The 1790s was a pretty significant time for both Europe and Africa — for better or worse, it was the time that Europe was experiencing a surge in economy and what you might call “swelling of the collective ego,” and people began to realize that the continent of Africa existed, and they didn’t know anything about it. The “swelling of the collective ego” part means that Europeans seemed to decide that even though millions of people already lived in Africa, it was “undiscovered country” they could do what they wanted with. But first they had to find out what was there.
The first European to explore parts of interior Africa and report back was the oddly named Mungo Park, who was born September 11, 1771 in Scotland. He explored the upper Niger river around 1796 and returned to write Travels in the Interior Districts of Africa. The book was extremely popular, and is believed to have influenced a lot more Europeans to start exploring, and meddling with, Africa.
Park was born into the equivalent of a middle-class family, and a large one. He was the seventh of 11 children, and his parents had the money to get him educated. At fourteen he was apprenticed to a surgeon, Thomas Anderson. This worked out very well for him; he went on to become a surgeon himself, and also met Anderson’s daughter Allison, who he later married. In 1792 he got a post as the assistant surgeon on a ship sailing to Sumatra, and when it returned two years later, Park was able to write a scientific paper and give lectures about new species of fish and types of plants he’d found in Sumatra. They weren’t new to anybody in Sumatra, of course, it’s just that Europeans had never noticed them.
When he returned, he heard about a new British club, the Association for Promoting the Discovery of the Interior Parts of Africa (in real life, everybody just called it the Africa Association), and they were planning an exploratory mission to find the source of the Niger River. Maybe even find the legendary city of Timbuktu — it’s a real place that was mentioned by ancient Greeks, but nobody in Europe knew where it was. Anyway, Park applied to lead the expedition and they selected him. The journey took three years, during which time Park got lost, thrown into prison, escaped, got seriously ill, recovered after several months, and finally made his way home by working as a surgeon on a slave ship. Everybody at home had thought he’d died, so they were pleased to see him again. He published his book in 1799, and it became a best seller.
He finally married Allison, and for a while it looked like he was going to settle down — he bought a house and started a medical practice around 1801. But then the British government decided to set up another expedition into central Africa, and asked Park to lead it. He was bored with his domestic life and agreed. But the expedition didn’t leave for another four years. It didn’t go well. Nearly everybody died of dysentery, and by the time he reached the Niger river, Park had only one companion left. They had a small sailboat, and started along the river. But Africa was not just sitting there waiting for Europeans to take control — the people already there controlled their own portions of the river, and in order to avoid paying tolls or bribes, Park decided to stay in the very middle of the river (it was up to three miles wide) and just shoot anybody approaching his boat. They weren’t just looking for tolls; the trading associations already operating in the area thought Park was an advance scout trying to put them out of business, so they gave orders to have him killed.
The traders didn’t succeed, but Park drowned after jumping into the river to escape a raiding party. At least that’s the story one of his few native crewmen told later. Park is memorialized by a statue in Scotland, the Mungo Park Medal, awarded by the Royal Scottish Geographical Society, and appears as a character in several books, including The Lost Manuscript of Mungo Park (it’s not his manuscript; it’s a novel), Water Music by T.C. Boyle, and even Moby Dick.
