John Ogilby’s Africa (1670): Adultification and Sexualisation of West African Girlhood
This blog post aims to illuminate the entanglement between slavery, medical science and law in the late seventeenth-century through the adultified and sexualised lens of girlhood in West Africa.
John Ogilby’s magnificent compendium, Africa: Being an Accurate Description, 1670, was the most accurate and extensive account of ‘Africa published in English in the seventeenth century’.[1] A copy of which can be found here. Descriptions or passages of girlhood, although fleeting, were remarkable for their persistently sexualised and increasingly violent accounts of girlhood in West Africa.[2] In discussing marriage practices, Ogilby wrote,
‘They use no peculiar Ceremonies in Marriage...: some chose Children of six, seven, or eight years of age, who when they arrive to ten, they take home...: If afterwards any behave themselves impudently, the husband may without any Man's gainsaying punish her...If (as it doth very often) that a Maid be enticed to leudness before marriage’.[3]
Sexual harm, domestic violence and childhood sexual precocity were constructed as a rite of passage in West African culture, according to Ogilby. As was the seemingly uncontrollable sexual appetite of prepubescent girls, Ogilby’s work adultified West African girls by sexualising them. It was a narrative that moved effortlessly between slave traders, doctors and planters; historian Tara Inniss has noted that myths regarding enslaved girls engaging ’in premarital sex from the age of puberty’ were common in planter communities.[4] Ogilby’s narrative merged biological information, including sexual maturity and age, with sexual and social taboos such as rape and domestic violence. This socio-medical narrative reinforced cultural and perceived ‘biological’ differences.
Image 1: A rare, coloured frontispiece from Dapper’s 1676 Dutch edition of Naukeurige beschrijvinge der Afrikaensche gewesten. A non-colour version of this image appeared in all versions, translations and editions of Dapper’s book. Image 2: Detail from the Africa frontispiece. West African females were said to feed their children by throwing one breast over their shoulder, 1670. Image credit: Public domain
In Ogilby’s Africa, girls from the 3000-mile West African Coastline known to Europeans as Negro-land, Guinea, and Nether- Ethiopia — the epicentre of the trans-Atlantic-slave trade on the African continent were identifiable by their childhood sexual precocity. Seemingly, their immature age was no barrier to sexual activity. It was, according to Ogilby, a characteristic that identified them as suitable for both slavery and Western medical inquiry.
Ogilby was not a doctor, a scientist or a naturalist; he was a royalist, cartographer and translator. His book Africa was essentially a translation of Olfert Dapper's 1668 classic, Naauwkeurige Beschryvinge der Afrikaensche Gewesten, a copy of which can be found here. Dapper was a Dutch doctor; however, like Ogilby he had also never been to Africa. Dapper’s main sources were from older travelogues, including Pieter De Marees’ 1602 classic, Beschrivinghe ende Hisriche Verhael van het Gout Koninckrijck van Gunea, or, A Description and Account of the Gold Kingdom of Guinea (Modern-day Ghana).[5] As well as the records of Samuel Bloomaerts, twice Director of the Dutch West India Company, who were supplying most of the enslaved Africans to English colonies in the mid-seventeenth-century.[6]
The front cover and detail of de Maree’s book, Beschrivinghe ende Hisriche Verhael van het Gout Koninckrijck van Gunea , A Description and Account of the Gold Kingdom of Guinea, 1602. Image credit: Public domain Leiden University Libraries
Four Women from the Gold Coast, de Marees, 1602. Detail: Mothers from the Gold Coast were depicted as breastfeeding their children over their shoulder. Image credit: Leiden University Libraries.
Upon the restoration of King Charles II in 1660, science and slavery were central to the English colonial enterprise.[7] Eventually, the RAC transported more enslaved African women, children and men to the Americas than any other organisation. In 1665, Ogilby accepted a royal appointment and would later become the Royal Cosmographer. In 1670, he published Africa and dedicated it to King Charles.[8]
Whereas in seventeenth-century England, the legal age of womanhood was twelve,[9] the RAC classified the age of womanhood in West Africa as being ‘over the age of ten’.[10] Ogilby reflected this in Africa, where he claimed girlhood began at an exceedingly young age,
‘A Nobleman may Marry as many Wives as he pleaſeth, and every year, over and above, gets two or three of his Companions Daughters, eight or ten years old, who ſerve him as Naked as they came from their Mothers Womb, till he enjoys them, and then they obtain a little Garment on, and are esteemed for Women.’[11]
In this passage, sexual violence is constructed as innate to West African girlhood and womanhood. Indeed, in West African society, Ogilby implied the act of incest turned very young girls into women whilst simultaneously exposing the corruption of ‘African’ motherhood. The gendered lens of scientific inquiry invariably constructed African female sexuality as deviant; here, the mother is a polygamist, and the daughter is precocious.[12] Medical science normalised the sexual violence inherent in slavery through narratives of precocity, promiscuity and sexual violence.
The lower age of womanhood in the slave trading zones was reflective of all African girls, not just those enslaved. Ogilby stated, ‘if the Parents bestow not their Daughter in Marriage before twelve…years of Age, after that time they have nothing more to do with her.’[13]
These girls, known as women–girls were prized in plantation and colonial economies for the physical immaturity of girlhood and the perceived sexual capacities of womanhood.[14] The sexual availability of these ‘women-girls’ remained a persistent theme in Ogilby’s work, if not a contested one. Lack of access, rather than access to these young girls, was what perturbed Ogilby. He could not understand why, if,
‘Every Man Marries as many Women as he desires, yet keeps besides a great number of Concubines: But a White or a Christian may not be permitted to keep a Girl, because forbidden on pain of Death.’[15]
105: A woman-girl. RAC Slave Purchasing ledger, 1780 Annamabo Fort, The Gold Coast, Guinea (modern-day Ghana). The National Archives, Kew, T70. Image: authors own
Pro-slavery narratives like Ogilby’s depicted African female sexuality of all ages as promiscuous, polygamous, or precocious. Accordingly, this led to sexual disease, incidents of which he claimed were high in West African females because ‘they are inclin'd to Wantonness, wherein they neglect no opportunities to satiate their Lusts; and this causes in many, an absolute sterility; in others, a seldom pregnancy, so that they have but few Children;’.[16] Slavery endowed non-medical professionals like Ogilby with a socio-medical narrative that was reinforced by its reiteration, forging an indelible link between African female sexuality and sexual disease in Western medical science. Enslaved women and girls ‘secret parts’ were forcibly examined by RAC slave ship surgeons for signs of sexual diseases, ’the younger amongst them, wept inconsolably during these bodily violations.’[17] The adultified narratives of African girlhood sexuality were intimately tethered to the medical institutions that supported slavery on all of the Atlantic coasts.
Dapper’s original was published in 1668, and Ogilby’s translation was published in 1670. Dapper’s book was translated into English, French, Latin, and German.
These early socio-medical narratives of sexuality, sexual consent and sexual violence were some of the embryonic seeds of nineteenth-century scientific racism. Indeed, the lower age of ‘womanhood’ in British West Africa would remain on the statute books until the end of British rule in the mid-twentieth century.[18] Age, female sexuality and sexual taboos were (and remain) pivotal in defining girlhood differences between Africans and Europeans. Thus, Ogilby’s Africa illuminates the interdependent relationship between slavery, race making (adultification) and medical sciences in the social and legal making of girlhood in the slaving zone on the West African coast and beyond.
Akosua Paries-Osei is a Techné funded PhD Candidate in History at Royal Holloway University of London and has recently completed a placement at the Sloane Herbarium and Botany department at the Natural History Museum, London. Akosua’s research areas include the history of science and slavery, childhood sexual harm and colonial sexual protection laws, and ethnobotany, gender and slavery. Akosua presents her research as video essays to illuminate the interdisciplinary nature of her research.
[1] Christies. “Ogilby, John (1600-1676). Africa: Being an Accurate Description of the Regions of Aegypt, Barbary, Lybia, and Billedulgerid. London: Thomas Johnson for the Author, 1670.: Christie’s.” OGILBY, John (1600-1676). Africa: Being an Accurate Description of the Regions of Aegypt, Barbary, Lybia, and Billedulgerid. London: Thomas Johnson for the Author, 1670. | Christie’s, 2024, www.christies.com/en/lot/lot-6145814#:~:text=Related%20articles-,OGILBY%2C%20John%20(1600-1676).,English%20in%20the%20seventeenth%20century.
[2] I use the term West African girl to represent the area of ‘Guinea’, along the West African Coast during the 1600 and 1700s.
[3] Ogilby, John. “OGILBY, John (1600-1676). Africa: Being an Accurate Description of the Regions of Aegypt, Barbary, Lybia, and Billedulgerid. London: Thomas Johnson for the Author, 1670. | Christie’s.” Nether - Ethiopia, Thomas Johnston, London, 1670, pp. 499–500.
[4] Inniss, Tara. “‘This Complicated Incest’ Children, Sexuality, and Sexual Abuse during Slavery and the Apprenticeship Period in the British Caribbean, 1790–1838.” Sex, Power and Slavery, Ohio University Press, Athens, 2014, pp. 253–270.
[5] Bryan, Mary-Louise. “ Olfert Dapper.” Dapper, Olfert. Algiers., 2023, www.paralosgallery.com/stock_detail.php?stockid=2456.
[7] America and West Indies: September 1672". Calendar of State Papers Colonial, America and West Indies: Volume 7, 1669-1674. Ed. W Noel Sainsbury(London, 1889), , British History Online. Web. 24 December 2024. https://www.british-history.ac.uk/cal-state-papers/colonial/america-west-indies/vol7/pp404-417.
[8] Pettigrew, William A. Freedom’s Debt: The Royal African Company and the Politics of the Atlantic Slave Trade, 1672-1752. The University of North Carolina Press, 2016.
[9] Brabcová , Alice. Marriage in Seventeenth-Century England: The Woman’s Story.
[10] Eltis, David. “Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade - Understanding the Database.” Slave Voyages, www.slavevoyages.org/voyage/about#methodology/age-categories/5/en/. Accessed 3 Jan. 2025.
[11] Ogilby, p466
[12] Morgan, p170
[13] Ogilby, p472
[14] Ray, Carina. “World War II and the sex trade in British West Africa.” Africa and World War II, 16 Apr. 2015, pp. 339–356, https://doi.org/10.1017/cbo9781107282018.019.
[15] Ogilby, p472
[16] Ogilby, p499
[17] Roberts, Carolyn Elizabeth. “To Heal and to Harm: Medicine, Knowledge, and Power in the Atlantic Slave Trade.” To Heal and to Harm: Medicine, Knowledge, and Power in the Atlantic Slave Trade, Harvard University, Harvard University Press, 2017, pp. 207–208.
[18] Aderinto, Saheed. When Sex Threatened the State: Illicit Sexuality, Nationalism, and Politics in Colonial Nigeria, 1900-1958. University of Illinois Press, 2017.