ABSTRACT
This chapter traces the origins of the idea of Africa, following its evolution thereafter in Renaissance thought. It shows that the notion of Africa as a continent arose among western cosmographers and cartographers when the cultural climate in Southern Europe allowed the three pieces of the ‘African puzzle’ to be perceived as a single distinct unit of homogeneous space. The modern historian Dana Bennett Durand is thus essentially right when she affirms that Renaissance cartography lasted until the nineteenth century. In the particular case of Africa, it would even be more precise to say that it gathered momentum until the last third of the nineteenth century. For the effective appearance of the idea of Africa as a continent, the expansion of the ecumene longitudinally proved to be insufficient. Guillaume Delisle reduced the still overestimated spread of the Mediterranean and established the longitudinal extent of the African landmass with remarkable accuracy.
