Anthropology, archaeology, biology, ethnology, geology, medicine, philosophy, and, not least, theology were some of the fields. In the following centuries, simianisation would enter into different sciences and humanities. His intellectual contemporaries knew well that the stage for this transgressing love-and-rape-story was Africa because, according to the wisdom of the time, drills lived in Guinea.
In the story’s first version (1570), a Portuguese woman was exiled to Africa where she was raped by an ape and had his babies.Ī good century onwards the story had entered the realm of Europe’s great philosophical thought when John Locke in his 1689 essay Concerning Human Understanding, declared that “women have conceived by drills”. The history of a narrative by Antonio de Torquemada shows how in this process Africans became demonised and the demons racialised. He characterised the region as a hotbed of monsters, arising from the sexual union of humans and animals. Already Jean Bodin, doyen of the theory of sovereignty, had ascribed the sexual intercourse of animals and humans to Africa south of the Sahara. She eagerly reciprocated and became helplessly hooked.įrom then on, the sexist manifestation of simianisation was intimately intertwined with its racist dimension. Several centuries later in 1633, John Donne in his Metempsychosis even let one of Adam’s daughters be seduced by an ape in a sexual affair.
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