These 10 Epic Feats of African Exploration Will Blow Your Mind

Doctor Hans Meyer and the First Summit of Kilimanjaro

From Mary Kingsley we move to Doctor Hans Meyer, mainly because he did one thing and one thing only, and that was to mount the first successful summit of Mount Kilimanjaro.

The existence of a snow-capped peak in central Africa was first noted and reported on by German missionary Johannes Rebmann, who published news of this extraordinary discovery in Church Missionary Intelligencer in May 1849. It was roundly dismissed as fantasy, however, and in fact the British Royal Geographic Society, which usually delivered the last word on any matter of geography or exploration, dismissed it as utterly impossible. Snow and ice could not occur at the equator.

And yet it did, and as other explorers confirmed the fact that Mount Kilima Njaro (White Mountain) did indeed exist, the Royal Geographic Society was forced to amend its opinion.

Discovering a great mountain, however, is usually just a precursor to someone climbing it, and it certainly was not long before European mountaineers were on the slopes of Kilimanjaro, and attempting to achieve its highest point.

By the 1880s, Kilimanjaro was established in the German territory of Tanganyika, so the first summit would obviously be a German prerogative. There were several attempts, but in the end, it was 31-year-old German geographer and geologist Hans Meyer who finally succeeded.

As a mountaineering feat, the summit of Mount Kilimanjaro does not really rank among the greatest, since Kili, as it is known only to those who have summited it, does not contain any real technical challenges. It is simply the altitude, almost 20,000ft, the defines its challenge, although in 1889, when Hans Meyer mounted his third, and only successful attempt, it was also a question of mounting an expedition into a region of Africa as yet rarely visited, and to then mount another to assault the summit.

With typical Teutonic precision, the expedition of September/October 1889 was expertly organized, utilizing local guides and porters, with Meyer and his companion Ludwig Purtscheller the only Europeans. It was on Purtscheller’s 40th birthday, October 6, 1889, that the two men finally reached the summit, which they named Kaiser Wilhelm Spitze, in honour of the German monarch.

However, on the evening of December 9, 1961, Tanzanian military officer Lieutenant Alex Nyirenda, planted the flag of independent Tanganyika on the summit, renaming it Uhuru Peak. Uhuru, in idiomatic Swahili, means ‘Freedom’.

Alexandre de Serpa Pinto

The name Serpa Pinto is probably only familiar to hard-core Africa enthusiasts, which is a shame, because he truly was one of the great African explorers.

The Portuguese were the oldest African colonizers by far. Their first colonies were founded in the 15th century, hundreds of years before the other major European powers began to develop their interests.

What is interesting about Portuguese exploration in Africa is the fact that much of it was undertaken in pursuit of the Slave Trade, and often by the illiterate scrapings of Lisbon’s prisons, with the result that few written records were kept. The result also was that many of the great feats of exploration recorded by the European explorers of the 19th century had already been done many times by the Portuguese, without any accolades. Another interesting fact is that much of the work done by Portuguese explorers was done by half-caste or ‘mulatto’ foot soldiers, whom later explorers refused to acknowledge because they were not white.

Serpa Pinto was the exception to this rule. He was a military officer, of good breeding and entirely literate. He arrived in East Africa in 1869, deployed to the colonies as a twenty-three-year-old junior officer to suppress native rebellions along the Zambezi River. This he did, but at the same time, he found himself fascinated with this great river that stretched away into the interior, almost unknown to European explorers. His exploration of the lower Zambezi was in fact just a recapitulation of what Portuguese slave traders already knew, but it was an entry into the field of exploration, and his later efforts would be far more dramatic.

In 1877, Serpa Pinto was one of the first to plot the headwaters of the Congo and Zambezi Rivers, marking the eastern extremities of the expanding Portuguese territory of Angola. Other than confirming the major hydrography of the region, what is remarkable about this expedition was its simplicity, and bearing in mind the challenges of terrain, its lack of disaster. Usually it was mishap and adventure that made for interesting reading in the popular press of the time, and this is perhaps why it received so little attention.

Far more high profile was his exploration of what would today be southern Angola, eastern Zambia and northern Zimbabwe, a long and formal expedition that kept exhaustive records, carried along with it numerous experts, and placed on the map of Africa vast regions hitherto unknown. Serpa Pinto arrived at Pretoria, in northern South Africa, on February 12, 1879.

Perhaps more amazing than the journey itself is the fact that the British were sufficiently impressed to award Serpa Pinto the Royal Geographic Society Founders Gold Medal, which was the first official British imperial acknowledgement of Portuguese achievement in exploration. In 1881, Serpa Pinto published his opus magnus, Como eu atravessei a África, or How I crossed Africa, which, although hardly one of the great epics of African exploration, certainly placed him in the pantheon.

René Caillié, Surviving Timbuktu

We are going to put René Caillié in the fourth spot, because he was the first European explorer to enter the legendary African city of Timbuktu, and make it out alive.

European exploration in its heyday in the 19th century was premised on ‘discovery’. This, of course, was a misnomer. Apart from the poles, and the summits of the great mountains, there were few places that Europeans ever went that had no been visited before by indigenous people of the various societies whose lands they were. Timbuktu was certainly such a place. For there to be a claim of its ‘discovery’, when it had been a seat of Islamic learning for centuries, is manifestly absurd, but nonetheless, that was the basis of René Caillié’s 1827 expedition.

René Caillié did not come from a wealthy family, and he did not enjoy the status and education that was often necessary to win sponsorship for expeditions of exploration. He was an orphaned merchant mariner who first landed on African shores in the French colony of Saint Louis, attached to what would later be Senegal. Here, at the junction of North and West Africa, he was captivated by what he experience. What he lacked in education he made up for in raw intelligence, and with an aptitude for languages, he quickly mastered several local dialects. This is important, because it allowed him to travel widely in a region of Muslim exclusivity, disguised as a Muslim, and sufficiently conversant in local languages and cultures to pull it off.

Like a modern day backpacker, he worked his way around Africa, doing odd jobs here and there, slowly building up credibility and resources to mount an expedition that had been incubating in his mind for some time. The legendary city of Timbuktu, a one-time trade depot, and later the seat of an Islamic scholastic culture, was then the home of the Sankoré Madrasah, or the University of Sankoré, an Islamic campus with its origins traceable to the first millennium. It existed as an African Camelot in the European imagination, and even its exact location was obscure.

René Caillié began his journey on the coast of what is today Guinea, traveling north through the tropical reaches of West Africa, before encountering the headwaters of the Niger and Senegal Rivers,. From there he struck northeast in the direction of Djenné, a trade depot on the inland Niger delta, in modern day Mali. Thereafter, he made his way relatively easily to Timbuktu, remaining in the city for five days before resuming his journey north by caravan to the Mediterranean coast, and then back to France. There he picked up a reward of 10,000 francs for the first, first-hand description of the mythic city, as well as an award of the Gold Medal of the Société de Géographie of France.

His claim, however, was the first European to enter Timbuktu and leave alive. Surving the experience wa shis claim to fame. A year earlier, British explorer Gordon Laing beat him to it, but he did not manage to get out alive.

Alexander Gordon Laing, Not Surviving Timbuktu

What René Caillié brought to the field of exploration was something the British were very rarely able to achieve, which is acculturation, and a willingness to adapt and learn from native culture. Alexander Gordon Laing made it to Timbuktu a year before René Caillié, but presenting himself as an Englishmen, with all the airs of superiority that this implied at the time, in the end got him killed.

Laing bore the pedigree of a British military officer, and the experience of various colonial regiments, including the Royal African Colonial Corps, based in the British colony of Sierra Leone. In various anti-slaving expeditions to the north of the territory, on the borders of the Sahel, he began to develop an interest in exploration. He was involved in the Ashanti War of 1823-24, the British campaign to pacify the region of the Gold Coast, later Ghana, after which he returned to England. There he presented the findings of his minor expeditions to date to the Royal Geographic Society.

By this, one can deduce that Laing was well connected in the exploration establishment, and the Royal Geographic Society sponsorship that was granted him guaranteed funding, publicity and a great deal of official and unofficial support. He was now an accredited explorer, and his next expedition, ostensibly to track the hydrography of the Niger River, was in fact a thinly disguised effort to discover the whereabouts of Timbuktu, and to be the first European to visit it.

On July 16, 1825, in what must have been an absolutely superb adventure, Laing left Tripoli and struck out overland across the Sahara Desert in the company of a local sheik. By various means, and over the course of the next six months, he made his way south across the great expanses of desert. On the way he fell victim to numerous ailments, suffered violence and looting, and generally reporting back the usual trials difficulties that a British expedition would be incomplete without. He described being wounded in 24 places in skirmish with hostile Tuareg, losing his right hand in the battle, but with the expected gumption of a British officer, he pressed on.

A letter dated September 22, 1826,carries the announcement of his arrival in Timbuktu, and his feat as the first European ever to cross the Sahara from north to south. In anybody’s language, this was the real stuff, and Gordon Laing without doubt deserves his accolades. However, sadly, nothing more was ever heard from him. It was later revealed that he was waylaid and arroted by a pair of Tuareg, his death tentatively placed at September 26, 1826. The motive for his murder was probably simply because he was an outsider.

Pierre Savorgnan de Brazza

Now we are starting to get into the realm of the heavyweights, and if the name ‘Brazzaville’, the capital of the old French, is familiar to anyone, then so is the field of exploration of this great man.

Brazza is another lifetime achiever, and his career in exploration began with events on the south bank of the Congo River, where Henry Morton Stanley, whom we will visit in a little while, was busy pegging out fresh territory on behalf of the Belgian King Leopold II. Fearing that Leopold was about to take over all of the Congo catchment, the French sent their man into the region to stake out French interests, beginning what would later come to be known as the Scramble for Africa.

Brazza was in fact an Italian, and like Mary Kingsley, he emerges as a man committed to a just and equitable European role in Africa. He did not act on behalf of, or support the arrogant, dominating cluster of powers that would eventually take over the continent, but an egalitarian partnership of equals. He was an idealist, ahead of his time, but he was also a great explorer.

Through his enrollment in the French naval academy in 1870, he became a French citizen, and through his naval deployments on the international anti-slaving squadrons, he made his first landfall in Africa in 1872. Once back in France, he presented a proposal to the French government to explore the hinterland of the future Gabon beyond the French coastal trading post, and this was authorized.

Pierre de Brazza was a very different kind of explorer. He was possessed on an easy going charm that easily won the affections of the tribes through whose lands he traveled. His entourage consisted to two Frenchmen, a doctor and a naturalist, and twelve Senegalese gendarme. Instead of a heavily militia, he traveled with a baggage train of trade goods and gifts, and instead of clubs and bullets, he practiced diplomacy.

His mission, however, was colonization and commerce, which had begun in that age to assume the dimensions of an imperial mission. Where once there had been illegitimate commerce, the philosophy ran, let there be legitimate commerce. Replace slaves as a commodity with cotton, and replace paganism with Christianity, that was the formula for civilization.

Richard Burton and the Somali Spear

The modern image of an intrepid Victorian explorer – titled, educated, urbane but fearless, and certainly a gentleman – was born in Sir Richard Burton. Fluent enough in Arabic to disguise himself as a pilgrim and enter Mecca, as at ease in the Palace of Windsor as the wilds of Central Africa, Burton really was the utterly quintessential explorer. In most photographic portraits, a deep scar is visible on the left side of his face, and of all of the anecdotes of career, how he came by that is probably the best.

Born in 1821, Richard Burton was the son of a British Army Colonel, and so he became accustomed to travel from a young age. His father saw a great deal of service in India, and young Richard grew up fascinated by Oriental studies. He was expelled from Oxford’s Trinity College, for misdemeanors many and varied, and in 1842 he joined the British Indian Army. By the time he was thirty, he could speak 29 languages, and as he handled live cobras, so he also mediated. It was his interest in eastern religions that led him to Mecca, and a growing interest in fame that eventually directed him into African exploration.

Richard Burton was central to the Source of the Nile debate, and that is perhaps what he is best known for, but in 1855, he was among a small clique of scholars and explorers attempting to penetrate the notoriously closed societies of the Horn of Africa. Today, these are the states of Djibouti, Ethiopia and Somalia. Disguised as an Arab merchant, he entered the holy city of Harar in what would today be northern Ethiopia.

Burton happened to be traveling with a fellow explorer by the name of John Hanning Speke. Their encampment near Berbera, on the coast of Somalia, was attacked by Somali Tribesmen. In the melee that followed, Burton took a speak in the face, and Speke was captured, escaping only later with fearsome injuries. The spear cut through both cheeks, knocked out four teeth and ‘transfixed’ his palate.

Burton fled into the night, breaking off the shaft of the spear, but with its blade still in his face. All night he was hunted down, but he evaded capture. The following morning he was able to identify two friendly boatmen, who took him across the Red Sea to the British port of Aden, and there at last, after two days, the blade of the spear was removed.

The scar that remained, however, was deep and livid, and thereafter it became Richard Burton’s signature.

John Hanning Speke and the Source of the Nile

John Hanning Speke and Richard Burton where two of the greatest British African Explorers, and two of the most implacable rivals. The Somali attack at Berbera took place on the first expedition the two undertook together. Both were strong willed and ambitious men, both were soldiers and neither much relished defeat.

By the middle of the 19th Century, the last, unsolved geographic conundrum was the Source of the Nile. The source of the Blue Nile was reasonably easily traced to the Ethiopian Highlands, but the white Nile, its western branch, arose somewhere in tropical Africa. However, in the complex landscape of lakes and mountains that comprise east and central Africa, no one had any clear idea exactly where.

Between 1856 and 1859, Speke and Burton mounted a major expedition into east/central Africa to find these lakes, and with some luck mark the source of the White Nile. Why these two men chose to travel together it is hard to imagine, since they so passionately hated one another. Perhaps it was to keep an eye on the competition, but either way, they set off from Zanzibar in June 1857, and seemed to run a contest on who could suffer the most physical distress.

Burton was ill almost the entire time, suffering either from malaria or typhoid, sometimes both, and so he participated in very few of the ‘discoveries’. Speke, on the other hand, suffered some malady of the eyes, and was blind most of the time. He was led around on various expeditions by the guide, Sidi Mubarak Bombay, who probably was responsible for most of what the expedition achieved.

What it did achieve was the ‘discovery’ of the two main Rift Valley lakes, Lake Tanganyika and Lake Victoria, and while neither man was really able to do much to survey these lakes, an argument broke out between them regarding which was the source of the Nile. This argument carried over to their return to England, and became deeply acrimonious.

Speke made several more trips to the central lakes region, and although he could not categorically confirm that Lake Victoria was the source of the Nile, he maintained his position that it was. Burton, on the other hand, held strenuously to the position that Lake Tanganyika was the source of the Nile.

To settle the matter, the Royal Geographic Society scheduled a public debate between the two men, which became a highly anticipated event. Speke, however, suffered a fatal hunting accident when he shot himself while climbing over a stone wall, and died a few minutes later. It was September 15, 1864.

Burton retorted that Speke had shot himself rather than face his rival in open debate, although soon enough Speke would be proved right. Lake Victoria is generally regarded as the Source of the Nile.

Doctor David Livingstone and the Zambezi Expedition

David Livingstone is probably the most storied African explorer of them all, and perhaps his most famous journey was his exploration of the Zambezi River.

David Livingstone arrived in Africa in 1841 as a young missionary, and according to him at least, he remained a missionary throughout his life. With no mission, however, and not a single convert, this was a tough position to argue. In the end, perhaps the best way to look at it is that he explored for Christ.

Livingstone great mission was in fact to expose the horrors of the Slave Trade that in the 1850s and 1860s ravaged east and central Africa. His solution was a concept that he defined as ‘Christianity and Commerce’, the first to banish the evils of paganism, and the second to replace illegitimate trade with legitimate. All that was required was a ‘Highway into the Interior’, in order to import western religion and export trade goods and products. When one day he found himself on the banks of the great Zambezi River, he imagined that this might be precisely that highway.

The year was 1852, and finding himself more or less equidistant between the east and west coasts of Africa, he decided to explore the upper headwaters first. He set off in company of 27 local Makololo tribesmen, and after a seat-of-the-pants journey of some 800 miles through unexplored territory, he stumbled into the Portuguese port of Loanda. Half starved, dressed in rags and almost dead from malaria, officers of the British anti-slaving squadron pleaded with him to return with them to England.

Livingstone, however, would have none of it. If he left his Makololo companions alone, the Portuguese would probably put them in chains and sell them. On the other hand, he had yet to find his highway into the interior, because this route certain was not it. Thus, he set off back the way he had come, after which he began his exploration of the eastern leg of the Zambezi.

This proved a little less rigorous, and a little shorter, at just 600 miles. As he was approaching the east coast, it was beginning to become clear to him that perhaps the Zambezi was navigable, and so eager was he to break this news that he traversed a wide bend in the river, and hurried on to the coast. What he did not know, but what he should have known, was that a bend in the river is usually the site of an obstruction, and indeed, this was the case. The Caborra Bassa Rapids, thirty miles of churning water, blocked all navigation. Livingstone would not discover this until years later when he led the famous Zambezi Expedition upriver to break ground. Oops!

But that is another story.

Henry Morton Stanley and the Congo River

Henry Morton Stanley is perhaps most famous for his greeting upon meeting David Livingstone in the middle of Africa. ‘Doctor Livingstone I presume!’

Most historian now accept that no such words were uttered, and that the phrase was a later creation of Stanley, who was a master of self-promotion.

Stanley’s expedition to find Livingstone was his first, and from it he extracted such fame and celebrity, that he decided he would follow it up with something truly spectacular, and that is why Stanley resides at the top of our list. By the mid-1870s, most of the major geographic question of Africa were answered, with the exception of the question of the source and course of the great Congo River.

A glance at a map will reveal that the Congo River rises at point more or less where the borders of Zambia, Angola and Congo meet, after which it flows in a wide, westward leaning arc, some 2,900 miles, crossing the equator twice before emptying out into the Atlantic Ocean.

At that point, nothing was known about it. In 1874, the 33-year-old Stanley, sponsored by the New York Herald and the British Daily Mail, set off from Zanzibar with a view to intercepting the Congo close to its source, and exploring it downstream to the coast. Geographically, this was a reasonably simple undertaking, but practically speaking, it was the commencement of one of the most epic feats of African exploration on record.

As was his habit, Stanley traveled with an entourage of several hundred porters, a small army and a handful of European companions. Initially, the journey was quite routine, but as his party began to enter the darker recesses of the Congo rain forest, it began to come under attack from hostile tribes occupying the banks on either side. Stanley spared no thought for propriety, and his response was simply heavy firepower, which killed a great many indigenous people, guilty or innocent.

But besides that, the physical conditions that Stanley faced were daunting to say the least. The Congo is a wide river, drawing a vast region of rain forest, and its rapids and obstacles are on the same scale. It is also a deathtrap of tropical diseases, of wild animals, snakes, insects and cannibals – in fact all the elements of a wild, boy’s-own adventure, the stuff of Tarzan or King Solomon’s Mines. When Stanley eventually emerged at the mouth of the Congo River after 999-days, his hair had turned white and he had aged twenty-years. More than a third of his expedition was dead, all four European members among them. It is impossible to overstate what an utterly harrowing adventure it was, and it is truly amazing that Stanley himself survived.

But now that he had, Stanley set about making as much noise about it at he could, and for that reason, and simply because he was an authentic, car-carrying bad-ass, Stanley is probably the most famous of all African explorers.

Where did we find this stuff? Here are our sources:

“Mary Kingsley: Demystifying Africa”. Jacqueline Banerjee. The Victorian Web, September 2013

“Suppressed story of Richard Burton’s rival explorer surfaces”. The Guardian, September 2017

“Richard Burton: Even a spear through his face could not stop this Explorer Extraordinaire”. Doug Williams, Outdoor Revival, February 2017

“René Caillié: the first European explorer who returned alive from the town of Timbuktu.” Tijana Radeska, May 20017

“The late Alex Nyirenda Remembered.” From Butiama and Beyond. Madaraka, December 2009

“Livingstone’s Life & Expeditions”. Livingstone Online, Justin D. Livingstone, 2014