Far from being deservedly neglected outliers, the Niger and Congo expeditions were in many respects emblematic of British efforts to explore Africa. The historical forces that did so much to shape the trajectories of the Niger and Congo expeditions—slavery and the slave trade, imperial rivalries with other European powers, and the roles of African states and communities—were a persistent feature of these efforts. Failure was a frequent outcome. The preoccupation with the Niger River and West Africa persisted through the first half of the century and the renewal of interest in the Congo River and Equatorial Africa toward the end of the century spurred the Scramble for Africa. The main throughline that runs from Mungo Park at the start of the century through the Niger and Congo expeditions to the many British explorers who trekked across Africa in the decades that followed was a shared sense of hubris.

Nineteenth-century Europeans developed scientific methodologies that generated new knowledge about Africa through Eurocentric ideas about progress. These ideas became the foundation for the development episteme. The development episteme emerged out of both these scientific endeavors and the missionary-imperialist project to disseminate European Christianity, commerce, and “civilization” to Africans. Knowledge explorers, cartographers, medical doctors, biologists, economists, ethnologists, and other scientists produced about Africa facilitated colonization by claiming mastery over the continent’s environment and people. Europeans drew on this scientific information to assert their technological expertise and moral right to “civilize” Africans. European scholars suggested their expertise was needed because they knew Africans best. Yet the development episteme was formulated in dialogue with Africans whose own knowledge and interests often determined which development efforts would succeed and which would fail. Many Africans working for Europeans were educated in Western, most often missionary schools. As such, African assistants were adept at filtering information through a Western lens. This filter transformed African knowledge into European “facts.” More recently scholars of the global north have introduced forms of knowledge about Africa that do not perpetuate the notion of Western superiority, but that still rely on some of the assumptions built into nineteenth-century European epistemologies.

At the end of the nineteenth century, the Islamic frontier and the European colonial frontier met in the Central African interior, augmenting each other as well as clashing. The crucial variable was exploitation, not conquest; mobility and freedom from being accosted while collecting valuable goods (if necessary, forcefully) were key to personal advancement and to the political-economic mode of life. ‘Zariba’ is the Arabic term for the enclosures built to contain the goods (slaves, ivory, food, etc.) that the raiders were able to amass. Some zaribas were temporary, while others became more established, morphing into cities. The chapter focuses on some of the key people involved in these raiding projects to show the personal orientation and skills they developed and the kinds of encounters and confrontations they navigated as they attempted to claim privileged status, or to undermine another’s status. By the early twentieth century, French colonial officials had become leaders in forceful acquisition, either co-opting or eliminating most of their challengers. While the French colonial government saw itself as replacing the acquisition-oriented polities with one geared towards production and the management of people, the French operated in a context of penury, and, as a result, their imposition of a state-bureaucratic form ironically entrenched forceful acquisition as a tactic of rule and profit. Raiding and acquisition retained their prominence less because they expressed values than because they were an improvised response to conflicts of values between people with competing claims and interests.