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Paper short abstract:

The arrival of the Europeans to the West African coast during the fifteenth century created new opportunities for commerce, cooperation and conflict. With no known local written sources, how can we reassess the primordial African agency in these dynamics using contemporary European literary sources?

Paper long abstract:

During the first phase expansion along the west African coast, the Portuguese attacked and kidnaped the local populace hoping to sell them as slaves or get ransom. This strategy worked until they suffered the first military defeats by the poisoned arrows of local warriors in Senegambia. It didn't take long for the Portuguese to adapt and refocus their expansion efforts into establishing commercial relations with the new sovereigns and communities they encountered. Trade would be the new language of enduring peace, as soon as the difficulties (especially in communication) of the first contacts could be overcome.

The establishment of commercial relations in the West African coast created new distribution channels and demand patterns, giving a renewed centrality to what was a peripheral region. This affected equilibriums, created breaks, and potentiated conflicts. Nonetheless, it also created conditions for cooperation and diplomatic alliances, as well as religious conversions. Either way, Africans were always the key decision makers in these dynamics. They were the overlords who fiercely controlled European presence in their lands.

But how to further study this agency if there are no known local written sources and the Portuguese documents are understandably euro-focused? This presentation addresses the fact that literary sources can be a trove of knowledge if read with the right questions. Travel literature (itineraries, geographic and ethnographic descriptions, reports and chronicles), can be looked beyond its European mindset to give us new avenues of research that unveils the center role of these African agents.