24 S. U. Abramova
closer in the line of development to apes than to human beings. This was the
beginning of racism in regard to Africans.
We shall not dwell here on racism in general, its origin, or how it was
and is manifested in different epochs and among different peoples. This report
deals in brief with the times when racialism in regard to Africans began to
assume the form of theory.
In the works of Azurara, Cadamosto and Pacheco Pereira, Portuguese
sailors who made voyages to Africa before the beginning of the transatlantic
slave trade, no racist views are expressed. When Europeans first came into
contact with the Negro race, Africans were not looked upon as inferior beings.
They could not be regarded as the Europeans' equal partners because priority
belonged to those who were stronger. But if the newly discovered lands had
been inhabited by non-black people having the same level of development as
the Africans encountered there, relations between the Europeans and the local
population would have developed in much the same way. At that time the
stress was not on racial but religious intolerance. And historians are well
aware that religious intolerance was displayed not only with regard to Africans
and not only in those times.
After the extermination of the Indians in the French and British West
Indies, white slaves were brought there to work alongside Africans (see above).
In the writings of those years we do not find any racial pronouncements against
African slaves. White and black slaves worked shoulder to shoulder on the
plantations and were subject to equally brutal treatment.
In the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries many works were
published by slave-traders and clerks employed in the numerous African trade
companies. Among these authors one finds Barbot, Snelgrave, Bosman,
Phillips et al.^22 Serving first as guidebooks (with the exception of Phillips'
book in which he openly pities African slaves), informing slave-traders of the
most profitable slave markets and means of delivering slaves with the least
possible losses to the New World, they were written in a business language.
Books written at the time by slave-traders contained no racialist views.
Discourse on the alleged inferiority of Africans as compared with Euro-
peans took place not among slave-traders but in quite different quarters.
In 1781, the work of P. Camper, a Dutch physician and naturalist and a
well-known scientist of his time,^23 appeared. Employing in his studies of skele-
tons of human beings and apes the facial angle, a measure he introduced,
Camper concluded that the facial angle of Africans came nearer to that of
apes rather than of Europeans. Camper merely stated his conclusions, but his
followers, including C. White,^24 used the distinctions between skeletons oi
people belonging to different races and apes to claim that Europeans were in
general superior to Africans not only physically but also intellectually. The prota-
gonists of the slave trade were quick to make use of this conclusion.