Research Projects and Conferences

Extract

Scholars working on the pre-1700 history of the Guinea coast find invaluable the series of bilingual editions of early Portuguese texts (Gomes, Pacheeo Pereira, Fernandes) issued at Dakar and Bissau in the 1950s by a group of French and Portuguese scholars. A fourth early text, that of Zurara, was very competently edited in French by L. Bourdon and published in Dakar in 1960. These texts can be reinforced and supplemented by the collection of documents published in many volumes by Fr. António Brásio since 1952. Earlier editions of Guinea texts of this vintage were much less satisfactory, largely because the editors lacked knowledge of the African background. This criticism applied to texts presented in Portuguese (Cadamosto, Almada, Lemos Coelho), in Dutch (De Marees and Ruiters), and in English (Cadamosto and Pacheeo Pereira). In more recent years, while there has been a flood of reprints, mostly unedited, there has been a lull in the publication of volumes of edited texts. However, shorter texts have recently been examined–in Thilmans' 1971 analysis of a section of Dapper's work, and in a number of papers by Avelino Teixeira da Mota, which have included materials from the project about to be described.