Edward A. Alpers’s scientific contributions

... Meals and rest at night structure the space-time of the travel narratives between which extraordinary events unfold. This text is of historical interest as it gives insights into things like bargaining patterns in respect of hongo, the fees charged by village chiefs for passing caravans (Pesek 2006); the barter of cloth and ivory with exact prices and amounts (Alpers 1975); the names of villages and chiefs and their perceived power and knowledge of the author-traveller the travellee are characterised as quaint, exotic and generally not particularly purpose-driven. Postcolonial critics point out that this literary figuration of the travellees diverges markedly from the historical agency they did have, both within their societies in general as well with a view to controlling the actual travel arrangements of the traveller-author (Smethurst 2019). ...

Reference:

“When the Kalmyks saw me, they thought I was their black devil”: Inverting Centres and Peripheries in Colonial Travelogues Written by East Africans