Abstract
A century ago the phrases “darkest Africa” and “the dark continent” were encountered often in European and American literature. The darkness, one would suppose, was in the minds of the writers, signifying their general ignorance of African geography and ethnography. Yet I doubt if many who spoke of darkest Africa thought of it in quite those terms. For most of them, the darkness was in the minds of the Africans themselves; a metaphor for their moral backwardness and for their ignorance of the higher arts of civilization. African darkness thus contrasted with European and American enlighten-ment—and the contrast provided moral justification for Europe's mission civilisatrice.
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