Moorings: Portuguese Expansion and the Writing of Africa (review)

As we now reflect more and more insistently on the way Europeans have written about Africa, we continue to view the continent through colonial and post-colonial lenses. Indeed, post-colonial studies have directed us, in the past twenty years, to reexamine the literature about Africa as the literature of the imperial gaze. It is enough to think here of the controversy still generated today by Conrad's Heart of Darkness to realize that the consequence of 'writing Africa' is as acute now as it was when the book was first published, over 100 years ago. But if Edward Said's Orientalism is the founding stone of post-colonial analysis, it is important to remember that the Palestinian scholar had already written about Heart of Darkness with a subtlety that many of his followers failed to achieve when excoriating European writing about the Empire. So the key question, now as then, is how to interpret what is written about Africa.

Moorings is original in two ways. First, it seeks to revisit the writings of the early chroniclers of Portuguese expansion from the contemporary perspective of critical literary analysis. Second, the author endeavours to do this in the context of the actual history of the writing of these canonical texts. The book is, in Blackmore's words, 'about the culture of writing on Africa in the first century and a half of maritime expansion, from Zurara's chronicles in the mid-fifteenth century to the epic poems Os Lusíadas of Luís de Camões [...]. It seeks to delineate the inchoate practices of writing that accompanied and, at the same time, were the product of, maritime expansion and voyaging' (xv-xvi). This is an ambitious and difficult task because it requires very different skills, which are seldom married: the deconstruction of texts from the perspective of those who read them at the time as well as the reinterpretation of some of the most widely disseminated and best known Portuguese texts from our present standpoint.

The author's argument for looking at these particular texts, which he sees as 'bracketing' the 'formative years of imperial discourse' (xvii), is coherent and does provide a suitable framework. The book is composed of three large chapters entitled, respectively, 'Encountering the African', 'Expansion and the Contours of Africa', and 'The Monster of Melancholy'. The first is an examination of the idea of the 'Moor' - which, according to the author, also included the Blacks - within the context of medieval and late-medieval Portuguese writing. It advances the argument that this notion was fluid, as well as shifting, and that 'Moorishness' was at that time both an interior and an exterior 'quality'. The second chapter examines the geographic and nautical writings of the period that precedes Camões and explains how they came to place Africa, physically as well as metaphorically, as the staging post in the Indian enterprise. The last chapter is a study of the famous episode in The Lusiads in which Vasco da Gama encounters the monster Adamastor, seen by many as the most important moment about Africa in Camões' poem.

The book shows an impressive depth of knowledge about the historical, cultural and literary context within which these texts about empire were written. Indeed, it is refreshing to read a contemporary critique of the writing of early European expansion that does not overdetermine the interpretation by projecting our world onto that world. The book will also offer a reading of this material from a Portuguese, rather than an undifferentiated European, perspective, which is welcome. One of the interesting, if not wholly unexpected, insights that Moorings provides is that, in the context of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, Africa was less the Dark Continent than the Continent of Mystery. Since the obsession of the period was with the 'Moor' and Islam, Africa was read, or imagined, as a place in between: in between the West and the Islamic lands; and in between the West...