History of Brazil, Volume 3

 

“The Moors of Morocco at this time took from the Portuguese the last of their possessions in that part of Africa. In the noonday of Portugal, her best historians found it necessary to distribute her history into four distinct portions,…so extensive was the empire which she had established in Africa, Asia, and America.”

“The history of Portuguese Africa, (or that part of it which had been of most importance,) was now closed by the fall of Mazagam; and it ended in a happier hour than it began. The immediate consequence was the most advantageous change in the commercial system of Brazil.”

“Hitherto Portugal had been in a state of permanent war with the Moors, and for that reason, the Brazillian trade was carried on by annual fleets,…..the prohibition of single ships, which had commenced during the Dutch war, having been continued in force, first because of the Buccaneers, and their successors the Pirates, and when those common enemies of all mankind had been exterminated, then on account of the Barbary cruizers.”

“Peace was now made with Morocco when there was no longer an old point of honor to impede it, and Oeyars immediately declared, that as soon as the fleets from Baia and the Rio should have returned, the trade with those ports might be carried on by single ships.”

“The inhabitants raised cotton and provisions and were well supplied with fish. Some twenty leagues to the east, the town of Almeirim stood in a commanding situation, at the mouth of the Paru, one of the points which the Dutch occupied when they attempted to establish themselves upon the great river: the remains of their works still make part of the fort.”

“Its population in 1784, was wholly Indian and amounted to about three hundred persons. They cultivated mandioc, maize, rice, pulse, and cotton. The women, at their ordinary occupations, were naked from the waist upward; but when they went to Church they wore a shift and linen petticoat, tied up their hair, and adorned their necks with a bentinho.”

“There were two smaller towns, and two river parishes, (so those parishes are called where the population has no fixed and central point,) between Almeirim and Mazagam. That place was losing its inhabitants because of its unhealthy situation, which proved fatal even to persons brought thither from the coast of Morocco.”

“Below Mazagam was Villa Vistoza da Madre de Deos,…the Beautiful Town of the Mother of God! It ill-deserved this lofty appellation. Three hundred families were planted there by the Government: some of them were good colonist from the Azores, but the greater number were criminals, foreign soldiers, and subjects taken from the house of correction: about nine-tenths of this hopeful population speedily forsook the place. It is on the left bank of the Anauirapucu, a considerable river, seven leagues from its mouth…”

Source: History of Brazil, Volume 3 By Robert Southey

Historical References on the Black African Skin color of the original Berber Tribes

Batalla del Puig del retablo del Centenar de la Ploma de Marxal de Sax

Dana Reynolds-Marniche provided several sources defining the original Berbers. Original Berbers here correspond with the Berbers imported into the Americas branded in slave legislation under the term “Negroes” in legislation like the Negro Law of South Caroline 1790. The distinction must be made because several groups now living in north Africa identity under designations that correspond with the term “Berber” such as the modern Amazigh tribes in North Africa.

Notably, Professor Marniche demonstrates that the pre-modern applications of the term “Amazigh” correspond with the Tamashek or Tuareg*, i.e. “Mazikes” and their vassal castes composed mainly of Songhai or Soninke, Zaghai or Ahel Gara (Jarawa) and that these peoples are the Ancient Ethiopians mentioned by the Greeks and Romans and that they correspond with the Mauri or Maure groups called “Mauri Mazazeces” and “Mazices” in Tripolitania of the Byzantine writers. Her blog also provides that:

“the Tuareg whose noble castes despise the plough as we have shown are direct descendants of the largely nomadic ancient Levathes Mauri still bearing their names. Among them are the modern Inusamani  (“Nasamones”), Ifran (“Yafran”) and Iforas (“Ifuraces”), Imoshagh (“Mazax” or “Mazices”) and Imakitan or (“Micateni”),  Imaqqoren (“Machruas”), and Kel Cadenit (“Silcadenit”) whom retain customs of the more nomadic and war-like ancient Libyans such as the Nasamonian practice of sleeping near ancestral tombs of their ancestors and prophesying through dreams. Al-Bekri said the Tuareg were strangers to agriculture, and even bread, living entirely off of the meat and milk of their herds. Ya’aqubi also said they had no cereal or grain.”
American Moors and people who are interested in this history need to understand that just as the Americans of the 1400s are not the majority representation of America in 2019, the same goes for Morocco or any modern nation-state in North Africa today. The average Citizen of the United States does not descend from the indigenous peoples of North America. The same understanding must be acknowledged as to North Africa. We see the examples of these facts with the Europeanization of Africa and America. Dana Reynolds-Marniche has also provided direct references that proves from a scholarly review  that the “Songhai” were recognized as Berber tribes long before the modern notoin that they were simply “Black Africans” or “Sub-Saharan Africans”. These references dead the “moot” issue among the African Americans or even Non-Black Muslims who attempt to remove the “Moor” and “Berber” identity from “Berber founded Empires” like “Songhai” and ancient “Ghana”. I provide a few of the limitless heavy hitting references cited in Dana Reynolds-Marniche blog titled:

Source: FEAR OF BLACKNESS SERIES – PART II Andalusia and the Mauri: An Exploration of the Original Berbers of Early Sources and their Settlements in Spain

“As for the Zaghawa, according to specialist Harold MacMichael “..witness is borne to this connection of the Zaghawa with the Berbers by Ibn Khaldun (1332-1406) who in speaking of the Tuwarek (‘mulethamin” – “veiled ones”) says they are a section of the Sanhaga Berbers, who include the kindred tribes of the Lamtuna, Zaghawa, and Lamta, and have frequented the tracts separating the country of the Berbers from the blacks…” However, the word Ibn Khaldun used “Zanj” is here translated as “the blacks” and by doing so the reality that the Zaghawa were also pretty much black is obscured, as were the other Berbers named.”

 

” …in the old sources, the terms Berber, Sanhaja, Massufa, Lamtuna and Tuareg are often used interchangeably”  Marq de Villiers and Sheila Hirtle ( 2009).  Timbuktu: The Sahara’s Fabled city of Gold, p. 271.”

“Gabriel Camps the specialist on the archaeological history of the Maghreb proposed in his Berberes: Aux Marges de’l’Histoire that name Bavares or Bavari was an early form of the name Barbars (Baadj, Amar S., p. 11). David Goldenberg, one of the West’s more trustworthy historians (in my opinion : ) when it comes to things related to “race” in the ancient world has written – “Barbares is a variant form of the name Bavares, a people of Mauretania Tingitana and/or Caesarensis, who possibly appear also under the name Babari. Note the association of Barbares with Mauretania in the Laterculus Veronensis (Riese, p. 129): ‘Item gentes quae in Mauretania sunt: Mauri [Quinque]gentiani, Mauri Mazices, Mauri Barbares, Mauri Bacuates….”” See pdf of Rabbinic Knowledge of Black Africa published in 1998 in the Jewish Quarterly, 5. The mountains of the Bavares were also known as the Grand and Petit Babors, the latter including Little Kabylia.” 
“According to Lewicki, in fact, Bavares is also thought to be the name of the people that came to be called the Bafour. “According to some traditions Bafour were whites … belonging to the Berber group of the Zenata. According to non-Muslim tradition the autochthonous inhabitants of Adrar Tmar were agriculturalists…The Bafour, might we think, be identified with the Libyan (Moorish) tribe of the Bavares, active in western part of North Africa in the third to fourth centuries of the Christian era” (Lewicki, Tadeusz, p. 313)” 
“A recent government document in Mauritania sheds some light on the Bafour/Bavari connections of the Soninke or Wangara. It reads -“From the 3rd to 7th centuries, the migration of Berber tribes from North Africa displaced the Bafours, the original inhabitants of present-day Mauritania and the ancestors of the Soninke. Continued Arab-Berber migration drove indigenous black Africans south to the Senegal River or enslaved them. By 1076, Islamic warrior monks (Almoravid or Al Murabitun) completed the conquest of southern Mauritania, defeating the ancient Ghana empire.” See (2000) Mauritania, Mineral, and Mining Sector Investment and Business Guide, Volume 1, Strategic Business Guide, p. 19.”

“Clearly it seems that the “Barbares” or Soninke of the Sahel and Sudan were the “Mauri Bavares” or Babars of Mauritania in what is now Morocco and Algeria possibly pushed down by the Tuareg “the second race of Berbers” and/or Arab Sulaym/Hilal peoples like the Trarza or Hassaniya. They were direct ancestors of the black merchants known as Soninke, Sughai (Isuwaghen or Zawagha) or Wangara who are called “whites” in early African manuscripts.” 

“The Bafour, in fact, is considered by some to be the same as the Zenagha or Znaga Berbers who came to be subject to the Almoravid (Tuareg) nobles. In Mauritania by the 15th century, they were referred to as “tawny and squat” by a slave trader from Venice named Alvice Ca’da Mosto (Thomas, Hugh, 1997, p. 22). They then fell into low caste status under the Hassaniyya or Hassan “Moors” (a group formed from the mixture of Arab/Berber peoples) which might explain how they came to be the first Africans sold out of Lagos to the Portuguese that were brought to Europe.”  

Source: FEAR OF BLACKNESS SERIES – PART II Andalusia and the Mauri: An Exploration of the Original Berbers of Early Sources and their Settlements in Spain

 

In 1704 a Willem Bosman of the Dutch West India company describing the “Gold Coast” wrote

“Here the Portuguese received a small quantity of gold dust, as well as some ostrich eggs; and, as Gonçalves had always desired, his men also seized some black Africans, twelve in number, to take back to Portugal (“What a beautiful thing it would be,” this commander told his men, ‘if we could capture some of the natives to lay before the face of our Prince’).

These people were nearly all Azanaghi, as had been most of those sold in Lagos in 1444. They seem not to have been carried off to serve as slaves—though one of them, a woman, was a black slave, presumably from somewhere in the region of Guinea. They were taken as exhibits to show Prince Henry, much as Columbus would bring back some Indians, fifty years later, from his first journey to the Caribbean“

The previous statements give credence to the suggestion by earlier colonial historians that the Jarawa or Garawan of North Africa were the Wangara or Wakore of the Sudan, and that the name of Djanawa is in fact derived from the traditional Berber ancestor “Djana”. Yves Moderan in Les Maures et l”Afrique Romain has said they were agriculturalists having some pastoralists, rather than camel nomads. “D’une part, en effet, tous les Zénètes ne peuvent être assimilés à de grands nomades chameliers : les plus célèbres, les Djarâwa, étaient, nous l’avons vu, des agriculteurs autant que des pasteurs”. The Mauri and Roman Africa link

Source: FEAR OF BLACKNESS SERIES – PART II Andalusia and the Mauri: An Exploration of the Original Berbers of Early Sources and their Settlements in Spain

Dana Reynolds Marniche commented in a post on Andalusia that certain groups claimed descent from the Jews and in particular Aaron and Jethro in Tarikh el-Fattach

She wrote –

“The Tuareg Inaden blacksmiths caste who are mostly Soninke in fact claims descent from the Jews of Wargla. Similarly the Wangara/Garawan (Soninke) related groups further west and south had traditions of Jewish origin.

‘In today’s Mauretania, endogamous groups of blacksmiths claim Jewish descent and some oral traditions maintain that it’s early inhabitants, the Bafur, were Jews from Wadi Nun…. Other traditions from Mali document the prevalence of Jews in the pre-Islamic period, some claiming that Maghribi Jews from the Dra’a and the Sus regions shared with the Mande their knowledge of blacksmithing.

The History of African Jews, one of the most understudied chapters in African history, would extend back to the days of king Solomon…. By the eighth century there were communities of Jews in most major oases on the desert edge such as Sijilmasa, Tu’at, Gurara, Ghadamis, Sus, and Wadi Nun ” (Lydon, Ghislaine, 2009, p. 66). ‘”

The so-called Maghreb jews were the WaKore and Wa’Kara/Wa’n’Gara. Beriberi, Soninke, “El-Berabir” or the ancient Berbers, and the earliest Jews in Africa were but one people. They were the people of the Niger bend, and many parts of West Africa, i.e. the Negro. Believe it, – or do not!”

“The author of the the book Aghram Nadharif, (2003), “According to the stereotyped image, the Garamantes are a black people (e.g. Ptolemy, 1.8.5; cf. Snowden 2001: 260-261 with full bibliography; Mattingly 2003: 89), part of the larger ethnic group of the Aethiopes (Desanges and Camps 1985). They are naked (nudi Garamantes: Lucan, Bellum civile IV 334) and burned by the sun…” (Mariano, Liverani, 2003, p. 432). : Ahel Gara is a general Tuareg name for people that were cultivators, though often seminomadic found throughout North Africa, the Sahara and Sahel.  They originally occupied places like Gara Mez- Zawaga in the Dahkhla Oasis west of the Nile and Gara Krima in the Wargla Oasis of the Mz’ab (Algeria) and towns named Garama or Jerma in Libya. These Djerma came to be known as DJerma or Zarma Songhai and were descendants of an ancient “Ethiopian” people named “Garamantes”. The author or the “Garamantian Kingdom and their Southern Border” writes: “According to the stereotyped image, the Garamantes are a black people (e.g. Ptolemy, I.8.5; cf. Snowden 2001: 260-261 with full bibliography; Mattingly 2003: 89), part of the larger ethnic group of the Aethiopes (Désanges and Camps 1985). They are naked (nudi Garamantes: Lucan, Bellum civile IV 334) and burned by the sun …” (Mariano, Liverani, 2003, p. 432).”

Source: FROM PROTO-BERBERS TO MOORS: NILO-SAHARAN ORIGINS AND THE GOLDEN TOWNS OF THE MOORS

The Barbary Company or Marocco Company 1585

“The Barbary Company or Marocco Company was a trading company established by Queen Elizabeth I of England in 1585 through a patent granted to the Earls of Warwick and Leicester, as well as forty others for an exclusive trade period of 12 years See Cawston, p.226  “The Barbary Company was separate from the Turkey Company and the Venice Company (1583), who also operated in the Mediterranean and later merged into the Levant Company in 1592, was established with many of the same merchant investors, with a focus on trade along the Atlantic coast of Morocco. Many of its members were naturally also trading for the dominant Levant Company, whose success perhaps implied the commercial defeat of the Barbary Company.” 

Source: Shakespeare Survey With Index 1-10

“Morocco was at that point the main source of sugar for the English market, prior of course to the development of the West Indies plantations in the 1600s. After the settlement of the Essex affair, Elizabeth wrote Muley Hamet of such matters as the release of prisoners and the difficulties of some English merchants in Morocco. An Act of the Privy Council had arranged the deporting of “negars and blackamoores“, who great numbers in England irritated Spain, and fostered trouble against her. Elizabeth’s release of Moorish captives later had the double advantage of both Spain and Barbary.” 

Source: Shakespeare Survey With Index 1-10

“Diplomatic relations between England and Barbary had always been a compromise, in a sense compromising. The questionable alliance was put in terms of the advice offered Elizabeth in 1586, that “Her Majesty in using the King of Fez, doth not arm a barbarian against a Christian, but a barbarian against a heretic”. But the heathen hand, though welcomed against Spain, was rarely taken in public. The military prowess of the Moors, typified in the Battle of Alcazar, coloured the drama of the day. But the diplomatic exchange waited upon emergencies. The Armada brought a Moroccan emissary to England, and Essex’s raid on Cadiz in 1597 inspired eventually the embassy of 1600. For two years later, emboldened by England’s success, and hopeful of her active support, Muley Hamet, King of Barbary, proposed the grand design of the total conquest of Spain.” 

Source: Shakespeare Survey With Index 1-10

“Queen Elizabeth sent Minister Roberts who remained in Morocco for three years, and obtained some privileges for the English, particularly that in future none of the English should be made slaves in his dominions. By the treaty signed at Mequinez in 1728, these privileges were extended, it being stipulated that British subjects taken on board of foreign ships by the Maroccans should be immediately released and sent to Gibraltar: that provisions and other supplies for his Britannic Majesty’s fleets and for Gibraltar might freely be bought at the market prices in any of the Moroccan seaports; and that Moors, Jews, and other natives of in the service of British subjects there should be exempt from taxes of all kinds. Thus considerable benefits accrued to the nation through this chartered company, whose exclusive trade does not appear to have been long maintained.” 

Source: The Early Chartered Companies (A.D. 1296-1858) By George Cawston, Augustus Henry Keane

The Tomson brothers, Richard, George, and Arnold, with their kinsman Jasper, were merchant adventurers. Richard, a servant of Cecil and holder of monopolies in almonds, dates, capers, and molasses had been accused of bringing into the trade as many interlopers as there were members of the Barbary Company. Doubtless, the Tomsons’ service to Cecil gave them safety at home and gun-running made them popular with the Moors.

Source: Shakespeare Survey With Index 1-10

“Elizabeth’s death in 1603, and a civil war in Morocco that same year, ended the period of British co-operation with the Moroccan monarchy. James I intervened more directly into the affairs of trading companies, adopting the Spanish government’s model of intervention in commerce. King Charles I was unable, or unwilling, to protect British commerce–and even British coastal communities such as Bristol and Plymouth–from the ravages of Barbary corsairs; this was one reason British merchants drove him from the throne. Some in Parliament called for war against Turkey, and, during the reign of Cromwell, Turkish ships supplied royalist forces in Ireland.” 

Source: The Barbary Origins of the British Empire

“Charles II, in addition to receiving the Portuguese garrison as a wedding gift from the family of his bride, Catherine of Braganza, sent the British fleet against Algiers and so gained control over the western Mediterranean. Though Britain’s possession of Tangier was brief, it was regarded as the beginning of a British empire in Africa. During the two decades of occupation, the British colony there replicated British life, trying to create a miniature London impervious to the Moorish world around it. Unlike the imperial ventures in America or in Ireland, in North Africa the British encountered powerful and well-organized societies which could not be simply conquered. Tangier was a middle ground for the British imperial idea, between the trading companies which brought the British into Asia, and the occupation and conquest of British America.” 

Source: The Barbary Origins of the British Empire

“While European and American literature are full of stories of captives held in the Barbary states, there are no first-person accounts of Moors held as captives in Europe. And yet there were thousands of Moors taken captive by the European powers. According to Matar, their stories do not survive because very few of them returned to their native lands. In his fourth chapter, “Moors in British Captivity,” Matar recovers what he can of the stories of Moorish captives. He also notes the different kinds of captivity in Barbary. A slave (‘abd) was purchased, while a captive (aseer) was held for ransom. Slavery (‘ubadiyya) and captivity (asr) were different institutions. All of the North African states were engaged in the trans-Saharan slave trade, as well as trade in gold and other goods. The capture of European sailors was a different facet of the economy (pp. 114-115). For Matar, though, the real focus of this chapter is on the European enslavement of Moors. Europeans did not differentiate between the status of their captives; raids by European powers in retaliation for the piracy of Morocco or Algiers and the bombardment of the North African cities were among the factors, he argues, in the economic and political decline of these polities in the eighteenth century (pp. 131-132).” 

Source: The Barbary Origins of the British Empire

“The Levant Company formed, in 1592, as the result of what could be called a “merger” between two earlier merchant corporations, the Venice Company and the Turkey Company, themselves both Elizabethan foundations. Attempts to explain the merger as reflecting a “regionalist” approach to Mediterranean trade are vexed by the long career of the Barbary Company, which, despite significant overlap between its membership rolls and those of the Levant Company, was to continue trading independently with the littoral states of North Africa well into the 18th century.”

Source:  The Levant Company Between Trade and Politics: or, the Colony That Wasn’t Martin Devecka

“The formal beginning of Anglo-Ottoman relations dates from the correspondence between Elizabeth I and Murad III in 15791  which led in May 1580 to an Ottoman pledge of safeconduct (ahidname) for English merchants in Ottoman-controlled seas and ports in the eastern Mediterranean (the Levant) and along the Barbary coast of North Africa This document is usually considered equivalent to a grant of trading privileges to the English.” 

Source: ENGLAND, THE OTTOMANS AND THE BARBARY COAST IN THE LATE SIXTEENTH CENTURY Dr Christine Woodhead, University of Durham

“Brotton traces how the anxieties, suspicions and xenophobia of Elizabethan Anglo-Islamic relations emerged in tension with the establishment of such trading enterprises as the Barbary Company, the Levant Company and the Turkey Company, whose activities brought riches, tastes and fashions home from an international trade in fabrics, food and munitions with Muslim countries.”

Source: Gloriana and the Sultan — England’s unlikely alliance Jerry Brotton’s study of how Queen Elizabeth I allied herself with Islam against the arch-enemy Spain makes for fascinating reading Marcus Nevitt