The Exploration of Africa

A beautifully designed, lavishly illustrated, large format book that documents the daring and merciless history of exploration on the continent of Africa; Though the mouth of the Congo river was discovered by Portuguese explorers in 1483, much of the African continent remained terra incognita until the eighteenth century, when merchants and arms traders opened trade routes within the continent, while other explorers pursued dreams of mythical cities and exorbitant treasures. In 1871, the journey of New York Times journalist Henry Morton Stanley to rescue the explorer David Livingstone captured the public imagination, and sparked a craze for African art and artefacts that lasted into the first half of the twentieth century. After the continent was partitioned by the major colonial powers at the Berlin Conference of 1885, school textbooks featured edifying images of African natives and makers of commercial goods used stereotyped portrayals of natives in their advertisements, belying the fact that, deep within the continent, rapacious profiteers were turning the jungles into the "heart of darkness" that Joseph Conrad later documented. Richly illustrated in lavish full colour, The Expl