Early modern geography and the construction of a knowable Africa

Abstract

Africa was integral to the early modern preoccupation with being able to account for the “whole” world in seemingly scholarly fashion. The Africa that took shape in early modern geographies was not imagined in isolation: its cultural geography was linked to other regions of the world in a comparative system that helped to distinguish between the “barbarous” and those “worthy” to be called human, and between the “Southern Nations” and the “Northern People.” It contributed to the emergence of a global south, made explicit through the language of cartography, which allowed early modern readers to gain their bearings in a more complex world. I examine some early scholarly representations of Africa in English, to reflect on the role of textual structure in constructing Africa as an object of knowledge, a place of strangeness and possibility. Editorial interventions transform inherited associations between Africa and “barbarism,” I argue, and between nomadism and “beastliness,” and subject them to new evidentiary strictures. Even so, these myths appear as a watermark in the later texts' adjudication of what it means to be human.To understand how early modern geographers understood the ambit of their work, and the implications for Africa, I examine three texts spanning a little over a 100 years, in 50-year steps: William Prat's Discription of the Contrey of Aphrique (1554), Pory's edition of Leo Africanus's A Geographical Historie (1600), and Richard Blome's 1682 English-language edition of Bernadus Varenius's Geographia Generalis, which sought to describe the discipline itself. In the account of Africa by Leo Africanus, a self-identified “African,” a more complex version of Africa entered the discourse. Scholars have presented Leo Africanus as a mediator between worlds, but his own speaking posture is complicated by the disciplinary structures shaping his narrative and the controlling presence of John Pory as partisan compiler and translator. Similarly, Blome's framing of Varenius's Geographia in 1682 establishes a set of equivalences across the “Southern Nations” that derive meaning in relation to their “Northern” opposites. Through the language of cardinal points and demonstrable experience, Africa in the seventeenth century emerges as knowable and inhabitable, but steeped in old stigmas.