Africa’s mythic darkness grew with exploration, not before it

Evidence

In Heart of Darkness, Africa is, for Marlowe, no longer the blank space on the map which had intrigued him as a boy. The blank spaces were becoming filled “with rivers and lakes and names.” But “it had become a place of darkness” (Conrad, 1983:33). The increasing darkness of Africa is proportional to the growth of exploration and colonization rather than the reverse, because the perpetuation and entrenchment of the idea of Africa was integral to the processes of colonial control. So Africa is an invention of the West. This is something we all know. But it is not just a political invention of the Berlin conference of 1884-5. It is an invention of the European imagination, a defining trope of the relentless binarism of imperial discourse. — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 3388

Categorization

• XREF: Reverses the naive assumption that Europeans ‘discovered’ a pre-dark Africa; echoes V.Y. Mudimbe’s Invention of Africa and connects to the reader’s interest in how perception of places is constructed.
• QUESTION: The claim that darkness increased proportionally to exploration — is there data on when the ‘Dark Continent’ label actually emerged in European print? Worth verifying against literary archive evidence.