SOURCE: Kiernan, Victor. “Africa.” In The Lords of Human Kind: European Attitudes to Other Cultures in the Imperial Age, pp. 203-54. London: Serif, 1995.

In the following excerpt from an essay first published in 1969, Kiernan discusses the views of noted nineteenth-century explorers who traveled to East Africa, including Sir Richard Burton, E. S. Grogan, David Livingstone, and John Speke, showing how these travelers imposed class and race divisions upon Africans; considered them to be childlike, savage, and lazy; and saw them as deserving of and needing Europeans to govern them.

Europeans in Eastern Africa

One of Burton's journeys, in 1854-5, carried him inland from the north-east coast through Somalia to the capital of another small Muslim despot, Harar. He was the first European to reach it, and he lay down for his first night's sleep rejoicing in the thought that he was ‘under the roof of a bigoted prince...