L'Africaine

L'Africaine (The African Woman) is an 1837 five-act French grand opéra by Giacomo Meyerbeer, with a libretto by Eugène Scribe. By 1852, the plot had been revised to depict fictional events in the life of Portuguese explorer Vasco da Gama, adopting his Gallicized name as its working title, Vasco de Gama. The full score was copied the day before Meyerbeer died in 1864.

François-Joseph Fétis's published edition, L'Africaine, premiered in 1865 at the Paris Opéra and was long performed. Since 2013, some productions and recordings have applied revisions, including the title Vasco de Gama, based on Meyerbeer's manuscript, from which Casa Ricordi published a critical edition in 2018.