The stories of early interpreters
In loving memory of Adrian Adams (1945-2000) When Pierre de Brazza started to explore the coast of Gabon and the Ogooué River in 1874, he relied on soldiers and sailors recruited by the French Navy – laptots – to act as his interpreters. These were the latest iteration of a system that relied on Senegalese intermediaries from the late seventeenth …
Bombay and Mabruki. H M Stanley, How I Found Livingstone, Scribner’s 1913. p. 69
The Portuguese slave-trade laid the foundations for what was to come, as did the Iberian conquests in the Americas. Had it not been for the need for labour in the New World to supplement reluctant and scarce native peoples, the sixteenth-century trade would not have grown to the transatlantic displacement of millions of Africans. As it was, when the Dutch, …
In the 1400s, navigators commissioned by the Portuguese royal family started to sail along the Guinea Coast, the shoreline from the Senegal River to South Angola. They hoped to obtain directly from the source the goods that were traditionally bought from Moorish merchants in North Africa. There was no need to brave the interior as the trading centres that had …