Introduction
Travel stories have to do with attitudes and impressions of a culture more than anything else. Many stories about venturing into southern or African hinterland have inspired people. There is another Mungo Park. In this essay, he and al-Tunisi will explore how they see today’s Southern or African interior. Similarities and differences will be noted. But for travelers with different cultural and historical points of view, there are two completely contrary angles from which one can observe this exchange between cultures. For this, we will explore what is meant by focusing on custom or practice, cherishing knowledge, and science of the past (regions). Mungo Park’s Travels in the Interior of Africa As for a pair of textual glasses, we take al-Tunisi’s Travels of an Arab Merchant in Soudan.
Mungo Park’s Perception of the Southern or African Interior
Mungo Park, a Scottish explorer of the late 18th century, made two significant journeys to West Africa. During his travels, he recorded detailed descriptions of everything he encountered. And indeed, throughout all his diaries- and especially in Travels In The Interior of Africa- he described almost everything from an outward viewpoint, as though coming to their new land from Europe. All that we know about them was gathered by European agents like Many, which will show the reader a Eurocentric perspective; the perspectives Park’s narrative describes the inhabitants of the Southern or African interior with eyes glazed by savagery and primitiveness. From Park’s perspective, the people he comes into contact with are curious; lavishly endowed with differences in dress and manners, they occupy a higher plane than average Europeans. This ethnocentric standpoint at that time underlay the now-modern colonial discourse. It has spread caricatures reinforcing the dehumanization of local peoples.
Furthermore, Park’s story reveals the survival of old concepts about this place. His stories could be formed from European conceptions of Africa as a new, uncharted land with dangers lurking behind exotic facades. Park’s encounters and understandings of Southern or African Africa are subject to the preconceptions that permeate colonial psychology. His work preserves the preconceptions and rhetoric about this place coined in the late 18th century, which he works with or against.
Al-Tunisi’s Perception of the Southern or African Interior
The perceptive Liberal Al-Tunisi provides us, in his travelogue ‘The Travels of an Arab Merchant in Soudan,’ with a rather unique and minute analysis of the Southern or African Interior. His travels occur in a web of Arab-Muslim cultural traditions before colonialism, challenging many Eurocentric conventions from that era. Al-Tunisi’s account responds to the Eurocentric lens, which naturalizes and exoticizes. Al-Tunisi presents unreservedly the southern or African societies, no longer reduced to exotic ‘otherness,’ but described in compassionate and respectful terms, with all their rich cultural complexity. His insistence on uniformity of strangers differs from the Eurocentric insistence on differences. Al-Tunisi’s words run to the core of local customs, traditions, and organizational systems. His image is more complex than one can get from looking at someone alone.
Al-tunes stresses cultural practices to prevent the exotic current that sways about African societies in Western novels. By delving deep into the various aspects of local customs, he defies type and presents an even more prosperous, more accurate picture of Southern or all of Africa. This focus is a deliberate effort to provide an alternative story that breaks out of the claustrophobia of Eurocentrism.
Al-Tunisi’s outlook, though not entirely free of preconceptions or rhetoric, is very different from the Eurocentric viewpoint–people are people everywhere they turn up. al-Tunisi’s southern or African interior is a historically and culturally unique place with deep roots in Arab-Muslim traditions. Departing from the Eurocentric discourse everyday in the early 19th century, a story is told that turns colonial insights inside out and provides new information about what was happening at home.
Comparative Analysis
Mungo Park’s Travels in the Interior of Africa and al-Tunisi’s ‘Travels of an Arab Merchant in Soudan’: An Intricate Comparison A fine-grained comparative examination reveals several striking similarities and differences that illuminate some fundamental differences in the ways they look at things. Although products of broadly similar cultural backgrounds, Park and al-Tunisi use current ideas about the area for play. The Eurocentric view that Park brings to bear on the African hinterland perfectly aligns with old colonial notions of a wild, exotic Africa. Besides, al-Tunisi’s Arab-Muslim point of view is influenced by preconceptions and historical relationships. The two travelers are seen and presented very differently. The peoples of the locales portrayed in Park’s novel are either exoticized or othered based on Western colonial stereotypes. Al-Tunisi’s account reflects a more culturally sensitive, humanist approach. The differences in their views also reflect that early modern travel narratives result from individual perceptions and cultural backgrounds, often representing clashes between cultures.
Similarities
The main similarity between Mungo Park’s Travels in the Interior of Africa and al-Tunisi’s Travels of an Arab Merchant in Soudan is that both were highly connected with those earlier ideas about learning gained on or concerning the Southern or African interior. Park and al-Tunisi work within the constraints of their cultural pasts. They utilize what is available in terms of narratives about Africa and the people’s existing beliefs; thus, with repetition, perception progresses until interaction accounts for interracial comprehension. Park’s Europe-oriented point of view is an example—the general European obsession with what was strange and foreign-led to a romanticizing treatment of Africa. Unlike Park, whose Eurocentric gaze is expressed throughout his accounts, al-Tunisi’s Arab-Muslim perspective derives from Cultural and religious experience.
Both plots deal with the same fundamental problem- fighting against cultural differences and finding a space between what is familiar and unfamiliar. It is no easy task, comprehension-wise, to find one’s way amid different customs and languages in diverse social structures. Both travelers see the difficulties of cross-cultural meetings. Both Park and al-Tunisi are in a foreign land, confronted with alien cultures. The awareness of these obstacles demonstrates a substantial amount of consensus among travelers about how hard it is to understand or even interpret customs and practices alien from one’s own. Its common theme also demonstrates that investigating and handling cultures other than one’s own is prevalent.
Differences
The main difference between Mungo Park’s Travels in the Interior of Africa and al-Tunisi’s Travels of an Arab Merchant in Soudan is that they see things from different angles. Eurocentric Colonial Park: The local people are stereotyped as exotic things. The African interior, which in his story seems a mysterious and wild jungle, does nothing to dispel preconceptions about how savage the inhabitants must be. However, al-Tunisi’s Arab-Muslim perspective is entirely different. He is concerned with culture and interested in humanizing the people he meets. But there is a clear distinction in each traveler’s language, tone, and attitude. Park writes in a more distant, coolly dehumanized vein. al-Tunisi describes an intense proximity to local people.
The third point of difference between the two narratives is their respective descriptions of the customs and practices of the Southern or African interior. Mungo Park often emphasizes cultural differences along lines that justify existing colonial stereotypes. Usually, his descriptions concern curious or unusual practices, further reinforcing the impression of the region as different and backward. On the other hand, al-Tunisi has a more sensitive and culturally attentive personal touch. He relates to his fondness for customry and explores all that local customry can offer afresh.
On the other hand, al-Tunisi’s story ignores difference as an exotic peculiarity. As the author writes in a way that knows how to appreciate and understand these finer points, his ethnocentrism can have room to develop. The contrast introduces two travelers ‘different angles and a larger cultural and ideological context within which their accounts of interior Africa are situated.
Conclusion
Mungo Park’s Travels in the Interior of Africa and al-Tunisi’s Travels of an Arab Merchant in Soudan attest to how much variation there has been in impressions of modern times ‘Southern or African interior. Both travelers illuminate cross-cultural contacts. Their methods drastically differ in perception and portrayal (separate roles for men and women) and focus on customs. Mungo Park’s Eurocentric perception only furthers the colonial myth about Africa as a mysterious land without order. On the one hand, Al-tunisi’s Arab Muslim perspective offers a counterpoint to Eurocentric thinking. His work is more culturally grounded and emphasizes our common humanity, cultural understanding, and respect for local customs. A comparative analysis reminds us that cross-cultural interchanges are, in fact, very complex and can only be understood from an assortment of angles. It also shows cultural background is as necessary as the historical environment when it comes to travel reports, something readers must bear in mind when they read these stories with our sensibility for different cultures.
Works Cited
Ibn Faḍlān, Aḥmad, and Timothy Severin. Mission to the Volga. Vol. 28. NYU Press, 2017.
Powell, Eve Troutt. A different shade of colonialism: Egypt, Great Britain, and the mastery of the Sudan. Vol. 2. Univ of California Press, 2003.
ibn ʻUmar Al-Tūnisī, Muḥammad. Travels of an Arab Merchant in Soudan (the Black Kingdoms of Central Africa). Chapman and Hall, 1854.
Bohls, Elizabeth A., and Ian Duncan, eds. Travel Writing 1700-1830: An Anthology. Oxford University Press, 2008.
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