25 results
The History of the Baga in Early Written Sources*
- P.E.H. Hair
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- Journal:
- History in Africa / Volume 24 / January 1997
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- 13 May 2014, pp. 381-391
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The extent of secure knowledge of the past of the groups of people known in scholarly literature as Baga is inconsiderable. This is in part because of the limited European interest in past times in the Baga homeland (on the coast of the post-colonial state of Guinée), and also in part because of limited scholarly investigations in recent times (the post-colonial state did not help by for long exiling or barring from access non-Marxist scholars).
Ethnographic and linguistic investigations have been undertaken only since the mid-nineteenth century and still amount to very little, with even less in print. Archeological investigations have yet to begin, apart from the brave attempt of Fred Lamp to date certain artefacts stylistically. As a result, in the 1990s the connotation and exact range of application of the term “Baga” remain unclear and the precise linguistic relationship of “the Baga language” with those neighboring languages that appear to form a language group is known only in outline. What this means that it is impossible to sum up the earlier history of the Baga briefly. The reader who continues and bravely tackles the listing and discussion of sources that follows will, however, be able to assess how much of the history can be securely reconstructed.
It is understandable that the desire to construct a history for the Baga has latterly turned on the interpretation of oral traditions. Such traditions now preferred by the Baga—or at least by certain sections, strata, or individuals—are patently of great interest to the anthropologist inasmuch as they depict what the present-day Baga, or some of them, wish to see as their past history and thus throw light on contemporary ideology and popular mindsets.
Attitudes to Africans in English Primary Sources on Guinea up to 1650
- P.E.H. Hair
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- History in Africa / Volume 26 / January 1999
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- 13 May 2014, pp. 43-68
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This essay investigates the attitudes to Black Africans, specifically those of Guinea, as evidenced in the pre-1650 primary sources on Anglo-African relations. Two 1980s studies by scholars working within the field of English literature have investigated English attitudes of the period to Africans in general and have expounded what are apparently popular as well as academically-received conclusions, as follows. Contact with Africans and with the existing Atlantic slave trade, building on older ideas of the meaning of “blackness” and the inferiority of non-Christians, led the pre-1650 English to create a stereotype of barbarous and bestial Blacks which served to justify the enslavement of Africans and English slave-trading. Both studies are based in the main on an analysis of English drama of the period, with passing reference, for instance, to the Othello controversy. Historians are bound to have reservations about the extent to which imaginative literature can inform on historical process and collective attitudes, perhaps not least in respect of the category of theatrical drama, especially when the drama is presented, as in this period, to a tiny segment of a national society. As it happens, these particular studies, while exemplary in their fashion, can be criticized for too limited a critical investigation of the primary non-imaginative sources, resulting in minor errors of fact and, more important, general statements about Anglo-African contacts less than wholly valid. They also treat their subject too narrowly, tearing out what they see as a “racist” stereotype from the context of English cultural relationships in the period, which, in the time-honored and universal way of cultural self-protection, inevitably tended to discriminate against all non-English ways and manners, overtly or covertly.
“Elephants for Want of Towns:” The Interethnic and International History of Bulama Island, 1456–1870
- P.E.H. Hair
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- History in Africa / Volume 24 / January 1997
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- 13 May 2014, pp. 177-193
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Bulama (otherwise Bolama) Island is the furthest inshore member of the Bissagos Islands, off the West African coast, in the present-day state of Guiné-Bissau. On the east side of the wide estuary of Rio Jeba, it stands near the mouth of Rio Balola. Small, low-lying, partly surrounded by sandbanks and swamps, often uninhabited, and considered by whites scenically attractive but very unhealthy, Bulama has appeared in historical records with disproportionate frequency. It may have been noted during the earliest stages of Portuguese “Discovery;” two centuries on, it was investigated by the French. It was later the locality of a disastrous British settlement, the proposed home for a colony of African-Americans, and for sixty years the site of a colonial capital; and it was the subject of a well-meant arbitration by a President of the U.S.A. Finally, it was the center for an international conference on its own past, held in 1990. That past, of little importance in itself, nevertheless provides a keyhole glimpse of much of the history of the western Guinea coast over four centuries.
Our knowledge of the earlier history of the island of Bulama is slight and depends on European sources. The region of the estuary of Rio Jeba—or “Rio Grande” as it was originally known—was first visited by Europeans in the 1450s. The earliest Portuguese ship to arrive was probably the one on which a certain Diogo Gomes traveled, the date probably 1456. The account of this voyage, as edited by a contemporary scholar in the 1490s from the oral narrative of Diogo Gomes in old age, indicates that the Portuguese landed at a point along Rio Jeba and saw wild animals: deer, elephants, and crocodiles.
Aspects of the Prehistory of Freetown and Creoledom*
- P.E.H. Hair
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- History in Africa / Volume 25 / 1998
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- 13 May 2014, pp. 111-118
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The immediate circumstances which led up to the founding of Freetown in the 1790s were highly contingent, even freakish. Christopher Fyfe has stressed the role of the scientist and dubious adventurer, Henry Smeathman, in publicizing the misguided view that the Sierra Leone district provided an ideal ecological environment for settlement. More recently, Stephen Braidwood has shown that the 1787 choice of Sierra Leone as a suitable locality for settlement by the Black Poor of London, the earliest settlers, came about as a result of acceptance of Smeathman's view, not by the white philanthropists and politicians who masterminded the exodus of the Black Poor, but by the London Blacks themselves—who knew nothing of Sierra Leone from personal experience but were convinced by Smeathman's rhetoric. That the Blacks were allowed to insist on their choice might itself be regarded as freakish.
Yet, seen in a wider historical context, the foundation of Freetown, and the subsequent development of the community eventually termed “Creole,” appear less accidental and extraordinary. Why, for instance, did Smeathman chose Sierra Leone for his butterfly-collecting on his only visit to Africa? Presumably it was because he was aware that he could obtain the support and protection of the trading settlements in the Banana Islands, on Sherbro Island, and along the coast between—settlements which had been established in earlier decades by the English-speaking families of the Caulkers, Parkers, and Tuckers, families whose very names (even if corrupted from African names) point back to the later seventeenth century and the activities on this coast of the Royal African Company. And perhaps Smeathman had read John Newton's published account of his early career as a resident trader on the same coast which, although full of complaints about his treatment by his African employers, at least showed that a white could survive there.
The Early Sources on Guinea
- P.E.H. Hair
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- History in Africa / Volume 21 / 1994
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- 13 May 2014, pp. 87-126
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The Guinea coast and near interior was a region of almost wholly preliterate societies before the coming of the Europeans. Islamic culture, with its literate strands, which had been spreading through the northern parts of West Africa over many centuries had barely begun to touch the Guinea region—although a handful of literate itinerant merchants and missionaries was to be encountered by the Portuguese, and Islamic religious practice had penetrated at least one royal court in Senegal. Hence the “medieval” sources in Arabic which are informative on the history of the Sudanic states of West Africa tell us little or nothing about the Guinea region. As for the oral traditions of the region, mostly collected only since 1850, these have an inbuilt “horizon” of recollection which falls far short of the arrival of the Europeans five centuries ago. Ethnographic, cultural, and linguistic evidence, systematized in recent times, can be extrapolated backwards to earlier times, but this can only be done, with any security, when trends over time have been identified from earlier hard evidence.
Such trends can of course be obtained from archeology, as well as from written sources. But the limited investigations of archeologists in Guinea to date, while they certainly inform on general issues such as agriculture and technology, are as yet decidedly weak, for a variety of good reasons, on the regional details of human settlement and population, and on the varieties of political structure. Moreover it is doubtful whether archeology per se can inform to any significant extent on ethnicity, language, and social characteristics. It is therefore only marginally debatable to refer to the earliest European written sources on Guinea as “the early sources.”
Antera Duke of Old Calabar—A Little More About an African Entrepreneur
- P.E.H. Hair
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- History in Africa / Volume 17 / January 1990
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- 13 May 2014, pp. 359-365
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The reference to Antera Duke of Old Calabar in HA 16 (1989) encourages me to contribute a note on this historical notable.1 A gross imbalance exists in the scholarly study of black slavery. The shelves of academic libraries groan under the weight of books on black slavery in the Americas. Yet for every hundred books on trans-Atlantic black slavery and the Middle Passage, there is at best a single volume on black slavery in Africa. Moreover, the curt preliminary chapter dealing with slavery in Africa mandatory in books on black slavery in the Americas, not uncommonly limits itself to repeating anachronistic moralizing cliches that show little awareness of up-to-date Africanist knowledge of slavery in Africa—and exhibit little empathy with past African enterprise. There is some excuse. Any historical social process shared between preliterate and literate societies will inevitably have fuller and clearer source material in respect of the latter than in respect of the former. Information on black slavery in the Americas, on the Middle Passage, and on the non-African aspects of the procurement of slaves, is relatively abundant; information on the transmission of an individual African from an earlier non-slave situation, through the hands of Africans, to the point where he or she was handed over to non-Africans, is almost nonexistent. This being so, the publication in 1956 of the diary of an African slave trader, Antera Duke of Old Calabar, a diary covering the years from 1785 to 1788, was an outstanding historiographical event.
Barbot, Dapper, Davity: A Critique of Sources on Sierra Leone and Cape Mount
- P.E.H. Hair
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- History in Africa / Volume 1 / 1974
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- 13 May 2014, pp. 25-54
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It is over a decade since Professor Lawrence made a plea “for subjecting the sources for African history to that kind of critical appraisal which has customarily been applied to Greek and Roman authors.” Among Anglophone African historians, the plea has largely gone unheard. Could this conceivably be because critical source analysis is dull stuff for minds accustomed to the excitement of filling blank plains of African history with elephants of speculation and castles of moralistic stance? The opportunity provided by the reprinting of the standard sources has all too frequently been lost. One editor of an essential west African source is content to remark that the contemporary translation into English he is reprinting, considered together with another contemporary translation into French, are “all [sic], for the most part, considered faithful renditions of the original Dutch.” Standards of source-verification in published African history not uncommonly fall below the standards demanded in other fields of history; even reputable publishing houses occasionally produce works whose standards of historical enquiry are so low that they have been termed, unkindly but not altogether unjustly, “Academic Oxfam for Africa.” Perhaps a case does exist for speculation and commitment in African history, perhaps non-written sources may inform in detail as well as stimulate in general; but if the African historian dares to step outside the ivory tower of African studies, and is concerned that his subject be taken seriously by the historical profession as a whole, he must perform his exercises on the common ground of historical enquiry. This means that he must include a measure of dull critical analysis of written sources. Professor Shepperson once suggested that the time had come for more ‘dull’ African history: the present paper is intended as a contribution to this and to no other good cause.
J.W. Davidson at Cambridge University: Some Student Evaluations
- George Shepperson, P.E.H. Hair, Doug Munro
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- History in Africa / Volume 27 / January 2000
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- 13 May 2014, pp. 215-227
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Before arriving in Canberra in 1950 as the foundation Professor of Pacific History at the Australian National University, J.W. (Jim) Davidson (1915-1973) was an Oxbridge don and author of a small book on The Northern Rhodesian Legislative Council (1948). A New Zealander by birth and upbringing, Davidson arrived at Cambridge in late 1938 on a Strathcona Scholarship and embarked on a PhD dissertation at St John's College, becoming a Fellow in 1945 and from 1 January 1947, a University Lecturer in Colonial Studies. While the formal details are easily established, little of substance is known about Davidson's activities at Cambridge. As Davidson's biographer-to-be, I was fortunate to receive a letter from P.E.H. Hair, one of Davidson's undergraduate students at Cambridge, who learned of my work from a footnote in one of my journal articles. Hair put me in contact with a fellow Davidson student, George Shepperson, which led to another fruitful correspondence.
Davidson is well known as the founding father of modern Pacific Islands historiography, and perhaps even better known as a Constitutional Advisor and Consultant to various Pacific territories approaching independence or self-government. These aspects of his life have been amply documented, not least by Davidson himself. A largely unknown aspect of Davidson's career is his undergraduate teaching: after all, he spent most of his working life at an institution devoted to research and postgraduate supervision, unfettered by the demands of undergraduate teaching. With this in mind, and with their permission, it was decided to publish the recollections of Paul Hair and George Shepperson of Jim Davidson as their History tutor at John's.
Research Projects and Conferences
- P.E.H. Hair
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- History in Africa / Volume 1 / 1974
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- 13 May 2014, pp. 167-169
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Scholars working on the pre-1700 history of the Guinea coast find invaluable the series of bilingual editions of early Portuguese texts (Gomes, Pacheeo Pereira, Fernandes) issued at Dakar and Bissau in the 1950s by a group of French and Portuguese scholars. A fourth early text, that of Zurara, was very competently edited in French by L. Bourdon and published in Dakar in 1960. These texts can be reinforced and supplemented by the collection of documents published in many volumes by Fr. António Brásio since 1952. Earlier editions of Guinea texts of this vintage were much less satisfactory, largely because the editors lacked knowledge of the African background. This criticism applied to texts presented in Portuguese (Cadamosto, Almada, Lemos Coelho), in Dutch (De Marees and Ruiters), and in English (Cadamosto and Pacheeo Pereira). In more recent years, while there has been a flood of reprints, mostly unedited, there has been a lull in the publication of volumes of edited texts. However, shorter texts have recently been examined–in Thilmans' 1971 analysis of a section of Dapper's work, and in a number of papers by Avelino Teixeira da Mota, which have included materials from the project about to be described.
Some Minor Sources for Guinea, 1519-1559: Enciso and Alfonce/Fonteneau
- P.E.H. Hair
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- History in Africa / Volume 3 / 1976
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- 13 May 2014, pp. 19-46
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The earliest detailed account of Upper Guinea was written by Cadamosto, probably in 1463, and published in Italian in 1507. In the decade 1500-1509, a more detailed account was compiled by Valentim Fernandes, and a similar account of the whole Guinea coast was prepared by Pacheco Pereira—but neither of these Portuguese works was published in the sixteenth century, and even Portuguese writers of the period do not appear to have seen the manuscripts. Late fifteenth century roteiros (guides to nautical routes, “rutters” in sixteenth century English) also remained in manuscript, but being in regular use were more easily borrowed and copied: detailed roteiros for Guinea certainly contributed to Pacheco Pereira's text, and less detailed information from roteiros seems t o have trickled through to some of the non-Portuguese sources we are about to discuss. The position regarding maps was very similar; thus, non-Portuguese writers on Guinea during the first half of the sixteenth century had available the following limited sources of information: (a) references, mainly mythological, in ancient and classical accounts of Africa—e.g., Herodotus, Pliny, and Ptolemy; (b) Cadamosto's account, after its publication in 1507; (c) later experience of seamen in Guinea, passed on orally, or from notes and roteiros not now extant; (d) maps based on some or all of the above sources.
Portuguese Documents on Africa and Some Problems of Translation
- P.E.H. Hair
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- History in Africa / Volume 27 / January 2000
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- 13 May 2014, pp. 91-97
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In 1983 a note in History in Africa described a survey of Portuguese archive documents on West Africa organized by Vice-Admiral Avelino Teixeira da Mota but left stranded by his untimely death in 1982. The task of continuing the project—by extending the survey, completing the transcription of the survey documents and other relevant material, and publishing the transcripts—has latterly been taken up by the present successor of Teixeira da Mota in the directorship of the same scholarly unit, Dr Maria Emilia Madeira Santos. The first two volumes of Portugaliae Monuments Africana appeared in 1993 and 1995, volume 3 has been at the press since 1997, and the material for at least two more volumes is in advanced preparation. As the title shows, the geographical range of the series is wider than that of the original survey. The documents appear in Portuguese (or occasionally Latin). But a brief summary of each document is supplied in French and English, as well as in Portuguese, making the contents to some extent accessible even to those African historians who do not read (late-medieval) Portuguese. Having translated into English some thousand or so of these document summaries, I now discuss some of my problems in translating, and hence certain problems for African historians in using this material.
PMA earns all those responsible the highest commendation for undertaking this difficult project; it is invaluable for that period of early African-European contacts it progressively covers; and it deserves the support of the scholarly community. The comments that follow are intended to make it better known and to explain some of its features, advantages and limitations.
A Note on French and Spanish Voyages to Sierra Leone 1550–1585
- P.E.H. Hair
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- History in Africa / Volume 18 / 1991
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- 13 May 2014, pp. 137-141
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Writing in the 1590s about Sierra Leone, André Alvares de Almada, a Cape Verde Islands trader who had probably at one time visited Sierra Leone, commended its peoples for being “unfriendly to the English and French,” not least by fighting John Hawkins—the latter remark obviously a reference to Hawkins' well-known visit in 1567/68. But when did the French visit Sierra Leone? Elsewhere I have cited the evidence for three French voyages to the Sierra Leone estuary in the later 1560s, probably in 1565, 1566, and 1567. I now analyze archive material published in two French works that appeared long ago but are probably little known to Africanists, since both concentrate on voyages to the Americas. The first source calendars items in the registres de tabellionage (notarial registers) of the Normandy port of Honfleur relating to intercontinental voyages, the items being mainly financial agreements made before or after voyages. Dates, names of ships, and destinations are supplied for the period from 1574 to 1621: what proportion of all intercontinental voyages from Honfleur during that period is represented in the registers is uncertain. But in the eleven years between 1574 and 1584, there are recorded 24 voyages to both Guinea and America, the ships proceeding across the Atlantic from Africa. The American destination is usually described as “Indes de Pérou,” meaning the Caribbean. The African destination of 15 named vessels making 19 voyages is “Serlione” or “coste de Serlion,” in 15 instances given singly, otherwise with the addition of “et Guinée,” “et Guinée et coste de Bonnes-Gens,” or “et cap de Vert et coste de Mina.” The remaining voyages were to “Guinée,” to “cap de Vert [Cape Verde, i.e. Senegal],” to “cap des Bonnes-Gens” [Ivory Coast], or to more than one of these.
An Inquiry Concerning a Portuguese Editor and a Guinea Text
- P.E.H. Hair
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- Journal:
- History in Africa / Volume 18 / 1991
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- 13 May 2014, pp. 427-429
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When in 1985 I issued an English translation of the 1684 version of the Description of Guinea by Francisco de Lemos Coelho, I referred to the 1973 annotated French translation of one chapter by Nize Isabel de Moraes, and I noted that this included a brief statement to the effect that “une publication de la seconde version, en portugais actualisé, fut entreprise en Lisbonne en 1937 (Inéditos Coloniais, sér. A, num. II).” This statement puzzled me, since the 1953 edition of the Portuguese texts of both versions, by Damiãlo Peres, said nothing about a previous edition, leaving the reader to suppose that the 1953 edition represented the first time these accounts by Lemos Coelho had found their way into print. However, since the reference by Nize Isabel de Moraes was a little imprecise (why “fut entreprise” rather than “fut imprimé,” for instance?), and since I have never been able to see her thesis, which originally contained the French translation and may give additional information about the 1937 enterprise, it has taken me some years to confirm that there was indeed an earlier edition and an earlier editor—albeit in rather curious circumstances, about which I would like to learn more.
The Periplus of Hanno in the History and Historiography of Black Africa
- P.E.H. Hair
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- Journal:
- History in Africa / Volume 14 / 1987
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- 13 May 2014, pp. 43-66
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The Periplus of Hanno describes a purported Carthaginian voyage down the coast of western Africa—a voyage to as far as Guinea in the opinion of some scholars. The brief text is of doubtful and at best partial historical authenticity; and in any case its account of the later part of the voyage concentrates on a few episodes of high drama and exotic observation, at the expense of those other detailed particulars which might have made the Periplus, if historical, an informative as well as unique documentary source on black Africa in the first millennium B.C.. At least as far as black Africa is concerned, it must be questioned whether the Periplus is worth a fraction of the intensive scholarly effort that has been spent on it during the past four hundred years.
Current debate among ancient historians and classical philologists turns on the nature of the Periplus: is it wholly fiction? or, if fact, is it fact fictitiously extended and embellished? or, a third possibility, is it fact dramatically and perhaps intentionally summarized and slanted? But from the point of view of the historian seeking to obtain information about early sub-Saharan Africa in general and west Africa in particular, this debate can be by-passed (hence the present paper does not need or attempt to comprehend, pursue, or augment the detailed scholarly arguments and evidence available in the literature). For whether based on fact or not, the Periplus is patently a piece of literature of a kind which does not afford precise historical information.
The Teixeira da Mota Archive and the Guinea Texts Project
- P.E.H. Hair
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- Journal:
- History in Africa / Volume 10 / 1983
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- 13 May 2014, pp. 387-394
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Avelino Teixeira da Mota, who died on 1 April 1982 (obituary, The Times, 23 April 1982), was most widely renowned in international scholarship for his contributions to the history of maps and navigation during the period of the Portuguese “Discoveries.” But at the heart of his studies was Africa. His service in Guiné between 1945 and 1957, largely in a hydrographic survey, and in Lisbon as director of the Early Maps Unit from 1959, led him to issue a stream of publications on Africa--mainly west Africa and within that region mainly western Guinea--first through the Centro de Estudos da Guiné Portuguesa at Bissau, then through the Agrupamento (now Centro) de Estudos de Cartografia Antiga. As well as publishing copiously himself, Teixeira da Mota encouraged and edited the writings of many other Africanists. Aged only 61 when he died (suddenly, though after a long debilitating disorder that he thought he had overcome), and with more than 120 books and articles published, Teixeira da Mota had planned and announced many more publications. One list of proposed publications appeared in the apologia pro vita sua which he inserted at the start of his 1977 tri-lingual edition of Donelha's “Account of Sierra Leone.” Africanists, as they express deep respect and unbounded admiration for what this serving naval officer--a natural scholar with no university training— achieved, will understandably be wondering what now happens to the further publications he planned.
At the request of Admiral Teixeira da Mota's widow, Senhora Maria de Lourdes Teixeira da Mota, I visited Lisbon in June 1982; and I also discussed the future of the Africanist papers and documentation left by Teixeira da Mota, with Dr. Ignácio Guerreiro of the Centro de Estudos de Cartografia Antiga (in the absence overseas of the new director, Professor Luís de Albuquerque) and with Commandante António Estácio dos Reis of the Navy Museum.
Was Columbus' First Very Long Voyage A Voyage from Guinea?
- P.E.H. Hair
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- Journal:
- History in Africa / Volume 22 / January 1995
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- 13 May 2014, pp. 223-237
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In 1492 Columbus made a non-stop voyage, on the high seas of the Atlantic, between the Canary Islands and an uncertain island off the coast of America, a distance of some 3,100 nautical miles. But there is a strong likelihood that he had earlier traveled on a voyage which may also have been non-stop on the Atlantic high seas and yet been even longer. According to casual references, made in notes apparently either written or authorized by Columbus himself, he had, at an unstated date, seen and perhaps been within the castle of São Jorge da Mina in Guinea. Assuming for the purposes of further discussion that this interpretation of the notes is correct, he had therefore sailed to Mina (Elmina in present-day Ghana), most probably, it is generally thought, between 1482 and 1484, not long after the Portuguese founded the fort. He must have sailed in some capacity aboard a Portuguese vessel, possibly as a trader, if not as a mariner.
Although not otherwise recorded, the voyage to Mina is plausible since it occurred during the period of nearly ten years in which Columbus was employed within the Portuguese sphere. Little is known of his activities in this period but it is evidenced that he worked at one stage as a trader and made voyages in the 1470s to the Madeira group, where he resided for a time. When he traveled to America his descriptions of features there were not infrequently in terms of comparisons with features of Guinea, indicating that he was to some extent informed about the latter region and suggesting, perhaps strongly, that he had visited certain parts, as I noted in an earlier paper.
The Cowboys: A Nigerian Acculturative Institution (ca. 1950)
- P.E.H. Hair
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- History in Africa / Volume 28 / 2001
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- 13 May 2014, pp. 83-93
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From 1952 to 1955 I carried out field research in eastern Nigeria, centered at Enugu, and I wrote the paper below, with the present title, before leaving Nigeria, which to my regret I have never revisited. It is reproduced with a very slightly edited text (but added explanatory footnotes), since it now supplies a twofold historical testimony, first, to an African situation, and second, to the discourse interests (and terminology) of an expatriate “colonialist,” a British academic historian, half a century ago. In the paper I commented on the first. I now let the second speak for itself. The article should incite Nigerian scholars—or ex-Cowboys—to question, correct, enlarge, and update my account.
Columbus from Guinea to America
- P.E.H. Hair
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- History in Africa / Volume 17 / January 1990
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- 13 May 2014, pp. 113-129
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yo e andado veynte y tres años en la mar.y ví todo el levante y poniente,…y e andado la Guinea…
The first world empire (truly one on which the sun never set) was created by the union of the crowns of Portugal and Spain in 1580. If the events immediately leading up to the union were unexpected and contingent, the creation of a global hegemony had been adumbrated nine decades earlier, with the almost simultaneous voyages, to west and to east, of Christopher Columbus and Vasco da Gama. What lay behind these voyages on the parts of Portugal and Spain, and hence the respective claims of these nations to have set in motion the process which led to world empire, form the background theme of this paper.
Concentration on the heroic figures of Vasco da Gama and Columbus has often prevented historians from appreciating the significance of earlier developments. Writers discussing Columbus and the consequent impact of Spain on the Americas regularly fail to lay sufficient weight on the seventy years of previous Portuguese discovery of the coast of Africa, and therefore on the consequent Portuguese grapplings with the political, economic, and moral problems of culture contact and imperial policy in an Outer Continent. Equally, historians of the Portuguese imperial effort, eager to reach the better-evidenced complexities of the Lusitanian contact with Asia, tend to neglect, not only the Portuguese effort in the South Atlantic, but also the rival Castilian effort in the same ocean—an effort that preceded Columbus and paralleled, to some extent, the deeds of Portugal. Yet, within Iberia the two kingdoms, Portugal and Castile (the latter in process of generating the new kingdom of Spain), were in close and involved contact, not least because the territorial shape of each in the 1490s had only been hammered out during the preceding one hundred years. There is thus a strong case for treating the global expansion of Iberia as a single process and not merely as two coincidental thrusts around the globe, ultimately in opposite directions.
Black African Slaves at Valencia, 1482-1516: An Onomastic Inquiry
- P.E.H. Hair
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- Journal:
- History in Africa / Volume 7 / 1980
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- 13 May 2014, pp. 119-139
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In 1964 the Spanish archivist and scholar, D. Vicenta Cortés, published summaries of a large number of entries in the Crown records of Valencia relating to the arrival of slaves between 1479 and 1516. Although about two thirds of the entries relate to lighter-skinned slaves - Guanche from the Canary Islands, Muslims and Jews from North Africa and other parts of Iberia, “blancos” apparently from the eastern Mediterranean - about one-third relate to black slaves or “negros.” Cortés described the legal and administrative context of the records but did not attempt a systematic analysis of the entries. However, she later usefully examined those relating to “negros” and offered a preliminary identification of stated provenances. In the present paper I consider the data on some 3,000 negros of stated Black African provenance, paying special attention to some 260 individuals whose provenance was given in terms of an ethnonym or narrowly located toponym and some 150 whose personal name in an African language was recorded. I note many instances where the Valencian data provide the earliest recorded documentation of an African ethnonym, while the anthroponyms are tabulated for study by field linguists.
As summarized and published by Cortés, the entries refer to some 5,400 Black Africans - the total of negros, apart from a handful stated to be from India or Brazil. This figure gives only a rough indication of the extent of the trade in Black Africans at Valencia during the period to which these entries apply, 1482-1516. About one hundred of the Africans were obtained, not more or less directly from Black Africa and normally via Lisbon, but from localities in North Africa or Iberia where it is likely that they had spent the greater part, if not all, of their lives.
Material on Africa (Other than the Mediterranean and Red Sea Lands) and on the Atlantic Islands in the Publications of Samuel Purchas, 1613–16261
- P.E.H. Hair
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- Journal:
- History in Africa / Volume 13 / 1986
- Published online by Cambridge University Press:
- 13 May 2014, pp. 117-159
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- Article
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In an earlier study I described the material on Morocco, the Saharan coast, sub-Saharan Africa, and the neighboring Atlantic islands, which appeared in Richard Hakluyt's collection of English voyages, in its two editions of 1589 and 1598-1600. Up to his death in 1616 Hakluyt continued to collect additional material for an intended third edition. This material passed to Samuel Purchas (1577-1626), an Essex and then London clergyman, who had already begun to collect and publish voyage material on his own account.
In 1613 Purchas published his Pilgrimage, which appeared again in progressively enlarged editions in 1614, 1617, and 1626. Pilgrimage presented a synthesis of contemporary knowledge of the outer continents, based on accounts of voyages and journeys to and descriptions of exotic lands, some of them published, others from manuscripts collected or inspected by Purchas, the whole notionally organized as a review of religious practices throughout the world. Although Pilgrimage cites a vast range of sources and sometimes quotes from them, the work is basically a summarizing of the sources in Purchas' own words. Of much greater interest, therefore, is Purchas' other major work, his masterpiece, his Pilgrimes, which appeared in 1625 in four very large volumes running to some 4000 pages. Pilgrimes is a collection of sources, on the model of Hakluyt's collection, though Purchas more frequently presents his sources in cut versions. The material covers voyages and journeys to all parts of the known world, and is not limited to English voyages--the major limitation being only the extent of material Purchas could lay his hands on.