The difficulty in studying African history from an outsider’s perspective is that much of the natural history of the people of the African continent had never been written down. Few documents exist that shed light on the cultures of the Medieval Africans, so what little researchers have to study comes primarily from secondhand accounts of European imperialists and colonizers. Oftentimes, relying on these kinds of documents can give researchers a biased picture of life for the Medieval civilizations on the African continent. By studying primary documents from a European perspective, such as the accounts from Ibn Battuta and Duarte Barbosa, one can formulate an idea of what life was like for Medieval African societies; however, one must also recognize that these documents may not accurately portray truths about the African cultures and come from a space of primarily economic interest.
The primary sources from Battuta and Barbosa reveal the African cultures of the Swahili Coast to contain great amounts of material and natural resources. For example, Barbosa recounts riches and material resources in abundance in such societies as the Sofala and Benamatapa. Economically, in these African civilizations, Barbosa notes a culture of Moors who trade products like cotton cloth, silk, beads, and ivory between different countries of the Swahili Coast in exchange for gold (37). Socially, Barbosa indicates the clothes the Moors wear (i.e., silk cloths, wraps, and hoods), the food they eat (millet, rice, meat, and fish), and the languages they speak (Arabic and other local languages (37-8). Politically, Barbosa explains that the African cultures typically have an overarching king, such as Benamatapa, and a series of lesser kings, each holding and ruling lands of their own. The subjects of these kings commonly bring material offerings as fealty to the king or kings each day. Revolts are dealt with violent force to quell the uprisings quickly and definitively. The kings use armies of women fighters as a type of police force to keep the peace (Barbosa 39). Interestingly, Barbosa notes the conflicts and economic, social, and political disruptions brought on by the arrival of the Portuguese into the African region. For example, in the nation of Mombaza, the king there refused to bend to the will of the King of Portugal. Resultantly, the king was forced to flee, his subjects were murdered by the Portuguese, and the lands stripped of natural resources to ship back to Portugal (Barbosa 41). This shows the effects that European invasion had on the native African cultures once the two civilizations came into contact.
Use your promo and get a custom paper on
"Using Written Sources to Study African History".
Along with these political, social, and economic observations from Barbosa, there are also silences, misinterpretations, and misunderstandings evident as well. One noted silence from Barbosa and others is the absence of religious customs, except for the noting of the Christian traditions in the kingdom of Prester John. One reason for the lack of African religious customs in the accounts of Europeans like Barbosa is that the imperialists were primarily concerned with the economics of the regions for their own personal interests relating to profit—hence the heavy focus on trade practices, political structures that determine economical structures, and the availability of natural and material resources. There does not seem to be much of an attempt to understand and recount African cultures of the Swahili Coast as much as an attempt to determine the capital gains that could be exploited from these areas of interest for the Portuguese. It is important to note that Barbosa was a commercial agent, not a historian, biographer, or a sociologist. Therefore, accounts written by agents like Barbosa were typically concerned with the inner workings of the African cultures insofar as the accounts would aid later imperialistic expeditions into the regions of the African coast.
Overall, primary sources from European imperialist agents are not particularly useful tools for historians to learn about Medieval African cultures. The main problems with relying on these outsider views is that, as noted above, capitalistic interests typically dominated the focus of these accounts. Additionally, though Barbosa and others appear certain of their perceptions of the African cultures, they are likely flawed, biased, and filled with misconceptions and misunderstandings. These imperialist agents whose accounts of the Africans have survived today were not living with the African people, nor immersing themselves in the African cultures. Instead, they arrived and relied on their initial perceptions to fuel their biases and stereotypes about the African people. For example, Ibn Battuta’s account of the city of Maqdashaw, on the surface, seems to be a fairly straightforward retelling of a narrative when Battuta met the local sultan (14). The account tells of the sultan’s remarkable generosity in giving his clothes away to a poor man and the sultan’s humility and selflessness with his people. This is a nice story, but it seemingly fails to capture the complex societal interchanges happening within this culture. There is a danger in taking an anecdote like this too seriously and overgeneralizing it to fuel unrealistic assumptions and stereotypes about a culture.
Accounts like those from Battuta and Barbosa are helpful to historians and researchers to a point. However, these primary documents should not be relied on as a pure source of sociological truths about the African cultures of the Swahili. One must consider the reason the Portuguese and other European imperialists were traveling to the African Coast in the first place, and it was certainly not simply for sociological insights and the inner workings of diverse cultures. Instead, these were primarily economic accounts of resources and materials that could be exploited by the Europeans for economic gains.
- Barbosa, Duarte. “The East Coast of Africa at the Beginning of the Sixteenth Century,” (1540)
From Documents from the African Past, Robert Collins, ed. Princeton: Markus Wiener Publishers, 2001, pp. 37-44. - Battuta, Ibn. “The East African Coast,” (1331) From Documents from the African Past, Robert Collins, ed. Princeton: Markus Wiener Publishers, 2001, pp. 12-14.
