Who Explored Whom? African and Australian Peoples' Encounters with British Explorers

This paper reassesses the encounters between British explorers and the peoples who inhabited sub-Saharan Africa and Australia in the nineteenth century. Though explorers were encouraged to portray these peoples as passive objects of study, they were in fact active agents in these encounters. Indeed, the relationship between explorer and explored often involved a reversal of roles, with the explored subjecting the explorers to close scrutiny and shaping the terms of their engagement to such a degree that it raises the question—who explored whom?

Because explorers invariably relied on the resources and knowledge of local peoples, the latter frequently held the upper hand in encounters with the former. Whether indigenes responded to these strangers with curiosity and cooperation or suspicion and hostility, they shaped the outcomes of expeditions. Indigenous peoples, however, did not merely react to explorers; they acted in certain respects as explorers themselves. Particular individuals from African and Australian Aboriginal communities aided expeditions as guides, translators, and go-betweens. Some of them did so for multiple expeditions, acquiring reputations over time as trustworthy, even indispensable, intermediaries for explorers. In some instances, colonized peoples were recruited and trained by the British to conduct their own expeditions to frontier zones. At the same time, some British explorers conducted expeditions on behalf of African states, further complicating the binary distinction between explorer and explored. In addition, native Africans and Australians traveled to Britain, conducting missions that in some respects reversed the very notion of who was exploring whom. While denied the label of explorer by the British, they engaged in journeys of discovery that were no less revelatory for them and their countrymen than were the journeys that British explorers carried out in Africa and Australia.