CHAPTER 1
Early European Views of African Bodies
Beauty
STEPHANIE M. H. CAMP
Though she was black, that was amply recompencâd by the Softness of her Skin, the beautiful Proportion and exact Symmetry of each Part of her Body, and the natural, pleasant and inartificial Method of her Behaviours.
âWILLIAM SMITH, A New Voyage in Guinea (1744)
Early modern European travelers in Africa did not consistently generalize about a place called Africa and people called Africans. Neither the place nor the people existed for Europeans prior to the Atlantic slave trade and, especially, European colonialism in Africa in the nineteenth century. Within African imaginations, too, âAfricaâ came into existence through the slave trade and colonization. Previously, people of the sub-Saharan continent identified as members of kinship, political, and linguistic groups. European travelers to West and Central Africa helped to invent âAfricaâ (and African Americans) when they purchased people who had been severed from the family relationships and the linguistic and political affiliations that gave them identities as persons. In place of these former selves, slave traders imposed a new identity: enslaved âAfricanâ chattel. In time, the identity âslaveâ would define African Americans just as âAfricanâ would define the people of the subcontinent.
But in Africa during the 1600s and 1700s, these identities were very much still in the process of becoming. English involvement in the slave trade produced paradoxical experiences. On the one hand, it gave the mariners, merchants, and sailors who worked in the trade every possible reason to malign the people they bought and sold. And so they didâprolifically. At the same time, the trade gave some Englishmen (and other European men) the opportunity to spend time, sometimes years, in Africa. During that time, they had experiences that challenged what they thought they knew about gender norms, about women, and about Africa. European writers recorded their conflicts over sexual practices in particular, offering evidence of some of the ways that West African definitions of what made bodies beautiful differed significantly from European ideals, as well as from what Europeans knew of Africans. Many Europeans recoiled from these challenges to their worldview, but others, after an initial shock of disgust, found it difficult to sustain their repugnance over time. They came to see African bodies as diverse: black and tawny, female and male, slave and free, rich and poor.
âThe Virginia Planters Best Tobaccoâ and âThe Tobacco Pipe Makersâ advertisements depict partially naked female slaves.
The Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, Museum Purchase.
When the traveler Richard Jobson traveled along the Gambia River on âGuinea Companyâ (the slave trading Royal African Company) business in the 1620s, he met people he called Fulbie (Fulbe). Quickly interpreting them through their bodies, Jobson was pleased to note that they âgoe clothed.â He then scoped out the differences between men and women and tried to figure out who, if anyone, was beautiful. Jobson approvingly noted that the Fulbe were âTawny,â not âblacke,â and âhandsome.â The women more so than the men: Fulbe women were âstreight, upright, and excellentlyâ well formed. They were blessed with âgood features, with a long blacke haire, much more loose then the blacke women have.â They tended to their hair fastidiously, just as they did to their clothes and their dairy work. Being quite âneate and cleaneâ in their habits, should they be caught in any ânastinesse,â Fulbe women, like good English women at home, blushed with embarrassment. They worked, like Irish women, with cattle, but were much tidier than Irish women. Theirs was a âcleanlinesse [with which] your Irish women hath no acquaintance.â Jobson linked âTawnyâ skin, âlong [. . .], longâ hair and straight bodies with âhandsomeâ women, and he made a point of distinguishing the lighter-colored Fulbe from âblacke womenâ in general as well as from the âperfectly blacke, both men and womenâ Mandinka. In Jobsonâs view, Africans came in multiple colors: tawny, black, and âperfectly black.â Not only were Africans not all one people, they were not yet all black. And, in Jobsonâs estimation, the lighter brown skin of some Africans enhanced their beauty.1 Eur-africans and brown-skinned Africans received much praise for being beautiful.
But dark brown and black Africans were far from unrecognized by European men for their beauty. For instance, during his time in the Cape Verde Islands in the late 1640s, Richard Ligon met the most beautiful woman he had ever seen. She was âa Negro,â the mistress of a Portuguese settler and a woman âof the greatest beauty and majesty that ever I saw.â In his account, Ligon dreamily detailed her bodyâs exquisite form (âher stature [was] large, and excellently shapâd, well favourâd, full eyâd, and admirably gracâdâ), the cloth and color of her clothing (she wore a head wrap of âgreen Taffety, stripâd with white and Philiamort,â a âPeticoat of Orange Tawny and Sky color; not done with Strait striped, but wavâd; and upon that a mantle of purple silkâ), her jewelry, her boots. And her eyes! A decade had passed since his voyage, but Ligon had never forgotten their exotic allure. âHer eyes were her richest Jewels, for they were the largest, and most oriental that I have ever seen.â Her smile was a paragonâand not, Ligon insisted, simply because all Africans had white teeth. That misconception was a âCommon error.â But hers were indeed âexactly white, and clean.â Ligonâs âblack Swanâ spoke âgraceful[ly],â her voice âunit[ing] and confirm[ing] a perfection in all the rest.â Hers was a âperfectionâ that exceeded the grace and nobility of British royalty. The woman was possessed of âfar greater Majesty, and gracefulness, than I have seen [in] Queen Anne.â Ligonâs readers must have been quite surprised to read a favorable comparison between their queen and an African concubine.2 Then again, it was not exactly easy in the middle of the seventeenth century to know what to expect when it came to representations of Africa. It was an age of intense contradictions.
Later in his travels, Ligon surprised his sixty-plus-year-old self with the force of the admiration and desire he felt for some of the âmany pretty young Negro Virginsâ he met later on his voyage. There were two âNegroâ women, in particular, who took Ligonâs breath away. The two women were âSisters and Twinsâ and their âshapes,â âParts,â âmotionsâ and hair were âperfectionâ itself. Indeed, they were works of art. True, Ligon admitted, their shapes âwould have puzzlâd Albert Durer,â the German Renaissance painter known for his mathematical approach to proportion. And Titian, the Italian painter revered for his soft, fleshy representations of the human form and harmonious use of color, would have been perplexed by their muscles and âColouring.â Still, the women âwere excellent,â possessed of a âbeauty no Painter can express.â The twins were unlike North Africans, East Africans, or Gambians, âwho are thick lipt, short nosâd and [who had] uncommonly low foreheads.â In what ways the twins were different from these others, Ligon did little to clarify; he did not describe their facial features, bodies, or skin color. He did, however, detail their hair and their âmotion,â both of which he found irresistible. They wore their hair neither shorn nor cornrowed, but loose in what Ligon deemed âa due proportion of length.â Their ânatural Curls [. . .] appear as Wyers [wires],â and the women bedecked their corkscrew curls with ribbons, beads, and flowers. The occasional braid twisted adorably onto their cheeks. Their motions? âThe highest.â Grace in movement was âthe highest part of beauty,â and the twins had mastered it. Ligon was surprised to find in Africa such living embodiments of âbeauty,â âinnocence,â and âgrace.â3
The emerging stereotype about African womenâs rugged reproductive capacity was not wholly devoid of admiration of African womenâs stoicism and physical strength, especially when European men (inevitably) compared African women to European women. In light of what they thought they witnessed in (or read about) Africa, some male writers came to see European women as annoyingly weak. Pieter de Marees announced in 1602, for instance: âthe women here are of a cruder nature and stronger posture than the Females in our lands in Europe.â4 In this double backhanded compliment, de Marees hitched together African and English women, loading both with the burden of embodying British civility and its constitutive opposite, African savagery.
Charles Wheeler, an English trader who lived in Guinea for a decade in the employ of the Royal African Company in the 1710s and 1720s, shared Mareesâs perception of the ease with which African women produced children, as well as his regard for it. âOne Happiness, which those of this Part of the World enjoy before those of Europe,â Wheeler told William Smith, who later wrote about his travels, âis their Labours. These are Times with them so easy, so kind, so natural and so good, that they have no Need of Midwives, Doctors, Nurses, &c. and I have known Women go to Bed over Night, bring forth a Child and be abroad the next Day by Noon.â Wheeler admiringly attributed the good times that African women enjoyed during pregnancy and childbirth to their ânaturalâ state of being. Citing the âBlack Ladyâ with whom he lived during his decade on the coast, he (and she) credited above all womenâs âChastityâ during pregnancy and menstruation. âYou White People,â Wheelerâs Black Lady told him, âdo not observe this Rule, [and] there are among you, Lepers, Sickly, Diseased, Ricketty, Frantick, Enthusiastic, Paralytic, Apopletic, &c.â European clothing made matters worse. English womenâs âStays, and Multiplicity of Garments [. . . as well as] the Multitude of other Distempers and damnable Inconveniences, [which they] through Pride and Luxury, had brought upon themselvesâ produced the âhard Laboursâ they suffered so terribly loudly. In Wheelerâs and his ladyâs interpretation, civility and its sartorial demands distorted womenâs bodies and led to painful parturition. African womenâs lighter, looser clothing, âso contrivâd as to confine no one Part of the Body,â rewarded them with easier pregnancies and more dignified birth experiences. The natural manner in which African women gave birth extended to the care of newbornsâwith beautifully healthful results. No special âProvision [. . .] of any Necessariesâ were made for newborns, and âyet all its Limbs grow vigorous and proportionate.â William Smith had lifted this last sentence from Willem Bosmanâs influential 1705 book, but with an important addition: Smith thought that it was the coddling of infants in Europe that âmakes so many crooked People.â The âvigorous and proportionateâ limbs of African infants were born of unconstrained, natural female bodies. African womenâs natural state rewarded them with ease in childbirth and straight-limbed children. African women, from Bosmanâs, Wheelerâs, and Smithâs points of view, were innocents unscarred by the curse of Eve.5
The same slave trade that pricked English interest in Africa and contempt for Africans also elicited its seeming opposite: a need to engage with Africans and to know something about them. In order to make their purchases, male travelers simultaneously recognized, fantasized, and reshaped local identities. They perceived, as we have seen, differences among Africansâdifferences of culture, of skill, and in their bodies. European travelers were not incapable of recognizing human beauty in Africa. Even slave traders were capable of recognizing it, but with a twist. Slave traders interpreted bodies through a merchantâs mindset: set to turn some African people into property, they perceived beauty with the slave market in mind. In the mid-seventeenth century, Richard Ligon knew that the buyers of slaves in Barbados saw Africans as more than simply monstrous or hardy. Barbadian planters chose slaves âas they do Horses in a Market; the strongest, youthfullest, and most beautiful yield the greatest prices.â
The naval doctor John Atkins agreed. âSlaves differ in their Goodness,â Atkins opined in 1735. Based on his travels in âNegro-landâ (West Africa), he found âthose from the Gold Coast are accounted best, being cleanest limbed, and more docibleâ (though he thought they were also âmore prompt to Revenge, and murderâ). Slave sellers in Africa and in the Americas embellished Africansâ bodies in order to make them appear healthier, stronger, more beautiful. The reality of starved, exhausted, and likely ill bodies had no place in the market. Sellers washed the stain of urine, feces, and blood from the slavesâ skin, shaved and deloused their hair, and rubbed them with âNegro Oyleâ (palm oil) or lard to make their skin glisten and hide the effects of the captivesâ traumatic forced migrations. Improving slavesâ appearance of vitality was an essential part of getting them sold âto Advantage.â Indeed, the historian of the slave trade Stephanie E. Smallwood has called the aesthetic preparation of the slavesâ bodies for sale the part that âwould matter most in the captivesâ upcoming performanceâ in the market.6 It was to no slave traderâs advantage to insist that Africans were a uniformly revolting people. The irony, of course, is that slaveryâs logic of commodification evacuated beauty of the power it often held. Commodified and enslaved beauty was anything but powerful.
Some English travelers thought they discerned a difference between African women and men, a difference in the aesthetic value of their bodies. Of those who compared men and women, most insisted that the men were far better made, smoother, and above all more symmetrical than the women. With some exceptions, African women, who challenged European gender norms so profoundly, were viewed as more unevenly made than men were.7 Their physiques, it was frequently claimed, had been disfigured by field work, pregnancy, and breast-feeding. The traveler Francis Moore claimed that the women he saw during his travels along the River Gambia in the 1720s were asymmetrically made with âone Breast [. . .] generally larger than the other.â The surgeon John Atkins, who had denounced the women of âNegro-landâ for their distended breasts, nonetheless admired the male bodies he encountered. The men were âwell-limbed, clean Fellows, flattish nosed, [. . .] seldom distorted.â The women were simply ânot nigh so well shaped as the Men.â âChilding, and their Breasts always pendulous, stretches them so unseemly a Length and Bigness,â he wrote, seemingly with nose wrinkled.8
Rich...