This paper will suggest that du Chaillu's Explorations and Adventures in Equatorial Africa can be read as a book which presents to the reader a series of dream scenes that centre on the figures of gorillas, cannibals and negroes. I will argue that, by thus positioning himself as a subject who experiences West Africa as if it were a dream, du Chaillu brings back from his interior explorations not only scientific knowledge, but also dream knowledge, and that these two ways of knowing Africa are inseparably interwoven.
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