Question

Give reasons for Africa was known as ‘Dark Continent’ till the 18th century.

Answer 1

Hint: The country Africa is not a black continent but it is referred to as dark continent. It is said to be one because of its unfound regions as compared to other continents and countries.

Complete Answer: Sir Henry Morton Stanley born in the year 1841 and died in 1904, was a Welsh explorer is believed to have given the term ‘Dark Continent’ in his explorations in his book ‘Through the Dark continent’. Over the many decades the term ‘dark continent’ has been used to refer to Africa. It is believed somewhere that the name is given to them due to the skin colour and racism.
While the existence of the continent itself was known to the Europeans since the 8th to 6th centuries BC, Europeans did not explore Africa until the 15th century. Portuguese explorer Bartolomeu Dias, sailed around the southernmost tip of Africa in 1488 and he became the first European to find a sea route to the cape of Good Hope. Despite such an awareness of the location of the continent itself, the maps of the 15th to early 19th century only outlined the geography of the coasts.
Other reasons for referring to Africa as the ‘Dark Continent’ could perhaps be;
(A) Nothing much was known about the continent, its people and its culture.
(B) The vast and unfamiliar geography, flora and fauna also gave rise to a great deal of curiosity about Africa.
(C) In the 19th century, the Christian missionaries found it a rather uphill task to convert Africans to Christianity. They blamed it on the ‘savage’ ways that Africans had been living, and that they were in ‘darkness’.

Note: Central Africa remained largely “dark” or unexplored until 19th century explorers such as Sir Richard Burton, David Livingstone, and Sir Henry Morton Stanley started their explorations.