19th Century: (Creeping Hegemony and the Invention of Africa — Exploration as Cultural Hubris, the Notion of Discovery Reducing Africans to Static Background…

19th Century: (Creeping Hegemony and the Invention of Africa — Exploration as Cultural Hubris, the Notion of Discovery Reducing Africans to Static Background Figures in Their Own Landscape, the Accumulation of Knowledge as a Form of Assumed Power, and African Suspicion That the White Man Was Here to Eat Up the Land): A multitude of travelers left behind an enormous body of literature that was problematic for historians — the only sources available for a given place and time, yet characterized by misunderstanding and contributing to the invention of Africa through a creeping literary hegemony. One of the key premises of nineteenth-century thinking was that Africa was there to be discovered — Europeans discovered lakes, river sources, waterfalls, and mountains, while in the European imagination Africans were static, background figures, ignorant and unresponsive recipients of the staggering geography surrounding them. The African did not discover his own landscape — he was simply there, as part of it. Europeans’ accumulation of knowledge was a form of assumed power over indigenous peoples. Nor were African rulers wholly unaware of this — there was much evidence of suspicion about European motives behind the collection of specimens, the charting of rivers, and the search for mountains. Some began to mutter that the white man was here to eat up the land, that the lone explorer and the Bible-wielding missionary would be followed by armed invading hordes. By the end of the 1880s, the golden age of exploration was largely over — explorers were no longer necessary in an age of invasion, in which colonial officials, army officers, and missionaries pushed the imperial frontier forward.