Legacy
Gustav Nachtigal is regarded as the other great German explorer of Africa, in company with Heinrich Barth. Like Barth, Nachtigal was primarily interested in ethnography, and additionally in tropical medicine. His works stand out because of their wealth of details and above all because of his unbiased views of Africans. In contrast to most contemporary explorers, Nachtigal did not hold to the alleged inferiority of Africans; his convictions are clearly reflected in his descriptions and choice of words.
He had witnessed slave hunts performed by African rulers and the cruelties inflicted by them on other Africans. The horror that he felt about these atrocities made him enter colonial endeavors because he somewhat naively accepted that European domination of the African continent might stop slave hunting and slave keeping.
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“What is popularly called fame is nothing but an empty name and a legacy from paganism.”
—Desiderius Erasmus (c. 1466–1536)