The British Empire and the Exploration of the African Interior

In 1800 the interior of Africa was, in the most literal sense, a blank on European maps. The outlines of the continent had been known since the Portuguese voyages of the fifteenth century, and the great rivers had been visible from the coast. But the courses of the Niger and the Congo, the sources of the Nile, the geography of the central African plateau, the extent of the African Great Lakes — all of these were unknown or misknown. Over the course of the nineteenth century a small group of British, French, German, and Portuguese explorers — the most famous of them British — filled in the map. The information they brought back, and the routes they established, provided the geographical basis for the Scramble for Africa of the 1880s. The exploration of Africa was, in this respect, the precondition for the colonisation of Africa.

The Background

The European knowledge of the African interior had been limited to the coastal areas for centuries, with the interior largely unknown to Europeans. The Arab and Swahili trading networks had penetrated deep into East and Central Africa — the slave trade from the East African interior to the Indian Ocean had been active since at least the eighth century — and the Portuguese had established trading posts on the East African coast in the sixteenth century, but the great rivers of central Africa remained mysterious to European geographers. The Niger, in particular, was a puzzle: the classical geographers had placed its mouth on the eastern side of the continent, and the recovery of the actual course of the river was one of the great problems of African geography until the late eighteenth century.

The exploration of the African interior was motivated by a combination of commercial, religious, and scientific interests. The anti-slavery campaign of the early nineteenth century, given political force by the abolition of the British slave trade in 1807, created a demand for information about the African interior, and the British established treaties with several African rulers to suppress the slave trade. The commercial interests of the British and Dutch trading companies provided further motivation, and the scientific societies of London, Paris, and Berlin — the African Association (founded 1788, later merged with the Royal Geographical Society), the Société de Géographie, the Gesellschaft für Erdkunde zu Berlin — provided the institutional framework for the great expeditions of the nineteenth century.

Mungo Park and the Exploration of the Niger

Mungo Park (1771–1806) was the first European to explore the upper reaches of the Niger River, in his first expedition of 1795–1797. Park’s expedition, sponsored by the African Association of London, identified the Niger as a great west African river, and it established the broad outline of its course. Park’s second expedition of 1805–1806, sponsored by the British government, ended in his death at the Bussa Rapids on the Niger — the expedition was attacked by local warriors, and Park, the only European survivor, drowned attempting to escape.

Park’s voyages were characteristic of the early European exploration of West Africa: the explorer was poorly equipped, often sick, and entirely dependent on the hospitality of local rulers. The information Park gathered about the geography of the Niger and the political structure of the West African states was, however, of great value, and it helped to establish the British commercial presence in the region. As the modern Africanist Kanya-Forstner has argued, Park’s contribution to the geography of West Africa was the foundation of the British understanding of the region for a generation.

Hugh Clapperton and the Lake Chad Region

Hugh Clapperton (1788–1827) was a Scottish explorer who explored West Africa in the 1820s, including the Lake Chad region. Clapperton’s first expedition, undertaken with Dixon Denham and Walter Oudney in 1822–1824, crossed the Sahara from Tripoli to Lake Chad, providing the first European account of the Bornu Empire. Clapperton’s second expedition of 1825–1827, undertaken in an attempt to trace the course of the Niger, ended with his death in Sokoto in April 1827.

Clapperton’s expeditions, along with the Lander brothers’ exploration of the lower Niger, established the basic geography of West Africa and prepared the way for the British commercial presence in the region. The Royal Niger Company, founded in 1886, drew directly on the geographical knowledge produced by Clapperton and the Landers, and the Nigeria that emerged from the British colonial period was a direct consequence of the exploration of these decades.

Burton and Speke and the Search for the Source of the Nile

Richard Burton (1821–1890) and John Hanning Speke (1827–1864) were the principal British explorers of the African interior in the 1850s, and their search for the source of the Nile was one of the most famous episodes in the history of African exploration. The Burton-Speke expedition of 1856–1858, sponsored by the Royal Geographical Society, reached Lake Tanganyika in February 1858, and Speke then made an independent journey to Lake Victoria, which he reached in August 1858.

The discovery of Lake Victoria, and Speke’s claim that it was the source of the Nile, was one of the most significant geographical discoveries of the nineteenth century. The subsequent controversy between Burton, who believed the source of the Nile was Lake Tanganyika, and Speke, who insisted on Lake Victoria, became one of the most heated scientific disputes of the age. The two explorers exchanged increasingly bitter public letters; their dispute, conducted in the pages of the Athenaeum and the Journal of the Royal Geographical Society, became a Victorian talking point. The eventual resolution, after Speke’s death in 1864 (he shot himself in a partridge-hunting accident, possibly accidental, possibly not) and the expeditions of David Livingstone, Henry Morton Stanley, and Samuel Baker, was that the Nile did flow from Lake Victoria, although the lake itself was fed by many smaller rivers.

David Livingstone and the Exploration of Central Africa

David Livingstone (1813–1873) was the most famous British explorer of Africa in the nineteenth century, and his explorations of central and southern Africa made him a national hero. Livingstone’s first expedition to southern Africa in 1840–1856, undertaken as a medical missionary with the London Missionary Society, was followed by the Zambezi expedition of 1858–1864, which was sponsored by the British government. Livingstone’s last expedition, begun in 1866, was a search for the source of the Nile that ended only with his death in 1873.

Livingstone was a complex figure: a committed missionary, a serious scientist, an opponent of the slave trade, and an observer of the African interior whose reports shaped British attitudes. His discovery of Victoria Falls in November 1855 — which he named after the Queen — his account of the slave trade in East Africa, and his famous meeting with Stanley in November 1871 all contributed to a public awareness of Africa that was unprecedented. The Livingstone memorial in Westminster Abbey, with the inscription “Missionary, Traveller, Philanthropist,” reflects the central place of his career in the British imperial imagination. As the modern African historian John Lonsdale has argued, Livingstone’s significance lay less in the geography he produced than in the moral framework he provided for the British engagement with Africa.

Henry Morton Stanley and the Finding of Livingstone

Henry Morton Stanley (1841–1904), the Welsh-American journalist and explorer, found Livingstone in November 1871 with the famous greeting “Dr. Livingstone, I presume?” Stanley’s expedition, sponsored by the New York Herald, was a journalistic enterprise of the first order, and it produced a public interest in Africa that was previously unmatched. The New York Herald expedition of 1871 was followed by Stanley’s great trans-Africa expeditions of the 1870s and 1880s, which produced detailed maps of central Africa and opened the way for European colonization.

Stanley’s trans-Africa expeditions produced some of the most significant geographical work of the nineteenth century. The Congo expedition of 1874–1877 traced the course of the Congo River from its source to the sea, and the Emin Pasha Relief Expedition of 1886–1889 charted much of the territory that would become the British East African protectorates. The maps and reports that Stanley produced were the basis of the European colonial claims of the 1880s, and the Berlin Conference of 1884–85 was in part an attempt to regulate the consequences of Stanley’s discoveries.

The Legacy

The British exploration of the African interior had a significant impact on the subsequent colonization of the continent. The routes established by the explorers became the routes of the colonial armies and the colonial administrators, and the geographical knowledge they produced was the basis of the colonial boundary drawing of the 1880s and 1890s. The explorers were also, often, the advance guard of the missionaries and traders who followed, and the British presence in East and Central Africa can be traced directly to the work of Burton, Speke, Livingstone, and Stanley.

The exploration of Africa was closely tied to the anti-slavery campaign and to the European “civilising mission” that justified colonial rule. The explorers’ accounts of the slave trade, and of African political systems, shaped British policy and prepared the way for the colonial period. The consequences of the exploration, like the consequences of European expansion generally, are now seen in a more critical light, but the geographical work of the Victorian explorers continues to be a major chapter in the history of Africa.

Historiographical Note

The historiography of African exploration has been substantially revised since the 1960s. The older British tradition, of which the work of H. M. Stanley and the biographer W. G. Blaikie is representative, treated the explorers as heroic figures whose main story was the discovery of African geography. The post-independence African historiography, of which the work of Bethwell Ogot, Toyin Falola, and the contributors to the Cambridge History of Africa is the most distinguished representative, has insisted on the African contribution to the European exploration of Africa — the guides, the porters, the local rulers who made the expeditions possible — and on the imperial context of the explorations themselves. The current generation of historians, of whom the work of Dane Kennedy, John Lonsdale, and the contributors to the Oxford History of the British Empire are representative, has produced a more nuanced picture in which the explorers are treated as imperial actors whose work made the colonisation of Africa possible. The Burton-Speke dispute has been the subject of substantial revisionist work, of which the contribution by James McDermott in his biography of Burton is the most recent.

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