Africa has a rich history of external conceptualisations. What has been “known” by much of the world about the continent has long been a product of external scholarship. It was however in Africa’s encounter with Europe’s colonial powers that the most enduring (and arguably the most damaging) image of the continent was formed. Africa was studied as a primitive, uncivilised, and otherworldly place — a continent of savages and cannibals so vividly portrayed to a Western audience in writing like Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness — a “prehistoric Earth … an unknown planet” inhabited by “prehistoric man”. Africa was set up as the antithesis of Western civilisation: an unknown into which Europeans could peer for assurance about their superior positions in the hierarchy of nature. As Comaroff says, Africa and the African “marked the point at which humanity gave way to animality”. Thus Africa was painted as an “other”: a continent without history in which indigenous bodies of knowledge and ways of thought were not considered. In the “natural progression” of the world towards European civilisation, Africa and the African were centuries behind the colonising powers.

The legacy of this thinking is still with us, despite the efforts of initiatives from Negritude and Black Consciousness to the African Renaissance, as eminent figures like Hugh Trevor-Roper and Nikolas Sarkozy portray. Trevor-Roper, Oxford’s late regius professor of modern history said in 1963 that “Perhaps in the future, there will be some African history to teach. But at present there is none: there is only the history of Europeans in Africa. The rest is darkness”. Sarkozy, speaking in Dakar in 2007, described Africa as a continent that has “not fully entered into history”, who’s people live in an “imaginary world” devoid of “human adventure or the idea of progress”, wallowing in a “static order where everything seems to have been written beforehand” and who need to realise that the “golden age that Africa is forever recalling will not return because it has never existed”, betraying the startling grip of the colonial conception of Africa. How has this image of Africa persisted? How does the state of global scholarship affect what is known about the continent? What role do places like Oxford have to play in all of this?

The Dark Continent, a name given to Africa by Europeans in the 19th century. The name meant that Africa was then an unknown area to Europeans, but it is now considered an offensive name.

Africa was deemed “The Dark Continent” (most likely used in print for the first time by US journalist and explorer Henry Stanley – of “Dr. Livingstone I presume?” fame – in his Africa account “Through the Dark Continent”) due to the fact