Victorian Studies

This article develops a cross-cultural and material analysis of the work of the East African Expedition of 1856-59, during which Richard Burton and John Speke "discovered" Lakes Tanganyika and Victoria. It explores the well-developed Arab-African trading network within which the EAE operated and suggests that the network, while facilitating the expedition's survey work, likewise circumscribed its findings. The result, best evidenced in the EAE's four published maps, was an attempt to efface the Arab-African basis of the expedition's cartography by writing the narrative of the EAE in place of existing Arab-African material and cultural reality. In this way the EAE's maps showcase the early development of a key imperial cartographical strategy that would, later in the century, have a profound impact on the colonial partitioning of Africa.