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 Rene Caillie (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.7 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,8 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
The era of great explorers.
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 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 Livings tone, 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, and between
1851 and 1856 he traversed the continent from west to east,
making known the great waterways of the upper Zambezi.
During these journeyings Livingstone discovered, November
1855, the famous Victoria Falls, so named after the queen of
England. In 1858-1864 the lower Zambezi, the Shire and Lake
Nyasa were explored by Livingstone, Nyasa having been first
reached by the confidential slave of Antonio da Silva Porto, a
Portuguese trader established at Bihe in Angola, who crossed
Africa during 1853-1856 from Benguella to the mouth of the
Rovuma. While Livingstone circumnavigated Nyasa, the more
northerly lake, Tanganyika, had been visited (1858) by Richard
Burton and J. H. Speke, and the last named had sighted Victoria
Nyanza. Returning to East Africa with J. A. Grant, Speke
reached, in 1862, the river which flowed from Victoria
Nyanza, and following it (in the main) down to Egypt, had the
distinction of being the first man to read the riddle of the
Nile. In 1864 another Nile explorer, Samuel Baker, discovered
the Albert Nyanza, the chief western reservoir of the
river. In 1866 Livingstone began his last great journey, in
which he made known Lakes Mweru and Bangweulu and discovered
the Lualaba (the upper part of the Congo), but died (1873)
before he had been able to demonstrate its ultimate course,
believing indeed that the Lualaba belonged to the Nile
system. Livingstone's lonely death in the heart of Africa
evoked a keener desire than ever to complete the work he left
undone. H. M. Stanley, who had in 1871 succeeded in finding
and succouring Livingstone, started again for Zanzibar in
1874, and in the most memorable of all exploring expeditions
in Africa circumnavigated Victoria Nyanza and Tanganyika, and,
striking farther inland to the Lualaba, followed that river
down to the Atlantic Ocean--reached in August 1877--and proved
it to be the Congo. Stanley had been preceded, in 1874, at
Nyangwe, Livingstone's farthest point on the Lualaba, by Lovett
Cameron, who was, however, unable farther to explore its course,
making his way to the west coast by a route south of the Congo.
While the great mystery of Central Africa was being solved
explorers were also active in other parts of the continent.
Southern Morocco, the Sahara and the Sudan were traversed
in many directions between 1860 and 1875 by Gerhard Rohlfs,
Georg Schweinfurth and Gustav Nachtigal. These travellers
not only added considerably to geographical knowledge,
but obtained invaluable information concerning the people,
languages and natural history of the countries in which they
sojourned.9 Among the discoveries of Schweinfurth was one
that confirmed the Greek legends of the existence beyond
Egypt of a pygmy race. But the first discoverer of the
dwarf races of Central Africa was Paul du Chaillu, who found
them in the Ogowe district of the west coast in 1865, five
years before Schweinfurth's first meeting with the Pygmies;
du Chaillu having previously, as the result of journeys in
the Gabun country between 1855 and 1859, made popular in
Europe the knowledge of the existence of the gorilla, perhaps
the gigantic ape seen by Hanno the Carthaginian, and whose
existence, up to the middle of the 19th century, was thought
to be as legendary as that of the Pygmies of Aristotle.
In South Africa the filling up of the map also proceeded
apace. The finding, in 1869, of rich diamond fields in
the valley of the Vaal river, near its confluence with the
Orange, caused a rush of emigrants to that district, and
led to conflicts between the Dutch and British authorities
and the extension of British authority northward. In
1871 the ruins of the great Zimbabwe in Mashonaland, the
chief fortress and distributing centre of the race which
in medieval times worked the goldfields of South-East
Africa, were explored by Karl Mauch. In the following year
F. C. Selous began his journeys over South Central Africa,
which continued for more than twenty years and extended
over every part of Mashonaland and Matabeleland. (F. R. C.)
V. PARTITION AMONG EUROPEAN POWERS
In the last quarter of the 19th century the map of Africa was
transformed. After the discovery of the Congo the story
of exploration takes second place; the continent becomes
the theatre of European expansion. Lines of partition,
drawn often through trackless wildernesses, marked out the
possessions of Germany, France, Great Britain and other
powers. Railways penetrated the interior, vast areas were
opened up to civilized occupation, and from ancient Egypt
to the Zambezi the continent was startled into new life.
Before 1875 the only powers with any considerable interest
in Africa were Britain, Portugal and France. Between 1815
and 1850, as has been shown above, the British government
devoted much energy, not always informed by knowledge,
to western and southern Africa. In both directions Great
Britain had met with much discouragement; on the west coast,
disease, death, decaying trade and useless conflicts with
savage foes had been the normal experience; in the south
recalcitrant Boers and hostile Kaffirs caused almost endless
trouble. The visions once entertained of vigorous negro
communities at once civilized and Christian faded away;
to the hot fit of philanthropy succeeded the cold fit of
indifference and a disinclination to bear the burden of
empire. The low-water mark of British interest in South
Africa was reached in 1854 when independence was forced
on the Orange River Boers, while in 1865 the mind of the
nation was fairly reflected by the unanimous resolution of
a representative House of Commons committee:10 ``that all
further extension of territory or assumption of government,
or new treaty offering any protection to native tribes, would
be inexpedient.'' For nearly twenty years the spirit of that
resolution paralysed British action in Africa, although many
circumstances--the absence of any serious European rival, the
inevitable border disputes with uncivilized races, and the
activity of missionary and trader--conspired to make British
influence dominant in large areas of the continent over
which the government exercised no definite authority. The
freedom with which blood and treasure were spent to enforce
respect for the British flag or to succour British subjects in
distress, as in the Abyssinian campaign of 1867-68 and the
Ashanti war of 1873, tended further to enhance the reputation
of Great Britain among African races, while, as an inevitable
result of the possession of India, British officials exercised
considerable power at the court of Zanzibar, which indeed
owed its separate existence to a decision of Lord Canning, the
governor-general of India, in 1861 recognizing the division
of the Arabian and African dominions of the imam of Muscat.
It has been said that Great Britain was without serious rival.
On the Gold Coast she had bought the Danish forts in 1850 and
acquired the Dutch, 1871-1872, in exchange for establishments in
Sumatra. But Portugal still held, both in the east and west of
Africa, considerable stretches of the tropical coast-lands, and
it was in 1875 that she obtained, as a result of the arbitration
of Marshal MacMahon, possession of the whole of Delagoa
Bay, to the southern part of which England also laid claim by
virtue of a treaty of cession concluded with native chiefs in
1823. The only other European power which at the period
under consideration had considerable possessions in Africa was
France. Besides Algeria, France had settlements on the
Senegal, where in 1854 the appointment of General Faidherbe
as governor marked the beginning of a policy of expansion; she
had also various posts on the upper Guinea coast, had taken
the estuary of the Gabun as a station for her navy, and had
acquired (1862) Obok at the southern entrance to the Red Sea.
In North Africa the Turks had (in 1835) assumed direct control of
Tripoli, while Morocco had fallen into a state of decay though
retaining its independence. The most remarkable change was
in Egypt, where the Khedive Ismail had introduced a somewhat
fantastic imitation of European civilization. In addition
Ismail had conquered Darfur, annexed Harrar and the Somali
ports on the Gulf of Aden, was extending his power southward
to the equatorial lakes, and even contemplated reaching the
Indian Ocean. The Suez Canal, opened in 1869, had a great
influence on the future of Africa, as it again made Egypt
the highway to the East, to the detriment of the Cape route.
Any estimate of the area of African territory held by European
nations in 1875 is necessarily but approximate, and varies chiefly
The division of the continent in 1875.
as the compiler of statistics rejects or accepts the vague claims
