SOURCE: Brantlinger, Patrick. “The Genealogy of the Myth of the ‘Dark Continent.’” In Rule of Darkness: British Literature and Imperialism, 1830-1914, pp. 173-97. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988.

In the following essay, Brantlinger traces the evolution of the myth of Africa as the Dark Continent in writings by British and American explorers, sociologists, anthropologists, missionaries, journalists, abolitionists, novelists, and poets in the nineteenth century.

We are thrown back in imagination to the infancy of the world.

—David Livingstone

In Heart of Darkness, Marlow says that Africa is no longer the “blank space” on the map he had once daydreamed over. “It had got filled since my boyhood with rivers and lakes and names. … It had become a place of darkness.”¹ Marlow is right: Africa grew dark as Victorian explorers, missionaries, and scientists flooded it with light, because the light was refracted through an imperialist ideology that urged the abolition...