The Early Modern Re-Invention of Rome’s ‘African Monstrosities’

In his 1988 The Invention of Africa, Congolese philosopher and classicist Valentin-Yves Mudimbe called for a detailed study of the influence of Greco-Roman literature on the European invention of Africa (Mudimbe 1988, cf. 1994). Whether or not Greco-Roman literature presents a coherent picture of African territories and people as geographies and ethnographies of alterity, Mudimbe’s point was that there is extensive evidence that the early modern European writings of Africa made use of descriptions borrowed from Greco-Roman authors to justify European superiority and colonial expansion into African territories.

Greco-Roman literature presents, already since Herodotus but most clearly in early imperial Latin authors such as Pomponius Mela and Pliny the Elder, veritable geographies of ‘African monstrosities’ that display a taste for the grotesque (Evans 1999). These include marvellous creatures, such as the dog-heads and the headless (fused at some point with the historical Blemmyes, cf. Updegraff 1988), or the Gorillai first mentioned in Hanno’s periplus (see Kroupa 2018 on their early modern reception). These dehumanised Africans fed into the medieval bestiaries and reached early modernity, where they profoundly influenced both early modern explorers and the chroniclers and poets who accompanied them, contributing to shape Europe’s colonialist thought both on the African continent and on the Americas. Portuguese captain Pedro Álvares Cabral, who landed on the coast of Brazil in 1500, owned and annotated a copy of Mela’s Chorographia, and had the text translated into Spanish by his accompanying physician and astronomer João Faras (Romer 1998: 28); the headless Blemmyes featured on the front page of editions of Walter Raleigh’s ‘Discovery of Guiana’ (1597) at the turn of the 17th century.

Descriptions of Africa and Africans borrowed from Greco-Roman authors were used extensively by Portuguese royal chronicler Gomes Eanes de Zurara, author of a ‘Chronicle of the Discovery and Conquest of Guinea’ (1453), which was one of the first texts to justify pseudo-scientific racism and the transatlantic slave trade. In poetry, they are reflected in Luís Vaz de Camões 1572 epic Os Lusíadas, recounting Vasco da Gama’s voyage to India in 1497- 98. After introducing the original contexts and formation of some of these Greco-Roman ethnographies, I shall show how they contributed to the dehumanisation of indigenous African people and the monstrification of the African landscape in these two key texts from the early modern Portuguese context, which was crucial to the formation of Europe’s colonial imagination of Africa (Blackmore 2000, 2009).