Born in Blackness: Africa, Africans, and the Making of the Modern World, 1471 to the Second World War

by Howard W. French

Well before he mounted his expeditions on behalf of Spain, Columbus, an Italian from Genoa, had sailed to provision Europe’s first large, fortified overseas outpost in the tropics at Elmina, in modern-day Ghana. Europe’s expeditions to West Africa of the mid-fifteenth century were bound up in a search for the sources of that region’s prodigious wealth in gold. Indeed, it was the huge trade in this precious metal, discovered by the Portuguese in 1471, and secured by the building of the fort at Elmina in 1482, that helped fund da Gama’s later mission of discovery to Asia. This helped make it possible for Lisbon, until then the seat of a small and impecunious European crown, to steal a march on its neighbors and radically alter the course of world history. Bartolomeu Dias, another habitué of Elmina, rounded Africa’s Cape of Good Hope in 1488, proving the existence of a sea route to what would become known as the Indian Ocean. But no onward voyage to Asia would even be attempted for nearly a decade after that, when da Gama finally sailed to Calicut.