Missionaries, geographers, and abolitionists formed a tight information network on Africa

Evidence

In Great Britain, the abolitionists were aided by a tight network of information about Africa that was fed through cooperation between the Royal Geographic Society, the British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society, and the Church Missionary Society. Explorers like Dr. David Livingstone, John H. Speke, James Grant, Charles Gordon, and Samuel Baker became celebrated experts of the Royal Geographic Society for the firsthand information they brought or sent home from the Nile Valley or Lake Victoria. Their stories about the victimization of innocents that slavery wrought inspired both Protestant and Catholic missionaries to set up stations in different parts of the African heartland. Sketches they sent home of enslaved Africans encouraged the urgent appeals of the Anti-Slavery Society and were reprinted in newspapers, giving readers opportunities to view the human face of slavery. — Eve M. Troutt Powell, A Different Shade of Colonialism_…, 652

Categorization

• CANDY: Fascinating detail about explorers’ sketches being reprinted in newspapers giving Britons their first visual of slavery.