Kenneth Habeeb is a writer and map collector who has contributed pieces for Calafia, the journal of the California Map Society. His collecting interests include maps of Africa and, more recently, of China during the Opium Wars.

I'm pleased to introduce you to one of my favorite maps from my collection: Africa, According to Mr. D'Anville.

The elaborate cartouche dates the map to 1772, though this map comes from an atlas published in successive versions between 1787 and 1818. 

In any case, the map dates to decades before the Scramble for Africa and the conquests of the 1800s. In the European imagination, the African interior remained, as it had for centuries, a mystical place from which most explorers never returned. It was a place that Europeans viewed as ripe for Christianity, along with the pursuit of gold, ivory, rubber, and enslaved people. 

European imperialism in Africa beyond the Mediterranean coast began with the Canary Islands. After landing in 1402, Portuguese, Spanish, and Norman forces spent the next 90 years fighting the indigenous people until the Canaries had become an enormous sugar plantation, powered by slave labor.

The Canaries served as a testing ground for the kind of colonialism that would emerge in the Americas.

While the Spanish completed their conquest of the Canaries, the Portuguese established bases on Cape Verde (modern-day Cabo Verde) as stepping stones for trade and exploration into West Africa. 

After conquering the North African city of Ceuta in 1415, the Portuguese began to buy gold coming from across the Sahara via caravan.

This was hideously expensive, and so the Portuguese tried to get around the middlemen by sending their caravels to the West African coast to set up a series of coastal forts, known as factories. The first and greatest was São Jorge da Mina (also known as Elmina) in modern-day Ghana, just below this dot.

From their factories, the Portuguese tried to send men into the interior in search of gold. Because of the dangers of interior travel, few returned alive, and so the coastal factories became trading posts.

The Portuguese were able to maintain a monopoly over West African trade for nearly one hundred years. 

This inset map of the "Gold Coast," as it became known to Europeans, shows the crowded state of affairs after the Dutch broke that monopoly with their capture of Elmina in 1637. 

With new competition from the Dutch, English, French, and Spanish came the industrial-scale slave trading of hundreds of thousands of people, most of whom were packed into ships bound for the Americas.

Even in the 1700s, European control often barely extended past the factory walls. This description notes European outrage at being scammed with counterfeit gold by the local agents who connected them to the inland gold mines.

The map is full of commentary meant to add to the 18th-century reader's "knowledge" with apocryphal tales. By zooming in, you can read for yourself the cartographer's entertaining banter. Keep in mind that these are "facts" from the 1700s. 

What made European exploration farther inland so dangerous? 

Road conditions during this time were not good, if there were roads. The interior traveler might encounter dense vegetation, streams and rivers, swampland and savannah, and also hippos, hyenas, big cats, snakes, crocodiles, scorpions, and more.

The African interior hosted malaria, yellow fever, typhus, and any number of gastrointestinal infections. The estimated mortality rate for these infections well into the 19th century was close to 50% for the first year after the infection, and 25% for the second year. Over time Africa developed a reputation as a white man’s grave.

This DOT text was adapted from Kenneth Habeeb, "The Perilous Search for Timbuktu and Africa’s Niger River – Part I, " Calafia 2023 no. 1: 45. To see the current issue of Kalafia, visit the website of the California Map Society at https://californiamapsociety.org/. 

Thank you for listening. If you enjoyed these Eight Interesting Aspects, I suggest exploring more around this map. The textual descriptions contain hidden gems, and many places on this map never existed.

For more maps like this, see my collection of Africa maps on Pixeum.

I've also written two articles on African exploration. You can find them in the archives of the California Map Society's official journal, Calafia.

• Habeeb, Kenneth. "The Perilous Search for Timbuktu and Africa’s Niger River – Part I." Calafia 2023 no. 1: 44-46.
• Habeeb, Kenneth. "The Perilous Search for Timbuktu and Africa’s Niger River – Part 2." Calafia 2023 no. 2: 42-44.

To learn more about the early stages of European colonization, see Boxer, C.R. The Portuguese Seaborne Empire, 1415-1825. London: Hutchinson & Co, 1969. A free version is available on the Internet Archive at https://archive.org/details/the-history-of-human-society-boxer-c.-r.-the-portuguese-seaborne-empire-1415-1825-hutchinson-1977/mode/2up. 

Created and presented by Ken Habeeb.

Adapted and edited by Andrew Gu, Pixeum Summer 2024 Intern.