There are two fascinating histories in José Lingna Nafafé’s book. The first focuses on Prince Lourenço da Silva Mendonça, a son of Ndongo royalty, who along with nineteen other princes and two princesses, collectively known as the Pungo-Andongo royals, were all deposed and exiled from their west–central African kingdom, Ndongo, by the Portuguese government. The exiled royals were not enslaved but put under house arrest, sent to Brazil, then to Portugal, the purpose being to get them out of Portuguese Angola, where their presence might inspire resistance to colonial conquest. The second history focuses on a court case brought by Prince Lourenço da Silva Mendonça at the Vatican to challenge African enslavement. The court case implicated Portugal, Spain and the Vatican in the brutality and injustice of slavery. This fascinating history emphasizes how an African abolitionist, working at the centre of seventeenth-century European power, called out the injustice of Atlantic slavery at the heart of Europe’s colonization of the Americas.
Nafafé sets up the 1684 court case with an in-depth history of the Portuguese Empire in Angola. He explains how Portuguese greed for cheap labour warped existing tribute systems such as baculamento into extortion to extract enslaved workers for the enrichment of governors and other colonial elites, including Catholic religious orders such as the Jesuits. Nafafé argues that wars started by governors such as Correia de Sousa were waged primarily to capture people, even in regions governed by Mbundu (Kingdom of Ndongo) vassals aligned with the Portuguese. The capture and sale into slavery of peoples nominally under Portuguese authority raised questions of the legality of the transatlantic slave trade in Angola, as Angolans and Kongolese living in societies that recognized Portuguese authority had rights based on their identity as Christians (pp. 94–5). Thus, even in the tortured logic of seventeenth-century colonialism, Portugal’s governors in Angola were illegally capturing and selling people.
Nafafé argues that ‘slavery did not exist in Angola and Kongo before the arrival of the Portuguese’ (p. 135). The argument adds to an existing and much debated historiography on the nature of slavery in Africa prior to the transatlantic slave trade. Nafafé makes a strong argument about how the pursuit of captives undermined Portugal’s alliance with Ndongo, just as it had soured the relationship with Kongo. Detailing the exile of the Ndongo royal family to Bahia in Chapter 3, ‘The journey of Mendonça: the princes of Pungo-Andongo in Brazil’, Nafafé calls the years (1672–73) spent in Brazil a watershed in Mendonça’s life because there he learned about the lives of enslaved people (p. 221) as well as about the collaboration between indigenous people and the Africans of the Quilombo dos Palmares, an autonomous, maroon community run by formerly enslaved peoples that lasted most of the seventeenth century (p. 239). Nafafé cites evidence that the Portuguese overseas council believed that the Africans in Palmares had come from Angola, knew Prince Mendonça and spoke Kimbundu, which is why the council, the Portuguese body in charge of the colonies, decided to send the prince to a second exile in Portugal.
Nafafé traces Prince Mendonça’s life, explaining his studies in Braga, Portugal, and later his work as an attorney of the Confraternity of Our Lady Star of Black Men in Lisbon and the Royal Court of Madrid, Toledo (p. 278). Confraternities in the Portuguese and Spanish empires provided spaces for Africans and Afro-descended peoples to socialize, to discuss ideas, and to provide mutual support. Nafafé links Mendonça’s work representing confraternities to his understanding of anti-slavery discourse (p. 279).
Nafafé explains that the core of Mendonça’s court case was the accusation against the Vatican that through various bulls it had allowed for the enslavement of Africans (p. 348) as a result of unjust wars waged by Portugal and Spain. In the court case, Mendonça argued that enslavement contravened natural and human law (pp. 369–70); he cited sixteenth-century kings of Kongo, Garcia II and Afonso I, who had made similar arguments; and he presented as corroborating evidence testimonies from confraternities in Brazil, Portugal and Spain (p. 347).
Nafafé makes a significant contribution to the historiography of abolition. Highlighting African abolitionists such as Prince Mendonça enriches a historiography primarily focused on British abolitionists. The depth of Nafafé’s research in archives on all sides of the Atlantic, including the Vatican, is impressive. The inclusion of court documents from the Vatican, specifically from the Office of Propaganda Fide, either in an appendix or digitally, would enrich the book. I hope to see a companion publication with an annotated and translated court case and supporting documents. José Lingna Nafafé has done an exemplary job in telling the important story of Prince Lourenço da Silva Mendonça of Ndongo and his claim for the freedom and integration of enslaved Africans across the seventeenth-century Atlantic world.
