ABSTRACT
From Classical and medieval geographers and from Arab contacts across the Sahara ideas about black Africa were circulating in Europe long before the Atlantic slave trade began. Islam had penetrated if superficially into black animist Africa; and empires had risen and fallen in the savannah regions south of the desert as a result of contacts with the non-Negro world. British traders were soon to experience the reality of the coast and their attitudes to the Negro were inevitably shaped by the way they were forced to adapt to well establish patterns of interracial contact as well as to the challenge of climate. Colonization of the Cape Verde Islands was built on a cotton growing and textile manufacturing enterprise, in which Portuguese ships brought Negro slave labour and distributed its products in the neighbouring coastal regions. The more important the slave trade became the more the observations of its practitioners were distorted and supplemented by the special pleading of vested interests.
