Decompiling Dapper: A Preliminary Search for Evidence

Abstract

Geographical compilations used to be valued because they made things easy for those who read them: instead of being confronted with a set of barely intelligible travelers' accounts, the reader was offered their essence in a predigested form. Yet today most self-respecting historians pride themselves on using only “original” sources. In the recent historiography of Africa much useful work has been devoted to the task of showing the derivative nature of certain seventeenth-and eighteenth-century European works.One of the victims of this growing awareness has been the monumental book on Africa by Olfert Dapper (1668). Many of Dapper's sources for individual regions have been identified, notably for the Cape of Good Hope, Senegal, Sierra Leone, the Gold Coast, Allada, and Loango. In the case of Tunis it has even been possible to show that everything in Dapper's account derived from published sources. Not surprisingly, some scholars have contemptuously dismissed the book as a “mere compilation.”