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The Gift of the Followers of the Path of Muhammad
Timbuktu, founded around 1100 as a commercial center for trade across the Sahara Desert, was also an important seat of Islamic learning from the 14th century onward. The libraries of Timbuktu contain many important manuscripts, in different styles of Arabic scripts, which were written and copied by Timbuktu’s scribes and scholars. These works constitute the city’s most famous and long-lasting contribution to Islamic and world civilization. This work is about the Songhai Empire, one of the most important states in West Africa during the 14th and 15th centuries ...
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Mamma Haidara Commemorative Library
A Summary Explanation of the Pronouncements of the Scholars and Theologians
Timbuktu, founded around 1100 as a commercial center for trade across the Sahara Desert, was also an important seat of Islamic learning from the 14th century onward. The libraries of Timbuktu contain many important manuscripts, in different styles of Arabic scripts, which were written and copied by Timbuktu’s scribes and scholars. These works constitute the city’s most famous and long-lasting contribution to Islamic and world civilization. In this work, the author examines theologians' and scholars' approaches to various issues in Islamic law and society and offers an explanation ...
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Mamma Haidara Commemorative Library
![Askiyah's Questions and al-Maghili's Answers [al-Maghili's Tract on Politics]](https://content.wdl.org/36/thumbnail/1430157223/192x192.jpg)
Askiyah's Questions and al-Maghili's Answers [al-Maghili's Tract on Politics]
Timbuktu, founded around 1100 as a commercial center for trade across the Sahara Desert, was also an important seat of Islamic learning from the 14th century onward. The libraries of Timbuktu contain many important manuscripts, in different styles of Arabic scripts, which were written and copied by Timbuktu’s scribes and scholars. These works constitute the city’s most famous and long-lasting contribution to Islamic and world civilization. This treatise is about the Songhai Empire, which flourished in West Africa during the 14th and 15th centuries. It consists of the ...
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Mamma Haidara Commemorative Library
Cape of Good Hope
John Arrowsmith (1790-1873) was best known for the 1834 publication London Atlas of Universal Geography, widely considered among the best European sources of maps at the time. In 1810 he had joined the mapmaking firm of his uncle Aaron Arrowsmith, one of the premier publishers of the day, known for rendering the latest geographical findings into impressively detailed maps. Arrowsmith was a founding member of the Royal Geographic Society, which awarded him its gold medal in 1863 for his maps of Australia, North America, Africa, and India. Arrowsmith’s 1842 ...
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Library of Congress
Map of Barbary, Nigritia and Guinea
Jan Barend Elwe was a publisher and seller of maps who was active in Amsterdam in the period between 1777 and 1815. He is best known for his pocket atlases of the Netherlands (1786) and of Germany (1791). Many of Elwe’s publications were reprints of earlier maps by well-known European cartographers. He reissued several maps by the great French mapmaker Guillaume de l’Isle, including this 1792 map of West and North Africa, which de l’Isle first published in 1707.
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Library of Congress
Map of Africa
This 1820 map of Africa by Adrien Hubert Brué (1786-1832), one of the leading French cartographers of the day, shows the state of European geographic knowledge of Africa in the early 19th century. Unlike many sedentary mapmakers, the Parisian Brué had traveled widely from a young age, on long sailing voyages to Mauritius in the Indian Ocean and as a midshipman on a French naval expedition along the Australian coast. These voyages damaged Brué’s health, however, so that he returned to Paris where he began to draft maps under ...
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Library of Congress
Map of the Belgian Congo
Little is known about the actual cartographer and engraver of this map, Léon de Moor. More is known about the publishing house, J. Lebègue and Co. The firm published many geographical documents, including maps and travel accounts. In 1896, when this map was published, the Belgian Congo–known as the Congo Free State–was actually a personal possession of King Leopold II and not an official Belgian colony. The king was engaged in a vigorous publicity campaign aimed at convincing the other European powers to recognize the legitimacy of his ...
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Library of Congress
Central Africa after the Newest Research
Dr. Joseph Chavanne’s map of central Africa, most likely created in the early 1880s, is a product of the European imperial “scramble for Africa.” Although the Dutch and Portuguese established trading posts along the coasts of Africa as early as the late 15th century, the European race to claim significant tracts of territory in sub-Saharan Africa began in earnest only in the late 19th century. Belgium, Britain, France, and Germany all carved out competing claims, based on the discoveries of inland explorers whose expeditions Chavanne documents. Originally from Vienna ...
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Library of Congress
Great Trading Routes of the Sahara
This 1889 map of trans-Saharan trading routes by French explorer Edouard Blanc reflects the growing priority that Europeans gave to land-based trade during the late 19th-century imperial “scramble for Africa.” In articles about his work, Blanc stressed the importance of identifying “natural” geographic routes that would connect French colonial possessions in west Africa, such as Senegal, to Algeria in north Africa, and link the Mediterranean coast to Sudan and central Africa. Blanc based his maps not only on his own travels but also on nearly a century of reports from ...
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Library of Congress
Africa, or Greater Libya
This map of Africa by Nicolas Sanson, royal geographer to Kings Louis XIII and XIV, and commonly known as the father of French cartography, was published by Sanson’s own house in 1679 in Paris. The map was based, according to Sanson, on a composite of information drawn from other maps as well as “upon the observations of Samuel Blomart.” It also may have drawn on the Dutch writer Olfert Dapper’s work of 1668, Naukeurige Beschrijvingen der Afrikaensche gewesten (Description of Africa). The continent is presented as “Greater Libya ...
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Library of Congress
Map of the West Coast of Africa from Sierra Leone to Cape Palmas, Including the Colony of Liberia
This map of part of Africa’s west coast is by the Reverend Jehudi Ashmun, a Methodist minister, skilled cartographer, agent of the American Colonization Society (ACS), and governor of Liberia from 1824 to 1828. The ACS established Liberia in 1822 as a colony for freed slaves from the United States. European merchants knew Liberia as “the Grain Coast” because of the great fertility of its soil. Ashmun taught American farming techniques to indigenous peoples and settlers, and worked to promote a balance between commerce and agriculture. He also promoted ...
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Library of Congress
Letter to the Warring Tribes
Timbuktu, founded around 1100 as a commercial center for trade across the Sahara Desert, was also an important seat of Islamic learning from the 14th century onward. The libraries of Timbuktu contain many important manuscripts, in different styles of Arabic scripts, which were written and copied by Timbuktu’s scribes and scholars. These works constitute the city’s most famous and long-lasting contribution to Islamic and world civilization. In this work, the author, a scholar and religious leader, urges warring factions to make peace and live in peace. He supports ...
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Mamma Haidara Commemorative Library
Zulu Chief, South Africa
This 1895 photo of a Zulu chief in native dress standing in front of a thatched hut is from the Frank and Frances Carpenter Collection at the Library of Congress. Frank G. Carpenter (1855-1924) was an American writer of books on travel and world geography whose works helped to popularize cultural anthropology and geography in the United States in the early years of the 20th century. The Zulu are southern Africa’s largest ethnic group. Zululand, where this photograph was taken, was absorbed into the British colony of Natal following ...
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Library of Congress
Instructions and Travel Diary that Governor Francisco Joze de Lacerda e Almeida Wrote about His Travel to the Center of Africa, Going to the River of Sena, in the Year of 1798
This manuscript diary by the Brazilian mathematician, geographer, and explorer Francisco José de Lacerda e Almeida (1750-98) describes Almeida’s journey into the interior of southern Africa in 1798. Almeida was born in Brazil, studied at the University of Coimbra in Portugal, and rose to the position of royal astronomer. In 1780, he returned to Brazil as part of a commission established to determine the borders between Spanish and Portuguese territories in South America under the recently concluded Treaty of San Ildefonso (1777). He spent ten years in Brazil, where ...
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National Library of Brazil
![King Bihuazin [i.e. Béhanzin] of Dahomey, and His Two Wives [Standing on Porch]: French Government Prisoner in Martinique, Fort de France](https://content.wdl.org/269/thumbnail/1471448550/192x192.jpg)
King Bihuazin [i.e. Béhanzin] of Dahomey, and His Two Wives [Standing on Porch]: French Government Prisoner in Martinique, Fort de France
This photograph was taken in Fort de France on the French island of Martinique around 1902. It shows the former King Béhanzin (1844-1906) of Dahomey (present-day Benin), who was banished to the Caribbean territory in 1894. The Kingdom of Dahomey, with its capital at Abomey, was founded in the 17th century. French colonial expansion into west Africa in the late 19th century and French efforts to suppress the slave trade led to conflict between France and the kingdom. In 1892, the kingdom was defeated in a war with France and ...
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Library of Congress
The Special Features of French Antarctica, Otherwise Called America, and of Several Lands and Islands Discovered in Our Time
André Thevet (1516/17-92) was a Franciscan friar who traveled widely and, through his writings, helped to establish cosmographie--as geography was called at the time--as a science in 16th-century France. After making trips to Africa and the Middle East in the 1540s, he was appointed chaplain to the expedition of Nicolas Durand de Villegagnon, which set out from Le Havre in May 1555 to establish a colony in Brazil. The expedition landed near present-day Rio de Janeiro in November of the same year. In January 1556, Thevet fell ill ...
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Library of Congress
Missionary's House, the Congo, Africa
This undated photograph from Africa is from the George Grantham Bain Collection at the Library of Congress. The collection contains approximately 40,000 glass plate negatives and 50,000 photographic prints, most dating from the 1900s to the mid-1920s. Bain, who was born in 1865 and died in 1944, founded the New York-based Bain News Service in 1898. Specializing in news about New York City and to a lesser degree the eastern United States, Bain distributed its own pictures and those purchased from other commercial agencies to about 100 newspapers ...
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Library of Congress
Sketch of Equatorial Africa: Containing the Latest Information Collected by Agents of the International Society of the Congo
The Association Internationale du Congo (International Association of the Congo) was an organization established by King Leopold II of Belgium to lay the basis for creation of a central African colony. Between 1879 and 1884, Leopold employed the explorer Henry M. Stanley to acquire from local chiefs, by means of treaties they did not understand or were coerced into signing, tracts of land along the Congo River and its tributaries. The association also established posts along the river. At an international congress in Berlin that convened on November 15, 1884 ...
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Library of Congress
A Map of the Great Forest Region, Showing the Routes of the Emin Pasha Relief Expedition, from the River Congo to the Victoria Nyanza
After his successful search for David Livingstone in 1871-72, the journalist Henry M. Stanley went on to become a celebrated African explorer in his own right. He led two further expeditions, an Anglo-American expedition in 1874-77, in which he explored the lakes of central Africa, and a relief expedition in 1887-90, ostensibly to rescue Emin Pasha (1840-92). Emin, a German explorer whose original name was Eduard Schnitzler, was the governor of Equatoria, the southernmost district of the Sudan, then ruled by Egypt. He was cut off from the outside world ...
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Library of Congress
The Bunyoro Agreement 1955
This document, from the National Archives of Uganda, is the original of the Bunyoro Agreement of 1955 between Great Britain and the Kingdom of Bunyoro-Kitara, one of the traditional kingdoms of Uganda. The agreement, in both English and Lunyoro, was signed on September 3 by Sir Andrew Cohen (1909–68), governor of the Uganda Protectorate, on behalf of the British government in London and the government of the protectorate, and the Omukama (king), Sir Tito Gafabusa Winyi IV (1883–1971), on behalf of himself and his successors, the Rukurato (the ...
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National Library of Uganda
Members of a Royal(?) Family Gathered for a Group Portrait, Kenya
This photograph, taken in Kenya in the early 20th century, is from the Frank and Frances Carpenter Collection at the Library of Congress. Frank G. Carpenter (1855-1924) was an American writer of books on travel and world geography whose works helped to popularize cultural anthropology and geography in the United States in the early years of the 20th century. Consisting of photographs taken and gathered by Carpenter and his daughter Frances (1890-1972) to illustrate his writings, the collection includes an estimated 16,800 photographs and 7,000 glass and film ...
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Library of Congress
Large Group of People Gathered Around Some Men with Musical Instruments, Mombasa, Kenya
This photograph, taken in Kenya some time in the early 20th century, is from the Frank and Frances Carpenter Collection at the Library of Congress. Frank G. Carpenter (1855-1924) was an American writer of books on travel and world geography whose works helped to popularize cultural anthropology and geography in the United States in the early years of the 20th century. Consisting of photographs taken and gathered by Carpenter and his daughter Frances (1890-1972) to illustrate his writings, the collection includes an estimated 16,800 photographs and 7,000 glass ...
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Library of Congress
Street Scene, Nairobi, Kenya Photo by D.V. Figueira, Mombasa
This photograph, showing a general store in Nairobi, Kenya, sometime in the first quarter of the 20th century, is from the Frank and Frances Carpenter Collection at the Library of Congress. Frank G. Carpenter (1855-1924) was an American writer of books on travel and world geography whose works helped to popularize cultural anthropology and geography in the United States in the early years of the 20th century. Consisting of photographs taken and gathered by Carpenter and his daughter Frances (1890-1972) to illustrate his writings, the collection includes an estimated 16 ...
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Library of Congress
Map of Liberia, West Africa
In 1815, the African-American Quaker and maritime entrepreneur Paul Cuffee financed and captained a voyage to Sierra Leone, where he helped a small group of African-American immigrants establish a colony on African soil. The success of Cuffee’s venture led to the founding, in 1817, of the American Colonization Society, with the mission of relocating freeborn and emancipated blacks to Africa. In 1822, the society established its first settlement near what is now Monrovia, Liberia. In the 1820s, colonization societies were formed in Maryland, Virginia, Pennsylvania, and other U.S ...
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Library of Congress
Map of a Journey to Musardu, the Capital of the Western Mandingoes
In 1868, President Daniel Bashiel Warner of the Republic of Liberia sent Benjamin J.K. Anderson, a Liberian government official, into the interior of the country to negotiate a treaty with the King of Musardo. Warner’s objective was to improve ties with the peoples of the interior and to try to associate them, economically and culturally, with the coastal colonies established by immigrants from the United States. Traveling through dense forest, Anderson made careful notes about the people, customs, and natural resources of the areas through which he passed ...
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Library of Congress
Sketch of the Careysburg Road
Careysburg, Liberia, was established in late 1856 by order of the Liberian Senate and House of Representatives. It was the country’s first interior settlement, and was deliberately situated on a plateau surrounded by hills in order to provide a healthier environment for settlers unable to cope with the heat, humidity, and disease-carrying mosquitoes of the coastal lowlands. The town was named for the Reverend Lott Carey (1780-1828), a former slave from Richmond, Virginia, the first American Baptist missionary to Africa, and an important figure in the early affairs of ...
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Library of Congress
The Important Stars Among the Multitude of the Heavens
Timbuktu, founded around 1100 as a commercial center for trade across the Sahara Desert, was also an important seat of Islamic learning from the 14th century onward. The libraries of Timbuktu contain many important manuscripts, in different styles of Arabic scripts, which were written and copied by Timbuktu’s scribes and scholars. These works constitute the city’s most famous and long-lasting contribution to Islamic and world civilization. This early 18th-century text was written to train scholars in the field of astronomy, a science that Islamic tradition traces back to ...
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Mamma Haidara Commemorative Library
Knowledge of the Movement of the Stars and What It Portends in Every Year
Timbuktu, founded around 1100 as a commercial center for trade across the Sahara Desert, was also an important seat of Islamic learning from the 14th century onward. The libraries of Timbuktu contain many important manuscripts, in different styles of Arabic scripts, which were written and copied by Timbuktu’s scribes and scholars. These works constitute the city’s most famous and long-lasting contribution to Islamic and world civilization. This collection of writings (date unknown) draws upon the Greco-Roman legacy of astronomy, with the addition of discoveries made by Muslim scholars ...
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Mamma Haidara Commemorative Library
Explanations of Problems in Arithmetic with Examples
Timbuktu, founded around 1100 as a commercial center for trade across the Sahara Desert, was also an important seat of Islamic learning from the 14th century onward. The libraries of Timbuktu contain many important manuscripts, in different styles of Arabic scripts, which were written and copied by Timbuktu’s scribes and scholars. These works constitute the city’s most famous and long-lasting contribution to Islamic and world civilization. This commentary by the 18th-century scholar al-Rasmuki explains a work by the medieval mathematician al-Samlali. Using charts and examples of problems, the ...
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Mamma Haidara Commemorative Library
Curing Diseases and Defects Both Apparent and Hidden
Timbuktu, founded around 1100 as a commercial center for trade across the Sahara Desert, was also an important seat of Islamic learning from the 14th century onward. The libraries of Timbuktu contain many important manuscripts, in different styles of Arabic scripts, which were written and copied by Timbuktu’s scribes and scholars. These works constitute the city’s most famous and long-lasting contribution to Islamic and world civilization. This compilation of cures (date unknown) instructs the reader about methods of diagnosing and medicating the sick. The author explains the use ...
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Mamma Haidara Commemorative Library
On the Calculation of Numbers in the Science of Astronomy
Timbuktu, founded around 1100 as a commercial center for trade across the Sahara Desert, was also an important seat of Islamic learning from the 14th century onward. The libraries of Timbuktu contain many important manuscripts, in different styles of Arabic scripts, which were written and copied by Timbuktu’s scribes and scholars. These works constitute the city’s most famous and long-lasting contribution to Islamic and world civilization. This work (date unknown) explains mathematical calculations and their use in astronomy and astrology. The final portion of the manuscript is missing.
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Mamma Haidara Commemorative Library
Explanation of the Work of al-Ghazali and Nuh ibn al-Tahir al-Fulani
Timbuktu, founded around 1100 as a commercial center for trade across the Sahara Desert, was also an important seat of Islamic learning from the 14th century onward. The libraries of Timbuktu contain many important manuscripts, in different styles of Arabic scripts, which were written and copied by Timbuktu’s scribes and scholars. These works constitute the city’s most famous and long-lasting contribution to Islamic and world civilization. This work by Sulayman ibn Ahmad comments on the work of the famous scholar al-Ghazali and discusses a commentary on Ghazali's ...
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Mamma Haidara Commemorative Library
Map of Barbary, the Nigrita, and Guinea
As late as the Renaissance, European knowledge of Africa was largely limited to the Mediterranean and coastal areas. It was also still heavily influenced by classical sources. Between 1570 and 1670, the Dutch, who dominated European mapmaking at the time, began translating reports from Portuguese sea captains, as well as earlier North African sources, to expand their knowledge of the continent. In the late 17th and early 18th centuries, the French Royal Academy of Sciences gave new impetus to the mapping of Africa. This 18th-century map by Guillaume de l ...
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Library of Congress
Map of the Western Sahara
This map by Ernest George Ravenstein (1834-1913) appeared in the London Geographical Magazine in 1876. Ravenstein was a British geographer and fellow of the Royal Geographical Society. He is best remembered for his pioneering Laws of Migration, published in 1885, which provided the theoretical underpinning for much subsequent scientific work on migration. This map shows the Sahara Desert, from present-day eastern Mali to the Atlantic Ocean. Shown in red are the tracks of the important 19th-century explorers who crossed the desert, including the Frenchman René-Auguste Callié (1799-1838), who in 1827-28 ...
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Library of Congress
Map of the Port of Mauritius
This late-18th century Spanish manuscript map depicts Port Louis and vicinity on the island of Mauritius in the Indian Ocean. The map is oriented with southeast at the top. It shows the coastline, coastal features, soundings, anchorages, fortifications, a battery, windmill, hospital, storehouse, and the port. It also includes a keyed legend. The map is part of the Library of Congress’s collection from the Real Escuela de Navegación, Cadiz, Spain, purchased from Maggs Brothers, London. Arab and Malay sailors knew of Mauritius as early as the 10th century. The ...
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Library of Congress
Portuguese Government Gunboat on the Zambesi River, Used to Preserve Order Among the Natives, Tete, Mozambique, Africa
This photograph, taken in the then-Portuguese colony of Mozambique sometime in the first quarter of the 20th century, is from the Frank and Frances Carpenter Collection at the Library of Congress. Frank G. Carpenter (1855-1924) was an American writer of books on travel and world geography whose works helped to popularize cultural anthropology and geography in the United States in the early years of the 20th century. Consisting of photographs taken and gathered by Carpenter and his daughter Frances (1890-1972) to illustrate his writings, the collection includes an estimated 16 ...
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Library of Congress
Girls from Madagascar
This photograph of a scene in Madagascar is from the Frank and Frances Carpenter Collection at the Library of Congress. Frank G. Carpenter (1855–1924) was an American writer of books on travel and world geography, whose works helped to popularize cultural anthropology and geography in the United States in the early years of the 20th century. Consisting of photographs taken and gathered by Carpenter and his daughter Frances (1890–1972) to illustrate his writings, the collection includes an estimated 16,800 photographs and 7,000 glass and film negatives ...
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Library of Congress
Plan of Table Bay with the City of Cape Town
This 1770 Spanish manuscript map depicts the Cape of Good Hope at the southern tip of the continent of Africa. The map shows the coastline, coastal features, soundings, anchorages, a settlement, and a pictorial representation of a ship. It is oriented with east at the top. A note on the map indicates that Cape Town was inhabited by the Dutch, and that the map is a copy of a 1765 original prepared by a frigate of the British East India Company, whose officers allowed a copy to be made in ...
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Library of Congress
Map of Cape Verde
This distinctive French map of Cape Verde and the Island of Gorée, Senegal, probably dates from the first half of the 18th century. The Portuguese were the first European settlers in this region, having arrived around 1450. In the 16th century, French and English pirates and merchants asserted increasing influence in Senegal. In 1633, the French established the Senegal Company, which was based on the gum and slave trades. Most prominently featured on this map are structures on the Island of Gorée depicting the renowned "factory" or slave-trading center. The ...
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Library of Congress
Africa—Tanganyika—Dar es Salaam—Women Convicts Working on Road
This photograph of a scene in Tanganyika (present-day Tanzania) is from the Frank and Frances Carpenter Collection at the Library of Congress. Frank G. Carpenter (1855–1924) was an American writer of books on travel and world geography, whose works helped to popularize cultural anthropology and geography in the United States in the early years of the 20th century. Consisting of photographs taken and gathered by Carpenter and his daughter Frances (1890–1972) to illustrate his writings, the collection includes an estimated 16,800 photographs and 7,000 glass and ...
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Library of Congress
King of Uganda and Royal Drummer with His Ears Cut off by Order of Former King, Africa
This photograph of a scene in Uganda is from the Frank and Frances Carpenter Collection at the Library of Congress. Frank G. Carpenter (1855–1924) was an American writer of books on travel and world geography, whose works helped to popularize cultural anthropology and geography in the United States in the early years of the 20th century. Consisting of photographs taken and gathered by Carpenter and his daughter Frances (1890–1972) to illustrate his writings, the collection includes an estimated 16,800 photographs and 7,000 glass and film negatives ...
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Library of Congress
Bridge on the Uganda Railway Made of American Steel and Put in Place Under American Direction, Africa
This photograph, taken in east Africa in the first quarter of the 20th century, is from the Frank and Frances Carpenter Collection at the Library of Congress. Frank G. Carpenter (1855-1924) was an American writer of books on travel and world geography whose works helped to popularize cultural anthropology and geography in the United States in the early years of the 20th century. Consisting of photographs taken and gathered by Carpenter and his daughter Frances (1890-1972) to illustrate his writings, the collection includes an estimated 16,800 photographs and 7 ...
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Library of Congress