author
Association for Promoting the Discovery of the Interior Parts of Africa
An eighteenth-century British society better known as the African Association, it set out to answer some of Europe’s biggest questions about West Africa. Its expeditions helped shape the early era of African exploration, especially through its search for the Niger River and Timbuktu.
2 Audiobooks
Travels in Nubia
by John Lewis Burckhardt, Association for Promoting the Discovery of the Interior Parts of Africa
![Proceedings of the Association for Promoting the Discovery of the Interior Parts of Africa [1790]](https://listenly.io/api/img/6a1002abd526f8ed6efc25e6/cover.jpg)
Proceedings of the Association for Promoting the Discovery of the Interior Parts of Africa [1790]
by Association for Promoting the Discovery of the Interior Parts of Africa
About the author
Founded in London on June 9, 1788, the Association for Promoting the Discovery of the Interior Parts of Africa was a private British society devoted to exploring West Africa. It is more commonly known as the African Association.
The group was strongly associated with figures such as Sir Joseph Banks, and its stated goals included discovering the course of the Niger River and locating Timbuktu, which held a powerful place in the European imagination at the time. It sponsored a series of expeditions, including the journey of Mungo Park, whose travels became the Association’s most famous legacy.
Today, the Association is remembered as an important early force in British-sponsored African exploration. Its work also belongs to the wider history of empire and European curiosity about Africa, so modern readers often see it both as a landmark in exploration history and as part of a more complicated colonial story.