The Burtoniana edition of Burton's Mission to Gelele, King of Dahome
A facsimile of the first edition of 1864, in two volumes. Enriched with extensive primary sources, including Burton's confidential reports to the Foreign Office and his maps and original sketches.
Your choices for decent reading material about Africa are limited. Postwar academic productions are mostly worthless: yoked to ideology, ruled with a fervor nearing sado-masochism. Drive-by accounts by dimwitted journalists are best avoided.
The best direction to go is back, to the original 19th century (and earlier) explorers. They predated the indoctrination that has gone from nascent to universal. They could form their own impressions and speak their own minds. Which is what they usually did. Their impressions vary a lot, which is a good sign. It depended a lot on where they were and who they met. They might be cautiously positive or definitely negative, but there is a much better chance that they are just being honest. Sometimes they had limited information, but a few among them had more information than their successors ever cared to master. Captain Richard Francis Burton (1821-1890) was the leading representative of the latter. He learned the languages of the areas he visited, he ingested their folklore, he took trouble to understand their beliefs as far as he could (no easy task). He would take notes all day, and write all night, using a board with wires stretched across it to guide his fingers in the dark, often after dancing, drinking and probably cavorting with his subjects. There has never been a more industrious traveler.
Burton's best-known works on Africa are probably First Footsteps in East Africa (1856), which deals inter-alia with Somali genital mutilators, and his Nile-directed Lake Regions (1860). Good reprints of these have frequently been available. However his two-volume West African Mission to Gelele, King of the Dahome (1864) has long been hard to find in a scholarly edition. Colin Newbury edited a reprint in 1966 but Bowdlerized it, cutting it down to one lame volume, leaving out much of the interesting stuff, while marking it up with dull commentary. Best go back to the first edition of two volumes issued in 1864.
You can now read that first edition in a superior hardcover facsimile, supplemented with a great deal of primary-source material. The new material includes Burton's two confidential reports to the Foreign Office, from 1863 and 1864. The first of these has never been published before, since it was strictly reserved for internal use. The second was only published in censored form for broader circulation. Both are reproduced entire and uncut, along with Burton's ethnological papers supplementing the popular narrative, which were discreetly confined to the Ethnological and Anthropological Societies---they describe, among other things, emulation of the "Hottentot's Apron"---both of which supposed-rivals he was an active mover of. His interesting pencil sketches of scenes in Dahome supplement the dearth of illustrations in prior editions. The first report was from Burton's private visit of mid-1863, which has been badly boggled by some lazy biographers, who were unaware of its existence. It has the extensive maps that Mission to Gelele should have featured in 1864, but did not---the sort of detail that a military invasion wanted. Indeed the Foreign office seem to have had good reason to reserve it for internal use only.
Dahome was a West African state of sorts in the Nigerian region, whose economy depended largely on conquering its neighbors for export as slaves, enlivened by the practice of human sacrifice on a reportedly-industrial scale. When the British blockaded the area to stop the slave trade, the Dahomans were bemused. Now they would simply have to execute all their captives instead. They could not, they patiently explained, just let them go without mortal danger to themselves. There was a brutal sort of logic to their argument, if one ignores their penchant for initiating the wars which preceded the capture of their doomed victims (though these were really at least as blood-thirsty as the Dahomans themselves).
Burton approached it all with an open mind, first visiting Dahome in May-June of 1863 on his own initiative (with a detailed report back to the Foreign Office, and the bill) and then on an official mission from Dec. 1863 to March 1864. That second mission was to instruct them to stop the export of slaves, and press for the release of some Christian converts they had captured. Burton made it clear that they were not to conduct human sacrifices (messengers to their ancestors in "Deadland", including postscripts) in his presence. They did so at night anyway, when he was not a witness, piously "watering" the graves of their forebears with the blood of their victims.
For years, the European world had marveled at the tales of Dahome's Amazon army, not of delivery drivers but rather of women rather past their prime armed with long razor blades, with which they boasted they would cut neighboring Abeokuta to shreds (in fact they lost badly a month later). Burton scoffed at these brawny harridans, and generally poured cold water on the tales of the Dahomans' bloody reign, which was certainly vicious but by then merely tawdry and dilapidated. Far from creating a lake of blood, they merely filled a small ditch. Who can forget his Waugh-like touches when he describes a village en route to the capital which welcomed him with great ceremony, solemnly bearing a broken old wooden liquor cabinet to him as if it was a sacred relic?
Burton's two volumes are packed with detail of the kind only he could collect so thoroughly, by his process of total immersion. It was an immersion that did not preclude sardonic commentary on the wretches he met, where it was warranted, but also open-minded consideration of the exaggerations and misunderstanding that marred Western knowledge. First-rate work by a rare mind.