Located on a Congo tributary known as the Aruwimi River, about two hundred miles northeast of Stanleyville, Penge had once been an important trading post. No longer. As the only white person in that area, Putnam lived in a redbrick house originally built for the district administrator. An adjacent two-room schoolhouse served as the Red Cross hospital and clinic.
Mickey considered buying either a motorcycle or car to drive to Penge. She abandoned those ideas upon learning that the settlement, deep within the Ituri Forest, was accessible only by river. Mickey hitched a ride to a place called Avakubi on a supply truck run by SEDEC, the Belgian arm of the multinational corporation Lever Brothers. The company had a monopoly at the time on trading posts and on much of the river transit in the Congo.
En route to Avakubi, the SEDEC truck stopped at an elephant farm, where the animals were domesticated and trained to do work. Mickey took notes for an article that her literary agent in New York eventually sold to Travel magazine.18 The piece was a precursor of the sort of investigative stories—by “our far-flung correspondents”—that later would become Mickey’s bread and butter in the pages of The New Yorker.
The SEDEC driver, a randy Englishman named Barlow, dropped Mickey off at the dock in Avakubi, but not before making a clumsy pass at her. She rebuffed him disdainfully. Barlow, embarrassed and angry, drove off muttering to himself that he would not forget the slight. He did not—as Mickey would eventually discover. However, for now, she had a far more pressing concern: the final leg of the journey to Penge.
She had just missed Patrick, who had been in town for supplies a few days earlier. He had made arrangements for Mickey to travel to Penge with a Belgian elephant hunter named Smet, several native men, and two native women. The night before they were to depart, Mickey received bad news: the truck carrying her luggage from Stanleyville to Avakubi had been involved in an accident. It was feared her typewriter, notes, medical supplies, clothing, and all of her belongings had been lost. That meant she was left with just the clothes on her back and the few personal items in her satchel. “I received the tidings with a surprising apathy,” Mickey wrote. “Hell, I’ll never get home at this rate, yet I don’t seem to care. What’s the matter with me. Am I crazy?”19 Mickey found solace in a bottle of Pernod that she split with Smet. They sat drinking and talking until one o’clock in the morning.
Bright and early the next day, March 3, 1931, Mickey and her party set out for Penge in a pirogue, a native canoe made from a hollowed-out tree trunk. Mickey escaped the scorching sun by sitting under a canvas awning spread over a wicker frame. The makeshift shelter was tied to the bow of the pirogue. Because the locals did not speak English and because Smet spent most of his time at the stern tinkering with a small outboard motor, the only sounds for hours on end were those of waves slapping against the hull and the rhythmic singsong of the paddlers. They glistened with sweat as they stroked the reddish brown water and tapped the side of the pirogue in time to their music. The jungle on both sides of the river, lush, dark, and mysterious, was a green wall at the water’s edge. Mickey stared in fascination. This was the untamed Africa of myth and storybook, the Africa of every child’s imagination.
They traveled all that day before stopping at a village to bathe, eat, and make plans to haul the pirogue past some rapids. It was now just a few hours’ paddling to Penge. To celebrate this fact and the news that her missing trunks had turned up, Mickey donned her best dress. Her bare arms attracted swarms of voracious insects and the curious gaze of the locals, who gathered to stare at the first white woman many of them had ever seen. Mickey’s every movement was followed with rapt attention, particularly when she brushed her teeth and spat out the toothpaste. When the crowd buzzed with sotto voce remarks, Mickey decided it was just as well she did not understand any of what was being said.
Even without most of the native paddlers, who stayed behind after being paid off, the next day’s travel was relatively easy. As they neared Penge, it was dusk. Mickey noticed that all along the riverbanks groups of people had gathered in the clearings. Some stared in silence; others shouted and waved. Word of her arrival had spread, and the curious were out in full force. Several pirogues appeared. In one of them was Patrick Putnam. À la Stanley, Mickey stood up and called out across the water: “Dr. Putnam, I presume?” Patrick waved. “I never thought you’d get here, not once in a thousand years!” he said with a laugh.