English slave traders borrowed Portuguese and French ideas rather than forming opinions from observation

Evidence

In 1554, an expedition captained by John Lok, ancestor of philosopher John Locke, arrived in England after traveling to “Guinea.” Lok and his compatriots Robert Gainish and William Towerson docked with 450 pounds of gold, 250 ivory tusks, and five enslaved African men. These three Englishmen established themselves as the new authorities on Africa and African people among curious British minds. Their opinions seemed to be shaped as much by the Portuguese and French as by their own observations. Sounding like Leo Africanus or Zurara, Gainish labeled Africans a “people of beastly living, without a God, law, religions, or common wealth.” The five “beasts” that he and his shipmates brought back to England all learned English and were sent back to Africa to serve as translators for English traders. — Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning, 68

Categorization

• QUESTION: The fact that the five enslaved Africans ‘all learned English’ visibly falsified the claim that Africans were ‘beasts’ — did contemporaries notice the contradiction? Kendi doesn’t push this point; worth testing where it goes.
• SEED: The enslaved translators who learned English and proved the traders’ racism false by their own competence is a sharp, concrete anecdote — material for a piece on how evidence contradicting racist ideas was simply ignored.