province of Duccala, one town (Bulahuan) is known for its “famous hospitall,”
“wherein all strangers trauailing that way, were sumptuously and freely enter-
tained at the common charge of the towne,” while a nearby city (Azamur) is
renowned for hospitality of quite another sort—“for the horrible vice of
Sodomie, whereunto the greatest part of the citizens were so notoriously ad-
dicted, that they could scarce see any young stripling, who escaped their lust”
(Africanus, 291 , 294 ). Although Africanus does treat the Arabians—more than
any other people—categorically, sometimes prejudicially, their characteristics
vary too: they can be learned, “wittie,” and poetic, constitutionally “vile and
barbarous,” or “verie rude, forlorne, beggerly, leane, and hunger-starued,” de-
pending on where and how they live (Africanus, 156 , 157 , 161 ).
Even Pory, despite his evangelical investment in skin color, works at the
level of the local. His supplements to John Leo’s text begin with a “general de-
scription of all Africa” and end with summary documents on the princes and
religions of Africa, as I have noted. But the mainstay of what in a modern edi-
tion comes to over one hundred pages is his extensive description of the places
“John Leo hath left vndescribed.” Within those pages, Pory not only breaks
the larger areas he surveys into kingdoms, provinces, and sometimes towns,
albeit with less regularity and specificity than does Africanus; he also draws at-
tention to the local exceptions that break the general rules, especially of reli-
gion and race, exposing the diversity as well as the historical contingency and
change that necessarily define Africa’s peoples. On the one hand, he offers
Mohammedanism as the provenance of the Moors, idolatry as a defining fea-
ture of the Cafri, and upper Ethiopia as the hotbed of Christianity (thanks to
the assumed presence of “Prete Ianni,” who seems to have survived as long and
as spectacularly in the myths of Africa as Elvis has in the myths of America)
(Pory, 54 ). On the other, he acknowledges that in each of Africa’s nations,
“some are Gentiles which worship Idols; others of the sect of Mahumet; some
others Christians; and some Iewish in religion” (Pory, 20 ). As well, even while
he claims that “all the kingdomes and countries” of southwest Africa, from
the Cape of Good Hope up to Capo Verde, are “inhabited by blacke people,”
he admits that people of “sundry colours” live near “extremely black” “Ne-
gros” to the north (Pory, 83 ). Detailing one area of lower Ethiopia (where the
“wilde” and pitch black Cafri are), Pory also exposes inhabitants who are
“Moores by religion,” Arabians by descent, and tributaries of the Abassins
(Pory, 53 ). There too he locates a city that was “in times past head of all the
townes and cities of the Moores” but that now houses residents of both an
“oliue-colour” and “blacke” (Pory, 54 ).
Cultural Traffic 151