The Dark Continent - The Wise World Traveler: Becoming a Part of All that You Meet - page 341

24. The Dark Continent
Africa is mystic; it is wild; it is a sweltering inferno; it is a photographer's paradise, a
hunter's Valhalla, an escapist's Utopia. It is what you will, and it withstands all inter-
pretations. It is the last vestige of a dead world or the cradle of a shiny new one. To a lot
of people, as to myself, it is just 'home'.” ― Beryl Markham , West with the Night
As the popular story suggests, repeated millions of times to European and American school
children for well over 100 years, Henry Morton Stanley, a reporter sent by the New York
Herald newspaper to search for a missing Protestant missionary in the wilds of Africa, sud-
denly cast his eyes for the first time on Dr. David Livingstone in summer 1872, whereupon
he uttered in a rather calm voice, “Doctor Livingstone, I presume?” To which the western
man in front of him replied, “Yes, that is my name.”
At least that is how the initial encounter between Stanley and Livingstone was reported
in the Herald under the heading, “A Historic Meeting.” [293] And what well may have been
the first example in human history of a story quickly going viral in the nineteenth-century
version of today's social media, newspapers throughout America and, thanks to a copper
telegraph cable recently laid across the floor of the Atlantic Ocean, Europe quickly picked
up the story and soon the “civilized” world would share the “deepest emotions of pride and
pleasure” of Stanley and his discovery.
LEGACY OF STANLEY AND LIVINGSTON
Whether Stanley actually uttered these now famous words or whether it was simply a news-
paper's hype to sell more copies is a matter of conjecture, no matter. As newspapers on both
sides of the Atlantic followed the story of this encounter in the unknown African continent
throughout the summer of 1872, tens of thousands of their readers were learning for the first
time about what was soon to be called the “dark continent.” [294] When the nineteenth cen-
tury had begun seven decades earlier, few Europeans and fewer Americans knew anything
about the vast African continent and far fewer still had visited it. Yet a scant thirty years
after Stanley's pen opened the African continent to western eyes, virtually all of the con-
tinent with the exception of present-day Ethiopia and Liberia had been colonized by seven
European powers: Great Britain, France, Spain, Belgium, Germany, Italy, and Portugal. For
the most part, the resultant structures created by extensive colonization throughout the con-
tinent have prevented or at least severely retarded political, economic, and social develop-
ment since then.