Nothing about wandering is left to wonder. But to wander with a purpose is to ask questions, because it is with a purpose that we travel. The beauty of travel is in the things you witness and the things you learn and based on those experiences you become a storyteller. Now, storytelling determines what type of person you are, because storytelling relies heavily on two things: your interest and where you're traveling. Two such individuals, renowned for their contributions to their times: David Livingstone and Rabindranath Tagore in their travelogues, display their storytelling skills which determined who they were. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned”? Get an Original Essay Considering this, neither Livingstone nor Tagore had anything in common. One was a Scottish Christian Congregationalist, a pioneer medical missionary of the London Missionary Society, an explorer in Africa and one of the most popular British heroes of the late Victorian era of the 19th century, while the other was a Bengali literary genius, humanitarian and social activist. But above all, they belonged to different eras. So, what could possibly bring these two travelers together? This is Africa, although Tagore never visited the continent, his preoccupations in Ode to Africa bring out the images mentioned in Livingstone's account of his journey to the Zambezi. The similarity therefore lies in the art of storytelling. In Livingstone's Expedition to the Zambezi and its Tributaries and to the Discovery of Lakes Shirwa and Nyassa 1858-1864, one of the accounts records a rebel for the slave trade. Livingstone, disembarking to greet some of his old friends among the latter, found himself amid the noxious odor and among the mutilated bodies of the slain; he was asked to take the governor, who was very ill, to Shupanga, and just as he gave his agreement, the rebels resumed the fight, and the cannonballs began to whistle in all directions. After trying in vain to get someone to come down to help the governor to the steamboat, and not wishing to leave him in such danger, the officer sent to bring our Kroomen not appearing, he entered the cabin and dragged His Excellency to the steamboat. boat. He was a very large man, and as he swayed in weakness, weighing down Dr. Livingstone, he must have felt as if one drunken man was helping another. Some white Portuguese soldiers fought with great courage against the enemy in front of them, while a few coldly shot their own slaves who fled into the river behind them. The rebels soon withdrew and the Portuguese fled to a sandbar in the Zambezi, then to an island opposite Shupanga, where they remained for a few weeks observing the rebels on the opposite mainland. This state of inactivity on the part of the Portuguese could not be remedied, because they had spent all their ammunition. In his Ode to Africa, Tagore talks about the colonizers and the chained slave trade. The merciless weapons of the primordial oceans have torn you, Africa, from the bosom of the primeval Earth Bind you in the impossible weave of the waking forest Deep within the sanctuary of the light of misery. There, surrounded by impenetrable privacy and leisure You set out on your quest To unlock the secrets of the unexplored - learning to read the incomprehensible signs Of the seas, land and skies The magical alchemy of nature , invisible, unheard Mantras awakened in your subconscious. Emboldened, you mocked the Terrible Under the guise of the unpleasant Thiswas only your attempt to defy restless apprehension Just as creatures magnify their faces In the haunting grandeur of the monstrous The cataclysmic sounds of Tandava. Alas, O Veiled Under the darkness of your dark facade lay unknown your human identity Degraded by the collective gaze of derision. And then they arrived, handcuffs in their hands. Claws far sharper than those of your wolves; They have arrived, thieves and human traffickers, all blind by vanity and arrogance, blind as far as your darkest and sunless forests. Than your darkest and sunless forests. The barbaric greed of civilization revealed in total nudity Its shameless and merciless inhumanity. Your silent lamentations and your tears Mixed with the fetid vapors of the jungle; Soaked in your tears and blood The dirt has turned into a noxious swamp. The muddy tracks of demonic cleats left for all eternity, the markers of your humiliation on the pages of your history. The poem is organized to reflect the advancement of Africa, with three stanzas individually handling the creation, colonization, and post-expansionism of Africa. . This sets up the system of differentiation of the three temporalities, which reveals the impression of bad faith of Western colonialism. For Tagore, Western colonialism in Africa ruined the nation's normal movement towards civilization. This is emphasized by his abundant use of humanoid attribution which offers a human measure to Africa. The work on sentiment in Africa also conveys the idea that Tagore created Western expansionism as being motivated by an uninformed sense of contempt that mercilessly victimized the continent in its purity. Because Livingstone, carrying out the task of a colonizer, witnessed this while Tagore, even if he had not physically traveled to Africa, wrote about the place (but not about a specific region), perhaps listening to the someone else's stories, or personal accounts or a travel journal. .But how does a person's story reveal beyond everyday travel activities? It is their approaches or rather their stories that decide. For example, in Tagore's excerpts from The Letters and Diaries of Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941), unlike other great travelers/explorers or travelers, he does not give details of his surroundings, but rather writes a metaphysical understanding of its environment, which relays its own reflection and gaze... The island where our ship is now anchored is known as Biliton. The population is sparse. There are tin quarries operated by their directors and workers. It's amazing how they treat the whole earth. Once upon a time, there were people who set off en masse towards unknown seas. They had traveled around the earth to know it, to measure it. This history of familiarization is long and dangerous. I wonder, when they had first lowered their sails here on these shores, far from home, how full those days of apprehension and waiting were also. The greenery, the animals, the humans here were all foreign to them. But today, everything is known and conquered! They defeated us, well, I'm thinking. The main reason is that we are static, they are dynamic. They could therefore move around easily and that is why they knew and their appetite for knowledge was further whetted. This appetite is weak among us because of our stagnation. Even our knowledge of our neighbors is vague and we do not want to know them better. Because our house confines us too much. Those whose vigor for knowledge is weak, so is their survival. With the same vitality that allowed them.”