The Heart of Africa

Record summary

Georg Schweinfurth’s The Heart of Africa, based on travels in the 1860s and published in English in the 1870s, contains descriptions of peoples, material culture, religious ideas, oral reports, and stories encountered in the Upper Congo region. It is a useful lead for studying how European natural-history and exploration writing recorded African traditions while simultaneously classifying them through evolutionary assumptions. The text can be compared with local histories and later ethnography, but the identity of informants and the translation of concepts are often unclear. Some descriptions may be secondhand or generalized.