Regency Personalities Series
In my attempts to provide us with the details of the Regency, today I continue with one of the many period notables.
Association for Promoting the Discovery of the Interior Parts of Africa (African Association)
9 June 1788-1831
Association for Promoting the Discovery of the Interior Parts of Africa (African Association) was a British club dedicated to the exploration of West Africa, with the mission of discovering the origin and course of the Niger River and the location of Timbuktu, the “lost city” of gold. The formation of this group was effectively the “beginning of the age of African exploration”.
Organized by a dozen titled members of London’s upper-class establishment and led by Sir Joseph Banks, the African Association felt that it was the great failing of the Age of Enlightenment that, in a time when men could sail around the world, the geography of the Dark Continent remained almost entirely uncharted. The Ancient Greeks and Romans knew more about the interior of Africa than did the British of the 18th century.
Motivated by sincere desires for scientific knowledge and the abolition of the slave trade, yet not averse to gaining opportunities for British commerce, the wealthy members each pledged to contribute five guineas per year to recruiting and funding expeditions from England to Africa.
Several expeditions were then funded to the dark continent. John Ledyard, Simon Lucas, Daniel Houghton, Mungo Park, Frederich Hornemann, Johann Ludwig Burckhardt, and Henry Nicholls all led expedition between 1788 and 1804
No explorer sent expressly by the African Association ever did find Timbuktu, though it was a major in the Royal African Corps named Alexander Gordon Laing who finally walked through its gates in 1826. The findings of the Association’s recruits, however, accomplished much for European knowledge of Africa and its people. Peter Brent describes the common perception of Africa in the years preceding the African Association:
Jungle, desert, mountain and savannah swam into one disagreeable continuity…all the peoples and sub-divisions of the peoples, all the cultures and languages and religions, were forced by the European imagination into one mould. Out of it stepped the “native,” the “savage,” offering the blood of sacrifice to grinning gods, dancing in lunatic abandon around flames and…making a meal of his enemies.
In contrast, according to Brent, “the explorers themselves had no such view of Africans, no simple picture that rejected African reality and denied to Africans their full humanity.” Mungo Park’s description in particular contributed to a balanced perspective.
This “humanizing” of the African people in the minds of Europeans was no doubt a boon to the abolition of the slave trade, since many of the African Association’s members were abolitionists and had ties to William Wilberforce. “By the beginning of the 19th century,” Brent writes, “the attack on the whole appalling business had sharpened, and Africa had become the subject of the day. And still, despite everything, the European ignorance about most of the continent’s interior remained almost unaltered. It was a situation that had to be put right.” The relentless efforts of the African Association over forty-three years certainly contributed to this enlightenment.
The society was absorbed by the Royal Geographical Society in 1831.
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