While conquest thus defines Africa’s past, traffic defines its present, com-
plicating “African” identity to a similar, if not even more extensive, extent. As
the example of the Arabians suggests, the contemporary Africa that The His-
torydisplays is a place of transformation, where diverse populations not only
move freely into territories outside their own but also settle there and inter-
mix, physically as well as culturally. Barbary, of course, borders on the
Mediterranean Sea; and the evidence of its exchange is everywhere. The Por-
tuguese appear frequently in descriptions of Morocco and Fez; a Spanish fort
marks the landscape of Fez and “ten shops of Spanish Moores,” its renowned
marketplace (Africanus, 440 ).^25 On an island off the Tunisian coast, Africanus
writes, “Christian, Mauritanian, and Turkish merchants haue their place of
residence” and carry on “great concourse,” the Moors there having fended off
the Spanish early in the sixteenth century with military force and tribute
(Africanus, 735 ). Jews too, he explains, who had been in Africa since earliest
times but whose “number is maruellously encreased euer since they were
driuen out of Spaine,” enter the commercial picture, making and marketing
“handy-craftes,” setting up “shops and synagogues” (Africanus, 278 , 477 ).^26
Reciprocally, the inhabitants of Barbary “trauell in a manner ouer the whole
world to exercise traffique,” “for they are continually to bee seene in AEgypt,
in AEthiopia, in Arabia, Persia, India, and Turkie” (Africanus, 183 ).
The signs of traffic are evident even in the descriptions of the “darker,”
ostensibly more isolated southern territories inhabited by the Negro peoples.
These lands are detailed most fully in Pory’s “description of all the knowne
borders, coastes and inlands of Africa, which Iohn Leo hath left vnde-
scribed.”^27 There we see, for example, that the coastal kingdom of “Zanzibar”
takes its name from “the Arabians and Persians” (Pory, 54 ). Not only is it in-
habited by “Moores and Mahumetans,” who, Pory notes, “have alwaies beene
in league with the Portugals” and who “build their houses very sumptuously
after the manner of Europe”; its corn comes out of “Cambaya,” and its
woman “are white, and sumptuously attired after the Arabian fashion with
cloth of silke” (Pory, 55–56).^28 We learn from Africanus that, reciprocally here
too, “many merchants” “come out of the lande of Negros for trafiques sake”
(Africanus, 254 ).^29 Within this context, it is not surprising that Barbary mer-
chants have spread their language in the land of Negros, not surprising that
they appear there marketing European cloth.^30 Nor is it surprising that they
“resort” to other “forren regions” with “sundry merchants” including Arabi-
ans and Jews, bringing goods from Barbary to trade for gold and slaves, whom
they, in turn, take “home” (Africanus, 783 , 303 ). From its Mediterranean
146 chapter six