Why was Africa called the dark continent? Victorian era adventure, missionaries, and imperialism

by ANGELA THOMPSELL

The most common answer to the question, “Why was Africa called the Dark Continent?” is that Europe did not know much about Africa until the 19th century. But that answer is misleading and disingenuous. Europeans had known quite a lot about Africa for at least 2,000 years, but European leaders began purposefully ignoring earlier sources of information to justify colonialism and anti-Blackness.

At the same time, the campaign against enslavement and for paternalistic missionary work in Africa intensified Europeans’ racial ideas about African people in the 1800s. White people called Africa the Dark Continent because they wanted to legitimize the enslavement of Black people and exploitation of Africa’s resources.

Exploration: Creating Blank Spaces

It is true that up until the 19th century, Europeans had little direct knowledge of Africa beyond the coast, but their maps were already filled with details about the continent. African kingdoms had been trading with Middle Eastern and Asian states for over two millennia. Initially, Europeans drew on the maps and reports created by earlier traders and explorers like the famed Moroccan traveler Ibn Battuta, who traveled across the Sahara and along the North and East coasts of Africa in the 1300s.

During the Enlightenment, however, Europeans developed new standards and tools for mapping, and since they weren’t sure precisely where the lakes, mountains, and cities of Africa were, they began erasing them from popular maps. Many scholarly maps still had more details, but due to the new standards, the European explorers—Burton, Livingstone, Speke, and Stanley—who went to Africa were credited with (newly) discovering the mountains, rivers, and kingdoms to which African people guided them.

The maps these explorers created did add to what was known, but they also helped create the myth of the Dark Continent. The phrase itself was actually popularized by the British explorer Henry M. Stanley, who with an eye to boosting sales titled one of his accounts “Through the Dark Continent,” and another, “In Darkest Africa.” However, Stanley himself recalled that before he left on his mission, he had read over 130 books on Africa.

Imperialism and Duality

Imperialism was global in the hearts of western businessmen in the 19th century, but there were subtle differences between the imperialist demand for African resources compared to other parts of the world. That did not make it any less brutal.

Most empire-building begins with the recognition of trading and commercial benefits that could be accrued. In Africa’s case, the continent as a whole was being annexed to fulfill three purposes: the spirit of adventure (and the entitlement white Europeans felt towards Africa and its people and resources they could then claim and exploit), the patronizing desire to “civilize the natives” (resulting in deliberate erasure of African history, achievements, and culture) and the hope of stamping out the trade of enslaved people. Writers such as H. Ryder Haggard, Joseph Conrad, and Rudyard Kipling fed into the romanticized and racist depiction of a place that required saving by strong (and white) men of adventure.

An explicit duality was set up for these conquests: dark versus light and Africa versus West. Europeans decided the African climate invited mental prostration and physical disability. They imagined forests as implacable and filled with beasts; where crocodiles lay in wait, floating in sinister silence in the great rivers. Europeans believed danger, disease, and death were part of the uncharted reality and the exotic fantasy created in the minds of armchair explorers. The idea of a hostile Nature and a disease-ridden environment as tinged with evil was perpetrated by fictional accounts by Joseph Conrad and W. Somerset Maugham.

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