Sexualizing the Other

Abstract

Wherever they traded, settled, and colonized during the Eu ro pean expansion, Eu ro pean men had sex with indigenous women, and indigenous women's sexuality and interracial sex became ongoing themes in contemporary travel accounts. On the Gold Coast during the era of the slave trade, interracial sexual relations were at least as common as they were in other parts of the world, and Eu ro pean travel accounts supplied direct and practical information on how to get a West African woman and what to pay for her. Pieter de Marees's Dutch account from 1602, for example, included a Fante phrasebook in the back that advised the newly arrived Eu ro pean on how to demand a woman. The literal En glish translation reads, "I won't listen. You talk a lot. Shut your mouth. Give me a woman who is very sweet. Woman, your vagina inside eat. " 1 In 1662, the German Wilhelm Johan Müller described how West African women would ofer themselves to Eu ropean men for a small pre sent or for as little as a bottle of brandy, and stay with the men as long as they lived on the coast. 2 Though the descriptions 7 | PERNILLE IPSEN