192 Hubert Gerbeau
times seems like the rather insipid continuation of exploits of civilization and
slave-trade phenomena that had been going on for centuries, would be a very
premature undertaking. There are still a great many obscure areas. Specialists
in Indian, Chinese and Islamic studies may one day bring new manuscripts to
light or propose a 're-reading' of extant documents, concentrating on the
problem of the slave trade. Archaeology should also shed further light on places
and movements. I shall return to this point later.
When Vasco da Gama's fleet penetrated into the Indian Ocean from Cape
Guardafui to Sofala in 1498, the coast was lined with prosperous sultanates.
Its Arabization and Islamization made it appear to the caliphs as a dependency
of the Muslim world, 'a notion whose full implications were to be discovered
by the Portuguese when they came face to face with the Egyptians and Turks '
(Otinno, 1975).
From the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuryProgress in the Mediterranean area and the first phase of the voyages of
discovery across the Atlantic were stimulated by the planting of sugar cane
and the concomitant search for slave markets. Profits from the Negro slave
trade were a consideration in the financing of later voyages of exploration
(J. Heers, 1966). When the Portuguese entered the Indian Ocean, however,
they were 'in quest of spices and nothing else' (Godinho, 1969). When they
visited the towns along the East African coast at the beginning of the sixteenth
century, they noted that slaves there wore simple loincloths, that buildings
were beautiful and that the social élite wore silk and jewels. But their goal was
farther off. They were interested in East Africa 'to the extent that it lay on
the "route to the Indies", and controlled access to it and traffic along it'.
This was the Portuguese attitude down to the nineteenth century (Mollat,
1974). Slaves and gold came later. In Sofala, merchants from Gujarat exchanged
cotton goods from Cambay and glassware from Melinda, for gold from
Monomotapa, ivory and captives which they took home with them. Following
their example, the Portuguese entered into relations with the Kaffirs (Godinho,
1969). In the course of punitive expeditions against the Kingdom of Monomo-
tapa, a handful of Portuguese Africans remained behind between the Zambezi
and Limpopo rivers and, after 1574, lived largely on the slave trade (Mauny,
1971).
The Portuguese, sailing towards India, recognized a number of islands in
the south-west of the Indian Ocean and gave them names. One of Don Sebas-
tian's captains, who took it upon himself to send his sovereign 'a host of slaves
for his galleys ', had a short-lived plan to conquer the Comoro Islands. More
tangible were the slave-traders' activities in Madagascar. In the seventeenth
and eighteenth centuries, the Portuguese, through the intermediary of Malagasy