Two Early Seventeenth-Century Sephardic Communities on Senegal's Petite Cote

Portuguese archives contain a wealth of documents that are insufficiently utilized by, and often unknown to, historians of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century west Africa. Lusophone sources are crucial for the period of earliest contact between Europeans and West Africans. While the publications of Avelino Teixeira da Mota are widely known, the work of contemporary Portuguese scholars such as Maria Emilia Madeira Santos, Maria Manuel Torrão, and Maria João Soares does not have the same visibility except among lusophone scholars. Relatively few Africanists have recognized the potential significance of the Portuguese archives for Senegambia, a region generally considered within the orbit of francophone or anglophone west Africa. The Portuguese archives remain a rich source of hitherto unknown documents, some of which will lead to fundamental transformations in our historical knowledge of the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Upper Guinea coast.The two of us have worked extensively on the history of the Luso-Africans in Senegambia and the Guinea of Cape Verde. Mark has investigated the construction and evolution of their identity. Horta, in particular, has for many years focused on their representation in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Portuguese sources. Both writers have argued elsewhere—following Boulègue and Moraes—that among these Luso-Africans—or “Portuguese” as they were known in contemporary sources—there were New Christians, some of whom were probably practicing Jews. Evidence of the Jewish presence in west Africa remained scanty, however, and we argued that if some “Christian” Portuguese were in fact practicing Jews, they were Jews primarily in the privacy of their own communities.

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Fact and fetish in creolization studies: Herskovits and the problem of induction, or, Guinea Coast, 1593

New West Indian Guide / Nieuwe West-Indische Gids ◽

10.1163/13822373-90002541 ◽

2002 ◽

Vol 76 (1-2) ◽

pp. 5-22 ◽

Cited By ~ 7

Author(s):

Bill Maurer

Keyword(s):

West Africa ◽

African Diaspora ◽

Scientific Revolution ◽

Slave Trade ◽

Scientific Work ◽

Guinea Coast ◽

Social Convention ◽

Cultural Elements ◽

History Of ◽

Different Parts

Focuses on the way Melville Herkovits used facts and facticity in his scientific work on creolization, and how these facts related to the theories in his work. Author relates this to the idea of fact as a stand-alone datum, or "fetish", independent of any theory for its existence. He describes how Herkovits in his work presented classifications of intensity of African retentions in different parts of the Americas, as well as of cultural elements, which Herkovits meant to be heuristic, yet, the author argues, seemed to precede the data. Further, the author discusses criticisms on this "economic anthropology". In addition, he sketches how the data as fetish, and related induction, developed out of the scientific revolution in Europe, separating arguments from facts, but also out of colonial ventures and the history of the slave trade in West Africa, making it a part of the study of creolization, of African slavery and the African diaspora. He points out, and applaudes, that Herkovits' theoretical stance changed from a strict empiricism to an awareness of the place of argument, or social convention, in the making of the facts themselves.

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The Impact of the Netherlandish Landscape Tradition on Poetry and Painting in Early Modern England*

Renaissance Quarterly ◽

10.1086/673585 ◽

2013 ◽

Vol 66 (3) ◽

pp. 866-903 ◽

Cited By ~ 1

Author(s):

Sara Trevisan

Keyword(s):

Seventeenth Century ◽

Early Modern ◽

Rare Case ◽

Early Modern England ◽

Historical Knowledge ◽

Complex Product ◽

Problematic Relationship ◽

History Of ◽

The Impact ◽

The Relationship

AbstractThe relationship between poetry and painting has been one of the most debated issues in the history of criticism. The present article explores this problematic relationship in the context of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England, taking into account theories of rhetoric, visual perception, and art. It analyzes a rare case in which a specific school of painting directly inspired poetry: in particular, the ways in which the Netherlandish landscape tradition influenced natural descriptions in the poem Poly-Olbion (1612, 1622) by Michael Drayton (1563–1631). Drayton — under the influence of the artistic principles of landscape depiction as explained in Henry Peacham’s art manuals, as well as of direct observation of Dutch and Flemish landscape prints and paintings — successfully managed to render pictorial landscapes into poetry. Through practical examples, this essay will thoroughly demonstrate that rhetoric is capable of emulating pictorial styles in a way that presupposes specialized art-historical knowledge, and that pictorialism can be the complex product as much of poetry and rhetoric as of painting and art-theoretical vocabulary.

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Further Considerations on the Sephardim of the Petite Côte

History in Africa ◽

10.1353/hia.2005.0010 ◽

2005 ◽

Vol 32 ◽

pp. 165-183 ◽

Cited By ~ 3

Author(s):

Tobias Green

Keyword(s):

Seventeenth Century ◽

West Africa ◽

Guinea Coast ◽

Documentary Sources ◽

Significant Step ◽

Extended Lifespan ◽

First Time ◽

Better Than ◽

Area Of Study

The publication in these pages of an article by Peter Mark and José da Silva Horta on the Sephardic communities of the Petite Côte in the early seventeenth century represents a significant step forward in our understanding of the Jewish presence in west Africa. Using previously unreferenced material, Mark and Horta have filled out for the first time the nature of this community, and in particular provided valuable evidence as to the group's connections with Lisbon and Amsterdam.This type of assiduous documentary research has long been needed for this topic. Although some Africanists have referred to the Jewish presence there, such references have tended to draw on the same few documentary sources. So though the work of Jean Boulegue, Antonio Carreira, and Nize Isabel de Moraes has been important in drawing the attention of Africanists to the Jewish presence in Senegambia, one can say that, in general, historians of the upper Guinea coast have not systematized the place of the Sephardim in discourses related to their area of study.Meanwhile, there is almost a complete absence of reference to the Jewish presence in west Africa among historians of the Sephardim. There are perhaps two overriding explanations for this lacuna. For one thing, these communities were comparatively small and did not have an extended lifespan, and it is of course natural that historians of the Sephardim should concentrate on the most important communities of the diaspora. For another, we suspect that the absence of their commentary on this subject is not entirely unrelated to fears as to what might be uncovered, since it is notorious that one of the major activities of Europeans in Africa at this time was slaving. The implication of a significant number of Sephardim being involved in this activity would not sit comfortably with the traditional interpretation of many historians of the Sephardim that their subjects were, essentially, victims of persecution, and that, where they were slave owners, they treated their charges much better than did Christians.

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Semper Aliquid Veteris: Printed Sources for the History of the Ivory and Gold Coasts, 1500–1750

The Journal of African History ◽

10.1017/s0021853700036653 ◽

1986 ◽

Vol 27 (2) ◽

pp. 215-235 ◽

Cited By ~ 5

Author(s):

Adam Jones

Keyword(s):

Seventeenth Century ◽

West Africa ◽

Primary Sources ◽

Critical Editions ◽

History Of ◽

The Relationship ◽

Printed Sources

Since completing my Ph.D. under John Fage in 1979 I have been working on critical editions of German, Dutch and French sources for the seventeenth-century history of West Africa. Many of these have been used uncritically, especially in the last twenty years. In my view it is wrong to cite such sources at all until one has at least attempted to establish the relationship between them. If one compares the whole corpus, one discovers a host of plagiarisms and other forms of interborrowing. At least half the Europeans who wrote about West Africa between 1500 and 1750 are known to have read the works of other authors. Using two chronological lists of publications which described the Ivory and Gold Coasts in this period, I seek to show that only a few can be regarded as purely ‘primary’ sources – mostly the ones which are least often cited.

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Takrūr The History of a Name

The Journal of African History ◽

10.1017/s002185370003632x ◽

1969 ◽

Vol 10 (3) ◽

pp. 365-374 ◽

Cited By ~ 14

Author(s):

'Umar Al-Naqar

Keyword(s):

Middle East ◽

West Africa ◽

Middle Eastern ◽

West African ◽

Generic Term ◽

West Africans ◽

History Of

The generic term Takarīr (also Takarna) is a popular Middle Eastern concept applied to all West African Muslims. The progenitor of the name, to which the attribution Takarīr is made, is the ancient state of Takrūr, which existed briefly on the Senegal basin from ca. a.d. 1OOO and which was the first West African chieftaincy to accept Islam. This paper suggests that probably the earliest West African Muslims to be seen in the Middle East in recognizable numbers may have come from that state. Because the milieu of the Hijaz and the diversity of races frequenting the annual pilgrimage ceremonies encouraged generalizations, the name Takarīr was conveniently applied to West Africans. The ambiguity of the term may thus be seen to have progressively increased with the expansion of Islam in West Africa, while the name itself became sufficiently entrenched in popular usage for it to survive the fame of great West African empires like Mali and Songhay. The term ‘Bilad al-Takrūr’ is essentially the extension of the Middle Eastern concept of Takrūr and has therefore received various territorial definitions.

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Dutch Caribbean

10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199227990.013.0008 ◽

2012 ◽

Cited By ~ 1

Author(s):

Henk den Heijer

Keyword(s):

Seventeenth Century ◽

West Africa ◽

Deep Water ◽

Slave Trade ◽

Passive Resistance ◽

Water Port ◽

Spanish Colonies ◽

History Of ◽

Dutch Caribbean ◽

New Phase

This article reviews scholarship on the history and historiography of slavery in the Dutch Caribbean. The history of the Dutch slave trade and slavery started a new phase with the Dutch West India Company's (WIC) seizure of Curaçao from the Spanish in 1634. Strategically located north of Venezuela and possessed of a superb deep-water port at Willemstad, the island would develop in little more than a decade into an important transit port for slaves destined for sale in the Spanish colonies. During the last quarter of the seventeenth century, Dutch interlopers from West Africa supplied most of the slaves offered for sale in the island of St Eustatius. Between 1719 and 1727 the WIC organized the island into an open slave market. The recent historiography of Dutch slavery has also dissolved crusted stereotypes of slave docility by detailing a range of ways, from passive resistance to open rebellion, that slaves countered dehumanization and altered the terms of their bondage.

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Agaja and the Slave Trade: Another Look at the Evidence

History in Africa ◽

10.2307/3171561 ◽

1976 ◽

Vol 3 ◽

pp. 57-67 ◽

Cited By ~ 7

Author(s):

David Henige ◽

Marion Johnson

Keyword(s):

West Africa ◽

Slave Trade ◽

Major Focus ◽

Guinea Coast ◽

Defensive Reaction ◽

Commercial Activities ◽

Single Exception ◽

History Of ◽

Eighteenth And Nineteenth Centuries ◽

Scholarly Attention

The Atlantic slave trade in its various manifestations has never lacked scholarly attention, be it disinterested or selfish. The major focus has often been on the motivations and roles of those who participated in the trade other than as victims. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, interest tended to be confined either to the apologists for the trade or to its critics; but in recent years, the matter has not failed to engage the attention of more serious enquiry.As a major center of the trade throughout the period, Dahomey has been studied extensively from the very beginning. Much of the work has regarded Dahomey as the slave trading state par excellence. Recently, however, I.A. Akinjogbin has advanced the stimulating and appealing argument that the Dahomey state was created partially, but explicitly, in defensive reaction to early signs of European interest in slaves on the Guinea coast. Akinjogbin further argues that–although Dahomey did in fact eventually develop into an important slave trading polity–it did so reluctantly and only because the Europeans trading along the coast demanded slaves–and only slaves–for their own goods.Needless to say, attractive arguments rather have a way of being more readily (and less discriminatingly) accepted, and Akinjogbin's interpretation of early Dahomey history has already re-appeared in several important recent works on the history of west Africa. With this in mind, the present paper has two purposes. First, it proposes to examine the validity of Akinjogbin's thesis by examining one particular aspect of his argument: the motives of the Dahomey ruler Agaja (ca. 1708 to 1740) in conquering the coastal states of Allada and Whydah between 1724 and 1727. In discussing Akinjogbin's elucidation of Agaja's motives, we propose to concentrate not so much on the logic of his argumentation, but on his use of the sources on which any assessment of Agaja's motives must be based. With a single exception the material examined here is the same used by Akinjogbin, and in this sense the first part of the paper should be seen as a study in the use of evidence and inference.The second part of this paper will be an examination of European and Dahomean commercial activities in the first few years after the conquest of the two coastal states. The sources describing these activities suggest that the motives and mechanisms of all parties were more complex than generally assumed.

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