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Originally posted by Doug M:
They were not ignorant in the sense of not knowing about Africa and the interior as much as you think. There were maps and stories from the Islamic world and elsewhere detailing the people of Africa with maps and legends of great wealth. THAT is why Europeans wanted to explore the world, which is to take the great wealth. So no, they were not ignorant in that sense at all. The Periplus of the Erythrean sea was 1500 years old when Europeans set out on their voyages of "discovery". Much of the idea of Europeans "discovering" everything and being ignorant is simply a lie told to cover up the fact that Europeans were simply on a quest to steal as much as they could everywhere they went based on the knowledge of the wealth that existed in various legends, writings and other sources they had available to them. Of course they knew about the gold of Africa, that was no secret in Europe and was common knowledge.

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You have carried on a trade to that quarter of the globe from this civilized and enlightened country. but such a trade, that, instead of diffusing either knowledge or wealth, it has been the check to every laudable pursuit. Instead of any fair interchange of commodities; instead of conveying to them, from this highly favored land, any means of improvement; you carry with you that noxious plant by which everything is withered and blasted; under whose shade nothing that is useful or profitable to Africa will eves flourish or take root. Long as that continent has been known to navigators, the extreme line and boundaries of its coasts is all with which Europe is yet become acquainted; while other countries in the same parallel of latitude, through a happier system of intercourse, have reaped the blessings of a mutually beneficial commerce. But as to the whole interior of that continent you are, by your own principles of commerce, as yet entirely shut out: Africa is known to you only in its skirts. Yet here you are able to infuse a poison that spreads its contagious effects from one end of it to the other, which penetrates to its very center, corrupting every part to which it reaches. You there subvert the whole order of nature; you aggravate every natural barbarity, and furnish to every man living on that continent motives for committing, under the name and pretext of commerce, acts of perpetual violence and perfidy

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But there was a much earlier ‘discovery’ of the continent and a similar ‘invention’ of it by Arabs—or at least those using the Arabic language to express their thoughts—a thousand and more years earlier and the picture that such writers drew of sub-Saharan Africa, at least in regard to its physical geography, certainly influenced Europeans of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century as they set out, mentally and physically to explore the interior of the continent. In 1788 when the Association
for Promoting the Discovery of the Interior Parts of Africa was founded in London, it noted in its ‘Plan’ that the map of inner Africa was ‘still but a wide extended blank on which the geographer, on the authority of Leo Africanus, and of Xeriff Edrissi, the Nubian author, has traced with a hesitating hand, a few names of unexplored rivers and of uncertain nations’.1 The situation had scarcely improved over the half century which had passed since Jonathan Swift had written with biting satire:

Geographers, in Afric maps,
With savage pictures fill their gaps,
And o’er unhabitable downs
Place elephants for want of towns.2

Thus, while the little that was known of the African continent away from the coast where European merchants had been trading was known principally from Arabic sources, it had to be admitted that that ‘little’ was itself only imperfectly known.

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There is no injustice done to the Arabs in thus ascribing altogether to theory a positive statement made by many of their best authors. It is in the highest degree improbable, that with little or no knowledge of the various Black nations inhabiting the eastern coast of Africa, they should have had any accurate acquaintance with the remote interior: and besides, the acquiescence in system here imputed to them, is no greater than must have inevitably arisen from the imperfect state of their knowledge. Little more than a century ago, European geographers represented Abyssinia as occupying nearly a fourth of the African continent; on its eastern borders they placed a great lake, from which issued the Egyptian ' Nile, and all the great rivers of Southern Africa.21 The maps of Africa of that date exhibit less vacant space than they do at the present day. The improvement of geography, with respect to that quarter of the globe, has consisted chiefly in reducing what is known within its proper limits. Distant nations were of course as easily brought together and united as distant countries. The different African tribes which, in the course of the sixteenth century, devastated the widelyseparate coasts of Sierra Leone, of Angola, and of Melinda, were, by a sweeping generalization, all supposed to be one and the same people, and were furthermore identified with the Agows and Gallas of Abyssinia.222 Vestiges of these ideas still remain in our treatises of geography, and in some of the latest maps, nor is the system of thinking from which they emanated yet quite obsolete.23 But the close resemblance of European theories respecting the mysterious interior of Africa to those of the Arabs, is strikingly manifest in the following words of the Portuguese historian, Da Couto:—" About the year 1570, a horde of barbarians, like locusts, issued from the heart of Ethiopia, from the great lake whence flows the Cuama, the Zaire, the Rhapta, and the Nile."24—Here then we have the exact counterpart of Lake Kura and the Demdem or Demadem. The subsequent history of the horde referred to by Da Couto is taken up by other learned writers, who affect to describe its march southwards from Mombasa to the Cape of Good Hope; thence to Angola, whence it spread to Sierra Leone and elsewhere: so that not even the Demadem were ever carried by conjecture so far from their native homes.26 Thus it appears that the theories ascribed above to the Arabs, much excelled in sobriety, while they were exactly parallel in design with the geographical speculations of a later age.

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26 Cavazzi de Montecucoli, a laborious and sincere writer, relates (Istorica Descrittione de tre Regni, &c. 1690, book n. c. 3) that a chief named Zimbo raised an army in Congo, with which he invaded Melinda on the opposite coast. Being there defeated, he retired towards the Cape of Good Hope, and afterwards attacked Angola, &c. Zimbo's marches equalled those of Tamerlane. The enormous exaggerations and mistakes of the Catholic Missionaries respecting the interior of Southern Africa, still retain their places in works of geography.

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It was this very ignorance that was the reason why it was such a late date that real conquest happened. The Europeans were very confused about the geography and thought Prester john was everywhere. The explorers and missionaries ect. were extremely important in opening up/conquering the continent

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The situation was perhaps similar to that in the early 19th century, when European explorers, who had penetrated the African interior in order to unveil her secrets, were amazed at how well the West Africans knew what was going on in the outside world. When Mungo Park arrived in Segu on the Niger in July 1796, being the first European in this city, he was told that the British and French were fighting in the Mediterranean. The news probably concerned the battles that took place after the treaty of Basle which was made in April 1795, when Park was in his way to Gambia. In 1824, Hugh Clapperton visited Kano, being again the first European in this city, and he was surprised by Muhammad Bello, the ruler of Sokoto caliphate, who asked him detailed questions concerning the British policy in India and the religious situation in Europe. In early 1871, Gustav Nachtigal, the famous German traveller who had left Tripoli in 1869 in order to explore Central Africa, was told in Bornu that a war had broke out between franse and nimse, meaning Frenchmen and Germans. Considering that the Franco-Prussian war began in July 1870, the news had reached Bornu very quickly.

Perhaps news of the great events in the medieval Mediterranean, like the fall of Acre in 1291 or the Turkish conquest of Constantinople in 1453, were heard in the capital of Mali as quickly. However, there are only few mentions in the contemporary Arabic sources concerning the transmission of news across the Sahara. We know, for example, that Mansa Musa of Mali sent a delagation to congratulate the Marinid Sultan Abu 'l-Hasan for the conquest of Tlemcen. Since Tlemcen had fallen to Marinids in April 1337, the news most probably arrived in Mali with the traders who had left Morocco in autumn, which was the usual season of departure for the caravans to the south. The Malian delegation was sent to Fez probably in the following summer, when the caravans returned to the north. Similarly, another Malian delegation was sent to congratulate Sultan Abu 'l-Hasan for the conquest of Constantine in 1349. The prompt action on part of the Malian rulers proves that they knew well the political geography of Northern Africa, being fully aware of the consequenses of the Marinid expansion to central Maghrib....

Similarly, it was another channel for West Africans to the outside world: in 1594 a Portuguese navigator reported that he had in Senegal met many blacks who were not only capable of speaking French but have even visited France. In was only during the age of imperialism that the encounter of West Africans with other civilisations turned definitely from controlled relationship to collision.

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Originally posted by Doug M:
In order for Europeans to be ignorant of Africa they would have to not have known that the continent existed, which they did and for a long while.

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Portuguese administrators came to depend on Swahili-speakers. In the sixteenth century, several Portuguese factors even employed Swahili elites as political and economic advisors.[9] This dependence was not only born out of an ignorance of East Africa, but also as a result of the ease with which many Portuguese could interpret the Swahili world conceptually, materially, and religiously. The Portuguese found a familiar Islamic civilization on the East African coast and, able to effectively communicate within it through dialog and/or coercion, attempted to manipulate it for narrow economic proposes. Yet Swahili-speakers, lacking military supremacy, used their paradoxically privileged position to impede Portuguese commercial relations with non-Swahili and, in some cases, even to further their own aspirations. Thus, despite fierce rivalries in Iberia and abroad, Portuguese familiarity with Islam and what they perceived as general Muslim material and social worlds precipitated close relations with the Swahili such that over the course of the sixteenth century Portuguese perceptions, language, relations, and investments in East Africa were filtered through the lens of Swahili society.[10]

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The Other described above is the total “alien” identified in many regions of sixteenth-century European intervention. For the East African coast, however, the Other that the Portuguese encountered, though technically an enemy, was
familiar precisely because he had access to all the material and non-material things described above. As commercial competitors, the Swahili could be a thorn in the side of the Estado da Índia, but Swahili merchants, ambassadors, and
interpreters were the only group who could single-handedly maintain the trade in gold to the benefit of the early Portuguese factors at Sofala, Kilwa, Malindi, Mombasa, Faza, and Mozambique Island. Likewise, Swahili access to coveted
material culture ultimately led the Portuguese to develop close relationships with Swahili merchants.

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.....The Portuguese factors on the coast initially knew nothing of the politics of the peoples to the west of Sofala, and despite attempts to correct their ignorance, were solely dependent on the Swahili for much of the sixteenth century.23 Such dependence led to a variety of colonial policy contradictions, allowing influential Swahili allies to break restrictions on trade ordered by the Viceroy at Goa. If the punishment of merchant-elites would injure colonial commercial interests or “provoke” important leaders, factors and captains often chose not to reprimand Swahili allies (Silva da
Rego 1962-89(2):328)

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Originally posted by markellion:
Notice all the complicated bismarckian like diplomacy stuff. I've read a few things like this I don't have a full picture but the knowledge of the people allowed the kings of the "Sudan" to wield a great deal of authority on the world stage. I remember something about Kanem or some other empire making alliances to control the Sahara and other cases. This brings everything into perspective concerning why lack of knowledge of basic geography in Africa would be such a hindrance to Europeans since colonial rule required more than simply brute force but at the same time Europeans didn't simply trick naive natives into treaties it was more complicated than that. However this was the end result:

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Originally posted by markellion:
Notice all the complicated bismarckian like diplomacy stuff. I've read a few things like this I don't have a full picture but the knowledge of the people allowed the kings of the "Sudan" to wield a great deal of authority on the world stage. I remember something about Kanem or some other empire making alliances to control the Sahara and other cases. This brings everything into perspective concerning why lack of knowledge of basic geography in Africa would be such a hindrance to Europeans since colonial rule required more than simply brute force but at the same time Europeans didn't
simply trick naive natives into treaties it was more complicated than that. However this was the end result:

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