The Portuguese in West Africa, 1415-1670: A Documentary History.

Gonzales, Rhonda M.

The Portuguese in West Africa, 1415-1670: A Documentary History, by Malyn Newitt. New York, Cambridge University Press, 2010. xviii, 246 pp. $90.00 US (cloth) $27.99 US (paper).

In this book, historian Malyn Newitt makes accessible English translations of select primary sources that convey to readers some of the broad intentions, responses, sentiments, and complicated outcomes that unfolded as a byproduct of exchanges among Africans and Europeans over an approximate two hundred and fifty year period in a vast region spanning Morocco to Angola, including hinterland zones and nearby Atlantic Islands. As the book's title suggests, it is a documentary history. As such Newitt does not set out to argue a thesis or to answer a set of questions. Instead, by offering readers a compilation of translated documents, he opens a pathway for researchers, teachers, and students to formulate preliminary questions and theses of their own, without having to first develop language skills necessary for translation or having to seek out important texts that are not easily accessible. Newitt makes a contribution to the cache of tools useful beyond any one field, because its contents are comprehensible to and usable by anyone who decides to pick up and read the book.

The book is well structured and user-friendly. Its fifty-seven documents are arranged such that upon beginning the book the reader may be inclined to think it will unfold entirely in chronological order, but what Newitt has done is compile a number of the earliest available documents, then divided them to comprise the hook's first two chapters: "The Portuguese in Morocco" and "The Early Voyages to West Africa." While later chapters in the book include documents also generated in the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, chapters one and two provide an introduction into the crucible of understandings and assumptions that European visitors to Africa constructed over the initial contact period. Once past the book's opening chapters, the reader navigates a text that is alternately arranged by geographic region and familiar periodization. For example, chapter four is titled "The Upper Guinea Coast and Sierra Leone" and chapter six is "Discovery of the Kingdom of Kongo," while chapters eight and eleven are titled "The Slave Trade" and "The Angolan Wars," respectively. The book's non-linear composition allows for a surprisingly natural flow among chapters. To aid its readers and to help them make connections among entries that do not fall in sequence, Newitt shrewdly uses footnotes to point readers to documents within the compilation that work well together.

Beyond the chapter organization, Newitt does a first-rate job of providing engaging and smooth translations of the documents. The result is that the reader never has to grapple with cumbersome vernacular. For those who want to locate the documents and attempt their own translations, Newitt has made finding the documents possible--whether he was working from the original document or from a published source--by leading each entry with bibliographic notes that include such information as its origin, author and repository information. Additionally, various length narratives that offer a context for each document conveniently follow the bibliographic entry. Useful, succinct footnotes are sparingly used to offer clarification of words not seamlessly translatable as well to highlight interrelated documents.

Because the processes by which Newitt selected the included texts is not explicitly shared with readers, the documents he chose to include can be evaluated fairly only for the totality of what they offer the reader. That said, since he states in the introduction that the texts convey interactions of culture, society, religion, ideas and more, one can surmise that he was in part drawn to texts that imparted insights that informed these themes. To that end, the documents do a very good job of conveying the insightful glimpses he claims they offer. Moreover, he does a noteworthy job of covering the themes fairly evenly over the two hundred and fifty-year period. Among the strongest themes not explicitly named is the emphasis many of the documents have on women, particularly their roles in religion and local economies. Thus while the selected documents are not written or recorded by women, they are valuable for offering an opportunity to analyze the way women were represented, and narrated as objects of the observer's imagination and experience. On this point, it is worthwhile mentioning that the overall usefulness of an otherwise strong index could have been bolstered by the inclusion of women and gender as subject categories.

There are two features that would have enhanced the text's overall value. The addition of published works that have previously relied on the complete or partial translations of the selected document would have made the book particularly useful as both an introduction to the documents and as a primer for additional research. This could have been done by adding a "suggested reading" section at the end of a document or at the end of each chapter. Secondly, the inclusion of expanded introductions that provided a more thorough discussion of the entire document's strengths, that is, beyond the excerpts presented would have aided researchers in making informed decisions about whether or not to seek out the entire document.

Finally, this text will be especially useful to teachers who find themselves short of primary source documents to use in courses that will both engage and teach students about the world-changing exchanges whose legacies they are taught again and again. For example, documents from the text can be easily integrated into high school and college surveys centred on World history. Additionally, the documents would benefit graduate students interested in the early colonial period across specialties. Indeed, the possibilities for its use in the classroom are innumerable. Readers from all areas of expertise and interest will find the book a valuable contribution to establishing foundational and nuanced knowledge of one of the most important and transformative periods in world history.

Rhonda M. Gonzales

University of Texas at San Antonio