Africa versus America

The Power of the Paradigm Luisa Isabel Álvarez de Toledo, Duchess of Medina
Sidonia
Luisa Isabel Álvarez de Toledo, Duchess of Medina Sidonia, investigates where
officially accepted history falters. Her book "Africa versus America" is the result
of a lifetime of exhaustive research and work: locating manuscripts, interpreting
texts, and comparative data analysis that official history often overlooks or
conceals.
Index
Index Prologue by Hashim Ibrahim Cabrera I. The Beginning of the Error The Gold
Mine From the Tartessians to the Benimerines The Confusion of the Continents The
Blacks The Revelations of Fauna and Flora II. The Fortunate and Other Islands The
Legend The Course of a Conquest The First War of Canaria The Raid of Pedro de Vera
The Death of Fernán The Last Defeat of the Canaries The Tower of Santa Cruz The
Decline of the Lugo The Two Archipelagos III. The Wars of Guinea The Prelude of
Henry IV The Struggle for the Throne The Great Armada The Complicated Path to Peace
Towards the Last Deception Pre-Colonial Navigations IV. The Columbian Period The
Palos of Discovery The Papers of Santa Fe The First Voyage The Second Isabella
Parallel Operations The Crown of Africa The Discoveries of 1497 V. The End of the
Western Berberia The Conquest of Discovery The Fourth Voyage The Regularization of
Trade The Last Treaty The Portuguese Administration The Lawsuit of the Colons VI.
In the Time of the Habsburgs The Embers of the Old Regime The Disintegration of the
Fortunate The Situation at Sea The Neighborhood, Indication of Location The Squares
of the Sharif The Peoples of the River
Sources Used
Graphic Documents
Maps
Prologue by Hashim Ibrahim Cabrera
"Using the pretext of the replacement of toponyms that accompanied the conquest,
the Emperor ordered, in 1536, a general seizure of nautical charts, maps, and
sketches, whether public or private property. The cleanup was entrusted to the
auditor Juan Suárez de Carvajal, who formed a team of eminent astronomers,
cosmographers, and geographers to fill the void, composing an updated 'padrón' or
'world map'. The map of Juan de la Cosa was saved from the burning. Dated 1500, it
offers the anomaly of outlining undiscovered coasts, such as the Gulf of Mexico and
Florida. A pilgrim figure hides the isthmus, forbidden to the Portuguese and
Castilians, as it was in litigation before Rome since 1490." Luisa Isabel Álvarez
de Toledo, Duchess of Medina Sidonia, investigates where officially accepted
history falters. Her book "Africa versus America" is the result of several years of
exhaustive work: locating manuscripts, interpreting texts, and comparative data
analysis that official history often overlooks or conceals. Granddaughter of Don
Antonio Maura, an tireless polemicist and visceral dissident, Luisa Isabel has
lived immersed in historical research for more than thirty years, uncovering lost
keys in the vast sea of documents she has organized and analyzed with commendable
patience and wisdom. Her solid and suggestive discourse helps us gradually discover
that the alteration of texts for political and religious reasons has been a common
practice and that the history we learned has more of these extrapolations than of
true narration. As we delve into the text, we realize that the history of Spain we
studied in school and university was more the result of consensus and the interests
of an ethno-confessional class than the will to know a past we could recognize as
more or less our own. The great milestones on which the collective memory of the
Spaniards rests, identity keys of an entire community, forged through faith courts
and exemplary massacres, not only falter but inevitably drown among the evidence.
With exquisite manners and a great sense of humor, Luisa Isabel declares herself a
descendant of a Muslim "beyond the sea," from that Overseas Berberia, which history
wanted to erase to develop the tremendous panoply of the Discovery. The documentary
archive of the Dukes of Medina Sidonia is perhaps the most important in Europe
regarding the existing documentation on the historical relations between Spain and
the Maghreb and the presence of the inhabitants of the Iberian Peninsula in the
American continent before the 'Discovery'. Based on this documentation and other
books and documents in the various historical archives of the country, she
reconstructs with a scent of verisimilitude that narrative that wanted to be
veiled, surprising in that it denies the meaning that has been supposed to the
'Columbian feat' and affirms, on the contrary, the existence of political and
commercial relations between different peoples and cultures that inhabited both
shores of the Ocean, almost from the earliest known written records. "Africa versus
America, the power of the paradigm" is, above all, a history book, of that history
denied by the interests of states that were formed at the expense of the social,
political, and religious reality of the peoples of the Iberian Peninsula. The
foundational moment of Spanish Modernity has been established by successive
generations of "modern" historians in the peninsular territorial unification that
the Catholic Monarchs culminated with the conquest of Granada and the consequent
announcement of the 'Discovery'. In light of this book, we see how maintaining a
historical falsehood has served the interests of a power that was based "on the
depredation of the cultures it encountered." The commercial relations that had
existed until then between all inhabited continents were profoundly affected by the
'conquest' policy carried out by the Catholic Monarchs and other European
monarchies and their successors legitimized by the Church, in a newly consensual
New World, which was 'new' only in the interests of the 'conquerors'. Luisa Isabel
Álvarez de Toledo has investigated a taboo subject due to its historical and
political implications. The existence of 'kingdoms' on the other Atlantic shore —
in the places "beyond the sea," as they appear named in the analyzed documentation
— causes a Copernican shift in the traditional view of relations between Europe
and America promoted by historians loyal to successive empires and consensuses. The
research is supported by numerous documentary passages that prove the existence of
distinctly American products in peninsular markets since at least the year 1200.
Who were those merchants who crossed the Atlantic without any problem? Perhaps the
same ones who guided Christopher Columbus on his voyages "beyond the sea,"
fishermen and sailors from Palos and other Andalusian ports, navigators from
Portugal and the Maghreb who knew a "Gold Guinea" that was not precisely in Africa
but in the territories of central and southern America. The text uses language,
skillfully armed in an archaic style, that can help the reader cross the centuries,
to focus the scene in a vivid and plastic way, despite the material not coming from
literature but from shipping manifests, orders, and inventories, from political
correspondence between statesmen who effectively lived in another time and who
remain today in our minds, in our collective memory, turned into the residual image
of a myth,

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