REVISING A VICTORIAN CONVENTION: ALAN PATON AND THE FINAL JOURNEY OF DAVID LIVINGSTONE

Victorian accounts of the transportation of David Livingstone's dead body across Africa either reinforced common British stereotypes of the black Africans who took care of the corpse on the journey or reflected confusion about the nature of the Africans who did not fit the stereotypes. In the 1950s, in the midst of his growing political role against apartheid, Alan Paton worked on two dramatic retellings of this subject. In both cases, he gives the black Africans voice to describe their own perspectives, values, and intelligence. His complicating of both the story and its characters invites re-examinations of unsubstantiated attitudes still associated with both black Africans and Europeans, including Livingstone.