this latter group not only the “white or tawnie Moores” whom Africanus
associates with Barbary but also the “Negros or blacke Moores” who, in
Africanus, stand distinct in “the lande of Negros” (Pory, 20 ). The result is that
Pory’s Africa contains two populations of Negros: the Cafri, the idolatrous
and “lawlesse wilde Negros” of lower Ethiopia, whose skin is “blacke as
pitch,” and the “Negros or blacke Moores” who appear as a subgroup of Bar-
barians (Pory, 53 , 41 ). All the more blackness, all the more need for Christian
light. And all the more evidence, then, in a circular twist, that blackness
(along with the “Idolators,” “Mahumetans,” Negroes, and Moors that it col-
ors) means evil from a Christian moral point of view.
Yet if Pory’s religiously and racially coded taxonomy tempts us to distill
either his or Africanus’s depiction of Africa’s people into general population
groups or to extract from The History’s pages a single, characterizing impres-
sion of, say, the Moor or the Negro, then we miss what is crucial to this text
and its early modern ethnogeographic vision and what constantly complicates,
even challenges, the racial and religious prejudices it also encodes: its insistence
on the primacy and contingency of Africa’s discrete communities.^37 For, in
fact, what makes The History’s over nine volumes of material almost madden-
ing to read is that they are filled with a profusion of qualifying particulars, an-
chored insistently to the local. Notably, Africanus rarely speaks of “Moors” and
uses “Africans” mostly to refer to Africa’s ancient inhabitants.^38 Instead, when
he gives an introductory overview of the continent, he divides each of Africa’s
four main domains (Barbary, Numidia, Libya, and the land of Negroes) into
separate “kingdomes” and those kingdoms into distinct “prouinces,” while also
breaking the four key population groups into “tribes” (Africanus, 125 , 130 ).
Barbary, for example, contains four kingdoms, and its “tawnie Moores” include
fiue seuerall people” spread out across a number of provinces (Africanus, 130 ).
Moreover, within the detailed descriptions which appear in the body of the text
and which follow a geographic trajectory from Barbary to the land of Negroes,
Africanus fractures the provinces further into cities, towns, and naturally
bounded communities. Significantly, it is within this last and local level that he
details the languages, customs, clothing, appearance, or other characterizing
features of the place or people, providing there an emergent if formulaic
ethnography. Hence, a given kingdom or province appears as a place not of one
culture or people but of many, often strikingly dissimilar. Appearing side by
side within the Moroccan province of Hea, for example, are the “most bar-
barous and sauage” people of the mountain of Atlas and the “most deuout and
religious” people of the “mountain of Iron” (Africanus, 246 , 247 ). In the
150 chapter six