Barbary, but of all Africa,” it may be in accordance with Islamic law that the
“Queene is alwaies of a white skin,” perhaps originally one of the “Christian
captiues, being partly Spanish, and partly Portugale women” who populate
the city (Africanus, 482 ).^35 In most cases, however, Africanus does not men-
tion religious identities, taboos, or laws: economics drive and legitimize inter-
course and intermarriage. Witness, for example, the Numidian city of
Techort, whose residents “fauour” strangers “exceedingly,” to the point that
“they had rather match their daughter vnto strangers, then to their own citi-
zens” (Africanus, 790 ). There, “for a dowry,” the natives “give some certaine
portion of lande, as it is accustomed in some places of Europe,” the reference
to European custom suggesting the possibility that the embedded strangers
are Europeans (Africanus, 790 ). Or witness Tombuto, a kingdom in Guinea,
whose “inhabitants, & especially strangers there residing” are “exceeding rich”
and whose king “married both his daughters vnto two rich merchants”
(Africanus, 824 ).
If the religious implications of these exchanges are largely submerged
within the text, the racial implications emerge more clearly, if sometimes im-
plicitly, especially as they are signposted by color. Both Pory and Africanus
understand skin color as an hereditary feature. Pory asserts at one point that
it is “transfused from the parents” and explains, at another, that “people of
sundry colours” appear within “nations extremely blacke” “by reason of the
varietie of women” (Pory, 68 , 83 ). Africanus, too, in describing a Moroccan
market town, underscores that the “men are of a tawnie and swart colour, by
reason they are descended of blacke fathers and white mothers” (Africanus,
255 ). Throughout the accounts, especially of the markets, both narrators cite
important instances where intermixing has made a color difference. Africanus
declares, for example, that “all the inhabitants” of a “famous mart-towne” on
the Moroccan coast “are of a most white colour, being so addicted vnto
friendship and hospitalitie, that they fauour strangers more than their owne
citizens” (Africanus, 243 , 244 ). “Fauour” here seems to carry the sexual impli-
cations it does elsewhere and to explain the implicit link between the color of
the natives and their addition to “friendship”: these inhabitants are “most
white” not simply in addition to their “intercourse” with (implicitly white,
European) “strangers” but indeed because of it. So too, Africanus notices that
in Egypt, the “countrey people are of a swart and browne colour” while the
“citizens” who inhabit the cities, the centers of trade, and who dress in in Eu-
ropean cloth are “white” (Africanus, 856 ). Pory is more explicit. Speaking of
islands off Africa’s western coast where the foreign traffic has been extensive,
148 chapter six