argued was practiced out of necessity. After living with the African people, Kingsley became directly aware how their societies functioned and how prohibiting customs such as polygamy would be detrimental to their way of life. She knew that the typical African wives had too many tasks to manage alone. Missionaries in Africa often required converted men to abandon all but one of their wives, leaving the other women and children without the support of a husband – thus creating immense social and economic problems. Kingsley's also criticised teetotal missionaries, suggesting that those who drank small quantities of alcohol had better survival rates. Kingsley's beliefs about cultural and economic imperialism are complex and widely debated by scholars today. Though, on the one hand, she regarded African people and cultures as those who needed protection and preservation, she also believed in the necessity of British economic and technological influence and in indirect rule, insisting that there was some work in West Africa that had to be completed by white men. Yet in Studies in West Africa she writes: "Although a Darwinian to the core, I doubt if evolution in a neat and tidy perpendicular line, with Fetish at the bottom and Christianity at the top, represents the true state of affairs." Other, more acceptable, beliefs were variously perceived and used in Western European society – by traders, imperialists, women's rights activists and others – and, articulated as they were in great style, helped shape popular perception of "the African" and "his" land. Writings Kingsley wrote two books about her experiences: Travels in West Africa (1897), which was an immediate best-seller, and West African Studies (1899), both of which gained her respect and prestige within the scholarly community. Some newspapers, however, such as the Times under pro-imperialist editor Flora Shaw, refused to publish reviews of her works. Though some have argued that such refusals were grounded in the anti-imperialist and pro-African arguments presented in Kingsley's works, this is unlikely to explain her sometimes unfavorable reception, because she was both a supporter of the activities of European traders in West Africa and the concept of indirect colonial rule. The notable success of Travels in West Africa was due in no small part to the vigour and droll humour of writing, that, in the guise of a ripping yarn, never wavers from its true purpose – to complete the work her father had left undone.