Letters, Inquiries and Studies about Central West Africa and the Ijebus: The importance of African informants in French “Scientific” production in the First Half of the Nineteenth Century.

• Autor(a) principal: Santana, Aderivaldo Ramos de
• Data de Publicação: 2018
• Tipo de documento: Artigo
• Idioma: por
• Título da fonte: Esboços (Online)
• Texto Completo: https://periodicos.ufsc.br/index.php/esbocos/article/view/2175-7976.2018v25n39p25

A brazilian statesman who, in the early nineteenth century, deduced the course of the Niger from the interviews that hem ade to some african slaves in Brazil; a naturalist who, following the same method, tried to sumarize all what was known about Central West Africa, using as informants, African Haussas enslaved in Slavador da Bahia; a man of “Science” who, during the Louis-Philippe Court, made a study of the Yoruba kingdom, using the information from an african Ijebu, who had been a slave in Brazil and resided in Paris as a free man. These are some examples of a Africa History elaborated from some enslaved Africans’ accounts. This article pretends to show how, in the first half of the 19th Century, the use of african informants as oral sources by scientific societies played na extremely important role in the production of knowledge about the interior of the african continente, during the planification for European colonization.