ster” invested in Africa and Islam and “the unity of Africa through Islam,”
“painful[ly]” though productively “unmoor[ed]” in Italy, diverging from Eu-
ropean and North African models to comment “on the world at a time of new
and mixed identity,” and “think[ing] carefully about what he should say and
especially what he should notsay” before his European audiences.^13
But suppose we take that “time of new and mixed identity” one step fur-
ther. Suppose we consider al-Wazzan’s geographical history apart from his bi-
ography and look at the description of Africa apart from the Moor. The text,
after all, contains very little of al-Wazzan’s own story and, with the exception
of a few passages, is told from a third- rather than first-person point of view.
Davis herself notes how few traces we have of this “shadowy figure” beyond his
writings, and she must reach outside those texts to speculate on his marital sta-
tus, for example, or to resolve the tension between his apparent commitment
to Islam and his conflicting use of “words inexcusable from an Islamic point of
view.”^14 Moreover, while Yeats may imagine that he can write to Africanus “as
if to Africa,” not only is Africa’s story not the Moor’s, the Moor’s story is not
Africa’s.^15 Al-Wazzan’s position between the worlds of Europe and North
Africa no doubt gives his history a unique perspective. But the vision of Africa
that results is not itself so neatly—or tensely—divided between those worlds,
even when that vision is augmented and translated by a man, Pory, who pro-
moted and participated in the colonial project of Virginia and whose evangel-
ical Christian agenda, with respect to John Leo, is clear. The History and
Description of Africathat becomes such a highly lauded, authorized, and sensa-
tional resource in early modern England depicts Africa, especially northern
Africa, as a place whose longstanding external and internal traffic has left its
mark—a place where “strangers” from inside and outside the continent’s bor-
ders intermingle and intermix, where colors and categories of identity are in-
variably in flux, and where histories of linguistic, religious, and cultural change
complicate the differentiation of peoples. Its “nations” house a plethora of local
communities, absorbing and reflecting ongoing cultural and material ex-
change. Never simply the Islamic alternative or antithesis to Christian Europe,
the Africa of The History, in short, takes definition from an extensive nexus of
diverse and evolving cultures, historically and currently open to the world.
***The History and Description of Africamay well be an “unreliable translation of
the faulty Latin translation of the already problematic Italian version,” and I
Cultural Traffic 141