One can read of African exploration and come away with the impression that blacks who served in the exploring parties were rarely more than porters- perhaps a few served as "native guides" or interpreters. The facts surrounding several of the more important black explorers show that not only did they open new territories and contribute well-written accounts to the growing body of information and literature about Africe circulating in the Western World, but that as blacks, their motives and concerns were entirely different from those of white explorers, providing elements of a growing sense of African nationalism and panAfrican iden

or. The explorers to be discussed here are Samuel Crowther, who was involved in expeditions to the interior of Nigeria in 1841 , 1854 and 1857; Martin Delany and Robert Campbell, who in 1859-1860, under the guidance of Crowther, examined possible sites for a settlement of black Americans in Niger

young Liberian surveyor, a graduate of Liberia College, Benjamin Anderson who had just completed a two-year appointment as Secretary of the Treasury, was commissioned to conduct an exploration of the interior in the highlands of the St. Pauls River with the objective of reaching Musardu, a Mohammedan city occupied by the Western Mandingoes.

As international interest in Africa had begun to focus on the Congo region that Stanley was in the process of opening up, Léopold II seized the opportunity of this conference to found the Association Internationale Africaine (AIA) with the objective of establishing scientific exploration stations from coast to coast, starting in the east.

Larger-scale regional maps were now needed — and were produced in profusion across Europe, to substantiate, both administratively and commercially, the consolidation of newly acquired European possessions. As the market for up-to-date maps grew in the European nations engaged in colonizing Africa, so did the cartographic output by geographical establishments and societies

In the end, the relatively large scale of 1:4,000,000, a cartographic novelty, was adopted for this map. It placed the project in between the smaller scale maps of the continent 12 and the new and ambitious venture by French Captain Régnauld de Lannoy de Bissy, who in 1881 had begun to publish his 1:2,000,000 map of Africa in sixty-three sheets, which we will come to later. Habenicht’s introduction to the first edition of the map in 1885 discusses the matter of scale in some detail. Within just over six months, from the end of 1884 to July 1885, the first installment was ready. The entire map in ten sheets was published by April 1886, less than a year and a half after the launch of the project — a major achievement by any standards of the time and testament to the capabilities of the cartographic enterprise in Gotha.

Stanley was also the first European to circumnavigate Lake Victoria and the man responsible for opening parts of central Africa to transportation. Stanley's discoveries answered some of the main questions about the geography of Africa's interior waterways. His observations became the foundation for Belgian King Leopold's violent Congo Free State and inspired a period of imperialism whose effects continue today.

Henry Morton Stanley's first African expedition was in 1871, on assignment for The New York Herald to find Livingstone, who was assumed dead. Stanley's famous question upon finding him, "Dr. Livingstone, I presume?" made Stanley a household name in the explorer frenzy that followed Livingstone's journeys.

While Stanley was traveling toward Nyangwe, British explorer Verney Lovett Cameron (1844-1894) had already arrived. He, too, had planned to uncover the Lualaba/Congo mystery; he suspected that the Lualaba was a river that fed the Congo.