NAME: ______PER;______DATE:______

World History – The Traders Are Kidnapping Our People

King Leopold’s Ghost – Adam Hochschild (1998)

  1. What is the Mare Tenebroso?
  2. What region lay beyond the Mare Tenebroso described by medieval imagination?
  3. Less than 100’ in length this compact vessel excelled at sailing into the wind –
  4. Diogo Cao sailed towards an inlet – the fresh water torrent he sailed against was moving at what speed?
  5. The great river has carved a canyon in the ocean floor of what dimensions?
  6. A contingent of Portuguesebegan the first sustained contact between Europeans and a black African nation in what year?
  1. Whoever approached the ManiKongo had to do so in what position?
  2. What practice horrified the Europeans?
  3. What turned out to be “catastrophic” for Africa?
  4. Within a few decades of 1500 the Western Hemisphere became a “huge, lucrative, nearly insatiable market” for what?
  1. African slave-dealers ranged how far into the interior of the continent?
  2. Why were the trails to slave ports strewn with bleaching bones?
  3. The Gullah dialect spoken by black Americans in Georgia and South Carolina can be traced to what language?

(Skim the section on King Affonso I of Kongo to his letters on page 13 of the text)

  1. Affonso writes to King Joao III of Portugal that “our wish that this kingdom not” be used for what?
  2. What do the white men do with the captives once they are in their hands?
  3. How did King Joao respond to King Affonso’s concerns?
  4. Is there evidence that anti-Semitic attitudes had been brought to Africa?
  5. King Affonso sent 10 of his young relatives to Lisbon for education. What was their fate?
  6. By the end of the 1500s Portuguese slave traders had been joined by what other Europeans?
  7. The people of the Kongo believed a person’s skin turned the color of chalk as a result of?
  8. A 20th century oral historian recounted: “From that time to our days now, the whites have brought us nothing but?
  9. Africans believed the bones of their people were burned and the ash turned into ?
  10. American slavery was a means of turning the labor of black bodies into ?
  11. The Congo River feeds more fresh water per second into the ocean than any other river except?
  12. The Congo flows from a plateau 1,000 feet high and tumbles over how many cataracts/waterfalls?
  13. By the beginning of the 19th century (1800) what did Europeans know of the interior of Central Africa?
  14. In 1816 James Tuckey set off to find the headwaters of the Congo River. How many of his 54 men survived the attempt?
  1. Why did Africa become known as “the Dark Continent”?