KINGSLEY, MARY HENRIETTA English traveller, ethnologist and author, daughter of George Henry Kingsley (1827-1892), brother of Charles Kingsley (q.v.), was born in Islington, London, on Oct. 13, 1862. She studied sociology at Cambridge, and on the death of her parents she resolved to study native religion and law in West Africa. From 1893-94, she pursued her investigations at Kabinda, Old Calabar, Fernando Po, and on the Lower Congo. After a short visit to England, she returned in Dec. 1894, and, proceeding via Old Calabar to the French Congo, ascended the Ogowe river, traversing much un known country. Returning to the coast Miss Kingsley went to Corisco and to the German colony of Cameroon, where she made the ascent of the Great Cameroon (13,76o ft.) from a direction until then unattempted. She returned to England in Oct. 1895. The story of her adventures and her investigations in fetish is vividly told in her Travels in West Africa (1897).
Her chief concern was for the development of the negro on African lines and for the government of the British possessions on the West Coast by methods which left the native "a free unsmashed man--not a whitewashed slave or an enemy." Miss Kingsley made preparations for a third journey to the West Coast, but the Boer War changed her plans, and she went first to South Africa to nurse fever cases. She died of enteric fever at Simon's Town, where she was engaged in tending Boer pris oners, on June 3, 1900. Miss Kingsley's works, besides her Travels, include West African Studies, The Story of West Africa, a memoir of her father prefixed to his Notes on Sport and Travel (1899), and many contributions to the study of West African law and folk-lore.
See a notice by George A. Macmillan prefixed to a second edition (190I) of the Studies.