The Dawning of the Apocalypse. Gerald Horne
The presence of gold in Africa, which these informants helped to reveal, set pulses racing in Europe, a continent that continued to be dazzled by the wealth displayed earlier by Mansa Musa.52 Like others they had been attracted by the legend—and reality—of the fabled gold that was thought to rest in Africa.53
For the kingdoms of Aragon and Castile (Spain in brief), as they were waging the Reconquista, had designs on the Maghreb since the thirteenth century, a process that was not deterred when agreements were inked allowing Christian merchants (Iberians and Italians) to settle in North Africa.54 This was followed by the “Disputation of Tortosa,” yet another anti-Semitic marker that became linked with the emerging bludgeoning of Africa.55
Thus, it was not only free labor but the presence of gold that helped to propel Africa on its downward slide, serving to exacerbate the “economic difference” between this continent and its continental neighbor due north. For as early as 1290, there was a mutually beneficial commercial treaty between Genoa and Ethiopia, and a Dominican monk who visited Alexandria in 1322 spoke of “warehouses … maintained” by merchants of Venice, Marseilles, and Genoa.56
“The Africa of this period,” says French historian François Xavier Fauvelle, “was home to powerful and prosperous states” that were “integrated … into some of the great currents of global exchange…. The continent enjoyed a considerable reputation from Europe to China, a reputation exemplified by the celebrity that Musa, King of Mali … achieved in the Islamic world and Christian Europe.” Thus, in the mid-thirteenth century, King James, the Conqueror of Aragon, invited Solomon ben Ammar, a prominent member of the Jewish community of Sijilmasa at the northern edge of the Sahara, to come along with his co-religionists to settle Majorca and Catalonia; at that juncture, besieged as they were by Arabs, many Aragonese sought fervently to attract those with knowledge of these important African commercial networks, to the detriment of the Maghreb competition. Indeed, a good deal of the intelligence relating to Mali’s Musa was due to the Jewish communities established along these vital African routes that reached the western Mediterranean vicinity. As early as the fifteenth century, Portugal was snatching up to about 1,000 Africans from Arguin to be enslaved, with gold following soon thereafter, if not simultaneously. Eastward in Tuat in today’s Algeria, a gold trade erupted and, ironically, those that had fled anti-Jewish pogroms became critical to this commerce, given their refuge there and the existence of a diaspora network.57
There was a perversity in the process that drove an ever-larger Jewish community, fleeing persecution into Africa, where they could then play a role in a similarly dastardly process that was emerging: the African Slave Trade. It was also in 1391 that murderous pogroms, of a kind that would become common in the Americas, erupted in Sevilla and Andalusia, eventuating in the devastation of members of the Jewish community, along with forced conversions. It happened again in Toledo in 1449, followed in 1478 by a Castilian Inquisition. The sequence of dates suggests the momentum of onrushing events: by 2 January 1492 Granada had been captured by the Christians, ending 800 years of the still potent shards of Islamic hegemony. By 31 March an edict was rendered to expel the Jewish community and some may have been alongside Columbus on 2 August.58
Yet, as Africa went into decline, so did other regions disrupted by this radical change in the status quo. Quite logically declining was also Venice—then a major power—that has been adjudged to possess an “armed … navy since the early fourteenth century, the first state to do so,”59 in order to enforce its diktat in the event of disputes, commercial or otherwise. Yet when Vasco da Gama “discovered” a new route to the east in 1498 via Africa, Venice was headed toward eclipse, yet another milestone in the rise of London in its stead.60
ANOTHER REVEALING SIGN EMERGED in 1437 with Portugal’s successful attack on Tangiers, employing arms developed by craftsmen from Flanders and points north and east, yet another Pan-European project that carried the germ of an arriving “whiteness.”61 At least by the 1440s Lisbon was involved in enslaving Africans with the utterly cynical rationalization of converting them to Christianity as justification. (Of course, it was a capital offense for a Moor or one who was Jewish to own Christian slaves.) Simultaneously, Pope Eugenius IV provided his blessings to this enterprise.62
Enslaving Africans in what is now Sierra Leone had begun as early as the 1440s, with interpreters aboard slave ships who often were “New Christians,” that is, those from the Jewish community who had “converted” and often had dispersed precisely to Africa.63 Historians subsequently have seen the 1440s as a turning point in the rise of the Atlantic slave trade,64 priming the pump for the post-1492 surge. Thus, in the century following the 1440s, Lisbon alone had an African population of 10,000 out of 100,000 with a similar percentage throughout Iberian cities. By the 1550s, enslaved Africans were a reputed 10 percent of Spain’s population.65
In sum, even before the post-1492 devastation, the Iberians were enmeshed deeply in the horror of enslavement. As Portugal moved more intently into Africa in the 1400s, more gold poured into Europe, along with African pepper for Antwerp, a city that was to evolve as a prime partner of England.66
Though Prince Ferdinand was taken prisoner earlier in North Africa—quite disastrous for Lisbon—the important city that was Tangiers was taken by 1471, yet another stepping-stone to a brutalizing penetration of Africa. The Portuguese also harmed the competition when they eliminated a pirate base on the present site of Casablanca and forced the chieftains of Safi and Azemmour to pay tribute.67 Also, by the 1470s Portuguese adventurers had arrived in the region that came to be known as Calabar, to the detriment of the Ibibio and the Ijaw.68
The fragmentation of Christianity, following the rise of Martin Luther in 1517, was matched in an opposing devolutionary direction by the political fragmentation of the Maghreb, induced in no small measure by the Iberians. This latter trend accelerated post-1415, and Morocco, quite noticeably, was disrupted by the influx of those fleeing anti-Semitism, not to mention Muslim refugees escaping Iberia. The response in the receiving region of the Maghreb was the fomenting of religious fundamentalism, which was arguably not conducive to socioeconomic progress, as Western Europe began to take off post-1492. By 1444, Portugal was bringing enslaved Africans to Europe. From the early 1440s to 1521 an estimated 156,000 Africans arrived in Spain, Portugal, and the Atlantic islands, mostly from today’s Guinea-Bissau, Guinea-Conakry, Senegal, the Gambia, and parts of Mali and Burkina Faso.69 (In 2019 the German Historical Museum in Berlin agreed to return to Namibia the Stone Cross of Cape Cross, an 11-foot-tall, 1.1-ton cross placed on the coast of southwestern Africa by Portuguese explorers, years before Columbus’s journey westward.)70
By 1446, Senegal and Cape Verde had been reached by Portugal and by 1474 Benin and Biafra, along with Fernando Po and São Tomé. Fernando Po was larger, but São Tomé was favored since it was farther from the African shoreline, at times in an uproar about the presence of uninvited visitors. Again, ironically, colonization often was driven by those fleeing inquisitorial Lisbon, though generally, as in Upper Guinea, the invaders included Castilians, French, and Genoese, as a synthetic “whiteness” began to take shape, given the exigencies of colonizing, along with various exiles, convicts, and adventurers who provided the rough-and-tumble necessary for oppression.71
Portugal, whose contemporary population is a mere 9 million, exemplified this Pan-Europeanism or what morphed into “whiteness” in that as early as the 1460s Lisbon granted concessions to Flemish captains in the Azores, which had been seized in 1431,72 and by 1475 Flemish ships were trading on the Gold Coast.73
EVENTUALLY, A NINETEENTH-century scholar concluded that a “Frenchman, a Briton, a Dane and a Saxon make an Englishman,” as full-blown “whiteness” had emerged. What had occurred beginning in the sixteenth century is that Protestants flocked—often fled—to London from various European sites, bringing their ingenuity and capital, enhancing England, then Britain, and germinating “whiteness.”74 There was another essential element involved in this Pan-Europeanism. It is also worthy of reiteration that as the Portuguese reached what is now Sierra Leone by 1446 and began enslaving Africans, aboard ship were translators of African languages. These were “New Christians” or