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 lands to their south, such as the lands of the Upper Nile, Nubia in present day Nilotic Sudan and in northern Ethiopia. The attraction was primarily trade for gold, ivory and ebony and also the quest to understand the sources of the Nile and the reasons for its rise and fall. Leithauser says that sometime in the Fourth Millennium Egyptian sailors sailed down the African east coast to Punt, near modern Somalia. Herrmann (1958) says that modern archaeologists have proven that "Egyptian explorers advanced deep into centr...