Part of review forum on “The Heretic of Cacheu: Crispina Peres and the Struggle over Life in Seventeenth-Century West Africa”
I wish to start by noting that this book has a tragic element even though it is not a work of fiction. The last paragraph of the book is indeed most revealing: it states that Crispina Peres returned to Cacheu in 1668 after three years in Lisbon facing the Inquisition, sick, and then first disappears from the written record, and then dies. “Death itself came to relieve Crispina from the enduring pain which had come from her experience of the daily struggle over life in Cacheu and in the creeks and tabankas beyond it” (281).
This is significant because it informs us that the written record was largely responsible for the author’s excellent ability to reassemble the life of Crispina. The years of her prosecution were the most detailed years of her life. Her name seeps through the records of the Inquisition. Here, we see the paradox of the written record becoming the most useful way to trace the life of a woman, who may have been illiterate, and came from a society where orality was paramount as a means of dissemination and transmission.
While the larger aspect of Crispina’s life comes out from the records generated by her tormentors, the contextual setting around her and Cacheu comes from the oral traditions that the author has ably woven into the written record. Indeed, so extensive is the author’s use of oral sources that Chapter Eight is dedicated to Gossip and Entertainment as a pillar of unearthing the life of Crispina and Cacheu.
The settings of the Bainunka, Wolof, Feloup, and Bissagoes who traded with Crispina, Bibian Vaz, and other mixed-race strong women come from oral sources. Cacheu was not an island. It had a vast catchment area of Senegambia. Generally, it takes a mixture of the written record and oral sources, the griots, old men and women, and so on, to paint a full picture of Crispina as given so clearly in his good book. I must say here, en passant, that the author made good and copious use of the Gambia Oral Archives in Fajara, which puts The Gambia firmly in this work (Ceesay, Reference Ceesay2018). Indeed, the author on page 11 tasks readers to consider as to how well the written record can fully explain or adumbrate the feelings and daily experiences of the hardworking women of Cacheu.
From the book, the town of Cacheu is both a place of terror and temerity. One can be unknowingly captured, frog-marched and sold onto a waiting slave ship; yet women like Crispina can have hope and thrive in business, running their households, choosing their partners, and trading beyond the creeks into the larger Senegambia.
Some of the scholarship on the slave trade and the legitimate trade tended to see the two forms of commerce as almost mutually exclusive. In this book, the author sees them as parallel. Slavers were selling humans, while at the same time buying and selling nonhuman goods from micro-states along the creeks and rivers of Senegambia. This is a revelation worth noting.
Another revelation is that the book is partly religious history. There is a lot of mention of healing, worship, shrines, jujus, Inquisition, penance, and so on. This is not out of place because as the author confides: “it is impossible to consider the complex histories of the African past without grasping the centrality of spiritual approaches to life, and what this may have meant to the core actors in the historical past” (15).
Yet, a review of the book cannot be complete without an admission of the fact that Senegambia of the seventeenth century had many Crispinas: strong women of mixed race who were efficient brokers of trade and culture. This region is well noted for its role in the transatlantic slave trade and also in the ways that women were part and parcel of this trade. The author cites the Signares—Euro-African women of wealth and influence—as cultural brokers. These were women of substance, of economic might and social standing. They were rich enough to have slaves; they kept slaves, traded in slaves. Their role in the trade remains deeply paradoxical.
Crispina reminds scholars of Gambian history of Fenda Lawrence, a Gambian widow of a British trader who continued slave trading after moving to Georgia in the eighteenth century—a story that points to the conflicted role of women in the transatlantic slave trade, of Phillis Wheatley, the enslaved poet from The Gambia region who became a literary voice of resistance. Wheatley rose above persecution to become a poet of note who received attention even from Thomas Jefferson. Their micro biographies relate to Crispina’s in many ways. Drawing on Alex Haley’s famous book, Roots, I wish to emphasize that The Heretic of Cacheu flashes light at the forgotten role of women in preserving identity through ritual, religion, and memory.
Professor Green’s books are notorious for giving agency to Senegambians in precolonial periods. This fine work is no exception.
My question relates to how can the historian reconcile the moral predicament of using sources of torture and torment such as Inquisition records, treason trials, Stalinist purges, and witch hunts to adumbrate the lives of people who were victims of such judicial process?
