‘Primitive Man’ and Media Time in H.M. Stanley’s Through the Dark Continent

Abstract

The Welsh-American explorer and journalist Henry Morton Stanley (1841–1904) did more than most to promote what Patrick Brantlinger has called ‘the myth of the Dark Continent’. 1 He was not the originator of the idea that sub-Saharan Africa was a region perpetually devoid of physical, spiritual and technological ‘light’; however, he did his best to perpetuate this notion in a series of murkily-titled volumes, including Through the Dark Continent (1878), In Darkest Africa (1890) and My Dark Companions (1893). When Marlow, the narrator of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1899), describes his own expedition into the African interior as like ‘travelling back to the earliest beginnings of the world, when vegetation rioted on the earth and the big trees were kings’, he is tapping into an extremely well-worn literary cliché which had been part of the European travel writer’s tool-kit since the Middle Ages. 2 In his Philosophy of History (1837), Hegel described Africa as ‘the land of childhood, which lying beyond the day of self-conscious history, is enveloped in the dark mantle of Night’. 3 Thus the absence of figurative light in Darkest Africa was intimately connected with the perceived dearth of African history. To a culture like that of Victorian Britain, which obsessively defined itself racially and culturally through shared historical narratives, this absence was particularly damning. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 13 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.