Stamped From the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America (6 page)

DESPITE SPAIN’S RISE
, Portugal remained the undisputed power of the African slave trade. And Gomes Eanes de Zurara’s racist ideas remained Europe’s undisputed defenders of slave trading until another man, an African, rose up to carry on the legacy. Around 1510, Al-Hasan Ibn Muhammad al-Wazzan al-Fasi, a well-educated Moroccan, accompanied his uncle on a diplomatic mission down into the Songhay Empire. Eight years later, he was enslaved on another diplomatic voyage along the Mediterranean Sea. His captors presented the learned twenty-four-year-old to the scholarly Pope Leo X in Italy. Before dying in 1521, the pope freed the youngster, converted him to Christianity, renamed him Johannes Leo, and possibly commissioned him to write a survey of Africa. He became known as Leo the African, or Leo Africanus. He satisfied Italian curiosity in 1526 with the first scholarly survey of Africa in Europe,
Della descrittione dell’Africa (Description of Africa)
.

Leo Africanus described the etymology of Africa and then surveyed African geography, languages, cultures, religions, and diseases. His summation: “There is no Nation under Heaven more prone to Venery [sexual indulgence].” The Africans “leade a beastly kind of life, being utterly destitute of the use of reason, of dexterities of wit, and of all arts,” Africanus wrote. “They . . . behave themselves, as if they had continually lived in a Forrest among wild beasts.”

Leo the African did not ignore the elephant in the room. How do “I my selfe write so homely of Africa,” he asked, when “I stand indebted [to Africa] both for my birth” and education? He considered himself to be a “historiographer” charged with telling “the plaine truth in all places.” Africanus did not mind if Africans were denigrated. He believed he was describing Africans accurately.
¹²

Leo Africanus established himself through
Della descrittione dell’Africa
as the world’s first known African racist, the first illustrious African producer of racist ideas (as Zurara was the first illustrious European producer of racist ideas). Anyone can consume or produce racist ideas of African inferiority—any European, any Asian, any Native American, any Latina/o, and any African. Leo’s African ancestry hardly
shielded him from believing in African inferiority and European superiority, or from trying to convince others of this plain racist “truth.”

Leo Africanus may have never visited the fifteen African lands he claims to have seen. He could have paraphrased the notes of Portuguese travelers. But veracity did not matter. Once the manuscript was finished in 1526, once it was published in Italian in 1550, and once it was translated into French and Latin in 1556, readers across Western Europe were consuming it and tying African people to hypersexuality, to animals, and to the lack of reason. It is not known what happened to Leo the African, the author of the most widely read and most influential book on Africa—next to Zurara’s—during the 1500s. He made countless Europeans feel that they knew him, or rather, knew Africa.

Around the time Leo the African’s text was making its way through Europe, and around the time Richard Mather’s parents were born, the British began their quest to break the Portuguese monopoly on African slave-trading, eager to reap the benefits and grow their empire. In 1554, an expedition captained by John Lok, ancestor of philosopher John Locke, arrived in England after traveling to “Guinea.” Lok and his compatriots Robert Gainish and William Towerson docked with 450 pounds of gold, 250 ivory tusks, and five enslaved African men. These three Englishmen established themselves as the new authorities on Africa and African people among curious British minds. Their opinions seemed to be shaped as much by the Portuguese and French as by their own observations. Sounding like Leo Africanus or Zurara, Gainish labeled Africans a “people of beastly living, without a God, law, religions, or common wealth.” The five “beasts” that he and his shipmates brought back to England all learned English and were sent back to Africa to serve as translators for English traders.
¹³

As English contact with Africans matured, so did the desire to explain the radical color differences. Writers like Gainish applied climate theory to the dark skins of Africa and the light skins of Europe. The popular theory made sense when looking at Europe, the Mediterranean, and Africa. But what about the rest of the world? During
the final decades of the sixteenth century, a new genre of British literature adopted a different theory. Writers brought amazing stories of the world into Anglican homes, into the Puritan homes of Richard Mather and John Cotton, and into the homes of other future leaders of colonial America. And these worldly stories were as racist as they were amazing.

CHAPTER 3

Coming to America

EXPLORERS WROTE ABOUT
their adventures, and their tales fascinated Europeans. This new travel literature gave Europeans sitting by their firesides a window into faraway lands where different-looking people resided in cultures that seemed exotic and strange. But the literary glimpses that explorers provided of African lands were usually overshadowed by the self-interests of the backers of the expeditions, who aimed most of all to fulfill their colonizing and slave-trading desires. Even a lonely abolitionist, French philosopher Jean Bodin, found his thoughts bogged down by tales connecting two simultaneous discoveries: that of West Africans, and that of the dark, tailless apes walking around like humans in West Africa. Africa’s heat had produced hypersexual Africans, Bodin theorized in 1576, and “intimate relations between the men and beasts . . . still give birth to monsters in Africa.” The climate theory of Africa’s hot sun transforming the people into uncivil beasts of burden still held the court of racist opinion. But not much longer.
¹

For English travel writer George Best, climate theory fell apart when he saw on an Arctic voyage in 1577 that the Inuit people in northeastern Canada were darker than the people living in the hotter south. In a 1578 account of the expedition, Best shied away from climate theory in explaining “the Ethiopians blacknesse.” He found an alternative: “holy Scripture,” or the curse theory that had recently been articulated by a Dominican Friar in Peru and a handful of French intellectuals, a theory more enticing to slaveholders. In Best’s whimsical interpretation of Genesis, Noah orders his White and “Angelike” sons to abstain from
sex with their wives on the Ark, and then tells them that the first child born after the flood would inherit the earth. When the evil, tyrannical, and hypersexual Ham has sex on the Ark, God wills that Ham’s descendants shall be “so blacke and loathsome,” in Best’s telling, “that it might remain a spectacle of disobedience to all the worlde.”
²

The first major debate between racists had invaded the English discourse. This argument about the cause of inferior Blackness—curse or climate, nature or nurture—would rage for decades, and eventually influence settlers to America. Curse theorists were the first known segregationists. They believed that Black people were naturally and permanently inferior, and totally incapable of becoming White. Climate theorists were the first known assimilationists, believing Black people had been nurtured by the hot sun into a temporary inferiority, but were capable of becoming White if they moved to a cooler climate.

George Best produced his curse theory in 1578, in the era between Henry VII and Oliver Cromwell, a time during which the English nation was experiencing the snowballing, conflicting passions of overseas adventure and domestic control, or, to use historian Winthrop Jordan’s words, of “voyages of discovery overseas” and “inward voyages of discovery.” The mercantile expansion abroad, the progressively commercialized economy at home, the fabulous profits, the exciting adventure stories, and the class warfare all destabilized the social order in Elizabethan England, a social order being intensely scrutinized by the rising congregation of morally strict, hyper-dictating, pious Puritans.

George Best used Africans as “social mirrors,” to use Jordan’s phrase, for the hypersexuality, greed, and lack of discipline—the Devil’s machinations—that he “found first” in England “but could not speak of.” Normalizing negative behavior in faraway African people allowed writers to de-normalize negative behavior in White people, to de-normalize what they witnessed during intense appraisals of self and nation.

PROBABLY NO ONE
in England collected and read travel stories more eagerly than Richard Hakluyt. In 1589, he published his travel collection in
The Principall Navigations, Voyages, and Discoveries of the English Nation
. In issuing this monumental collection of nearly all the available documents describing British overseas adventures, Hakluyt urged explorers, traders, and missionaries to fulfill their superior destiny, to civilize, Christianize, capitalize, and command the world.
³

The Puritans believed, too, in civilizing and Christianizing the world, but their approach to the project was slightly different from that of most explorers and expedition sponsors. For the others, it was about economic returns or political power. For Puritan preachers, it was about bringing social order to the world. Cambridge professor William Perkins rested at the cornerstone of British Puritanism in the late sixteenth century. “Though the servant in regard of faith and the inner man be equal to his master, in regard of the outward man . . . the master is above the servant,” he explained in
Ordering a Familie
, published in 1590. In paraphrasing St. Paul, Perkins became one of the first major English theorists—or assimilationist theologians, to be more precise—to mask the exploitative master/servant or master/slave relationship as a loving family relationship. He thus added to Zurara’s justifying theory of Portuguese enslavers nurturing African beasts. For generations to come, assimilationist slaveholders, from Richard Mather’s New England to Hispaniola, would shrewdly use this loving-family mask to cover up the exploitation and brutality of slavery. It was Perkins’s family ordering that Puritan leaders like John Cotton and Richard Mather used to sanction slavery in Massachusetts a generation later. And it was Perkins’s claim of equal souls and unequal bodies that led Puritan preachers like Cotton and Mather to minister to African souls and not challenge the enslavement of their bodies.
⁴

Richard Mather was born in 1596 in northeastern England at the height of William Perkins’s influence. After Perkins died in 1602, Puritan Paul Baynes succeeded him at Cambridge. Richard Mather closely studied Baynes’s writings, and he probably could quote his most famous treatise,
Commentary on Ephesians
. In the commentary, Baynes said slavery was partly a curse for sins and partly a result of “civil condition,” or barbarism. “Blackmores” were “slavish,” he said, and he urged slaves to be cheerfully obedient. Masters were to show their superiority through kindness and through a display of “a white sincere heart.”
⁵

AS RICHARD MATHER
came of age, Richard Hakluyt was establishing himself as England’s greatest promoter of overseas colonization. Hakluyt surrounded himself with a legion of travel writers, translators, explorers, traders, investors, colonizers—everyone who might play a role in colonizing the world—and began mentoring them. In 1597, he urged mentee John Pory, a recent Cambridge graduate, to complete a translation that may have been on Hakluyt’s list for quite some time. Pory translated Leo Africanus’s
Geographical Histories of Africa
into English in 1600. English readers consumed it as quickly as other Europeans had for decades, and they were just as impressed. In a long introduction, Pory argued that climate theory could not explain the geographical distinctions in color. They must be “hereditary,” Pory suggested. Africans were “descended from Ham the cursed son of Noah.”
⁶

Whether they chose to illuminate the stamp of Blackness through curse theory or climate theory, the travel writers and translators of the time had a larger common goal, and they accomplished it: they ushered in the British age of adventure. They were soon followed by another group: the playwrights. With the English literacy rate low, many more British imaginations were churned by playwrights than by travel writers. At the turn of the century, a respected London playwright from Stratford-upon-Avon was escorting English audiences back into the ancient world and around modern Europe, from Scotland (
Macbeth
), to Denmark (
Hamlet
), to inferior Blackness and superior Whiteness in Italy (
The Tragedy of Othello, the Moor of Venice
). The racial politics of William Shakespeare’s
Othello
did not surprise English audiences when it premiered in 1604. By the late 1500s, English dramatists were used to manufacturing Satan’s Black agents on earth. Shakespeare’s first Black character, the evil, oversexed Aaron in
Titus Andronicus
, first came to the stage in 1594. Down in Spain, dramatists frequently staged Black people as cruel idiots in the genre called
comedias de negros
.
⁷

Shakespeare’s Othello is a Moorish Christian general in the Venetian military, a character inspired by the 1565 Italian tale
Gli Hecatommithi
, and possibly by Leo Africanus, the Christian Moor in Italy who despised his Blackness. Othello’s trusted ensign, Iago, resents Othello for marrying the Venetian Desdemona. “For that I do suspect the
lusty Moor / Hath leaped into my seat,” Iago explains. To Desdemona’s father, Iago labels Othello “an old black ram / . . . tupping your white ewe.” Iago manipulates Othello to make him believe his wife betrayed him. “Her name that was as fresh / as Dian’s visage, is now begrim’d and black / As mine own face,” Othello says before strangling Desdemona. At the play’s climax, Othello realizes his dead wife’s innocence and confesses to Emilia, Desdemona’s maidservant. “O! the more angel she,” Emilia responds. “And you the blacker devil.” Othello commits suicide.
⁸