German explorer renowned for his dramatic journeys across the deserts of North Africa. More an adventurer than a scientific explorer, Rohlfs nevertheless compiled valuable geographic information. He was also the first European known to have traversed Africa by land from the Mediterranean Sea south to the Gulf of Guinea.

Rohlfs entered the French Foreign Legion in 1855 and, after learning Arabic, began his explorations. In 1862, disguised as an Arab, he explored Morocco to the Atlas Mountains, and in 1864 he reached the Fezzan region of Libya, deep in the Sahara. The following year he began an immense journey through wholly unexplored regions, from Tripoli on the Mediterranean entirely across the Sahara to Bornu in what is now northeastern Nigeria and then down the Niger River to the Atlantic Ocean near Lagos, where he arrived in 1866. In 1873–74 he again explored the Sahara, traveling east from Tripoli to Egypt, and in 1878 he traveled to the Al-Kufrah (Kufrah, Al-) oasis in modern-day Libya. In 1885 he was named German consul to Zanzibar.