The continent of Africa was for a long time kept safe from exploration by the mistaken belief of early Greece, India and China until the 17th century, that the earth was flat (as a dish), encircled by a river called 'Okeanós' (Latin 'Oceanus' = 'ocean' = 'the great stream that encircles the earth'), from which 'the sun & stars rose, and into which they descended'. Greek mythology also supposes a flat earth as in the quest for the Golden Fleece, 'which hangs from a tree at the end of the world, the prize of the gods', pursued by Jason, 'from the [other] end of the earth'. The Greeks did not venture beyond the straights of Gibraltar until after 600BC (long after the semitic Phoenicians). We know from Herodotus (585-425BC) that the ancient pre-Arab Egyptians appear in 455BC to have successfully rounded the African Cape, ref. p4 in Stigand's 'the Land Of Zinj'
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Greek philosophy laid the basis for Greek logical thought and Roman exact science. Eusebius (263-339AD), bishop of Caesarea, and author of 'Chronica', a priceless history of early world events, in 325AD quoted Aristobulus of Alexandria, philosopher, who says in 150BC that "Plato, (427-347BC) closely followed our [= Hebrew] legislation", and "Pythagoras (570-495BC) transferred many of our [= Hebrew] precepts and included them in his own set of doctrines". (Plato's philosophy dealt a.o. with creation and the universe, immortality of the soul, righteousness, laws and conscience. Pythagoras dealt with the religious teachings of Orphism (Orpheus): origin of the universe, man ('a soul trapped in a body'), sin, and the need for purifying reincarnation to reach Elysium (as opposed to Hades)).
As a Greek of a later period (after 600BC), Pythagoras was reportedly the first to suggest the world was in fact round. Greek historian and philosopher, Plutarch, reports that Nearchus, Alexander's (345-32BC) admiral, on his Indian campaign, 'endeavoured to sail from the Euphrates with a great fleet, with which he designed to go around Arabia and Africa, and so by Hercules' pillars (today's straights of Gibraltar) into the Mediterranean' (Plutarch's Lives Vol.2 (Dryden), 'Alexander', pdf, p44). Whilst not a confirmation that ancient Greeks (and Macedonians) knew the world was round (since they believed it to be a flat dish surrounded by water), it does confirm Herodotus' intimation that the continent of Africa's extent was known very early on.
This shared belief in a world surrounded by a circular ocean is confirmed by Roman historian Tacitus (58-117AD), referring to the earth's edge as 'flat' and the ocean beyond Scandinavia as 'the end of the earth', where 'the sun does not fully set'.
Early (North) Africa in the days of Carthage, after 500BC (location of present Tunisia), was known to the Greeks as 'Lybya'. The Romans after the three Punic wars with Carthage of 261-146BC eventually made it its province of 'Africa', the breadbasket of the Roman Empire. Northern Africa was densely forested, lush and green, and supported much wildlife, witness Hannibal's elephants, and Pompey displaying 500 lions in his Roman spectacles, and wall paintings of giraffes, rhino's and such by early Bushmen before they traveled South. Plutarch reminds us of the 'wild beasts' of North Africa and Pompey's desire "that they ought not be left without some experience of the courage and success of the Romans and therefore he bestowed some days in hunting lions and elephants".
Isodore of Seville (560-636AD), of the Roman province of Spain, collected ancient knowledge of antiquity, including many absurdities, and displayed in his 'Paradiso' an early flat earth map borrowed from the Greeks. Galileo, a Christian, did not argue against the church, but against secular 'scientists-of-the-day' in its service, who held to the ancient Greek beliefs that the earth was the centre of the universe, despite Catholic Copernicus' findings to the contrary, who was fascinated by the beauty of God's creation.
Similarly, the question that seemed to confound Africans most, not unlike the ancient Greeks, around the same time was 'where the sun went at night, into a hole in the earth, or a hole in the water'?(Ernest Wilson, 'Beloved Angola', p161).
The ancient world advanced slowly by the written scripts, starting with pictorial script (like hieroglyphs with 1000 characters, found on Crete of the lost Minoan culture (1900-1400BC), as yet undeciphered, and of ancient Egypt (3000BC-400AD)).
Secondly, syllablic (cuneiforms, the Mycenaean script also from Crete (1600-1200BC) recently translated in 1952, called Linear B. (Linear A (Cypro-Minoan) from Cyprus has not been translated).
Thirdly, Sonic script with 'sound' as basis changed that and gave ancient Europe a more advanced form of communication as basis for its civilization and conquests, since all sounds could now be expressed with ony 22-26 letters. The adaptation of the post-flood, four thousand year old, abstract Semitic LETTERS of the 'alphabet' (from the Hebrew 'alef-bet', see good examples in Psalm 119 by King David, 1000BC) by way of Greece (the Greek 'alpha-beta'), brought most likely via the seafaring semitic Phoenicians to Europe around 900BC. The Greek alphabet was adopted in various parts, Athenian (Ionian) in 403BC, with West-Greek being adopted by the Etruscans and later the Romans. This sonic script meant a huge advance from the vastly complex graphic (pictorial) and syllabic scripts of the orient and near East with thousands of descriptive characters).
Combine this vastly simplified SCRIPT with the Babylonian design of literal angles into abstract NUMBERS, from zero to infinity (ref Hyslop Babylon's 'zer' as abstract zero), brought to Europe by the 'Wandering Jew' via India (compare this to the impossibly complex Roman numerals with no zero and a practical numerical maximum of a 3999), set the Western world on a path to progress and exploration of the unknown.
None of the pagan peoples or cultures were hindered by the Biblical knowledge that the world was round. Yet the Bible frequently mentions the 'stretching out of the heavens' as in: 'around the world', and 'God sits above the vault (circle or globe!) of the earth', eg. Job9:8, 22:14, 26:7,10, 36:29, 37:18, 2Sam22:10, Neh9:6, Ps18:9, 104:2, 144:5, Prov8:27, Isaiah36:11, 40:22, 42:5, 44:24, 45:12, 45:12, 48:13, 51:13,Jer 10:12, 51:15, Ez 1:22, Zech12:1). To illustrate, the venerable Anglo-Saxon Christian monk Bede (673 - 735AD) refers to the earth as 'the ball boys play with'. Galileo did not oppose the Bible, he opposed secular 'scientists' of the day who claimed the sun rotated around the world (and placed him under house arrest, if he recanted, rather than jail, from where he secretly wrote his views and smuggled them to be published in Protestant Amsterdam). From 1400 to 1900AD, time of the reformation, nearly all scientists and inventors were Christian believers, who were in awe of God's creation and wished to explore it for man's benefit and improvement (thereafter came many, seeking to explain the origins of the the solar system, design, geology, life, species, man, by denying the existence of God, leading to moral relativism: 'survival of the fittest' (mass destruction of life through dictatorships and abortion), and futile wars by atheist regimes in the 20th century).
Comparable to Biblical intimations re. a spherical earth, the ocean currents were discovered in the 19th century by US Navy Commodore Matthew Maury, 'pathfinder of the seas', who had first read about the 'paths of the seas' in Psalm 8 of the Bible. US Founding Father, diplomat and scientist, Benjamin Franklin, (maternal) grandson of a humble (Ana)Baptist preacher, Peter Folger of Nolfolk, England, weaver, miller, machinist, shoemaker, blacksmith, surveyor, eyeglass grinder, county clerk, teacher, translator, poet, missionary, 'all rolled into one', of Flemish descent, had already meticulously mapped the Gulf Stream, 'a river in the ocean', on a trip from France in 1785 as the first US ambassador (and by then, the richest man in America).
Muslim slave traders for a 1000 years on the East African coast believed the world to be'flat like a carpet', as per Koranic decree (Sir Thomas More, accused with treason for not supporting King Henry VIII's second marriage, is reported to have said: "Some men think the earth is round. Others think it flat. It is a matter capable of question. If it is flat, will the King’s command make it round? And if it is round, will the King’s command flatten it?")
"If Algeria introduced a resolution declaring that the earth was flat and that Israel had flattened it, it would pass by a UN vote of 164 to 13 with 26 abstentions."
Israeli Foreign Minister Abba Eban in 1970 on the possibility of flattening the earth by UN decree
Since the 7th century, the muslim Arabs of southern Arabia ventured deep into Africa's interior to buy and transport as many as 17 million black slaves via the Red Sea and the East African Coast, to sell to muslim North Africa, Mesopotamia and Arabia (soldiers, swamp laborers and women, resp.), to Persia, to India (the Siddis), and to China (men as eunuchs), well into the 20th century, along ill-trodden, skeleton-lined paths. The Mongwana tribe (ref. 1907 Journal of the African Society, Vol7, p2), are said to be African descendants of Arab slavers. Swahili (from 'sawahili', Arabic for 'coast') is a mix of Bantu and Arabic. While Mohammedanism was a political-religious system (with forced conversions), the West was commercially driven. It transported around 7 million slaves from 1660-1800 across the Atlantic to the Americas, of which 400,000 to North America, where slavery was abolished by Christians from the North, in the Civil war of 1861-65, against slave-holding Democrats from the South, a struggle which cost 700,000 American lives.
The British, who had earlier abolished the slave trade via the 'Act for the Abolition of the Slave Trade' (1807, under Wilberforce's tireless 20-year fight, moved by charitable Christian motives) and abolished slavery itself via the 'Slavery Abolition Act' of 1833, also enforced the abolition of Muslim slavery by Arab Zanzibar (1873), although it went on illicitly in Zanzibar and elsewhere in Africa until well into the 20th century, with ruthless Arab traders (in slaves and ivory) like notorious figure Tippu Tib devastating East Congo, finally being edged out by rival commercial and political interests from Western powers. While the Berlin Conference of 1884 had agreed spheres of influence in Africa, and sought 'to terminate slavery by black and Islamic powers in Africa', it was the West's (separate) Christian missionary efforts, unlike Islam, that did so much to subsequently help rebuild Africa (by education, administration, health and sanitation, agriculture, order and rule of law).
The muslim Arabs of North Africa, after their expulsion from Spain in 1492 and Portugal in 1497, also proceeded over three centuries to kidnap well over one million white Europeans as slaves from Europe's coastlands from Italy to England, as described in 'Christian Slaves, Muslim Masters' by Robert Davis, and in 'White Slaves, African Masters', published by Paul Baepler (see online versions). This 'barbarian piracy' from the Barbary coast was finally stopped around 1800 (not unlike Roman general Pompey who evicted all pirates from the Mediterranean in 67BC), at the behest of Thomas Jefferson, by the recently founded US Navy (its original reason for being!).
The Vikings overcame their long suspicion of the earth's ends being populated by fierce dragons of sorts, to reach North America (NewFoundland) in early 1000AD.
Having encountered North American Indians there around 1000AD, themselves fairly recent arrivals from central Asia, they shared with them some of their milk-based products (but not their coveted metal weapons). The simplistic Indians, being lactose intolerant (as most non-Caucasians are), suffered greatly, and thinking they were being poisoned, proceeded to exterminate the early Viking settlements.
It was Viking descendants, Norwegian Amundsen and Englishman Scott, who finally conquered the last frontier, Antarctica, the real end of the earth, and quite a contrast to the Northpole, whose surprising findings were that the Southpole is land surrounded by sea, whereas the northpole is sea surrounded by land; the Southpole is lifeless, while the Northpole is full of life.
The earliest rounding of the Cape was disputed as 'impossible' by Greek mathematician / historian Ptolemy (100 - 168AD), who reasoned that Africa and Asia were connected, a general belief seen in early world maps, a notion which lasted until the Portuguese Dias' rounding of the Cape in 1488 and Vasco da Gama reaching India a decade later. That Europeans knew the world was round is also shown in the first complete map of the world with America as separate continent, the Waldseemuller map of 1507. Portuguese explorer Serpa Pinto investigated the African continent between the west-coast Portuguese colony of Angola and Mozambique on the east coast between 1869 and 1879 (the Zambezi and Congo basins), receiving assistance from the missionary Francois Coillard, which allowed him to continue to explore the last terra incognita
Despite centuries of massive acquisition of information by Christian nations and scientists, it was in fact the secular philosophers of the very 'age of reason' in the 19th century, who introduced the notion that their 'simplistic' seafaring predecessors once believed in a flat earth, as they wrongly claim to this day (of all people, seafarers knew best that the earth was round, with the top of ships' masts and tops of land objects first appearing on the horizon).
Early maps of Africa's unknown interior parts also show a strong influence by Ptolemy until well past the 17th century, who claimed in antiquity that the Nile river originated near the Mountains of the Moon in the far South (thought to be referring to the Ruwenzori Mountains) in the vicinity of two lakes, which the first maps of Africa by Juan de la Cosa and Juan Vespucci reflect. While the odd Pygmee and giraffe from central Africa were somehow brought to the early Egyptians (Choefor), and to Romans, as curiosities and source of wonder, their origins remained a mystery as shown by the many animal cartouches on early maps of Africa, of which the coast was first charted by Portuguese sailors Dias (1487/88AD) and da Gama (1498AD), (and attention diverted away from it by Columbus in 1492AD), whose interior did not lightly give up its secrets.
As with the Americas, in the search by Europeans for a passage to India and China, Africa also was an obstacle to finding the passage to India for the entire 16th century, before explorers became interested in looking for access to the unknown African interior itself.
Since Biblical writings, Africa was known by three of four sons of Ham: Cush (Nubia, south of Egypt, bordering on the Red Sea), Mizraem (Egypt), Put (Libya, the Magreb), and Canaan (located in modern Israel), and Canaan's son, Sin, whence the Sinites of the Orient (the Chinese, who by their own account, originated at a North-flowing river with nine tributaries, the Nile. The prophet Isaiah refers to the by then distant Sinites,
Is.49:12). In most writings since Homer and the early Greeks (who founded Thebes and Memphis along the Nile, as per Daniel 11:3-4), all Africans were referred to as 'Aethopians', literally in Greek those of 'burned' (aitho) and 'skin' (ops), so all dark skinned people, as the map of Herodotus indicates, who refers to Aethiopia as 'the last inhabited land in that direction'. Roman historian Eusebius holds the dark skinned people migrated from the Indus Valley (where similar dark skinned people lived), following Strabo, who mentions their exploits in the Middle East (the Bible mentions in Gen10:10, that Cush's mighty son Nimrod founded Babylon, after which they dispersed).
In the late 16th century, beginning with Mercator, maps started venturing more into Africa's interior, showing the region of Monomotapa (near the Zambezi), thought to be the source of Solomon's mines. Scotsman James Bruce discovered the source of the Blue Nile at 9500ft in Ethiopia in 1760, after having been well received by its emperor Tekle Haymanot II (there were earlier claims by Christian missionaries, having arrived via the Red Sea). On his return, Bruce was detained in Al Quadarif by Muslim brigands, and again by king Ismael, before making his way to the mouth of the Nile in 1763. Scotsman Mungo Park was one of the first Westerners to explore inland Africa in 1795. He discovered that the Niger river was not connected to the Congo as he suspected (nor to the Nile). He was robbed by the Africans, and tortured mercilessly by the Arabs, but survived. He was killed on his second trip in 1805, after having been attacked by tens of tribes and Moors while covering 1000 miles of the unknown Niger river (which actually originates near the coast but flows inland). Irish-born James Tuckey, in an ill-fated search for a connection between the Congo and Niger basins (beyond the Boussa rapids, where Park had been killed), died of fever in 1816.
In 1821 Scotsman Hugh Clapperton and Englishman Richard Denham were charged to find business opportunities and traveled to lake Chad hoping to find the source of Africa's big rivers. They were not only disappointed, but robbed bare. On the next trip in 1826, with young Cornish explorer Richard Lander, Clapperton died of dysentery, a sickly prisoner for nearly a year of Sultan Bello at Kano. Richard Lander, the only survivor of the Clapperton campaign, and his younger brother John returned in 1830, and despite being robbed and held for ransom by a local chief, escaped onto a British ship on the coast, and finally confirmed the Niger's course into the gulf of Guinea.
Englishmen polyglot Richard Burton and officer Hanning Speke's Nile exploration in 1859, after much sickness, being held by fierce interior tribes, and paying various ransoms, established Lake Victoria as likely source of the Nile.
Scotsman David Livingstone, in an attempt to open Africa for business opportunities, was the first to traverse Africa east to west along the Zambezi to the Angolan coast and back. He returned in 1866, intending to confirm the exact source of the Nile, thought it might be the Lualaba (which turned out to lead to the Congo river basin, though it was known that Lake Tanganyika's elevation was 360m lower than the more northerly Lake Victoria, source of the Nile). But Livingstone was struck by disease and died in Ujiji on the shore of Lake Tanganyika in 1873, a virtual captive to Arab slave traders in central Africa (who saw the Christian's release as a threat to their lucrative slave trade). Welch-American Morton Stanley, after having located 'Mr. Livingstone, I presume', also ventured to confirm the exact source of the Nile, by following the Lualaba, to confirm the course of the Congo river instead, having been confronted by at least seven man-eating tribes along the river, suffering much deprivation including the loss more than half his crew of 288 men. He was rescued by the Portuguese at the mouth of the Congo, near the coast in 1877.
In 1848, one of the last of Africa's secrets was discovered by Johannes Rebmann of Church Missionary Society, who during an evening sunset briefly spotted the glitter of an unlikely distant snow-capped mountain near the equator, which turned out to be Mt KilimaNjaro (its Kibo peak). That it had taken this long for a European to discover was partly due to two reasons. On the one hand the unbearable tyranny of the muslim Zanzibari slave traders. On the other hand, the oversensitization of the interior tribes by the same cruelties of the capricious slave trade, which made them attack even peaceful visitors. In 1849, a German colleague of Rebmann, Dr. Johann Ludwig Krapf saw from a great distance of 100 miles, not one but two glittering snow-covered peaks, 200 miles apart: Mt KilimaNjaro and Mt Kenya (ref. Dr. J Julien, 'the Eternal Wilderness' (p48), 1949, and 'Campfires along the Equator' (p156), 1940. Dr Julien became himself the last explorer, traveling for three months in 1932 on foot through impenetrable, roadless jungle from the Liberian coast to the Niger River, as described in his 'Pygmeeen' (Pygmees), 1953). He completes his exploration of Africa with 'the Sons of Ham', 1960, an interesting treatise on the traditions and lore of the Masai, and their obvious Middle Eastern roots and decent from the North.
Not until after 1300 years of slave trade, and nearly four centuries of exploration since the first modern-age recorded rounding of the Cape in 1488 by Portuguese navigator Bartolomeu Dias, did Africa's unknown interior finally give up its last secrets to the world.
. (Islam continues to this day a form of the practice, by demanding forced payments of tributes by native non-muslims. Medical doctor Paul Julien corroborates this in his 'Campfires along the Equator' (p82), as late as the 1940s, where upstanding, faithful West African muslims, without a hint of irony, keep the black population poor, dependent, and in servitude).
Similarly, many of the Christian missionary achievements of the 19th and early 20th centuries were destroyed by neo-colonial communist powers (Russia and China) in subsequent AIDS-, hunger-, corruption-, and war-ravaged Africa after 'independence' of the 1960s, and the Grand Theft of African minerals by foreign communists powers, in one of the largest transfers of wealth from capitalist owners to communist dictators, leading to a mass exodus of millions of Africans to their former European colonial rulers in Europe, and to egalitarian America (with reportedly more than 250,000 Nigerian immigrants prior to 2021).
THE AFRICANS
By educating and developing the continent and outlawing slavery, the Christian colonial powers eventually empowered the Africans to be master of their own fate, and brought it into the age of flight, freedom from servitude ('if they can keep it'), development, independence, and satelite technology, to where we can now view every detail of Africa from space.
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