frontier can be established, but a reasonable approximation is at the high-
lands of Rwanda and Burundi. Sandwiched between two huge deserts, the
area fades gradually into three zones. South of the great Sahara and north of
the Namib Desert, the land becomes progressively wetter toward the middle.
First come the semiarid steppe (Arabic,sahel) in the north and the Bié
plateau of Angola in the south. These grasslands gradually give way to a
wooded savanna and then, as rainfall increases, to a true forest on both sides
of the equator. Plunging through the heart of the area are a number of great
rivers including the Senegal, Gambia, Volta, Niger, and Congo (or Zaire).
This geographical description was not how Westerners of the six-
teenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries viewed Atlantic Africa. They
knew practically nothing about the interior, but, drawing upon the
accounts of sailors and slavers who frequented the shoreline, they saw it as
a sequence of “coasts.” It was the Portuguese who had led the way in learn-
ing about them, in the fifteenth century.
The Portuguese were driven by the lust for gold. European commerce
was then hobbled by a lack of specie; so in addition to being a source of
personal riches, gold was as strategic an objective as oil would become in
our time. Africa was the main source then known; at that time, gold was
available to Europeans only through Berber and Tuareg middlemen who
brought it on camelback across the Sahara to markets on the North African
coast. The Portuguese wanted to get to the source, where they expected to
obtain gold more cheaply. Since the Berbers controlled the desert roads,
the only way to go was by sea. That was the objective for which Prince
Henry the Navigator mobilized the Portuguese voyages of exploration. Step
by step, from about 1434, Portuguese sailors dropped down the African
shore.
Sailing along the seafront of the vast Sahara, the Portuguese arrived in
1450 at the mouth of the Gambia River, which was deep enough to give
their small ships access to the interior. Rowing and sailing upriver brought
them closer than they suspected to Prince Henry’s dream, but they did not
find the mines. So, like the explorers in the New World, they constantly
asked where gold came from and how to get there. They initially thought
that the then still mythical city of Timbuktu was the source. Timbuktu was
Africa’s El Dorado. No one from Europe had yet been there. Unlike El
The African Roots of American Blacks 81