Michael Boyms Bericht aus Mosambik ‒ 1644

In 1644 the monsoon winds held Polish Michael Boym, the great China-missionary, in southeast African Mozambique for some months. His since then unpublished report about the Country of the Kaffirs represents not only an important source for the local history of early modern Mozambique, but unfolds it´s significance particularly in Boym`s unusual criticism of the Portuguese colonial administration, a criticism consequently developed out of the basic attitude of his order, the Society of Jesus. Furthermore the inner-European aspects of his disapproval of Portuguese colonialism give an intersting testimony for a fundamental change in the western European society of the late 16th and early 17th centuries, when the overseas empires of the Iberian discoveres broke down under the pressure of northwest European powers and the cultural hegemony of the Italo-Iberian civilisation came to its end.