That's the interior of Africa! Not the easiest place to explore. Savage tribes, unfriendly forces, a large number of different species of animals on the menu, harsh tropical climate, no communication or roads, etc. A similar situation has left the interior of South America unexplored. The "edge" of the two continents is well known. Further exploration of the interior must await the development of treatments for diseases such as malaria. In the 17th century, Jesuit missionaries discovered cinchona bark containing quinine in Peru. The environment created a suitable opportunity to spread the bark from Rome to all of Europe throughout Europe through the Jesuits. The therapy— associated with the name of the Bark of the Jesuits — soon spread to England.
North America, by contrast, is a piece of cake.
A print depicting Mungo Park, a Scottish explorer in West Africa. After exploring the upper Niger around 1796, Parker wrote a popular and influential book called Travels in the Interior of Africa, in which he theorized that Niger and Congo should merge into the same river. Founded in 1788, the Association for the Promotion of Inland African Discovery (commonly known as the African Society) is a British club of wealthy people dedicated to exploring West Africa, with a mission to discover the origins and course of the African inland region. Home to the Niger River and the golden "Lost City" of Timbuktu. The formation of this group was actually the beginning of the era of African exploration. The club's motivation was a sincere desire for scientific knowledge and the abolition of the slave trade, but was not opposed to access to opportunities for British commerce. The results of the association's recruits added much to the europeans' understanding of Africa and its peoples in the late 18th century. In the minds of Europeans, the "humanization" of African peoples and cultures was undoubtedly a boon for the abolition of the slave trade.
discuss:
Race is primarily a social structure that is used in different ways at different times and places. Europeans in the 19th century increasingly came into contact with people of different constitutions and skin tones in Africa, Asia, and the Americas. This is not the only one. The Bible dealt with the concept of human differences 2,000 years ago, but 19th-century intellectuals were making unfounded judgments about them.
Many religious denominations use the hidden biblical curse as an excuse for racism. Many people teach that Cain's mark is dark skin. Of course, skin color has no moral significance in any way, but some biblical support for this strange interpretation is pried out of the Old Testament. The Bible records that "the Lord made a mark on Cain." (Genesis 4:15) In addition, one of Noah's sons, named Han, sinned against his father and condemned his so-called black descendants as "servants of the servants." According to the Bible, Han gave birth to four sons, who gave birth to the southern tribes of the earth, including all Africans. It is worth noting that it was Noah, not God, who cursed Han. (Genesis 9:25) In medieval Europe, the idea that slaves were the descendants of Cain was widely publicized as a justification for serfdom. Many other prominent scholars support this version of the ham curse because it fits the ideological and economic interests of European elites who want to justify the exploitation of African labor. As late as 1873, Pope Pius IX prayed for "the unfortunate Ethiopians of Central Africa, hoping that Almighty God would finally remove the curse of ham from their hearts." It is not easy to practice that Christians, priests, bishops, missionaries or popes have to admit that two millennia of accepted moral doctrines are wrong. [I]
During the Enlightenment, a secular theory of race took the subject away from the Bible and insisted on the fundamental unity of all humanity. Ethnologists in the 18th century began to see humans as part of the natural world and subdivided them into three to five races, often as variants of a single human species. Johann Friedrich Blumenbach's 1775 paper "The Natural Diversity of Mankind" proposed five main races: caucasian, Mongol, Ethiopian (later known as black), Amerindian, and Malayan, but he did not propose any hierarchy between races. However, a growing number of 19th-century writers insisted that these races constituted separate species with different origins. This scientific classification of human variation is often accompanied by racist ideas about the innate tendencies of different groups, always a way of attributing the most desirable traits to the European white race and arranging other races along a continuum of increasingly unpopular attributes (inferior distributions). Ironically, the initial support of religious and secular believers for basic human equality exacerbated, rather than eliminated, racism. [ii]
The missionary association of America's primary focus is to provide liberal Christian education among African Americans. AMA operates in Hawaii, Siam, and Egypt, but most of the work is done in North America. Missions were set for fugitive American slaves in Canada and freed slaves in Jamaica, as well as Chinese immigrants in California.
To some extent, educational, medical and social issues obscure the religious efforts of these Christian missionaries. Missionaries sent out rarely received any special training to prepare them for the tasks they undertake, but many had already developed personal skills in medicine, language, or geography. In that era, an attitude within missionary communities was that God would provide those who were called for this purpose with the tools and skills they needed.
Look for the source of the Nile. As Henry Stanley shows, the White Nile flows out of Lake Victoria, but the lake itself has several tributary rivers, and geographers and amateur explorers today are still debating which of them is the true source of the Nile.
David Livingston was one of the most popular British heroes/explorers of the late 19th century. Livingstone is known as an explorer, missionary, and geographer. His obsession was to understand the source of the Nile. This seems to be the "holy grail" of Victorian geographers. His missionary travels, "disappearances", and eventual death in Africa — and subsequent posthumous national heroes in 1874 — led to the establishment of several Central African Christian missionary initiatives that advanced during the African Age of Discovery.
In 1851, livingston, an experienced African missionary, set out from the village of Linyanti, roughly in the heart of the continent, on the Zambezi River in southern Cape Town. This was the missionary post on the northern border at that time. Livingstone heads northwest from Linnetti and up the Zambezi River, believing it will be the best "natural highway" into Africa. His experience led him to believe that the best long-term opportunity for successful evangelism to the locals was to explore Africa before European commercial interests and other missionaries were drawn and navigated through maps of the rivers. In this way, Livingstone became the first European to cross South-Central Africa, a latitude that Europeans had never crossed before. He briefly returned to England to gain support for his ideas and published a book on his travels, which made him one of the leading explorers of his time.
His second expedition lasted from March 1858 to mid-1864. After the government ordered the recall of the expedition, he eventually returned home in 1864 because the expedition's costs were increasing and it had not been able to find a navigation route inland. Livingstone returned to Africa in January 1866, and in 1869 he found himself seriously ill in the jungle. His Last Diary was published in 1874. Livingstone lost contact with the outside world completely for six years and fell ill for most of the last four years of his life. Only one of his 44 letters was sent to Europe.
In 1869, the New York Herald sent Henry Morton Stanley(welsh-born American) to find Livingston. In 1871, he found Livingstone in a small town on the shores of Lake Tanganyika and greeted him with the now famous word "Dr. Livingstone". Despite Stanley's strong discouragement, Livingstone was determined not to leave Africa until the mission was completed. Subsequently, Stanley led a separate expedition through Africa. In Stanley's Crossing the Dark Continent (1878), he coined the term "Dark Continent" for Africa—darkness means hiding. "He (Stanley) is clearly in the lead in terms of the explorations and discoveries defined in Europe in the 19th century."
Richard Burton was a captain in the Army of the East India Company who served in India and later briefly fought in the Crimean War. After this, he was hired by the Royal Geographical Society to explore the east coast of Africa. In 1856, the Royal Geographical Society funded Burton and John Hanning Speke on an expedition to "explore the then completely unknown Central African Lake Region" in an attempt to find the source of the Nile.
Despite his fascination with non-European cultures, some portray Burton as an undisguised imperialist, convinced of the historical and intellectual superiority of whites on the grounds that he was involved in the Anthropological Society, an organization that established the doctrine of scientific racism. Nonetheless, one of the hallmarks of Burton's books is the large number of footnotes and appendices containing a wealth of observations and information.
Mary Kingsley's father spent most of his life with nobles around the world, writing diaries and notes, hoping to publish them. Educated at home, Mary learned the basics of natural history from him. He hired a mentor to teach his daughter German so she could help him translate scientific papers. His comparative study of sacrificial rituals around the world was his main passion, and it was Mary's desire to complete the work, which led her to West Africa in 1892. Her two trips were not remarkable for geological exploration, but in the Middle-Class, victorian old maid, in her thirties, did not speak African languages or French. During the Anglo-Bub War, Kingsley died in simon's town (Cape Town) nursing prisoners of war.
By 1870, only 10 percent of Africa was under formal European control; by 1914, that had increased to almost 90 percent of the continent, with only Ethiopia (Abyssinia) and Liberia, the freeland colonies developed by the United States in 1821. The colonization of Africa is known to many historians as the "Scramble for Africa". Competition between Britain, France, Germany, Italy, and other Western European powers accounted for a large part of colonization. However, it is clear that it is not just imperialism that has stimulated the "discovery" of the African continent.
[i] () Tim Robinson (2007), "Racism: History."
[ii] () George M. Fredrickson, "The Historical Origins and Development of Racism." URL: RACE - The power of illusion. Background reading