To be sure, in one almost apocryphal response to these kinds of differ-
ences, Pory declares it “strange to consider” that on one side of the Senegal
River “the people are blacke and well proportioned, and the soile pleasant and
fertile” whereas on the other side “they are browne and of a small stature, and
do inhabite a barren and miserable countrie” (Pory, 82 ). His observation
(which is, of course, textual, not actual), along with his surprise, had already
been prescribed long before in classical texts, and more recently in Hakluyt,
where one narrator finds “marveilous and very strange” the fact that on one
side of the Senegal “the inhabitants are of high stature and black, and on the
other side, of browne or tawnie colour, and low stature” (Hakluyt 6 : 167 – 68 ).
If Pory’s expression exoticizes the difference similarly, taking the sign as a
wonder almost de rigeur, the image here—of natives, black and brown, short
and tall, living side by side with barely a river between them—actually under-
scores what sets The Historyapart from earlier visions: its insistence on the
diversity of Africa’s peoples and the permeability and mutability of their cul-
tures. Given the complicating particulars which Africanus and Pory necessar-
ily display from point to point throughout (despite a politics, in Pory’s case,
that would have it otherwise) perhaps the wonder is not that these natives are
not separated further, but that they are separated at all.
The structural conjunction of Pory’s and Africanus’s texts actually
clinches the point, amplifying the fluidity of Africa’s geographic borders and
the variability of the Africans’ cultural identities across time as well as space.
For Pory’s additions—especially his general and particular descriptions of the
continent—are not simply an extension of Africanus’s vision but also, explic-
itly, a revision. Layering his own classification of Africa’s nations on top of
Africanus’s, Pory announces that what he presents is the “best moderne diui-
sion of Africa, for these our times” (Pory, 23 ). “For these our times”: the mes-
sage is that the Africa of 1526 needs to be updated now in 1600. And updated
it is, in ways that, I think, pave the way for the New World projects which
eventually depend on western Africa and its Negroes. For al-Wazzan in the
early decades of the sixteenth century and England in the decades that imme-
diately follow, it is Barbary that really matters, that provides the pivotal
ground for evolving global economies. For the Christianizing Pory, on the
brink of a new century and an emerging westwardly oriented world, the con-
suming focus is Africa’s dark side, its idolatrous Negro peoples and its lower
domains, which best evidence the need for providential intervention. The dif-
ferences between Africanus’s and Pory’s visions suggest both the subject of
Africa and the writing of Africa’s history as works in progress: within the
152 chapter six