A thought-provoking reappraisal of the first European encounters with
Africa
As early as 1441, and well before other European countries encountered
Africa, small Portuguese and Spanish trading vessels were plying the
coast of West Africa, where they conducted business with African
kingdoms that possessed significant territory and power. In the process,
Iberians developed an understanding of Africa's political landscape in
which they recognized specific sovereigns, plotted the extent and nature
of their polities, and grouped subjects according to their ruler.
In African Kings and Black Slaves, Herman L. Bennett mines the
historical archives of Europe and Africa to reinterpret the first
century of sustained African-European interaction. These encounters were
not simple economic transactions. Rather, according to Bennett, they
involved clashing understandings of diplomacy, sovereignty, and
politics. Bennett unearths the ways in which Africa's kings required
Iberian traders to participate in elaborate diplomatic rituals,
establish treaties, and negotiate trade practices with autonomous
territories. And he shows how Iberians based their interpretations of
African sovereignty on medieval European political precepts grounded in
Roman civil and canon law. In the eyes of Iberians, the extent to which
Africa's polities conformed to these norms played a significant role in
determining who was, and who was not, a sovereign people--a judgment
that shaped who could legitimately be enslaved.
Through an examination of early modern African-European encounters,
African Kings and Black Slaves offers a reappraisal of the dominant
depiction of these exchanges as being solely mediated through the slave
trade and racial difference. By asking in what manner did Europeans and
Africans configure sovereignty, polities, and subject status, Bennett
offers a new depiction of the diasporic identities that had implications
for slaves' experiences in the Americas.
