Short Essay One

Characteristically ‘Other’: The Changing Image of the African in Europe, 1400-1600

            The years 1400-1600 C.E. marked a rise in European imperialism and capitalist competition between major powers on the economic frontier of the New World. Before the early modern period, Europeans new little about the African continent, the dominant conception of the faraway land being “that of a hot, rainy, forested continent with exotic fauna and black people.”[1] Initially, European colonizers respected the autonomy of West African states and sought diplomatic relationships with African rulers, but it would prove impossible to reconcile the fundamental differences in social custom to maintain diplomacy, and so began the decline of the image of the African in European society. As transatlantic trade became central to political and economic competition, Africans were increasingly valuable commodities. The fundamental differences in physical appearance and cultural practices forced the growing African population of Europe to occupy a marginalized echelon of society, whose permanent presence and miscegenation did little to improve their public image. The explosion of the slave trade during this period shifted attitudes towards Africa from exotic curiosity to fear and brutal suppression.[2] Though the image of the African evolved differently in Mediterranean Europe and Northern Europe, the rampant dehumanization and commodification of Africans during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries can be identified as a shared trend. By the end of this 200-year period, the opportunities of the New World made possible by a dependence on slaves ushered in the era of the modern European empire.

             The experiences of the African slave in the Iberian Peninsula and other parts of Mediterranean Europe were decidedly different from those of Northern Europe. The labor shortage resulting from the Black Death’s devastation of the European population forced previous feudal structures to break down, and landholders seeking alternatives to negotiating with liberated serfs increased demand for slave labor. Diplomacy in the fifteenth century between the Portuguese and West African states is evidence of the initial exoticism in the European idea of Africa; the Portuguese respected the autonomy of West African rulers and on the outset, treated the Africans as any other foreign nation, but the insurmountable cultural differences eventually led Portugal to abandon diplomacy for violence, resulting in the capture of thousands of West African villagers for slave labor. As the presence of Africans in Europe became a permanent fixture, art and the theater were significant means of communicating matters of public opinion. In many productions, “The Black was portrayed as a buffoon during this period when his presence, at its peak, often threatened the economic and social order with his availability as a worker in areas such as shipbuilding, craftsmanship and farming.”[3] By the 17^th century, the major minority groups in Spain – the Jews, Moors, and the Blacks – “had only one raison d’etre, assimilation.”[4] But compared to Northern and Western Europe, Iberia’s pioneering role as the first African colonizers allowed more opportunities for slaves to earn freedom: “Well-worn avenues to freedom within Iberian religious and legal traditions offered greater hope for personal liberty than anything the English had to offer.”[5]  Aside from this divergence however, it is clear that Northern and Southern Europe alike began to fear and despise the black European population, leading to further objectification and dehumanization of Africans in the minds of Europeans.

            In England and other parts of Northern Europe with a similar social structure, the image of Africans from the fifteenth to the seventeenth centuries was dominated by differences in skin color and culture. To illustrate, “The sub-Saharan Africans ‘black’ skin and drastically unfamiliar customs and convictions, the evidence suggests, set them apart in English eyes and imaginations as a special category of humankind.”[6] During the fifteenth century, the explorers who served as sources of information about Africa had the primary goal of entertainment as opposed to truth, emphasizing Africa’s exoticism and fantastical allure, but “By gradual but increasing contrast, the secular-minded explorers who succeeded them in the last quarter of the sixteenth century as England’s chief sources of geographical information were more ethnographic, more precise, and generally more truthful.”[7] Despite this step towards truthful understanding of the continent, the second half of the sixteenth century saw an increase in negative representations of sub-Saharan Africans in Northern and Western European culture as well as Southern.[8] By the first decade of the seventeenth century, significantly more reliable information about Africa was available, and the proliferation of the slave population in England and increase in cultural references to Africans was important: “After centuries of relative ethnic isolation English men and women were jolted by sudden exposure, in print and in person, to people remarkably different from themselves.”[9] The image of the African in Northern and Western Europe was ultimately tainted by an intrinsic prejudice about that which was characteristically ‘other.’

             The fourteenth and fifteenth centuries experienced significant change in the European perception of Africans, from exotic fantasy to important economic tool. The treatment of Africans was an important element in relations between competing European powers. In England for example, “The circumstances of an Atlantic world in which either holding Africans in bondage or liberating them from slavery could be leverage to enhance English power vis-à-vis Spain was at the heart of how Englishmen approached Africans in the late sixteenth century.”[10] But more importantly, this was the source of widespread dehumanization in the slave trade, and by the onset of the seventeenth century, Africans were a measurably valuable commodity; “To the Portuguese, Dutch, and Spanish in the early seventeenth century, an African became a ‘piece’, measurable in practically the same way as a piece of cloth.”[11] In sum, although Northern and Southern European powers held different positions of power in the Atlantic world, they undoubtedly viewed the people and natural resources offered by Africa through the same exploitative lens.[12]

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[1] Walter Rodney, “Africa in Europe and the Americas,” in The Cambridge History of Africa Vol. 4: From c. 1600 to 1790 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975), 578-579.

[2] Michael Guasco, “Free from the Tyrannous Spanyard? Englishmen and Africans in Spain’s Atlantic World,” Slavery and Abolition 29.1 (2008): 13.

[3] Annette Ivory, “Juan Latino: The Struggle of Blacks, Jews, and Moors in Golden Age Spain,” Hispania 62.4 (1979): 617.

[4] Ibid, 613.

[5] Michael Guasco, “Free from the Tyrannous Spanyard? Englishmen and Africans in Spain’s Atlantic World,” 13.

[6] Alden T. Vaughan and Virginia Mason Vaughan, “Elizabethan Representations of Sub-Saharan Africans,” The William and Mary Quarterly 54.1 (199): 21.

[7] Ibid, 24.

[8] Ibid, 44.

[9] Ibid, 29.

[10] Michael Guasco, “Free from the Tyrannous Spanyard? Englishmen and Africans in Spain’s Atlantic World,” 14.

[11] Walter Rodney, “Africa in Europe and the Americas,” 589.

[12] Michael Guasco, “Free from the Tyrannous Spanyard? Englishmen and Africans in Spain’s Atlantic World,” 14.