Heinrich Barth is undoubtedly one of the greatest (if not the greatest) of the nineteenth-century European explorers of Africa. It is strange, however, that he seems to be familiar to a narrow group of specialists only, who focus on the history and anthropology of Sudanic Africa. Barth is mentioned indeed in the general histories of European exploration of Africa, albeit in passing, but his travel account is never consulted seriously when the subject is ‘European/Western encounters with Africa’ – and the same applies to many other German and continental European explorers, too. Equally striking is that there exists no modern comprehensive biography of Barth in English. Even in Germany, the most authoritative is still the one written by his brother-in-law Gustav Schubert and published in 1897.

In Barth's case, the reason for his marginality in the anglophone world is not the language, as he wrote his account in English. Nor is the reason the availability of his account: if the original English edition of 1857–8 is rare (not many copies were printed), the Centenary Edition published by Frank Cass in 1965 is by no means difficult to obtain. Yet one should not take the English version as definitive. Barth wrote his journal simultaneously in German and these two texts are not identical. They should be read together since there are remarkable differences in their contents, although these differences have not been surveyed systematically. The same applies to his notebooks and letters, which are scattered in various locations in Germany, Great Britain and France.

The true reasons for Barth's marginality are ideological. The first is the tendency amongst British and American scholars to consider continental Europe as irrelevant to the ‘Western’ experience, which is usually regarded as tantamount to the stereotypes of their own cultures. The second is that Barth is rather inconvenient to those scholars who tend to follow the lines of post-colonial theories guided by Edward Said's influential Orientalism (1978). The fact that a European ‘white male’ of the imperial age was willing to understand and to respect black Africans is perhaps considered too improbable, though Barth was definitely not unique in this respect.

The present volume includes fourteen contributions, both in French and in English, which are based on selected papers presented at an international conference which was held in Timbuktu in late 2004 to celebrate Barth's visit to the city 150 years earlier. A similar volume appeared in 1967, edited by Heinrich Schiffers, to coincide with the centenary of Barth's death. These two festschrifts do not overlap with each other. The emphasis in the present volume is on Barth's influence in the development of European historiography and ethnography of Africa. There are many important questions and conclusions which are not limited to the personality of Barth only but concern the research in the history of European encounter and exploration of Africa in general. It is therefore most desirable that the present volume should reach a wider audience than the narrow confines of Barth's fan club.

Three contributions deserve particular attention. One is written by Achim von Oppen, a descendant of Barth's sister Mathilde, who analyses the tension between the texts and illustrations in Barth's account. Those who have seen the original English and German editions of 1857–8 have certainly admired the colourful plates skilfully drawn by the artist Martin Bernatz. Yet Barth himself was less happy with Bernatz's illustrations. The second is written by Georg Klute, who discusses Africans’ knowledge of the wider world according to Barth's account, which contains many references to Africans who were familiar with news from the Mediterranean and eager to expand their knowledge of Europe. This question – the extent of pre-colonial African knowledge of the wider world – has been touched on superficially by other scholars, too, including myself, but it is still a blank area in research on the encounter and interaction between Africans and Europeans. The third is written by Muhammad S. Umar, who examines in an innovative way the extent to which Barth's account reflects and/or refutes Said's critique of the linkage between knowledge and power in the European discourses on the other.

Yet there is still one aspect of Barth which was not touched on in the volume edited by Schiffers and equally is not addressed in the present one. The biographical descriptions of Barth always tend to focus on his experiences before his great African voyage. Much less attention has been paid to his life after he had returned from Africa and finished his account in London. As is well known, Barth never returned to Africa but performed several brief and leisurely trips in northern Spain, Italy, Ottoman territories in the Balkans, and Asia Minor before he died in Berlin in 1865. These trips were all documented in books which are now forgotten. However, it would be worth examining Barth's behaviour during these trips, if only to see to what extent Africa and Africans had educated him as a traveller.