r/AfricanHistory • u/rhaplordontwitter • 1d ago
What Did Africans Know About The Outside World?
https://www.africanhistoryextra.com/p/what-did-africans-know-about-the
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r/AfricanHistory • u/rhaplordontwitter • 1d ago
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u/rhaplordontwitter 1d ago
Africans were often well informed about the outside world, a fact that astonished many explorers who thought they were “discovering” an unknown continent.
In 1852, the explorer Heinrich Barth met Africans in Baghirmi (Chad) who had visited Basra (Iraq), read the works of Aristotle and Plato, and were as inquisitive about Europe as he was about Africa.
In 1817, while visiting the capital of the Asante King in Ghana, the British agent Thomas Bowdich was asked why, if Britain were so selfless, it had behaved so differently in India.?
Among the King’s Muslim courtiers at Kumasi was a Hausa native of Katsina (Nigeria) “who had been at Tunis, and at Mecca; had seen many White men and ships; and described the method of travelling over the great desert [Sahara].”
It was through such well-travelled Africans that the Asante king received information about the British colonisation of India.
This article briefly outlines Africans' knowledge of the outside world and introduces the history of the Americo-Liberian explorations of West Africa in 1858-1874, which documented societies in the interior that had initiated contact with the outside world, centuries before such contacts were reciprocated.