Tangled Worlds: Africa, Europe, and the Making of a Connected Atlantic World, c. 1400-1800¹

In 1487, a Kongolese nobleman named Nsaku ne Vunda arrived in Lisbon as the ambassador of Manikongo Nzinga a Ntinu.² He came not as a suppliant but as a diplomat, bearing letters written in Kikongo and accompanied by gifts carefully calibrated to signal the power and sophistication of the Central African kingdom he represented.³ That same decade, Portuguese navigators were still struggling to round the Cape of Good Hope and had not yet set eyes on the Indian Ocean.⁴ The encounter between Kongo and Portugal - two expansionist polities at the edge of their respective worlds - was, in a real sense, a meeting of equals. Yet the historiography of early modern Atlantic history has rarely treated it as such. For most of the twentieth century, the story of Africa and Europe before 1800 was told primarily as a story of European activities and agency: of caravels pushing southward along the African coast, of Portuguese feitorias (trading posts) established at El Mina, Whydah, and Luanda, of the Dutch West India Company reorganising the slave trade, and of British merchants accumulating the capital that would eventually finance the Industrial Revolution.⁵ Africa appeared in these narratives primarily as a source of labour and raw materials - a vast hinterland activated by European demand. That gap in Africa’s historiographical scholarship was plugged by a new wave of nationalism and Africanism in the 1940s and 1950s, which produced dynamic and articulate African and Africanist scholars who championed the reconstruction of African history in its own terms, which served as a bedrock for African historiography into the twenty-first century.⁶ Before twenty-first-century scholarship came John Thornton’s groundbreaking claim that the economic and military power of Africa gave Africans the ability to set the terms for Atlantic trade rather than simply provide it.⁷

But this process of reorientation has been a lopsided one. It has largely taken place in an economic, political and military context, with the intellectual history of Africa, its knowledge systems, and its religious cosmologies remaining under-analysed as constitutive factors in the Atlantic world. It has also been geographically lopsided: there is much scholarship that centres on the Gold Coast, the Kingdom of Kongo, and the Bight of Benin, but less on other areas, even when their economic, religious and political networks had intimate connections with the Atlantic. Finally, it has been lopsided in its methodological approach: while there have been numerous regional case studies, these are seldom connected to form a coherent thesis. This paper addresses all three aspects of lopsidedness simultaneously.

This paper adopts a different approach. It argues that the Atlantic world before 1800 was constructed, not discovered, and that African kings, merchants, intermediary religious figures, and intellectuals were amongst its leading creators. This is not merely a corrective tactic; it is not even a reiteration of a consensus already achieved. Rather, it is a proposition at the intersection of three distinct fields — regional, thematic, and comparative — that the political economies, epistemologies, and cultures which developed in the Atlantic basin during the fifteenth to eighteenth centuries cannot be fully understood without giving serious attention to African agency, institutions, and ideas, in more diverse regions than have yet been considered by the field.

For clarity, the argument unfolds across five sections. The first examines diplomatic and political entanglements, focusing on the ways in which African rulers engaged European powers on terms they partially set. The second turns to commodity knowledge - the expertise that African producers, brokers, and healers contributed to early modern European pharmacopoeias, botanical knowledge, and trade systems. The third explores religious translation: the creative, often contentious work of rendering Christian, Islamic, and indigenous African cosmologies legible to one another. The fourth section considers cartography as a site of contested knowledge production, examining how African geographical understanding shaped, and was shaped by, European mapping of the continent. The fifth and final section travels into East, South and North Africa and tests the four overlapping themes against West and Central Africa. Together, these themes suggest that we need a genuinely bilateral and multilateral analytical lens for understanding Afro-European history before 1800.⁸

The Kingdom of Kongo is the most extensively documented African polity in early contact-era sources, and its history offers an illuminating entry into the question of African political agency. From the late fifteenth century, the Kongolese court pursued a sophisticated foreign policy that used Christianity as a diplomatic instrument without surrendering sovereignty to Lisbon.⁹ When Nzinga Mbemba [Afonso I] (1506-1543) wrote to King Joao III of Portugal in 1526 to protest the illegal enslavement of his subjects by Portuguese traders, he did so in the language of Christian brotherhood and royal equality, not as a subject petitioning a suzerain.¹⁰

Afonso’s letters, preserved in the Portuguese national archives, are remarkable documents. They deploy the full apparatus of Renaissance diplomatic correspondence - formal salutations, protocols of reciprocal respect, appeals to shared religious obligation - while insisting on the inviolability of Kongo’s sovereignty. “In this kingdom,” Afonso wrote, “there should not be any trade of slaves nor outlet for them.”¹¹ The letter frames the slave trade not merely as an economic grievance but as a violation of the Christian compact that had ostensibly united the two kingdoms. This was not naive theology; it was astute politics.

Kongo was not unique. Along the Upper Guinea Coast, the rulers of the Jolof Confederation, the Mane kingdoms of Sierra Leone, and the smaller polities of the Grain and Ivory Coasts engaged European traders through carefully managed systems of brokerage and controlled access.¹² African rulers required Europeans to trade at designated points, imposed customs duties, demanded gifts (often understood as tribute in African political idiom), and expelled those who violated local protocols. The Portuguese term tangomaos - traders who had gone partially “native,” adopting African languages, kinship networks, and sometimes religion - testifies to the pressure that African social institutions exerted on European newcomers rather than the reverse.¹³

In the Gold Coast, the situation was equally complex. El Mina (São Jorge da Mina), established by the Portuguese in 1482, was built on land leased from the Fante chief Caramansa, who extracted considerable concessions before permitting construction.¹⁴ The famous meeting between the Portuguese commander Diogo de Azambuja and Caramansa, described in the near-contemporary chronicle of João de Barros, reveals a scene of negotiation rather than imposition.¹⁵ Caramansa, dressed elaborately, required the Portuguese to observe specific protocols of address, and made clear that the arrangement was one of commercial convenience, not submission.

The Dahomean kingdom of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries represents yet another mode of African political engagement with European powers. The Dahomean state actively participated in the slave trade as a supplier, using the revenue to finance state expansion and military consolidation.¹⁶ This is a morally uncomfortable history, but it is an important one. African rulers were not simply victims of European rapaciousness; some were participants in and beneficiaries of a trade that devastated other African communities. The point is not to distribute blame differently, but to insist that the history is not reducible to a single axis of European perpetration and African suffering.

In the farther east, Benin of the Niger Delta offers perhaps the best-known example of African diplomatic boldness. When the Portuguese Envoy Afonso d’Aveiro arrived in Benin City in 1485-86, the Oba not only gave him trade privileges but also sent his own ambassadors to Portugal.¹⁷ The person entrusted with the task was Ohen-Okun, Chief of the Port of Ughoton. He was to serve as the Chief Priest, the Port Administrator, and the representative of the dynasty that founded the place.¹⁸ Later, one of the sons of the then Oba sent an envoy to Portugal, and the gesture was reciprocated throughout the sixteenth century.¹⁹ It must be noted that the Portuguese who visited Benin discovered a complex, hierarchical state, an operational bureaucracy, and a well-articulated external policy.²⁰

The Oba of Benin received the Portuguese at his court, inspecting their merchandise with what they reported to be keen, evident appraisal. To the initial annoyance of the Europeans who had set out in search of spices and other valuable commodities, he seemed more interested in purchasing firearms than in selling pepper – and so the world knew military technology to be the single most desirable export from Europe, and African leaders and despots and dictators alike sought the weapon with the utmost clarity. The confidence Benin’s monarch exhibited on such diplomatic occasions was not just a matter of court ceremony. From the coastal site upon which his kingdom was built flowed networks of coastal producers which led back into the vast, inner economic space of an array of interior Igbo and Igala-speaking polities which straddled the western bank of the Niger River, many of whom we shall yet hear of by name – including the Enuani communities (previously known as West Niger Igbo communities) which lay there.²¹ Within those lands, the periodical fairs, with which many of them are so keenly familiar even now (and in all likelihood since long before Europeans arrived), guild and network organisation (both craft-specific and that of canoe building), even their currency systems operated under the sway of an internal rhythm and internal logic.

Of internal production and exchange; the demands and production patterns of the interior did not necessarily map neatly onto the coastal market, and the demand signals arriving from across the sea were at least as much a product of the rhythm and logic of interior supply. Full and adequate information about this hinterland economy has only become available in the context of the colonial and post-colonial eras in Benin itself; it only dates from the nineteenth century, rather than the fifteenth century. Yet we have abundant information as to its density and stability over time, which may indeed reflect much longer traditions.²² This structural position on the hinterland at least helps to explain how a coastal power, such as Benin’s, was able to project that air of confidence into its negotiations with Europeans which it so often conveyed.

In a similar case but on a smaller scale is the kingdom of Warri. Although the Itsekiri kingdom derived its ancestry from Prince Ginuwa of Benin, who resided in the western Niger delta area before the coming of the Portuguese, the Itsekiri kingdom forged a diplomatic relationship with the Portuguese rather than automatically acquiring the diplomatic relationship between Benin and the Portuguese.²³ By the 17th century, Warri’s Olus had corresponded with the kings of Portugal and Spain as equals, even after the reduction in Portuguese trading to the area. The successive Olus sent their children to be baptised and educated in Portugal, where one returned with a Portuguese wife; thus, the Catholic identity was more dynastic than anything else because it distinguished Warri from Benin in terms of prestige, and Christianity was a court language, which was fluent in diplomatic and dynastic symbolism but never reached into the Itsekiri population.²⁴

The history of commodity exchange between Africa and Europe before 1800 is usually narrated in terms of extraction: gold, ivory, and enslaved people flowing out of Africa; textiles, metals, and alcohol flowing in. This account is accurate as far as it goes, but it systematically undervalues the role of African knowledge in producing the commodities and enabling the trades that made the Atlantic economy function.²⁵

Consider the case of malagueta pepper (Aframomum melegueta), harvested along the coast that Europeans named, precisely because of this trade, the Grain Coast. From the early fifteenth century, malagueta pepper was among the most commercially significant spices reaching European markets - valuable enough that the Portuguese crown attempted to monopolise its trade. The crop was cultivated, harvested, and processed by West African farmers using agricultural knowledge accumulated over centuries. European traders had no independent access to it; they depended entirely on African intermediaries who controlled both the supply chain and the pricing. The “Pepper Coast” was an African creation, sustained by African labour and knowledge, that European merchants were permitted to tap on terms they did not unilaterally set.

A similar argument applies to the trade in medicinal plants and substances. The early modern European pharmacopoeia was substantially shaped by African botanical knowledge, even when European authors were reluctant to acknowledge this.²⁶ Garcia de Orta’s Colóquios dos simples e drogas (1563), written in Goa but drawing on knowledge accumulated across the Portuguese trading world, contains numerous references to remedies and substances learned from African healers. The knowledge of which plants to use for ailments, how to prepare them, and in what doses was African; what Garcia de Orta and his contemporaries contributed was systematic written documentation and integration into European medical frameworks. Londa Schiebinger, Judith Carney and Richard Nicholas Rosomoff’s argument also formed the basis of Pablo Gomez’s work. Gomez also treats African and Afro-Caribbean healers as empirical knowledge-producers rather than sources mined by European physicians like Garcia.²⁷ Gomez has traced the diagnostic and therapeutic expertise of enslaved and free Black healers in Caribbean port cities, further underscoring that the systematic accumulation of empirical medical knowledge in this period was substantially an African and African-diasporic achievement, however unevenly credited at the time.²⁸

The case of kola nuts illustrates a related dynamic. In West African societies from Senegambia to the Niger Delta, kola served as a currency of social relations — offered at weddings, funerals, and councils as a mark of respect and fellowship.²⁹ When long-distance trade networks expanded across the Sahara and later the Atlantic, kola traveled with them. European traders who entered these networks discovered that success depended on understanding kola’s social functions.³⁰ Those who could offer kola appropriately — in the right quantity, to the right people, at the right moment — gained access to markets and relationships that were otherwise closed to them. Commercial intelligence, in the early modern Atlantic, was partly a form of cultural literacy, and the cultural norms being learned were African ones.³¹

The indigo and cotton textile industries of West Africa also demand attention. When European consumers encountered African textiles — particularly the fine strip-woven cloths of the Sahel and the resist-dyed fabrics of Yorubaland and the Gold Coast — they encountered products of sophisticated technical knowledge.³² African weavers and dyers had developed techniques for producing colourfast fabrics using local plant-based dyes that European textile manufacturers would spend decades trying to replicate. The trade in African textiles to the Americas — where they were exchanged for enslaved people or worn by enslaved people themselves — means that African material culture helped constitute the Atlantic world as a cultural as well as an economic space.

The interaction among Christianity, Islam, and African indigenous religions during the early modern period was one of the most significant intellectual events of that time, though it is often overlooked.³³ The usual accounts of Christian missions in Africa tend to emphasise European actions, such as the Jesuits founding the College of São Tomé in São Tomé, the Capuchins sent to Kongo in 1645, and the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel (SPG) and Church Missionary Society (CMS) missions in the eighteenth century. However, the ways Christianity was received, adapted, and transformed in African contexts were not just passive. African converts and catechists actively participated in religious translation, making Christianity understandable within existing belief systems, which significantly changed the religion they encountered.

The case of Kongo illustrates this point well. By the mid-sixteenth century, Kongo had developed what some scholars call “Kongolese Christianity.”³⁴ This was a blend that integrated Catholic saints into local ancestor-veneration practices, linked the cross with the Bakongo cosmogram (a symbol delineating the boundary between the living and the dead), and reinterpreted baptism through local purification and social inclusion rituals. This was not syncretism in a negative sense, implying a dilution of original beliefs. Instead, it was thoughtful theological work by Kongolese priests, catechists, and lay Christians, who seriously considered how Christian ideas related to their existing realities.

Kimpa Vita (Dona Beatriz), who led the Antonian movement in Kongo from 1704 to 1706, exemplifies the radical potential of this tradition.³⁵ Claiming to be inspired by the spirit of Saint Anthony, Kimpa Vita preached that Jesus and the apostles were born in Kongo and that the holy city of Jerusalem equated to Mbanza Kongo (São Salvador). She argued that European missionaries had distorted the true African version of Christianity. Although burned as a heretic by Kongolese authorities under European pressure, Kimpa Vita was making a theological claim with a respected place in comparative religious history: that Christianity is not inherently European and that its universal claims should be interpretable from non-European perspectives.

Benin and Warri add complexity to this discussion in a helpful way because neither reached the same theological synthesis as Kongo. The Obas of Benin dealt with Portuguese missionaries on their own terms during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. They allowed churches and permitted princes or chiefs to convert. Occasionally, they even requested priests.³⁶ However, conversion never reached the throne. The Oba’s power depended on his role as the kingdom’s spiritual leader as much as its political head; giving that up was never an option. When a Capuchin mission tried to stop a ritual sacrifice in 1651, the chiefs expelled the missionaries. Their refusal was a strong stance, not indifference. Warri took a different approach but ended up in a similar situation. Its Olus sent their sons to be baptised and educated in Portugal. They maintained correspondence with the Portuguese and Spanish crowns as equals into the eighteenth century.³⁷ However, Christianity in Warri served as a diplomatic and dynastic tool rather than a social one. This was evident in crucifixes, baptismal names, and royal letters, but it was absent from the daily religious lives of most Itsekiri.³⁸ The refusal in Benin and the selective adoption in Warri were, ultimately, two versions of the same calculation that explains Kongo’s acceptance: rulers retained what boosted their authority and discarded what posed a threat.

Islam had been influencing West African politics and intellectual life since at least the eleventh century. By the early modern period, Islamic scholarly networks in the Sahel—centred on Timbuktu, Djenné, and Kano—formed one of the world’s most advanced intellectual environments.³⁹ The University of Sankore in Timbuktu attracted students from North and West Africa and maintained correspondence with scholars in Cairo, Fez, and the Ottoman capitals. When Leo Africanus (al-Hasan ibn Muhammad al-Wazzan) described Timbuktu for European audiences in his early sixteenth-century geographical survey, he noted that book sales were one of the city’s most lucrative trades.⁴⁰ This detail highlights the rich literacy culture in the Sahel. While the Sokoto jihad of 1804–1808 falls just outside our period, its intellectual roots are entirely from it.⁴¹ Usman dan Fodio, the movement’s leader, learned from the scholarly traditions of eighteenth-century Hausaland, which were linked to the broader world of Sahelian Islamic learning.⁴² On the manuscript-book culture of the Sahara-Sahel from the fifteenth century, tracing connections from Timbuktu to Sokoto, Shamil Jeppie argues that the political theology of West African Islam—its views on just governance, legitimate authority, and the link between religious law and state power—developed from 1400 to 1800 independently of European intellectual influence, even as it interacted with European commerce and politics.⁴³

The encounter between African indigenous religions and both Christianity and Islam produced various outcomes in the early modern period, including conversion, adaptation, resistance, syncretism, and creative reinvention.⁴⁴ However, it seldom resulted in a straightforward replacement of African cosmological beliefs with imported ones. African religious thought was deep and adaptable enough to integrate external influences while maintaining its own integrity. European missionaries often found this surprising, as they expected conversions to resemble European Christianity.

European maps of Africa before 1800 are often cited as evidence of European ignorance and fantasy, with the notorious interior labelled terra incognita, rivers flowing in incorrect directions, and mythical kingdoms like Prester John.⁴⁵ However, this view overlooks how much European map-makers relied on African geographical knowledge, even when they failed to acknowledge it. The earliest accurate maps of the West African coast were created using information from African pilots, interpreters, and merchants who guided European ships along familiar shores. This can be contrasted starkly with the geographic ignorance of Europeans. In 1375, the Catalan Atlas - which was made on Majorca but included information from both the Mediterranean and Saharan trading worlds - showed the King of Mali seated on his throne wearing a crown and holding a golden orb, over the text: “His country is so very rich in gold that he is the wealthiest, most noble king in all the land.”⁴⁶ This figure was almost certainly supposed to represent Mansa Musa - whose 1324-1325 journey to Mecca sent a glut of gold through the Mediterranean markets and the Mali Empire across the known world.⁴⁷ This was a sort of geographic-cum- diplomatic tour and as such represented an act of charting the African territory of the empire within the context of the Islamic world as a site of power and prestige. This visual history of Mali self-representation was not only carried on in Europe. The manuscript cultures of Timbuktu, Djenné and the surrounding Saharan Sahel had already developed an extensive body of geography, history and astronomical texts in Arabic (authored, transcribed and dispersed among African scholars to African audiences), providing an African equivalent to the information Europeans were unceremoniously pilfering for their maps.⁴⁸

The question of who knew African geography before 1800 is more complicated than the stereotype of European ignorance suggests. Arab geographers had produced detailed writings about sub-Saharan Africa since the ninth century, and educated Europeans had access to this knowledge through Latin translations.⁴⁹ Al-Idrisi’s twelfth-century geographical survey, commissioned by King Roger II of Sicily, contained more accurate information about the Sudan and the Niger River than any European map created before the nineteenth century.⁵⁰ The “ignorance” present in European maps of Africa was partly a choice—an unwillingness to acknowledge non-European sources of knowledge—rather than a necessity.

African geographical knowledge also directly influenced European expansion. The pilots who guided Portuguese ships along the Angolan coast, the merchants who detailed the network of rivers, markets, and kingdoms in the Niger Delta, and the Swahili traders who illustrated the geography of East Africa all contributed to a growing European geographical understanding without receiving credit. Early modern cartography is, among other things, a history of unrecognised African intellectual contributions. The genre of portolan charts—practical navigational tools that guided European ships along African coasts from the fourteenth century onward—systematically, though silently, incorporated knowledge from African sources.⁵¹ Place names along the African coast in these charts often reflect corruptions of African names: El Mina from the Fante, Benin from the Bini, and Calabar from the Efik. The accuracy of these charts relied on knowledge gathered from African informants, translated into European cartographic formats, and then shared through European trade networks as if they were distinctly European creations.⁵²

Diplomacy on African terms, commodities with embedded African expertise, religious systems that Africans translated rather than just received, cartographic knowledge that Europeans absorbed without acknowledging its source, were not phenomena confined to the West and Central African coast.

Morocco provides a clear North African parallel to the confidence seen in Kongolese diplomacy, and in some ways, it was even more assertive. After Sultan Ahmad al-Mansur (1578–1603) conquered the Songhay Empire in 1591, he took control of the trans-Saharan gold trade and approached England from a position of strength.⁵³ In 1600, he sent his secretary, Abd el-Ouahed ben Messaoud, to the court of Elizabeth I. He wasn’t there to ask for protection or favours. Instead, he proposed that Morocco and England launch a joint invasion of Spain to help Dom Antonio reclaim Portugal. Elizabeth agreed to trade with them but turned down the military alliance.⁵⁴ The letters from that time show that the Moroccan court set the terms for their discussions and did not act like they were beneath the English. This was diplomacy between two powers that both disliked Spain. This represents a form of diplomacy carried out by an interested power seeking to lure Protestant England away from Catholic Iberia – true diplomacy with multiple poles involved; this takes our earlier discussion much further beyond that of Kongo, as al-Mansur wanted a war.

Morocco’s role in the development of Atlantic commodity knowledge remains insufficiently addressed within the existing historiography of global history. The Sa’dian state established advanced sugar-refining infrastructure in the Sous and Haouz regions well before the emergence of the Atlantic sugar complex on Madeira and the Canary Islands. The agronomic and refining techniques later utilised by Iberian planters in the Caribbean and Brazil were derived in part from methods developed in Moroccan mills, which, after 1591, were increasingly operated by enslaved labour from the conquered Songhay territory.⁵⁵ This involvement complicates the conventional binary of European extraction and African victimhood, a theme central to this paper’s analysis of Dahomey. It indicates that Moroccan sugar technology was instrumental in establishing the foundations of the Atlantic plantation system, which subsequently facilitated the large-scale enslavement of West and Central Africans.

The preceding analysis of the Catalan Atlas (1375) in this paper as an instance of African self-representation requires further contextualization regarding its production. The atlas was created in Majorca by Cresques Abraham, a Jewish cartographer whose information regarding the wealth of Mansa Musa was mediated by Maghrebi commercial and scholarly networks involved in the trans-Saharan trade.⁵⁶ As recent scholarship on this trade has highlighted, North African intermediaries functioned as the primary channel through which Malian gold was integrated into the European cartographic perspective.

A similar complexity of intellectual and religious translation is evident in the career of al-Hasan al-Wazzan, also known as Leo Africanus. A scholar educated in Fez, al-Wazzan was captured by Christian corsairs and presented to Pope Leo X. After his baptism, he authored the most influential early modern geography of Africa in Italian, which served as the principal source for European understandings of North and West Africa for generations.⁵⁷ Although he is often cited regarding the book trade in Timbuktu, his life represents a significant case of embodied translation. Moving between the Islamic and Christian intellectual spheres, al-Wazzan remains a central figure of cross-cultural mediation, with some historical accounts indicating that he eventually returned to North Africa and his original faith.

Solomonic Ethiopia’s diplomatic interactions with Latin Christendom provide a significant East African parallel to the Kingdom of Kongo, though the relationship was shaped by distinct political objectives. Beginning in the early fifteenth century under Dawit II and continuing through the reigns of Yeshaq and Zarʼa Yaʾqob, the Ethiopian state dispatched numerous embassies to Venice, Naples, Aragon, and the papacy.⁵⁸ Recent archival evidence challenges the traditional historiographical view that these missions were primarily appeals for military alliances against Islamic powers. Instead, Ethiopian monarchs sought religious relics, specialised craftsmen, and prestige items to facilitate an ambitious state-sponsored programme of church and monastery construction. These diplomatic missions served to project the dynasty’s authority and validate its claims to Solomonic lineage.⁵⁹ During the Council of Florence in 1441, European observers frequently conflated the Ethiopian monarch with the mythical figure of Prester John. Although Ethiopian delegates corrected this identification, the European fantasy persisted.⁶⁰ This dynamic represents a strategic inversion of typical knowledge transfer: rather than Europeans adopting African geographical insights, Ethiopian rulers utilised European misconceptions to maintain diplomatic channels and secure material resources.

The Swahili coast presents a case that complicates rather than merely extends established diplomatic frameworks. While the Kingdom of Kongo negotiated with Portugal as a unified sovereign entity, the city-states of Malindi, Mombasa, and Kilwa responded to the Portuguese arrival through the lens of their own regional rivalries.⁶¹ In 1498, Malindi allied with Vasco da Gama’s fleet to gain an advantage over Mombasa, providing the maritime expertise and knowledge of monsoon winds necessary for the Portuguese to cross the Indian Ocean. In contrast, Kilwa resisted Portuguese advances, resulting in the sack of the city in 1505.⁶² African agency in this region manifested as opportunistic alignment with a new external power against local competitors, a departure from the coordinated brokerage systems observed in West African contexts. Economic power along the coast was rooted in the control of gold and ivory networks connecting the Zimbabwean plateau to Sofala. These circuits, developed by Swahili and mainland intermediaries over several centuries, could be accessed by Portuguese traders but not independently managed or replicated by them.⁶³ Additionally, the Islamic scholarly and dynastic culture of Kilwa offers a model of cultural positioning distinct from the Christian synthesis in Kongo. The Kilwa Chronicle utilises narratives of Shirazi Persian descent to link the region to the wider Islamic world.⁶⁴ This process of self-fashioning allowed Swahili elites to integrate themselves into a global Islamic civilisation under their own authority, independent of external missionary influence.

South of the Zambezi, the Mutapa state (successor to Great Zimbabwe), which inherited the gold-trading networks previously centred at Great Zimbabwe, maintained an engagement with the Portuguese for over a century.⁶⁵ This relationship transitioned from an initial period of Mutapa control over interior gold and ivory to a gradual decline in authority driven by the prazo system, characterised by land-grant estates issued by the Portuguese crown along the Zambezi starting in the sixteenth century.⁶⁶ For several decades, Mutapa rulers navigated these pressures by playing rival Portuguese factions against each other and against internal competitors for the throne. While this pattern of brokerage aligns with the systems documented along the Upper Guinea Coast, it proved less stable. By the mid-seventeenth century, Portuguese-backed claimants and prazo-holders began to diminish Mutapa sovereignty in a manner not observed in the West African polities examined in this paper before 1800.

The Cape of Good Hope represents a significant deviation from the four-part overlapping themes of this paper. The interactions between the Khoikhoi and the Dutch East India Company after 1652 did not produce the religious synthesis, sovereign diplomacy, or cartographic records found in Congo, Warri, or Timbuktu. This absence is attributable not to a lack of societal complexity among the Khoikhoi, but to the Cape’s rapid shift toward permanent settler land dispossession, which contrasted with the negotiated coastal access models seen elsewhere. However, the Cape does provide an example of religious and linguistic translation concentrated in the figure of Krotoa. A relative of the Khoikhoi leader Autshumato, Krotoa entered Jan van Riebeeck’s household as a child and acquired proficiency in Dutch and Portuguese.⁶⁷ During the 1650s and 1660s, she served as the principal interpreter, envoy, and trade broker for the VOC in negotiations with Khoikhoi groups.⁶⁸ Her subsequent marginalisation underscores the conditional and precarious nature of such mediating power within this specific colonial trajectory.

The four themes explored in this paper—diplomacy, commodity knowledge, religious translation, and cartographic imagination—do not fully capture how African and European histories were intertwined before 1800. Hence, writing the history of this period is not possible from either side alone. Writing intertwined history is not merely about adding African figures to a primarily European story. It requires a genuine shift in approach—a willingness to examine sources from different traditions, to seriously consider historical accounts that do not match European standards, and to avoid treating European documentation as the default against which African experiences are measured. The oral histories of Kongo, the ajami manuscripts of the Sahel, the praise poetry of the Benin court, and the material culture of West African textile production are all valid historical sources, even if they do not resemble the materials that trained historians initially used to craft this history.

The Atlantic world that formed between 1400 and 1800 was marked by violence, exploitation, and extreme inequality. The transatlantic slave trade, which forced twelve to fifteen million people from African societies, ranks as one of history’s greatest crimes.⁶⁹ None of the arguments in this paper aims to lessen that reality. However, acknowledging African suffering and victimisation—an overdue necessity—is not the same as recognising African agency. Both are essential and true. The enslaved individuals were not defined solely by their enslavement. The rulers who took part in the trade acted as historical figures making choices under constraints, not as machines driven by European demand. Africans played significant roles in this complex history. Hence, the early modern Atlantic world (c. 1400–1800) was made, not found, and African rulers, merchants, healers, and intellectuals were co-architects of it rather than passive raw material for European expansion.

[1] The writing of this piece stemmed from curiosity – my students’ curiosity. This work came into being through the many questions my students have raised, unprompted and unencumbered, as they took a suite of modules that it was my pleasure to teach alongside Drs Maria Barry and Sparky Booker – HIS1059 African States and Societies, 1500-1800; HIS1046 Empires and Globalisation; HY118/119 Uses and Abuses of History; and EDP1047 History, Citizenship, Identity, and Interculturalism in Diverse Classrooms, for Joint Honours programme in the School of History and Geography, the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences and the Bachelor of Education students at Dublin City University’s Institute of Education (IoE). For these modules represented a certain milestone – the first special modules in African and global history before 1800 offered by the School of History and Geography at Dublin City University. For my students, much of what they would learn here was new ground – and their openness to that newness, to question rather than take things on faith, sparked this piece.

[2] John K. Thornton, “The Development of States in West Central Africa to 1540. In: A History of West Central Africa to 1850. New Approaches to African History (Cambridge University Press; 2020):1pp 6-55.

[3] On Nsaku ne Vunda and Kongolese diplomatic missions to Lisbon, see John K. Thornton, Africa and Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World, 1400–1800, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 52–71. For the broader context of Kongolese foreign policy, see Thornton, The Kingdom of Kongo: Civil War and Transition, 1641–1718 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1983).

[4] For a history of Portuguese explorations, See David B. Abernethy, The dynamics of global dominance: European overseas empires, 1415-1980 (New Haven and London, 2000); Jane Burbank and Frederick Cooper, Empires in world history: Power and politics of difference (Princeton: 2011); Charles Ralph Boxer, The Portuguese seaborne empire, 1415-1825 (London, 1969); M.D.D. Newitt, A history of Portuguese overseas expansion, 1400-1668 (London and New York, 2005); David Birmingham, Portugal and Africa (Ohio, 1999); J.H. Parry, The Age of Reconnaissance: Discovery, Exploration, and Settlement, 1450-1650 (California, 1982); J.H. Parry, Europe and the Wider World, 1415-1715 (London, 1977).

[5] The "Eurocentric" tendency in Atlantic historiography is traced in Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), 1–40. See also Charles Seligman, Races of Africa, (London, 1930); Hugh Trevor-Roper, “The Rise of Christian Europe”, The Listener, (28 November 1963), p. 871.

[6] Kenneth Dike is regarded as a pioneer of African history. These generation of scholars produced brilliant scholarship on African history. Some of the works produced during this period were Kenneth Dike, Trade and Politics in the Niger Delta, (Oxford University Press, 1956); J.F.A. Ajayi and Espie, I. (eds.), A Thousand Years of West African History, (Ibadan University Press, 1965); Cheik Anta Diop, The African Origin of Civilization: Myth or Reality (translation of sections of Antériorité des civilisations négres and Nations nègres et culture). Translated from the French by Mercer Cook. (New York: L. Hill, 1974). For a comprehensive critique, see Boubacar Barry, Senegambia and the Atlantic Slave Trade (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). See also the contributions of the Ibadan School of History to this critique – J.D. Omer-Cooper, “The Contribution of the University of Ibadan to the Spread of the Study and Teaching of African History within Africa” Journal of the Historical Society of Nigeria, Vol. 10, No. 3 (Dec. 1980), pp. 23-31.

[7] John K. Thornton's Africa and Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World, 1400–1800 (1992). This is not an isolated incident, but rather part of a trend – Thornton’s work has been hailed as being foundational to the study of the subject matter, in that he constantly emphasizes that Africa played an equal role in the Atlantic world, which has given rise to an entire body of literature after him. See Toby Green, A Fistful of Shells: West Africa from the Rise of the Slave Trade to the Age of Revolution (University of Chicago Press, 2021); Rebecca Shumway, The Fante and the Transatlantic Slave Trade (University of Rochester Press, 2011); Kristin Mann, Slavery and the Birth of an African City: Lagos, 1760-1900 (Indiana University Press, 2010); Linda M. Heywood and John K. Thorton, Central Africans, Atlantic Creoles, and the Foundation of the Americas, 1585–1660 (Cambridge, United Kingdom: Cambridge University Press, 2007); James H. Sweet, Recreating Africa: Culture, Kinship, and Religion in the African-Portuguese World, 1441-1770 (The University of North Carolina Press, 2003).

[8] The framework of "entangled histories" (histoires croisées) is developed theoretically in Michael Werner and Bénédicte Zimmermann, "Beyond Comparison: Histoire Croisée and the Challenge of Reflexivity," History and Theory 45, no. 1 (2006): 30–50.

[9] The authoritative study of Kongo-Portuguese relations remains Anne Hilton, The Kingdom of Kongo (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985). For the political uses of Christianity, see Susan Herlin Broadhead, "Beyond Decline: The Kingdom of Kongo in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries," International Journal of African Historical Studies 12, no. 4 (1979): 615–50. For general discussion on central African States including Congo, see David Birmingham and Phyllis Martin (eds), History of Central Africa (Vol.1: London and New York, Longman, 1983);

[10] See Excerpt of letter from Nzinga Mbemba to Portuguese King João III ," Basil Davidson, The African past: Chronicles from antiquity to modern times (1st ed., Boston and Toronto, 1964), p. 171.

[11] See Davidson, The African past, p. 172.

[12] On brokerage systems along the Upper Guinea Coast, see Walter Rodney, A History of the Upper Guinea Coast, 1545–1800 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970). On tangomaos, see Peter Mark, "Portuguese" Style and Luso-African Identity: Precolonial Senegambia, Sixteenth–Nineteenth Centuries (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002).

[13] See C.R. Boxer, Race Relations in the Portuguese Colonial Empire, 1415–1825. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1963).

[14] Christopher Ehret, The civilisations of Africa: A history to 1800 (Charlottesville, 2002).

[15] See John D. Hargreaves and George Shepperson (eds), Trade and Politics on the Gold Coast, 1600-1720: a study of the African Reaction to European Trade (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970).

[16] Robin Law, The Kingdom of Allada (Leiden: African Studies Centre, 1997) remains fundamental. See also Edna Bay, Wives of the Leopard: Gender, Politics, and Culture in the Kingdom of Dahomey (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1998).

[17] Ijoma, J. O. “Portuguese Activities in West Africa before 1600: The Consequences.” Transafrican Journal of History 11 (1982): 136–146.

[18] A.F.C. Ryder, Benin and the Europeans, 1485-1897 (Bristol, 1969).

[19]On Oba Ozolua's dispatch of Ohen-Okun — chief of the port of Ughoton, chief priest, and descendant of the port port's founding lineage — as ambassador to the Portuguese crown following Afonso d'Aveiro's mission to Benin City in 1485–86, and on the later embassy of an Oba's son to Portugal, see A. F. C. Ryder, Benin and the Europeans, 1485–1897 (Bristol: Ibadan University Press, 1969); Jacob Egharevba, A Short History of Benin, (Ibadan: Ibadan University Press, 1960)

[20] A.F.C. Ryder, “The Benin Missions”, Journal of the Historical Society of Nigeria (11) 2: (Dec, 1961), p. 231.

[21] Enuani is a topographical construct derived from the physical feature of the area occupied by the people, namely Enu (Up or High) and ani (land). The Enuani comprise two related groups, namely the Aniocha (whiteland) and the Oshimili (riverine) groups, respectively. The Enuani are commonly referred to as “Ika Igbo”. See Amaury .P. Tal. The Peoples of Southern Nigeria, (London: Frank Cass, 1969) p.39; Fordes, D and Jones, G.I. The Ibo and the Ibibio Speaking Peoples of South Eastern Nigeria, (London: International African Institute, 1950), p.48; R.N. Henderson, The King in Everyman. Evolutionary Trends in Onitsha Ibo Society and Culture, (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1972), p. 36. See also Ben Nwabua, Ogwashi-Ukwu Kingdom. 1000 Years of Traditional Democracy and Cultural Life 950-1914, (Ogwashi-Ukwu: Ides of March Communication, 1994), p.40.

[22] On the depth and independence of the Niger hinterland's market economy — periodic market cycles, craft and canoe-building guilds, and long-distance trade circuits linking riverine and inland Anioma communities — see James Onochie Akpu, "An Economic History of Ubulu-Uku and Her Neighbours, 1650–1890" (unpublished paper), drawing on National Archives Ibadan (NAI), Ben Prof 4/3/8, Intelligence Report on Ogwashi-Uku, Asaba Division, and oral testimony collected in Ubulu-Uku, Ogwashi-Uku, and neighbouring towns between 2011 and 2015. The documentation is nineteenth-century; on the longer-standing integration of these markets into regional trade circuits linking Igala and Niger Delta networks, see David Northrup, Trade Without Rulers: Pre-Colonial Economic Development in South-Eastern Nigeria (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978), 47; R. E. Bradbury, The Benin Kingdom and the Edo-Speaking Peoples of South-Western Nigeria (London: International African Institute, 1957), 62–63.

[23] Ekeh, Peter P. “J. O. S. Ayomike and the Truth about Warri City.” Urhobo Digital Library and Museum. Accessed June 8, 2026. https://urhobodigitallibrarymuseum.com/j-o-s-ayomike-and-the-truth-about-warri-city/

[24] On Warri's parallel diplomatic trajectory, its Benin-descended ruling line, and the political uses of the Olu's Catholic affiliation, see A. F. C. Ryder, "Missionary Activity in the Kingdom of Warri to the Early Nineteenth Century," Journal of the Historical Society of Nigeria 2, no. 1 (1960): 1–26; Joseph Kenny, The Catholic Church in Tropical Africa, 1450-1850 (Ibadan: Ibadan University Press and Dominican Publications, 1982).

[25] The systematic undervaluation of African commodity knowledge is discussed in Judith Carney and Richard Nicholas Rosomoff, In the Shadow of Slavery: Africa's Botanical Legacy in the Atlantic World (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009).

[26] Londa Schiebinger, Plants and Empire: Colonial Bioprospecting in the Atlantic World (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004) examines the politics of botanical knowledge. For African contributions specifically, see Carney and Rosomoff, In the Shadow of Slavery, 37–89.

[27] Pablo F. Gómez, The Experiential Caribbean: Creating Knowledge and Healing in the Early Modern Atlantic World (UNC Press, 2017).

[28] Pablo F. Gómez, The Experiential Caribbean: Creating Knowledge and Healing in the Early Modern Atlantic World (UNC Press, 2017).

[29] George E. Brooks, Landlords and Strangers: Ecology, Society, and Trade in Western Africa, 1000–1630 (Boulder: Westview Press, 1993)

[30] George E. Brooks, Eurafricans in Western Africa: Commerce, Social Status, Gender, and Religious Observance from the Sixteenth to the Eighteenth Century (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2003)

[31] George E. Brooks, "Kola Trade and State-Building: Upper Guinea Coast and Senegambia, Fifteenth–Seventeenth Centuries," Working Papers in African Studies, no. 38 (Boston: African Studies Center, Boston University, 1980)

[32] On West African textile traditions and their Atlantic significance, see Colleen E. Kriger, Cloth in West African History (Lanham: AltaMira Press, 2006).

[33] The intellectual significance of African-Christian encounter is foregrounded in Lamin Sanneh, West African Christianity: The Religious Impact (Maryknoll: Orbis Books, 1983). See also Adrian Hastings, The Church in Africa, 1450–1950 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994).

[34] See Jason R. Young, Rituals of Resistance: African Atlantic Religion in Kongo and the Lowcountry South in the Era of Slavery (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2011); John Thornton, A History of West Central Africa to 1850 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020); Luis Cordeiro-Rodrigues, “Christianity in the Kingdom of Kongo and Western Theism: A Comparative Study of the Problem of Evil” Philosophia Africana (2022) 21 (1): 13–27.

[35] The standard biography of Kimpa Vita remains John K. Thornton, The Kongolese Saint Anthony: Dona Beatriz Kimpa Vita and the Antonian Movement, 1684–1706 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998).

[36] A.F.C. Ryder, Benin and the Europeans, 1485-1897 (Bristol, 1969).

[37] S.U Erivwo, Christian Churches in Urhoboland, Orita VII/I, June 1973, p.32.

[38] On Benin's principled refusal of conversion as a defence of sacred kingship, including the 1651 expulsion of the Capuchin mission, and on Warri's Christianity as a dynastic and diplomatic resource detached from social translation, see James Akpu, "Diplomacy without Conversion: African Agency in Portugal's Relations with Benin and Warri, 1485–1725" (unpublished paper), drawing on A. F. C. Ryder, "Missionary Activity in the Kingdom of Warri to the Early Nineteenth Century," Journal of the Historical Society of Nigeria 2, no. 1 (1960): 1–26, and Okechukwu Hilary Ocho, "Beyond Conversion: The Need for Empathy and Sacrificial Commitment in Mission. A Case Study of the Portuguese Mission to Warri," Missiology: An International Review (2026): 1–10.

[39] See the live and digitised The Google/HMML "Mali Magic" digitization of the Haidara manuscript collection (SAVAMA-DCI partnership) Available at https://artsandculture.google.com/experiment/the-timbuktu-manuscripts/BQE6pL2U3Qsu2A?hl=en Accessed 12 May 2026.

[40] Shamil Jeppie, Writing Timbuktu: The Book in West African History (Princeton University Press, 2026)

[41] For Revolutions in the Western Sudan, see Nehemia Levtzion and Randall L. Pouwels, The history of Islam in Africa (Athens, Oxford, and Capetown, 2000); Paul Lovejoy, Jihad in West Africa during the Age of Revolutions (Ohio, 2016); Akyeampong Emmanuel Kwakur, Themes in West Africa’s history (Oxford, 2006); Austen Ralph, Trans-Saharan Africa in world history (London and New York, 2010); Mervyn Hiskett, The Sword of Truth: The Life and Times of the Shehu Usuman Dan Fodio (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973); Murray Last, The Sokoto Caliphate (London: Longman, 1967).

[42] On the intellectual context of the Sokoto jihad, see Murray Last, The Sokoto Caliphate (London: Longmans, 1967), and more recently Hilary Achebe, "Usman dan Fodio and the Intellectual Tradition of Hausaland," Journal of West African History 3, no. 1 (2017): 1–28.

[43] Jeppie, Writing Timbuktu, p.

[44] See Bruce Hall, A History of Race in Muslim West Africa, 1600–1960 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011).

[45] The history of European cartography of Africa is surveyed in Thomas Bassett and Philip Porter, "From the Best Authorities: The Mountains of Kong in the Cartography of West Africa," Journal of African History 32, no. 3 (1991): 367–413.

[46] P. F. de Moraes Farias, Arabic Medieval Inscriptions from the Republic of Mali (British Academy/Oxford, 2003).

[47] See Zeinab Badawi, An African history of Africa: From the dawn of humanity to independence (2024); Robert Collins, African History in Documents: Western African History (Princeton, N.J: Markus Wiener, 1997); Ajayi, J.F.A., and Michael Crowder, eds. History of West Africa. Vol. 1. London: Longman, 1971; Akyeampong Emmanuel Kwakur, Themes in West Africa’s history (Oxford, 2006).

[48] On the manuscript-book culture of the Sahara-Sahel as a parallel African tradition of textual and geographical self-representation, see Shamil Jeppie, Writing Timbuktu: The Book in West African History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2026). For a documentary corpus of Arabic-script epigraphy from the region, see P. F. de Moraes Farias, Arabic Medieval Inscriptions from the Republic of Mali: Epigraphy, Chronicles and Songhay-Tuareg History, Fontes Historiae Africanae, New Series, 4 (Oxford: British Academy/Oxford University Press, 2003). A substantial portion of the Timbuktu manuscript collections held by SAVAMA-DCI has since been digitised in partnership with the Hill Museum and Manuscript Library and made freely accessible online.

[49] On Arab geographical knowledge of sub-Saharan Africa, see Nehemia Levtzion and J.F.P. Hopkins, eds., Corpus of Early Arabic Sources for West African History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981). On al-Idrisi, see S. Maqbul Ahmad, "Cartography of al-Sharīf al-Idrīsī," in J. B. Harley and David Woodward, eds., The History of Cartography, vol. 2, bk. 1 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 156–74.

[50] Shamil Jeppie, Writing Timbuktu: The Book in West African History (Princeton University Press, 2026)

[51] For a discussion on the tools of European discovery, expansion, and empire, see two magisterial works - J.N.L. Baker, A History of Geographical Discovery and Explanation, (London., 1948); J.H. Parry, Europe and the Wider World 1415 -1715, (London, 1953). See also Kumin, Beat (ed.), The European World, 1500-1800: An introduction to Early Modern History (London and New York, 2009); Sachs Jeffrey, The Ages of Globalisation: Geography, Technology, and Institutions (Columbia University Press, 2020); Weisner-Hanks Merry, Early Modern Europe 1450–1789 (Cambridge, 2006).

[52] On the African origins of place names in portolan charts, see Jeffrey C. Stone, A Short History of the Cartography of Africa (Lewiston: Edwin Mellen Press, 1995), 22–59.

[53] For a discussion on the Battle of Songhai and its aftermath, see Timothy J. Stapleton, A Military History of Africa, (2013), p. 77; Kaba, Lansiné, "Archers, Musketeers, and Mosquitoes: The Moroccan Invasion of the Sudan and the Songhay Resistance (1591–1612)". The Journal of African History. 22:4 (1981): 457–475; Levtzion, Nehemia , "The western Maghrib and Sudan". In Oliver, Roland (ed.). The Cambridge History of Africa: From c. 1050 to c. 1600. Vol. 3. (Cambridge University Press, 1977). p. 455; Abitbol, Michel, "The end of the Songhay Empire". In Ogot, Bethwell A. (ed.). Africa from the Sixteenth to the Eighteenth Century. (Paris: UNESCO, 1992). p. 201.

[54] Jerry Brotton, This Orient Isle: Elizabethan England and the Islamic World (London: Allen Lane, 2016), esp. ch. 7 on the 1600 embassy of Abd el-Ouahed ben Messaoud.

[55] Samia Errazzouki, “Sultans of Sugar: The Rise and Fall of Morocco’s Saʼdian Dynasty (1541–1631)” (PhD diss., University of California, 2023).

[56] On the Majorcan cartographic workshop and its Maghrebi commercial sources, see Kathleen Bickford Berzock, ed., Caravans of Gold, Fragments in Time: Art, Culture, and Exchange across Medieval Saharan Africa (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2019).

[57] The standard study remains Natalie Zemon Davis, Trickster Travels: A Sixteenth-Century Muslim between Worlds (New York: Hill and Wang, 2006).

[58] See Roland Oliver and Anthony Atmore, Medieval Africa 1250-1800 (Cambridge, 2001)

[59] Verena Krebs, Medieval Ethiopian Kingship, Craft, and Diplomacy with Latin Europe (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2021).

[60] Samantha Kelly, “Ewosṭateans at the Council of Florence (1441): Diplomatic Implications between Ethiopia, Europe, Jerusalem and Cairo,” Afriques 7 (2016).

[61] See David Birmingham, Portugal and Africa (Ohio, 1999), J.H. Parry, Europe and the Wider World 1415 -1715, (London, 1953); R. Prestage, The Portuguese pioneers, (London, 1933).

[62] On Malindi, Mombasa, and Kilwa in 1498–1505 and on Indian Ocean monsoon pilotage, see Stephanie Wynne-Jones and Adria LaViolette, eds., The Swahili World (Abingdon: Routledge, 2018); and Edward A. Alpers, The Indian Ocean in World History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014).

[63] On the Zimbabwean plateau–Sofala gold network, see Shadreck Chirikure, Great Zimbabwe: Reclaiming a “Confiscated” Past (Abingdon: Routledge, 2020).

[64] On the Kilwa Chronicle and Shirazi dynastic origin narratives, see Stephanie Wynne-Jones, A Material Culture: Consumption and Materiality on the Coast of Precolonial East Africa (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016).

[65] For a comprehensive history, see Molefi Kete Asante, History of Africa: The quest for eternal harmony (3rd edition, New York and London, 2019); Christopher Ehret, The civilizations of Africa: A history to 1800, (Charlottesville, 2018); Kevin Shillington, History of Africa (London, 1995).

[66] Innocent Pikirayi, “Palaces, Feiras and Prazos: An Historical Archaeological Perspective of African-Portuguese Contact in Northern Zimbabwe,” African Archaeological Review 26 (2009): 163–85; Shadreck Chirikure et al., “The Mutapa and the Portuguese: Archaeometallurgy and Regional Interaction in Southern Africa,” in Archives, Objects, Places and Landscapes: Multidisciplinary Approaches to Decolonised Zimbabwean Pasts, ed. Munyaradzi Manyanga and Shadreck Chirikure (Bamenda: Langaa RPCIG, 2017).

[67] For a history of the Bantu States and European presence in Africa, See Iris Berger, South Africa in world history (Oxford and New York, 2009); Thompson, Leonard Monteath, A history of South Africa (3[rd] . ed., Connecticut, 2001).

[68] Julia C. Wells, “Eva’s Men: Gender and Power in the Establishment of the Cape of Good Hope, 1652–74,” Journal of African History 39, no. 3 (1998): 417–37; Pamela Scully, “Malintzin, Pocahontas, and Krotoa: Indigenous Women and Myth Models of the Atlantic World,” Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History 6, no. 3 (2005).

[69] Current scholarly estimates of the transatlantic slave trade are drawn from the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database (TASTD), accessible at https://www.slavevoyages.org/ and https://news.emory.edu/features/2019/06/documenting-slave-voyages For the social and demographic impact on African societies, see Patrick Manning, Slavery and African Life: Occidental, Oriental, and African Slave Trades (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990); Paul Lovejoy, Transformations in Slavery: A History of Slavery in Africa (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012); Barbara L. Solow, The economic consequences of the Atlantic slave trade (Lanham, Maryland, 2014); Toby Green, The rise of the trans-Atlantic slave trade in western Africa, 1300-1589 (New York, 2012); Austen Ralph, Trans-Saharan Africa in world history (London and New York, 2010); Joseph E. Inikori and Stanley L. Engerman (eds), The Atlantic Slave Trade: Effects on economies, societies and peoples in Africa, the Americas and Europe (Durham, NC, 1992); Philip Curtin, The Atlantic Slave Trade: A Census. (Wisc. Madison, 1969); Joseph E. Inikori, The Origin of the Diaspora: The Slave Trade from Africa," in A. I. Asiwaju & Michael Crowder (eds.), The African Diaspora (Tarikh, Vol. 5, No. 4, Longman, London, 1978), pp. 1-9.