European exploration of Africa
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The first European attempts to explore Africa were motivated by the search for a water route to India. These expeditions were mostly conducted by the Portugese, who had been given papal authority to exploit all non-christian lands of the eastern hemeshpere. The Europeans set up coastal colonies to prosecute the slave trade, but the interior of the continent remained unexplored until the 1800s. Nineteenth century christian missionaries like Stanley and Livingstone were the first whites to find the great African Lakes and the headwaters of the Nile.
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[edit] Prehistory and Antiquity
The connection between Europe and Northern Africa is older than recorded history. Though there is some uncertainty, it seems clear that in the late Paleolithic and Neolithic ages, cultural influences overcame the Mediterranean barrier. Hence North African late Paleolithic cultures like Aterian and Gafsan are connected with those of Europe. Some early Neolithic influences to Europe may also have arrived via North Africa. Additionally, the Megalithic phenomenon of the Chalcolithic period is also found on both shores of the Mediterranean Sea.
[edit] Middle Ages
With the expansion of Islam in the Middle Ages, North Africa was culturally cut off from non-Muslim Europe. The Islamic world created a barrier between Europe and the rest of the world, and it was only by paying heavy tributes that European traders could obtain highly prized commodities like West African gold, East Asian spices and silk. The Italian republics of Venice and Genoa, among others, specialized in this trade.
Image:Catayo.jpeg Other specialists were the Jews of Spain and Morocco, who were allowed to trade in both cultural regions. Among them Abraham Cresques and his son Jehuda improved European knowledge of Africa and other regions with the creation of the Catalan Atlas, elaborated in 1375, with a good deal of Muslim geographical knowledge and some educated guesses and imagination to fill the blanks.
The Genoese were also interested in circumventing (or circumnavigating) the Muslim monopoly of Asian trade. In 1291, Jacob Doria ordered Vandino and Ugolino Vivaldi to reach India via the Atlantic Ocean. When the expedition was lost, Doria sent ambassadors to Mogadishu to try find out their fate.
Naval charts of 1339 show that the Canary Islands were already known in Europe. In 1341, Portuguese and Italian explorers prepared a joint expedition to these islands. In 1344, French admiral Luis de la Cerda was named by the Pope Prince of Fortune and sent to conquer these islands too.
In 1402 Jean de Bethencourt and Gadifer de la Salle sailed to conquer the Canary Islands but found them already plundered by the Castilians. They did conquer the isles, but Bethencourt's nephew was forced to cede them to Castile in 1418.
[edit] Portuguese expeditions
The first one to approach the exploration of Africa and the oceanic route to the Indies methodically was the Portuguese Prince Henry, known as the Navigator. From his residence in the Algarve, he directed successive expeditions to circumnavigate Africa and reach India. In 1420, Henry sent an expedition to secure the uninhabited but strategic island of Madeira. In 1425, he tried to secure the Canary Islands as well, but these were already firmly under Castilian control. In 1431, another Portuguese expedition reached and annexed the Azores.
Along the western and eastern coasts of Africa, the progress was also steady: Portuguese sailors reached Cape Bojador in 1434, Cape Blanco in 1441. In 1433, they built a fortress on the island of Arguin, in modern day Mauritania, that traded European wheat and cloth for African gold and slaves. It was the first time that the semi-mythic gold of the Sudan reached Europe without Muslim mediation. The slaves were mainly sent to Madeira, which became, after thorough deforestation, the first European plantation colony ever.
Between 1444 and 1447, the Portuguese explored the coasts of Senegal, Gambia and Guinea. In 1456, a Venetian captain under Portuguese command explored the islands of Cape Verde.
Henry the Navigator died in 1460 but his legacy would prove to be enduring: in 1462 Portuguese sailors explored the Bissau islands and named Sierra Leona (Lion Range).
In 1469, Fernão Gomes was rented the rights of African exploration for five years. Under his direction, in 1471, the Portuguese reached modern Ghana and settled in La Mina (the mine), later renamed as Elmina. They had finally reached a country with aboundance of gold and hence the historical name of Gold Coast that it would eventually receive.
In 1472, Fernão Poo discovered the island that would bear his name for centuries (now Bioko) and an estuary abundant in shrimp (Portuguese: camaron), giving its name to Cameroon.
Soon after, the Equator was crossed for the first time by Europeans since the Phoenicians. Portugal stabilished a base in Sāo Tomé that, after 1485, was settled with criminals. After1497, expelled Spanish and Portuguese Jews could also find a safe haven there.
In 1482, Diego Cao found the mouth of a large river and learned of the existence of a great kingdom: Kongo. In 1485, he explored the river upstream as well.
But the Portuguese wanted, over anything else, to find a route to India and kept trying to circumnavigate Africa. In 1485, the expedition of João Afonso d'Aveiros, with the German astronomer Martin of Behaim as part of the crew, reached India, after twenty-one months of navigation only 18º South. [citation needed]
In 1488, Bartholomeu Dias and his pilot Pedro d'Alemquer, after putting down a mutiny, turned a cape where they were caught by a storm, naming it Cape of Storms. They followed the coast for a while realizing that it kept going eastward with even some tendency to the north. Lacking supplies, they turned around with the conviction that the far end of Africa had finally been reached. Upon their return to Portugal the promising cape was renamed Cape of Good Hope.
Some years laters, Colombus landed in America under rival Castilian command. Pope Alexander VI decreed then the Inter caetera bull, dividing the non-Christian parts of the World between the two rival Catholic powers, Spain and Portugul.
Finally in the years 1497-1498, Vasco da Gama, again with Alemquer as pilot, took a direct route to Cape of Good Hope, via St. Helena. He went beyond the farthest point reached by Dias and named the country Natal. Then he sailed northward, making land at Quelimane (Mozambique) and Mombasa, where he found Chinese traders, and Malindi (both in modern Kenya). In this town he recruited an Arab pilot and set sail directly to Calicut. In August 28, 1498, King Manuel of Portugal could already inform the Pope of the good news: they have reached India.
Soon Egypt and Venice reacted to this news with hostility; from the Red Sea, they jointly attacked the Portuguese ships that traded with India. The Portugese defeated these ships near Diu in 1509. With the Ottomans rather indifferent, Portugal had almost exclusive control of the trade through the Indian Ocean, estabilishing many bases along the eastern coast of Africa, from Mozambique to Somalia, and even capturing Aden in 1513.
In 1500, a Portuguese fleet commanded by Alvares Cabral, that followed the route just opened by de Gama to India, was dispersed by a storm in the Indian Ocean.[citation needed] One of the ships under command of Diego Dias arrived to a coast that wasn't that of East Africa. Two years later a chart already showed an elongated island est of Africa that beared the name of Madagascar. But only a century later, in 1613-1619 did the Portuguese explore the island in detail, signing treaties with local chieftains, and sent the first missionaries, who found it impossible to make locals to believe in Hell, and were eventually expelled.
[edit] Portugal and the native states of Equatorial Africa
Portuguese colonization of some parts of Africa would have a very negative impact in some of the already existing civilizations. By 1583 they had destroyed the Afro-Muslim Zendj civilization of East Africa that competed with them for the African trade, but two other important African kingdoms would also be destroyed by the Portuguese conquistadores: the Kongo and the Monomotapa.
The relation with Kongo was initially good: Congolese kings embraced Catholicism and welcomed Portuguese missionaries and merchants. But the slave trade eventually became a major issue of dispute in the region. The Portguese (and later also the Dutch) supported the enslaving warrior state of the Jaggas, who sacked the Kongo repeatedly. They also used the Kongo to weaken the enighbour realm of Ndongo, where Queen Nzinga, put a fierce but eventually doomed resistance to Portuguese and Jagga ambitions. Portugal intervened militarly in these conflicts creating the bases for their colony of Angola. In 1663, after another conflict, the royal crown of Kongo was sent to Lisboa. Nevertheless a diminished Kongo Kingdom would still exist until 1885, when the last Manicongo, Pedro V, ceded his almost non-existent domain to Portugal.
The relation with the other major state of Southern Africa, the Monomotapa (in modern Zimbabwe), was similar: Portugal intervened in a local war hoping to get aboundant mineral richess, imposing the King a protectorate. But with the authority of the Monomotapa diminished by the foreign presence, anarchy took over. The local miners migrated and even buried the mines to prevent them from falling in Portuguese hands. When in 1693 the neighbouring Cangamires invaded the country, the Portuguese accepted their failure and retreated to the coast.
[edit] Dutch intervention
The steps of Portugal were largely followed in the 17th century by a young country: the Netherlands. This was largely caused by the European political circumstances: while the Dutch were waging an long war against Spain for their independence, Portugal had temporarily been united to Spain in 1580. As result, the growing colonial ambitions of the Netherlands were mostly directed against Portugal.
For this purpose, two Dutch companies were founded: the West Indies Company, with power over all the Atlantic Ocean, and the East Indies Company, with power over the Indian Ocean.
The West India Company conquered Elmina in 1637 and founded Luanda in 1641. In 1648 they were expelled from Luanda by the Portuguese . Overall they built 16 forts in different places, including Goree in Senegal, partly replacing Portugal as the main slave-trading power.
The Dutch left a lasting impact in South Africa, a region ignored by Portugal that the Dutch eventually decided to use as station in their route to East Asia. After non-satisfying attempt in St. Helen's Bay, in 1653, they founded Capetown, starting the European exploration and colonization of South Africa.
[edit] Other early European presence in Africa
Image:James Island and Fort Gambia.jpg Almost at the same time as the Dutch, other European powers also attempted to create their own outposts for the slave trade in Africa.
As early as 1530, English merchant adventurers started trading in West Africa, coming into conflict with Portuguese troops. In 1581, Francis Drake reached Cape of Good Hope. In 1663, the British built Fort James in Gambia. In 1664, another British colonial expedition attempted a setlement in southern Madagascar, resulting in the death of most of the colonists. The British forts in the West African coast were eventually taken by the Dutch.
In 1626 a French Compagnie de l'Occident was created. This company expelled the Dutch from Senegal, making it the first French domain in Africa.
France also put her eyes in Madagascar; the island that was used since 1527 as stop in the travels to India. In 1642, the French East India Company was created and founded a settlement in southern Madagascar called Fort Dauphin. The commercial results of this settlement were scarce and, again, most of the settlers died, but one of the survivors, Ettiene de Flacourt, published a History of the Great Island of Madagascar and Relations, that was for a long time the main European source of information about the island. Further settlement attempts had no more success but, in 1667, François Martin led the first expedition to the Malgassy heartland, reaching Lake Alaotra. In 1665 France oficially claimed Madagascar, under the name of Île Dauphine, yet this pretension would not have real impact until the 19th century.
In 1657 Swedish merchants founded Cape Coast in modern Ghana but were soon displaced by the Danish, who found Christiansborg near modern day Accra.
In 1677, King Friedrich the Great of Prussia sent an expedition to the Western coast of Africa, the commander of the expedition, captain Blonk, signed agreements with the chieftains of the Gold Coast. The Prussians built there a fort named Gross Friederichsburg and also restored the abandoned Portuguese fort of Arguin. But in 1720, the king decided to sell these bases to the Netherlands for 7,000 ducats and 12 slaves, six of them chained with pure gold chains.
Overall, European exploration of Africa in the 17th and 18th centuries was very limited. Instead they were focused in slave trade and for that they only needed coastal bases and items to trade. The real exploration of Africa beyond its coasts would only start well into the 19th century.
[edit] 19th Century
European exploration and conquest
An 1812 map of Africa by Arrowsmith and Lewis[edit] 19th Century European explorers
- See also: Colonization of Africa and Scramble for Africa
Although the Napoleonic Wars distracted the attention of Europe from exploratory work in Africa, those wars nevertheless exercised great influence on the future of the continent, both in Egypt and South Africa. The occupation of Egypt (1798-1803) first by France and then by Great Britain resulted in an effort by Turkey to regain direct control over that country, followed in 1811 by the establishment under Mehemet Ali of an almost independent state, and the extension of Egyptian rule over the eastern Sudan (from 1820 onward). In South Africa, the struggle with Napoleon caused the United Kingdom to take possession of the Dutch settlements at the Cape, and in 1814, Cape Colony, which had been continuously occupied by British troops since 1806, was formally ceded to the British crown.
Meantime considerable changes had been made in other parts of the continent. The occupation of Algiers by France in 1830, put an end being the piratical proceedings of the Barbary states. Egyptian authority continued to expand southward, with the consequent additions to the knowledge of the Nile. The city of Zanzibar, on the island of that name, rapidly attained importance. Accounts of a vast inland sea, and the discovery in 1840-1848, by the missionaries Johann Ludwig Krapf and Johann Rebmann, of the snow-clad mountains of Kilimanjaro and Kenya, stimulated the desire for further knowledge about Africa in Europe.
In the middle of the 19th century, Protestant missions were carrying on active missionary work on the Guinea coast, in South Africa and in the Zanzibar dominions. It was being conducted in regions and among peoples little known, and in many instances, missionaries turned explorers and became pioneers of trade and empire. One of the first to attempt to fill up the remaining blank spaces in the map was David Livingstone, who had been engaged since 1840 in missionary work north of the Orange River. In 1849, Livingstone crossed the Kalahari Desert from south to north and reached Lake Ngami, and between 1851 and 1856 he traversed the continent from west to east, making known the great waterways of the upper Zambezi. During these journeyings Livingstone discovered, November 1855, the famous Victoria Falls, so named after the Queen of the United Kingdom. In 1858-1864 the lower Zambezi, the Shire and Lake Nyasa were explored by Livingstone, Nyasa having been first reached by the confidential slave of António da Silva Porto, a Portuguese trader established at Bié in Angola, who crossed Africa during 1853-1856 from Benguella to the mouth of the Rovuma. A prime goal for explorers was to locate the source of the River Nile. Expeditions by Burton and Speke (1857-1858) and Speke and Grant (1863) located Lake Tanganyika and Lake Victoria. It was eventually proved to be the latter from which the Nile flowed.
Henry Morton Stanley, who had in 1871 succeeded in finding and succouring Livingstone, started again for Zanzibar in 1874. In one of the most memorable of all exploring expeditions in Africa, Stanley circumnavigated Victoria Nyanza and Tanganyika, and, striking farther inland to the Lualaba, followed that river down to the Atlantic Ocean—reached in August 1877 -- and proved it to be the Congo.
Explorers were also active in other parts of the continent. Southern Morocco, the Sahara and the Sudan were traversed in many directions between 1860 and 1875 by Gerhard Rohlfs, Georg Schweinfurth and Gustav Nachtigal. These travellers not only added considerably to geographical knowledge, but obtained invaluable information concerning the people, languages and natural history of the countries in which they sojourned. Among the discoveries of Schweinfurth was one that confirmed the Greek legends of the existence beyond Egypt of a "pygmy race". But the first western discoverer of the pygmies of Central Africa was Paul du Chaillu, who found them in the Ogowe district of the west coast in 1865, five years before Schweinfurth's first meeting with them; du Chaillu had previously , as the result of journeys in the Gabon region between 1855 and 1859, made popular in Europe the knowledge of the existence of the gorilla, perhaps the gigantic ape seen by Hanno the Carthaginian, and whose existence, up to the middle of the 19th century, was thought to be as legendary as that of the Pygmies of Aristotle.
[edit] List of explorers
Some of the major European explorations conducted in Africa.
- Diogo Cão (15th century Portuguese explorer of the African coast)
- Diogo de Azambuja (15th century Portuguese explorer of the African coast)
- Bartolomeu Dias (15th century Portuguese explorer of the African coast)
- Pêro de Alenquer (15th century Portuguese explorer of the African coast)
- João Infante (15th century Portuguese explorer of the African coast)
- João Grego (15th century Portuguese explorer of the African coast)
- Álvaro Martins (15th century Portuguese explorer of the African coast)
- Pêro Dias (15th century Portuguese explorer of the African coast)
- Gil Eanes (15th century Portuguese explorer of the African coast)
- Nuno Tristão (15th century Portuguese explorer of the African coast)
- Antão Gonçalves (15th century Portuguese explorer of the African coast)
- Dinis Dias (15th century Portuguese explorer of the African coast)
- António Fernandes (15th century Portuguese explorer of the African coast)
- Pêro de Sintra (15th century Portuguese explorer of the African coast)
- Lopes Gonçalves (15th century Portuguese explorer of the Atlantic and of the African coast)
- Alvise Cadamosto (15th century Portuguese explorer of the Atlantic islands and of the African coast)
- Diogo Dias (15th century Portuguese explorer of the Atlantic islands, of the African coast and the Indian Ocean, discovered Madagascar)
- António Noli (15th century Portuguese explorer of the Atlantic islands and of the African coast)
- Fernão da Po (15th century Portuguese explorer of the African coast)
- Alvaro Caminha (15th century Portuguese explorer of the Atlantic islands and of the African coast)
- João de Santarém (15th century Portuguese explorer of the Atlantic islands and of the African coast)
- Pedro Escobar (15th century Portuguese explorer of the Atlantic islands and of the African coast)
- Duarte Pacheco Pereira (15th century Portuguese explorer of the Atlantic and of the African coast)
- Vasco da Gama (Portuguese, Lead the discovery of the sea route to India in 1498 along the African coast)
- Pedro Álvares Cabral (Portuguese, discoverer of Brazil in 1500, from there it's fleet went to India along the African coast)
- Pero da Covilhã (15th century/16th century Portuguese diplomat and explorer in Ethiopia)
- Paulo Dias de Novais (16th century Portuguese explorer and colonizer of Africa)
- Lourenço Marques (16th century Portuguese trader and explorer in East Africa)
- Francisco Alvarez (16th century Portuguese missionary and explorer in Ethiopia)
- Serpa Pinto (19th century Portuguese explorer, soldier and colonizer of Africa)
- Richard Francis Burton (19th century British explorer, great lakes of Africa}
- John Hanning Speke (19th century British explorer, source of the Nile)
[edit] Africa as 'Dark Continent'
For many centuries, Africa was known to the Western world as the 'dark continent', meaning an unexplored but also savage and untamed area, populated by heathens and wild animals. The mind of the explorer is typically excited by the prospect of negotiating hostile and unchartered environments, and hence Africa became a magnet to many European explorers.
[edit] Attitudes to exploration of Africa
Exploration took with it a certain Christian (and perhaps Victorian, though many European explorers were not British) mindset. Many explorers felt that it was their duty to introduce Western civilisation and Christianity to savage negro peoples, and hence exploration was seen by most people during the post-Renaissance era as a useful expenditure of energy. It was also a source of national pride to have an explorer reach a certain goal, and explorers certainly competed as the stakes of hubris were high for the men who could identify the source of the Nile or reach other landmarks.
It should be noted that exploration was an activity mostly practised by well-educated, wealthy men, who had the resources and the initiative to explore. Explorers' ability to conquer uncharted territory (to non-natives) should not be underestimated, but neither should the resources available to such men.
[edit] Bibliography
- Historia Universal Siglo XXI. Africa: desde la prehistoria hasta los años sesenta. Pierre Bertaux, 1972. Siglo XXI Editores S.A.
