“Elephants for Want of Towns:” The Interethnic and International History of Bulama Island, 1456–1870

Bulama (otherwise Bolama) Island is the furthest inshore member of the Bissagos Islands, off the West African coast, in the present-day state of Guiné-Bissau. On the east side of the wide estuary of Rio Jeba, it stands near the mouth of Rio Balola. Small, low-lying, partly surrounded by sandbanks and swamps, often uninhabited, and considered by whites scenically attractive but very unhealthy, Bulama has appeared in historical records with disproportionate frequency. It may have been noted during the earliest stages of Portuguese “Discovery;” two centuries on, it was investigated by the French. It was later the locality of a disastrous British settlement, the proposed home for a colony of African-Americans, and for sixty years the site of a colonial capital; and it was the subject of a well-meant arbitration by a President of the U.S.A. Finally, it was the center for an international conference on its own past, held in 1990. That past, of little importance in itself, nevertheless provides a keyhole glimpse of much of the history of the western Guinea coast over four centuries. Our knowledge of the earlier history of the island of Bulama is slight and depends on European sources. The region of the estuary of Rio Jeba—or “Rio Grande” as it was originally known—was first visited by Europeans in the 1450s. The earliest Portuguese ship to arrive was probably the one on which a certain Diogo Gomes traveled, the date probably 1456. The account of this voyage, as edited by a contemporary scholar in the 1490s from the oral narrative of Diogo Gomes in old age, indicates that the Portuguese landed at a point along Rio Jeba and saw wild animals: deer, elephants, and crocodiles.