Few books written today will still be read in a hundred years’ time, but I would be prepared to bet that this will be one of them. José Lingna Nafafé’s book issues a devastating challenge to the accepted history of the abolition movement. However, it’s a challenge which has still not been fully acknowledged, and so the purpose of this review is to set out exactly why this award-winning book is such a landmark in the historiography.

Nafafé charts the case taken to the Vatican in 1684 by a prince from the kingdom of Ndongo (today’s Angola), Lourenço da Silva de Mendonça. Mendonça’s case was that slavery in the Atlantic world was contrary to civil, divine, human and natural law, and that therefore the Vatican should rule to abolish it as against Catholic precepts. This was a transnational movement, supported by Black religious brotherhoods (confrarías) from across the Atlantic world – from Lisbon and Luanda to Salvador da Bahia (all cities that Mendonça knew well). But Nafafé also provocatively argues that Mendonça saw his case as wider than this already immense issue, and as a shot across the bows of injustices committed against Native Americans through Iberian colonialism, and New Christians (descendants of converted Jews) through the Inquisition.

To make this case, Nafafé charts Mendonça’s life and career from Angola to the Vatican, via Brazil, Portugal and Spain. Nephew of the famous Queen Njinga of Matamba, Mendonça’s life changed following a military defeat of Ndongo forces at the Battle of Pungo-Andongo in 1671. Along with a large number of brothers, sisters and cousins, Mendonça was sent into exile from Angola. Initially he was taken to Salvador in Bahia, then the capital of the Portuguese colony of Brazil. Here, however, the colonial authorities feared he might draw support towards the rebel maroon state of Palmares, which by then was over fifty years old, and so they sent him on to a monastery in northern Portugal. Here, Mendonça began the studies that would enable him to take his case to the Vatican a decade later. After being appointed procurator of the Black confraría in Lisbon, he marshalled the evidence for his case, following further stays and alliance building in Spain.

This, then, is the remarkable story of what we should rightly call one of the first transnational social justice movements in modern history. Nevertheless, the first remarkable aspect of this book is that Mendonça’s case has not been told by historians until now. Nafafé’s painstaking, time-consuming and far-flung research across three continents has literally rescued this remarkable case from the memory hole of history. The reason for this is clear enough: the records are scattered across the world, and also are often found through isolated references that have to be accumulated very slowly into the picture which eventually emerges. Until the age of globalized historical research, such a project was almost impossible to conduct; and even now, the metrics of modern neoliberal universities are rarely kind to someone who wants to spend twenty years researching a book, as Nafafé has done.

But there is a second reason why this analysis of Mendonça’s life has not been produced until now, and that is to do with the challenge that an account of it poses to established literatures of the historical canon. The unerring conclusion that must be drawn is that the abolition movement did not somehow arise in the late eighteenth century in England, drawing on Quaker abolitionist groups in North America, the rise of the working class in Britain and technologies of news information, and the leadership of English abolitionists such as Thomas Clarkson and William Wilberforce. Instead, Nafafé’s book argues that abolitionism as a legal movement began over a century before, in the work that Mendonça did to form a strong case against the legality of slavery in as major a court of international law as existed at the time.

Here, it is important to draw a distinction between the literature around abolitionism and resistance to enslavement. There is, of course, a vast literature on the latter, showing the many ways in which enslaved people challenged, fought and resisted slavery as an Atlantic institution. Abolitionism, on the other hand, is generally conceived of as a legal and constitutional process, enacted by European parliaments following mass political movements. This abolitionism is one in which African intellectual and political leadership has rarely if ever been included – until now. Thus, Nafafé’s book presents a major challenge to the existing historiography, which is now well over 200 years old and dates back to the works of the early British abolitionists such as Clarkson.

This is one major aspect of the challenge that this work represents. Another is its approach to the historiography of enslavement in Africa, and the question of the use of sources. Nafafé effectively contends that much of the existing literature on the question draws on inappropriate language and therefore reproduces racist stereotypes. Concepts of slavery in European languages inevitably refer back to the notion of enslavement in Roman law, in which chattel slavery is codified. However, concepts in languages such as Kimbundu relate to very different sets of social dependencies; as Nafafé argues effectively, the term kijikó, often translated as ‘slave’, means something very different in Kimbundu in terms of the relationships, rights and responsibilities enshrined. By mistranslating the term, historians could debate the pre-existence of slavery in Angola, and therefore the questions of responsibilities, in inaccurate terms – a move that, as Nafafé argues, has shaped much of the historiographical debate.

Some will wonder how far the examples from Angola – the only real site of a proto-colonial occupation in Africa before the late eighteenth century – are translatable to other parts of the continent. Others may dispute some of Nafafé’s representations of the historiography. But this is to lose sight of the big picture, which is that this is not just ‘a monograph’: it is, in fact, certainly one of the most important works in the field of slavery and abolition to be published in recent decades.