Captain Harry Foster Dean’s 1929 memoir The Pedro Gorino is the extraordinary story of his time in southern Africa around the turn of the twentieth century. Dean’s narrative describes his thrilling maritime adventures and his encounters with important figures in history, but he never loses sight of his main purpose: establishing a colony where diasporic Africans could settle alongside native-born Africans and together build a racial empire. His beloved ship, the Pedro Gorino, was at the center of his plans. A race leader manqué, Dean attempted throughout his life to convince Black people everywhere of the importance of the sea for the success of the race. A rich selection of contextual documents supplements the annotated memoir, providing materials on Dean’s life and work, imperialism and environmental exploitation in South Africa, Black seafaring, and the Pan-African missionary movement. Comments “For years I’ve often puzzled over my yellow clothbound copy of Captain Harry Dean’s singular autobiography The Pedro Gorino. That is because relatively little has been known about the author of this strange, surprising, and occasionally apocryphal romance of sail and of globe-spanning Pan-Africanism in the age of the New Imperialism. How could a narrative with so much evident interest to students of the Black Atlantic attract such scarce attention for nearly a century? At last, Nadia Nurhussein has expertly and generously re-edited Dean’s episodes, contextualizing The Pedro Gorino’s literary and historical imagination and amassing the scarce facts available beyond Dean’s own accounts. Dean’s place is restored in a literary history that spans from Martin Delany and Victor Hugo to Joseph Conrad and Alain Locke. This edition is a generous gift to readers of this improbable book.” — Harris Feinsod, Johns Hopkins University “This critical edition of Harry Dean’s Pedro Gorino brings Dean and Black nautical history to the fore. Born of a time in which sailing and ships were still so central to global power, the book has always offered insight into key ways in which African Americans understood the significance of maritime life. Nurhussein re-presents Dean’s memoir with a careful curation of vital primary-source documents to help us situate the book and Dean in that time. At a moment when Black Studies is increasingly being called to understand itself on more global terms, Nurhussein’s efforts are urgently necessary, profound, and timely.” — Victoria J. Collis-Buthelezi, Associate Professor of English and Director of the Centre for the Study of Race, Gender & Class, University of Johannesburg
