Before the age of imperialism and the great scramble for Africa, adventurous men of questionable character had to open the gates of the continent to Europeans. This is the story of the age of explorers in Africa. This episode is broken into two parts.
In this episode, we look at the history of exploration in Africa, the importance of finding the source of the Nile and Niger rivers, and the struggles that many explorers endured to make inroads into the continent. While the coastlands were explored as far back as ancient Carthage and Egypt, the interior of the continent remained unexplored for outsiders. The name “the dark continent” originally came from the color of ancient maps and the dark spaces left on the continent for all that was unknown.
We will also look at some of the first famous European explorers of Africa.
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Find the other episodes of our History of Africa podcast series here.
