PRE-COLONIAL EXPLORATION OF AFRICA
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This research paper discusses the exploration of Africa before its colonization by the European powers in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Successive efforts by explorers dating back to antiquity to uncover the secrets of the Dark Continent including most importantly discoveries made by the Egyptians, the Phoenicians, the Romans and the Portuguese had provided the outside world by the late 18th century with a fairly accurate idea of the African coastline and its immediate environs. However, most of the important discoveries relating to the African heartland were made by a series of intrepid, mostly young, and often eccentric group of explorers acting out of a mixture of motives during a period of less than a century after 1788. Africa as Terra Incognita Prior to 1400 The most advanced civilization in Africa and at the time the most advanced in the world was developed by the Egyptians, a people of Afroasian origins, in the lower Nile Delta. That civilization flowered and peaked in the Second Millennium BC and did not effectively end until the Assyrian conquest in 671 BC. Iliffe (1995) says that "Egypt was remarkably unsuccessful in transmitting its culture to the rest of the continent" (p. 26). The most important barrier to contact between peoples of North Africa and regions further south was the Sahara desert, which began to desiccate around 7,000 BC. The Egyptians, however, were very interested in the
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nded up being chased out of the Congo by a cannibalistic tribe, the Jaga, in 1568 and had to settle for Angola which they held for 400 years. In 1572 the Portuguese tried to strike inland from East Africa to find Prester John but had to turn back to Mozambique.
In 1486 Bartolomeu Dias discovered the Cape of Good Hope and the coast of South Africa which he named Natal as well as a passage through the southern straits to the Indian Ocean. This was a considerable discovery because the Greek-Egyptian geography Ptolemy in the 2nd century AD, ignoring the Phoenician circumnavigation of the Continent, had published geographies showing that Africa and India were a single interconnected landmass.
Dias returned 11 years later with the 27-year-old Vasco da Gama, whose small fleet landed at several ports on the East Coast, including Mombasa, where they had difficulties with some Arabs, took on in Malindi, courtesy of the Sultan of Kilwa, an experienced pilot familiar with the Indian Ocean and sailed on to India where he arrived in 1498. Vasco da Gama made three voyages to India where the Portuguese waged a series of inconclusive wars with Muslims for control of trade with India. Once India was discovered, Portuguese interest in further Af
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Some common words found in the essay are:
Dark Continent, Oliver Fage, Henry Stanley, West African, Portugal Spain, According Herrmann, North Africa, Portuguese Guinea, Crossing Sahara, Prince Henry, leithauser 1955, oliver fage 1989, oliver fage, fage 1989, mclynn 1992, herrmann 1958, west african, exploration africa, north africa, iliffe 1995, sources nile, vasco da gama, il waveland press, inland east africa, york alfred knopf,
Approximate Word count = 4220
Approximate Pages = 17 (250 words per page)
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