Parfait-Louis Monteil

Parfait-Louis Monteil (1855 – 29 September 1925) was a French colonial military officer and explorer who made an epic journey in West Africa between 1890 and 1892, travelling east from Senegal to Lake Chad, and then north across the Sahara to Tripoli.

Monteil was a graduate of the École spéciale militaire de Saint-Cyr. He served in Senegal, where his duties included cartographical surveys. In 1884 he was made a member of the Société de géographie de Paris and in 1886 became an officer of the society. He was influenced by the former governor of Senegal, Louis Faidherbe, whom he regularly visited in his apartment (where Faidherbe was confined by paralysis) in the middle 1880s.

Monteil served in the French protectorate of Annam, now part of Vietnam, from 1886 to 1888. He then spent time investigating a railway project to link Bafoulabé and Bamako in Senegal, before launching on his great journey across West Africa in 1890.

France, Britain, Germany, Portugal and Italy came to a broad agreement on the way in which they would divide up the continent of Africa at the 1884–1885 Berlin Conference. France gained primacy in the bulk of West Africa from Algeria and Tunisia south across the Sahara and the Sahel into the Sudanian Savanna. The other powers could extend their coastal colonies north from the Gulf of Guinea into the interior. In the case of Britain, these colonies included the Gambia, Sierra Leone, the Gold Coast (now Ghana), the Lagos colony and the territory claimed by the Royal Niger Company.

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