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The construction of knowledge about Africa.

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This study analyzes the travelogues of European travelers to Africa and asks how the encounters between the Europeans and the "strangers" were then turned into knowledgeable publications.
A trip to the depths of precolonial Africa was always a risky undertaking for Europeans. Yet many cultured travelers took on this risk in order to visit previously unknown territories. And then they published their comprehensive travelogues. The author of this volume takes a look at these many knowledge-creating travelogues and how they evolved. She shows that the travelogues combined very individual experiences of uncertainty with socially colored perceptions. These examples of trips to the Ethiopian Highlands show that the "strangers" in these travelogues were not just projection surfaces, but also remain characters of their own accord.

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Before the era of (high) imperialism, a journey into the African interior was a risky undertaking for Europeans. Nonetheless, from the middle of the eighteenth century a number of learned travelers ventured into the ´unknown´ parts of Northeastern, Western and Southern Africa in order to accurately describe them to an educated public back home. They published comprehensive travel narratives that were intended as contributions to multiple fields of knowledge production. Individual travel experience with its specific moments of physical and epistemological insecurity formed a narrative thread, to which a variety of findings and speculations were attached. Anke Fischer-Kattner is tracing back some of the paths precolonial travelers chose as they turned their journeys into knowledge-producing publications. Even in their published texts traveling Europeans never exerted full control over their perceptions and experiences. Socio-cultural preconceptions and previous travel publications offered certain themes, of which a traveler might compose individual variations. Moreover, African ´others´ in the narratives were not merely objects of European imagination, as is demonstrated in particular by three in-depth case studies of travels into the Ethiopian highlands. Africans appeared in pre-colonial travelogues as personalities with potentially unsettling agency. Archival documentation of the journeys allows further glimpses into the practices employed by travelers as they turned experience into socially acceptable knowledge. In a theoretically inflected interpretation of the array of documentary traces left by travelers, this study foregrounds their attempts to come to terms with the fundamental insecurities of encounters.

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Fischer-Kattner, Anke
Dr. Anke Fischer-Kattner ist Wissenschaftliche Mitarbeiterin am Historischen Institut der Universität der Bundeswehr in München.

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