The most common answer to the question, “Why was Africa called the Dark

Continent?” is that Europe did not know much about Africa until the 19th century.
But that answer is misleading and disingenuous. Europeans had known quite a lot
about Africa for at least 2,000 years, but because of powerful imperial impulses,
European leaders began purposefully ignoring earlier sources of information.

At the same time, the campaign against slavery and for missionary work in Africa
actually intensified Europeans’ racial ideas about African people in the 1800s.
They called Africa the Dark Continent, because of the mysteries and the savagery
they expected to find in the interior.

Exploration: Creating Blank Spaces

It is true that up until the 19th century, Europeans had little direct knowledge of
Africa beyond the coast, but their maps were already filled with details about the
continent. African kingdoms had been trading with Middle Eastern and Asian
states for over two millennia. Initially, Europeans drew on the maps and reports
created by earlier traders and explorers like the famed Moroccan traveler Ibn
Battuta, who traveled across the Sahara and along the North and East coasts of
Africa in the 1300s.

During the Enlightenment, however, Europeans developed new standards and tools
for mapping, and since they weren’t sure precisely where the lakes, mountains, and
cities of Africa were, they began erasing them from popular maps. Many scholarly
maps still had more details, but due to the new standards, the European explorers—
Burton, Livingstone, Speke, and Stanley—who went to Africa were credited with
(newly) discovering the mountains, rivers, and kingdoms to which African people
guided them.

The maps these explorers created did add to what was known, but they also helped
create the myth of the Dark Continent. The phrase itself was actually popularized
by the British explorer Henry M. Stanley, who with an eye to boosting sales titled
one of his accounts "Through the Dark Continent," and another, "In Darkest
Africa." However, Stanley himself recalled that before he left on his mission, he
had read over 130 books on Africa.

Imperialism and Duality

Imperialism was global in the hearts of western businessmen in the 19th century,
but there were subtle differences between the imperialist hunger for Africa
compared to other parts of the world. Most empire building begins with the
recognition of trading and commercial benefits that could be accrued. In Africa's
case, the continent as a whole was being annexed to fulfill three purposes: the spirit
of adventure, the desire to support good work of "civilizing the natives," and the
hope of stamping out the slave trade. Writers such as H. Ryder Haggard, Joseph
Conrad, and Rudyard Kipling fed into the romantic depiction of a place that
required saving by strong men of adventure.

An explicit duality was set up for these adventurers: dark versus light and Africa
versus West. The African climate was said to invite mental prostration and
physical disability; the forests were seen as implacable and filled with beasts; and
crocodiles lay in wait, floating in sinister silence in the great rivers. Danger,
disease, and death were part of the uncharted reality and the exotic fantasy created
in the minds of armchair explorers. The idea of a hostile Nature and a disease-
ridden environment as tinged with evil was perpetrated by fictional accounts by
Joseph Conrad and W. Somerset Maugham.

Abolitionists and Missionaries

By the late 1700s, British abolitionists were campaigning hard against slaveryin
England. They published pamphlets described the horrid brutality and inhumanity
of plantation slavery. One of the most famous images showed a black man in
chains asking “Am I not a man and a brother?”

Once the British Empire abolished slavery in 1833, however, abolitionists turned
their efforts against slavery within Africa. In the colonies, the British were also
frustrated that former slaves didn’t want to keep working on plantations for very
low wages. Soon the British were portraying African men not as brothers, but as
lazy idlers or evil slave traders.

At the same time, missionaries began traveling to Africa to bring the word of God.
They expected to have their work cut out for them, but when decades later they
still had few converts in many areas, they began saying that African people’s
hearts were unreachable, "locked in darkness." These people were different from
westerners, said the missionaries, closed off from the saving light of Christianity.

The Heart of Darkness

Africa was seen by the explorers as an erotically and psychologically powerful

place of darkness, one that could only be cured by a direct application of
Christianity and, of course, capitalism. Geographer Lucy Jarosz describes this
stated and unstated belief clearly: Africa was seen as "a primeval, bestial, reptilian,
or female entity to be tamed, enlightened, guided, opened, and pierced by white
European males through western science, Christianity, civilization, commerce, and
colonialism."

By the 1870s and 1880s, European traders, officials, and adventurers were going to
Africa to seek their fame and fortune, and recent developments in weaponry gave
these men significant power in Africa. When they abused that power—especially
in the Congo—Europeans blamed the Dark Continent, rather than themselves.
Africa, they said, was what supposedly brought out the savagery in man.

The Myth Today

Over the years, people have given lots of reasons why Africa was called the Dark
Continent. Many people think it is a racist phrase but can't say why, and the
common belief that the phrase just referred to Europe's lack of knowledge about
Africa makes it seem out-dated, but otherwise benign.

Race does lie at the heart of this myth, but it is not about skin color. The myth of
the Dark Continent referred to the savagery that Europeans said was endemic to
Africa, and even the idea that its lands were unknown came from erasing centuries
of pre-colonial history, contact, and travel across Africa.

https://www.thoughtco.com/why-africa-called-the-dark-continent-43310

African literature, literary works of the African continent. African literature

consists of a body of work in different languages and various genres, ranging from
oral literature to literature written in colonial languages (French, Portuguese, and
English).
See also African languages ; South African literature .
Oral literature, including stories, dramas, riddles, histories, myths, songs, proverbs,
and other expressions, is frequently employed to educate and entertain children.
Oral histories, myths, and proverbs additionally serve to remind whole
communities of their ancestors' heroic deeds, their past, and the precedents for their
customs and traditions. Essential to oral literature is a concern for presentation and
oratory. Folktale tellers use call-response techniques. A griot (praise singer) will
accompany a narrative with music.
Some of the first African writings to gain attention in the West were the poignant
slave narratives, such as The Interesting Narrative of the Life and Adventures of
Olaudah Equiano or Gustavus Vassa, the African (1789), which described vividly
the horrors of slavery and the slave trade. As Africans became literate in their own
languages, they often reacted against colonial repression in their writings. Others
looked to their own past for subjects. Thomas Mofolo, for example,
wrote Chaka (tr. 1931), about the famous Zulu military leader, in Susuto.
Since the early 19th cent. writers from western Africa have used newspapers to air
their views. Several founded newspapers that served as vehicles for expressing
nascent nationalist feelings. French-speaking Africans in France, led by
Léopold Senghor , were active in the négritude movement from the 1930s, along
with Léon Damas and Aimé Césaire , French speakers from French Guiana and
Martinique. Their poetry not only denounced colonialism, it proudly asserted the
validity of the cultures that the colonials had tried to crush.
After World War II, as Africans began demanding their independence, more
African writers were published. Such writers as, in western Africa, Wole Soyinka ,
Chinua Achebe , Ousmane Sembene , Kofi Awooner, Agostinho Neto , Tchicaya u
tam'si, Camera Laye, Mongo Beti, Ben Okri, and Ferdinand Oyono and, in eastern
Africa, Ngugi wa Thiong'o , Okotp'Bitek , and Jacques Rabémananjara produced
poetry, short stories, novels, essays, and plays. All were writing in European
languages, and often they shared the same themes: the clash between indigenous
and colonial cultures, condemnation of European subjugation, pride in the African
past, and hope for the continent's independent future.
In South Africa, the horrors of apartheid have, until the present, dominated the
literature. Es'kia Mphahlele , NadineGordimer , Bessie Head , Dennis Brutus , J.
M. Coetzee, and Miriam Tlali all reflect in varying degrees in their writings the
experience of living in a racially segregated society.
Much of contemporary African literature reveals disillusionment and dissent with
current events. For example, V. Y. Mudimbe in Before the Birth of the
Moon (1989) explores a doomed love affair played out within a society riddled by
deceit and corruption. The Zimbabwean novelist and poet Chenjerai Hove (1956–
2015), wrote vividly in English and his native Shona of the hardships experienced
during the struggle against British colonial rule, and later of the hopes and
disappointments of life under the rule of Robert Mugabe . In Kenya Ngugi wa
Thiong'o was jailed shortly after he produced a play, in Kikuyu, which was
perceived as highly critical of the country's government. Apparently, what seemed
most offensive about the drama was the use of songs to emphasize its messages.
The weaving of music into the Kenyan's play points out another characteristic of
African literature. Many writers incorporate other arts into their work and often
weave oral conventions into their writing. p'Bitek structured Song of Iowino (1966)
as an Acholi poem; Achebe's characters pepper their speech with proverbs
in Things Fall Apart (1958). Others, such as Senegalese novelist Ousmane
Sembene, have moved into films to take their message to people who cannot read.
https://www.infoplease.com/encyclopedia/arts/world-lit/misc/african-
literature