Why do we travel? Sometimes we are curious, sometimes we are looking for profit; sometimes we are escaping the mundane or running away from circumstances; some travellers are looking for romance or a chance to immerse themselves in a landscape they love. We travel to understand ourselves as well as the place we are visiting. And our journeys reveal hidden aspects of our character. We may become more adventurous, or perhaps surprise ourselves with our timidity or latent prejudices.

It is hard to pin down exactly when travel as a recognised genre first began. Expeditions are one of the oldest human endeavours, and people, be they military officers, missionaries, explorers, scientists or migrants, have combined it with literature ever since linear alphabets were invented. Travel writing as a genre is thought to have begun with Herodotus, the Greek historiographer, who reported from foreign lands in the fifth century BC. Travel literature became popular in China during the Song Dynasty between the 10th and 13th centuries, and it featured strongly in Arab literature from the 15th century onwards.

This contribution represents a short introduction to the African travel notebooks, or ‘Chronicles’, of Mabel Virginia Anna Bent (1847-1929) - wife of the explorer James Theodore Bent (1852-1887) - and some of the resources consulted during research into the publication of these notebooks. What follows is based on a presentation made at the SCOLMA conference, the University of Birmingham, on 2 July 2014.

The 19th century is studded with the derring-do of explorers in Africa and elsewhere, but we have relatively few first-hand records of husband-and-wife partnerships. And Mabel and Theodore Bent really were one of the great British travelling partnerships in terms of their results, the distances covered, and the sheer physical efforts involved over a period of nearly twenty years of journeying together between 1880 and 1897. In particular, Theodore's work in today's Zimbabwe made the couple into explorer-celebrities, and accounts of them at travellers’ soirées, or sharing passenger lists with famous names, such as Stanley, are common. The couple regularly feature in the major relevant bibliographies - archaeological, ethnographical, and travel - to this day.

Barclays’ international business was founded in 1925 as Barclays Bank (Dominion, Colonial and Overseas). The roots of the business lay in three 19th century banks: the Anglo-Egyptian, the Colonial, and the National Bank of South Africa. It had long been the dream of Barclays Chairman, Frederick Goodenough, to create an ‘Empire Bank’, and, by buying these three and merging them, that is precisely what he achieved. This article sets out to provide an overview of the collection and suggest avenues of future research.

Isaac Fadoyebo's Second World War memoir A Stroke of Unbelievable Luck is an unusual and compelling memoir of a West African soldier's Second World War service. Although much of Fadoyebo's narrative centres on the Second World War, the memoir as a whole has much more to offer. Fadoyebo uses his military service to structure a narrative that covers much of his life until the 1980s. Although this coverage is not systematic, it leaves the reader with a vivid impression of Fadoyebo's upbringing, education, post-war career, and his positioning of the past from the vantage point of old-age. This article will focus on the role of travel, showing how the constraints of military service and wartime shaped a distinct descriptive language. It will argue that this language is characterised by attention to the particular. More specifically, it will show how the particular becomes especially important when the ‘bigger picture’ of movements, motivations and landscapes remains unknown to the soldiers.

Since the turn of the millennium a crop of travel books by Africans or Africans in diaspora describing their travels within Africa have appeared to assert a fresh African self-representation in travel writing. Noo Saro-Wiwa's travel book Looking for Transwonderland (2012) tells the story of British-Nigerian journalist and travel writer Saro-Wiwa's travels around Nigeria for the first time since the death of her father Ken Saro-Wiwa. Looking for Transwonderland describes Saro-Wiwa's journey all over Nigeria, from Lagos to the north via the east and southwest, including a stop in her father's village in Ogoniland. Saro-Wiwa represents herself as a pioneer, one of the first travel writers of western-published, tourist-oriented travel writing about a country which in global tourism terms is “this final frontier that has perhaps received fewer voluntary visitors than outer space” (p.8).

The impact of postcolonial criticism on discussions about ‘representations of the Other’ has been felt far beyond the academic sphere, and has had significant influence on a wide variety of cultural forms. Contemporary informal writing practices such as those found on travel and aid blogs employ terminology and ideas that stem directly from the theoretical frameworks developed by critics such as Said, Pratt and Spurr (1978; 1992; 1993). The blogs Stuff Expat Aid Workers Like (henceforth SEAWL) and Gurl Goes to Africa seek to highlight and critique examples of ‘orientalism’ and ‘exotification’ found in other travel blogs, and therefore to draw a comparison between the discourse of colonial travellers and missionaries and that of young ‘gap-year’ travellers and aid workers. These blogs form part of a wider internet trend of satirising the pretensions of privileged ‘Western’ travellers. One example is the comedy sketch video ‘Gap Yah’ (which has been viewed more than five million times on Youtube since its posting in 2010).