A critical study of geography handbooks for schools dating back to 1880, and centred on one aspect at human geography: physical variety and cultural differences. The author retraces the portrait of "the other man" as this has been presented to pupils. The handbooks express a very ethnocentric discourse, marked by determinism and social evolutionism. Large sections of the text are nothing else than justifications of colonialism in Central Africa. Darwinian theory on evolution has not been taken into account as an explanation of the diversity in humankind, the latter having been considered only under the angle of "race".