Continental Drift : African Europeans: An Untold History
Continental Drift: Two continents and two millennia of extraordinary African Europeans.
Christienna Fryar, January 2021, History Today
Olivette Otele’s African Europeans: An Untold History begins in
23 BC and ends in the present day, spanning two continents, from Sweden
to Senegal, from Portugal to St Petersburg. Inevitably such ambitious
scope requires a focus. Otele, who became the UK’s first female Black
history professor in 2018, covers the terrain by orienting her study
around extraordinary figures from each period.
Beginning in the Roman era, Otele explores how officials such as
Marcus Cornelius Fronto and Emperor Septimius Severus navigated their
African and Roman identities. Staying in the Mediterranean, a discussion
of 16th-century Florence and Spain focuses on the lives of the Duke of
Florence, Alessandro de’ Medici and the Spaniard Juan Latino, a Latin
scholar and poet who had been enslaved for the first few decades of his
life. Otele then moves north to the 17th-century Dutch Republic. As the
Dutch invested in global trade, the country’s involvement in Atlantic
slavery grew. Like Latino, Jacobus Capitein was also originally
enslaved. Born in West Africa, he became one of the first Africans
to study in Europe, at the University of Leiden. Eventually, he returned
to the Gold Coast as a Reformed Church missionary, yet his legacy is
far from clear: published in 1742, his dissertation De servitude, libertati christianae non contraria defended the right of Christians to own slaves.
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