he postulates that “the coniunction betweene the men of Europe and the
Negro women” has “bred a generation of browne or tawnie people” (Pory,
96 ). To find color-coded Africans here is, in more than a few instances, to find
the traces of outsiders, emblazoned in natives who may be not only “blacke”
and “extremely blacke” but also “tawnie” or “most white.”
As critics we have attempted to come to terms with the complications of
the African landscape and the African people by using the overarching cate-
gories of religion, race, and nation to sort out the natives and finding here a
politics of prejudice. In notable places, The Historydoes construct difference
categorically and outline an early racism. Pory, in particular, uses the story of
Africa and Africanus to propel a Christian, evangelical mission—one which
he will pursue more vigorously as secretary of the Virginia assembly, embrac-
ing the Indians (whose history is, at that moment, ostensibly less mixed) as a
more amenable target of his zeal and writing his politics home in letters from
the New World.^36 In his efforts to turn John Leo’s history into the readable
manifestation of “divine prouidence,” he invokes established dichotomies of
light and dark, drawing a steady ideological line between the “miseries and
darknes” [sic] of Africa and the “little light” of Christianity, the “true religion”
that can transform them (Pory, 1021 ). This imagery at once overlays and un-
derscores the association of blackness of skin with blackness of soul. It is not
surprising to find in his reports “inhabitants” who “are for the most part
black” “being Idolaters, and much addicted to sorcery and witchcraft,” or, de-
spite his anti-Muslim bias, to find a contrast between “blacke people,” “which
are for the greatest part Idolaters” and can only “pretend a kinde of ciuilitie
both in their apparell, and in the decencie and furniture of their houses,” and
“Moores and Mahumetans,” “a kind, true-harted, & trustie people” “of a
colour inclining to white” (Pory, 55 ).
Further, Pory revises Africanus’s general layout of Africa’s populations in
a way that effectively darkens the landscape, implicitly producing more
“deadly enimies to the Christians” than the parent text suggests (Pory, 41 ). In
an introductory outline of the continent, Africanus divides the natives into
four groups, the “Africans or Moores,” the Numidians, the Libyans, and the
“Negros,” and he emphasizes especially the distinction between the Moors,
the “tawnie” natives who inhabit Barbary, and the “Negros” or “blacke
Moores,” whose domain is “the lande of Negros” to the south (Africanus, 130 ,
123 ). Pory, however, assigns Africa “five principall nations”—the Cafri or
Cafates of lower Ethiopia, the Abassins of upper Ethiopia, the Egyptians, the
Arabians, and “the Africans or Moores” of Barbary—and he includes within
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