An Ethnolinguistic Inventory of the Upper Guinea Coast before 1700

Abstract

In 1625, Purchas’ collection of voyages provided the English reader with a very full list of the African peoples living along the Upper Guinea coast, their names recorded with fair accuracy. 1 The list was taken from the French translation of a Portuguese collection of Jesuit letters, published 1603–11, which included correspondence from missionaries in Upper Guinea. But the Jesuits appear to have obtained much of their own detailed information from a Portuguese manuscript source, the lengthy account of the Rivers of Guinea by Alvares d’Almada, a member of a Portuguese trading family resident in the Cape Verde Islands. Thus, as early as the first half of the seventeenth century, a list of peoples of the Upper Guinea coast, based on first-hand local inquiries, was available in print in several European languages, albeit in a rather unsystematic and crude form. For the lower Guinea coast, Portuguese sources of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were not as informative on the disposition of the African peoples: but Dutch sources of the early seventeenth century, as brought together in print by Dapper in 1668 (with translations into German, French and English by 1690), filled many of the gaps.

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