Gustav Nachtigal
Gustav Nachtigal (; born 23 February 1834 – 20 April 1885) was a German military surgeon and explorer of Central and West Africa. He is further known as the German Empire's consul-general for Tunisia and Commissioner for West Africa. His mission as commissioner resulted in Togoland and Kamerun becoming the first colonies of a German colonial empire. The "Gustav-Nachtigal-Medal", awarded by the Berlin Geographical Society, is named after him. Life and travels. Gustav Nachtigal, the son of a Lutheran pastor, was born at Eichstedt in the Prussian province of Saxony-Anhalt. His father died of Phthisis  pulmonum in 1839. After medical studies at the universities of Halle, Würzburg and Greifswald, he practiced for several years as a military surgeon. He worked in Cologne, Germany. Nachtigal contracted a lung disease and relocated to Annaba in Algeria in October, 1862. He travelled to Tunisia in 1863, where he studied Arabic, and took part as surgeon in several expeditions into Central Africa between 1869 and 1875. He returned to Germany and met Friedrich Gerhard Rohlfs. Rohlfs asked him to go to the Bornu Empire. He then would be commissioned by King Wilhelm I of Prussia to carry gifts to  Umar of Borno, sheik of the Bornu Empire, in acknowledgment of kindness shown to German travelers, such as Heinrich Barth. Nachtigal set out in 1869 from Ottoman Tripoli and accomplished his mission after a two years' journey. During this period, he visited Tibesti and Borku, regions of the central Sahara not previously known to Europeans. He traveled with eight camels and six men. From Bornu he traveled to Baguirmi, an independent state to the southeast of Bornu. From there, he proceeded to Wadai (a powerful Muslim kingdom to the northeast of Baguirmi) and to Kordofan (a former province of central  Sudan). Nachtigal finally emerged from his journey through the Sahel at Khartoum (then the centre of Turkish-Egyptian Sudan) in the winter of 1874, after having been given up as lost. His journey, described in his "Sahara and Sudan", earned him a reputation as a discoverer. In 1882, he was awarded the Royal Geographical Society's Founder's Gold Medal. After the establishment of a French protectorate over Tunisia, Nachtigal was sent as consul-general for the German Empire and remained there until 1884. Thereafter, he was appointed by Chancellor Otto von Bismarck as special commissioner for West Africa. Local  German business interests in that region began advocating for protection by the German Empire, after they had acquired huge properties in West Africa. Nachtigal’s task was to establish a claim for Germany, before the British could advance their own interests — and Togoland and Kamerun became Germany’s first colonial possessions. On his return, he died at sea aboard the gunboat off Cape Palmas on 20 April 1885 and was initially interred at Grand Bassam. In 1888 Nachtigal’s remains were exhumed and reburied in a ceremonial grave in Duala in front of the Kamerun colonial government building. Legacy. Along  with Heinrich Barth, Nachtigal has been regarded as the other important German explorer of Africa. Like Barth, Nachtigal was primarily interested in ethnography, and additionally in tropical medicine. His works stand out because of their wealth of details and because of his unbiased views of Africans. In contrast to most contemporary explorers, Nachtigal did not regard Africans as inferior to Europeans, as is reflected in his descriptions and choice of words. He had witnessed slave hunts performed by African rulers and the cruelties inflicted by them upon other Africans. The horror that he felt about these atrocities made him enter  colonial endeavors, because he believed that European domination of the African continent might stop slave hunting and slave keeping. Works. Original Publication English Translation