Our mental image of the British in Africa is so firmly fixed in the so-called Scramble for Africa of the late nineteenth century that we struggle to recall that when Englishmen first arrived in Africa they came not in pith helmets and khaki uniforms but in doublets and hose. The English traders who infiltrated the Portuguese trading zones in coastal West Africa in the sixteenth century did not come as colonizers but, like all other Europeans, as traders.
