This is a work of deep scholarship, drawing on a wide range of archival sources, and meticulously presented. Yet it also packs an interpretative punch. The argument is that Mendonça, born into an African royal family in Angola, developed a sustained critique of the European slave trade in the seventeenth century. An educated and multilingual Christian, he contested slavery within the realm and institutions of the Catholic Church. His efforts culminated in the papal courts, where, with some success, he attempted to have slavery declared illegal in the Catholic maritime empires. The evidence shows that the ideas behind abolitionism, often seen as a European, and especially British, movement beginning in the late eighteenth century, should be reconsidered as rooted in African networks and dating from a century earlier.
While Mendonça has surfaced in historical writing before, and there is a growing literature on slavery in the Portuguese and Spanish empires, this proposition has not yet made a major impact on the historiography, at least for those who are not immersed in this period. One reason may be that colonial histories are still viewed discretely through the lens of different European empires. Nafafé’s detailed yet forceful book challenges historians to expand their frames: by the force of argument, the quality of the material and its range. Historical thinking sometimes needs a big book to take a step upwards; I think this will provide it.
Nafafé writes within a strong Africanist tradition, emphasizing agency and African cosmopolitanism. Mendonça reaches out to us, as readers more than three centuries later, evincing a mentality that is universal, rights-based and humanitarian in its language. A subsidiary argument is that slavery, contrary to those defending the trade at the time, was not a feature of African society; here, Nafafé draws on the strongly debated strand initially developed in Miers and Kopytoff’s collection on Slavery in Africa,Footnote 1 which generally distinguished African systems of servility from transatlantic chattel slavery.
Strangely, this claim about African internal slavery appears to have been significant in the legal justification of enslavement within the Catholic Church, and its formal acceptance by the Vatican. Nafafé, on the one hand, notes that African societies such as the Ndongo provided a haven against slavery and, on the other, he emphasizes a Portuguese decree demanding that tribute in Angola by African chiefs be paid in slaves. It was this Portuguese intervention that generated slave raiding. Yet there are moments when his focus scans a more general terrain and suggests an adjacent and wider dynamic of militarism and servitude in some African societies, as Europeans extended their colonial reach. There were perhaps more layers of African engagement in the slave trade in west and west–central Africa than accepted here. Understanding these now are in no way a justification for the Vatican’s pro-slavery position, a blot on the history of Christianity, and a deep hypocrisy in a church that was simultaneously trying to convert Africans. The power of this book is also to expose Catholic moral confusion and to expand understanding of how slavery was continuously contested, not only through escape and revolt, but also in a humanitarian, and to some degree Christian, movement of that time.
While the papal records provide a backbone, much of the other material is scattered, in many languages and archives. Part of the fascination of this book is that Nafafé takes the reader with him in his extended quest. It is an irony, in the writing of colonial history and Atlantic slavery, that the careful records of enslavement, associated violence and governance, and even slave experience, rest in the written colonial archive. Sometimes this leads to detailed explanatory footnotes that require the reader’s patience but can also be rewarding.
Nafafé’s text will speak to those with different historical interests – slavery and abolition, European empires, Christianity and Catholicism, and not least those exploring networks of African intellectuals who straddled the Atlantic in earlier centuries. It is important that they are all connected. Nafafé provides routes away from seeing Africans through the lens of ethnicity and identity and directs us to intellectual history, as well as the creation of new communities, including those of runaway slaves and Black brotherhoods. In an appealing intervention, Nafafé gently criticizes the influential conception of a Black Atlantic, suggesting that it is, at least in the longer term, insufficiently focused on those rooted in Africa.
Just as the writing about Queen Nzinga, in the first half of the seventeenth century, has opened routes for feminist thinking about Africa, so Nafafé offers pathways for African inclusion in global intellectual history, abolitionism and humanitarianism. He combines African experiences and discourses with ideas developing in European law. In both this early period and in the overwhelming colonization of Africa in the first half of the twentieth century, these intertwined routes of knowledge were sites of creative thinking. A particularly interesting strand in the book explores not only Mendonça’s connections with African confraternities in the church but his call for the freedom of all enslaved people and the rights also of Jewish converts, New Christians and Native Americans in the Atlantic world.
The nature of power and wealth in the seventeenth century seems to have kept Mendonça’s arguments, in part accepted by the Vatican court, at the periphery of imperial practice. As this body of historiography grows, it would be valuable to know whether these seventeenth-century ideas fed directly into later eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century abolitionist movements, when they gained more political purchase. Did Equiano, or Wilberforce, know about Mendonça, or at least have a diffuse sense of this legacy? New historical adventurers, with a similar range of languages, will need to follow protagonists across the corrugated field of imperial expansion. A foundation has been laid, and I hope that the reach of Nafafé’s book can be extended through accessible versions and, ideally, a film. The story is specific, but the messages are universal.
