stamping their language, law and religion indelibly upon South Africa. This process, however, was exceedingly slow.
During the 18th century there is little to record in the history of Africa. The nations of Europe, engaged in the later half of the century in almost constant warfare, and struggling for supremacy in America and the East, to a large extent lost their interest in the continent. Only on the west coast was there keen rivalry, and here the motive Waning and revival of interest in Africa. was securance of trade rather than territorial acquisitions. In this century the slave trade reached its highest development, the trade in gold, ivory, gum and spices being small in comparison. In the interior of the continent—Portugal’s energy being expended—no interest was shown, the nations with establishments on the coast “taking no further notice of the inhabitants or their land than to obtain at the easiest rate what they procure with as little trouble as possible, or to carry them off for slaves to their plantations in America” (Encyclopaedia Britannica, 3rd ed., 1797). Even the scanty knowledge acquired by the ancients and the Arabs was in the main forgotten or disbelieved. It was the period when—
| Geographers, in Afric maps, |
| With savage pictures filled their gaps, |
| And o’er unhabitable downs |
| Placed elephants for want of towns. |
| (Poetry, a Rhapsody. By Jonathan Swift.) |
The prevailing ignorance may be gauged by the statement in the third edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica that “the Gambia and Senegal rivers are only branches of the Niger.” But the closing years of the 18th century, which witnessed the partial awakening of the public conscience of Europe to the iniquities of the slave trade, were also notable for the revival of interest in inner Africa. A society, the African Association,[1] was formed in London in 1788 for the exploration of the interior of the continent. The era of great discoveries had begun a little earlier in the famous journey (1770–1772) of James Bruce through Abyssinia and Sennar, during which he determined the course of the Blue Nile. But it was through the agents of the African Association that knowledge was gained of the Niger regions. The Niger itself was first reached by Mungo Park, who travelled by way of the Gambia, in 1795. Park, on a second journey in 1805, passed Timbuktu and descended the Niger to Bussa, where he lost his life, having just failed to solve the question as to where the river reached the ocean. (This problem was ultimately solved by Richard Lander and his brother in 1830.) The first scientific explorer of South-East Africa, Dr Francisco de Lacerda, a Portuguese, also lost his life in that country. Lacerda travelled up the Zambezi to Tete, going thence towards Lake Mweru, near which he died in 1798. The first recorded crossing of Africa was accomplished between the years 1802 and 1811 by two half-caste Portuguese traders, Pedro Baptista and A. José, who passed from Angola eastward to the Zambezi.
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 Effects of the Napoleonic wars—Britain seizes the Cape. over that country,[2] 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 Great Britain 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.
The close of the European conflicts with the battle of Waterloo was followed by vigorous efforts on the part of the British government to become better acquainted with Africa, and to substitute colonization and legitimate trade for the slave traffic, declared illegal for British subjects in 1807 and abolished by all other European powers by 1836. To West Africa Britain devoted much attention. The slave trade abolitionists had already, in 1788, formed a settlement at Sierra Leone, on the Guinea coast, for freed slaves, and from this establishment grew the colony of Sierra Leone, long notorious, by reason of its deadly climate, as “The White Man’s Grave.”[3] Farther east the establishments on the Gold Coast began to take a part in the politics of the interior, and the first British mission to Kumasi, despatched in 1817, led to the assumption of a protectorate over the maritime tribes heretofore governed by the Ashanti.
An expedition sent in 1816 to explore the Congo from its mouth did not succeed in getting beyond the rapids which bar the way to the interior, but in the central Sudan much better results were obtained. In 1823 three English travellers, Walter Oudney, Dixon Denham and Hugh Clapperton, reached Lake Chad from Tripoli—the first white men to reach that lake. The partial exploration of Bornu and the Hausa states by Clapperton, which followed, revealed the existence of large and flourishing cities and a semi-civilized people in a region hitherto unknown. The discovery in 1830 of the mouth of the Niger by Clapperton’s servant Lander, already mentioned, had been preceded by the journeys of Major A. G. Laing (1826) and René Caillié (1827) to Timbuktu, and was followed (1832–1833) by the partial ascent of the Benue affluent of the Niger by Macgregor Laird. In 1841 a disastrous attempt was made to plant a white colony on the lower Niger, an expedition (largely philanthropic and antislavery in its inception) which ended in utter failure. Nevertheless from that time British traders remained on the lower Niger, their continued presence leading ultimately to the acquisition of political rights over the delta and the Hausa states by Great Britain.[4] Another endeavour by the British government to open up commercial relations with the Niger countries resulted in the addition of a vast amount of information concerning the countries between Timbuktu and Lake Chad, owing to the labours of Heinrich Barth (1850–1855), originally a subordinate, but the only surviving member of the expedition sent out.
Meantime considerable changes had been made in other parts of the continent, the most notable being—the occupation of Algiers by France in 1830, an end being thereby put to the piratical proceedings of the Barbary states; the continued expansion southward of Egyptian authority with the consequent additions to the knowledge of the Nile; and the establishment of independent states (Orange Free State and the Transvaal) by Dutch farmers (Boers) dissatisfied with British rule in Cape Colony. Natal, so named by Vasco da Gama, had been made a British colony (1843), the attempt of the Boers to acquire it being frustrated. The city of Zanzibar, on the island of that name, founded in 1832 by Seyyid Said of Muscat, rapidly attained importance, and Arabs began to penetrate to the great lakes of East Africa,[5] concerning which little more was known (and less believed) than in the time of Ptolemy. Accounts of a vast inland sea, and the discovery in 1848–1840, by the missionaries Ludwig Krapf and J. Rebmann, of the snow-clad mountains of Kilimanjaro and Kenya, stimulated in Europe the desire for further knowledge.
At this period, the middle of the 19th century, Protestant missions were carrying on active propaganda on the Guinea coast, in South Africa and in the Zanzibar dominions. Their work, largely beneficent, was being conducted in regions and among peoples little known, and in many instances missionaries turned The era of great explorers.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. In 1849 Livingstone crossed the Kalahari Desert from south to north and reached Lake Ngami,
- ↑ The Association, in 1831, was merged in the Royal Geographical Society.
- ↑ The Mamelukes, whom the Turks had overthrown in the 16th century, had regained practically independent power.
- ↑ In imitation of the British example, an American society founded in 1822 the negro colony (now republic) of Liberia.
- ↑ The first territorial acquisition made by Great Britain in this region was in 1851, when Lagos Island was annexed.
- ↑ As early as 1848 an Arab from Zanzibar journeying across the continent had arrived at Benguella.
