Video Lesson

Learning Competencies: After Learning this lesson, you will be able to:

• analyse the reasons behind the coming of European explorers and missionaries to
  Africa;
• identify the parts of Africa that were first reached by European explorers and missionaries.

Brainstorming Question

• What is the difference between an explorer and a missionary?

Key terms and concepts

The Trans-Atlantic slave trade gave way to the “legitimate trade”. In order to get maximum benefit from this trade, Europeans needed sufficient information about Africa`s potential as a source of raw materials, cheap labour and new markets for European manufactured goods. In 1788, a group of wealthy and influential Englishmen formed the “African Association”. Their aim was to send an expedition to visit the city of Timbuktu and to investigate the course of the Niger River. Between 1788 and 1877, many European explorers ventured into Africa to enhance their understanding of the continent. Notably, in the 1850s and 1860s, Richard Burton, John Hanning Speke, and James Grant succeeded in tracing the source of the White Nile to Lake Victoria and demonstrated the river’s navigable potential upstream from Khartoum.

Similarly, Dr. David Livingstone, a former missionary, explored the Zambezi River, the Shire River, and the lakes of South-Central Africa, leading several expeditions in the region before his death in 1873. Henry Morton Stanley completed Livingstone’s work by demonstrating the navigability of the Zaire (Congo) River in 1876. King Leopold II of Belgium, interested in Stanley’s findings, sent him back to the Zaire River basin in 1879. These explorations were crucial in paving the way for European colonial control over Africa.\

By the 1860s, the French on the Senegal River had established a narrow riverine colony. Similarly, the British government declared the Fante states a Crown Colony when the kingdom of Asante challenged the British trading monopoly on the Gold Coast. The British position in this coastal colony was further secured by a military victory over the Ashante army in 1874. The real motive behind those great explorations was commercial interest and the desire to control the natural wealth of Africa.

Nevertheless, until the second half of the 19th century, European exploration did not show significant progress. This was due to the high mortality of Europeans from malaria fever. It was since the early 1850s, when the Quinine was discovered and provided reasonable protection from malaria fever, that European exploration of Africa was quickened.

The main concern of European exploration in the 1850s, 1860s and 1870s was to discover the courses of the major rivers of Africa mainly the Upper Nile, the Zambezi and the Zaire. This intense interest in Africa`s rivers was not fired simply by detached scientific curiosity. The rivers of Africa were viewed by Europeans as the primary trading arteries to and from the interior areas of the continent. They were the ‘high ways’ through which Europeans could ‘open up’ the continent to European trade and exploitation.

In the course of the 19th century, a large number of European missionaries also came to Africa. The most important were the British-based Anglican Church Missionary Society (CMS) and the Wesleyan Methodist Missionary Society or London Missionary Society (LMS). Besides, Protestant missionaries came from France, Germany, Holland and the United States. French Catholic missions, too, came later towards the end of the century.

Since the early 19th century, European missionaries have conducted successful missionary activities in West Africa, (e.g. Sierra Leone and Liberia) and Southern Africa. It was among freed slaves, the poor and dispossessed communities of Khoisan and mixed-race peoples that LMS and Moravian missionaries founded their most successful early missions. Beyond the borders of the Cape Colony, missionaries were often welcomed for their technical and literary enterprise and their access to firearms. The missionaries themselves valued the opportunity to act as chief advisers.

Apart from these places, by the third quarter of the 19th century, the Christian mission was making slow progress. Mission stations were still largely confined to coastal regions, working among Africans already in cultural contact with Europeans through trading activities. By the 1880s, the number of Christian converts was less than one percent of non-Muslim Africans, excluding Ethiopia. It was largely because of this relative lack of initial success that missionaries appealed to European governments` intervention to help change African society and make it more open to missionary enterprise.

In a number of cases, Christian missionaries played a significant role in promoting and shaping the advent of European colonialism. In the final quarter of the 19th century in particular, European missionaries appealed to their home governments for various degrees of
political or military ‘protection’. This was usually in the face of local political conflict which threatened the safety of their missions. Because of their own wider strategic and commercial interests, European governments’ response to these appeals was positive. For instance, in Namibia in the early 1880’s, German missionaries appealed to their government for ‘protection’ because there was a territorial conflict between the Nama and Herero peoples that destroyed the missionaries` settlement in Namibia. It was due to this that the German government declared a “protectorate” over South West Africa in 1884.

In the scramble for Southern Africa, British missionaries played an active part in promoting the extension of British imperial control. They saw this as preferable to white-settler control from colonial South Africa. When the Christian missionaries in Buganda were threatened because of the existence of a civil war in the area, they appealed to Britain. The Anglican CMS, fearing for the survival of their mission in Buganda, set about raising money in Britain. This was used to pay for half the cost of maintaining a British military force in the country from 1890 to 1891. The CMS action undoubtedly saved their mission promoted Protestant Christianity and helped smooth the way for the formal declaration of the British Protectorate” of Uganda in 1894.