chapter six
Cultural Traffic
The History and Description of Africa
and the Unmooring of the Moor
At the endof the sixteenth century, Queen Elizabeth was ordering select
blackamoors out of England; King Philip III was moving toward the official
banishment of all Moors from his realm. Within the English theater, Aaron
and Eleazar were performing their atrocities, in spectacular excess, in the mid-
dle of imagined ancient Roman and contemporary Spanish courts. And
everything was in place for the codification and segregation of Moors as an
unwelcome and unworthy presence within Europe. Yet, if what I have been
arguing is correct, the possibility, plausibility, and even desirability of secur-
ing this kind of physical and ideological boundary—of casting Moors out,
turning them into political scapegoats, or reducing the figure to stereotype—
were challenged by complications within the very representations that gave
such discrimination form. Add to that a remarkable, if not revolutionary, tex-
tual event: the emergence of the Geographical Historie of Africa, produced ini-
tially in 1526 by al-Hasan ibn Mohammed al-Wezâz al-Fâsi, whom England
would know as “John Leo” and “Leo Africanus.” Remarkable because here
was an early sixteenth-century account of Africa created by a “real” Moor,
who had traveled extensively through northern Africa, lived in Rome, con-
verted to Christianity, and produced Africa’s story in both Arabic and Italian.
While other texts were writing the Moor tentatively out of European society,
this history was writing the Moor persuasively in.
The emergence of theHistoriewas clearly an important event. The text