The most common answer to the question, “Why was Africa called the Dark Continent?” is that Europe did not know much about Africa until the 19thcentury, but that answer is misleading. Europeans had known quite a lot, but they began ignoring earlier sources of information.
More importantly, the campaign against slavery and missionary work in Africa actually intensified Europeans’ racial ideas about African people in the 1800s.
They called Africa the Dark Continent, because of the mysteries and the savagery they expected to find in the “Interior."
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