There is nothing to be surprised about wandering. But to wander with purpose is to ask yourself, why with purpose are you traveling. The beauty of travel is in the things you witness and the things you learn and then, based on those experiences, you become a storyteller. Now, storytelling determines the type of person you are, because storytelling relies heavily on two things: your interest and the place you are traveling to. Two of these individuals, renowned for the contributions of their time: David Livingstone and Rabindranath Tagore, in their travel accounts, show their storytelling skills that determine who they were. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an Original Essay If taken into account, neither Livingstone nor Tagore had anything in common. One was a Scottish Christian Congregationalist, pioneer medical missionary to the London Missionary Society, explorer in Africa and one of the most popular British heroes of the late 19th century Victorian era, while the other was a Bengali literary genius, a humanitarian and a a social activist. But above all, they belonged to different times. So what could create similarities between these two travellers? It is Africa, even though Tagore never visited the continent, his concerns in Ode to Africa bring out the images mentioned in Livingstone's account of his voyage to the Zambezi. The similarity therefore lies in the art of storytelling. In Livingstone's expedition to the Zambezi and its tributaries and the discovery of Lakes Shirwa and Nyassa 1858–1864 one of the tales gives an account of a slave-trading rebel. Livingstone, landing to greet some of his old friends among the latter, found himself amidst the nauseating odor and mutilated bodies of the slain; he was asked to carry the governor, who was very ill with fever, across to Shupanga, and just as he gave his assent, the rebels renewed the fight and the balls began to whistle in all directions. After trying in vain to find someone to help the governor get onto the steamer, and not wanting to leave him in such danger, as the officer sent to bring our Kroomen had not shown up, he entered the hut and dragged His Excellency with him to the ship. He was a very tall man, and as he staggered about in weakness, weighing down Doctor Livingstone, he must have looked like a drunken man helping another. Some white Portuguese soldiers fought with great courage against the enemy in front, while some coldly shot their slaves who fled into the river behind. The rebels soon retreated, and the Portuguese fled to a sandbar in the Zambezi, and thence to an island opposite Shupanga, where they remained for some weeks, watching the rebels on the mainland opposite. This state of inaction on the part of the Portuguese could not be avoided, as they had exhausted all their ammunition. In Tagore's Ode to Africa, he writes about the colonizers and the chained slave trade. The merciless arms of the primordial oceans have stolen you, Africa, from the bosom of the primordial Earth that binds you in the impossible plot of the watchful forest Deep in the sanctuary of light misery. There, surrounded by impenetrable privacy and leisure, you embarked 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 and unheard. Mantras awaken in your subconscious. . Encouraged, you mocked the Terrible in the guise of the unpleasant. It was nothing more than your attempt to defy nervous apprehension Just as creatures amplify their faceIn the enchanting grandeur of the monstrous The catastrophic sounds of Tandava. Alas, O Veiled One, beneath the darkness of your dark facade lies your human identity unknown, degraded by the collective gaze of derision. And then they came, with manacles in hand and claws far sharper than those of your wolves; They have come, thieves and human traffickers, all blind with vanity and arrogance, blind far from your darkest, sunless forests. Of your darkest and sunless forests. The barbaric greed of civilization reveals in its raw nakedness its shameless and merciless inhumanity. Your silent moans and tears mingled with the fetid fumes of the jungle; Soaked in your tears and blood, the earth has turned into a noxious swamp. The mud-laden tracks of demonic cleats left behind for all eternity, the marks of your humiliation on the pages of your story. The poem is organized to reflect Africa's progress, with three stanzas individually handling Africa's creation, colonization, and post-expansionism. . Thus the system of differentiation of the three time intervals is configured, which reveals the impression of the bad faith of Western colonialism. For Tagore, Western colonialism in Africa ruined the nation's normal movement towards civilization. This is underlined by his extensive use of humanoid attribution which offers a human measurement of Africa. Likewise, the work of feeling in Africa conveys the origin of Tagore's Western expansionism as driven by an uninformed feeling of contempt that mercilessly victimized the landmass of its purity. Because Livingstone, carrying out the task of a colonizer, saw it firsthand while Tagore, even if he did not physically travel to Africa, wrote about the place (even if not about a region precisely) listening perhaps to someone else's stories, or personal accounts or a travel diary. .But how does your account reveal itself beyond your daily travel activities? It is their approaches or rather their narratives that decide. For example, in Tagore's excerpts from The Letters and Diaries of Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941) unlike other great travellers/explorers or travellers, he does not give details of his surroundings, rather he writes a metaphysical understanding of his surroundings , which transmits its own reflection and gaze... The island where our ship is anchored is now known as Biliton. The population is sparse. There are tin quarries run by their managers and workers. It's amazing how they are milking the entire earth. Once these people sailed in swarms to unknown seas. They had traveled around the earth to know it, to measure it. That history of familiarity is long and dangerous. I reflect, when they lowered the sails here on these coasts, far from their homes, how full of apprehension and expectation even those days were. The vegetation, animals and humans here were all foreign to them. But today everything is known and conquered! They defeated us, because, I think. The main reason is that we are static, they are dynamic. So they could get around easily and that's why they got to know and their appetite for knowledge was further whetted. This appetite is weak among us because of our stagnation. Our knowledge of our neighbors is also vague and we don't feel the need to know them better. Because our home encloses us too much. Those whose vigor for knowledge is low, so is their vigor for survival. With the same vitality that allowed them to earn all the rights to Java, there is the dedication of their archaeologists in exploring this island. Yet, like this island, its archeology was completely alien to them..”