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The people of the British Isles and the people of Africa met for the first time when Britain was a cold province on the northern fringe of Rome’s intercontinental, multi-ethnic and multi-racial empire. We were colonized long before we became colonizers. Among the Roman citizens who settled in Britain, and serving in its Roman garrison, were people from the empire’s African provinces, as well as men and women from sub-Saharan Africa who had passed through the empire’s porous borders. Imperialism was the force that brought the first Africans to Britain, just as centuries later it would take thousands of Britons to Africa. Those Afro-Romans arrived in the British Isles during the third century AD, well over a thousand years before the first English sailors reached the shores of sub-Saharan Africa in the middle years of the sixteenth century.
We know about one group of Afro-Romans who were stationed in the North of England due to two pieces of evidence. The first appeared in 1934 in the little village of Beaumont, on the banks of the River Eden in Cumbria, when an altar stone was found in the foundations of an old cottage during its demolition. Carved into it was an inscription dedicated to the god Jupiter. It was written in the stylized and abbreviated Latin that was favoured by the Roman legions, and it recorded that in the middle of the third century, at the nearby Roman fortress of Aballava, a unit ‘of Aurelian Moors’ had been stationed.1
The Aurelian Moors, probably named in honour of Emperor Marcus Aurelius, had been raised in the North African provinces of the Roman Empire, which consisted of parts of what are today the states of Libya, Tunisia and Algeria – regions that were particularly racially diverse. Their base at the fortress of Aballava was one of the strongpoints sited at the western end of Hadrian’s Wall, which is occupied today by the little Cumbrian village of Burgh-by-Sands. At its centre stands the church of St Michael, the oldest parts of which were constructed from stone blocks harvested from Hadrian’s Wall itself, their origins betrayed by the telltale marks and striations left by the tools of Roman masons. The inscription found in Beaumont referenced the names of two Roman emperors, Valerian and Gallienus, which allows historians to establish the approximate date of the inscription, and therefore the presence of the Roman Africans in Britain, as lying between AD 253 and AD 258. The second piece of evidence that connects the Aurelian Moors to Hadrian’s Wall and the fortress of Aballava is a Notitia Dignitatum, a Roman register that lists the officials and dignitaries who visited the region, including a visit by the ‘prefect of the numerus [unit] of Aurelian Moors, at Aballava’.
The Beaumont inscription and the Notitia Dignitatum are among the small number of artefacts and inscriptions that between them record the presence of Africans at various Roman sites in Britain. Most are clustered along Hadrian’s Wall, the most strongly garrisoned region.2 Much of this evidence and most of these artefacts were available to historians writing on the black presence in Britain half a century ago, and new finds are extremely rare. However, in recent years a revolution in archaeology and forensic science has brought a remarkable and unexpected expansion in what is known about the presence of people of African descent in Roman Britain.
Key discoveries relate to some two hundred human remains that were discovered in York in finds made by chance over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. When the historian Peter Fryer wrote his book Staying Power in 1984 he noted that among the skeletons exhumed were several ‘whose limb proportions suggest that they were black Africans’.3 Thirty years later and forensic science has confirmed what in the 1980s was a mere suspicion. The innovation that is transforming our understanding of the presence of African peoples in Roman Britain is the process of radioisotope analysis, a technique that uses oxygen and strontium isotopes to detect chemical signatures in bones and teeth. This allows archaeologists to determine where individuals originated and where they spent their childhood years. By means of these techniques, we can distinguish individuals born and brought up in hot climates from those who come from colder regions, and establish whether remains unearthed in Britain belong to locals or outsiders. This powerful new tool has enabled archaeologists to identify the patterns of mobility and migration within ancient populations; skeletons excavated decades ago are suddenly able to tell their stories. When applied to Roman remains, long ago excavated and stored in the vaults and basements of British museums and universities, isotope analysis continues to reveal new evidence for the settlement in Britain of people from Roman North Africa and beyond.
Isotope analysis has worked best when combined with craniometrics, the measuring of tiny details and proportions in the human skull. When cranial analysis was carried out by the University of Reading’s Department of Archaeology a number of the two hundred or so skulls excavated in York were found to be of mixed ethnic ancestry. The remains of these citizens of Roman York were also subjected to isotope analysis, and while most of those examined displayed European ancestry, some 11 to 12 per cent proved to have been of African descent. That the remains studied came from two different burial sites, one of them used to bury poorer people and the other reserved for York’s wealthier residents, suggests not only that there were significant numbers of people of North African ancestry living in Roman York, but that they moved in all levels of society.
The now famous Ivory Bangle Lady is perhaps the most significant individual to have emerged from the work on third-century York’s citizens. She was discovered in 1901 in a stone sarcophagus buried in a site near to Sycamore Terrace, an everyday street in the city. On one of the shards of bone had been carved the inscription SOROR AVE VIVAS IN DEO, which translates as ‘Hail sister, may you live in God’, and suggests that she may have been a Christian. In her sarcophagus were a number of luxury grave goods: some blue glass beads, fragments of five bone bracelets, silver and bronze lockets, two yellow glass earrings, two marbled glass beads, a small round glass mirror and a blue glass perfume bottle.4 The presence of these objects suggests that she was a woman of high social status, from the upper strata of Roman York, a settlement then known as Eboracum. The most telling of her grave goods were two bracelets, one made of jet stone, which probably came from Whitby on the north-east coast of England, the other made of African ivory.
The geographic range from which her grave goods had been drawn was, it later proved, reflective of her own ancestry. In 2009, sixteen centuries after her death, the remains of the Ivory Bangle Lady were subjected to radioisotope analysis, and precise measurements taken of her skull and skeleton. The chemical signature deposited by the food and drink she had consumed in her childhood, and the measurements of her skeleton, suggest that this high-status citizen of Roman York is likely to have been a mixed-race woman of North African descent, and that either she, or her parents or grandparents, had come from Mediterranean North Africa. She had been between eighteen and twenty-three years old when she died, although the cause of death was unclear. Her mobility across the empire is suggestive of a woman who was connected to the Roman army, as whole families moved to accompany men posted in distant provinces and York was a significant military settlement. Relocations from the provinces in North Africa to those of northern England were not unknown, and others have been recorded. Subsequent work on other remains is now demonstrating that Roman Britain was a society of far greater racial diversity than had been presumed.5 The mobility that was a feature of the late Roman Empire may well have meant that parts of third-century Eboracum may well have been more ethnically and racially diverse than parts of York today in the twenty-first century.
Another equally remarkable discovery was recently made in the seaside town of Eastbourne, on the south coast of England. Again it involved the reassessment and analysis of remains that had been excavated decades earlier, and again an Afro-Roman woman was discovered. In 2012 local archaeologists in Eastbourne began to work their way through a collection of skeletons that had been locally excavated from the late nineteenth century up until the 1990s. One skeleton – almost complete – was stored in a box labelled ‘Beachy Head’, by earlier generations of archaeologists. The remains were those of a young woman, only around five feet tall and probably in her early twenties at the time of death, but there was little to indicate when she might have lived. The skeleton of the ‘Beachy Head Lady’, as she was dubbed, was one of twelve sent for radioisotope analysis to determine if they had been born locally. The archaeologists, led by Heritage Manager Jo Seaman, arranged for a forensic facial reconstruction to be carried out by Professor Caroline Wilkinson, a leading figure in the field. Professor Wilkinson was able to tell, merely by looking at the skull, and before she had begun the minute measurements that underpin her work, that the skull of the Beachy Head Lady was that of a sub-Saharan African. The process of radiocarbon dating placed the Lady as having lived around AD 125 to 245, and the results of the radioisotope analysis confirmed that she had spent much of her childhood in the southeast of England.
The Beachy Head Lady was therefore a second-or third-century Afro-Roman who had been brought up in the south of England and had either been born in that region or was brought there very young, possibly from Africa. The radioisotope analysis also suggested that she was well nourished in her youth, having had a diet rich in fish and vegetables, details that were encoded in the chemicals of her teeth. The facts that those teeth were in good condition, that she had enjoyed a healthy diet and was discovered laid out carefully in her grave go to suggest that in life she had not served in a lowly position, or lived as a slave. Over a millennium before the British people began their ‘years of distant wandering’ and empire-building the Beachy Head Lady – the first black Briton known to us – had lived and died in rural East Sussex, by the Channel coast with its white cliffs and green rolling hills.
From the fall of the Western Roman Empire in the fifth century AD to the beginning of Europe’s Age of Exploration a millennium later, the British Isles, like the rest of Europe, were largely cut off from Africa and her people. The collapse of Rome marked the end of an era of extraordinary connectivity and mobility. The intercontinental pathways that had made it possible for the Ivory Bangle Lady and the Beachy Head Woman to settle in the British Isles were wiped away. In the seventh century the rise of Islam further broadened the gulf between Africa and Europe. As the Arabs expanded along the coast of North Africa the new states they created became a political, religious, military and cultural barrier spreading northward of the physical barrier of the Sahara.6 For the next millennium contact and interchange between Africans and Europeans was mediated by the Arab traders who controlled the caravan routes across the Sahara.
Despite this, the archaeological record and a handful of archival sources reveal that there were tiny numbers of people of African heritage travelling to and living in Britain in the medieval age. Yet while, for most Britons, Africans were no longer encountered face to face as individuals, as they had been during the Roman era, this did not mean that Africans vanished beneath their mental horizon. Both the people and their continent continued to reside within the realms of myth, legend and scripture. Africa was, after all, a land of the Bible, and through the books of the Old Testament, the African continent – the Nile Valley and the land of Ethiopia in particular – remained present in the minds of medieval scholars and was discussed by the priests and monks whose cathedrals and monasteries were the great centres of learning. Just as important were the texts of the classical world, as it was through these ancient writings that medieval Europe’s tiny educated elite were able to read travel accounts that described the geography of Africa and portrayals of the nature and reputed habits of her people. Medieval Europe knew that not only had the Greeks and Romans reached sub-Saharan Africa, but black people from those regions had moved north and been part of Greek and Roman societies, as both free and enslaved people.
Africans and their homelands were chronicled in the works of Homer, Herodotus, Ptolemy and Pliny, among others, as well as in pictorial form on pottery and in sculpture. The picture of Africa that educated Europeans drew from the classical texts contained much that was later demonstrated to be accurate. The first-century-BC writer Diodorus Siculus, for example, informed medieval readers that the people of Africa were ‘black of colour’, with ‘flat noses and woolly hair’.7 Other ancient scholars had worked out the rough shape of the continent. Yet classical texts were also prone to misdescribe both the people and the continent itself. Africa was repeatedly conflated with and confused for other poorly understood regions of the world, and there was a strong tendency within the works of the Greek and Roman writers for conjecture and myth to be given the same weight as verifiable facts. The Greek historian Herodotus offered his readers an accurate description of the people who lived to the south of the Nile, a region he himself had visited, but then went on to speculate that somewhere in Africa was a race of men who had the heads of dogs.
Of all the classical authors, it was perhaps the Roman writer Pliny the Elder who contributed most to the mystification of Africa. In the 1550s, just as the first English traders began to reach West Africa, a new popular edition of Pliny’s Summary of the Antique Wonders of the World was published in England.8 In one remarkable passage Pliny catalogued the many bizarre and monstrous races of mankind who resided in Africa:
Of the Ethiopians there are diverse forms and kinds of men. Some there are towards the East, that have neither nose nor nostrils, but the face all full. Others that have no upper lip, they are without tongues, and they speak by signs, and they have but a little hole to take their breath at, by which they drink with an oaten straw . . . In a part of Africa be people called Ptoemphane, for their king they have a dog, at whose fancy they are governed . . . Towards the west there is a people called Arimaspi, that hath but one eye in their foreheads, they are in the desert and wild country. The people called Agriphagi live with the flesh of panthers and lions; and the people called Anthropophagi, which we call Cannibals, live with human flesh. The Cinamolgi, their heads are almost like to the heads of dogs.9
Pliny also informed his readers of the existence in Africa of the Garamantes, a people who eschewed the institution of marriage and whose men held all women in common. Just as fascinating were the Gamphasantes, who were said to never wear clothes, the Troglodytes, who lived in caves, and a race of people who walked on their hands.
Not content with the considerable assortment of bizarre peoples and array of natural wonders bequeathed to them by the classical authors, medieval European writers added their own layers of mythology, fantastical conjecture and geographic confusion. Some of these authors were men who claimed to have travelled out into the world beyond Europe. Others had stayed at home and were merely the compilers of the accounts of others. The most influential of these works tells the story of an epic journey claimed to have been undertaken by the book’s supposed author. The Travels of Sir John Mandeville – Mandeville’s Travels, as it is more commonly known – was originally written in French, sometime in the mid-fourteenth century (some sources suggest 1356 or 1357). It has undergone a vast amount of scholarly detective work, yet many questions remain unanswered and probably always will. The book describes a journey across central Asia, Arabia, India, the Far East and Northern Africa, and was assembled from around two dozen separate texts, variously either consulted, quoted or plagiarized (if plagiarism is the appropriate word for the way that medieval authors habitually took liberties with one another’s texts when compiling their own).10 The author of the book was said to have been a certain Sir John Mandeville, an English knight of St Albans, but modern scholars suggest that the author was in fact a Frenchman, and a number of possible candidates have been identified. More than any other book, Mandeville’s Travels offered, or appeared to offer, answers to burning questions about the nature of the known but unreachable continents outside of Europe. The marvels of other civilizations and the wonders of the natural and supernatural worlds were laid bare. As in the writings of the classical authors, the book freely mixed elements of genuine travel writing with what to the modern eye is evidently the fantastical and the mythological. One of its interesting claims is that the world is round.
Mandeville’s Travels was one of the most widely translated books of the later Middle Ages; editions appeared in several languages as it spread rapidly and widely across Latin Christendom. It is believed that alongside Marco Polo’s travels, Christopher Columbus took a copy of Mandeville with him on his journey to find the Indies in 1492. The book told its readers that: ‘In Ethiopia men and women, in the summertime, go together to streams and lie therein from morning till noon, all naked, because of the great heat of the sun.’ In other parts of Ethiopia ‘the air is so cold that . . . there is a continual frost which freezes the water so that it turns to crystals’.11 Africa was also a region, Mandeville explains, in which diamonds littered the earth and grew to enormous sizes, yet despite these treasures the people of Africa lived in a state of almost communist equality, as ‘the goods of the country are common to every man, and none of them is allowed to be richer than the others, nor does any desire to be’. Such utopian egalitarianism was possible in Mandeville’s Africa because there was a limitless supply of food that could be effortlessly gathered. Even more fortunately, the rivers and streams that cut across Africa flowed with waters that were flavoured and spiced. Other natural springs were capable of curing the sick of their maladies. The Mandeville author himself claimed to have drunk from a well that was the source of eternal youth. Those who lived near it, he wrote, ‘never get sick, and their appearance is always youthful’.
Something of the sense of wonder at Africa that emanates from the pages of Mandeville’s Travels can also be seen in medieval maps. Hereford Cathedral’s Mappa Mundi – literally, Map of the World – was produced around 1300, about fifty years before Mandeville’s Travels appeared, and is the largest surviving medieval map of the world. Little about it corresponds to our modern understanding of geography or the conventions of cartography. Instead, it is an orbisculum, a map of the known earth shown in the form of a sphere, and its orientation is profoundly confusing to the twenty-first-century viewer, with Asia placed at the top of the map, rather than Europe in the north. On the Mappa Mundi, as in other medieval maps, Africa is shown as one of three known continents, a tripartite division that was an essential feature of the medieval world-view. The map depicts time as well as physical space, showing events from the Bible as well as the locations of nations. At the top, Adam and Eve are shown being expelled from the Garden of Eden, and above them the Day of Judgement has arrived: the saved are being welcomed into heaven and the damned driven en masse towards the mouth of hell. At the centre of the map – both literally and conceptually – is the city of Jerusalem, above which can be seen the crucifixion.
Whereas Europe is shown on the Mappa Mundi with its rivers and cities clearly marked and illustrated, the continents of Asia and Africa, which lay beyond the knowledge of the map’s creator, are depicted as the realms of the monstrous races that Mandeville described. The monopods, a race of men with only one foot, whom Mandeville claimed to have seen in Ethiopia, are depicted in Asia. An illustration of that race shows a man sheltering from the sun beneath the shade of his single enormous foot. As well as presenting Africa as the realm of monstrous peoples, the Mappa Mundi reinforces the ancient idea that Africa was a land of such excessive heat that its residents are forced to seek shelter from the sun or have become adapted to its burning rays.
At the fringes of Africa, right on the very edge of the map and therefore of the known world, are the strangest of all the monstrous races, the Blemmyes, a people who have no heads, but faces upon their chests. On the coast of Ethiopia can be found the Marmini people, who each have four eyes with which they can gaze in four different directions simultaneously. Near them in Ethiopia are the Agriophagi of whom Pliny had spoken and whom Shakespeare would later mention in Othello and The Merry Wives of Windsor. The Agriophagi apparently lived under the rule of a cyclops king who is shown on the Mappa Mundi wearing a crown and carrying a sceptre.12
Both the author of Mandeville’s Travels and the creator of the Mappa Mundi presented Africa as a land that was wondrous and profoundly different from late medieval Europe. Yet despite its riches and many natural marvels the continent was occupied by peoples that both considered savage. The cultural practices of the Africans were strange and at times unnatural. Their sexual habits ran counter to European norms and their religions were false and troubling. Yet of all the many astounding and disconcerting possibilities that Mandeville’s Travels presented to late medieval Europeans, nothing was more startling and enticing than his claim that somewhere within Africa there lay a black Christian kingdom. The author was embellishing an already established legend that had first emerged in the twelfth century. The myth had probably begun when the crusaders, whose conquests in Palestine were being threatened by the rising power of the Saracens, heard rumours of a Christian kingdom beyond their reach in Eastern Africa, and may have encountered Christian Africans in the Holy Lands. This lost Christian kingdom was ruled over by an African king known as Prester John. Both he and his people were said to be fabulously wealthy, and within his kingdom lay many natural wonders, including the aforementioned fountain of youth.
There were many versions of the legend. In some, the kingdom of Prester John was said to be located somewhere in Asia, in others it was to be found in Ethiopia, and in some in India – which did little to pin it down on the map, as there were believed to be two Indias, India inferior and India superior, as well as two distinct and separate Ethiopias.13 The tendency of the kingdom of Prester John to migrate around the known world over the course of innumerable retellings and reimaginings was a reflection of the medieval European tendency to conflate Africa with India, or to subsume Africa into a vague general notion of the ‘Saracen’ lands of Asia and the Middle East. By the fifteenth century, however, the locus of Prester John had come to rest more firmly in Africa, specifically in Abyssinia, modern Ethiopia.
The origins of this myth are obscure, but the reasons why it so appealed to the medieval mind are relatively simple. The idea that somewhere in Africa, beyond the barrier of the Islamic world, lay a black Christian kingdom raised the tantalizing prospect that an intercontinental Christian alliance might be forged. In this vision, Prester John and his African people were presented as a potential ally that could be roused to arms, perhaps thereby tipping the balance in Christendom’s centuries-long conflict with Islam. The myth was, in effect, a collective act of wishful thinking, born out of growing knowledge in Europe of the enormous military and cultural power of the Islamic world.
The myth of Prester John might well have stemmed in part from the cultural shadow cast across medieval Europe by the very real Coptic Christian kingdom that did exist in Ethiopia. Separated from Europe by Islamic North Africa, Ethiopia’s Christians gradually became known to Europeans during the late medieval period, and it seems possible that the reality of Coptic Ethiopia at some stage fused with the legend of Prester John. So convinced were Europeans of the existence of this African king that in 1400 King Henry VI of England dispatched a letter to him. By the fifteenth century Prester John had become firmly established as the name that Europeans ascribed to the emperors of Ethiopia, and which came as an utter surprise to them. In 1441, when a diplomatic delegation from the Ethiopian monastery in Jerusalem travelled to Italy to attend the Council of Florence, it shocked their European hosts to learn that the name Prester John meant nothing to their African co-religionists, and that the name had never been used in Ethiopia.
Yet even this was not enough to demolish the legend. When Portuguese explorers began to make their way around the coast of Africa in the fifteenth century, making contact with numerous African societies, they continued to enquire about the whereabouts of Prester John and his kingdom. The medieval myth and the tantalizing prospect of a grand pan-Christian alliance lingered on until the seventeenth century. Prester John’s mythical kingdom and the wondrous regions described in books such as Mandeville’s Travels may well have been the earliest origins of the persistent notion that somewhere in Africa lay a great and ancient ‘lost kingdom’. This trope survived well into the twentieth century, in novels by John Buchan and Rider Haggard.
At the start of the fifteenth century, around thirty human generations after the fall of Rome, the regions of Africa below the Sahara remained beyond the reach of European travellers and obscured behind a dense veil of classical and medieval mythology. So powerful were these ideas that when, in the early fifteenth century, European explorers did begin to inch their way around the coast of Africa, they did so with copies of Mandeville’s Travels in their hands, and in the genuine hope of finding Prester John. The first European traders and explorers were able to make those epic journeys because they also carried with them the fruits of Islamic learning: new instruments for navigation and books on astronomy, maths and trigonometry.
The people who led the way were the Portuguese, the great mariners of what became known as the Age of Discovery. Portugal’s cartographers and navigators had built upon Islamic learning and were far in advance of most of their competitors. Her shipbuilders had also risen to the challenge and crafted a vessel capable of taking Europeans further south than they had travelled since the age of Rome. This was the caravel, built around a rugged internal frame. Tiny by modern standards, it was in its day the most advanced ocean-going vessel Europeans had yet constructed, the fifteenth- and sixteenth-century equivalent of the space shuttle. Shallow-draughted, with two or three masts and lateen sails, it was uniquely suited to harnessing the poorly understood winds of the African coast and tackling its demanding shoreline. The journeys that took Europeans out of the familiar and navigable Mediterranean and around the Atlantic coast of Africa pushed the arts of navigation to their limits and required breath-taking courage. Mariners ventured into regions about which almost nothing was known and of which mythology offered ominous predictions of fatal climates and treacherous seas.
Portugal’s first base on African soil was the city of Ceuta, on the very tip of Northern Africa in modern-day Morocco, directly opposite Gibraltar. In 1419 King Henry of Portugal, known as ‘Henry the Navigator’, ordered his captains to venture around the North African coast. Progress was painfully slow, each expedition probing a little further than the last, testing whether the winds were capable of returning them to Lisbon. By 1434 they had ventured two hundred miles beyond the dreaded Cape Bojador on the coast of modern-day Morocco. This headland that juts out into the North Atlantic was known to the Arabs as Abu Khatar – The Father of Danger. By breaching that barrier the Portuguese had disproved the widely held belief that the seas to the south of Bojador were governed by winds and currents that would make any return to Europe impossible. In 1436 they travelled beyond Cape Blanco on the modern border between Western Sahara and Mauritania. A mission to the Bay of Arguin in Mauritania returned to Portugal with gold and African slaves, and in 1441 the Portuguese dispatched a mission to push on and find the legendary ‘river of gold’ that some late medieval maps located in the region of what is today Senegal. By the 1460s they had established a trading post on the island of Arguin, and from that bridgehead had begun to draw out the wealth of the African continent.
It was in many ways natural that Portugal would be the nation that first reached out towards Africa. Like Spain, she had been conquered by Muslim invaders from North Africa, and the legends of Africa’s gold mines and Prester John gripped imaginations in Lisbon. But geography also played a part. Comparatively isolated, on the far west of Europe, Portugal’s ports and harbours faced not the Mediterranean but the austere and seemingly endless Atlantic. The ocean almost summoned her sailors and traders out into its great expanse. But Portugal was also a nation in search of wealth, which was needed to build up her power and fend off the attentions of her larger neighbour, Spain. Trade with Africa might also fund further expeditions to discover a sea route to India and access to the spice trade monopolized till now by Muslim traders into the eastern Mediterranean. While Portugal’s kings and mariners were possessed by a spirit of adventure and human curiosity, her interest in Africa was motivated primarily by a clear-eyed and pragmatic search for trade. Economic considerations were always paramount.
The commodities that drew the Portuguese to Africa were dyewood, ivory (which English merchants were later to quaintly call ‘elephants’ teeth’), and a form of pepper from Sierra Leone, known then as ‘grains of paradise’. The trade in slaves did not count for much at this stage, although both African and Berber people were captured on some of these early ventures and enslaved in small numbers. The real lure of Africa was gold. Since the age of the Byzantine Empire, Europeans had been aware that somewhere in Africa lay the source of the gold that flowed across the Sahara and into their continent, carried by Arab and Berber caravans. By traversing down the coast of Africa in their caravels the Portuguese had outflanked the desert and travelled around Islamic North Africa. African gold could now be shipped directly to Europe without passing through the intermediary hands of desert traders and Muslim merchants. Portugal had cut out the middleman.
Even before it had been fully proved, the trade in African gold was given papal approval and protection. In the 1450s, Pope Nicholas V and his successor Callixtus III took it upon themselves to issue papal bulls, edicts confirming Portugal’s position as the exclusive trader along two thousand miles of African coastline. By the 1470s the mariners of Lisbon had reached the coast of modern Ghana, a land that up until its independence in 1957 retained the name it acquired in the Age of Discovery – the Gold Coast. In 1482 the Portuguese built a trade fortress there named São Jorge da Mina – Saint George of the Mine – because the Portuguese optimistically believed that their new outpost lay close to Africa’s legendary gold mines. From this enclave they hoped to tap the region’s prodigious wealth at source. Unbeknownst to the men who built the fortress of El Mina, the alluvial goldfields of West Africa lay many miles inland, through the then impenetrable forest belt. Neither the Portuguese nor any of their European rivals in the Age of Discovery were ever to gain access to those regions of the interior.* It would take Europeans another four centuries to finally break through the forests to the gold mines, and it was to be the British in the 1890s, rather than the Portuguese in the 1480s, who reached the mines around the city of Kumasi. Even then, and armed with the Maxim gun and the modern rifle, the British forces were decimated by disease and suffered serious losses in battle against the Ashanti people who vigorously defended their kingdom and its riches.
Nonetheless, by the end of the fifteenth century 25,000 ounces of African gold had been brought from the interior and sold to the Portuguese on the coast by African traders, thereby reaching Europe directly from Africa. In the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries the predecessors of the British colonialists who were to capture the gold mines of Ghana looked upon Portugal’s expansion into the African world with a mixture of wonder and envy. Reports of Portuguese discoveries and trade heightened interest in Africa and its new, exotic products. Coveted and desired in London as much as in Lisbon, these commodities became markers of social distinction and signifiers of wealth and status. English merchants who saw the enormous wealth that the Portuguese had acquired through the trade in African gold sought to find other distant regions of the world where they might set up similar trades. Some of them were sorely tempted to break into the Portuguese sphere of influence on the coast of West Africa itself and grab a share of the African gold trade. In the 1530s the English sea captain William Hawkins, of Tavistock in Devonshire, sailed in quest of trade to the Guinea coast of West Africa, but his was a one-off venture. No matter how strong the draw of African gold, there were sizeable obstacles (Portugal’s established relationships, the trade fortress at El Mina, and the power of the papal bulls) that deterred English mariners from ventures along the African coast.
However, the barrier imposed by the papal bull was suddenly and unexpectedly removed when Henry VIII married Anne Boleyn in 1534 and a year later passed the Act of Supremacy. This led, inevitably, to Henry’s excommunication by Pope Clement VII. Clement’s successor Paul III excommunicated the English king for a second time, and in the papal bull Eius qui immobilis made the judgement hereditary. With some irony it specifically mentioned Henry’s sons ‘born or to be born’ (the issue of sons having been the root cause of Henry’s break with Rome).14Excommunication meant that England was a heretical state, one that in theory at least was no longer subject to papal bulls. But this in itself was not inducement enough for English mariners to rush headlong for the Guinea coast of West Africa. Further encouragement was required, and some of it may well have been provided by Anthony Anes Pinteado, a Portuguese captain who had sailed the routes between Africa and the Portuguese colonies in Brazil.15 Having fallen out of favour in Lisbon, Pinteado had travelled to England, and there offered his services.* His experience of the Guinea Coast, and the tales he may have told his English hosts of the riches to be obtained there, appear to have helped stiffen English resolve. Pinteado was appointed adviser and second-in-command in the first English expedition to the African coast that aimed to break into the Portuguese trade – that of Thomas Wyndham in 1553.
Wyndham left from Portsmouth with three ships: the Lion, the Moon and the Primrose. He had previously sailed with William Hawkins and was backed by a number of London merchants and, it seems, by King Edward VI, the son and heir that had finally been delivered to Henry VIII by Jane Seymour. There is some evidence to suggest that the Moon and the Primrose may have been royal vessels.16 Giving the Portuguese a taste of what was to come, Wyndham’s expedition sought plunder as well as trade. He attacked Portuguese shipping and raided their bases. As Wyndham was a seasoned pirate, such violence was part of his standard operating procedure; all that was unique about this aspect of his 1553 voyage was how far from home he had sailed to locate his prey.17 Tacking along the coast of West Africa, heading towards the Gold Coast, Wyndham and Pinteado took good care to skirt the Portuguese fortress at El Mina, and during their progress were able to trade for 150 pounds of African gold. Yet despite this success, at some point in the venture the two men appear to have quarrelled; Wyndham is reported as having denounced his second-in-command as a ‘whoreson Jew’.18
After trading on the Gold Coast, Wyndham ventured further east to the court of Benin, inland through the lagoons of modern-day Nigeria. There he traded his English goods for 80 tons of Malaguetta pepper. However, he was to be denied a glorious return to England with his cargo of gold and pepper. Ignoring the advice of the more experienced Pinteado, he extended the mission long enough for disease to sweep through the crew. He and Pinteado and around two-thirds of their men succumbed to tropical fevers and died. There were so few survivors that the Lion was abandoned, for lack of hands to sail her home. Only around forty of the original complement of 140 made it back to Plymouth. The expedition had been costly in lives but enormously profitable for its investors. Thomas Wyndham had demonstrated the potential of the African trade, albeit posthumously.
The next English expedition to make an incursion into Portugal’s sphere of influence was supported by some of the same investors who had profitably backed Wyndham’s fatal voyage. The new venture was led by John Lok, a member of a significant London merchant family and the great-great-great-grandfather of the great Enlightenment philosopher John Locke (the spelling evolved over the centuries).19 Lok left for the coast of Africa in 1554 just four months after the survivors of Wyndham’s expedition had returned. His three ships headed to the Gold Coast, and like Wyndham avoided the Portuguese centre of power at El Mina. Returning to England faster than Wyndham had, Lok and his men did not suffer the death toll that befell the early expedition and arrived back in Britain with a cargo of pepper, 250 tusks of ivory and most importantly gold – more than 400 pounds of it. Lok’s expedition, coming so hard on the heels of Wyndham’s, reaffirmed to the London merchants that the so-called Guinea trade was viable. To the Portuguese the incursions of Wyndham and Lok showed that their African monopoly was under threat and that they were unable to defend their trading rights along so extensive a coastline. Official protestations were registered in London by the envoys of the Portuguese King John III, but further English and French interlopers were inspired to organize fresh expeditions.
An account describing the voyage of John Lok tells us that in addition to their haul of ivory, pepper and gold, Lok and his men also, ‘brought with them certaine blacke slaves’. These men, five in total, seem not to have been slaves, in fact, but Africans recruited to act as intermediaries and translators for future English expeditions in the hope that these would become more regular and increasingly profitable. While in London the five men were to learn English and then be returned to Africa. Here again the English were learning from the Portuguese, who as early as the 1440s had pioneered the practice of taking Africans – sometimes by force – and training them as translators. The men Lok brought to England were from Shama, a small and unremarkable fishing town that can still be found on the coast of Ghana. Their African names are not recorded, but the names that three of them adopted while in England were Anthonie, Binnie and George. We know little of their time in England, or what they made of the land from which their new trading partners had come. Richard Hakluyt, the author of The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques and Discoveries of the English Nation (1598), a compendium of sixteenth-century expeditions to Africa, describes them as ‘tall and strong men’, who were able to ‘wel agree with our meates and drinkes’. Hakluyt recorded that ‘The colde and moyst aire doth somewhat offend them’ and noted that these ‘men that are borne in hot Regions may better abide colde, then men that are borne in colde regions may abide heate’.20 By the nineteenth century the confident belief that Africans were able to easily tolerate the cold of Europe had evaporated. By the Victorian age the prevailing view in Britain was that the climate of Europe was injurious to the health of Africans, and those arriving in Britain were encouraged to remain in the country only for short periods.
The five men from Shama were returned to Africa after just a few months in London. Three were carried back to the Gold Coast by the London merchant William Towerson in 1556, while Anthonie and Binnie stayed on in London. A description of the return of the first three to Africa, written by an English mariner, describes how when the expedition landed in the town of Hanta, not far from Shama, they discovered that the three Africans ‘were well knowen, and the men of the towne wept for joy when they saw them, and demanded of them where Anthonie and Binne had bene: and they told them that they had bene at London in England, and should bee brought home the next voyage.’ When the English ships reached Shama itself the three men were returned to their families and similar scenes erupted: ‘wee sent our Negros on shore, and after them divers of us, and were very well received, and the people were very glad of our Negros, specially one of their brothers wives, and one of their aunts, which received them which much joy, and so did all the rest of the people . . .’21
The recruitment of the five men from Shama to act as translators was evidence that London merchants like Lok believed that the English might be able to permanently force their way into the Portuguese-dominated gold trade, but the English effort to train translators to work on their behalf on the coast of Africa also tells us something of the nature of the relationship that had developed between Europeans and their African trading partners. Our mental image of the British in Africa is so firmly fixed in the so-called Scramble for Africa of the late nineteenth century that we struggle to recall that when Englishmen first arrived in Africa they came not in pith helmets and khaki uniforms but in doublets and hose. The English traders who infiltrated the Portuguese trading zones in coastal West Africa in the sixteenth century did not come as colonizers but, like all other Europeans, as traders.
No other relationship would have been possible. The African peoples with whom they hoped to trade were members of societies that were neither inward-looking nor primitive. Centuries of contact with the Islamic states of North Africa and the Middle East had bound the region up with the wider world and trained its rulers in the profitable arts of long-distance trade and negotiation. The trans-Saharan trade routes had brought wealth to African societies, but also new ideas and knowledge. Islam had moved southwards with the trade caravans. There, in the lands below the Sahara, highly organized, administratively centralized empires had been formed. In modern-day Nigeria the Oyo empire had risen. To its west stood the empire of Dahomey, which dominated much of what is today the nation of Benin. The Akan peoples in whose territory lay the goldfields of the Gold Coast had taken control of much of the south and central region of what is today the state of Ghana, while the ancient empire of Benin had become the paramount power in the south of modern Nigeria. Centuries of trade and cultural contact meant that these states and empires were worldly enough to deal competently with their European trading partners in this first stage of contact. Some of the kingdoms of West Africa had, like Benin, constructed cities, and there was no question of all their populations living in straggling villages prone to seaborne incursion.
By the time the English arrived in the middle of the sixteenth century, West Africans had been trading with the Portuguese for several generations. The leaders of these kingdoms tended to welcome the English as new customers, and to such militarily powerful and administratively competent African societies the English, in these early decades, must at times have looked unimpressive – few in number, often sickly, and plainly inexperienced. Neither the English interlopers nor the Portuguese who were present in far greater numbers, and who had built permanent structures, offered a significant military threat. This is not to say that relationships between West Africans and Europeans were always peaceful. The English captain William Towerson made several expeditions to the coast of Africa in the 1550s. During his third voyage of 1558 he faced opposition from the Portuguese and found that some of the Africans he approached were openly hostile and unwilling to trade. In a portent of things to come, Towerson responded by attacking and burning an African town.22
Some sense of the overall balance of power between Europeans and their African trading partners comes from the accounts of the merchants themselves. The Dutch trader Pieter de Marees, who wrote of his trip to West Africa in 1602, noted that the Africans he encountered and entered into trade with had a clear understanding of the value of their commodities and very definite ideas about the types and qualities of the European goods which they were willing to accept in exchange. These were not people to be swindled, and they were quick to spot any attempt to cheat or defraud them. ‘When we have brought them things they did not like,’ de Marees reported, ‘they have mocked us in a scandalous way.’23 Another trader noted that the Africans he traded with used weights and measures to determine the exact value of the gold they traded and were ‘very ware in theyr bargenynge, and wyl not lose one sparke of golde of any value’.24 Thomas Wyndham had been surprised when, on meeting the Oba (King) of Benin in 1553, he discovered that the monarch ‘could speake the Portugall tongue, which he had learned of a child’.
It was Benin, of all the African kingdoms with which Europeans traded in the sixteenth century, that the traders and chroniclers found most impressive. This powerful kingdom refused to permit Europeans to build trading fortresses on its territory, and the value and scale of its trade in pepper, ivory, home-grown cotton goods and other commodities impressed all visitors. The Oba, who had dispatched an ambassador to Lisbon following the arrival of the very first Portuguese explorers, ruled from Benin City. Its enormous earthen-wall defences and wide boulevards awed European visitors, as did the palace of the Oba, with its long hallways decorated with brass reliefs. Centuries later, those brass reliefs were wrenched from the walls and doors of the palace and sold to defray the costs of the punitive British expedition launched against the city in 1897. They can today be found in museums across Europe and North America, with a large collection on display in the British Museum.
In the period before the rise of the Atlantic slave trade, the societies of West Africa were in some ways at an advantage in their dealings with Europeans. This was due not just to their own cultural and military power but also to the geography of their coastline and the natural barrier of the inland forest belt. The coast of West Africa might have been built to fend off potential colonizers. Three thousand miles long, it is armoured along much of its length with an array of deadly obstacles. Powerful surf tides and steeply rising beaches make dropping anchor difficult in many places and impossible in others. Treacherous sandbanks lurk under the waters, forcing travellers in sailing vessels to keep their distance. These natural defences include the deadly Bank of Arguin, off the coast of modern Mauritania, where in the nineteenth century the French frigate Médusefamously ran aground, her passengers resorting to cannibalism while adrift on a makeshift raft. Between the Sierra Leone River and the lagoons and inlets of the Niger River, the coast of West Africa is largely bereft of natural harbours. The few accessible anchorages that do exist are far from ideal. One of the striking features of the first age of contact between Europeans and West Africans is how few European structures were built, and how small and scattered they were. Much of the coastline remained impenetrable and unreachable. These geographic factors combined with the prevalence of tropical disease and the military capacities of the West African empires to effectively lay down the rules of engagement that Europeans and Africans were to follow until the advent of the Atlantic slave trade.
Although the voyages of John Lok and later of William Towerson might have proved the viability of an English trade with Africa, albeit one forbidden by the Papacy, the English remained only minor players in the gold trade of the sixteenth century. Seven years after John Lok had arrived in London with the five men from Shama, John Hawkins, a ship owner and trader from Plymouth, became the pioneer of the English triangular slave trade. Hawkins was the younger son of the trader William Hawkins, who had sailed to the West African coast in the 1530s. He was also the cousin of Sir Francis Drake and to some extent was Drake’s mentor. Like the other English traders, Hawkins was aware that Africans were being sold as slaves on the West African coast and shipped by Spain to her colonies in the New World. In October 1562 he set off for West Africa, arriving in the vast harbour of the Sierra Leone River, a region which, over the following centuries, Britain was to reshape and remake more than perhaps any other part of the continent. Richard Hakluyt in his Principal Navigations tells us that in Sierra Leone Hawkins ‘got into his possession, partly by the sword and partly by other means, 300 Negroes at the least, besides other merchandises which that country yieldeth’.
Hawkins had attacked and plundered a number of Portuguese vessels, seizing the enslaved Africans on board. With his ships loaded up ‘with that prey he sailed over the Ocean sea unto the island of Hispaniola’ (present-day Haiti and the Dominican Republic). Hawkins called at several Spanish colonies and sold his commodities, including the African captives. According to Hakluyt ‘he received, by way of exchange, hides, ginger, sugars, and some pearls’. When he arrived back in England in September 1563 he had, through this one expedition, made himself a fortune and proved that English ships could break into the Spanish trade in African slaves, even though English participation in the trade was prohibited under Spanish law. He had also shown that buying and selling human beings could be as profitable as the trade in gold.
In 1564 and again in 1567 Hawkins embarked upon further slave-trading missions to the West African coast, attracting investors from the political elite of the Elizabethan court. Among those who backed his later expeditions were William Cecil, then Secretary of State, the Earls of Leicester and Pembroke and Queen Elizabeth I herself. In the hope of boosting profits and increasing the chances of success, the Queen provided Hawkins’s second slave-trading mission with two of her own ships, the Minion and the 700-ton Jesus of Lübeck, a vessel that Henry VIII had bought from the German Hanseatic League – hence its Teutonic name. The second expedition was essentially a repeat of the first. Hawkins again headed for the Sierra Leone River and there went ashore ‘to take the inhabitants . . . burning and spoiling their towns’. Other Africans were seized from intercepted Portuguese ships. Again, Hawkins then set sail for the New World, there selling the enslaved Africans to Spanish colonists.
This second venture proved as profitable as his first. Hawkins claimed that his personal profit stood at 60 per cent.25 Queen Elizabeth was clearly pleased with the return on her investment, as soon afterwards Hawkins was knighted. The coat of arms he had designed for him in 1571 included an image of a female African slave.
Sir John Hawkins is often considered the initiator of the English triangular trade and the first English slave-trader. This is questionable in two ways. First, as the work of the historian Gustav Ungerer has demonstrated, other English slave-traders were active before Hawkins. As early as the 1480s Englishmen were operating from bases in Andalusia, trading in slaves and other commodities in close cooperation with their Spanish, Genoese, Florentine and Portuguese business partners.26 Some were slave owners as well as slave-traders. While England was a relative latecomer to the slave trade and was late to acquire New World slave colonies, English merchants, operating from abroad, were active in both trades generations earlier.
The second obstacle to the idea that Hawkins’s expeditions marked the beginning of an English slave trade is the fact that his missions did not represent the beginning of an unbroken pattern of slave-trading in the Atlantic, carried out by domestic merchants and mariners sailing from British ports. This is partly because Hawkins’s final expedition was a disaster. In 1568, sailing in a fleet of five ships, one of them commanded by Francis Drake (not yet knighted), Hawkins was intercepted by the Spanish off Mexico – then the colony of New Spain. In the ensuing battle of San Juan de Ulúa three of the English ships, including the Jesus of Lübeck, and a caravel recently captured from the Portuguese, were lost. Only two English vessels made it home and the incipient triangular trade was brought to an ignominious and ruinous end. It was to be a century before it would be revived in any serious sense. In the interim, the English discovered themselves to be more adept at privateering – licensed and state-sanctioned piracy against the Spanish treasure fleets – than slave-trading.
Between Thomas Wyndham’s 1553 voyage and 1565 there were nine English expeditions to the coast of West Africa, which between them involved at least twenty large ocean-going vessels and an unknown number of smaller craft. The historian Cheryl A. Fury has estimated that between a thousand and fifteen hundred men took part in these ventures, most of whom came safely back to England.27 Wyndham, Lok and the other English traders who sailed to the coast of West Africa left England knowing little of the continent, but they and their crewmen returned with their own first-hand experiences and observations.
It might be expected that these new accounts – both verbal and literary – would overthrow and displace the image of Africa that had emerged from medieval mythology, but that is not what happened. To the modern observer one key feature of the Age of Discovery is that Europeans could continue to harbour beliefs in medieval myths even in the face of observed and verifiable reality. In the case of the English, this was because each voyage appeared to confirm rather than refute the notion that Africa was a land of mysteries and marvels. The reports of mariners who returned from the continent were rapidly adulterated with large doses of exaggeration and conjecture. Such accounts did little to dim the allure of the old myths, some of which were, if anything, reinforced by the tales told by England’s mariners.
In 1555, the same year that John Lok had returned to London with the five men from Shama, two new books were published that reiterated a number of timeworn myths. The Fardle of Facions was a translation of a work by Johannes Boemus that blended classical accounts of Africa, including those of Pliny and Herodotus, with equally misleading medieval sources. More influential was Richard Eden’s dubious translation of Peter Martyr’s The Decades of the New World, which offered an account of the Spanish exploration and colonization of South and Central America. To this established work Eden appended accounts of the English voyages of Wyndham, Lok and others, padding out their narrative accounts of those voyages with a great deal of fantasy of his own invention. Some of Eden’s additions were later incorporated into Richard Hakluyt’s Principal Navigations, and in this way, long after English traders had encountered the real Africa and traded with real Africans, the continent continued to be described in fantastical terms. Eden’s account of the journey of John Lok, for example, offered a relatively sober description of the morphology and habits of elephants. This was immediately followed, however, by a passage, apparently of Eden’s devising, in which it is boldly stated that these giant creatures live for two hundred years and are continually at war with dragons, who prey upon them in order to drink their blood, which is said to be icy cold.28
Artefacts as well as words contributed to the mystification of Africa. On his return to London John Lok, in addition to his five African translators and his haul of gold, had brought with him the head of an elephant. This was put on display at the home of another London merchant, Sir Andrew Judde. Those who might have been willing to abandon medieval notions that Africa was a land of monsters and monstrous men might well have concluded that if elephants existed in Africa, and their remains could be viewed at the home of a London merchant, then might not some future expedition return to the city with Blemmyes, Troglodytes or the head of a dragon? If elephants were real and verifiable, then why not dragons?
Accounts of incredible animals and of the intense climatic conditions that were said to prevail in Africa were no more exciting or perplexing to the English than what they were learning in the same years about the people of Africa themselves. Human physical difference, and most importantly the blackness of African skin, posed profound challenges to the thinkers, chroniclers and philosophers of the sixteenth century. Why were Africans black? Was it – as seemed logical to many – because they had been burnt or bronzed by the extreme heat of the African sun? If that were the case, would Africans remain black if they settled in Europe? Conversely, would the skin of Europeans become blackened if they resided in Africa for long periods? Was the blackness of Africans temporary or permanent, congenital and inherited? What about children born to inter-racial couples: would they be black, white or some other hue? And what, if anything, did the black skin of the African signify?
All of these questions swirled around in the Elizabethan imagination. Although the causes of human blackness were a matter for philosophical debate, its permanence seemed to be widely appreciated. That no amount of washing could change skin colour was a truism that spawned aphorisms such as, ‘To wash a blackamoor is to labour in vain’.29 Jon Lok was one of the first to reject the hypothesis that blackness was due to the heat of Africa, concluding that the skin colour of Africans was due to ‘a secret worke of nature’. Lok observed that ‘throughout all Africke, under the Equinoctial line . . . the regions are extreeme hote’, and there the people were indeed ‘very blacke’. However he also noted that there were ‘regions of the West Indies’ that were equally tropical and correspondingly hot, yet the indigenous peoples of these islands (Amerindian peoples who were decimated by European conquest) were ‘neither blacke, nor with curlde and short wooll on their heads, as they of Africke have, but [are] of the colour of an Olive, with long and blacke heare on their heads’. If the peoples of the West Indies lived under a sun as intense as that which burned over Africa, and yet were not as dark, then the sun alone could not explain African blackness, concluded Lok.
The English sailor George Best reached the same conclusion via a different route. In the 1580s he wrote, ‘I myselfe have seen an Ethiopian as blacke as cole brought into England, who taking an English wife begat a sonne in all respects as blacke as the father was, although England were his native countrey, and an English woman his mother; whereby it seemeth that blackness proceedeth rather of some natural infection of that man, which was so strong, that neither the nature of the Clime, neither the good complexion of the mother concurring, could any thing alter and therefore, we cannot impute it to the nature of the Clime.’30 If a mixed-race child conceived by an African man and an English woman was born with dark skin, then there had to be some other explanation for ‘the Ethiopians great blackness’, Best reasoned.
After determining that the cause of human blackness was not the ferocity of the African sun, George Best fell back upon religion. The explanation ‘manifestly and plainly appeareth by holy scripture’, he asserted. The biblical story that Best and some of his contemporaries looked to was well known in the sixteenth century, and was often discussed and deployed in the centuries that followed, but has been largely forgotten in the modern age. According to scripture, in the book of Genesis, the three sons of Noah were the progenitors of the three acknowledged races of mankind. As George Best explained, ‘after the generall inundation and overflowing of the earth, there remained no moe men alive, but Noe [Noah] and his three sonnes, Sem, Cham, and Japhet, who onely were left to possess and inhabit the whole face of the earth: therefore all the land that until this day hath been inhabited by sundry descents, must needs come of the offspring either of Sem, Cham, or Japhet’.
The idea that the peoples of the world were the offspring of the three sons of Noah was one that neatly correlated with other aspects of the medieval world-view. Up until 1492 there had been only three known continents, and upon each, it was believed, resided the three races of mankind. Medieval mapmakers at times used the names of the three sons of Noah to denote the three known continents. The descendants of Cham – or Ham as he was more commonly known – were said to be the people of Africa, Asia was the home of the descendants of Sem, and Europe the land of the people born of the familial line of Japhet. This understanding of the world was reflected in another late medieval concept, that of the Three Kings or Three Wise Men who travel to Bethlehem to worship the infant Christ. In a tradition that probably began in Germany in the last decades of the fourteenth century, the youngest of the Three Kings, Balthazar, came to be depicted as a black African.31 The Three Kings, therefore, accorded with the trinity of known continents and races. The notion that one of them was an African was referenced in a number of medieval literary texts, including Mandeville’s Travels.32 This tradition, which has become a familiar feature of each Christmas and nativity play, has deep medieval roots that have been largely lost and forgotten.
From the sixteenth century onwards, the legend that Africans were the ‘sons of Ham’ was often invoked to explain their blackness. The legend was also to have far-reaching and dismal consequences, as it was later deployed as a justification for New World slavery. According to scripture, Ham had humiliated his father, and as punishment for his transgression Noah had placed a terrible curse upon Ham’s son Canaan. This curse was to be passed on to all of Canaan’s descendants in perpetuity. In the relevant passage of Genesis, Canaan was condemned to become ‘a servant of servants . . . unto his brethren’, and that same status was to be passed down to each generation for all time.
Although neither race nor skin colour is mentioned within these passages from Genesis, at some point the story of the Curse of Ham became racialized. George Best stated that Noah had intended that all the children of Ham ‘should be so black and loathsome, that it might remain a spectacle of disobedience to all the world’. Best believed that it was from ‘this black and cursed’ line of humanity that ‘all these black Moores which are in Africa’ had sprung.33 How fast and how far that idea spread is difficult to determine, but George Best was not alone in interpreting the black skin of the African as the marker of the curse of endless servitude that Noah had imposed upon the sons of Ham. In an age in which scripture was the highest source of knowledge and explanation, this biblical story – obscure and bizarre though it may be to the modern reader – became for some the favoured explanation for the blackness of Africans.