Uncharted Africa
Travel and exploration narratives of Africa
Herodotus was already questioning Egyptian priests about the sources of the Nile, and the question would run through twenty-five centuries. The first great witnesses to the African interior wrote in Arabic: Ibn Battuta visited the Mali Empire in 1352-1353, and Hassan al-Wazzan, known as Leo Africanus, completed in Rome in 1526 a description of Africa that remained Europe's standard reference for two centuries. The Portuguese sailed down the coasts from the fifteenth century; the priest Francisco Álvares accompanied the Portuguese embassy to Ethiopia from 1520 to 1526.
The eighteenth and nineteenth centuries made Africa the field of methodical exploration. James Bruce reached the sources of the Blue Nile in 1770, Mungo Park saw the Niger flowing east in 1796, and René Caillié entered Timbuktu in 1828. On the Nile, the Egyptian conquest of 1820 opened Nubia and Sudan to travellers and antiquarians, who found the temples and pyramids of Meroë. Then came the race for the great lakes, with Burton, Speke, Livingstone and Stanley, and after it the colonial scramble. These narratives speak of endurance, fever and wonder, but also of a hardening gaze: the Africa that was described slowly became the Africa to be conquered.
Our titles on this subject
Further reading: accounts and works on the same theme
Accounts and works around this subject, in date order, to place our titles in context. Each links to a free online edition when one exists, or to our own page when the work is in our catalogue.
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William Lempriere, A Tour from Gibraltar to Tangier, Sallee, Mogodore, Santa Cruz, Tarudant (1789-1790)
Half a century after Maria, in 1789, the surgeon of the English garrison at Gibraltar is called to the bedside of a son of Sultan Sidi Mohammed, at Taroudant. William Lempriere crosses Tangier and Salé, follows the coast to Mogador, crosses the Atlas and reaches Marrakech, where he is allowed into the royal harem, which he describes in detail. He finds there what Maria had known in Meknes: the favor of the palace women, the sovereign's unpredictable moods, promises of departure endlessly put off. His book, published in 1791, is the testimony of a free man about a world of which Maria had been the prisoner.
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Ali Bey el Abbassi (Domingo Badía), Voyages d'Ali Bey el Abbassi en Afrique et en Asie (1803-1805)
In 1803 a Muslim prince from the East lands at Tangier. He is in fact a Catalan, Domingo Badía, sent by Godoy, the Spanish minister, to observe Morocco and perhaps conquer it. The sultan takes a liking to this learned man who reads the stars, admits him to his retinue at Meknes, Fez, Rabat and Marrakech, gives him two wives, then has him expelled in 1805. The account appeared in Paris in 1814. Maria's reader recognizes the cities, the royal progresses, the prestige of astronomy at court, and measures the distance between the captive who schemes to survive and the spy who schemes to see.
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George Bethune English, A Narrative of the Expedition to Dongola and Sennaar (1822)
Behind the American renegade Waddington met in the camp, Mahommed Effendi, one recognizes George Bethune English. Born in Boston and a convert to Islam, he served as an artillery officer in Ismail Pasha's army, which he followed as far as Sennar. His narrative, published in London in 1822, tells of the same campaign seen from inside the ranks: the marches, the battles with the Shaigiya, the submission of the kings, the advance southward beyond Jebel Barkal. To read the two books together is to hear two versions of the same war, that of the convert soldier and that of the English visitor who held him in contempt.
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Frédéric Cailliaud, Voyage à Méroé, au fleuve Blanc, au-delà de Fâzoql (1826-1827)
The Frenchman Frédéric Cailliaud, whom Waddington passed on his way back, joined Ismail Pasha's army early in 1821 with his companion Letorzec. Luckier than the two Englishmen, he was allowed to follow it south: he reached the pyramids of Meroe, which he was one of the first Europeans to describe, then Sennar and Fazughli. His book, published in Paris in several volumes with an atlas, completes Waddington's. Where the English journal stops at Jebel Barkal, Cailliaud continues the road and shows that the city of Meroe lay much further south.
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George Alexander Hoskins, Travels in Ethiopia, above the Second Cataract of the Nile (1835)
In 1833, a dozen years after Waddington, the Englishman George Alexander Hoskins travelled up the Nile beyond the Second Cataract. Nubia was now an Egyptian province, and he moved with a freedom his predecessors had not enjoyed. He visited Jebel Barkal, went on to the pyramids of Meroe, which he describes with care, and devoted part of his book to the state of the country under Muhammad Ali's rule. It is the natural sequel to Waddington's journal: the same temples and the same villages, seen again once the war was over and the Egyptian administration in place.
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Richard Lepsius, Letters from Egypt, Ethiopia, and the Peninsula of Sinai (1852)
Sent by the King of Prussia at the head of a large scientific expedition, the Egyptologist Richard Lepsius travelled through Egypt and the Sudan from 1842 to 1845. He went up as far as Meroe and the Blue Nile, then stayed at Jebel Barkal, where he recorded the temples and pyramids with a new precision. His letters, published in 1852, tell of the journey day by day. Lepsius identified the ruins of Jebel Barkal as Napata, the ancient capital of the kings of Kush, a conclusion Waddington had already defended. The Cambridge antiquary had been right, with far more modest means and in the middle of a war.
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Charles de Foucauld, Reconnaissance au Maroc (1883-1884)
In 1883 Morocco is still closed to Christians, as in Maria's day. Charles de Foucauld, a former officer, enters it disguised as a rabbi, guided by Rabbi Mardochée Aby Serour. For nearly a year he covers more than three thousand kilometers, from Tangier to Fez, then beyond the Atlas to the edge of the Sahara, recording routes, altitudes and villages unknown to European maps. Published in 1888, his book made him a recognized geographer before he became the monk of the Hoggar. He too must hide his faith, and his pages on the condition of Moroccan Jews shed light on the role of the Jewish intermediaries who haunt Maria's account.
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Pierre Loti, Au Maroc (1889)
In the spring of 1889, Pierre Loti accompanies Jules Patenôtre's embassy to Sultan Moulay Hassan. The caravan rides on horseback from Tangier to Fez, and Loti then pushes on to Meknes, the capital where Maria had lived her twelve years of captivity. He describes a court frozen in its ceremonial, immense, half-ruined ramparts, a country he already sees as threatened by Europe. Published in 1890, the book is full of nostalgia and unabashed exoticism. Read after Maria, it shows the same walls seen by a distinguished guest, where she had seen them through the eyes of a slave.
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Winston Churchill, The River War (1899)
A young officer and war correspondent, Winston Churchill took part in 1898 in Kitchener's campaign against the Mahdist state and fought at Omdurman. His book traces the reconquest of the Sudan by Anglo-Egyptian forces, the advance up the Nile through Dongola and the railway driven across the desert from Wadi Halfa. Nearly eighty years after Ismail Pasha, another army from Egypt took the same road along the river, between the cataracts and deserts Waddington and Hanbury had crossed. The book also looks back at the conquest of 1820, the starting point of this whole story.
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Edith Wharton, In Morocco (1917)
In September 1917, in the midst of war, the American novelist Edith Wharton visits Morocco at the invitation of the resident general Lyautey. She sees Salé, the old city of the corsairs, then the red ruins of Moulay Ismail's palaces at Meknes, which she recalls were built by thousands of prisoners and captives, Christians included. She then stays at Fez and Marrakech. Her book, published in 1920, is one of the first guides to Morocco under the protectorate. She describes, as a cultivated tourist, the very places where Maria ter Meetelen, two centuries earlier, had served the sons of this builder sultan.
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Paul Theroux, Dark Star Safari (2002)
In 2001 Paul Theroux set out from Cairo to reach Cape Town overland, by train, bus and truck, sometimes in armed convoy. In the Sudan he followed the Nile, lingered in Khartoum and Omdurman, then took the road into Nubia. The American writer, who had taught in Africa as a young man, takes a hard look at the state of the countries he crosses and at the role of aid organizations. Nearly two centuries after Waddington, the Nubian valley remains a land of passage, riverside villages and ancient ruins, where the foreign traveller still depends on the goodwill of those he meets.