A captured Moroccan scholar produced Europe’s first scholarly survey of Africa.

Evidence

Around 1510, Al-Hasan Ibn Muhammad al-Wazzan al-Fasi, a well-educated Moroccan, accompanied his uncle on a diplomatic mission down into the Songhay Empire. Eight years later, he was enslaved on another diplomatic voyage along the Mediterranean Sea. His captors presented the learned twenty-four-year-old to the scholarly Pope Leo X in Italy. Before dying in 1521, the pope freed the youngster, converted him to Christianity, renamed him Johannes Leo, and possibly commissioned him to write a survey of Africa. He became known as Leo the African, or Leo Africanus. He satisfied Italian curiosity in 1526 with the first scholarly survey of Africa in Europe, Della descrittione dell’Africa (Description of Africa). — Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning, 63

Categorization

• SEED: The biography of Leo Africanus — enslaved scholar elevated by a pope — is a rich narrative thread for an essay on how colonial knowledge production began with an unfree African.