At the end of the 18th Century, Europe was on the threshold of an extraordinary era of colonial expansion. But one continent remained a mystery to Europe. The interior of Africa was a blank on the maps of European geographers who still relied on the accounts of the ancient Greek historian Herodotus and the 16th Century Andalusian adventurer Leo Africanus for much of their information.
But in 1788 a group of prominent British politicians, bankers, scholars, philanthropists, geographers and scientists came together to form a society dedicated to the exploration of Africa. Over the next forty-odd years, the African Association — as the society was called — organized and funded numerous attempts to penetrate the African interior from the north, from the east and from the west.
Many of these attempts ended in failure. Most of them ended in death from sickness or violence. But the journeys of the disparate collection of soldiers, doctors, scholars, and eccentrics who were sponsored by the African Association in the first half of the 19th Century paved the way for subsequent colonization of almost the whole of the continent in the second half.
The achievements of the African Association and its intrepid explorers were remarkable. But considering the expense and effort (and lost lives), their contribution to African geography was actually quite modest. Mungo Park became the first European to reach the Niger and established that it flowed from East to West (not as previously thought from West to East). One of the few African Association explorers to make his way home alive, Park later returned to Africa and died (it is not known exactly how) before he could resolve the question where the Niger ended. Timbuktu, the city of the African interior, fabled for its wealth and importance, turned out to be a dusty town of little significance when it was finally reached by Captain Gordon Laing in 1826. Laing, who was badly wounded in a Tuareg raid on way out across the Sahara, was killed by desert tribesmen on his way back.
But even though the discoveries of the Association were modest in geographical terms, in psychological terms they had a huge impact — as was evident from the massive sales of the travelogues of those like Mungo Park who lived to tell the tale. These journeys showed that travel into the interior of Africa was difficult and dangerous, yes. But they opened the way, and soon the trickle of European movement into Africa became a flood. Perhaps the most interesting and attractive of the African Association explorers, Jean Louis Burkhardt, died before he could even start on the mission which he had been commissioned to undertake — to reach the Niger across the Sahara from Egypt. But by the time he succumbed to a fever in Cairo, the adventurous Swiss had spent almost ten years in preparation for his journey and in the course of this time he had learned fluent Arabic, discovered the ruins of Petra and Abu Simbel, converted to Islam, performed the pilgrimage to Makkah, traveled further south along the Nile than any European before him, and written one of the classic travel books of the 19th Century.
The journeys of the African Association travelers, as well as the intellectual musings and political dealings of their rich and influential sponsors back in London, provide a wealth of material for Anthony Sattin’s well-researched and very enjoyable new book “The Gates of Africa”.
Not only does Sattin convey the sense of exotic adventure inherent in these travelers’ tales and the perilous (usually fatal) hardships that they endured, he also manages to paint a convincing picture, using contemporary sources (many of which have not been published), of the spirit of the age that drove them. Their motivations were, it seems, a mixture of adventure, scientific quest, personal ambition, and greed. One also gets an intriguing whiff of the stirrings of colonial enthusiasm among the politicians and merchants who step in and out of the pages of the book.
The story of the African Association and its exploits takes place against a backdrop of extraordinary geo-political upheavals, and Sattin weaves these skillfully (though with one or two avoidable historical errors) into his narrative: The aftermath of the French revolution, the Napoleonic wars between Britain and France, Napoleon’s expedition to Egypt, the rise of Muhammad Ali, the Pasha of Egypt, the military campaigns of his son Ismail Pasha in Sudan, the campaign to abolish slavery (whose great advocate William Wilberforce was a member of the African Association), and many others.
Sattin is aware that, whatever the philanthropic aims of some of the characters in his book, our attitude to the early European exploration of Africa is likely to be colored by the knowledge, in hindsight, of what came next. Sattin writes: “We look at this puzzle of what lies in the interior of Africa from another point of view, colored by the fact that Africa is now seen, in the words of a British prime minister, as ‘a scar on the conscience of the world’. How hard it is to forget all that, but how essential if we are to understand the story.”
Well, perhaps. But when one reads of Mungo Park on his final voyage down the Niger blasting away at the natives from his raft in the middle of the current and refusing to go ashore, one gets a foretaste even at this early stage of the colonial excesses that were to follow as Africa was opened up to European exploration.