Gomes Eanes de Zurara and the Treacherous Prince

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In the fifteenth century, Prince Henry the Navigator wanted to get into the slave trade but didn’t want to work with Islamic slave traders, who were enslaving a variety of people including Europeans, Arabs, and Africans. Prince Henry sponsored voyages to West Africa and focused the Portuguese slave trade on Africans. His ships explored new regions of the continent, including the feared waters around Cape Bojador. 

Because the Islamic traders were enslaving people from a variety of areas, their trading policies weren’t racist. However, Prince Henry’s policy, because it focused on a particular group of people, was racist.

In 1453, 20 years after Prince Henry had organized the African slave trade, the King of Portugal commissioned Gomes de Zurara to write a biography of Prince Henry. Zurara invented the African race when he described the people being sold at a slave auction in Lagos, Portugal. He described the people as being different from each other in language, ethnic group, and skin color, but he lumped them into a single group of people who lived like animals and needed to be saved by civilized Europeans, who were inherently superior. This of course was a deliberate fabrication to justify the new unbalanced style of target slavery. This great lie publish so long ago still has very damaging effects and has been the foundation of eugenics, justification for countless genocides and ”racial cleansing”. The author didn’t even believe in his own writing and at times wrote about the humanity and sorrow of the captured slaves.

Needless to say, the “hit piece“ done by the treacherous Prince Henry succeeded and the now “minority classes” have been fighting to justify our humanity ever since. Only when a people is dehumanized can someone truly cope with perpetrating the kind of atrocities committed against the African and Black Hebrew people.

This also proves that the enslavement of black men and woman has been targeted since the beginning in the so called “civilized world”. 

Large direct excerpts from https://www.shortform.com/blog/zurara-how-to-be-an-antiracist/