The Black Urban Atlantic in the Age of the Slave Trade 9780812208139

Table of contents :
Contents
Introduction Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra, Matt D. Childs, and James Sidbury
PART I. AFRICAN IDENTITIES IN ATLANTIC SPACES
Chapter 1. Identity among Liberated Africans in Sierra Leone
Chapter 2. Ouidah as a Multiethnic Community
Chapter 3. African Nations in Nineteenth-Century Salvador, Bahia`
PART II. THE SOURCES OF BLACK AGENCY
Chapter 4. Re-creating African Ethnic Identities in Cuba
Chapter 5. The Slaves and Free People of Color of Cap
Chapter 6. Kingston, Jamaica: Crucible of Modernity
PART III. URBAN SPACES AND BLACK AUTONOMY
Chapter 7. The African Landscape of Seventeenth-Century Cartagena and Its Hinterlands
Chapter 8. The Cultural Geography of Enslaved Ship Pilots
Chapter 9. Slavery and the Social and Cultural Landscapes of Luanda
Chapter 10. African Barbeiros in Brazilian Slave Ports
PART IV. BLACK IDENTITIES IN NON-PLANTATION ECONOMIES
Chapter 11. The Hidden Histories of African Lisbon
Chapter 12. Black Brotherhoods in Mexico City
Notes
Bibliographic Essay
List of Contributors
Index
Acknowledgments

Citation preview

The Black Urban Atlantic in the Age of the Slave Trade

the early modern americas Peter c. mancall, series editor Volumes in the series explore neglected aspects of early modern history in the western hemisphere. interdisciplinary in character, and with a special emphasis on the atlantic World from 1450 to 1850, the series is published in partnership with the Usc–huntington early modern studies institute.

The Black Urban Atlantic in the Age of the Slave Trade

EDITED BY

Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra, Matt D.Childs, and James Sidbury

universit y of pennsylvania press phil adelphia

Copyright © 2013 University of Pennsylvania Press All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations used for purposes of review or scholarly citation, none of this book may be reproduced in any form by any means without written permission from the publisher. Published by University of Pennsylvania Press Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104-4112 www.upenn.edu/pennpress Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data The black urban Atlantic in the age of the slave trade / edited by Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra, Matt D. Childs, and James Sidbury. — 1st ed. p. cm. — (Early modern Americas) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-8122-4510-3 (hardcover : alk. paper) 1. Slave trade—Atlantic Ocean Region—History. 2. Sociology, Urban—Atlantic Ocean Region—History. 3. Blacks—Atlantic Ocean Region—Social conditions. 4. Atlantic Ocean Region—Race relations— History. I. Cañizares-Esguerra, Jorge. II. Childs, Matt D. III. Sidbury, James. IV. Series: Early modern Americas. HT985.B53 2013 305.896’018210903—dc23 2012050151

Contents

Introduction Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra, Matt D. Childs, and James Sidbury

1

PART I. AFRICAN IDENTITIES IN ATLANTIC SPACES Chapter 1. Identity among Liberated Africans in Sierra Leone David Northrup

21

Chapter 2. Ouidah as a Multiethnic Community Robin Law

42

Chapter 3. African Nations in Nineteenth-Century Salvador, Bahia João José Reis

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PART II. THE SOURCES OF BLACK AGENCY Chapter 4. Re-creating African Ethnic Identities in Cuba Matt D. Childs

85

Chapter 5. The Slaves and Free People of Color of Cap Français David Geggus

101

Chapter 6. Kingston, Jamaica: Crucible of Modernity Trevor Burnard

122

vi

Contents

PART III. URBAN SPACES AND BLACK AUTONOMY Chapter 7. The African Landscape of Seventeenth-Century Cartagena and Its Hinterlands Jane Landers

147

Chapter 8. The Cultural Geography of Enslaved Ship Pilots Kevin Dawson

163

Chapter 9. Slavery and the Social and Cultural Landscapes of Luanda Roquinaldo Ferreira

185

Chapter 10. African Barbeiros in Brazilian Slave Ports Mariza de Carvalho Soares

207

PART IV. BLACK IDENTITIES IN NON-PLANTATION ECONOMIES Chapter 11. The Hidden Histories of African Lisbon James H. Sweet

233

Chapter 12. Black Brotherhoods in Mexico City Nicole von Germeten

248

Notes 269 Bibliographic Essay 341 List of Contributors 351 Index 355 Acknowledgments 373

The Black Urban Atlantic in the Age of the Slave Trade

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Introduction Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra, Matt D. Childs, and James Sidbury

In 1763 a young enslaved man who went by the name Gustavus Vassa went to sea in the British Caribbean. Like most sailors, he soon began to engage in petty commerce to make a bit of money. Over the next four years he built up his small savings by transporting goods from one island port and selling them in another. Around 1767 he invested all of his savings in limes and oranges that he took on a voyage to Santa Cruz (present-day Saint Croix). When the ship arrived in port, probably at Frederiksted, he and a friend lit out for the city to sell their fruit. Almost immediately “two white men” stopped them and openly stole their three bags of fruit. The two young slaves pleaded for the return of their trade goods, but the robbers “not only refused to return” the citrus, they cursed their two victims and threatened “to flog” them as well if they did not leave them alone. Thus, at the “very minute of gaining more by three times than” he had ever had “by any venture” in his “life before,” the young enslaved petty merchants was “deprived of every farthing” he “was worth.” 1 Port cities created opportunities for enslaved Africans, but they also held dangers. Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African, lived an amazing life in the Black Atlantic. According to his 1789 autobiography, The Interesting Narrative of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African. Written by Himself, he was born in 1745 in a small Igbo village called Essaka. Kidnapped as a young boy, he was sold into American slavery. More fortunate than most victims of the slave trade, he ultimately won his freedom and became an antislavery advocate and author. His account of enslavement, the Middle Passage, his life as a slave, and his careers as a free man offers the most powerful

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first-person account of eighteenth-century slavery to be found in English. Not surprisingly, scholars of eighteenth-century race and slavery use it in discussions of almost every aspect of eighteenth-century black life in the Englishspeaking world. And why not? Equiano/Vassa’s story lives up to its title—it is, indeed, an “Interesting Narrative.” He offers chilling descriptions of being snatched from Essaka with his sister, of being separated from her while traveling to the African coast, and of being purchased by slavers and shipped to America. Once in the New World he was sold to a Virginian and then to a ship captain, after which he traveled throughout the Caribbean, North America, and Europe, going as far east as Smyrna in the Ottoman Empire. He fought on a Royal Navy man-of-war alongside his owner during the Seven Years War. He converted to Christianity in England. Sold back to America, he worked and made money for his owner while engaging in petty commerce on his own account. Finally, despite numerous efforts by whites to defraud him like the one on Santa Cruz, he saved enough to buy his freedom. As a free man he worked as a sailor, a barber and personal servant, and as an overseer. By the time he decided to write his autobiography, he had lived a life well worth telling, a life many would and did want to purchase as text. His Interesting Narrative was a best seller. That broad range of experience also helps explain the Narrative’s appeal to scholars. Equiano/Vassa went so many places, he interacted with whites and blacks throughout so much of Britain’s Atlantic empire, he recounted so many fascinating stories that his autobiography can seem like a gold mine for people searching for all-too-rare points of entry into the ways that slaves understood their world. Of course that very variety of experience raises questions about how to use evidence from the text. No one has ever pretended that Equiano/Vassa’s life as a slave resembled that of most victims of the Atlantic trade, but relatively little attention has been paid to the prominence of cities in his story. Though he spent a few weeks as a slave in rural Virginia, and a few months as an overseer on the Mosquito Coast of present-day Nicaragua, he reported precious little experience on plantations, the institution that dominated the lives of most American slaves. Instead, most of his time was spent either in ports or on ships sailing between ports. He tells stories of his time in London and of visits to ports in France, Portugal, and Spain. The list of American cities he spent time in is almost too long to list: Basseterre (St. Kitts), Charleston (South Carolina), Kingston (Jamaica), New Providence (the Bahamas),

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Philadelphia (Pennsylvania), Plymouth (Montserrat), and St. Pierre (Martinique). Equiano/Vassa’s Interesting Narrative reveals a network of black sailors, craftsmen, stevedores, and laborers who worked in the port cities of the Atlantic World, providing much of the labor and expertise that lubricated Atlantic commerce. While no one would suggest that cities should replace the plantation as the primary site for making sense of Atlantic slavery, the essays in this volume, when read together, make a strong case that we need to pay much more attention than we have to the black urban Atlantic that played such a central role in Equiano/Vassa’s life. While the Interesting Narrative provides occasional glimpses of enslaved Africans and people of African descent working, and playing, and worshipping, and suffering brutal exploitation, these essays look in much more concentrated ways at the texture of black urban life in Atlantic cities. This collection provides a series of detailed case studies of black life in different Atlantic ports—one in Europe, three in Africa, two in Brazil, two on the Spanish American mainland, and three in the Caribbean—as well as an essay discussing slave pilots who worked Atlantic ports. By placing the activities that Equiano saw throughout the Atlantic within their specific urban contexts, these studies provide a rich and diverse sample of the ways Africans and African-descended people experienced urban life during the era of plantation slavery. The essays center collectively on the eighteenth century, though they range from the sixteenth to the nineteenth. Together they reinforce and enlarge upon a point that David Northrup makes in his contribution to this volume when he points out that the historiographies of African slaving ports and American slave-importing ports not only are asking some of the same questions, but also are beginning to reach similar conclusions about the nature of cultural adaptation and change among the victims of the Atlantic slave trade. That is not to say that blacks throughout the urban Atlantic experienced the social and cultural upheaval of slaving in the same way. It is to say, however, that the essays in this volume fit with much of the new literature on the Black Atlantic in suggesting new directions in our understandings of the cultures of the African diaspora. Over the past decade it has become apparent that long-standing debates about creolization and African cultural survival must give way to more flexible understandings of cultural change and persistence.2 Especially after the middle of the seventeenth century people of African birth or descent became increasingly numerous residents of British, Dutch, French, Spanish, and Portuguese port cities and of American ports, even

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those that served non-plantation hinterlands. They became or remained demographically dominant in African ports and in the towns and cities of the plantation Americas. This was in part, but only in part, because free and enslaved blacks became increasingly important maritime workers, so Atlantic ports included uncertain but significant numbers of transient black sailors enjoying shore leave while the ships on which they served loaded and unloaded cargoes.3 In addition, blacks worked in domestic service, in the many crafts necessary to support transoceanic commerce (blacksmithing, sail making, carpentry and other woodworking, etc.), and in the nonartisanal work that took place around docks, where they served as stevedores, carters, sex workers, boarding house keepers, and day laborers. Many slaves in the urban Black Atlantic negotiated the right to hire their own time, enhancing their autonomy and winning the right to participate in the Atlantic commercial system, often acting as agents on their masters’ behalf in addition to marketing some of their own goods and services. Self-hired slaves had a much better chance of acquiring sufficient money to purchase their freedom, though opportunities for manumission varied in different imperial legal regimes. Africans did not come to dominate artisanal and day labor positions in all cities, though they dominated them in some, but they established an urban presence throughout the Atlantic World.4 This collection of essays brings out the stark contrasts but also commonalities that marked the urban Black Atlantic during the early modern period. In terms of contrasts, the African merchants and others born in Ouidah and Luanda covered in chapters by Robin Law and Roquinaldo Ferreira lived there by choice. Some of these merchants traveled back and forth across the Atlantic—especially the South Atlantic—choosing to live in Brazil or Portugal at various times. Others sent children to be educated in England, France, or Brazil.5 Less wealthy free people of African descent—sailors and craftsmen who lived outside of Africa—also exerted some control over where they lived, though their choices were certainly more constrained than those of wealthy African merchants. But the vast majority of Africans living in European or American ports had been involuntarily drawn into those urban centers either directly or indirectly by the transatlantic slave trade that from the fifteenth to the nineteenth century transported eleven million enslaved Africans throughout the Black Atlantic. Many of the black people living in eighteenthcentury Lisbon or London, in Kingston or Le Cap, in Rio or Bahia, but also in Ouidah and Luanda, were victims of slaving. Like most people living in the early modern Atlantic, they had grown up in villages with profoundly local

Introduction

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conceptions of identity, but they had been yanked out of them and thrust into a frightening new urban milieu.6 In this regard their experiences were not different in kind from those of the majority of victims of the Atlantic trade who ended up on plantations, but the urban setting made a difference. First, in most Atlantic cities, enslaved Africans found themselves in black communities that dwarfed even very large plantations. As James Sweet points out, slaves did not constitute a large percentage of eighteenth-century Lisbon’s nearly two hundred thousand people, but the city was home to some ten thousand enslaved Africans. Of course Lisbon was a very large city, but the much smaller Kingston, Jamaica, held roughly seventeen thousand slaves among its almost twenty-seven thousand people in 1788, and Saint Domingue’s modest Le Cap in the 1780s was home to about ten thousand slaves (out of a population of fifteen thousand). Even towns serving peripheral plantation hinterlands included sizeable enslaved populations: seventeenth-century Cartagena had between three and four thousand enslaved residents (compared to twenty-five hundred whites), and the tiny and newly founded fall line port of Richmond, Virginia, with fewer than fifteen hundred total residents in 1784, was home to more than six hundred slaves. When one remembers that these were geographically constrained eighteenth-century walking cities, it becomes apparent that notwithstanding the relative absence of large individual urban slaveholders or specifically demarcated slave quarters, urban slave communities were substantially larger than plantation communities.7 Did the size of Black Atlantic cities matter? It did in a number of ways, and the authors to this volume have studied in detail some of the locations that would be classified as “capitals” of the Black Atlantic for the size of their enslaved and free populations. As is clear in the case studies that follow, cities afforded those victimized by slaving in Africa and slavery in the Americas the opportunity to overcome the dislocation caused by enslavement and coerced migration by creating new communities.8 Some communities defined themselves through claims to shared places of African origin, in some cases to quite specific places and in others to a single slaving port or language group. Some communities defined themselves through shared religious belief. Some through shared occupations, or shared commitments to collective responsibility for medical and burial costs. The bigger the city, the larger its population of African and African-descended people, the more regular and the more reciprocal its connection with ports on the other side of the Atlantic, the deeper the well of cultural resources available to dislocated slaves in the

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Introduction

city seeking to find or forge a new community within which to embed themselves. Urban centers from Luanda, Freetown, Ouidah, and Lisbon, to Rio and Bahia, to Kingston, Havana, and Le Cap, to Cartagena and Mexico City all offered what modern Westerners value as cosmopolitanism—urban settings in which different mixes of African, American, and European peoples lived side by side. This forceful mix of involuntary African migrants enslaved by European colonial powers produced examples of syncretic cultures that are often celebrated today as examples of globalization and transnationalism. However, one must not be lulled by the similarity to qualities valued in twenty-firstcentury Western culture into thinking that “cosmopolitanism” was a welcome thing. Catholic brotherhoods with explicit ties to a single African ethnic group welcomed others to their celebrations and sometimes looked beyond their ethnic “kin” for members and beliefs. Africans of various backgrounds who lived in Lisbon turned to bolsas de mandinga in order to ward off dangerous forces. The Atlantic slave trade ripped men and women out of their local cultures, leaving them to coalesce as best they could and create new communities that would give meaning to their existence. The African urban Atlantic was a world of forced cosmopolitanism and desperate cultural adaptation. Blacks in these cities did not choose cosmopolitan ways of life or values, and the processes through which they developed them exacted brutal and inhumane costs. Those involuntarily swept into the black urban Atlantic responded creatively to those costs in ways that continue to enrich the myriad synthetic cultures of the Atlantic basin today.

Cultural Change in the Urban Black Atlantic The chapters in this volume shed light on some of the common dynamics that influenced these processes. First, they show time and again that however absolute a master’s legal power over a slave might have been—and that, of course, varied in different slave regimes—in actual eighteenth-century cities in which the goal of slave owners was to benefit from slaves’ labor, domination came through negotiation coupled with brute force. To be sure the parties to these negotiations brought very different resources to the table, and masters never relinquished the threat of violence or the threat to sell recalcitrant bondsmen away from the relative liberty of the city. But urban economies required skilled workers, and they rewarded those who were responsive

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7

enough to markets to reallocate labor as needed. As noted earlier, many masters responded by putting the onus on their slaves by allowing them to hire their own time and find their own work. If this was a good bargain for urban slaveholders, and it certainly was, it also provided opportunities for urban slaves’ desperate and creative attempts to improve their own condition. In return for doing that work well and making money for their owners, urban slaves enjoyed much greater autonomy both at work and when not working. Cities, then, were far from being in the stranglehold of elites. Early modern state power was tenuous, shallow, and weak.9 Terms like “conquest” and “slavery,” with all their latent and explicit references to European dominance over Indians and Africans, can obscure as much as they illuminate.10 They are abstractions reinforced by a historiography that relies on the paperwork left behind by lay and clerical European settlers and imperial bureaucracies. Extant archives register the everyday operations of the various local and imperial state powers and therefore register their aspirations of mastery and sovereignty rather than the complicated and endlessly negotiated on-theground realities of life in the Americas. Cities were less the epicenters of colonial power than they were borderlands within the heart of the colonial project. The violence that characterized the Atlantic, violence characteristic of colonialism throughout the world, was itself the reflection of the limits of the state’s control. The best model to capture the power dynamic of the Atlantic World is one that highlights each locale (urban and otherwise) as networked and self-organizing. European hegemony in Afro-American cities was tenuous indeed. Take Cartagena, analyzed by Jane Landers in this volume. The Caribbean port city was surrounded by hinterlands dominated by maroon communities. How did masters maintain control over city slaves if they could easily flee to the hinterlands? Jane Landers shows that palenques (runaway slave communities that exhibited an element of permanency and encampment) used the city of Cartagena, and in turn the city used them. Maroons raided the city’s outskirts for staples and women, they built alliances and engaged in rivalries with neighboring Indian nations, they maintained networks of support with urban slave populations, they drew on the sacred expertise of urban Catholic priests to tend the palenques’ spiritual needs, and ultimately they negotiated with and won recognition from imperial authorities as “cities” of their own. As a result, maroons living in the palenques acquired standing as subjects of the king and fully enfranchised vecinos. The maroon villages near Cartagena were in fact microcosmic “African cities,” teeming with peoples with

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wide-ranging genealogical origins that stretched from Senegal to Angola. These towns became spaces of ethnogenesis, polyglot African towns led by a representative authority, usually a king. As such, these settlements traded recognition within the imperial order for a promise to support that order by returning runaway slaves and participating in provincial defense. Blacks in other Atlantic cities followed analogous paths, though the local variations are as important as the similar themes. For example, the black quarter of Lisbon became known as Mocambo to reflect the Angolan and Congo population that populated the city. “Mocambo” is a Kimbundu word for a hideout and was commonly used by masters and slaves in Brazil to refer to maroon communities. According to James Sweet, Lisbon’s Mocambo, like those of other Atlantic cities, played complicated and contradictory roles within the larger social order. It sometimes protected fugitives escaping from the interior, and it probably included freed colored people and slaves engaged in a broad range of urban occupations, from day laborers to artisans to washerwomen to prostitutes, who hired their time and lived away from their owners. Blacks gathered at night on street corners and crossroads in Mocambo to perform religious rituals like burying mandiga bags. Household slaves were privy to the private behavior of their masters and occasionally denounced them to the Inquisition for impiety. This was just one way that blacks manipulated the regime of composite sovereignty of the city: they also escaped authorities by seeking refugee in the church when accused of street crimes. Lisbon, like Cartagena, offered enslaved and free Africans and people of African descent tools that they used to increase their social and cultural autonomy. Mexico City offered another set of variations on the theme as the chapter by Nicole von Germeten shows. In 1615 Afro-Mexican cofradías organized a rebellion that was nipped in the bud, showing that even ecclesiastical authorities found it difficult to control the cofradías. The aborted uprising began with a procession of fifteen hundred cofrades, whose brotherhood was linked to the Mercederians, parading the body of a dead woman slave. They pelted the archbishop’s palace and the Inquisition with stones, showing a clear lack of respect for their ecclesiastical superiors and eliciting a brutal response. The authorities ultimately hanged thirty-five conspirators, six of whom they quartered while still alive; the remaining twenty-nine were posthumously decapitated. The black cofradías exercised their autonomy most dramatically by appointing women to positions of authority over the organizations’ communal property. African women even participated in acts of public flagellation

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9

among penitential cofradías, violating standard practices of Iberian sodalities. The self-governing aspect of these black organizations was reflected in their finances. Cofradías would collect fees to maintain burial and health services provided to the members, and they retained control over the fees and fines that members paid and the benefits that the organization bestowed. Some of these activities fell within the parameters of the Church’s expectations and of the norms governing Iberian cofradías, but others did not, revealing the ways that blacks in Mexico City used the institutional structures provided by the Church to increase their collective autonomy. The religious sodalities of Havana, there called cabildos, operated in similar ways, though perhaps because Cuba’s involvement in the Atlantic slave trade continued for so long, the cabildos’ ties to African places of origin remained more specific much later than was the case in Mexico. The chapter by Matt D. Childs shows that enslaved and free people of color in Havana joined together in cabildos that were often tied to specific places of African origin, and that they worked in them and through them to organize their resistance to slavery. But he goes beyond that here by exploring the more routine ways that Havana’s cabildos fostered the communal lives of the city’s black residents. Syncretic rituals and beliefs emerged in the different cabildos, as they adjusted first to slavery and then to the decision of Havana’s authorities to move them out of the heart of the city. This did not stop their commitment to communal support and cultural survival. In fact, by moving the cabildo houses beyond the city walls, authorities inadvertently seem to have increased their autonomy by making them less susceptible to constant surveillance. Removed from the center of Havana, the African cabildos came to play an even more central role in black Havana’s cultural and political life. Approved institutional structures authorized by the Catholic Church were not always necessary for Africans and their descendants to build fraternal structures. The French in the port city of Le Cap in the colony of Saint Domingue did not encourage the creation of cabildos and cofradías among African slaves as was common in the Iberian Atlantic. Nonetheless, even without the Church’s institutional support, the African and Africandescended residents of Le Cap built analogous organizations. In the absence of institutional support, the records through which their activities can be reconstructed are inevitably sketchy, but David Geggus’s analysis of those scarce records reveals that slaves congregated along ethnic lines in established places on the outskirts of the city. On Sunday market days when the thirty-five hundred slaves of Le Cap were joined by fifteen thousand others

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from surrounding plantations, the slaves would gather along ethnic lines, each with their own self-appointed authorities and pools of money that took care of their dead and infirm. Different ethnic groups wore different sashes and garments and gathered in distinct quarters: La Providence, La Fossette, and Petit Carénage. Scholars too easily conceive of cabildos and cofradías as institutions introduced to African American cities by Spanish Catholic corporatism. No doubt that is partially true, but Geggus’s discovery of these unincorporated organizations in Le Cap combined with the emergence of analogous organizations among free black people in the very different world of northern U.S. port towns strongly suggests that the Spanish institutional framework simply allowed slaves’ adaptation of the various and widely shared West and Central African secret society traditions to find their way into the historical record. Africans and African-descended people in Cartagena illustrate the similarity between what happened in Le Cap and the standard narratives of ethnic “survival” in Spanish America. Slaves in Cartagena, as in Le Cap, gathered in the outskirts of the city in designated places along ethnic lines, as some of the evidence gathered by Jane Landers suggests. The city council, through ordinances, repeatedly sought to regulate the rowdiness of these meetings, to no avail. Some had formal cofradías that offered institutional loci for their communities, but the Araras of Cartagena had no cofradía or cabildo of their own. Nonetheless, during the seventeenth century, they began electing a king who was responsible for, among other things, collecting dues to pay for burying the dead. This self-organized and self-governing brotherhood differs little from those of Le Cap. And if both differ in interesting ways from cofradías that were formally endorsed by the Church, those differences may have more to do with the ways they interacted with white authorities than with the ways they developed internal senses of community. Different variations on these themes played out in African Atlantic urban places that are often seen as distinct from these European-dominated hubs of the Atlantic trade. The principle of autonomy and self-organization of African urban communities can be seen in the religious choices of the ninetyfour thousand recaptives of Freetown, Sierra Leone, who are the subject of David Northrup’s chapter. Many joined Methodist or Baptist churches rather than the Anglican Church, opting to control their own autonomous parishes. Slaves in Luanda lived in sensalas, separate makeshift quarters. The state exercised little control over these neighborhoods, where thieves and smugglers organized rackets and thrived, as Roquinaldo Ferreira elegantly shows. This is

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reminiscent of Le Cap’s Petite Guinée, ostensibly the quarter of the city where slaves for hire lived, but also home to those escaping their masters, as illustrated by a single raid in which authorities found two hundred runaways in 1785. The point is not that all of these cities were the same. They were not, but they shared some important structural characteristics that created opportunities for blacks victimized by the Atlantic slave trade to carve out economic, social, and cultural niches within which they could shape their own lives and the lives of these cities. Enslaved and freed black Brazilian sailors and merchant factors traveled back and forth across the Atlantic in ways that created an inordinately strong ongoing and reciprocal network of communication between the black communities in Brazil and the slaving ports of Africa. This also created remarkably autonomous black individuals, but such autonomy was not limited to mariners in the Luso-Atlantic. Consider enslaved pilots who guided boats into British American harbors and who are the subject of Kevin Dawson’s study. Pilots held one of the highest positions open to slaves for hire in the port cities of the Black Atlantic because pilots’ skills made them particularly valuable. Enslaved British pilots were sometimes manumitted when they used their skills to save vessels and crews, and at other times they accumulated enough money through their work to buy their freedom. Their navigational skills conferred unusual power over crews in moments of danger. The safety of cargo, property, and crews was in the hands of pilots, and crewmates and captains chose to treat them with the respect accorded to officers. The case of pilots and their privileges in the British Caribbean suggests a world of autonomous networking and limited but significant self-governance in urban slave societies and even rural ones. The case of Rio de Janeiro’s barbeiros, a combination of healers, blood letters, and hair dressers, as recounted in Mariza de Carvalho Soares’s chapter, also exemplifies the autonomy acquired by some urban slaves. As slaves for hire, barbeiros were frequently sent as surgeons on ships, visiting ports in Africa and India. African slaves often sought to organize themselves along distinct ethnic lines. Different ethnicities sometimes gained dominance over specific trades, sometimes cohered in identifiable neighborhoods or quarters, and sometimes lay claim to specific urban locations for worship. Ethnic patterns changed and evolved, taking different meanings over time and place, so, as has become increasingly clear, it is a mistake to fall into the creolization/survivalist dichotomy by looking for either the straightforward transmission of group identities across the Atlantic or the construction of entirely new identities

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in the Americas. Meanings varied from city to city as well as over time, so that being Hausa in Bahia was not the same as being Hausa in Freetown, and neither corresponded exactly to being Hausa in Hausaland. Nor, however important ethnicity was, did it rule out alternative, more centripetal forms of identity and identification. Parallel to the centrifugal forces of ethnic identity there stood mechanisms of cohesion that informed pan-ethnic identities. Ethnic identities could and did form in tandem with racial (or pan-African) identities, however much it might seem that there must have been tensions between the two processes. The complicated interplay among these forces, as Robin Law’s chapter suggests, appeared in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Ouidah, one of the main slave ports of West Africa, which alone exported over one million enslaved Africans. Different ethnic groups, some of long-standing and some of more recent formation, lived together in different neighborhoods. Ouidah was divided into twelve quarters, and its governing structure was remarkably similar to those that prevailed in early modern European composite monarchies. It was a part of the kingdom of Dahomey, which comprised peoples of various ethnicities who pledged allegiance to the same king. Like many early modern European commercial entrepôts, Ouidah reflected the multiethnic character of its kingdom as well as the cosmopolitan reach of its mercantile connections—in this case, the slave trade. It housed persons from England, France, Portugal, Brazil, Madeira, Angola, and even Goa. Certain ethnic groups were associated with specific skills and trades: enslaved and free canoe men came from the Gold Coast a region, which had a very well-established tradition of coastal trading. Gold Coast slaves also served as soldiers. The multiethnic African character of the city was reflected in the multiple deities and temples, most of which catered primarily but not exclusively to followers who shared an ethnic origin. Ouidah did not have the kind of secret societies that often cut across ethnic division and contained the centrifugal force of ethnic rivalries by mediating among factions when differences arose in other West African slaving ports. That is not to say that Ouidah lacked any centripetal force. The port’s complicated relationship with and resistance to Dahomey did much to unify the different groups. In nineteenth-century Sierra Leone, British efforts to curtail the slave trade created a laboratory in which the processes of ethnogenesis stimulated by Atlantic slaving played out under unusually watchful eyes, as analyzed in the chapter by David Northrup. Between 1815 and 1850 Sierra Leone received ninety-four thousand recaptives from the English navy during interdiction of

Introduction

13

the slave trade. Recaptives claimed fragmented identities along ethnic and linguistic lines, with over 160 languages recorded among the Africans taken to Sierra Leone. A sense of being “African” developed among some elites. Yet the populace developed subcontinental, new identities out of the bewildering mix, and they helped forge identities that continue to shape African politics today: Yoruba, Igbo, Hausa, Coromantee, Calabar, Kongo, Mozambique, Paupa, and Mandingo. Emerging ethnic communities created mutual aid societies, called “companies,” which behaved much like mutual aid societies in the Americas, working to preserve dances, music, festivals, and other customs from their homelands through a process of collation and compromise. Some of these cabildo-like institutions elected kings of their own. Old African religions coexisted with Christianity as well as with Islam. A Yoruba identity emerged in Sierra Leone as part of the diaspora and was later taken to the original Yoruba homeland by emigrants, not unlike returns of Yoruba migrants from Cuba and Brazil to Yorubaland in the nineteenth century. The same thing happened with the Igbo of the lower Niger. But if many of these ethnic identities quickly came to understand themselves as “traditional,” they were syncretic from the start. Their leaders often joined Methodist and Baptist churches that had been introduced to Freetown by the founding communities of “Nova Scotian” black refugees. The recaptives used English-language prayer books while developing new skills such as literacy in missionary schools. A Christian, creole identity emerged alongside and in conjunction with more specific ethnic identities. Brazilian cities like Bahia that maintained close connections to Africa witnessed and participated in similar processes as João Reis’s contribution persuasively shows. From 1801 to 1866 Bahian merchants imported 415,331 slaves, 88 percent of whom came from West Africa, most enslaved in the wars waged by the kingdom of Dahomey on its neighbors and the collapse of the Oyo Empire due to civil war. West Africans in Bahia were originally referred to as “Mina,” but over time enslaved Bahians differentiated among Jejes, Nago, and Hausa. Free colored and self-hired enslaved members of these ethnic communities organized spatially in residential settlements, and ethnically homogeneous labor gangs laid claim to different corners of the city (cantos). Ethnic communities could bridge the urban-rural divide, creating vertical and horizontal systems of economic integration by monopolizing the production and distribution of certain commodities and services. Ethnic groups sometimes organized savings pools (juntas de alforria) to help enslaved members purchase manumission, and these newly freed people would pay high

14

Introduction

interest rates to the group, helping to perpetuate the cycle of manumission within the group. In the case of the Hausa, the pools also helped defray the cost of Muslim garments and health care for members. Ethnic groups also organized in sodalities, despite the effort of Catholic authorities to open them to blacks of all ethnicities. Cofradía ethnicity was determined by those in positions of leadership; the cofradía itself, however, often admitted individuals from other ethnicities, though it limited them to subordinate positions. Ethnic groups also gelled around communities of religious initiates dedicated to worshiping ancestral spirits through spiritual possession cults, now known as Candomblé. The Jejes organized around Vodun, the Nagos around the Oriza, the Hausa around Bori, and the Angolan around Nkisi. Houses of worship organized around ethnic lines, in turn, occupied distinct locations in the outskirts of town. Yet despite the attempts to pair ethnic communities with specific religious practices, hybridity marked the beliefs of the enslaved and free population of African descent in Bahia. For example, the Nago cult to Oriza borrowed from Jeje Vodun practices and institutions. Even rebellion took on an ethnic dimension. The Muslim Hausa led their own in multiple uprisings between 1809 and 1814. By the 1830s it was Yoruban Muslims who were leading revolts as their numbers increased in the city. Brazilian-born slaves, in turn, developed a separate creole identity, distinct from their African parents, and refused to join rebellions or mingle with new Africans. In Rio, as in Bahia, some artisanal work was dominated by slaves of a particular ethnicity. Barbeiros, for example, became firmly associated with Minas, Angolans, and Bengelas, as Mariza de Carvalho Soares’s chapter shows. This association was enforced by guild regulations that reflected the barbeiros’ determination to retain ethnic control of their craft. In keeping with the patterns found in Bahia, Lisbon, and Havana, ethnically defined sodalities played an important role in the barbeiros’ attempt to exert control over their lives in Rio. They joined a sodality devoted to Nossa Senhora dos Remédios, as well as organizing a distinct militia corp. The fascinating if fragmentary evidence of the barbeiros’ methods of bleeding and cupping patients in Brazil provides glimpses of the ways that knowledge of healing practices crossed the Atlantic and the ethnic lines of identification among black Brazilians. Mariza de Carvalho Soares’s discovery that Luanda merchants sold Central African leeches to Rio provides even more details on the medical practices that linked the port cities of the Black Atlantic in the eighteenth century. These processes of Africanization and creolization did not exclude—and may even have encouraged—the circulation of individuals across ethnic and

Introduction

15

racial lines in ways that further hybridized these urban communities. Slaves of crown officials crossed and recrossed the Atlantic, connecting black communities in various Atlantic ports. Merchants of various nationalities also brought slaves into different port cities, sometimes visiting and sometimes settling in new locations and always enhancing the trans-imperial circulation of ideas. The barbeiro slaves of Rio were hired out to serve on ships that went out for months sailing the oceans and visiting various ports. Luanda also had highly mobile slaves for hire who frequently went to sea. Others were sent into the Angolan interior by their merchant masters, serving for months or even years as factors. In Le Cap’s hinterland black coachmen enjoyed great mobility, and some, most famously Toussaint Louverture, would later become leaders of the Haitian Revolution. In the case of the Portuguese Atlantic, the very centralization of the Inquisition in the metropole meant that trials of Brazilian slaves took place in Portugal, thus taking troublesome slaves to the metropole. Free colored merchants in Salvador, Ouidah, Rio, and Luanda brought residents of Brazil and Africa into regular, ongoing contact. These essays illustrate why it no longer makes sense to see the processes we have called creolization and those we have conceived of in terms of cultural survival as mutually exclusive.

The Experiences of Africans in the Urban Black Atlantic The essays are organized into four thematic sections. In the first section, titled “African Identities in Atlantic Spaces,” David Northrup, Robin Law, and João Reis analyze the social and cultural dynamics of Freetown, Sierra Leone, Ouidah in present-day Benin, and Bahia, Brazil. They tell very different stories about these different cities, but each sheds light on the way that African ethnic identities that were, until recently, often treated by scholars as “traditional” or re-creating “traditional cultures” were in fact products of slaving in the Atlantic World. This does not, of course, make them less authentic, real, or African. Instead, it reveals them to be, like all collective identities, the product of history, and in the cases of Ouida and Freetown, it underscores the influence of the Atlantic economy and the Atlantic slave trade on the cultures of Africans who were not taken from the continent. The second section, titled “The Sources of Black Agency,” consists of essays by Matt Childs on Havana, Cuba, David Geggus on Le Cap, Saint Domingue, and Trevor Burnard on Kingston, Jamaica. Each of these cities is, of course,

16

Introduction

on a Caribbean island, but each was also controlled by a different European imperial power. Given the similarity of their socioeconomic histories—each, in the period covered in these essays, was the port for a booming sugarproducing hinterland—they provide an opportunity to contemplate the effects of different imperial regimes on the local cultures of the African diaspora. The essays reveal real and important differences: Africans in Havana came together in formally organized sodalities, and the institutional strength they gained through the Church both influenced their forms of religious devotion and provided them with a secure foundation in the city (and the historical record). Africans in Le Cap lacked such formal institutions but organized themselves in similar ways, though presumably their organizations were more tenuous; they are certainly less well documented. Only the scantiest evidence of such organization has turned up in Kingston, though there are hints that analogous things were occurring. Read together, these three essays do more than provide fascinating and much-needed analyses of black life in three of the Caribbean’s most important cities; they raise crucial questions about the ways that different imperial cultural and legal regimes influenced the avenues available to victims of Atlantic slavery, and they remind us how important it is to distinguish between how such regimes changed what happened on the ground and how they changed what found its way into official records. The third section, “Urban Spaces and Black Autonomy,” brings together four essays that highlight the ways urban social relations expanded opportunities for black agency. In Jane Landers’s discussion of the complex relationships between maroons living outside of Cartagena and residents—black and white—within the city, in Kevin Dawson’s discussion of enslaved pilots’ remarkable record of self-assertion and financial success, in Roquinaldo Ferreira’s unpacking of the extraordinary social relations in Luanda, and in Mariza de Carvalho Soares’s discussion of the barbeiros of Rio, this section provides a series of snapshots of the kinds of urban relations that historians of North American slavery once thought rendered urbanization incompatible with slavery. The essays do far more, however, than prove once again that slavery was an adaptable institution that could flourish in cities. They highlight the range of ways that different people of different ethnic backgrounds and possessing different kinds of skills worked within the constraints posed by slaving and slave regimes to forge meaningful communities and collective identities. The final section of the book, “Black Identities in Non-plantation Economies,” comprises two essays examining black life in cities somewhat removed

Introduction

17

from the plantation complex. That is not, of course, to say that they were not a part of it; they were. But neither James Sweet’s Lisbon nor Nicole von Germeten’s Mexico City served either as a major slaving port or as the central urban place for a plantation hinterland. Nonetheless, African and Africandescended people played important roles in each city, and they responded to what they found in each city in ways that are analogous to developments in African cities and to ports that served plantation America. They bring the collection to an appropriate conclusion by emphasizing the ways that African and African-descended people living in cities throughout the Atlantic World participated in a similar array of cultural processes.

Cities in the Black Atlantic Atlantic slavery was driven by what historian Philip Curtin in 1990 labeled the “plantation complex.” 11 The overwhelming majority of the West and Central African victims of slaving who were sold into the Americas ended up on plantations, usually sugar plantations. There are, then, good and obvious reasons that scholarship on slavery in the Americas has focused on rural places and experiences. These essays do not, and are not intended to, suggest that Atlantic cities should replace plantations as the focus of slave studies. They do, however, suggest that historians of Atlantic slavery, at least of slavery in places other than Brazil, may have paid less attention to cities than they should have, and that they may have been too inclined to focus on the very real differences between urban and plantation slavery rather than on the links between them. Atlantic port cities in the era of the slave trade became sites of cultural incubation, bringing together peoples of different African and European identities and creating conditions in which they lived, worked, worshipped, fought, and died in close proximity. It was in these cities that the complex and contentious collision of the peoples of Africa, America, and Europe who created the Atlantic World were most intense and persistent. It was probably in American port cities, as Trevor Burnard points out in his discussion of Kingston, Jamaica, that most enslaved Africans definitively experienced one of the transformations that defined plantation slavery. It was there, when they were taken off ships and sold to buyers in the slave market, that most must have begun to perceive a decisive move from a familiar if often horrific system of slavery in which those who lost their places in locally recognized lineages became nonpeople, to a system of slavery in

18

Introduction

which people became commodities. It was there that disoriented victims of the Middle Passage must have begun to face what historian Walter Johnson has labeled the “chattel principle.” 12 The essays in this volume clearly support arguments made by scholars like Vincent Brown who have rejected attempts to explain what happened after sale by invoking the concept of social death.13 Faced with the devastation of losing their places in their Old World communities, enslaved Africans set about creating new communities in which they could reestablish themselves among the socially living. Most of course had to do most of this work on the plantations to which they were sold, but it began in the African and American ports, and those ports became cultural hothouses, where the cultural processes found throughout the African Atlantic occurred faster and with more intensity. Throughout much of Iberian America the Catholic Church supported fraternal organizations that those victimized by the slave trade used to build and reinforce local communities. As David Geggus shows, urban slaves facing similar challenges without that institutional support responded in similar ways. Trevor Burnard has not reported similar responses in Kingston, but at the risk of reading too much into a snippet of evidence, it is worth noting that Olaudah Equiano/Gustavus Vassa reported that the slaves of Jamaica gathered on Sundays to dance “after the manner of their own country.” 14 It is at least possible—even probable—that enslaved Jamaicans living in Kingston forged the same kinds of informal sodalities that enslaved Saint Dominguans living in Le Cap built. And it seems likely that in both of these places, as became clear in Havana during the Aponte Rebellion and Cartagena with connections to maroon communities, these urban institutions maintained connections to enslaved people in the countryside, serving as crucial sites for the development and transmission of syncretic cultural traditions. In this way the urban Black Atlantic played a disproportionately important role in the development of the cultures and identities of the diaspora. As has become increasingly clear, and as is underscored in David Northrup’s essay on Freetown and Robin Law’s on Ouidah, the urban Atlantic also provided the cultural hothouse in which what we now consider the traditional cultures of West Africa grew. That the genealogy of Yoruba identity reaches back to both of those non-Yoruba African cities as well as to Bahia in Brazil underscores the role that Atlantic cities and their African and Africandescended residents played in creating the world in which we live.

P art I African Identities in Atlantic Spaces

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Chapter one

Identity among Liberated Africans in Sierra Leone David Northrup

In their influential collection of essays on Caribbean and Latin American port cities in 1991, Franklin Knight and Peggy Liss suggested that the presence of people of African origins, both slave and free, was an “especially important” topic in Atlantic history that deserved greater attention and study.1 Since then there have been many important studies of the African presence in the Americas. As it happens, there has also been growing attention to AfricanEuropean interactions in cities along Africa’s Atlantic coast. Three years before Knight and Liss’s book appeared, Joseph Miller’s celebrated Way of Death tied together the histories of Angola ports with the ports of Brazil. Subsequently, influential books by John Thornton and George Brooks have studied cultural hybridity in coastal Atlantic Africa. Robin Law’s study of the famous port of Ouidah is the most fully developed of the works focusing on West African ports as cultural and commercial meeting places of African and European worlds. By joining this body of scholarship on Africa with the existing literature on the Americas, the influence of European and African cultural influences in early modern Atlantic cities can be reconsidered, without the presumption of European dominance that was characteristic of earlier studies.2 Adding African coastal cities to the discussion requires changes in the conventional paradigm of Atlantic cities, but perhaps not so many as nonAfricanist scholars might think, since there are many close parallels. In the first place, African Atlantic cities were growing at about the same moment as port cities were emerging in colonial Americas. As in the New World,

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Chapter One

Iberians pioneered the new African contacts (Northern Europeans following), and Africans were quick to build on these new contacts, although some coastal cities on the islands and in Angola were built on European foundations. Finally, in port cities on both sides of the Atlantic, Africans were more numerous than Europeans. In the late eighteenth century Ouidah and Luanda had only a few hundred resident Europeans, but as the chapters on Bahia, Rio de Janeiro, Havana, Cartagena, Cap Français, and Kingston show, Africans were also in the majority in American ports, a substantial proportion of whom were born in Africa.3 The historiographies that developed in isolation on opposite sides of the Black Atlantic have now converged sufficiently for serious and more direct dialogue to take place. For example, working separately and with different evidence, Rosanne Adderley and I have reached nearly identical conclusions about changes among displaced Africans on the different sides of the Atlantic. We both underscore the complementary processes of Africanization and creolization. We both agree that as the time and distance from the place remembered as homeland grew, its boundaries expanded. Like the case of Africans liberated in Sierra Leone considered in this essay, the Bahamian Africans seeking to return home whom she considers were less focused on their natal communities than on a geographical region of origin; in their case one was newly created by the International Congo Association. If I have one bone to pick with Adderley, it would be with the sentence “diasporic Africans and their descendants simultaneously and over long periods of time could and did negotiate a dialectical experience of simultaneously remaining African and becoming African-American.” 4 As her larger analysis makes clear, she argues vigorously against Africanness as static, but the tendency to use language that implies an opposition between being and becoming has bedeviled diaspora studies. To be sure an individual was very likely to imagine the process in just such terms: remaining Christian while becoming Yoruba, remaining Yoruba while becoming Christian. But viewed from without, dynamic change is evident on both elements of such pairings. Immigrants were becoming African and becoming part of larger Creole communities at the same time and in ways that were complementary. This chapter examines how African identities in Sierra Leone evolved in tandem with the development of English-speaking, literate, Christian communities and considers two quite different yet connected subsequent developments. The first is the gradual integration of the liberated Africans into the small, preexisting Creole society of Freetown, Sierra Leone, rather than

Sierra Leone

23

into the larger African communities in whose midst the colony resided. The second is the return of some liberated Africans, when circumstances permitted, to the Yoruba-speaking homeland in what later became southwestern Nigeria. While this return might be seen as the completion of the dream of return to the Congo that circumstances prevented the Bahamians from accomplishing, it produced a range of different outcomes. At one end were the Sierra Leoneans who partially reintegrated into ancestral communities, nearly always defined at the level of dialect groups. At the other was the small body of African missionaries whose efforts to convert their countrymen led not just to the kinds of culture change (in religion, literacy, and so on) associated with creolization most commonly found in the Americas and explored in particular by the chapters authored by João Reis for Bahia and Nicole von Germeten for Mexico City, but also to the actualization of a pan-Yoruba identity for the first time in that homeland. In between were many who struggled to find a middle ground. Sierra Leone began as the Province of Freedom, founded as a refuge for free blacks in the Atlantic diaspora. The first settlers in 1787, 411 free blacks from England, were joined in 1792 by some 1,100 “Nova Scotians,” that is, blacks who had sided with the British in the War of the American Revolution so as to get their freedom and who were brought to the colony after having been initially settled in Nova Scotia. In 1796 nearly 600 “Maroons,” free Afro-Jamaicans, joined the struggling colony. Financial distress and high mortality led to the settlement’s annexation as a British Crown Colony at the beginning of 1808, just when Britain was also taking steps to halt the Atlantic slave trade. Sierra Leone found greater success as the headquarters of a British squadron and as a place where persons from captured slave ships were liberated and resettled.5 The arrival of some 94,000 Africans whom British patrols had rescued from slave ships and liberated in the colony, mostly between 1815 and 1835, transformed Sierra Leonean society. Not counting the indigenous Africans outside the colony’s boundaries, liberated Africans became the new majority. By 1820 they already constituted 62 percent of the colony’s 12,500 residents, compared to 13 percent for the earlier black immigrants and a mere 120 Europeans.6 Over time the newly liberated Africans and their descendants swamped the older black immigrants, but in the process the later arrivals absorbed the founding Creoles’ social and cultural norms. The experiences of the tens of thousands of men, women, and children from all over Africa who were rescued from slave ships by British naval

24

Chapter One

patrols and resettled in Sierra Leone between 1815 and 1850 differed in ways both large and small. Sierra Leone was a place of liberation and thus quite different from the slave societies of the Americas to which other Africans had the misfortune to be transported, but, despite the liberated Africans’ greater freedom, the outcomes of their efforts to rebuild their cultural lives in Sierra Leone often resembled the outcomes in slave societies in the Americas. The similar outcomes are observable in the process of creolization, the adoption of new cultural traits from the first settlers and the Europeans in the colony, and in the process of Africanization, the construction of radically altered senses of their African identities. Though these two processes were intimately connected, it is analytically simpler to examine them separately.

Creolization Africans who survived the experience of captivity, enslavement, transportation, recapture, and the voyage against the prevailing winds to Sierra Leone would have stepped on the shores as physically and mentally traumatized as did captives who reached the Americas. They faced similar cultural challenges in re-creating themselves, if under less traumatic circumstances than in the Americas. As in many parts of the Americas, Europeans were a distinct minority in Sierra Leone, but European speech, institutions, beliefs, and customs dominated. However, most of those involved in this were other Africans, whether from the earlier Atlantic African immigrants or from earlier generations of receptive settlers who helped resettle the newly arrived recaptives in villages, taught them English, and preached Christianity to them. Because of the great diversity of the African languages that recaptives brought to Sierra Leone, it is not surprising that the language of the earliest settlers and the British authorities rapidly became the lingua franca for communication. A Sierra Leone African renamed George Crowley Nicol testified to a British parliamentary committee in 1849 that all recaptives freed in Sierra Leone picked up English soon after their arrival since the language was essential for communication with the authorities and among Africans there. Even at home, he reported, married couples such as his own recaptive parents spoke nothing but English when they had no African language in common.7 Youths learned fastest, but observers noted that older people also picked up the language. Religion was another area of cultural change. It is hardly surprising to find such openness to spiritual consolation among people who had been torn

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25

from their families and communities and had experienced the traumas of the Middle Passage. Separated from the sacred sites and ancestral shrines of their homelands, they took up new religious practices as readily as they did the new language. In his history of Sierra Leone, Christopher Fyfe describes the process in vivid biblical imagery: “Amid the Babel of tongues English became not only a lingua franca but a Pentecostal interpreter, speaking a message many were ready to hear. For abandoned by their own gods who had failed to protect them in their homeland, they came up from the hold of the slave ship like Jonah from the whale, cut off from their own life, ready to be reborn into a new.” 8 The agents promoting this process of religious rebirth were mostly other black people. In 1820 the colony had only 120 European residents, mostly officials and merchants. The number of black Christians was many times greater: 1,530 Nova Scotians and 597 Afro-Jamaican Maroons.9 Anglican, Methodist, or Baptist missionary societies funded from Europe provided food, housing, medical care, and schools, as well as religious instruction, but, given the paucity of European missionaries in the colony and the extremely high mortality they suffered, most day-to-day instruction and leadership were in the hands of these “Creoles,” who also organized religious instruction classes for the new arrivals in their own languages. In time, newly converted liberated Africans became the major agents of acculturation. Beginning as “helpers” to European missionaries, many Africans went on to become teachers and catechists for the missionary societies. A few were ordained ministers, including Samuel Ajayi Crowther (later consecrated as an Anglican bishop); his shipmate, Joseph Bartholomew; an Igbo recaptive, Charles Knight; and another Yoruba speaker, Joseph Wright. After their ordinations in 1848, the Reverends Knight and Wright had precedence over more junior missionaries in the colony, to the chagrin of some of the newly arrived Europeans.10 Instruction in Christianity was more voluntary in Sierra Leone than was the case on slave plantations in some parts of the Americas. Africans were not compelled to attend and were free to choose and switch congregations. Many found the church-run schools an irresistible attraction. In an autobiographical essay the Reverend Joseph Wright described how learning and faith were intertwined: “Although I did not embrace or believe from my heart when I first read the word of God, I had great love to it. I liked to hear reading, and I liked to hear the minister preach to me Jesus. In five or six years after I came to this country. I began to learn to pray morning and evening, although I did it not from the heart. . . . In the year 1834 . . . I began to attend the Methodist

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Chapter One

Chapel. . . . From the day I met in class, I began to seek the peace of God.” 11 In addition, as Fyfe suggests, the traumas of enslavement and forced relocation made recaptives receptive to the message of salvation that missionaries and catechists preached. However, the process was not passive and one-sided, for Africans also infused European forms of Christianity with African religious sentiments, just as they had in the Americas, as analyzed in Chapters 3, 4, 7, and 12, which focus on African participation in Catholic sodalities, for example. Hymn singing was infused with distinctly African musical forms and accompanied by hand clapping and dancing. In Sierra Leone the path to conversion generally involved “seeking and finding,” encountering salvation through outward signs, such as visions and convulsions, rather than by passive acceptance of the preacher’s message. Like Joseph Wright and the Nova Scotian emigrants, many liberated Africans gravitated toward the Methodists because they were more open than the Anglicans to such appeals to the spirit. Nor did it take long for congregations to gain significant control over their churches. Some congregations built their own churches and hired (and fired) their own ministers.12 Christianity became a powerful link among nonindigenous Sierra Leoneans. The Nova Scotians had successfully introduced Christianity to the young generation of Maroons, whose ancestors in Jamaica had resisted conversion. As many liberated Africans became Christians, the basis of broader identity emerged, though some obstacles remained.13 Especially for young Africans, schools were critical agents of acculturation. The schools had their beginnings among the colony’s original black settlers from England and Nova Scotia. Missionaries and colonial officials actively promoted education, but liberated Africans embraced formal education in Western subjects with great enthusiasm. To meet the demand for schooling among both children and adults, teachers were enlisted from every possible source and included individuals of African descent, locally resident European merchants, and an occasional stranded sailor. The missionary societies spent great sums to keep up with the demand. After the missions imposed modest fees in the 1830s to help defray costs, school enrollment continued to rise in the prospering colony. In Fyfe’s analysis, “Lack of schooling became a moral stigma: Europeans found their servants too busy writing to do housework. Schools overflowed; children had to be turned away; new schools opened.” By 1840 there were over eight thousand children in Sierra Leone’s schools (a fifth of the population). A secondary school opened in 1845, and shortly afterward the old seminary that Ajayi had attended in the late 1820s at Fourah Bay was revitalized and again became an important center for African education.14

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27

While Sierra Leone’s freedom and schools have no counterparts in the slave systems of the New World, the process of creolization on both sides of the Atlantic has many suggestive parallels. Language acquisition was a necessity. Religious change might have been an option that appealed to many. New skills were acquired in formal and informal contexts. Such similar outcomes suggest that the element of coercion by slave owners and managers needs to be balanced by sufficient attention to how much enslaved Africans were themselves agents in the process of creolization, responding to new circumstances in ways that reflected their fundamental needs both material and spiritual. But as important as the adoption of elements of European culture was, it was only one side of the larger acculturation process that was taking place

Africanization The creolizing tendencies evident in the spread of the English language and of Western Christian denominations were accompanied by equally profound transformations in displaced persons’ conception of their African identities. Even before they boarded a European slaver, the circumstances of captivity, encounters with unfamiliar African religions and languages, and contacts with other victims of the slave trade had led many captives to expand and alter their identities. This process of Africanization included a much greater awareness of themselves as part of a pan-African community and an expanded or entirely new sense of themselves as members of distinct “national” groups. Before experiencing overseas exile, it is unlikely that many residents of sub-Saharan Africa had a conscious sense of belonging to a large regional or linguistic groups, still less of being residents of the African continent or of sharing physical traits that distinguished them from peoples elsewhere. Encounters with Europeans and with people from other parts of Africa forced Sierra Leone recaptives to become aware of their pan-African identity, just as it did for Africans in more distant lands. Sierra Leone was one of the earliest places in sub-Saharan Africa where people identified themselves as “Africans,” but only the most educated and traveled did this as a matter of course. One who did was the son of Igbo-speaking recaptives, James A. B. Horton, an Edinburgh-trained physician. The “A” was for Africanus, a name Horton adopted consciously following the usage of many North Africans in the Roman Empire; the name was also used by the small community of long-term residents from sub-Saharan Africa in eighteenth-century Britain, such as the writers

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Chapter One

Gustavus Vassa (Olaudah Equiano) and Ignatius Sancho, who had identified themselves as sons of Africa by the use of “the African” or “Africanus.” 15 For the less elite the process of Africanization was played out on a smaller, subcontinental scale. Among the recaptives settled in Sierra Leone, a German missionary named Koelle was able to record 160 languages, plus several distinct dialects of the languages with large numbers of speakers in the colony. The biographies of his informants that he included with his vocabulary lists are very revealing. When asked to identify where they were from, his informants all named a community even smaller than a dialect group. Of the 128 languages for which Koelle provided information (see Table 1.1), fully 25 had only one (surviving) speaker in the colony, 73 others were represented by a dozen or fewer speakers at the time of their interview, and 21 languages had between 13 and 50 speakers in the colony. Only 9 had more than 50 speakers.16 Given this linguistic fragmentation, new identity groups had to be created. By 1848, the colony’s census was able to list Africans as members of just nineteen “tribes” or “nations.” Some of these “nations” were defined by a common language, but others had to build identity communities out of more exotic materials. Whether based on linguistic or other criteria, none of these “nations” then existed elsewhere in Africa. In Sierra Leone, as in parts of the Americas touched upon in chapters by Matt Childs for Havana and João Reis for Bahia, many of these ethnic “nations” were creations of the slave trade. The largest of Sierra Leone’s new African “nations” were the Aku or Yoruba. In his account of enslavement and journey to the coast, Samual Ajayi Crowther makes clear that no pan-Yoruba identity or common name then existed among those in his home of Oyo and the intervening people among whom he lived on his slow journey to the port of Lagos. In Sierra Leone, other Africans called Ajayi and his “country people” the “Akoo” (Aku), a name derived from a greeting that they used. Koelle chose to refer to the dozen dialects of the language as Aku, noting, “It is . . . not the historical name [of] these numerous tribes.” He specifically objected to the use of “Yoruba” as a general name because it was unhistorical and used only by the Oyo, adding that if one called an Ijebu a Yoruba, that person would reject the term with as much vigor and justice as a Bavarian would object to being called a Prussian.17 The next most numerous group in Sierra Leone were the “Eboo” (Igbo). In their homeland along and east of the lower Niger, Igbo speakers inhabited a multitude of politically autonomous village groups dispersed over a substantial area. Their political autonomy and geographical range had fostered considerable linguistic and cultural diversity, which had precluded the

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development of a common identity. At midcentury, the Niger explorer William Baikie emphasized the great dialectical and cultural differences “between different parts of this extensive country” and pointed out that when at home “each person hails, as a sailor would say, from the particular district where he was born.” Only when removed from their particular ancestral kinship communities, as in Sierra Leone, Europe, or the Americas, was a common Igbo identity likely to surface. From the recaptives in Sierra Leone, Koelle was able to collect vocabularies of five main Igbo dialects and the names of ten other “countries” whose people were called Igbo in Sierra Leone. He stressed that, like the Yoruba, most Igbo speakers in their homeland shared no national name and knew “only the names of their respective districts or countries” and had never heard the name Igbo before coming to Sierra Leone.18 Five other “nations” also shared a common language, but likewise seem to have acquired their common identities in Sierra Leone. The Hausa, who appeared in large numbers in nineteenth-century Bahia, as analyzed by João Reis in this volume, were the next most numerous after the Yoruba and Igbo in the colony and had lived in a number of autonomous city-states for many centuries until their forcible incorporation into the Sokoto Caliphate at the beginning of the century. Some sort of national identity may already have existed among the more mobile Hausa traders, but it is doubtful that it held meaning for the majority of Hausa, who were sedentary farmers. Both of Koelle’s informants on the language self-identified with the traditional Hausa city-states of Kano and Katsina. Some Fulbe in Hausaland had acted in concert in creating the Sokoto Caliphate, but centuries of pastoral migration had made them the most widely dispersed people in West Africa. Koelle recorded four “Pula”’ dialects—two in Hausaland and two hundreds of miles to the west. Some Wolof speakers may have came from the Jolof kingdom, but the group probably included others who had not had a sense of political identity in their homelands. The “Kromantee” nation (named after one of the trading forts on the Gold Coast) probably consisted of Akan speakers from the various states of the southern Gold Coast, but is likely to have also included many people from farther inland who passed through Akan country on their way into the Atlantic trade. Finally, the “Calabah” nation (named for the major slave port of Old Calabar) appears to have represented the three major dialects of the language that Koelle called Anang after one of them, but has subsequently come to be called Efik-Ibibio or Efik. The Calabah used language to distinguish themselves from other Africans in the colony, but their lack of a common name for themselves even today suggests how weak their sense of

Table 1.1. Linguistic Diversity and Ethnogenesis among Liberated Africans in Mid-nineteenth-century Sierra Leone 1848 census name Koelle’s and population names

Family Language

Modern language name

Dialect

Akoos, 7,114 Aku

Ota, Egba, Ijesa, Yoruba, Yagba, Eki, Ijuma, Oworo, Ijebu, Ife, Ondo, and Jekiri

Eboos, 1,231 Ibo

Isoama, Ishiele, Abaja, Aro, Mbofia, Elugu, Ungwa, Ozozu, Ndoki, Ohuasora, Bom, Mudiaka, Oru, Mboli, Obani, Amoni

Yoruba

Igbo

Paupahs, 1,075 Dahomean

Adampe, Anfue, Hwida, Dahome, Mahi

Adangme, Adja, Hueda or Aizo, Fon, Mahi

Hausas, 657

Housa

Hausa

Kano, Katsina

Small tribes, 549 Isuwu, Diwala, Orungu, Bayong, Bakum, Bagba, Balu, Bamom, Ngoala, Bamenya, Papiah, Mokos, 470 Moko Param, Ngoteng, Melon, Nghalemoe, Seke

Isuwu, Duala, Rungu, Bayon, Bakom, Bagba, Beli, Bamum, Nwala, Bamenyam, Bafia, Bamileke, Ngoteng, Bongkeng, Kossi, Seke



KongoCongos, 421 Ngola



Kabenda, Bam-bona, Musentandu, Mbamba, Kanyika, Nteke, Batsaya, Babuma, Mumbete, Kasands, Nyombe, Sunde, Ngola, Benguela, Lubalo, Ruunda, Songo, Kisama

Calabahs, 319 Anang or Kalaba

Anang, Bibie, Nkuo, Okua, Ekoe, Efik

Vili, Mboma, Ntandu (Kongo), Tege, Kaniok, Teke, Tsaye, Boma, Mbeti, Imbangala, Yombe, Nsudi, Ambundu, Ovimbundu, Kimbundu, Lunda, Songo, Kisama

Efik or Efik-Ibibio

Kromantees, 168

Akan, et al.

Kakanjas, 163

Basa

Nupe, et al.

Binnees, 107

Sobo, Egbele, Bini, Ihewe, Oloma

Urhobo, Etsaka, Edo, Ishan, Olomo

Bassas, 60

Basa

Bassa, et al.

Mozambiques, 18

Veiao, Kiriman, Marawi, Meto, Matatan, Nyamban

Yao, Cuabo, Maravi, Medo, S. Makwa, Inhambane (Tonga)

Note: The 1848 census did not include the entire colony and is therefore only a rough approximation of the relative size of the nonnative “nations” in Sierra Leone. The records of the slave cargoes captured and landed in Sierra Leone cannot be converted directly into ethnolinguistic groups, but there is a general correspondence of language distribution and probable coast of origin. The following are the percentages of those enumerated in the census grouped by probable coast of origin and, in parentheses, the percentage of recaptives from those coasts: Akoo and Paupah 66 percent (Bight of Benin 41 percent); Binnee, Eboo, Hausa, Calabah, Moko, and Kakanja 24 percent (Bight of Biafra 37 percent); Kromantee 1 percent (Gold Coast 2 percent); Congo 3 percent (West-Central Africa 6 percent); Mozambique more than 1 percent (Southeast Africa 1 percent). It will be apparent that even when all members of groups that might have gone to either the Bight of Benin or Bight of Biafra ports are assigned to the latter, that coast’s share is low, while the Akoo numbers are higher. Given the limitations of the census, it is impossible to say what significance should be attached to these anomalies.

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Chapter One

common identity must have been at home two centuries ago. Their “nation,” too, would have included nonnative speakers who learned their language while in Old Calabar. Other African “nations” in Sierra Leone lacked both a common language and prior political unity in their homelands. The “Paupah” (or “Popo”) from the western Slave Coast, the third largest group in the 1848 census, spoke five different languages by Koelle’s count. Other such polyglot nations were the Mandingo (five Mande or Mandinka languages), the Bini (the Edo of the kingdom of Benin, plus speakers of six or seven neighboring languages), the “Moko” of Cameroon (sixteen different languages), the “Kongo” (eighteen distinct languages scattered over a vast area of West-Central Africa), and the “Mozambique” of southeastern Africa (six languages). It should be clear, then, that the African “nations” in Sierra Leone were not “survivals” from ancestral homelands, but new, expanded identities arising out of the circumstances and experiences of captivity, transport, and resettlement. Three distinct forces helped create these new identities: the perceptions of other Africans, who often gave the new group its name; the perceptions of Africans inside the group, who accepted the new identity to some degree; and the policies of the British authorities who oversaw the resettlement of the tens of thousands of recaptives rescued from the Atlantic slave trade. It is difficult to calculate the relative roles of each, although official policies are the best documented. Newly arrived Africans were put under the care of residents who spoke their own language or something close to it, but to communicate with their neighbors they needed English or another common language.19 However important outside forces were in establishing these new identities, once they came into existence, those who belonged to them had the central role in shaping their development. Multiple identities were common. African settlers regularly took steps to strengthen solidarity by forming beneficial societies, often called “companies,” whose fellow members accorded each other the kinds of mutual aid customary in kinship-based villages elsewhere in Africa. Strikingly similar to the Catholic sodalities and mutual aid societies discussed in chapters by Sweet for Lisbon, Landers for Cartagena, Reis for Bahia, Childs for Havana, von Germeten for Mexico City, and Geggus for Cap Français, many of these companies had a common linguistic core (though this did not exclude some outsiders from joining), but other companies were based on different principles. One Sierra Leonean (himself descended from African Americans from Nova Scotia) reported that soon after a new shipload of people “of different tribes or nations” was settled in a village, they formed

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33

a club “including the whole of their shipmates, without distinction of nation, for the purpose of mutual assistance.” This club of all shipmates was called the Big Company, which he distinguished from the Little Company, a separate ethnically based club that, in addition to other activities, helped preserve the festivals, dances, music, and other customs of their homelands. However, it was impossible to preserve all the rich variations of these customs from different homeland communities in the microcosm of the Sierra Leone diaspora. Inevitably, what emerged were composites, simplified and imbued with new features and understandings based on life in Sierra Leone.20 As might be expected, the numerous Yoruba speakers formed the largest ethnic companies in the villages and even had a “king” to whom Yoruba from villages all over Sierra Leone pledged allegiance. While this clearly reflects the re-creation of an institution from the homeland (where several kingdoms existed) that had been streamlined and adapted to altered circumstances, it is important to note that it was also a new creation that corresponded to no particular Yoruba kingdom and that it functioned quite differently from any homeland political system. In other words, the Yoruba nation was both old and new. Perhaps in imitation of the numerous and well-organized Yoruba, the Nupe, Igbo, Mandinka, Susu, and other “national” groups also chose kings and other officers, though none of them achieved the Aku’s degree of solidarity. It is instructive that their solidarity did not persist when Yoruba left Sierra Leone and returned to their homeland, where they fit themselves into the complex of older identities overlain by many new kingdoms that decades of civil warfare had produced.21 These new “nations” drew upon shared languages and customs, but they were formed in Sierra Leone under circumstances conceivable only outside their homelands. They not only made use of institutions, such as written constitutions (in English), that had no counterpart in their homelands, but could be found in the Americas in such institutions as the cabildos de nación, as discussed in the chapter by Matt Childs, but they also borrowed freely from the other nations around them. As in the Americas, an ethnic name might conceal a more diverse membership. Many liberated Africans in Sierra Leone were from linguistic groups too small to form “nations.” Some created nonethnic affinity groups, as was the case “when a group of Bassa described themselves as of the Bassa Society, not nation.” Yet another option was to affiliate with a larger “nation,” whose language one knew, even if it did not represent one’s actual origins. At one point, the reigning “king” of the Aku in Sierra Leone, a man named John Macaulay, appears to have been Hausa in origin.22

34

Chapter One

As other chapters in this volume touch upon, these new nations were “invented,” but not out of nothing. In their struggle to rebuild their lives and communities, displaced Africans naturally drew upon everything they knew and loved from home, but they also adapted old ways to new circumstances, adopted new customs and beliefs, and enlarged the circle of their contacts and understandings. The most important point is the dynamic nature of what was happening, not the static “survival” of bits and pieces from home. To focus on the relics (the survivals) rather than on the dynamics by which African individuals and communities survived by reinventing themselves is to miss the point. To use a scriptural image many Sierra Leonean recaptives would have understood, they were pouring old wine into new wineskins as well as new wine into old skins. Sierra Leone shows a marvelous blend of creolization and Africanization, sometimes existing in harmony, sometimes existing in conflict, and sometimes running along parallel lines of development.

Other Identities Sierra Leoneans also formed alliances that cut across “national” identities or that represented different religious perspectives within a single “nation.” In the village of Waterloo, for example, the leaders of the major ethnic groups organized a sort of “United Nations of Africa” to mediate disputes. Known as the Seventeen Nations, it represented the village’s seventeen largest ethnic groups, as they had evolved in the colony. The institution spread to other settlements, where it served as an effective local government and persisted for decades. The Seventeen Nations had been formed to settle interethnic disputes following a “war” involving three of the nations during Christmas week in 1843. The “war” was reportedly set off by the unauthorized bathing practice of a “Calabar” woman, which offended “Aku” sensibilities. However, during the conflict the vastly outnumbered “Calabar” had been joined by the Igbo people.23 Such rivalries and interethnic alliances prefigure the ethnic politics of twentieth-century Nigeria, but in their precolonial homelands the Yoruba and Igbo were too isolated from each other to be rivals. Rather, such rivalries and identities were first born in the diaspora and may well have reflected Igbo resentment at the numerical predominance of the Yoruba speakers. In addition, the Calabar-Igbo alliance may have reflected friendships formed in Bight of Biafran ports and on slave ships, which, it was noted earlier, were the basis of enduring organizations in other villages.

Sierra Leone

35

A more complex cultural transformation came in religion, where the traditional beliefs and Islamic beliefs brought from homelands confronted the growing Christian influence.24 In 1847 the acting governor of Sierra Leone estimated that there were some two thousand Muslims and at least twelve thousand “Pagans” in the colony, along with some twenty-one thousand African Christians.25 Muslims would have predominated among the Hausa and Fulbe and were common among the numerous Yoruba recaptives. While Islam was the predominant religion of the indigenous peoples in the vicinity of Sierra Leone, within the colony the religion met with the stern disapproval of both officials and missionaries. Many Muslims persevered in the practice of their faith despite such hostility, while others modified their beliefs. The parents of Thomas Maxwell of Sierra Leone, for example, had both been raised Muslim in Bornu, but in Sierra Leone, while his father remained devoted to Islam, his mother became a Christian.26 It is likely that Muslim identity would have been affected by the reformist Islamic movements in the vicinity of the colony, but few details are known. One has somewhat better information with regard to the so-called Pagans, whom the report accorded the courtesy of a capital letter. Some individuals, especially older men, continued religious practices and beliefs they remembered from their homelands, but the continuation of such religious traditions proved difficult because African religions were based on particular communal identities in the homelands and were often closely tied to ancestral shrines and local nature spirits. In addition, the creation of broader identity groups meant that a more encompassing religious identity was also necessary. As the 1847 report shows, most Africans fulfilled this need by becoming Christians. However, others successfully adapted traditional beliefs to these new circumstances. The most notable example of this occurred among the Yoruba speakers. Not only were Yoruba speakers very numerous, but the elaborate pantheon of Yoruba deities and myths proved as transportable to Sierra Leone as it did to Brazil and Cuba. The acting governor identified this neo-Yoruba religion with the worship of Shango, the god of thunder. Others associated it with the worship of the creator, Oludumare, or his son Oduduwa, the founder of the Yoruba. The emergence of this unity in exile stands in striking contrast to the strong sense of religious alienation Ayaji had experienced among the alien ancestral and nature shrines of the Egba and to the political disunity and civil war that had ravaged their homeland and fostered this massive forced exodus into the Atlantic. In exile, Yoruba recaptives reinvented their ancestral

36

Chapter One

religion with a stronger emphasis on those elements that could bind them together, while deemphasizing the particular ceremonies and shrines that had such variety in the homeland. The process was also reversible. When Yoruba recaptives who had embraced this neo-Yoruba religion in Sierra Leone returned to their homeland after the end of the civil wars, they tended to take up the local particular religious practices while deemphasizing the overarching cosmological aspects of the religion. As Fyfe puts it, “[O]nly in Sierra Leone were all the children of Odudua, the Yoruba ancestor-god, united.” 27 By 1850 the Yoruba in Sierra Leone came to have substantial numbers of Christians, traditionalists, and Muslims, just as would be the case later in their homeland. Other ethnic groups were similarly divided into two or more camps. In some cases these divisions were sources of conflict, especially as some Sierra Leonean Christians worked hard to eradicate “pagan” practices among their members. However, many new Christians continued traditional beliefs and ceremonies, particularly those associated with birth, death, marriage, and other major parts of the life cycle. This phenomenon explains the seemingly contradictory descriptions one gets from the European Christian ministers. The optimists among them were full of praise for the remarkable progress being made in the direction of Christianity. The purists tended to have a more pessimistic take, denouncing the shallowness of faith and the survival of “heathen practices.” Occasionally, one strikes a happy medium that has the ring of truth, as in this observation by a missionary on the recaptives of Bathurst: “Heathenish customs are certainly on the decline . . . [people] are anxious that their children should be baptized, and instructed in the truths of the Christian religion, but yet themselves prefer the superstitions of their own Country; for no better reason that it was the religion of their forefathers.” The acting governor also believed that many inhabitants professing Christianity believed as well in the powers of traditional magic and witchcraft of their homelands. While conceding that decades of efforts had failed to convert many recaptives, he preferred to emphasize how much had been done.28

Identity Dynamics after 1850 At midcentury the black populations of Sierra Leone and its hinterland were far from being a single community. The deepest division was between indigenous peoples and the immigrants. An occasional outsider like Edward Wilmot Blyden from the Virgin Islands might express admiration for the

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37

indigenous Muslim societies in the region, but this was not a view widely shared among the settlers. Furthermore, the settlers themselves were split between older immigrants and liberated Africans. Deeply committed to an identity as black Englishmen, Nova Scotians initially held liberated Africans in deep contempt for their lesser acculturation to that norm, and some referred to them in derogatory terms, such as “Willyfoss [Wilberforce] niggers.” 29 For their part, the liberated Africans’ dual Creole/African identities made them quite distinct from the monocultural African Americans. The liberated African community was far from homogeneous but divided by neoethnic, religious, and geographical differences. However, as the founding generations of the settler communities passed on, crosscutting ties among their descendants fostered greater rapprochement. By midcentury, the descendants of the London, Nova Scotian, and Jamaican settlers were beginning to coalesce into a single community. This small community grudgingly admitted a few of the best educated and most prosperous liberated Africans, who adopted its cultural values and manners. Such social integration and intermarriage were encouraged by the growing number of indigenous Africans in the colony, whom both groups looked down upon. “By the late 1870s,” Leo Spitzer argues, “the lines separating Nova Scotians, Maroons, and Recaptives had virtually disappeared.” Instead there was a single Creole community distinguished by distinctive mores, European dress, language (Krio), and social boundaries. In time a few indigenous people who were deemed suitable also gained admission to Creole society. Creole society remained stratified along class lines, with education and wealth the great signifiers and the principal means of social advancement.30 Religious affiliation was also a discriminator among Creoles. Christian denominations had their own places in the social hierarchy, but the sharpest distinction was between Christians and Muslims. The largest community of Muslim Creoles were Yoruba. As John Peterson argues, the sharp division between (Christian) Creoles and Muslims can be exaggerated: “In everything but religion, the Freetown Muslim Creole developed similarly to the Freetown Christian Creole.” Still, their separate identity has a long history. In the 1820s and 1830s the independence of Yoruba Muslims was already a matter of British concern, military action, and judicial proceedings—all of which produced no substantial change. In Sierra Leone the label “Muslim Creole” remained common into the twentieth century. In the 1950s the seventy-five hundred Yoruba Muslims had a distinct identity and customs in Freetown and nearby towns in Sierra Leone and maintained ties to others who had

38

Chapter One

emigrated to Senegal and the Gambia. The Yoruba may not have been the only Muslims who resisted assimilation, but I am unaware of evidence that other groups had sufficient numbers to maintain a separate identity.31 As the Muslim circumstances suggest, besides being a place of multiple acculturation processes, Sierra Leone was also a point of dispersal. During the last two decades of the Atlantic slave trade over fifteen thousand Africans, most newly liberated, sailed from there under contracts of indenture to British Caribbean colonies, where their acculturation was gentler than what earlier generations of enslaved Africans had experienced.32 Another stream of emigrants from Sierra Leone, though fewer in numbers, is of greater interest here since it illustrates the ways in which identities continued to evolve as people returned to their homeland areas. Individuals of other groups may have sought to return to their homelands, but only the numerous Yoruba speakers did so in significant numbers once it became safe to do so. Three new circumstances at midcentury facilitated this return migration. The first was the decline in the decades of civil war among the Yoruba that made the region safer. The second was British success in ending the slave trade from coastal ports, notably the port of Lagos, through which so many thousands of enslaved Yoruba speakers had passed. After diplomacy failed to stop Lagos’s external slave trade, the British first occupied the port and then annexed it. Finally, a burgeoning “legitimate” trade in palm oil provided along the West African coast promoted regular shipping along the coast, which furnished ancillary passenger service to Sierra Leoneans at a reasonable price. Those returning from Sierra Leone (and smaller numbers of Yoruba speakers from Brazil) arrived with a grasp of the spoken language (or one of its dialects) and childhood memories that could reconnect them, but, like many return migrants to Europe and Asia in the nineteenth century, they found their exiles had changed them. Most returning “Saros” (Sierra Leoneans) and the “Amaros” (Americans, i.e., Brazilians) were sincere Christians and admirers of other aspects of Western culture. The concentration of homeland Yoruba in dense settlements, often referred to as cities, tended to accentuate the impact of the returnees on their more numerous countrymen. One stream from Sierra Leone was composed of Christian missionaries who were bent on having a strong impact. Even before Lagos was occupied, the Reverend Samuel Ajayi Crowther had gained entry to the port of Badagry, just west of Lagos, and from there managed to visit the inland town of Abeokuta in 1846. Subsequently missionaries from Abeokuta and from Lagos reached the important city of Ibadan in 1853 and elsewhere in Yorubaland.

Sierra Leone

39

The Sierra Leone missionaries brought a Christian vision, but they also brought a sense of a common Yoruba identity. In a recent book, anthropologist John Peel documents how the pan-Yoruba identity that had developed in Sierra Leone was re-created on a much larger scale in the homeland in association with the spread of Christianity.33 As in the construction of other new national identities, there were vigorous debates about national symbols, with issues associated with language of particularly importance. As part of the missionary enterprise, Samuel Ajayi Crowther compiled the first dictionary and grammar of his native language, which he called “Yoruba,” a decision that gave rise to furious debates among missionaries and Yoruba speakers. Some Sierra Leone missionaries supported using Yoruba for all the dialects, but, as was seen above, Koelle considered it a misapplication of the part for the whole and preferred the foreign “Aku” in his lexicon. Other native speakers opposed the new name, some even suggesting that English would be a better medium of instruction. Despite the initial controversy it evoked, the name Yoruba caught on among the growing Christian community during the latter part of the nineteenth century. Through their influence the name gained general acceptance among both native speakers and others in the twentieth century. Extending the process of ethnic identity formation begun among the diaspora in Sierra Leone and elsewhere, the acceptance of a common name in the homeland promoted the acceptance of a common Yoruba identity, first among the expanding Christian population and then more broadly. The creation of this pan-Yoruba nationality can be seen as an extension of the Africanization process that the diaspora had set in motion. However, Peel strenuously argues against seeing this process as due principally to missionary influence. Rather, as he puts it, the mission was only “the midwife of [the Yoruba] nation.” Elsewhere, he invokes a different image to the same end: “Christianity’s Yoruba inculturation” illustrated the Yoruba proverb, “If the leaf stays on the soap, it will become soap”; that is, in their “mutual assimilation . . . Christianity [was] the leaf and Yoruba culture . . . the soap.” Such an interpretation of this process of ethnogenesis was itself a product of this interaction. Samuel Johnson, the son of Sierra Leone recaptives, wrote a massive and influential History of the Yoruba (completed in 1897 but not published until 1921), a work that “sought to reconcile the contradictory claims of Christian faith and Yoruba identity . . . by a narrative of their providential resolution on the terrain of historical practice.” In Johnson’s conceptualization the tragic fall of the Oyo empire to the Fulbe Muslim invaders and

40

Chapter One

the resulting civil wars were part of a divine plan for the redemption of the greater nation through Christianity.34 This mutual interaction of African ethnolinguistic nationalism and Western influence was not confined to the Yoruba. A half century later, the process of identity formation that also had its origins in Sierra Leone blossomed east of the lower Niger, where the numerous speakers of another diverse language, now known as Igbo, discovered a common identity as they too embraced Christianity. Here too modern researchers stress that the process was largely internally determined, despite the obvious role of foreign missionaries in the process. In Adrian Hastings’s telling phrasing, “the Igbos converted themselves” in the early twentieth century and, in the process, gave birth to a new nation.35 A second stream of liberated Africans were also returning to the Yoruba homeland in the mid-1800s. Some of these reinforced the Christian and ethnic impact of the Creole missionaries, while others underwent a reversal (at least partial) of the creolization that had occurred in Sierra Leone. Probably the greatest number occupied a middle position. Like other migrants these nonmissionaries were motivated by the “push” of socioeconomic problems in Sierra Leone and Brazil and by the “pull” of better economic prospects in Yorubaland as well as romantic ideas of return to the motherland. The need to survive and hopefully prosper did not preclude a sincere desire to return to one’s home and people, but in the individuals we know about pragmatism seems to have been stronger than romantic nationalism. Indeed, those who had been sold from these very shores years earlier could hardly have returned without very mixed feelings. Thus it should not be surprising that the returning recaptives and their offspring exhibited a range of responses. As Jean Herskovits puts it, their behavior “ran a gamut from rejecting all the ways of the West to cherishing the ‘Black English’ ideal. Within this range, behavior varied widely.” 36 One tendency was to weaken the pan-Yoruba identity of the Sierra Leoneans in favor of the prevailing Egba, Oyo, Ibadan, and other ethnicities that prevailed among those who had never left. Lagos housed an important and often prosperous community of Saros, as did Abeokuta, where the pull of Egba Yoruba culture was strong. Many second-generation Saros, while maintaining a formal allegiance to Christianity, also sought to advance themselves in Egba society through polygamy, slave owning, and membership in traditional ritual associations—all actions that the missionaries were preaching against. “In her study of elite marriage patterns in Lagos over the period

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41

1880–1915, Kristin Mann found no less than 60 percent of elite men entered into customary or polygamous unions or had informal unions with ‘outside wives’ during their lives, mostly in addition to their church unions.” Following contemporary usage, Peel distinguishes the less common act of apostasy (“saying ‘No’ to Christianity”) from the quite common act of backsliding (being unable “to say ‘No’ to aspects of Yoruba culture and religion” that were incompatible with orthodox Christianity). He goes on to argue that backsliding was in fact part of a nearly universal syncretism, attempting to amalgamate Western Christianity with Yoruba culture. The backsliders from this perspective were those Christians whose syncretism fell most clearly outside the bounds of mission Christianity, but many backsliders considered themselves Christians nevertheless.37

Conclusion This chapter argues that Africans whom British patrols rescued from slave ships and liberated in Sierra Leone in the nineteenth century underwent a dual transformation in their personal and group identities. On the one hand, the concentration of Africans of diverse ethnic and geographical origins in urban communities facilitated and the adoption of African identities that were broader and simpler than those in their homelands. This process of Africanization was accompanied by and promoted by their creolization, as they learned new non-African languages, attended school, and embraced global belief systems. For most, Western cultural influence imparted by Afro-Creole immigrants from the Americas and European missionaries was a powerful catalyst for this creolization, but Islamic influences seem to have produced similar outcomes. Yet it is difficult to argue that these were distinctly urban phenomena. For one thing, the cities in question were no more than towns (in the case of Freetown) or vast agglomerations of agricultural peasants (as in the case of the Yoruba cities). For another, what happened in the cities did not stay in the cities—and did not entirely start there. Perhaps the most one can say is that concentration sped the processes.

Chapter two

Ouidah as a Multiethnic Community Robin Law

The town of Ouidah, in the modern Republic of Bénin (formerly the French colony of Dahomey), was one of the preeminent “port” towns on the Atlantic coast of Africa in the precolonial period.1 It was a major point of embarkation of slaves for export across the Atlantic from the 1670s onward, and continued to flourish in this role even after the legal prohibition of the slave trade in the early nineteenth century, into the early 1860s. The only African exporting city that exceeded Ouidah in volume and importance for the transatlantic slave trade was Luanda, covered by Roquinaldo Ferreira in his chapter of this volume. Ouidah’s role as a commercial entrepôt was carried over into the “legitimate commerce” in palm oil and kernels, which developed to replace the slave trade from the 1840s onward, though by the end of the nineteenth century it had been overshadowed by the new port of Cotonou, to the east, and in the colonial period it was altogether commercially marginalized. Initially, it was subject to the small coastal kingdom of Hueda (whence the name “Ouidah”),2 but in 1727 Hueda was conquered by the kingdom of Dahomey, whose capital was at Abomey some one hundred kilometers inland, to which the town of Ouidah then became subject, until the French colonial conquest in 1892. From its long history of involvement in overseas commerce, Ouidah grew to be a substantial urban center, its population being estimated by European visitors at around seven to eight thousand in the second half of the eighteenth century, rising to between fifteen and twenty thousand by the mid-nineteenth century.3 The process of its demographic and spatial growth can be traced through the history of the foundation of its component quarters.4 As it existed

Ouidah

43

by the mid-nineteenth century, Ouidah comprised twelve distinct quarters, only one of which (Tovè, in the northeast) predated the beginning of continuous European trade in the 1670s. Three others were formed during the period of Hueda rule (to 1727). These were those associated with the three European fortified trading posts that were established in the town: from west to east (which was also the chronological order of their foundation) the French (Ahouandjigo quarter), English (Sogbadji), and Portuguese (Docomè). Two quarters on the north of the town (Fonsaramè, Cahosaramè) represent the Dahomian administrative and military establishment installed after the Dahomian conquest of 1727. The remaining six quarters, all on the western side of the town, were founded in the nineteenth century, mostly by individual wealthy merchants. One (Ganvè) represents the household of Nicolas d’Oliveira, an Afro-French merchant prominent in the early nineteenth century, two (Blézin, i.e., Brazil, and Zomaï) derive from that of Francisco Felix de Souza, surnamed “Chacha,” a Brazilian who settled permanently in the town in 1820,5 and two (Boya and Quénum) were founded by indigenous African merchants who were originally associates of de Souza. The sixth and final quarter (Maro) was settled by African-born former slaves who returned from Brazil from the 1830s. Involvement in international commerce affected not only the size of the town, but also its character. Ouidah was a cosmopolitan community, in which European (and American) and African populations and cultures underwent intensive interaction and intermixture, what would commonly be referred to in the Americas as “creolization.” The most obvious instances of this are provided by the cases of European (and American) traders who settled permanently in the town, or at least long enough to leave families of descendants, by African wives—such as the Afro-French d’Oliveiras and the Afro-Brazilian de Souzas. Ouidah was unusual (although not unique) among West African coastal towns in that permanent posts were established in it by three different European nations—French, English, and Portuguese.6 Although these forts were abandoned when the slave trade became illegal in the early nineteenth century, they were reoccupied in the 1840s: the French and English forts by private merchants involved in the new palm produce trade, but the Portuguese by the Portuguese government. Despite this diversity of overseas links, the most important external influence on Ouidah throughout the period of the Atlantic slave trade was that of Portugal, or more precisely of its colony Brazil, which took by far the greatest share of the slaves exported through Ouidah. In the first phase of its

44

Chapter Two

occupation (to ca. 1806), the links of the Portuguese fort were to Brazil, rather than directly to metropolitan Portugal, being administratively subordinate to the viceroy (later governor) of the province of Bahia, and its personnel appointed from there. Ouidah’s links with Brazil were further accentuated in the period of the illegal slave trade, between the 1810s and 1840s, for which Brazil was initially the main market (though rivaled in this by the Spanish colony of Cuba). These cultural links were mirrored on the other side of Atlantic: as the chapter by João Reis shows, Bahia, Brazil, was intricately connected to activities in Ouidah not just by the arrival of slaves, but also by merchants who operated trading ventures on both sides of the Atlantic. This led to the development of a substantial Brazilian community in Ouidah, which included returned former slaves of African birth or ancestry, as well as “white” Brazilian traders and their descendants.7 Although generally referred to as “Brazilians,” this community included persons from other Lusophone territories around the Atlantic, including for example two prominent families (Rodrigues and de Medeiros) whose founders were from Madeira. It also incorporated nonLusophone persons, with two of the Ouidah families nowadays regarded as “Brazilians” in fact hailing from Cuba.8 When the Portuguese fort was reoccupied in 1844 (Brazil having meanwhile seceded from Portuguese rule), it was administered from the island of São Tomé. This tended to link up Ouidah to West-Central Africa (modern Angola), with which the island was closely associated: in the 1870s the fort garrison consisted of “Congo” soldiers.9 In Ouidah to the present, there are families that trace their origins to São Tomé and Angola, as well as to Brazil.10 The Portuguese imperial connection also brought some persons to Ouidah from even farther afield: the Roman Catholic priest appointed chaplain of the fort in 1869, Rozario Corréa, was in origin an Indian from Goa.11 The cosmopolitan character of Ouidah related not only to the origins of its population, but also to its style of life. The settlers from Brazil and elsewhere commonly maintained family and social ties, as well as purely business links, with their homeland, for example sending their children for education there. Some purely indigenous Africans also participated in these transatlantic networks: an example is Antonio Dossou-Yovo, who served as interpreter to de Souza for the French and Portuguese languages and undertook an official mission to Brazil for the king of Dahomey in the 1820s.12 The importance of these transatlantic links was such that it can be argued that coastal communities such as Ouidah, or at least their commercial elites, should be seen as active participants in an “Atlantic community,” in the sense that their reciprocal

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interactions with counterparts on the other side of the Ocean were centrally important to their social life and cultural identity.13 This chapter, however, focuses on a different aspect of Ouidah’s cosmopolitan (or “creole”) character, which relates to the purely African component in its population. Ouidah was a demographically heterogeneous and multicultural community, not only in including European as well as African elements, but also in incorporating Africans of many different origins. Although most of its inhabitants derived from groups that, although politically and culturally distinct, spoke closely related languages (of the family nowadays generally called “Gbe,” but formerly more commonly “Ewe”), they also included persons from only remotely or totally unrelated language groups. It seems reasonable to describe the African population of Ouidah as “multiethnic” in its composition. Admittedly, the term “ethnicity” is not without difficulty in this context, since it seems to have no straightforward equivalent in the local language, Fon.14 However, this term (or something equivalent) is required in order to distinguish different levels of identity and allegiance that were operative within the precolonial kingdom of Dahomey. “Dahomey,” it should be stressed, was a political rather than an ethnic concept: what made a person a Dahomian was allegiance to the royal dynasty, and by secondary implication residence within the territory “owned” by the king, rather than any sense of common descent or cultural solidarity.15 The common modern perception of Dahomey as an ethnic state, belonging to the Fon people (as implicit in references to “the Fon kingdom of Dahomey”), is an anachronism: in the precolonial period, the terms “Fon” and “Dahomey” were alternative terms for the same entity, the Dahomian kingdom.16 Only in the colonial period, after the destruction of the Dahomian kingdom, was the attempt made by local intellectuals to rethink Fon as an ethnic category, defined by a distinctive traditional culture.17 In precolonial Dahomey, however, people continued to define themselves, not only as citizen-subjects of Dahomey, but also by their allegiance to smaller-scale (and usually preexisting) communities, and it is these that are here referred to as “ethnicities.”

Ouidah as a Multiethnic Community Ouidah was in fact probably to some degree an ethnically mixed community even before the arrival of the first European traders.18 When the first European trading factory was established (by the French) in the town in 1671,

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it belonged, as noted earlier, to the kingdom of Hueda, whose king resided at Savi, about eleven kilometers to the north. Local tradition identifies the town’s founder, Kpase, as a king of Hueda, and Tovè, the earliest quarter of the town and site of the shrine of the founder-hero Kpase, remains today partly populated by Hueda families.19 However, there is an alternative traditional account that credits the foundation of Ouidah to a different person, Kposi,20 who belonged to a different (albeit related) group, the Pla or Hula, who originated from Grand-Popo to the west, from where he is said to have migrated along the coastal lagoon to settle at Ouidah. In this version, Ouidah under Kposi was originally independent of the Hueda king at Savi, with whom Kposi delineated a frontier, but was later conquered by Hueda, and Kposi expelled.21 The claim that Ouidah was originally a Hula settlement is supported by the fact that the earliest European accounts of the area, in the seventeenth century, apply what appear to be versions of this ethnonym (“Fulao,” “Foulaen,” “Pelleau”) to the town.22 Moreover, in recent times the senior vodun (deity) worshipped in the town has been not Dangbe, the national vodun of the Hueda, but Hu, god of the sea, the national vodun of the Pla people. It may be noted that Hu’s shrine is situated not in the Hueda quarter Tovè, but in Sogbadji, in the south of the town, which became (from the 1680s) the site of the English fort. Maybe one should envisage a Hueda settlement in Tovè and a Hula settlement in Sogbadji, which coalesced to form the historical Ouidah. However this may be, there remains an awareness to the present that certain pre-Dahomian families, including that of the priests of Hu (the Hunon), are Hula, as distinct from Hueda.23 The Dahomian conquest in 1727 further complicated the ethnic composition of the town, by installing a Dahomian or “Fon” element, with the foundation of a new “Fon quarter,” Fonsaramè, which is still mainly populated by descendants of Dahomian officials and merchants; as well as the installation of a Dahomian military garrison, originally outside the town to the northwest, but now incorporated within it, as the quarter of Cahosaramè, “Caho’s quarter,” named from the title of the local Dahomian military commander. This “Fon” element was itself multiethnic in its origins, including persons whose ancestors had immigrated into Dahomey from elsewhere, or who belonged to communities incorporated into it in recent times. For example, several prominent Dahomian families in Ouidah (Gnahoui, Hodonou, Quénum) claim descent from founders who originally belonged to the kingdom of Weme, southeast of Dahomey, by which it was conquered and incorporated in the early eighteenth century;24 while the Boya family traces its origins

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to the Mahi country, north of Dahomey (which was not conquered by Dahomey until the 1840s); and the Adanle family to Adja-Tado, to the west (in modern Togo) (from which the Dahomian royal family traced its origins, but which never itself was politically incorporated into Dahomey). The founder of the Hohonsi family of Fonsaramè, although he had served as a royal adviser in the Dahomian capital Abomey before settling in Ouidah, belonged to the royal family of the Hula kingdom of Djeken, east of Ouidah. The multiethnic character of the town was further compounded by its role as a center of European commerce from the seventeenth century, which led not only to the settlement in it of Europeans, but also to the immigration of Africans from elsewhere, attracted there by the opportunities for employment in the European trade. In particular, canoe men were regularly recruited from the Gold Coast (modern Ghana) to the west. At Ouidah (and elsewhere in the region) European ships were unable to approach close to the shore, owing to heavy surf along the shore and on sandbars parallel to it, and had to employ African canoes to communicate with the shore. The indigenous people of Ouidah, however, although using canoes on the inland lagoons and rivers, had no tradition of navigation on the sea; whereas on the Gold Coast the inhabitants had employed canoes for fishing and coastwise communication even before the arrival of the Europeans. Consequently, Europeans trading at Ouidah regularly bought canoes and hired crews of canoe men on the Gold Coast on their way down the coast, in order to land goods and embark slaves.25 In the 1680s, for example, it was noted that “[t]he men of Mina [i.e., Elmina, the Dutch headquarters on the Gold Coast] are the best at manoeuvring these canoes over the breakers . . . and you could hardly manage with any other men at Juda [Ouidah] and Offra [the port of Allada to the east], where the breakers are more dangerous than anywhere else in Guinea”; and still in the 1790s that ships trading at Ouidah and other ports in the region “require one or two canoes, and a set of canoe-men, both of which are to be obtained at Cape Coast [the English headquarters on the Gold Coast] . . . the surf on this line of coast being very heavy, and the natives never passing it, either for the purpose of fishing, or trade.” 26 During the second half of the seventeenth century, indigenous Gold Coast merchants also began to travel to the Ouidah area by canoe, to trade independently of (and in competition with) the Europeans, for locally made cotton cloth and beads, which were resold on the Gold Coast.27 Most of these canoe men and merchants from the Gold Coast returned home on completion of their business, but some settled permanently in

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Ouidah. In the 1700s Cape Coast was reported to be visibly depopulated because of the recruitment from there of canoe men by English ships trading at Ouidah, “after which they liking the place, live there, and seldom remember to come home again.” 28 The presence of Gold Coast canoe men is regularly alluded to in contemporary European accounts of Ouidah between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries. Indeed, down to the present there exist families of Gold Coast origin descended from ancestors who were canoe men in the service of the three European forts: Kocou in Sogbadji, Cotia in Ahouandjigo, and Agbessikpé in Docomè. The founder of the Kocou family can be traced in the contemporary record, in a man called “Quacoe [Kwaku],” who was recruited as a canoe man by the English fort from Cape Coast in 1776, and promoted to “boatswain” or head canoe men in 1781.29 Persons from the Gold Coast also served European traders in other capacities: the man who was serving as interpreter to the English factory in Ouidah in the 1690s, called “Captain Tom,” was also in origin from the Gold Coast.30 Others from the Gold Coast came to Ouidah as independent traders, such as the founders of the Gbeti family of Sogbadji, and of the Soule Ade family of Ganvè, who were both from Accra. Elements from the Gold Coast, from Elmina and Accra, had also settled from the late seventeenth century onward on the coast to the west of Ouidah, forming the community called by Europeans “Little Popo” (modern Aného and Glidji, in Togo).31 Although they originally spoke (respectively) Fante and Ga, these over time became linguistically assimilated into the local population (who were Hula), giving rise to the language nowadays known as “Gen” (a variant of the name “Ga”). In the nineteenth century, a strong connection developed between Ouidah and Little Popo, mainly through the activities of the Brazilian slave trader Francisco Felix de Souza, who had lived at Little Popo prior to settling at Ouidah in 1820, and maintained business and personal links with people in the town thereafter. The most prominent of his many sons, who succeeded in turn to leadership of the de Souza family after his death, Isidoro (b. 1802), Antonio (b. 1814), and Ignacio (b. 1812), were all born to Gen wives at Little Popo; 32 and tradition among Antonio’s descendants recalls that in turn all of his fifteen wives were also Gen women.33 De Souza also attracted clients from other families of Little Popo, notably Pedro Felix d’Almeida, who despite his Portuguese name was an African who had never been to Brazil, but learned Portuguese in de Souza’s house. These Gold Coast elements, including those from Little Popo, are commonly called “Mina” in Ouidah—at least when speaking in

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European languages; in Fon and other local languages, they are more usually referred to as “Gen.” 34

Slaves and Ex-slaves The ethnic diversity of Ouidah’s population was further enhanced by the incorporation of slaves from other areas of West Africa. In common with other coastal towns in West Africa, the demographic growth of Ouidah was evidently achieved largely through the acquisition of slaves, as well as (probably more than) by free immigration.35 The personnel of the “European” forts in Ouidah was in fact largely African, comprising mainly slaves, although freemen were also employed. The households of the European and EuroAmerican merchants who settled locally, such as de Souza, and of indigenous officials and merchants also included many slaves. A large, perhaps the preponderant, proportion of the population of Ouidah was of slave status or descent already in the eighteenth century; and the scale of local slavery increased further in the nineteenth century, with the shift into trade in palm produce, whose production and transportation required large inputs of labor.36 In the nineteenth century, European observers had the impression that the population of Ouidah consisted mainly of slaves: one visitor in 1871 estimated that no fewer than four-fifths were slaves.37 Some of those brought as slaves to Ouidah were from within Dahomey itself: for example, the founders of the Dekplega and Zinsou-Akpadé families of Ahouandjigo were members of Dahomian chiefly families, who were enslaved for disobedience to the king, and sold to the French fort. More usually, however, they were outsiders, enslaved through capture in Dahomey’s wars against its neighbors, especially the Mahi to the north and the Yoruba (called in Dahomey “Nago”) to the east. In the cases of enslaved females, many of these were taken as wives or concubines by local wealthy men and incorporated into their households; for example, the founder of the Agbessikpé family in Docomè, himself a canoe man from the Gold Coast, is recalled to have married a Yoruba slave woman, who is acknowledged together with him as founder of the family. Some male slaves, however, were able to establish their own families: as, for example, the Adjakoun family of Tovè, whose founding ancestor was a Mahi enslaved in a Dahomian campaign and sold to a Dahomian official in Ouidah in the eighteenth century. In the nineteenth century, the successful expansionist wars of the Dahomian

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kings Gezo (1818–58) and Glele (1858–89) were directed mainly against neighboring Yoruba/Nago communities, and generated an enormous supply of Yoruba slaves, many of whom were transported to Brazil and Cuba, where their presence was particularly apparent in the port cities of Bahia and Havana, as mentioned in the chapters by João Reis and Matt Childs in this volume, but many also were retained in Africa. The incorporation of large numbers of enslaved Yoruba in this period, and consequent Yoruba cultural influence, has been noted by Edna Bay, with regard to Dahomey generally.38 In the specific case of Ouidah, many of the families in Brazil and Zomaï quarters acknowledge descent from slaves of the Brazilian Francisco Felix de Souza. Although these include some with Mahi ancestors, notably Apotossou (who served as de Souza’s interpreter for the Mahi language) and Bode, and one from Agonli, to the east of Abomey, called Sougla (who had care of his artillery), they also include several descended from Yorubas, notably Goulola (his Yoruba interpreter) and Alapini. Another family of Yoruba origin (and likewise preserving a Yoruba name), Fakambi, is descended from a Yoruba slave purchased by the one of the first Chacha’s sons, Lino Felix de Souza (d. 1888), and employed by him as a tailor.39 The prominence of enslaved Yoruba was also noted in a contemporary report of 1855, which alluded to the large numbers of “Anagoos and other tribes of analogous origin, slaves to the Portuguese at Whydah, and to natives in other parts of the country,” who were then suspected of being involved in a plotted insurrection.40 Some of the slaves exported through Ouidah were from the remoter interior, brought to Dahomey through trade rather than enslaved in its own military operations, and some of these too were retained in service in the town. The French fort in the eighteenth century, in particular, seems to have recruited its slaves mainly from an ethnic group in the interior, called “Acqueras”; 41 although the term “Acqueras” is not identifiable today, it may be noted that two families in Ahouandjigo that acknowledge descent from former slaves of the French fort recall that their founding ancestors came from “Bariba,” that is, Borgu, a region that extends from the north of modern Bénin into the adjoining area of Nigeria to the east.42 In 1723 the French fort also reported that it had purchased “Chamba [Tchamba]” slaves, this being another ethnicity in the interior (in northern Togo); 43 but no recollection of specifically Tchamba ancestry seems to survive in local tradition nowadays.44 Occasional references to slaves of northern origin in Ouidah also occur in the nineteenth century. Mohammah Gardo Baquaqua, a slave exported through Ouidah to Brazil in about 1845, who was from the town of

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Djougou, to the west of Borgu, found a friend from his homeland there, who had been brought as a slave to Ouidah two years earlier, and who remained there when Baquaqua was embarked.45 When the French Roman Catholic mission purchased slaves for local use in 1862, from among a batch of captives taken in the Dahomian capture of Ishaga, a Yoruba town to the southeast, they found that they included some from other countries who had been caught in the town, including at least one from Hausaland (in what is today northern Nigeria).46 Some slaves were even imported into Ouidah for local use by sea, specifically from the Gold Coast. In the 1690s, for example, it was noted that “most” of the slaves of the English factory in Ouidah were “Gold Coast negroes,” who were considered superior soldiers to the local people.47 Conversely, it may be noted, slaves from the Slave Coast (commonly called “Ardas,” from Allada, which preceded Dahomey as the dominant state in the region) were often employed by Europeans in their factories on the Gold Coast.48 This is reflected to the present in the existence of quarters called “Alata [i.e. Allada]” in the English and Dutch sections of Accra, and presumably also the “Allade” quarter of Elmina.49 The logic of this preference for slaves from distant places was, explicitly, that they were less likely to try to escape than those whose homelands were within closer reach. Consequently, the process of dislocation so thoroughly marked by the transatlantic slave trade to American ports also occurred in African ports at places like Ouidah. The ethnic situation in Ouidah was further complicated by the resettlement in Ouidah, mainly (but not exclusively) in Maro quarter, of significant numbers of former slaves from Brazil, from the 1830s. In local eyes, these repatriated former slaves were commonly regarded as yovo, “white men,” this term being constructed primarily in cultural rather than narrowly racial terms.50 But they frequently retained an identification with the ethnic groups of their birth (or that of their parents). The African origins of these Brazilian repatriates were various: contemporary European accounts from 1845–50 report that the freed slaves from Brazil in Ouidah were “generally from the Fulah and Eya countries,” that is, Fulani (meaning here probably Hausaland, which had been brought under Fulani rule by the jihad of 1804) and Oyo, the most powerful of the Yoruba states; or that they were from “Yoruba” (i.e., Oyo) and Borno, northeast of Hausaland.51 Down to the present, indeed, the families descended from Brazilian ex-slaves that still reside in Maro and elsewhere in Ouidah often recall the original African ethnicity of their founders, most often “Nago” or Yoruba.52 In several cases, their particular towns

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or areas of origin within Yorubaland are indicated. The descendants of Antonio d’Almeida (d. 1890), for example, who still retain the Yoruba surname Olufade, recall that he was originally from Iseyin.53 Several other Brazilian repatriate families in Ouidah recall their origins from specific Yoruba towns, for example, those of Olougbon from Ofa, Americo from Iseri, Villaça (aka Kilofé) from Ijesa. A few claim Mahi ancestry, such as the Lima family. Others trace their origins from farther in the interior, in modern northern Nigeria: the founders of the Vieyra and Dangana families, for example, were “Atakpa,” which is the Yoruba name for the Nupe, their northeastern neighbors; Joaquim das Neves was Hausa; and João do Rego and Angelo Custodio das Chagas were “Kaniké,” that is, from Borno.

The Expression of Ethnic Difference While the fact of diversity of ethnic origins is incontrovertible, its significance in the functioning of precolonial Ouidah society may be open to question. The remainder of this chapter offers a necessarily preliminary and tentative exploration of the continuing importance of ancestral ethnicity in Ouidah, and also of how (or to what extent), in the face of this ethnic diversity, the community was able to function as (and perceive itself as) a cohesive unit. It may be said, first of all, that the principal testimony to the continuing importance of ethnic affiliations is provided by the evidence of local memory itself, to the extent that in family traditions to the present a consciousness of places of origin (and, either explicitly or by implication, original ethnic affiliation) outside Ouidah is almost universal. This is well reflected in the principal local history of the town, Casimir Agbo’s Histoire de Ouidah, published in 1959, which includes an appendix listing 117 families of the town, for the great majority of which, 104, he gives details of their ethnicity (he himself actually uses the word “race”) 54 and/or the place of origin of their founders.55 Eleven of these families are distinguished as descended from European or American (French, English, Portuguese, and Brazilian) traders who fathered families by African wives; and a further seventeen from former slaves of African birth or descent who returned from Brazil (or in two cases, São Tomé and Angola) to resettle in Africa, but eleven of the latter are also identified by their founder’s ancestral ethnicity or place of origin in Africa, as well as by their being Brazilian. Of the eighty-seven families whose origins/ ethnicity are given, thirteen are identified as Hueda (Houéda) or “indigenous

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[autochtone],” that is, as having been settled in the town prior to the Dahomian conquest in 1727. Families described as Fon or Dahomian constitute the largest group, although well less than half of the total (thirty-two). It is noteworthy that a number of families whose founding ancestors came to Ouidah under Dahomian rule as officials or authorized merchants, and who were therefore in a political sense Dahomians, are identified instead by their remoter origins, from places outside the borders of the Dahomian kingdom or absorbed within it only by recent conquest, such as Weme, Mahi, Agonli, and Adja-Tado. The ancestor of the Quénum family, for example, is described as “native of Zado, region of Ouémè-Djigbe,” rather than of “Fon race.” Others came from the Gold Coast, Little Popo, and Hueda; 56 and others were Yoruba, Nupe, Bariba, and Hausa. In this emphasis on origins, and on ethnic diversity, Agbo was by no means unique. At a conference of the Union Générale pour le Développement de Ouidah (UGDO) to discuss the “means of regeneration” of the town in 1985, two contributions in different ways addressed this issue. One used the case of Ouidah to illustrate the alleged centrality of the “origin-principle [principe-origine]” as the basis of African social, religious, and political life, discussing local writings on history and culture in terms of four distinct “traditions”—Fon, Hueda, Hula, and Yoruba.57 A second dealt with the “foundation communities [communautés de base]” of Ouidah, and likewise stressed the town’s ethnic diversity, its component communities representing different “micro-cultures,” each with its own specific “mentalities, manners, traditions, customs, implicit and explicit values.” 58 The town is thus a “crossroads of cultural microcosms,” “the first cosmopolitan centre of former Dahomey,” “a real mosaic of human groups.” In broad outline, the major communities are distinguished here as the Hueda, the Fon, the Wemenu, and the Yoruba, together with the “European and Afro-Brazilian community” (here too treating the returned former slaves from Brazil as cultural “white men”). Each of these communities is credited with a distinctive contribution to Ouidah’s political, economic and religious culture; this “mixture [brassage]” of peoples is thus a defining feature of Ouidah. The concern with origins, and by implication with ethnicity, is also reflected in the preservation of traditional “praise-names” by many families in Ouidah. Casimir Agbo also collected a number of such “litanies de famille” of prominent Ouidah families in a second appendix to his book.59 These regularly make reference to the place of origin of the founding ancestor of the family, and frequently to their ancestral ethnicity: the Quénums, for example,

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are greeted as “people of Tosso, children of the king of Djigbé-Wémè.” Those of Brazilian repatriate families allude to their original provenance/ancestry in Africa, rather than to their connection with Brazil: that of the d’Almeida/ Olufade family, for example, describes them as “ara Segni [people of Iseyin].” In the past (though less so nowadays) communal origins were also advertised by distinctive scarifications: as was noted in the 1790s, the indigenous inhabitants of Ouidah could be distinguished from the Dahomians by their facial marks.60 It is also clear that, given the heterogeneous origins of its population, Ouidah must have been to some extent a multilingual society. Many of the component communities of the town—the Hula, Hueda, Fon, Mahi, Agonli, and Gen—spoke languages of the Gbe family, which were sufficiently closely related to be mutually intelligible, or at least easily learned.61 But, for example, the immigrants from the Gold Coast spoke languages (Fante, Ga) only remotely related to Gbe, as were those of the Yoruba and Nupe; and those of people from Borgu, Hausa, or Borno not at all. Evidently, over time, immigrant populations were for the most part linguistically assimilated, but this process of linguistic assimilation is difficult to trace in the surviving records. It may be noted, however, the praise name of the Soloté family of Ahouandjigo, although explicitly referring to their “Bariba” origins, is in Fon—and indeed, the term “Bariba,” which it uses, is not the self-appellation of the people of Borgu (which is “Baru”), but the Fon (and Yoruba) term for them.62 One case where the persistence of ancestral language is explicitly documented is that of the Yoruba. The French Catholic mission that arrived in Ouidah in the 1860s listed “Nago,” that is, Yoruba, along with “Dahomian” and Portuguese, as the “usual languages” spoken in Ouidah. This prominence of Yoruba in part reflected the predominantly Yoruba origins of the Brazilian repatriates, of whom it was noted that they “almost always speak Nago and Portuguese, but rarely the local language where it is not Nago, even those born in Ouidah of Nago parents rarely speak the local language.” 63 But it was also due in part to the large numbers of Yoruba slaves held in the town who were imported directly from the interior. Some families of Yoruba origin, indeed, retained their distinctive language into modern times. Agbo in the 1950s, for example, noted of the descendants of the Brazilian repatriate Antonio d’Almeida that “all the family speak Nagot.” 64 Likewise the prominent merchant Joaquim João Dias Lima (d. 1914) was the grandson of a returned Brazilian ex-slave of Mahi origin; but his wife, Marie, was in origin a slave, from the Yoruba town of Meko (captured when the town was destroyed by

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the Dahomians in 1882), whom he purchased and married; and their descendants recall that Yoruba remained the language of the household within living memory.65 It may also be noted that the praise names of several Yoruba families recorded by Agbo are in Yoruba, rather than Fon: these include both those of families whose ancestors came immediately from Brazil (Antonio d’Almeida, Americo, Monteiro, Villaça) and some that came directly from the interior (Alapini, Olotanikun).66 Interestingly, the praise name of a group of families called “Toure-Ouras,” which include the do Rego and das Chagas families from Brazil, although it explicitly identifies them as “Kaniké” from Borno, is also in Yoruba (and, again, “Kaniké” is the Yoruba name for the people of Borno, rather than their self-appellation); 67 the linguistic assimilation of these non-Yoruba groups probably occurred in Brazil, where the Nago were the predominant ethnicity of enslaved Africans in Bahia, as analyzed by João Reis in Chapter 3 of this volume.68 The ethnic diversity of Ouidah was also expressed, and to a large extent continues to be expressed to the present, in its religious practice.69 Ouidah is distinguished from other communities in the region by the large number of different vodun worshipped in the town. A survey conducted in 1936 counted a total of 104 vodun “temples”; 70 the total of vodun worshipped is much greater, since although some vodun have more than one temple, several different vodun are normally worshipped within each temple. Ouidah’s local historian Casimir Agbo refers to “a swarming [pullulation] of fetishes.” 71 This religious pluralism reflects the multiethnic character of the town, with different vodun associated with the disparate groups who have settled in it. As a French Roman Catholic missionary active in Ouidah, Abbé Laffitte, observed in the 1860s, “Each of the branches of the great African family, coming to settle on Dahomian soil, has brought with it the religious beliefs and ceremonies of their motherland.” 72 Some of the cults practiced in Ouidah today date from the period of rule of Hueda kings before 1727. The principal pre-Dahomian cults, according to tradition, are those of Hu, the sea; Dangbe, the royal python (originally associated with agricultural fertility, but also the ancestral lineage deity of the Hueda royal family, and so in effect the national deity of the Hueda kingdom); Hwesi, the vodun of the earth who was also believed to cause smallpox; and Zo, the vodun of fire. European accounts of Hueda religious practice prior to the Dahomian conquest refer only to two of these, Hu and Dangbe. Hwesi and Zo are not attested until later; but their preDahomian origins are consistent with the location of their shrines in quarters

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of the town that predated the Dahomian conquest. Other major cults whose pre-Dahomian origins are agreed by both local tradition and contemporary European evidence are those of So, the god of thunder, who gave his name to one of the earliest quarters of Ouidah, Sogbadji, which became the location of the English fort built in the 1680s; and Fa, the god associated with divination by the method of casting palm nuts, which is already described by European visitors to the Hueda kingdom in the early eighteenth century. Even in the pre-Dahomian period, Ouidah religious practice was evidently already eclectic and multiethnic, since some of these cults that predated Dahomian rule were not indigenous, but had originated, according to tradition, outside the town and its immediate region. Among the four senior gods listed above, for example, the sea god Hu was in origin the vodun of the Hula people, and introduced ultimately from Grand-Popo, the traditional cradle of the Hula people, to the west. The seniority of the Hu cult in Ouidah suggests, as noted earlier, that it was originally a Hula settlement, only later absorbed into the Hueda kingdom. The thunder god So was associated with the Aïzo people, in the area of the Allada kingdom to the northeast, as reflected in his common appellation Hevioso, “So of Heviè,” which is a village about twenty kilometers northeast of Ouidah. The divination cult of Fa was of Yoruba origin, the diviners (boko) being mostly Yoruba, as was noted by a European commentator in Ouidah already in the early eighteenth century.73 Dahomian rule after 1727 introduced further new cults to Ouidah. Some of these were specifically Dahomian, including in particular those connected with the worship of ancestors of the royal dynasty, promoted as a means of consolidating the authority of the Dahomian monarchy: especially the Nesuhwe cult, focused on nonreigning members of the royal family, which is associated in Ouidah with the Dagba family, descended from a Yovogan (Dahomian Governor) of Ouidah appointed in the 1820s.74 Other cults introduced into Ouidah under Dahomian rule, however, had themselves been brought to Dahomey from elsewhere, or represented the cults of originally distinct communities absorbed within it by conquest. For example, an important cult that came to Ouidah from Dahomey is that of Mawu, goddess of the heavens (and creator of the world), which is said to have originated in AdjaTado, to the west, from where it was introduced into Dahomey by Hwanjile, the “Queen Mother” of King Tegbesu (1740–74); in Ouidah it is associated with the Adanle family, whose founder was related to Hwanjile and settled in the town under her patronage.75 Another is that of Sakpata, a variant version of the earth/smallpox god, who is acknowledged to have originated from

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Dassa, a Yoruba community north of Dahomey.76 Ouidah also hosts cults of various forms of Dan, conceived as a serpent (but distinct from the Hueda Dangbe), including the rainbow serpent Dan Aïdohuedo (best known from his prominence in the Afro-American vaudou religion of Haiti), who is acknowledged to be of Mahi origin.77 The Dahomian families of Weme origin in Ouidah (Quénum, Gnahoui, etc.) worship a vodun specific to their homeland, called Masse, who was originally the spirit of the River Weme. Abbé Laffitte in the 1860s also noted that the “Mina” or Gold Coast elements who visited or resided in Ouidah continued to worship “the deities . . . of their country,” and also to “marry according to the rites of their religion”; and the “Mina” families of modern Ouidah still preserve their distinctive religious practice, in a cult called Adjigo.78 Some of the foreign cults that became established in Ouidah were introduced by slaves from the interior, who were retained for local service rather than sold into export. A notable example is Azili, a female water spirit, who is evidently the prototype of the goddess Ezili worshipped in Haitian vaudou, who is sometimes distinguished in Haiti as “Ezili-Freda-Dahomi,” that is, Ezili of Ouidah in Dahomey.79 Azili was originally a vodun of the Agonli people, northeast of Dahomey (around the modern town of Zagnanado), and identified with a lake in that region that still bears her name. From there she was introduced into Ouidah and relocalized there, being now identified with a local watercourse. Her shrine in Ouidah according to tradition was established in the reign of the Dahomian king Agaja, the conqueror of Ouidah (d. 1740), by an Agonli woman who had been taken captive by the Dahomian army, but when she arrived in Ouidah she was found to have religious power, and consequently retained locally rather than sold on into export.80 Slaves of Yoruba (Nago) origin also introduced their own cults, such as that of Chango (Sango), the Yoruba version of the thunder god. It may also be observed that Christianity and Islam, when they were institutionalized in Ouidah in the nineteenth century, operated in much the same way as the African cults, serving a distinct ethnic community that continued to practice its ancestral cult. The Christian missions that operated in Ouidah in the nineteenth century basically catered to foreigners, evangelization of the local “pagans” making little impact before the 1920s. The British Methodist mission that was established in Ouidah in 1854 found few customers: its congregation was described in 1863–64 as amounting to only a dozen men, who were “mostly Fantis,” that is, from the Gold Coast, who were probably employees of British traders.81 The French Roman Catholic mission that

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arrived in 1861 had a much larger following, since it was able to serve the preexisting Roman Catholic community represented by the Brazilians, including African-born freed slaves as well as the descendants of freeborn Brazilian merchants.82 Islam also developed (from the 1830s) as the cult of one section of the Brazilian repatriate community, which had either originated from Muslim societies in the interior of West Africa or converted to Islam in Brazil.83 This religious pluralism of Ouidah is evident enough nowadays, but it must be admitted that it is only partially represented in contemporary documentation of the precolonial period. This was probably due in part to the fact that some non-Dahomian cults, under Dahomian rule, could be practiced only in privacy. Abbé Laffitte in the 1860s noted that although there were people in Ouidah who came from “neighboring kingdoms” who “preserved the religious rites particular to their nation,” they “have no public cult”— although he also noted that “on certain occasions they give homage simultaneously to their own gods and to the Dahomian gods,” perhaps referring to the identification of foreign and local gods, as, for example, the Yoruba Sango was assimilated to the indigenous Hevioso.84 These constraints were removed with the ending of Dahomian rule in Ouidah by the French conquest of 1892. In particular, the Yoruba masquerade cults that are visible in Ouidah nowadays seem to have been established only in the colonial period. The Gelede cult was instituted in Ouidah only in 1913, in the Brazilian quarter of Maro, with masks imported from the Yoruba town of Ketu.85 The Egungun cult, representing deceased ancestors, was inaugurated in the Dahomian capital Abomey only circa 1920, and although it was introduced immediately from Ouidah, it is likely to have been a recent innovation there also.86 These cults represented, therefore, not a straightforward survival, retained from the countries of origin of slaves taken in the nineteenth century, but a selfconscious subsequent reassertion of Yoruba identity. It is not of course suggested that immigrants into Ouidah maintained their ancestral ethnic identities unchanged. There was evidently a degree of interethnic marriage, as with the enslaved Yoruba women taken as wives by the “Mina” Agbessikpé family and the Brazilian/Mahi Lima family, as noted earlier (and a daughter of the latter marriage subsequently married into the Dahomian Dagba family, and a granddaughter into the Brazilian de Souzas). New (or additional) identities might be also be taken on, as with those of non-Dahomian origin who entered the service of the Dahomian state, such as the Botokous, whose founder was originally a captive recruited into the

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Dahomian army, who originated from Weme, but in the words of Casimir Agbo “became Fon.” 87 In the case of the numerous Yoruba in Ouidah, including those brought directly from the interior as well as those who returned from slavery in Brazil, it likewise seems that their experience of displacement into a predominantly non-Yoruba-speaking environment encouraged their development of a sense of a pan-Yoruba identity that supplemented (without replacing) their allegiance to the particular communities and states from which they originated, though the generic term that was applied to them and they applied to themselves was “Nago” (following Dahomian and Brazilian usage) rather than “Yoruba.” The development of a generalized Yoruba identity has commonly been supposed to have occurred, in its initial stages, among freed slaves who settled in Freetown, Sierra Leone, and to have been fed back into the Yoruba homeland only through their subsequent reimmigration there; 88 though recently attention has also been paid to role of interaction between the Yoruba homeland and the “Nago” diaspora in Brazil.89 Some account should perhaps also be taken of the experience of the diaspora of enslaved Yoruba within more immediately neighboring regions, such as Dahomey. Certainly, the processes of uprooting and displacement, and intensified interaction with speakers of other languages, which are invoked to explain the aggregation of persons from formerly distinct groups into larger “nations” in the Americas, were also operative in Africa. In Atlantic port towns such as Ouidah, the redefinition of identities would also have been promoted by the opportunity for interaction and mutual influence between Yoruba ex-slaves from Brazil and newly enslaved Yoruba arriving from the interior—including, of course, the possibility of Brazilian repatriates themselves acquiring Yoruba slaves.

The Management of Cultural Difference: Unity in Diversity? The emphasis of this chapter thus far on the heterogeneity of geographical origins and ethnic affiliations of the population of Ouidah serves to raise the question of how (or to what extent), nevertheless, the community was able to function as a cohesive group and develop a sense of collective identity. In general, the politics of West African coastal communities, including some of Ouidah’s neighbors, were characterized by extreme factionalism, which not infrequently resulted in actual civil war, as, for example, in Little Popo in 1821–22 and Badagry (in Nigeria, to the east) in 1851.90 Ethnic differences

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were evidently only one factor among several in these divisions, along with commercial rivalries and the alliance of competing factions with different groups of European traders and with different neighboring African states. Ouidah, however, seems largely to have avoided these problems, at least during the era of Dahomian rule after 1727.91 In some other West African coastal towns, ethnic and social tensions were contained by “secret societies” that repressed dissent and/or mediated disputes, such as the Ekpe (or Egbo) society of Old Calabar, or Zangbeto in Badagry.92 But nothing of this sort existed in Ouidah—apparently because the kings of Dahomey forbade such organizations, as a potential threat to the central authority of the state.93 It might be argued that the maintenance of interethnic peace in Ouidah was achieved, in fact, by Dahomian policy. This policy, however, did not seek to impose cultural assimilation, but rather accepted the reality of cultural diversity. This was most obvious in the sphere of religion, where Dahomian policy was systematically to tolerate (and coopt) the distinctive cults of conquered communities, rather than suppressing them in favor of an authorized Dahomian pantheon. As was noted by European observers in the nineteenth century, “religious freedom . . . exists in Dahomey, all cults have freedom of the city,” “the king tolerates all religions.” 94 A European observer in the 1780s attributed the success of the Dahomians in assimilating conquered peoples to a combination of intermarriage and this policy of “tolerating [their] new subjects with the free exercise of their various superstitions,” referring specifically to the cult of Dangbe, the national deity of the Hueda, which was not only permitted but also officially patronized under Dahomian rule.95 At the level of popular perception, as well as state policy, unity was based on the recognition of diversity. The analysis advanced by Sandra Barnes for the analogous case of Lagos seems to apply equally to Ouidah: 96 although the continuing practice of ethnically specific ancestral cults evidently served to maintain a sense of cultural difference, at the same time the fact that these cults involved public ceremonies in which the generality of the populace could participate, if only as spectators, meant that their operation also served to express the incorporation of foreign elements into the community. Today, as expressed in the UGDO conference papers of 1985 cited earlier, cultural diversity, and more particularly religious toleration, is regularly seen as a defining characteristic of Ouidah’s identity. This is not to say that interethnic tensions were completely absent from Ouidah. Problems over the integration of the large numbers of Yoruba slaves incorporated into the town (and settled in its surrounding farmlands) in the

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mid-nineteenth century are suggested by a panic that gripped Ouidah in 1855, when an invasion of Dahomey was anticipated from the Yoruba state of Abeokuta to the east, and it was feared that they would foment an insurrection among their enslaved fellow Yoruba there, as noted earlier. Local tradition in Ouidah, it may be noted, also recalls a plot to “betray the town to the Yorubas” by a group of six hundred “Nago” slaves, who were liquidated in punishment, which may relate to the same incident.97 It also appears that the growth of influence of Gen/Popo elements linked to Francisco Felix de Souza, noted earlier, raised some hostility. In 1851, when the British navy blockaded Dahomey, in an attempt to force the suppression of the slave trade, Francisco’s eldest son, and successor to his title of Chacha, Isidoro, feared that he would be blamed for the breakdown of relations with the British, and observed that people would say “this is what we get by having strangers, he being Popoe by birth.” 98 It should also be noted that Ouidah’s local historian Casimir Agbo insists on the significance of the distinction between the Hueda (or “autochthones,” including other pre-Dahomian groups such as the Hula) and the Fon of Dahomey, explicitly presenting the town as a conquered community, and Dahomian rule as an alien, oppressive, and exploitative (effectively, colonial) regime, from which Ouidah was glad to be liberated by the French conquest of 1892.99 In his own time, Agbo was president of a body called the Union Sympathique des Houédas et leurs assimilés, formed in 1947, which restricted its membership to descendants of the pre-Dahomian population.100 It is indeed the case that, although politically subject to Dahomey, Ouidah did not regard itself as fully part of that polity. Europeans noted that people from Ouidah going to the capital Abomey spoke of traveling “to Dahomey,” as if it was a different country.101 Relations between Ouidah and Abomey were frequently problematic, especially in the nineteenth century, when many leading members of the Ouidah merchant community were liquidated and/ or their property expropriated by the Dahomian monarchy.102 However, this opposition between Ouidah and Abomey was not clearly understood or expressed in terms of a division between Hueda and Dahomian elements within the town—in which the former represented, as noted earlier, only a small minority. In fact, the victims of Dahomian judicial terror included several prominent families of Dahomian origin, notably the Quénums, whose power and wealth was destroyed in 1877. Indeed, it seems likely that the tendency (noted earlier) of many of the families that came to Ouidah from Dahomey to define themselves by their remoter ancestral origins, rather

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than as Dahomians—as, for example, the Quénums insist on their Weme ethnicity—reflects a desire to distance themselves from Dahomey, deriving from this experience of opposition to the Dahomian state. Dahomian as well as non-Dahomian inhabitants of Ouidah thus shared the perception of the town as a victim of Dahomian tyranny, and in consequence of the French conquest as a liberation. In fact, it may be suggested that multiethnic Ouidah acquired its sense of collective identity less as a result of Dahomian rule than in self-conscious opposition to it.

Chapter three

African Nations in Nineteenth-Century Salvador, Bahia João José Reis

The city of São Salvador da Bahia, known as the city of Bahia through the nineteenth century, and later as Salvador, was founded between the open sea and the Bay of All Saints in 1549. The city held the position of Portuguese America’s colonial capital until 1763, when it was replaced by Rio de Janeiro, the closest and most active port linking the coast to the booming mining regions of the interior, especially Minas Gerais. Salvador also gained its high status from what happened in its immediate hinterland. From the midsixteenth century, when Salvador was founded, sugar cane cultivation began to take over the lands that surrounded the Bay of All Saints, a region known as the Recôncavo, on the southern tip of which the city was located. The production of sugar for export through the port of Salvador would become the main economic activity in the region. Indigenous people toiled on the sugar plantations beginning in the sixteenth century, and then African hands began to take their place over the course of the next century.1 As African slavery developed in the sugar districts, it also developed in Salvador. By the end of the seventeenth century, Salvador was a mature slave society, which we know less by any detailed census of its population, as there is no known comprehensive census for the period, but more by the overwhelming presence of slaves in documents such as parish, probate, public notary (bills of sale and manumission papers), and administrative records, to name a few. The presence of slaves working both as domestics and in the streets of Salvador increased during the eighteenth century, despite a crisis

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in the sugar sector that led to a considerable reduction in the transatlantic slave trade to Bahia. Toward the end of that century, however, and especially after the 1791 Haitian Revolution, as occurred in Cuba and mentioned in the chapter by Matt Childs, the sugar business rebounded vigorously, fueling renewed growth in the Atlantic slave trade. The chapter by Robin Law discusses the creation of a multiethnic African community, which was created in large part as Ouidah supplied the demands for enslaved Africans in Salvador and the Recôncavo. In a report written in 1800 to the Portuguese crown, Joaquim Ferreira da Costa said that the city’s inhabitants “had a passion” for the Atlantic trade, especially within the Slave Coast (known as Costa da Mina in Bahia).2 Most slaves imported by merchants based in Salvador ended up on the plantations of the Recôncavo or were re-exported to plantations and mines in the southeast of the colony, but many were sold within and worked in the port city. In fact, based on lists of slaves in probate records between 1802 and 1806, Salvador displayed a higher proportion of African-born slaves (68.5 percent) than did the Recôncavo (40.2 percent). Just as David Geggus emphasizes in his chapter on Cap Français and Trevor Burnard in his chapter on Kingston, Black Atlantic port cities in the Americas were often more African than Creole despite the predominance of domestics, artisans, and market vendors. In the region of the Recôncavo, the rate of demographic creolization ran high on sugar plantations and even higher in the districts where manioc and tobacco were the dominant crops, the former perhaps the most important staple food—consumed in the form of flour—and the latter the main product used by traders to buy slaves in West Africa. Salvador remained a densely African city in the mid-1830s, with about 60 percent of its slave population born overseas and close to 80 percent of the estimated total population either black or mulatto.3 If any city could make a claim to being the capital of the Black Atlantic World, the only close rival to Salvador would be Rio de Janeiro, examined by Mariza de Carvalho Soares in this volume. Indeed, European visitors to Salvador repeatedly wrote that they thought they had landed at an African city. One observed that “[e]veryone that runs, screams, work, everyone that transports [someone] or carries [something] is black.” A few pages later this visitor described Salvador as the “metropolis of the negroes.” 4 During this period, slaves were being imported to the city of Bahia primarily, and increasingly, although not exclusively, from ports on the Slave Coast or the Bight of Benin, namely Whydah (as described in the chapter by Robin Law), Porto Novo, Badagry, and Lagos. Bahian traders controlled

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the importation of captives from these ports because they could offer valuable tobacco rolls in return. Figures for the last fifty years of the Brazilian slave trade (1801–51) suggest that West Africa supplied a little less than 10 percent of the slaves imported into Brazil, but 88 percent of these West Africans landed in Bahia. The region was the most common destination in Brazil of captives taken in the eighteenth-century Dahomeyan wars, in the FulaniHausa jihad of the first two decades of the nineteenth century, and in the devastating Yoruba wars in the 1820s through 1840s. The latest estimate of slaves disembarked in Bahia in the first half of the nineteenth century (1801–60) is 415,332, or 21 percent of all imports into Brazil. Less reliable are the data for the ports of embarkation of the African captives to Bahia because, for the critical years between 1815 and 1831, when imports from regions above the equator were forbidden, slave traders would report West-Central Africa or Mozambique as the destination for their vessels but would indeed collect slaves at Bight of Benin ports.5 Data from lists of slaves in probate records (Table 3.1) indicate the growing proportion of West Africans in the enslaved population of Bahia, and particularly the overwhelming presence of Yoruba speakers, known in Brazil as Nagôs.6 These numbers show the distribution of African “nations” in Bahia in the first half of the nineteenth century. We have long known that these terms rarely refer to specific appellations of self-identity as they would have been understood in Africa, but usually to broad regions as they were known to European and New World traders, to hinterland African markets and ports of embarkation, or to terms used by African traders for the foreign groups they enslaved, bought, and sold, among other criteria. The nomenclature also varied according to period in the host slave society or to different regions where the slave labor force was consumed. Despite these considerations, an African logic was not completely absent in the slave trade “ethnic” terminology. For example, the fact that the ethnic terms denoting “nation/nação” appear with some consistency across different places and times (as analyzed in the chapters by Jane Landers and Matt Childs) shows that they reflect, to varying degrees, both a process of self-identification and an identification inherent in the violent process of converting Africans into Atlantic slaves. In early nineteenth-century Brazil, the term “Mina” represented an umbrella expression for West Africans that included speakers of Gge, Yoruba, Hausa and other smaller groups such as the Borno, Nupe (or Tapa, the Yoruba term for them also used in Brazil), and Borgu (or Bariba, also the Yoruba term for them) exported through the Bight of Benin ports. In general,

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Table 3.1. African Nations in Salvador, 1802–50 Nation

1802–6 1819–20 1835 (sample) (sample) (population)a

1845–50 (sample)

West Africa Mina 223 21 1,681 23 Hausa 22 34 1,611 15 Nagô 51 36 5,388 378 Jeje 72 47 2,668 40 Others 6 26 1,268 25 Subtotal n 374 164 12,616 481 % 67.0 68.6 72.8 85.0 West-Central and Southeast Africa Angola 149 31 1,763 52 Benguela 30 8 399 3 Cabinda — 26 1,334 16 Others 5 10 1,213 14 Subtotal n 184 75 4,709 85 % 33.0 31.4 27.2 15.0 Total n 558 239 17,325 566 % 100.0 100.0 100.0 100.0

Source: Probate records from the Arquivo Público do Estado da Bahia. a Estimated African-born slave population of Salvador in 1835. João José Reis, Rebelião escrava no Brasil (São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 2003), 24.

while in other regions of the country Mina continued to hold the same general meaning, in Bahia, as the century advanced, more specific terms such as Jeje, Nagô, and Hausa—terms already known since the first half of the eighteenth century—became more prevalent and Mina gradually came to denote primarily slaves from Little Popo, or the “Mina proper,” to use late nineteenth-century anthropologist Nina Rodrigues’s expression.7 The change in the ethnic terminology derived from both the greater concentration of and the need to distinguish among and control African slaves from Dahomey (Gbe area), Yorubaland, and Hausaland, while also reflecting the local construction of African ethnic identities in Brazil. Nagôs in fact represented an umbrella term for Yoruba speakers, though it was a smaller umbrella than

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Mina implied. Africans known as Nagôs originated from Oyo, Ilorin, Egba, Ilesa, Ijebu, Ketu, and other Yoruba state formations. The Jeje were primarily peoples of Fon, Mahi, Allada, or Ewe origin, most of whom were in the early nineteenth century conquered subjects of the kingdom of Dahomey. The ethnonyms Nagô, Jeje, and Angola did not make much sense in the African context, although Nagô clearly derives from Anago, a small Yoruba-speaking group to the west of Dahomey, whose merchants imposed the term on captives from Yorubaland as a whole, and Angola (from Ngola, king of Ndongo) referred mainly to slaves imported through the port of Luanda, usually captured or bought in markets between the Bengo and Kwanza rivers. In other Brazilian contexts, in Rio de Janeiro for instance, although the vaguer term “Angola” also prevailed among slaves from Luanda, one can more often find more specific labels, such as Casange, Ambaca, or even Luanda itself, to name just a few, terms that are rarely found in available sources for nineteenthcentury Bahia.8 In nineteenth-century Bahia, Nagô, Jeje, and to a lesser extent Hausa—a “native” term that covered peoples from different city-states in a vast area of the Central Sudan—developed and matured as local ethnonyms, based primarily on common linguistic features. There survived, however, in the midst of the larger reference group—and for internal consumption so to speak— narrower identities that usually referred to specific locations from where Africans had originated. Thus, if Nagô, for example, was the general term used by Yoruba speakers to identify themselves to outsiders, ethnonyms such as Egba, Jabu (for Ijebu), Fe (for Ife), Jexa (for Ilesa), and so on continued to be operative within the Nagô community. The same phenomenon can be observed among the Jeje; there were Jeje-Mahi, Jeje-Dagomé, or simply Dagomé and Ardra (Allada), these last two rarely employed in the period covered here, but commonly used in the early eighteenth century. Similar to the formation of cabildos de nación discussed by Matt Childs, Africans often formed associations that reflected a broad provenance region as an umbrella group and then emphasized a specific locality among themselves to designate their ancestral homelands. Sometimes the deployment of these smaller identities crossed the frontier of inclusive ethnic communities. During the interrogations by the police in the wake of the 1835 Muslim rebellion in Salvador, Nagôs often used terms like Nagô-Ba (Nagô from Egba), Nagô-Jabu (Nagô from Ijebu), and so on to differentiate themselves before interrogators from the Nagôs from the north (from Oyo and, more specifically, Yoruba Muslims

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from Ilorin) who were known by all Nagôs—not so much by the police—to have been the most important factor in the rebellion. Ethnic formations can be observed from different angles in the city of Salvador, both among African slaves and, especially, among freed persons. The logic of ethnicity shaped residential arrangements, for instance. The police investigations after the 1835 rebellion revealed that individuals, both slaves and free, who belonged to the same African ethnic group tended to live together under the same roof. The pattern is confirmed in more detail by the 1849 Santana parish survey of African freed persons. Of fifty-two buildings with more than one tenant, thirty-eight (or 71.7 percent) sheltered African men and women who claimed to be of the same nation. Of these “households,” the Nagô formed twenty-seven, the Jeje ten, and the Mina one. Looking from another angle, 84 percent of the Nagôs who shared houses with other tenants, their marital partners included, had other Nagôs as housemates, against 61.5 percent of the Jejes in the same circumstance. Of course, these numbers reflect the preponderance of Nagôs and Jejes among the African freed population, which only mirrored their equally weighty presence among slaves. The two groups together stood for, respectively, 59.5 percent (Nagôs) and 29.5 percent (Jeje) of the two hundred freed Africans registered in the Santana parish in 1849 for whom an ethnic identification was recorded. However, the Nagôs represented 63.5 percent of the freed Africans living in collective residences, a good 20.5 percent distance behind the proportion of residential endogamy they displayed. In this regard the Jejes could be even more radically exclusive, for they represented only 26.3 percent of the Africans living together, a large 35 percent difference from their weight of residential ethnic exclusivity. Of course the smaller nations, such as the Hausa, Borno, Tapa, Angola, and Mina, had less chance to make ethnically restricted living arrangements. There were only five freed Hausas living in Santana, each one of whom shared a house with Jeje, Nagô, Borno, Mina, and Angola freed persons.9 Among the Santana residents, I could identify only thirty African men and women who could have been couples. Once again, twenty were Nagôs living with Nagôs, four were Jejes living with Jejes. The remaining three couples were formed by a Hausa man and a Borno woman, a Mina man and a Jeje woman, and a Nagô man and a Jeje woman. A tendency toward marital endogamy is confirmed by the 1835 trial records, which show that of seventeen couples for whom an ethnic identification could be established, fourteen belonged to the same group. This is confirmed by other researchers.

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Mieko Nishida identified thirty Catholic marriages involving freed Africans, twenty-three of whom belonged to the same nation; and Isabel Reis identified twenty-seven couples, nineteen of whom married inside the same nation.10 Slaves in the city had more opportunity than rural slaves to carve out spaces of their own within and outside the bounds of slavery and to construct social identities, including ethnic identities, around a common experience as enslaved laborers. Besides domestic service, slavery in the urban setting was based on the hire-out or ganho system. Slaves employed as porters, artisans, street vendors, and the like contracted to remit an agreed-upon amount of money to their masters at the end of the day or more commonly by the end of the week. “To pay the week” is an expression often found in nineteenthcentury documents to describe this arrangement. Slaves could keep everything that they earned that exceeded the contracted amount. As was common in port cities and urban areas throughout the Black Atlantic, slaves for hire often lived independently from their masters by renting or subleting rooms, usually from freed Africans, closer to the port area, where their services were mostly needed. From time to time the police would try to force masters to keep their slaves at home, but masters often preferred that hired-out slaves take responsibility for their own daily living, as long as they kept bringing the weekly fee.11 Many urban economic activities were shared by African slaves and freed persons, who worked side by side in the streets of Salvador. Freedmen very often retained the same occupations they held when they were slaves. Both groups organized themselves together, and along ethnic lines, in groups called canto, a term that referred to both song and street corner. In fact, African porters sung African tunes while working and usually gathered on street corners to fetch clients more easily. Each canto had a leader called captain, a man familiar with the potential clients, who negotiated payments, recruited canto members for specific tasks, and, later in the century, was responsible for fellow workers’ behavior before police authorities. While waiting for clients, canto members could weave baskets and ropes, sew clothes, make and fix shoes, carve wood, and pursue other tasks. Many had more specialized occupations such as carpenter, bricklayer, or smith and would take jobs in the transportation business only when out of work in those activities. By the mid1880s canto captains presided over complete construction teams that could quickly mobilize when needed. The canto thus served as a kind of ethnically defined labor pool where employers could find different kinds of specialized workers, similar to the African immigrants of present-day Lisbon, who

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organize by nationality on street corners, mentioned in the opening of James Sweet’s chapter.12 The ganho and the cantos constituted major institutions of urban slavery in Salvador. Besides being ethnically demarcated, cantos were exclusively male; African women, though not formally organized, circulated among canto sites, selling cooked food, the distribution of which they practically monopolized. Enslaved women also utilized the ganho system, gaining preeminence as peddlers and small-time merchants. Some had fixed stalls in the market, and others crossed the city north and south, east and west carrying on top of their heads shining glass boxes that contained all kinds of cooked and uncooked food, small trinkets, beads, West African textiles (or pano-dacosta), and other products—including ritual ingredients—imported from the other side of the Atlantic. Other women who were hired out sewed or took in clothes for washing and ironing. In many cases, they doubled as domestics and street earners. But they were particularly successful petty merchants in their own right and often managed to accumulate capital to buy their freedom, open small shops, and own slaves who were also employed in street work. The commercial networks they forged also had an ethnic accent. On different occasions in the 1850s Bahian merchants complained that African farmers sold their produce to African intermediaries, who in turn sold to African street peddlers and merchants in Salvador, thus forming a chain of preference that resulted, according to those merchants, in virtual market control of certain products such as manioc flour, which was the Bahian staple food par excellence. Fish was another product controlled by African women since at least the turn of the nineteenth century.13 After long years of arduous toil and disciplined savings—I have estimated between eight and ten years on the average—many African slaves were able to buy their freedom, this being the main mechanism for the formation of a sizeable and growing freed African population (about 4,615, or 7.15 percent, of Salvador’s inhabitants in 1835).14 Similar to the Havana cabildos de nación, Africans gathered as nations to form the juntas de alforria, or manumission societies, to which slaves contributed and from which they could borrow to help in the purchase of their freedom or with other expenses. Members of these juntas who obtained their freedom and paid their debts often continued to invest in the juntas for profit, for those who borrowed had to pay high interest to the group. And again similar to the Havana cabildos, the juntas’ membership, therefore, included freed people and slaves, but the leaders were usually African freedmen responsible for receiving and safeguarding

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the association’s monies, for which they were compensated. The juntas, however, were not organized exclusively for the purpose of funding the manumission of slave members. In 1835, Africans of the Congo nation organized a money pool “with the purpose of helping the deprived ones of their Nation,” according to a witness heard in the inquiry concerning the African uprising that year. And not all juntas were organized along ethnic lines. Luis Sanin, a Muslim preacher, organized a junta to collect from each member weekly fees corresponding to one day of ganho pay to buy cloth to sew Muslim garments, to pay masters when members failed to earn enough to do so, and finally to help members buy their freedom.15 Formation and negotiation of identities around the notion of African nation can be observed in religious institutions such as Catholic brotherhoods, Candomblé, and Islamic groups. As discussed in the chapters by Nicole von Germeten and Jane Landers, Catholic brotherhoods often resulted in a clustering of African ethnicities in specific sodalities. Although Catholic brotherhoods were in general not ethnically exclusive—due, among other things, to official pressure against it—certain African nations could and did control the government of specific sodalities usually in association with other local or African-born groups. The bylaws of the brotherhood of the Good Lord of Necessity and Redemption, written in 1778 and confirmed in 1804, established that only the “black nationals from out of town,” meaning “those from the Mina Coast or Luanda” (presumably all West and West-Central Africans), could join. The African founders specifically barred the admission of Creoles, under the pretext that they had their own brotherhoods, which excluded Africans.16 This was not entirely accurate, for the Creoles often shared their sodalities with Angolas. In the important Our Lady of the Rosary brotherhood in the central parish of Salvador, only Angolans and black creoles (mulattos had their own brotherhoods) could sit on the board, even though the majority of its new members at the turn of the nineteenth century identified themselves as Jejes in the admission book.17 African alliances inside Catholic brotherhoods could involve groups living thousands of miles apart in Africa, as in the case of the brotherhood of the Good Lord Jesus of Redemption. In the late eighteenth century, Jejes and Benguelas controlled the administrative board of the Our Lady of the Rosary brotherhood in São Pedro parish.18 This and similar rules adopted by other institutions probably did not survive the tremendous influx of the Nagôs in the first half of the nineteenth century, for any African brotherhood that would have barred their access in this period would have collapsed for lack of

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new members. Ethnic diversity inside black brotherhoods expanded particularly with the growth of the African freed population, who represented the backbone of these institutions because slaves usually could not sit on their governing boards. In addition, to parade their prestige—or to create it—great numbers of African freed persons belonged to more than one of these institutions, though they often played a more active role in one than in the others. Gertrudes Maria do Espirito Santo, a Nagô freed woman who died in 1825, belonged to five brotherhoods—including two of the Rosary and that of São Benedito, the most popular one among the freed Africans—all of which she requested, in her last testament, to join her funeral cortege to a grave at the brotherhood of Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, located in the imposing Carmelite convent.19 The brotherhoods found throughout the Catholic Black Atlantic World represented an urban institution par excellence because they needed a good number of members to flourish, to help build and maintain altars and churches, to celebrate their patron saints with lavish festivals, to help members when unemployed, hungry, homeless, or sick, to sometimes help them buy their freedom, and, of course, to bury them with due splendor when they died. Ex-slaves abounded in the city, and one of the ways they displayed their freedom was by playing a vital role in the workings of these institutions. The brotherhoods delimited the reach of local identities in the urban landscape in the sense that each belonged to a specific parish, where the majority of its members usually resided. Brotherhoods were themselves a territory where Africans from different origins met around a devotion to specific Catholic saints. Local and devotional identities, however, did not conflict with the creation and reproduction of ethnic identities. Perhaps because some groups controlled their leadership, brotherhoods promoted ethnic discrimination and divisions that reinforced alignment around cultural values other than the ones emanating from the patron saint’s altar. The construction of New World African ethnicities developed in conjunction with religious values, practices, and institutions that captives carried with them across the Atlantic and reconstituted, in part at least, in Brazil. Different aspects of the African spiritual experience, particularly spirit possession cults, were called Calundu until roughly the early nineteenth century, when the term Candomblé appears in Bahian archival documents. The term referred to a variety of practices, from the individual services offered by the medicine man/woman and the diviner to convent-like groups of initiates organized in temples or cult houses to worship one or more deities and ancestor

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spirits. The organized cults that can be identified in nineteenth-century sources were primarily dedicated to the Vodun of the Jejes and the Orisa of the Nagôs, although the undocumented Angolan Nkisi no doubt held a place in the Afro-Bahian pantheon of the day. All these cults, especially the Orisa cult, still exist in Bahia, but others disappeared. The Hausa Bori, for instance, vanished, although there is evidence of its presence in Bahia’s nineteenthcentury religious scene.20 It is difficult to assess the ethnic composition of nineteenth-century Candomblé initiates and clients because the police did not record the nations of those arrested in cult houses, who were vaguely referred to only as “Africans” or “blacks.” In one case, however, the information is available elsewhere. The famous Nagô high priestess Francisca da Silva, whose devotional name was Iya Nassô, was a prosperous businesswoman who owned several slave women, all Nagô, except one Nupe woman. There is good reason to believe that these women were also Orisa priestesses. Of course, the Nupe woman may or may not have held a place in the group of initiates, but if she did she accommodated herself and her devotion to a majority group. She may have had no other choice since she was a slave of the Candomblé Nagô leader. It may be more than a coincidence, however, that Dankô, a Nupe god, is to this day worshiped in the Nagô Candomblé founded by Iya Nassô. When Francisca da Silva returned to Africa to escape police repression after the 1835 rebellion, she manumitted most of these slaves on the condition that they join her on the voyage. The exception was Marcelina da Silva, or Obatossi, also Nagô, who, having paid for her freedom, returned to Bahia to become a high priestess in the cult house her former mistress had founded. Like her former mistress, Marcelina was a slaveowner, and most of her slaves whose ethnic group could be identified also belonged to the Nagô nation and were Orisa priestesses in her temple. Note, however, that both Iya Nassô and Obatossi also owned creole slaves, most of whom were children of their African slave women.21 However, the history of nineteenth-century Candomblé is primarily a history of inclusion that crossed over and disrupted ethnic and even African exclusivity, beginning with clients and, little by little, reaching all the way to the top of its hierarchy. The expansion of Candomblé was both geographical and social, and it began very early in the nineteenth century.22 Candomblé practices existed all over the city of Salvador, a good number in the Sé central parish, but the majority, especially those more openly organized around cult houses, settled in less visible sites, mainly the periphery that ringed the city. For obvious reasons, the police were more vigilant in the

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urban districts than in the suburbs, where the woods, rivers, creeks, and lakes favored the worship of spiritual beings associated with nature.23 Beginning in at least the early nineteenth century, the outskirts of the city were a place where freed Africans and creoles established themselves as small farmers to cultivate fruits, vegetables, beans, yams, and manioc and to raise fowl that they sold in Salvador’s market. Those farmers worked both on their own land and on other people’s property. The occupation of the capital’s outskirts expanded with the growth in the number of freed laborers who left the urban center after they had obtained their manumission. Farming, however, went hand in hand with ritual life. The festival of the New Yam, for instance, was celebrated every year, usually in November, when the root was harvested and the first crop was offered in sacrifice to the gods.24 A rich picture of predominantly African communities on the periphery of Salvador at the beginning of the nineteenth century was painted in a series of letters written by Bahia’s colonial governor Count of Ponte (1805–10) to the Portuguese minister of overseas affairs, Viscount of Anadia. The governor was particularly worried about the number of runaway slaves living or circulating in the area, but these were peculiar runaway communities or quilombos. According to the governor, “In the outskirts of this Capital and in the woods that surround it, there were countless groups of this quality of people, who, led by the hand of industrious impostors, enticed the credulous, the vagrants, the superstitious, the thieves, and the criminals, and by the sick to join them.” He continued, “They lived in absolute liberty, dancing, wearing extravagant dress, false medicine, uttering fanatical prayers and blessings; they used to rejoice, to eat and indulge themselves, violating all rights, laws, orders, and the public peace.” 25 This description reveals the existence of runaway settlements that were much more complex than a classic definition of quilombo as a group of fugitive slaves living in isolation in the depths of forests or swamps or on top of high, inaccessible hills. Similar to the Mocambo neighborhood of Lisbon analyzed by James Sweet, the city, not plantations, produced the social types found in these suburban sites, and they were not reduced to fugitive slaves. Mixed with slaves were individuals defined by the governor as thieves, vagrants, and criminals, but also the credulous, the superstitious, and the sickly. These were people who needed to protect or hide themselves from the urban authorities and who sought medicine men and women to cure them from diseases, witchcraft, and bad luck. There were also those persons, mostly Africans, enslaved or free, somehow tied to various cult houses where they

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performed religious obligations as initiates. In sum, these semiurban quilombos often maintained within their borders religious temples or altars led by specialists of the sacred who distributed “false medicine, blessings and fanatical prayers” to coreligionists and clients, services that could be more freely offered away from the urban center where neighbors would readily denounce their activities and the police would be catalyzed to repress their existence. The governor had discovered that the periphery of his capital was politically organized around religious leaders he called “industrious impostors.” We can assume that there existed cult houses of Candomblé complete with groups of initiates, priests, and priestesses dedicated to different gods and goddesses, with consolidated hierarchies, a calendar of celebrations, and the day-to-day obligations or rituals to spiritual beings, ancestors included. The “dances and extravagant dress” probably made up rituals in which the devotees were possessed by deities and other spirits through dancing and drumming, and dressed and adorned themselves in ways typical of each one of the deities. The governor justifiably defined quilombos as places where African rituals were celebrated, an association that located the two kinds of community organizations on the same level of resistance, a link that would continue to be made in the future. In the late 1860s the newspaper O Alabama defined quilombos as Candomblé houses in the very heart of Salvador where drumming and animal sacrifice happened regularly.26 Both quilombos and Candomblés sheltered runaway slaves throughout the century, offering them freedom, abundance, revelry, solace, cure, and privileges that the white man’s city denied them. They drew in slaves, ex-slaves, and the free urban poor, but also members of the respected society. In the middle of the century a Catholic newspaper lamented that African “witches” (feiticeiros) were sought after by men and women who “did not belong to the lowest class of society.” 27 In 1868, O Alabama published a list of social types who attended Candomblé sessions, such as “married women who seek medicine that would make their husbands remember conjugal duties; slaves asking for ingredients to soften the mood of their masters; . . . and even businessmen seeking success in their dealings.” 28 Candomblé practitioners and followers sold services to and built alliances with members positioned in different layers of the Bahian social hierarchy, testifying to the centrality of the religious system in the cultural landscape of the city. If during the first half of the century Bahian authorities worried about the association between what was seen as African religions and revolt, by

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the middle of the century they were concerned with what they considered the cultural Africanization of a city that the elite struggled to reform while having the “civilized” European model in mind. “Barbarous customs” needed to be wiped out to allow the advancement of “civilization.” One important battle focused on the expansion of Candomblé practices beyond the African population, to include creole blacks, mulattos, and even whites. The reformers’ main target was the African freed population, for they constituted the Candomblé leadership, just as they did in the brotherhoods. From the middle of the century, when the campaign to civilize the province took off, numerous freed Africans accused of crimes related to “witchcraft” were deported back to Africa against their will, just as they had been in enormous numbers after the 1835 rebellion. It was however too little and too late, for Candomblé had already won the souls of many in the Bahian population.29 The proliferation of Candomblé houses and the inclusion of new social groups within them went hand in hand with the affirmation of the Orisa cult over other African religious branches. Due in part to the overwhelming presence of the Nagôs, the religion of the Vodun and Nkisi lost ground to that of the Orisa. But a lot of intra-African borrowing went on. The Nagôs, for instance, adopted part of the institutional model of Vodun, namely the Jeje organizational edifice, which is reflected in the initiation nomenclature. Apparently they also borrowed from the Jeje the practice of worshiping different deities under the same roof, although Catholic brotherhoods may have functioned as a model—or reinforced preexisting tendencies—for both Jejes and Nagôs, in the sense that within Catholic temples one often found a main altar devoted to the patron saint and surrounded by secondary altars for other saints.30 The experience of Islam was different in many ways. African Muslims belonged to a variety of ethnic backgrounds. They could be Hausa, Nagô, Tapa, Borno, Bariba, Fulani/Fulah, though the latter three groups, especially the Fulani, were rare in Bahia. The Hausas, on the other hand, numbered in the thousands among slaves imported to Bahia in the years that followed the beginning of the Fulani-Hausa jihad in 1804. Naturally, among the Hausas of Bahia there were Muslims from both sides in the conflict as well as some “pagans” and Bori adepts. The Hausas as a whole represented 20.7 percent of all West African slaves in Salvador in 1819–20. Muslim Hausa groups may have dominated the complex cultural territory in the suburbs of Salvador described by governor Count of Ponte in 1807. Words used by the governor such as “blessings and fanatical prayers” described Muslim better than Candomblé practices. The blessings given by

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Muslim priests had special spiritual and prophylactic powers (or baraka), and the frequent daily prayers, besides the recitation of the Koran, denoted salient aspects of Islam in Bahia. Besides, African Muslims wore peculiar vests when they got together, such as the white agbada, turbans, and skull caps, all of which—besides the many amulets hanging from their necks and tied to one or all pieces of the attire—would fit the definition of “extravagant dress” advanced by the Portuguese count. But one of the main signs of “Hausaness” in Bahia in the early days of the century was their propensity to rebel. A few weeks after sending his men to suppress the suburban settlements, the governor discovered that a sophisticated slave plot was being conceived in the port district of the capital, where captives disembarked from slave ships and were sold in warehouses. When the police invaded a house rented by a Hausa freedman that served as the epicenter of the conspiracy, they found bows and arrows, a drum, and Muslim amulets. The investigation that followed revealed that, among other things, the Hausas planned to take over Salvador, gather Catholic images from churches, and burn them in a public square surrounded by Catholic churches. Even more threatening, the Hausas reportedly planned to have their leader assume the authority of both governor and bishop of the colony, an allusion perhaps to the convergence of religious and political power being constructed across the Atlantic in Hausaland. The organization of the movement apparently emerged out of the hierarchy previously built into labor groups, for Hausa canto captains were responsible for the mobilization of hire-out slaves throughout Salvador. Although the plot was an entirely Hausa affair, rumors circulated that other African nations would eventually be invited to join the movement. However, those who faced trial and sentencing were all Hausas.31 The Hausas struck again two years later, and then twice in 1814. The 1809 rebellion involved mass flight from Salvador to a village in the Recôncavo, but the rebels were quickly overpowered. Here again only Hausas were arrested.32 Resistance continued in the streets, however. An inspector of the king’s troops wrote in 1809 that in the southeastern captaincy of Minas Gerais one soldier alone was enough to disperse fifty blacks, and in Bahia the situation used to be the same, but now one black would beat soldiers “in plain day light, before everyone.” 33 He was certainly referring to a Hausa warrior in his Bahian exile. In February 1814, Hausa runaways from Salvador in combination with others from nearby quilombos rose up in arms and killed fifty people in the nearby fishing village of Itapoan. This time the leader was clearly identified as a Muslim preacher, a Malomi (or Malami, Malam). In all these occasions

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the Hausas fought alone, but not all of them were clearly Muslims. One of the 1814 leaders, for instance, was described in the trial records as “president of the dances of his nation,” a description that fits a Bori possession cult priest or the leader of a festive group known as Congada better than a Muslim preacher.34 However, Hausa and Muslim became synonyms in the minds of Bahian authorities. Even when they ceased to rebel in the late 1810s, as their numbers dwindled in the slave trade, they were still considered the typical literate Africans, the written amulet makers par excellence. That is how they appear in the documents related to the 1835 Malê revolt. But the main force behind the conception, inception, and carrying out of this uprising was undoubtedly Yoruba Muslims, whose numbers increased considerably in the Bahian slave trade as the war between Oyo and Ilorin reached new heights in the 1820s. At that point in time, Ilorin had become a refuge for Yoruba Muslims escaping Oyo Ile, the kingdom’s capital. Few individuals of the Hausa and Tapa nations participated in the 1835 movement, and the Muslim prayer groups that witnesses identified as active before the uprising were largely ethnically exclusive Yoruban groups. Only one Hausa preacher was said to have Nagôs among his pupils, and no Nagô preacher ministered to Hausa pupils–and this man, Elesbão do Carmo, was not so militant a Muslim, since he often stood godfather in Catholic baptisms. Of the thirty-one Hausa defendants, only three were found guilty, and only one Hausa, whose ethnic affiliation was in any case ambiguous—he also declared to be a Mina—confessed participation in the movement. In other words, the contribution of the largest African Muslim nation in Bahia to the 1835 rebellion was truly negligible if any.35 Police investigation of the Malê revolt—Malê derives from imale or Muslim in Yoruba—revealed that the conspirators met in back rooms, in the cantos, and even in Catholic churches to learn Arabic, memorize and recite the Koran, pray, dine and celebrate sacred dates on the Islamic calendar, and to prepare the revolt. The recruitment of converts among Nagôs was intense in the months that preceded the uprising, but one did not have to be a Muslim to join, and many non-Muslims accepted invitations from their Muslim ethnic “relatives,” just as had been the case during the 1814 Hausa uprising. While non-Nagô Muslims made a very modest contribution to the rebellion, Nagô Muslims and non-Muslims alike participated. “Long live the Nagô” was the ethnically demarcated war cry heard in the streets of Salvador during the uprising. The experience of Hausas and Nagôs suggests a strong ethnic rationale

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guiding their collective action. Islam did not represent a strong enough ideological force to overcome ethnic boundaries. On the contrary, ethnicity seems to have been at the root of these two great nations’ inability to unify around a common political project to challenge their commonly shared racial and class subordination. It can even be argued that Islam reinforced both “Nagôness” and “Hausaness.” For the smaller nation, of course, the choice was again absorption into these and other larger groups. One of the main Muslim leaders in 1835 was a Nupe man, Luis Sanin, who led a group that was purely Nagô. This man, however, spoke the language of the Nagôs fluently.36 Taking together what has been said thus far about residential and marital arrangements, labor groups, credit institutions, the religious experience in brotherhoods, Candomblé, and Islam, the conclusion is that ethnic identity was a strong force shaping the lives of enslaved Africans and freed persons in Salvador. However, these processes did not create a completely hermetic ethnic frontier. These were cultural and ethnic frontiers, not militarized ethnic nation-states barricaded by borders to defend inclusionary/exclusionary citizenship rules and juridical rights common to our own time. Identity frontiers demarcate “cultural communities,” as the African nations in Bahia were, but they do not necessarily build insurmountable “barriers to the transit of people, goods or ideas,” as Marshall Sahlins suggests.37 It can be said, on the other hand, that in each one of these social spheres and spaces different degrees of fluidity existed, although more detailed data are needed for a more refined discussion. Apparently, ethnic loyalty influenced residential patterns and membership in cantos and Muslim groups more powerfully than it influenced membership in brotherhoods and Candomblé houses. Just as there were variations according to kinds of sociability and institutional forms, cultural processes of self-identification also changed with the passage of time and as a result of personal experience. Changes in the African demography of Salvador had a major impact on ethnic formations in the city. The Nagô were everywhere from the 1840s and came to constitute at least 80 percent of Africans in the second half of the nineteenth century. Yoruba became the lingua franca among the Africans.38 Entire neighborhoods became the Nagôs’ almost exclusive territory, as shown by the existence of a Nagô Alley in the port district and a Nagô Street (still named as such today) in the Santana parish. They became the typical local Africans, so to speak, and did not need to mobilize too much energy to be accepted as such nearly anywhere in the African community of Salvador. Other Africans had to accommodate to a world increasingly dominated by the Nagôs, who, on the other hand,

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felt less need to assert an active ethnic politics as potential rival ethnicities became less numerous. The proliferation of Candomblé houses in Salvador reflected more specifically the proliferation of the Nagô Orisa devotion. In the meantime, black brotherhoods declined due primarily to the Romanization of the Brazilian Catholic Church in the second half of the nineteenth century, a doctrinaire movement that entailed an assault on the autonomy of lay institutions like brotherhoods. On the Islamic front, Muslims were badly hit by repression in 1835. Their religion was strictly prohibited, and hundreds of Muslim slaves were sold to the south of the country. Many freed Muslims were deported to Africa, others decided to go to escape police persecution and official, often legal discrimination. Although a few Muslims remained active in Bahia in the second half of the century, Islam failed to recruit creoles and eventually disappeared from Bahia with the death of the last Africans at the turn of the twentieth century. What was happening on the religious front had parallels in the labor arena. The Nagôs composed close to 80 percent of the street workers by the end of the 1850s—probably more later on—but thirty years later they shared this activity in almost equal numbers with Brazilian-born workers, mostly blacks, with whom they now mixed in the cantos. In 1887, only 45.7 percent of African street workers belonged to all-African cantos.39 Of course ethnic identities did not disappear altogether simply because Nagôs prevailed over other Africans, and because the number of Africans in general decreased dramatically with the end of the slave trade in 1850. Anthropologist Nina Rodrigues investigated the remnants of the African population in the 1890s, when he interviewed Nagôs, Jejes, Hausas, and other Africans who still embraced notions of ethnic belonging.40 African nations turned out to be inscribed in the predominant symbolic apparatus of Candomblé houses, which are to this day generally referred to as Nagô, Jeje, or Angola.41 Memories of origins as part of ethnic configurations can also be found in documents produced by African individuals. Domingos Pereira Sodré is a case in point. In 1881, when he was in his mid-eighties and dictated his will and testament, he said he had been born in Onim (or Lagos), while the majority of Africans who produced the same kind of documents at this point in time would simply say they were “Africans” or born in Africa. Maybe this had something to do with the fact that Sodré was a Candomblé man, and the Bahian/Lagos ritual connections ran high in the second half of the nineteenth century.42 Sodré had been arrested in 1862 under the accusation

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of divining—he was probably an Ifa priest, a babalawo—and of producing witchcraft to tame his slave clients’ masters. Notwithstanding his deep involvement with Candomblé, he also belonged to a black brotherhood of the Rosary, and he wished in his will to be buried in its cemetery, accompanied by his devotional brothers, which actually happened. In addition, Sodré married twice in the Catholic Church and stood godfather to numerous creole children and adult African slaves. He himself owned five Nagô slaves and led an African manumission society, most of whose members were Nagô members. But although he was a Nagô he had friends, coreligionists, clients, and supporters who belonged to different African nations, besides local whites, blacks, and mulattos. He befriended two Hausa freedmen, he attended a Candomblé led by a Jeje woman, he was assisted in the manumission society by a mulatto accountant, whites served as witnesses to his marriages, and he stood godfather to slaves owned by white masters. The man from Onim fought in the war against the Portuguese in Bahia, in 1822–23, and proudly wore his veteran of war green uniform when he was arrested in 1862 by policemen dressed in blue uniform. He knew very well how to manipulate the codes of both the African and the local cultures. Sodré was a truly ladino African.43 “Ladino” is the best term for “acculturated” people like Sodré, and not only as a descriptive, “native” term, but also as an interpretive tool. In recent years the term “creole” or the composite “Atlantic creole” has become current in the historical and anthropological literature to identify African individuals with experiences similar to those of Sodré. The processes of culture formation and social relations discussed by creole theorists no doubt apply to Sodré and millions of other Africans in the Atlantic Basin. However, creole has perhaps become a reductionist expression that does not depict the subtleties of life experiences such as those of this man. To put it differently, as far as Africans are concerned creolization created the ladino, not exactly the creole. In Brazil, in particular, the use of the term crioulo for an African-born individual is especially problematic because it implies a very specific meaning: a locally born dark-skinned person with all the cultural and social qualities this implied in nineteenth-century Brazil. The addition of the qualifier “Atlantic” to creole does not solve the problem. The Brazilian crioulo differed not just from the African. Mixed bloods, or mestiços, were never referred to as creoles; they could be cabra, mulato, pardo, and sometimes moreno, depending on their skin color. And they were often referred to with other “racial” descriptors. The position of crioulos—and cabras, pardos, and so on—in the economy, society, politics, and culture diverged substantially from that of the

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African-born person. No one born in Brazil, including crioulos, ever joined Africans in the slave revolts that shook Bahia in the first half of the nineteenth century. During the same period one rarely finds creoles working side by side with Africans in the streets of Salvador, marrying Africans,44 or joining Muslim groups. Of course, first-generation creoles and their parents had common experiences and shared institutions such as brotherhoods and Candomblé houses that eventually became spaces of African/creole sociability. But the two groups never became one. However “creolized” the African became, he or she never ceased to be a ladino or ladina. It could be argued that the expression has the defect of referring to Africans who had some degree of control over the “master’s culture,” particularly those who could speak the local language, and this ignores the intra-African cultural dynamics. But I would suggest that, as an interpretive tool, the term ladino be expanded to include both fronts of cultural changes experienced by African individuals, for as far as I can tell, in Bahia, despite these changes, people like Sodré never ceased to be Africans, and were reminded of this daily. Moreover, they never ceased to think of themselves as belonging to a specific African nation, even when they in due course came to be only “Africans.”

P art II The Sources of Black Agency

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Chapter four

Re-creating African Ethnic Identities in Cuba Matt D. Childs

Havana has long served as a location for the major social and cultural processes that have marked the history of the Black Atlantic over the past five hundred years. In the sixteenth century, Havana became the largest city in the Caribbean, with an enslaved labor force that made up at least one-third of the city’s population. The transatlantic slave trade connecting Havana to West Africa lasted longer than that between Africa and any other New World destination, with its final abolition only coming in 1867, after as many as one million Africans had been forcibly brought to the island. Beyond the transatlantic slave trade, Havana has long been a destination for people of African descent migrating from nearby islands and other locations throughout the Black Atlantic. During the era of Caribbean slavery individual runaways often made their way to Havana, and in the aftermath of the Haitian Revolution free people of color and slaves arrived from the former French colony of Saint Domingue. After the abolition of slavery in 1886 and continuing through the first half of the twentieth century, seasonal and permanent migrants from the French and British Caribbean routinely worked on the island during the sugar harvest. And throughout the twentieth century and continuing until the present day Black Atlantic intellectuals have visited Havana and taken inspiration from political, cultural, and religious activities, which, in turn, have influenced how they defined themselves when they returned to their homelands.1 Given this broad sketch of the diverse historical processes that have shaped African diasporic cultures in Havana, the goal of this chapter is to examine a specific period, geographic location, and institution to ask how

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African culture in Havana manifested itself through an organizational framework. To this end, I consider how Havana’s role as a major destination for the transatlantic slave trade helped foster collective identities rooted in a general and sometimes very specific places of origin in Africa. Dating back to as early as the sixteenth century, Africans in Havana could form religious/mutual aid societies that evolved over the centuries from lay religious brotherhoods to collective voluntary associations that emphasized a common place of origin in Africa. Africans organized these societies by stressing a shared place of family ancestry and culture such as Congo, Lucumi, Mina, and Carabali, among others. As they became more prevalent in colonial society during the eighteenth century, these organizations acquired their own houses and became known as cabildos de nación to reflect the grouping by a common identity—often referred to as “nación” in Spanish—of the numerous African “nations” forcibly imported to Cuba. The Spanish term “cabildo” represents the English-language equivalent of a town council or a town government. The naming of these societies as cabildos de nación suggests that their houses functioned as representative bodies for Africans by providing a cultural, social, and political space for their members to meet and fraternize in Havana.2 To a certain degree the designations of African ethnicity and identity that the cabildo houses represented were colonial creations that often referred to broad provenance areas from whence slaves were sold. Most individuals on the African continent would not have identified with a large geographic area or a linguistic area prior to arrival in the Americas. Over time, however, these designations emphasizing a Congo, Lucumi, Carabali, or Mina identity in the form of cabildo associations gave local meaning in Havana to Africans’ ancestral regions on the other side of the Atlantic. Furthermore, these ethnic designators often involved two parts; first, a broad embarkation region such as Congo or Carabali; and then a second marker indicating a specific region, town, or area. For example, a Havana cabildo house took the name Carabali Induri, indicating the broad provenance area of the hinterlands that served the slaving ports at Calabar, but also the smaller locality Induri. In this sense, the names of the cabildos are indicators of the formation of both a panethnic African identity in the diaspora as cultural commonalities became more apparent when Africans encountered fellow Africans toiling under slavery, and the strength and permanence of identifying with a smaller more local community. The names of cabildo houses offer qualitative evidence of both the broad and the specific geographic origins of the population of

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African descent in Havana that are often found only in quantitative records from census data documenting the transatlantic slave trade.3 The ethnic names that cabildo houses chose to reflect the identity of the their members are also found in other contemporary documentation. The African Names Database, compiled from interviews the British conducted with “liberated” Africans in nineteenth-century Havana, lists for place of origin the ethnic term “Carabali,” with over forty subdesignations, such as “Carabali Apapa,” “Carabali Isuama,” and “Carabali Cuella,” among others. Some of the terms referring to slaves’ places of origin in the African Names Database correspond to the names of the Havana cabildos.4 The appearance of these ethnic categories in different historical documents, whether through interviewees providing information on their place of origin when being “liberated” or in the names of Havana’s cabildos, provides sound evidence that these terms were much more than just labels created by masters and colonial officials to identify Africans in the New World. The formation and activities of the cabildo houses provide an opportunity to examine what historian Paul Lovejoy has called an African “identity in the shadow of slavery,” which can allow scholars to study the experience of the enslaved beyond racial categories alone.5 Havana’s cabildo houses illustrate how people of African descent emphasized their place of origin in terms of where they were born and also how they remembered, reconnected, and recreated Africa in the New World. The attempts to express and recreate an identity for Africans that spoke to their natal place of origin represents a historical phenomenon many slaves went through in the Americas. Africans became “black” in the Americas, but how did their previous culture, history, and languages influence their experiences under racial slavery? The social and cultural forces that changed an individual’s identity from one that drew strongly from African origins to one that reflected adaption to a New World environment is crucial for understanding slavery because it happened in all slave societies of the Americas during the era of the transatlantic slave trade. Nor is this question unique to the African diaspora, as it addresses larger issues common to all migrants whose previous identities, histories, and cultures changed upon arrival at new destinations. In focusing on Havana’s cabildos, I am intervening in current debates over studying African culture in the Americas during the era of slavery. For the sake of brevity, two interpretative paradigms can be identified. In a widely influential essay first authored in 1976, Sidney Mintz and Richard Price argued that African slaves brought to the New World represented “crowds”

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of disparate groups and cultures “and very heterogeneous crowds at that.” Mintz and Price did not ignore and even highlighted the cultural traditions Africans brought with them, but they forcefully suggested that scholarship should examine the creation of creole cultures and innovations in the New World in response to “[w]hat they [slaves] undeniably shared at the outset was their enslavement.” Mintz and Price cautioned scholars against looking for similarities between Old World and New World African traditions. Instead, they highlighted the ways diverse African cultures came together and began to inform new creole identities born out of slavery.6 Since the 1970s, a large body of literature on slavery in the Americas has followed the Mintz and Price creolization model with its emphasis on New World innovations.7 Beginning in the 1990s, a new direction in the field of diasporic studies began to challenge the creolization model by employing the Atlantic Ocean as one unit of study. Scholars with a deep knowledge of African history, such as Joseph Miller, Paul Lovejoy, Michael Gomez, Robin Law, John Thornton, David Eltis, James Sweet, and others, took an increasing interest in slavery in the Americas.8 Embracing an Atlantic model for diaspora studies, scholars emphasized that slaves forcefully transported to the Americas carried with them their own histories, cultures, and identities that decisively shaped their experiences in the Americas. As the cabildo houses formed along lines of tracing their ancestry to a geographic origin in Africa, yet represented institutions that catered to the needs and experiences of Africans in Havana, they reflect both innovations in adapting to New World slavery and efforts to maintain connections with an African past. They illustrate both the benefits and limitations of current historiographical paradigms for interpreting diasporic cultures in the Americas. In addition to inserting the cabildos into the larger historiographical debates about African culture in the Americas during slavery, this study complements and complicates the existing literature on these societies as they relate more specifically to Cuban history. Scholarly examination of the cabildos has largely focused on two distinct topics: religion and rebellion. In regard to religious studies of the African diaspora in Cuba, the cabildos often serve as the starting point where the Yoruba-influenced religion of Santeria was born. The cabildo house functioned as the location where Yoruba and Catholic belief systems merged to create Santeria. Cabildos with Yoruba (referred to in Cuba as Lucumi) members, however, represented only one of many different African groups in Havana. Consequently, the role of other African groups in the history of cabildos tends to be grafted onto the experience of the Yoruba.

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In addition, the cabildos have often been featured prominently is studies of rebellion and resistance as they played important roles in some of the largest slave uprisings such as the Aponte Rebellion of 1812, the La Escalera Conspiracy of 1843–44, and the Wars for Independence. While many members utilized cabildos to strategize and engage in acts of resistance, they did so many other things there that it mischaracterizes the institutions to look solely at acts of rebellion. This focus on rebellion and resistance has most certainly been beneficial for our understanding of the cabildos. Scholars now have a much more detailed knowledge about how these societies operated by focusing their investigations on these topics. But the orientation of this literature also has limitations for understanding the cabildos. What these approaches have in common is that they use the cabildos as a brush to illustrate the history of a different topic, rather than focusing on how the cabildo houses operated on a day-to-day basis.9 Most of the archival sources I utilize to examine the cabildos’ activities derive from documents generated from civil lawsuits. These legal disputes generally involved property that cabildos held in common, money they held as savings, or attempts to remove leaders of these societies for malfeasance. Most cases grew out of a Havana urban code enacted in 1792 that brought about a series of new regulations to govern the city’s growing population. Most articles of the 1792 urban code dealt with mundane matters related to markets, fines for illegal activities, and what parts of the city could be organized for certain types of commerce and industry. Article 39 focused specifically on the cabildo houses and set in motion their relocation from inside the city walls (intramuros) to outside the city walls (extramuros). The new regulations moved cabildo houses away from wealthier inhabitants in the center of the city.10 This forced cabildos to sell existing houses and buy new ones, creating conflicts in some of these organizations that resulted in drawnout legal disputes. An examination of the resulting legal documents provides significant details into how these societies operated and what services they provided for their members.11 At the most basic level these were civil cases over property and financial matters that many subjects in the Iberian empire fought over throughout the colonial period, and which, fortuitously in hindsight, resulted in notaries producing thousands of documents with which historians can reconstruct the social and cultural history of Latin America. Yet more than just property was at stake in these cases because the crucial existential issue for the cabildos was the ownership of a house. Almost all the activities of these societies revolved

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around the cabildo house. It provided rooms to rent for urban members who often were the elected leaders of the society.12 The cabildo house provided a place for holding weekly meetings and special festivities during religious holidays.13 It also functioned as an informal bank, holding the membership dues, offering loans, and sometimes even purchasing freedom for enslaved members.14 On Sundays and religious holidays, most notably the Day of the Kings, the house turned into a theater for dances.15 And the houses often functioned as funeral parlors for their members.16 In brief, without a house these societies could not have functioned. Havana’s cabildos trace their origins to the Spanish and Portuguese practice of organizing Africans into religious brotherhoods on the Iberian Peninsula, in Africa, and in the New World. Historian Mariza de Carvalho Soares shows that in Rio de Janeiro religious brotherhoods Africans who shared a similar ethnicity often formed their own sodalities.17 These brotherhoods gave a Catholic institutional framework to ethnic identities as the members of specific sodalities shared a common place of origin in West and West-Central Africa. The same phenomenon occurred in various locations of the Spanish Empire, where a large African population could be found. By the end of the sixteenth century different sodalities in Lima often reflected different African ethnicities (e.g., the Dominican brotherhood for the “negros Congos,” and the brotherhood of Nuestra Señora del Socorro for Angolans).18 In Mexico City, Africans outnumbered Spaniards two to one at the end of the sixteenth century. Unsurprisingly, religious brotherhoods populated by and catering to the population of African descent proliferated, as historian Nicole von Germeten has shown.19 From the northern borderlands of Saint Augustine to the far southern extreme of Buenos Aires, Catholic brotherhoods made up by the population of African descent could be found throughout the Spanish Empire.20 In Cuba Catholic brotherhoods that included people of African ancestry can be traced to the sixteenth century. In 1573 the Havana Town Council reported that Africans took part in the procession of Corpus Christi, and several wills indicate that they regularly made donations to sodalities.21 Historian Jane Landers found that the Mandinga, Carabali, Lucumi, Arara, Ganga, and Congo proliferated in Havana and organized important brotherhoods. Most of the brotherhoods selected a patron saint that they honored on his or her feast day with elaborate festivals and ceremonies.22 Likewise, historian Alejandro de la Fuente has shown that during the sixteenth century free blacks and slaves organized brotherhoods in Havana that often elicited complaints

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because of their loud festivities, which were described as “scandals.” 23 By the mid-eighteenth century Cuban bishop Morell de Santa Cruz reported on the “scandalous and grave disorders” created by the “cabildos . . . when they congregate on festival days.” Apparently, during the span of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries some cabildos had begun to exercise a greater degree of freedom from the brotherhoods and had taken on a social role somewhat independent of the church. The bishop planned to bring the “lost sheep of the flock to the Good Shepherd [by] . . . administering to the cabildos the sacrament of confirmation, reciting the Holy rosary,” and appointing lay religious officials to supervise the societies.24 The 1792 urban code relocating cabildos outside the city walls of Havana most likely continued the process of diluting church supervision as the physical space they inhabited moved farther away from Catholic direction. Historian Philip Howard concludes that “the resultant spatial distance from church officials became very attractive to Afro-Cubans as it allowed the cabildos to enjoy much more religious autonomy from the cofradías.” 25 While greater distance from a parish church likely contributed to a decline in supervision, cabildos did not completely break ties with the Catholic Church and take on an independent existence. Jane Landers’s most recent work on the secular and religious organizations of Havana’s enslaved and free population of African descent that were formed and employed to strategize about how to assert political, religious, and economic claims has shown a certain degree of overlapping membership lists.26 Financial records show that after relocating several cabildos continued to make monetary donations to the Catholic Church. When the Lucumi cabildo was founded in 1728 it was located on the plaza fronting the church Santo Cristo de Buen Viaje. After relocation in the 1790s, it retained the name Cabildo Lucumi de Santo Cristo de Buen Viaje and hence the tie to the parish of its origin.27 The Cabildo Carabali Induri followed the Lucumi cabildo’s example, also retaining its ties with its founding church as shown by its name: Cabildo Carabali Induri de Santo Cristo de Buen Viaje.28 Other cabildos followed the same pattern of taking the name of the ethnicity of their members and the church where the brotherhood was founded, such as the cabildo Carabali Apapa de San Francisco de Paula and the cabildo Carabali Oquella de San Augustin.29 Some cabildos continued to make financial donations to their churches. For example, the cabildo Carabali Osso adopted Saint Christopher as its patron and made donations to the convent of Saint Agustin.30 The cabildo Carabali Apapa gave three pesos on a yearly basis to the festival

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honoring San Benito de Palermo.31 Relocating the cabildos away from their supervising churches undoubtedly lessened those churches’ control, but the cabildos did not cut all ties. In fact, cabildos falling under less direct Catholic control after relocation but continuing to associate with the church provide evidence of a strong connection with the brotherhoods even after moving their houses outside the city walls. Various scholars have traced the origins of the cabildos to religious holidays and Catholic brotherhoods of Spanish origin, but analogous corporate, religious, and mutual aid societies were common to West and Central Africa.32 At the port of Old Calabar and in the surrounding regions in the Bight of Biafra, an all-male secret society known as Ekpe formed as early as the second half of the seventeenth century. Identified with the leopard, Ekpe members paid dues assessed by their rank in the organization. According to historians Paul Lovejoy and David Richardson, Ekpe society created an “interlocking grid of secret associations [that] served to regulate the behavior of members.” 33 The secret organization crossed the Atlantic and resurfaced in nineteenth-century Cuba in an altered form with a different purpose through the Abakuá society.34 In a methodological essay, anthropologist Stephan Palmié has laid out the promises, problems, and pitfalls of relying on causal links between the Ekpe society in Calabar and the development of Abakuá society in Havana to argue for African continuities in the New World. Rather than arguing for African continuities, he concludes Ekpe and Abakuá should be regarded as simultaneously emerging Atlantic phenomena.35 In contrast to Palmié and employing an approach firmly grounded in primary and secondary sources, anthropologist Ivor Miller and historian Paul Lovejoy emphasize both Ekpe origins in Calabar, but ongoing transformations modified to a Cuban environment.36 Likewise, in the Yoruba Kingdom of Oyo there existed a semisecret organization known as the Ogboni society that advised the king on religious and political matters. Scholars disagree about the founding date of the Ogboni society and the extent of its influence. However, it is almost certain that because the war-torn region of Yorubaland funneled thousands of Africans to Cuba in the nineteenth century, some knowledge of the organization likely crossed the Atlantic and influenced the Yoruba-based cabildos.37 Associations, organizations, and secret societies in West and Central Africa provided social and cultural structures that enslaved and free Africans could transform into institutional organizations molded to their New World surroundings in Cuba. Various other societies could be found in West and Central Africa that

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performed charitable, recreational, political, and economic functions for members who often shared the same language, ethnicity, and nationality. The collective and communal organizing principles of these organizations often found expression in mutual aid societies in the Americas. The African-born and American-born populations of African descent displayed a strong tendency to socialize and meet with those who shared a similar ethnicity and form some sort of organization, formally or informally, to keep in touch with and look out for each other. In Cuba and elsewhere in the Americas, the association of Africans who shared a common language, culture, history, and identity often functioned as a mutual aid society, linking the more fortunate and well-placed members with those who were poorer and severely exploited through patron-client networks. The Yoruba in West Africa, for example, operated mutual aid societies as early as the eighteenth century through the Ajo and Esusu saving institutions. Each member paid dues into a collective fund that would then be made available for individual loans. When Yoruba slaves began to be exported across the Atlantic, the Esusu savings association emerged in the Caribbean.38 Spanish colonial administrators and Catholic priests regarded African cabildos in Havana as a natural and safe extension of their own religious sodalities. The organizations for Africans, however, surely did not represent something entirely of Spanish or Cuban origin, but an Old World institution modified to a New World setting. Pairing off the origins of the cabildos in terms of Catholic versus African traditions of collective organization helps us to trace out their ancestry, but above all these societies represented an Atlantic phenomenon that converged and took form in Havana. The Catholic practice of lay brotherhoods provided an institutional framework to house West and West-Central African forms of collective organization in a colonial setting. Cabildos created associational ties among Africans who shared a common geographic origin, which reinforced the importance of their African natal culture, rather than having it completely eclipsed by an identity tied to notions of blackness that emerged under racial slavery. In order for the societies to have legitimacy in the eyes of religious and secular authorities in Havana who monitored their activities, they had to fill recognizably Catholic functions. Just as important, to have legitimacy among their members, the cabildos most certainly had to appeal to African cultural traditions.39 The distance from Catholic Church patrons as a result of forced relocation in 1792 had important consequences for how the societies operated. The most pressing issue for these organizations was establishing a new house for

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their functions. In 1794 the cabildo Mina Guagni bought a house from Juana de Mesa in response to the 1792 regulation.40 Five years later, in 1797, de Mesa was once again requesting payment, as the cabildo still owed her seven hundred pesos.41 In 1793 the cabildo Carabali Ibo purchased a house from Isabel Herrera just outside the city walls.42 The cabildos Carabali Umugini and Carabali Osso pooled their financial resources to buy a house where they jointly held their activities in the 1790s.43 As both of these cabildos shared a broad Carabali heritage traced to the Bight of Biafra, these ethnic ties most likely facilitated their cooperation in making the purchase. Likewise, the cabildo Carabali Ysuama Ybi and the cabildo Carabali Ysieca joined to purchase a house in the 1790s, but nearly twenty years later, in 1812, they separated and bought their own houses.44 In the 1790s the cabildo Carabali Oquella relocated to a street just outside the city walls where they also held their functions.45 Other cabildos that did not have the financial resources to purchase a house rented spaces on weekends and festival days to host their activities.46 The relocation of the cabildo houses was part of the larger demographic transformation reshaping Cuba. Beginning in the second half of the eighteenth century and accelerating in the aftermath of the Haitian Revolution, the Cuban plantation economy went through a boom. The expansion of sugar, tobacco, and coffee plantations worked by enslaved Africans transformed the island from its long-established role as a port of call for ships trading in the Atlantic to the most valuable colony in what remained of the Spanish Empire after wars for independence swept the continent in the early nineteenth century. As part of the Spanish crown’s increased attention to the colony of Cuba, it declared free trade in slaves throughout the empire.47 No colony in Spanish America capitalized on the decree more than Cuba. While a scholarly consensus has yet to produce exact figures, historians have suggested that from 1790 to 1820 as many as three hundred thousand slaves could have entered Cuba.48 The impact of the trade on Havana’s population growth was obvious to contemporary observers. During the thirty-five years between the 1792 and 1827 censuses, the population of Havana and the surrounding rural hinterland grew from 51,307 to 237,828. The enslaved increased in number from 17,970 to 109,535, and the number of free people of color grew from 9,800 to 31,622 during the same period.49 As Cuban policy required the vast majority of slaves to be trafficked through Havana before being sold in the hinterland, the population of African descent expanded markedly. Cuban historian

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Gloria García has worked most closely with the Havana import records and estimates that 286,125 slaves arrived in Havana from 1790 to 1820.50 Foreign travelers such as James J. Alexander commented on the growth of the city; he estimated in 1833 that “Havana and its suburbs are said now to contain nearly two hundred and fifty thousand inhabitants, and, as in all fortified cities, this great population occupies little room within the walls.” 51 The 1792 urban code requiring the relocation of the cabildo houses outside the city walls serves as a qualitative index on the very notable increase of the African population in Havana. Relocation involved more than simply purchasing a new house. As some of the supervisory roles shifted from religious to secular authority, new taxes and fees had to be paid to local neighborhood officials charged with monitoring the organizations. Cuban officials required the societies to purchase licenses to host events and meetings at their houses. In addition, colonial officials would recognize newly elected cabildo leaders only after the organizations paid required fees. Cristobal Govin, the leader of the Carabali Oquella cabildo, wrote to the governor of the island in 1804 requesting a barrio commissary be sent to their house to supervise and officiate their election for the positions of second and third capataz.52 Over a month after the request, commissary Damian Munoz and a notary arrived at the house of the cabildo Carabali Oquella to record the votes and officially recognize the election of the new leaders.53 On a different occasion the cabildo Carabali Oquella had to pay twenty-four pesos to a notary and barrio commissary for observing an election and an additional four pesos on an inspection visit.54 The account books for the cabildos Carabali Osso and Carabali Umugini reveal they routinely had to pay notaries and neighborhood officials who visited their house, recorded their activities, and supervised some of their functions.55 It remains unclear from the sources how much these routine visits influenced the cultural activities of the cabildos. At a minimum, however, the expenses reveal that the operation of these societies generated fees that regularly brought colonial officials into interaction with the organizations. Once a cabildo purchased a house, the members quickly made their presence heard in the neighborhood and the larger city of Havana. As various travelers to nineteenth-century Havana commented, what marked the cabildos most notably in the eyes of outsiders were their weekly festivals. British traveler Robert Jameson described cabildo performances as “courtly festivals (usually held every Sunday and feast day) [where] numbers of free and enslaved negroes assemble to do homage with a sort of grave merriment that

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one would doubt whether it was done in ridicule or memory of their former condition.” 56 When American John G. F. Wurderman visited Cuba in the 1840s he remarked that during these festivals “almost unlimited liberty was given to the negroes. Each tribe, having elected its king and queen, paraded the streets with a flag.” 57 And according to Swedish author Frederika Bremer, on cabildos’ festival days “the whole street swarmed with negroes, some decked out with ribbons and bells, some dancing, others standing in groups here and there.” 58 Over time these weekly festivals became recognized as a right sanctioned by Cuban law. In 1842 when Cuban governor Geronimo Valdés issued a new legal code, articles 87 and 88 granted cabildos the right to meet on Sundays and to hold their festivals on the Day of the Kings as long as they provided advance notification to the neighborhood commissary.59 As part of weekly gatherings and special festivals at cabildo houses, several organizations took extra measures to inject their meetings with pomp, elaborate displays, and plenty of food and beverages. The account books for the Carabali Osso y Umigini cabildo indicate ten pesos was paid on 11 October 1801 for the purchase of a new banner for their parades and festivals.60 The elected king of the cabildo Carabali Induri had a special staff made for eight pesos that he most likely carried in parades and displayed for ceremonial purposes.61 Another cabildo had a large party at its house that cost the organization thirty pesos in beverages and food in recognition of the election of a new leader.62 Not to be outdone, the cabildo Lucumi Llane apparently had an even larger gathering costing fifty-seven pesos during their annual festival days.63 Similarly, one of the largest expenses for the cabildo Carabali Osso involved paying for what was generically described as refrescos (refreshments or beverages).64 Smaller festivals and secret meetings in cabildo houses on days other than Sundays and religious holidays occasionally caught the attention of neighborhood officials. The 1842 Cuban code specified that any cabildo that had a parade or a gathering without notifying the neighborhood commissary would be fined and its house could be closed.65 Colonial officials fined the cabildo Carabali Apapa on two separate occasions for holding illegal meetings and conducting a dance without giving prior notification.66 Havana resident Manuel Bosque requested that neighborhood officials look into the activities of the cabildos much more closely for he suspected that little was known about the organizations beyond their activities during weekly festivals and religious holidays. He urged the government to discover “what type of idolatry is practiced in the cabildo” house for he feared that if the houses were

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not shut down it would result in “unfortunate and sad events.” 67 The existing records documenting the cabildos give a mixed impression of, on the one hand, routine government oversight and supervision and, on the other, fines in the wake of failed attempts to prevent secret meetings, illegal dances, and festivals. Beyond hosting festivals, gatherings, and dances, the cabildos provided various services to their members that helped them survive in colonial Havana. One of the most common practices of these organizations was to lend money to members. Because the membership consisted of enslaved and free members, most frequently it was the relatively wealthy free members who made the largest donations to cabildos. For example, the queen of the cabildo Lucumi, Llane Maria Loreto de la Torre, loaned the organization 542 pesos, which was subsequently redistributed to its members.68 In 1805, when members of the cabildo Carabali Osso requested that the money they held in common be counted, it was revealed that several of the elected leaders who had been loaned money still had outstanding debts.69 Some cabildos took special precautions when they approved loans to members. For example, money could be removed from the safe of the cabildo Carabali Induri only at a special meeting that required the presence of twenty members to approve the transaction.70 In a society that rarely offered credit to people of African descent, the black community used cabildos to pool resources and lend money, opening a small but important avenue to economic improvement. Some cabildos lent money to their enslaved members so that they could purchase their freedom. In 1809 when the cabildo Congo Mocamba reconciled its account books, the membership reminded Cayetano Garcia that he still owed eighty pesos of the original two hundred pesos he received to purchase his freedom.71 Other cabildos interceded on behalf of their enslaved members when they had disputes with their masters. Under Cuban law slaves had the right to seek out a new owner when they had a confrontation or trouble with their master. If a slave could convince a legal official to concede this right known as papel—for the paper they were given authorizing them to solicit a new master to buy them—he or she could request a transfer from one master to another. The leader of the Congo cabildo wrote to Cuban authorities on behalf of its enslaved female member María Luisa González to have her master honor a solicitation for a new slave owner.72 By performing these services, cabildos interceded on behalf of their enslaved members, helping to improve their difficult working conditions and even possibly achieve their freedom.

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One of the most important services provided by cabildos was care during times of illness. In something akin to sick leave pay, cabildos often provided money to help members who became ill or otherwise incapable of working. For example, the leader of the cabildo Carabali Induri ordered the treasurer to give four pesos to “Matias Biyalta because he was sick.” 73 Cabildos also took measures to ensure that some members of their organization received the medical care they needed. When an associate of the cabildo Carabali Osso became too weak to walk, it provided a carriage for travel to the town of Guanabacoa, where he received medical treatment at the cost of ten pesos.74 At least from the records detailing these examples, it appears that this aid was not in the form of a loan that had to be repaid, but a benefit that came from being a cabildo member. An indication of the overlapping role of the cabildos and the religious brotherhoods was that both organizations often paid for the burial of their members. In 1804 several members of the cabildo Carabali Osso passed away. On one occasion the society paid thirty pesos for the burial of José María Rodríguez and on another forty-seven pesos for the interment of María del Rosario Castellon. To mark the solemnity of the burials, the society also paid seven pesos for candles to be used during the ceremonies.75 Likewise, the cabildo Carabali Oquella paid twenty pesos in 1804 for the burial of Rafael Mecoleta.76 Many societies continued to honor their departed members by having masses said in their memory. The Carabali Osso paid eight pesos for masses said on behalf of the “soul” of Dolores Martínez.77 In 1799 leaders of the Carabali Oquella cabildo wrote to the Cuban Governor requesting that their cabildo house be reopened so that they could beg for alms to have masses said on behalf of departed members.78 Over time the religious ceremonies that occurred in cabildo houses without representatives of the Catholic Church present began to attract attention from neighbors and Cuban officials. As many slaves lived in Havana, it would have theoretically fallen upon their white masters by both custom and societal expectations to provide for the burial of their slaves. Some slave owners, however, conceded this obligation to the cabildos. Several masters allowed the cabildo Mina Guagni to provide a wake for the enslaved members inside the organization’s house.79 This practice became common enough that in 1842, when Governor Valdés authored a new urban code, article 159 prohibited “the moving of cadavers of people of color to the cabildos for grieving.” Furthermore, the article also specified any “singing” in the name of the dead members at cabildo houses “in the style of their nation” was subject to a

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seventeen-peso fine.80 How successfully the colonial state enforced these provisions and imposed fines for conducting funerals inside the cabildo houses remains unclear, but existing documentation suggests that judicial authorities were not eager to enforce these rules and collect extra revenues. In addition to hosting festivals and religious functions, the cabildos also served a very practical purpose in providing housing for their members. The cabildo Carabali Apapa rented out four rooms to its members who had to pay their rent on the first of the month.81 Likewise, the cabildo Carabali Oquella also rented out four rooms that raised ninety-nine pesos for the society over six months.82 The members of cabildo Mina Guagni used the rent they earned from leasing out their rooms to fellow members to purchase their new house in the 1790s after relocation outside the city walls.83 When the Carabali Ibo bought a new house from fellow cabildo member Rosalia Sanchez, members agreed to pay her 144 pesos to cover nine months of rent for the entire house until they could purchase the home outright.84 Over time, renting rooms often proved to be the most effective strategy these societies had for raising revenues. Over four years the cabildo Carabali Induri rented out three rooms that brought in a total of 870 pesos for the society.85 These savings represented a significant amount given that the prices for slaves listed in Havana newspapers usually ranged from 300 to 500 pesos.86

* * * Over time, the meetings, festivals, and religious services at cabildo houses and the loans and housing provided to members created ties of solidarity that bound them together as an ethnic group. The relocation of the cabildo houses outside the city walls in the 1790s happened at the exact moment when Havana’s connection to Africa intensified with the expansion of the transatlantic slave trade. The arrival of thousands of Africans provided the numbers for the enslaved to seek out people who shared similar ethnic backgrounds. Although the transatlantic slave trade was the most powerful influence creating notions of blackness and whiteness, it also simultaneously created conditions that allowed multiple African cultures to thrive in Havana. The Africans who arrived in Havana from the horrific Middle Passage used the approved institutional structure of the cabildos to connect with other Africans who shared a similar history rooted in specific geographic locations on the other side of the Atlantic. Although not composed of voluntary migrants, Havana’s cabildos resemble

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immigrant associations that thrived in other urban destinations of the Atlantic World. In a survey of the literature on immigrant associations for the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, historian José Moya concluded that “the migration process itself . . . tends to intensify and sharpen collective identities based on national, ethnic or quasi-ethnic constructs.” 87 The growth of Havana’s cabildos and in particular their 1792 relocation served to “sharpen” the collective identities of Africans and African-descended people as they pooled their resources to buy houses in neighborhoods just outside the city walls. By the nineteenth century Havana could be regarded as one of the capitals of the urban Black Atlantic for the size of its African population and its enduring connection to the transatlantic slave trade. Cabildo houses can be seen as “African consulates” for the cultural, social, and economic services they provided to their members. In establishing these societies and selecting names to reflect their place of origin, cabildo houses developed as institutions that fostered and perpetuated the vibrancy of African cultures in Havana.

Chapter five

The Slaves and Free People of Color of Cap Français David Geggus

For most of the eighteenth century, Cap Français was the largest town in the Caribbean’s wealthiest colony, French Saint Domingue. At the height of its commercial importance in the late 1780s, it was home to about 15,000 permanent residents. Two-thirds were slaves and about one-tenth were free people of color. Its resident white population of 3,600 was reinforced by the presence of 1,000 or so soldiers stationed in the city barracks and, intermittently, by some 2,500 transient seamen who spent up to several months in the city each year. Even counting these outsiders, more than 60 percent of its inhabitants were of African descent.1 Founded in the late seventeenth century, Le Cap had grown rapidly in the 1750s and still more in the 1770s and 1780s. Scarcely two thousand people lived there before 1730 and fewer than five thousand in 1770. The town occupied an area of less than half a square mile, hemmed in between the Morne du Cap and the broad bay that formed its harbor. It extended just over a mile from north to south and measured more than a half mile at its widest point. On the eve of the Haitian Revolution of 1789–1803, most of its 1,361 houses were built of stone with slate or tile roofs; one-quarter had two stories. Among the seventy-nine public buildings were some impressive structures, notably the government house and the convent that were set in their own gardens, the huge barracks and arsenal, the royal warehouse, the hospital, and the prison. The presence of church and state was slightly less visible than in a typical Iberian colony—such as those covered in this volume by Landers,

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Childs, Reis, von Germeten, and Soares—but considerably more so than in a British colonial town. Le Cap’s Frenchness could be seen in its tree-lined squares centered on large ornamental fountains, its numerous cafés and billiard halls, its bath houses, and a theater that seated fifteen hundred people, the largest in the Caribbean.2 Cap Français had only one-third of the population of Havana, Rio, and Philadelphia, and was smaller, too, than Charleston and Boston, and even Kingston, Jamaica, and St. Pierre, Martinique. Although Saint Domingue exported more than the United States, or all the British Caribbean colonies combined, its peculiar geography had given rise to a dozen transatlantic ports. Whereas the other port cities explored in this volume generally served as the single entrepôt for an entire colony or region, the abundance of shipping points in Saint Domingue reduced Cap Français’s local salience, as did the fact it was never (apart from a couple of years in the 1760s) the colonial capital. Le Cap handled only 35 percent of Saint Domingue’s export trade in the late 1780s and had only 45 percent of its urban population, which was itself very limited; merely 7 percent of the colony’s inhabitants were urban dwellers.3 Cap Français was nevertheless bigger than 90 percent of French towns. Visitors from Europe and North America considered it an elegant and bustling city of sizeable proportions.4 The town was an administrative and ecclesiastical center, a place of entertainment and of considerable strategic importance, but its primary function was commercial. It was a point of transshipment and a market for a very rich agricultural hinterland that exploited the labor of some 200,000 slaves. Sharing with the minor ports of Fort Dauphin and Port de Paix the trade of the entire North Province of Saint Domingue, Le Cap serviced the needs of nearly 2,000 coffee plantations, several hundred indigo and cotton plantations, and more than 260 sugar estates. It also acted as an entrepôt for several other of the colony’s ports. Excluding contraband, its annual exports on the eve of the French Revolution were worth more than ten million dollars.5 Whereas Port-au-Prince, the colonial capital that Le Cap overshadowed, has been the subject of a multivolume history, Cap Français has been very little studied. Dominique Rogers’s richly detailed dissertation on these two towns’ free populations of color constitutes the major exception.6 Urban slavery in Saint Domingue remains almost entirely unresearched, and sources for its history are not abundant. Only 4 or 5 percent of the colony’s slaves lived in towns, villages, or hamlets.7 The collections of plantation papers deposited in modern archives have no urban counterpart. Saint Domingue never had the

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Catholic sodalities of Iberian colonies, and hardly any of its surviving parish registers include slaves. Fortunately, the notaries of Cap Français have left an extensive archive, but as they conducted business with property owners from all over the North Province, only a small proportion of the slaves mentioned in their transactions lived in the town.

Free People of Color In town and countryside, the smallest but fastest growing sector of the population was that of free people of color, particularly those of mixed racial descent. Free blacks still formed a majority of the group in the 1770s, but by the late 1780s it was reckoned that two-thirds were of Afro-European ancestry.8 Labeled mulâtres, quarterons, and grifs (mulattos, quadroons, sambos), they tended to be wealthier and more often literate than free blacks, and more European in culture. They often benefited from closer connections with the white population.9 In the West and South provinces of Saint Domingue, AfroEuropeans completely dominated the free population of color. The North was distinctive, however, and particularly Cap Français, in its number of prominent black families. The phenomenon was established early in the eighteenth century and has persisted in independent Haiti.10 The 1771 census counted only 271 free people of color living in Le Cap, but by 1789 they were five times as numerous. A large and increasing majority of them were women. Their influx into the city coincided with that of soldiers during the American Revolutionary War and the flood of young Frenchmen who came seeking their fortune in the 1780s.11 Contemporary texts usually portrayed the free woman of color as “a colonial Venus who cultivates beauty, sophistication, and sensuality for the purpose of seducing white men.” 12 Image and reality no doubt diverged, but in wealthy Cap Français they were perhaps closer than elsewhere. If prostitution was ubiquitous in Caribbean port towns, the mulâtresses of Le Cap seem to have occupied the apex of the region’s sexual economy. Both their detractors and admirers described them as a somewhat haughty and independent sisterhood with a code of conduct that insisted on courtship. The “quadroon balls” of New Orleans had their origins in the redoutes des filles de couleur of Saint Domingue. As the colony had no brothels, sex workers tended to be self-employed. Many became the concubines of white males, as either live-in housekeepers or independently kept women.13 Heavy consumers of imported fine fabrics and jewelry, they

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were renowned for their expensive wardrobes and the high prices they exacted for their favors.14 In the 1770s, Hilliard d’Auberteuil reckoned that three thousand free black or mulatto women lived in Saint Domingue’s towns and that one thousand were married and two thousand were “prostitutes”—he allowed for no alternatives. Girod de Chantrans, another French visitor, contrasted “the women of color,” who were the illegitimate daughters of white men, with “the bourgeoisie of the towns [presumably black] whose conduct is very regular,” and whose families were long established. Moreau de Saint-Méry, a resident of Cap Français, wrote in the 1780s that most free mulâtresses were white men’s housekeepers. Although fellow northerner Félix Carteau later claimed almost all Le Cap’s free coloreds were married and wealthy, the city’s parish registers show that most births to free nonwhite women were out of wedlock and that this was overwhelmingly the case for women of mixed racial descent, many of whose children were fathered by whites.15 During the revolutionary 1790s, when white supremacy gave way to black power, interracial sexual relations probably diminished, although several marriages between prominent white radicals and women of color advertised the new egalitarianism. Even after independence, however, when the French had been expelled, Haitian men complained that local women preferred to be the mistresses of white foreigners rather than take local husbands. Gender was an important variable in Caribbean race relations. Urban prostitution seems to have flourished with the collapse of the slave economy but became uncommon after independence. Church marriage remained rare.16 In the 1770s, free people of color owned roughly one-fifth of Le Cap’s houses, and one-fifth of these house owners were women.17 Their houses tended to be the cheaper properties located in the Petite Guinée (Little Africa) neighborhood, but they also included expensive buildings that were rented to white tenants.18 Fanchette Mouton, an illiterate black freedwoman, took advantage of a dip in the real estate market in 1787 to buy a half-built house for some $2,200 (18,100 livres), which in four months she had completed and leased out to two military officers for $340 a year.19 In order to make the purchase, Mouton had to sell five of the slaves she owned.20 Free colored women in Cap Français were active buyers and sellers of slaves, usually of Africans and females. Like whites, they rented them out, or used them in their businesses; quite a few were shopkeepers, market traders, or dressmakers. Some speculated in the “leftover” captives of slave ships, reselling them when they had regained their health or received training.21 Rogers found that,

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compared to their counterparts in Port-au-Prince, where land was cheaper and slaves more costly, Le Cap’s free coloreds were relatively more likely to invest in slaves than in real estate.22 Whatever their color or gender, all Saint Domingue slave owners branded the Africans they bought and sold, but free blacks were apparently the most likely to free their slaves.23 Much like their female counterparts, free men of color were generally depicted in a negative fashion by colonial writers—as unemployed, licentious, and frivolous—but in Saint Domingue’s property records and church records they appear in a more respectable light, as businessmen and craftsmen, godfathers and guardians. In 1785, an elite advisory body, the Chamber of Agriculture, recommended that Le Cap’s nonwhite unemployed be forced to take jobs as servants, because they were setting a bad example to slaves. Supposedly lazy and spendthrift, they had pretentions above their station, the colonists complained; “even free blacks” were rude to whites who failed to address them as Monsieur or Mademoiselle.24 When in 1777 the French government banned travel to France by nonwhites, one of the reasons it gave was that, on returning to the colonies, “they introduce there a spirit of independence and disobedience, and they end up more harmful than useful.” 25 The colonial attorney general was particularly worried about unregistered gambling houses, which he saw as refuges for idle free blacks and dissolute whites who traded in goods stolen by slaves. Among those fined for illicit gambling was the African-born hairdresser Jean-Baptiste Belley, who later had his portrait painted in Paris when he served as a colonial deputy at the height of the French Revolution.26 A frequent witness at the weddings and funerals of other nègres libres, Belley was a prominent figure in his community with ties to other prominent families like the Leveillés and Coidavids (into which the maître d’ and future king of Haiti Henry Christophe married in 1793). Common in this milieu were stonemasons, carpenters, and roofers, along with hairdressers, tailors, and fishermen.27 Several black masons, like Jean-Baptiste Cap, who was wealthy enough to own a carriage, became building contractors, although builders were generally of mixed racial descent and among the wealthiest urban free coloreds.28 Free blacks frequently married in church, legitimating their out-of-wedlock children. They included many African freedmen who had bought their way out of slavery in middle age. Belley claimed to be from Gorée in Senegal. Louis Desrouleaux was a Kongolese pastry cook who ran a boarding house.29 More numerous were people from the Bight of Benin, like the Aja-Fon couple Ulisse Biesdor and Marie-Rose Bossy, the Hweda

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Jean-Baptiste Leveillé dit Richer, and his Yoruba namesake Étienne Leveillé. In honor of a powerful African state, both Richer and boat owner Pierre Zogo gave the name Dahomet to slaves whom they freed; thirty years later King Christophe would choose the same name for his police force.30 Alaou Kinson, known as Jean-Baptiste Jasmin, was married to a Hweda woman and seems to have been a Muslim Yoruba. Born about 1715, he was a mason, but as early as 1756 he had founded a hospice for people of color outside Cap Français. Using his own funds, he cared for the destitute and adopted orphans. By the 1780s, he owned five rental houses and twenty-five slaves, whom he divided between the hospice and his thirty-three-acre farm a few miles away. A belated, government-backed plan to recognize his philanthropy with the award of a gold medal fell foul of local politics.31 Other successful urban blacks, like the Leveillés, Zamoras, and Augustins, similarly invested in small rural properties, where they took up residence sometimes a dozen miles from Le Cap.32 Yet they maintained their place in the city militia, in which they were noncommissioned officers (NCOs). The militia was segregated, and Le Cap had separate companies for whites, blacks, and men of mixed race. Shared service no doubt strengthened community bonds, as Stewart King shows, reinforcing ties forged by intermarriage and godparentage, the guardianship of minors, apprenticeship, and commercial dealings. King’s attempt to identify a “military leadership group” among Saint Domingue’s free coloreds is less convincing.33 Although he eschews racial or regional labels, the group he singles out consisted overwhelmingly of northern free blacks, primarily from Le Cap.34 As militia service was compulsory for all men throughout the colony, it is unlikely they were more “military” than any other free coloreds, and as all officers after the 1760s had to be white, they did little leading. The French militia, moreover, did not enjoy the social privileges of its Spanish counterpart. Becoming an NCO, like joining the police force, was a step up for a working man, but it did not confer elite status. During the Haitian Revolution, very few free colored leaders came from the group King describes. The city resident who would have the greatest impact in the revolution was Vincent Ogé, who led a brief rebellion in the northern mountains in 1790. A quarteron, with three white grandparents and a white brother in law, Ogé was one of the colony’s very few free colored merchants. In March 1789, his movable property was estimated at more than 100,000 livres, his debts at 77,000, and his outstanding credits at four times that amount.35 He was probably the wealthiest man of color in Cap Français. Although Ogé said at the end of his

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life that he had never been insulted by whites,36 all descendants of Africans, rich or poor and of whatever complexion, were subject to discriminatory laws that banned them from public office and the professions, from holding militia commissions and wearing fine clothing, and from sitting with whites in churches and taverns. In the theater, where they were first admitted in the mid-1770s, blacks and Afro-Europeans were each assigned separate seating, just as in the militia they served in separate companies. Four-fifths of the free coloreds who married, and nine-tenths of the free blacks chose a spouse from within their “color” category (quarteron, mulâtre, etc.). Their wedding guests and the godparents of their children reveal a similar homogeneity.37 Contemporaries argued whether this segmentation of the nonwhite population was due to economic difference or to its own color prejudice.38 As wealth tended to correlate with complexion, the point was moot. Vincent Ogé, who became a martyr to the cause of racial equality, claimed he had never been friendly with free blacks and that he hardly knew any.39 The degree of segmentation of the free colored community and its degree of integration with the white population are two of the main research questions confronting historians of Saint Domingue. The traditional picture of race relations has been one of mounting tension. Legal restrictions on free nonwhites increased, especially after 1763, at the same time as their numbers and wealth. Rogers offers a revisionist challenge that at least nuances this portrait. She notes that racist legislation was unevenly enforced, that housing was not strictly segregated, and that, if only in civil cases, the courts did not discriminate against nonwhites. Concubinage, friendship, and commercial dealings all furthered racial integration. An expensive girl’s school run by the nuns of Cap Français included white and free colored pupils. Racial intermarriage was never widespread, and in France it was banned in 1778, but it continued at a low level, even in Le Cap. Whites and free coloreds, she concludes, formed neither one community nor two separate ones.40

The Slave Population The general contours of the town’s slave population seem to have resembled, in an exaggerated form, those of the colony’s rural population: it was predominantly male and African and overwhelmingly adult. The only census of Cap Français parish that provides a breakdown of the urban component of the slave population shows that it consisted (in 1775) of 58 percent men,

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Table 5.1. Gender and Age of North Province Slaves (percentage) Town of Le Cap Sugar plantations Coffee plantations

Men Women Boys 65 41 44

23 36 33

6 11 12

Girls Number 7 12 12

810 10,257 3,253

Sources: (for Le Cap) Archives Nationales d’Outre-Mer, Aix-en-Provence, SDOM 788–90, 855–58, 865–70; Susan Socolow, “Economic Role of the Free Women of Color of Cap Français,” in More Than Chattel: Black Women and Slavery in the Americas, ed. David Barry Gaspar and Darlene Clark Hine (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996), 279–97; (for sugar and coffee) author’s personal database, workforces of 59 sugar estates (1777–90) and 72 coffee plantations (1777–91), North Province.

37 percent women, and fewer than 5 percent children.41 Burial statistics for 1783, however, suggest a somewhat lower sex ratio (120:100), more in line with that of the slave population as a whole.42 Although historians have often exaggerated the sexual imbalance of the colonial population, both census and plantation data show that among slaves the sex ratio had fallen below 125:100 by 1780.43 To get a clearer and more detailed picture of the urban slave population, I collected a sample drawn from thirteen volumes of notarial papers dating from the period 1778–89 that consisted of 751 people living in slavery in the town of Le Cap. To these I added another 59 described in an essay by Susan Socolow concerning free women of color in the early 1780s.44 This sample (Table 5.1) shows an extremely high man to woman ratio of 244:100 but is undoubtedly biased upward by the inclusion of 301 slaves who worked for Saint Domingue’s richest building contractor.45 The small Socolow sample, on the other hand, is biased downward, as all its slave owners were female. Omission of both groups from the sample points to a sex ratio of about three males for every two females, as in the 1775 census. Even at this lower level, sexual imbalance was evidently more marked among Cap Français’s slaves than among those of the surrounding plains and mountains, where children were also twice as common as in the town. The scarcity of children was related, as both cause and effect, to the town population’s high sex ratio and its low number of locally born creoles, who, other things being equal, tended to have more children than did African slaves. In view of Cap Français’s reputation as a place of sexual encounter, it may also be that urban women chose to restrict their fertility more so than

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Table 5.2. African and Creole Slaves in the North Province (percentage of slaves of known origin)

Local creoles Foreign creoles Africans Number # of known origin

Town of Le Cap Sugar plantations Coffee plantations

34.4 61.4 42.9

2.3 0.2 0.1

63.3 38.4 57.0

810 10,257 2,312

486 9,854 2,202

Sources: (for Le Cap) Archives Nationales d’Outre-Mer, Aix-en-Provence Archives Nationales d’Outre-Mer, Aix-en-Provence, SDOM 788–90, 855–58, 865–70; Susan Socolow, “Economic Role of the Free Women of Color of Cap Français,” in More Than Chattel: Black Women and Slavery in the Americas, ed. David Barry Gaspar and Darlene Clark Hine (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996), 279–97; (for sugar and coffee) author’s personal database, workforces of 59 sugar estates (1777–90) and 72 coffee plantations (1777–91), North Province.

did rural women, or that they were affected more frequently by venereal disease.46 The relative paucity of creole slaves (Table 5.2) is perhaps surprising given the large number of domestic servants that presumably lived in Le Cap and the colonists’ preference for creoles in those positions.47 However, we do see the influence of this factor in the high proportion of creoles of mixed racial descent in the urban sample. On northern sugar estates in this period, mulâtres, quarterons, and grifs typically made up 3 percent of enslaved workers, and on northern coffee farms, even fewer, but here they accounted for one in eight slaves. “Foreign creoles” (Table 5.2) had arrived through the interisland slave trade. Half of those in Le Cap had come from Martinique or Guadeloupe; the others were from Dutch or Spanish colonies including “Mississippi.” They added to the port’s ethnic diversity and probably broadened the horizons of the slave community. Many were doubtless deported because of the trouble they had given previous owners. They were disproportionately represented in fugitive slave adverts and were unusually successful in escaping.48 An uncertain proportion were in fact Africans who had lived long enough in the Americas to acquire a new identity. Creoles, therefore, made up little more than a third of Cap Français’s slaves and were more numerous in the countryside than the town. When the colonial intellectual Moreau de Saint-Méry wrote that twothirds of Saint Domingue’s slaves were Africans, he was probably referring only to adult slaves. Plantation records suggest that, by the 1780s, the aggregate numbers of locally born and African-born slaves were much closer to

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Table 5.3. African Slaves in the North Province (percentage of Africans)

Le Cap

Sugar plantations

Coffee plantations

West-Central Africa Congo 45.5 42.0 63.7 Mondongue 4.5 1.9 4.2 Other a 0.4 1.2 Bight of Benin Aja-Fon 11.4 16.4 10.0 Mina (Gen) 2.3 3.6 1.0 Yoruba 5.2 8.0 5.5 Otherb 4.2 6.2 2.9 Senegambia Sénégal 4.5 2.0 0.7 Mandingue 5.5 2.4 2.9 Fulani 0.6 0.4 0.4 Other c 0.3 4.6 2.0 Windward Coastd 6.8 4.9 2.4 Bight of Biafra 2.9 2.9 2.3 Southeast Africa 2.3 0.2 0.1 Other 3.9 3.3 1.5 Total 100.0 100.0 100.0 n slaves 308 3,782 973 Sources: (for Le Cap) Archives Nationales d’Outre-Mer, Aix-en-Provence, SDOM 788–90, 855–58, 865–70; Susan Socolow, “Economic Role of the Free Women of Color of Cap Français,” in More Than Chattel: Black Women and Slavery in the Americas, ed. David Barry Gaspar and Darlene Clark Hine (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996), 279–97; (for sugar) author’s personal database, workforces of 59 sugar estates (1777–90); (for coffee) David Geggus, “Sugar and Coffee Cultivation in Saint Domingue and the Shaping of the Slave Labor Force,” in Cultivation and Culture: Labor and the Shaping of Slave Life in the Americas, ed. Ira Berlin and Philip Morgan (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1993), 81. a

Includes Damba (Ndembu?), Solongo, etc.

b

Bariba, Gurma, Nupe, Côte d'Or, etc.

c

Bambara, Male.

d

Susu, Pongo, Canga, Mesurade.

parity.49 The slave community in Le Cap was thus rather more African than most of the colony, and considerably more so than the sugar estates of the Northern Plain that surrounded the town. This, along with their high sex ratio, implies that more urban slaves worked on the waterfront, in the artisan crafts, and in the building trades than in domestic service, in which creoles and women were most

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prominent. A Hispanic visitor commented that a three-livre servant tax made domestics much less common than in Spanish colonies.50 On the other hand, the city did not employ many in manufacturing, except perhaps in furniture making. The North Province had a number of distilleries, potteries, and tanneries, but the risk of fire and public nuisance kept them outside the urban perimeter. Cap Français’s slave population resembled that of the mountain coffee plantations in its relative proportions of Africans and creoles, but it resembled the workforces of the lowland sugar estates in its African population’s ethnic makeup (Table 5.3). Like everywhere else in Saint Domingue, the Kongolese were the largest ethnic group, though not so disproportionately as in the mountains, and, as in all the sugar-growing regions, the Aja-Fon (Arada, etc.) were easily the second most prominent group. The African city dwellers were nevertheless unusual in a few respects. Whereas Bambara, who constituted from 2 to 6 percent of Africans in other regions of Saint Domingue, were almost entirely absent, the other peoples transported from Senegambia (Mandingo, Fulani, etc.) were notably more numerous than anywhere else in the colony. So were the Susu from the Windward Coast (Table 5.3). According to some, Mandingues and Sénégals (presumably Wolof, Tukolor, Serer, and Sarakollet) were preferred as domestic servants. Plantation evidence does nothing to confirm this, however.51 All the Senegambians, and the Susu, had two other features in common. Together with the Hausa, they were, by a clear margin, the tallest ethnic groups in Saint Domingue, and they had been exposed to Islam.52 Although modern scholars doubt that more than half of the Senegal valley’s population had been converted prior to the nineteenth century, Moreau de Saint-Méry thought that most of these peoples were influenced by Islam to varying degrees.53 It is not obvious why the most Islamized, or the tallest, Africans, might be selected for urban employment, but it appears that Cap Français contained an unusual concentration of Muslims, who may have constituted between 10 and 15 percent of its African residents and at least one in twenty of its slaves.54 Finally, people from Southeast Africa, who were newcomers to Saint Domingue in the 1780s and very rare in the countryside, were clearly more common in Cap Français.

People as Property Thanks to the Atlantic Slave Trade Database and the earlier research of Jean Mettas, we now know a good deal about the migration flows that brought

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these Africans to Saint Domingue. Le Cap was the main destination of more than one-third of all French slaving voyages. In 1790, the peak year of the French slave trade, French ships brought more than nineteen thousand Africans to Cap Français—a record for any American port to that date. They usually arrived on vessels carrying more than three hundred captives. After 1750, an average of one in eight died during the crossing.55 A critical gap in our knowledge is what happened between the Africans’ arrival in port and their final sale. In the late 1780s, slave ships spent an average of only three months at Le Cap and most captives were sold on board ship, as the city lacked merchant yards like those Trevor Burnard describes in Kingston, Jamaica. Yet only for the year 1784 do official statistics distinguish between the number arrived and the number sold, and the gap is considerable. At Port-au-Prince, 11.7 percent of arrivals died unsold, and at Cap Français, 18.4 percent.56 One would like to know whether this was an unusual year. The issue has important implications regarding colonial demography and slave trade economics, as well as the African migration experience. If these figures were truly additional to the known shipboard losses, and the Port-au-Prince figures were typical for Saint Domingue, then the mortality rate of Africans in transit would need to be almost doubled; the Cap Français figure implies a loss rate of nearly 30 percent. Given the difficulty of separating arrival, disembarkation, and sale data for every voyage, however, it is likely that the currently available slave trade mortality statistics derive from a mixture of all three and hence obscure the reality. The newspaper article that reported these figures merely commented that the reasons for the higher mortality at Le Cap should be investigated. Midway through 1784, administrators had already intervened to change the way slave traders did business. Sales were usually conducted on board ship in the harbor, but unsold, often sick, captives were disembarked and packed into merchants’ warehouses near the waterfront, where many died amid filth and squalor in public view. The administration therefore ordered sales transferred to La Fossette, a large open space to the south of town, where recently vacated barracks were converted into a slave market. The new policy apparently remained a dead letter, but a new hospital for slaves supposedly saved many lives.57 Le Cap was regarded as a premium market in the slave trade; slaves it rejected were sent on to the colony’s other ports for sale. It is thus surprising that African newcomers cost less in Cap Français than elsewhere in the colony. Slave traders offered better prices there because they could turn their

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Table 5.4. Average Prices of Slaves (livres coloniales)

Men

Women Children Average

1778–79 1,960 1,763 1,312 1,818 1784–89 2,914 2,733 1,640 2,830 Source: Archives Nationales d’Outre-Mer, Aix-en-Provence , SDOM 788–90, 855–58, 865–70. Note: Children = 0–14 years.

ships around quickly and because local buyers were less prone to demand credit.58 Local buyers benefited from a discount of 200 to 300 livres, but like all Domingan colonists they saw the cost of labor rise steeply after the American Revolutionary War. The average price of Africans sold by slave ships in Saint Domingue rose from 1,670 livres coloniales in 1783 to 2,134 livres in 1789.59 In our data set of 751 urban slaves, prices rose as listed in Table 5.4. The “masculinity premium,” or gap between male and female prices, shrank considerably. This was probably because the need for men to clear land was diminishing and because the rising cost of labor increased the value of the reproductive capacity of slave women. The value of newcomers increased once they had survived the “seasoning period” and learned the creole lingua franca, particularly if they acquired specialized skills. The price of one young Kongolese woman rose from 1,800 to 4,000 livres in three years, though physical maturation doubtless explains much of the increase. After five years in Saint Domingue dressing wigs, a Kongolese boy of fifteen was valued at 3,000 livres. In general, Africans were valued less than creoles. In this sample, their average price was 2,583 livres, and that of creoles 2,968, but there was a large number of unknown origin, whose average price was 2,899 livres (slaves aged fifteen and over). Most of the latter were artisans belonging to the contractor Jean Artau, who handled major building projects for the government. Table 5.5 shows the range of values attached to different occupations, and notably the artisan crafts. Stonemasons and wheelwrights generally ranked ahead of blacksmiths, coopers, and carpenters. Several of the masons were worth more than 5,000 livres, although the most highly priced person in the sample was a carpenter valued at 10,000 livres.60 Ordinary domestic servants, mainly female, were priced only a little above general laborers. Hairdressers and cooks, generally male, averaged more than 2,800 livres, and two seamstresses had an average value above 7,000 livres. Teamsters, who drove mule carts and ox carts, were

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Table 5.5. Average Prices by Occupation

Livres coloniales

Coachman 5,300 Mason 3,888 Wheelwright 3,638 Blacksmith 3,571 Cooper 3,500 Carpenter 3,336 Roofer 3,125 Joiner 2,973 Painter 2,833 Canoe man 2,662 Caulker 2,600 Servant 2,300 Teamster 2,213 Laborer 2,172

n 2 71 4 6 9 56 18 13 3 29 2 8 31 61

Source: Archives Nationales d’Outre-Mer, Aix-en-Provence, SDOM 788–90, 855–58, 865–70.

not highly prized, but driving a coach—one of the most creolized occupations in Saint Domingue—was among the most sought-after positions a slave could obtain. Cochers, like the Cuban calesero, occupied a special place in the slave hierarchy, as they would later in the leadership of the Haitian Revolution.

Slave Life in Le Cap The slave community of Cap Français was more youthful than that of the surrounding plantations. Young adults predominated, and despite the paucity of children, the average age in the 1770s and 1780s was just over twenty.61 Colonists described slaves in Le Cap as better fed, wealthier, and healthier than rural slaves.62 The little that is known about where they lived reveals two contrasting patterns. Unlike plantation slaves, who had their own quarters, most probably slept under their master’s roof. Artisans presumably lived in their workshops, like their free counterparts, and domestic servants were housed in cramped structures lining the walls of the interior courtyards of Le Cap’s houses. Many, however, lived more independent lives. Despite legislation to the contrary, they hired themselves out, paid their owners a share of their earnings, and found their own lodgings. According to a report written

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in 1785, “There are in the town 2,000 slaves who pay their masters a certain sum every day, week or month . . . but they do not see their masters for two or three months.  .  .  . They rent rooms where they please, where they can commit the worst excesses. . . . All the slaves are thieves and receivers of stolen goods.” 63 Such laxity, the same critics charged, also provided a cover for “quick-witted fugitive slaves . . . who obtain lodgings from ship captains and town residents, which is an enormous abuse.” When the governor conducted a sudden sweep of the town during the American Revolutionary War, two hundred fugitives were caught. The likeliest place for renting rooms was the appropriately named Petite Guinée neighborhood on the western side of town, where it pushed up against the encroaching hillside. One of the few districts in Le Cap to retain many wooden buildings, its house plots were subdivided and shared by numerous small shacks separated by alleyways. It was not exactly a ghetto, since one-quarter of the residents were white and it contained some stylish buildings, but free blacks owned or rented much of the property.64 Two court cases from the mid-1780s shed light on this world where slave autonomy, maroonage, and crime intermixed. In one case, a free black woman and a dozen creole and African slaves were condemned for participating in a ring of thieves and receivers. They had recently broken into the room of a free woman of color, stolen her furniture, and moved it into the Petite Guinée district, where several rented rooms from a poor white. Half the slaves involved appeared to be fugitives using forged passes. One was a hairdresser, another an upholsterer. A white soldier was charged with them but acquitted. The other case involved the slave of a priest, who allowed him to live free in Le Cap in exchange for a monthly payment. César, the slave, had supposedly suborned a group of slaves from distant Gonaïves, whom he rented out in the town, pretending to be their owner. The court suspected he was hoping to sell them. After conducting an investigation, it condemned César to hang and denied his owner compensation. The white landlord who rented César a room was prosecuted, as were several people of color who forged papers for him, and a free black who helped arrest him received a 600 livres reward.65 Colonial commentators liked to contrast an idealized field slave, simple, stoic, and unassertive, with a corrupted urban counterpart, spoiled by contact with white society. Apart from theft and maroonage, other themes that recur in colonial complaints about urban slaves were conspicuous display, gambling, promiscuity, and, above all, insolence.66 Some added drunkenness, but Moreau de Saint-Méry, who complained about slaves’ late-night drinking

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and gambling in Le Cap’s numerous rum shops, observed that inebriation was exceptionally rare among slaves.67 A major reason for colonists’ concern was fear of urban slaves’ influence over the numerous rural slaves they rubbed shoulders with in the towns’ Sunday markets. According to Moreau de Saint-Méry, fifteen thousand came into Cap Français on Sundays to buy and sell. The marché des Nègres in Clugny Square operated seven days a week, but its regular stallholders seem to have been free women of color. On Sundays, however, the square filled with plantation slaves who brought fruit and vegetables from their provision grounds, eggs and poultry from their chicken coops, and handicrafts like sisal rope and decorated calabashes. Bartering with town slaves and haggling with free colored traders, plantation workers purchased salt meat and fish, trinkets, and clothing; they particularly prized the madras handkerchiefs that were the hallmark of creole style. Because they could usually eat what they did not sell, rural slaves drove hard bargains and exhibited in matters of commerce “an astonishing solidarity.” Proximity to urban centers had a visible effect on their standard of living. Those with access to the towns were able to afford the modest finery that so impressed European visitors; those who lived furthest from the ports were more likely to wear rags or go naked.68 The urban market, with a clientele from Europe, Africa, and America, cottons from India and shoes and jewelry from France, yams and plantains from the plain, and carrots and cabbage from market gardens in the hills, was a crucible of transculturation. In imitation of whites, urban slaves were said to eat bread rather than root crops, but many French creoles, despite the national passion for bread, apparently preferred cassava and yams.69 Young white women copied the clothing and languorous gait of women of color.70 Along the harbor front could be heard all the coastal accents of France from Marseille to Dunkirk, but the language of the food market was Créole. Le Cap was unusual in having its own dialect of Créole, which is still spoken in northern Haiti. At what point it took shape is uncertain, but some of its distinctive features may derive from Spanish influence. It may thus reflect Cap Français’s trade links with Spanish America, which made the peso fuerte, cut into bits, the most commonly used coin in the colony’s markets. The evenings of market days were occasions for dancing, drinking, and stick-fighting at several locations on the outskirts of town. Comparable to New Orleans’ Congo Square, and the cabildo festivals and Candomblé meetings analyzed by Childs and Reis in this volume, La Fossette became

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“a spectacle of fury and pleasure,” in the words of Cap resident Moreau de Saint-Méry. A Martinique creole, Moreau was a connoisseur of Caribbean dance, but he was one of several elite figures to accuse the town’s small police force of turning a blind eye to such gatherings and of failing to enforce restrictions on gambling and the selling of alcohol to slaves. He also singled out the carrying of cudgels by male slaves that, like self-hiring, had long been illegal.71 Magistrates like Moreau were learning in these years that the men who owned such wooden clubs, sometimes fitted with metal studs, might pay sorcerers to increase their potency by drilling holes into them where they inserted magical powders. He did not know that such weapons could function as badges of membership in secret societies in Africa and Saint Domingue.72 Yet he was aware that such societies—which colonists were beginning to call “Vaudou”—might mask their religious activities by holding secular public events to allay whites’ suspicions. Perhaps to allay the fears that this mysterious Vodou cult causes in the colony, a show is made of dancing it in public to the sound of drums and handclapping. It is even followed with a meal at which only poultry is eaten. But I can assure you this is only another ruse to mislead the vigilance of the magistrates and to better secure the success of these sinister meetings. They are not for amusement and pleasure but rather a school where weak minds give themselves over to a domination that in a thousand ways could prove to be fatal. . . . Nothing is more dangerous than this Vodou cult, which is founded upon the idea that [its priests] know and can do everything. It is ridiculous, but a potentially terrible weapon.73 It is not evident whether Moreau de Saint-Méry’s famous description of a Vodou ceremony had a rural or urban setting. The site-specific accounts we have of such ceremonies are all rural, but the two detailed accounts left by Moreau and Drouin de Bercy give no clues except that they took place in secrecy in fairly large buildings. It seems unlikely that such noisy activities could have been concealed in the Petite Guinée neighborhood or a periurban location such as La Fossette, but it cannot be ruled out. As Moreau’s account features a king and queen, and hints at Vodou’s functioning as a selfhelp organization, the following anonymous reference to burial societies is of considerable significance.

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The daily surveillance of slaves in Le Cap is extremely negligent. They have organized separate rankings among themselves. They have gathering places, kings and queens, sashes of different colors with different types of gold and silver braid that they wear on their jackets, and the women wear round their waist. They pay a subscription of several portugaises [a gold coin worth 66 livres] and burial fees which the others inflate as they feel like it. These funerals give rise to big processions, at which the sashes are worn.74 Given that the largest slave uprising in American history was brewing at this time in the Cap Français region, it would be useful to know in what measure these different social activities—whether secular or religious, ludic or for self-defense—were creating new social identities or just preserving older, ethnic ones of African origin. Ethnic tensions were to run through the Haitian Revolution and impede its progress at certain points, but it presumably would not have succeeded without the creation of solid, shared identities. Descriptions of public dancing from elsewhere in the colony indicate that, in the 1790s, different African peoples danced in separate groups on such occasions, even pushing away “outsiders.” Communal dances thus brought people together and separated them simultaneously; they affirmed a sense of difference on a common ground. Vodou, with its separate rites of different ethnic origin, would appear to have done the same. Yet no one has demonstrated that its umbrella structure in fact emerged before, rather than after, the revolution and thus promoted political cohesion, as is usually assumed. Some evidence suggests that traditional religion was a divisive influence into the 1790s. However, if we read the ceremony Moreau de Saint-Méry described as combining a West African snake cult and blood oath with a Kongolese invocation and amulets, a case can be made that the major ethnic groups in Saint Domingue were worshiping in the same forum before 1791, which perhaps sheds light on how slaves from diverse regions of Africa were able to band together in contentious cooperation during the slave revolution.75 Another, more visible, forum in which Cap Français’s slaves found religious common ground was its Catholic church. In 1761, the local attorney general had raised alarm about free and enslaved blacks holding their own meetings in the church during the afternoon siesta and at night, sometimes without the presence of a priest. They had named choir leaders, beadles, and church wardens. Some among them catechized and preached, not only in the church, but in the town and on surrounding plantations.76 This was during

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the time of the Jesuits, whose expulsion soon afterward diminished slaves’ exposure to Christianity. The parish continued, nonetheless, to employ a special curé des nègres, the only one in the colony. A separate “Negro mass” was held on Sundays and was preceded by hymn singing and prayers conducted by some elderly black men and women. Félix Carteau, a local merchant, claimed that the slaves were the most Christian part of Saint Domingue’s population. According to Carteau, they avoided confession, and only old women took communion, but they believed in heaven and hell, regarded baptism as a status symbol, packed churches for the mass, and enjoyed processions and hymns.77 None of these attributes, of course, would have prevented participation in Vodou. Several of the themes touched on above reappear in a remarkable report drawn up in 1785 by the Chamber of Agriculture. Seeming to foreshadow the coming upheaval, it expresses a sense of losing control and depicts the town of Cap Français as the root of the problem.78 The Negroes are so open in their insubordination that the line of demarcation between whites and slaves has almost vanished. What remains of it can be seen when one journeys away from [Le Cap]. Sooner or later this town is going to cause ever greater problems between discipline-loving planters and their workforces. Controlling them nowadays requires more technique, subtlety, and caution [than before]. . . . The Chamber dares to predict there will be grave events that will change the face of things if . . . the minister does not speedily give orders to put an end to this evil. . . . Such good intentions, however, will be useless if the Negroes are not brought under control in the towns and villages, whence the evil is bit by bit spreading, and if we tolerate their nightly gatherings and gambling dens, their nocturnal dances, associations, and brotherhoods. . . . Let us list some of the acts of insolence that will perhaps better demonstrate how far the slaves push their disobedience. . . . Monsieur Dufour, walking along Rue Espagnole at five o’clock in the evening, found his way blocked by a group of blacks. He had a lady on his arm. As none of them thought it his duty to step aside, he said to them, “Let Madam pass.” One of them replied, “M–r F–r, if it was one hour later, you wouldn’t dare say anything. You’d step aside yourself.”. . . On Rue Royale, a man told a group of Negroes making a noise in front of his house to go away. He received the reply, “The street doesn’t

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belong to you; it belongs to the king!” He went to raise his cane and someone threw a large stone at him just missing his chin. . . . Seeing a slave woman pass by who had just been whipped in the jail, one of M. Fouché’s slaves, shouted out, “Well now! Isn’t it right for slaves to kill whites? Just look what they did to this woman!” Many Negroes in Le Cap never go out without a large stick, and on holidays you find 2,000 of them gathered at La Providence, La Fossette, and Petit Carénage all armed with sticks, drinking rum, and doing the kalinda.79 The police do nothing to prevent these parties and they never end without quarrels and fighting. The comment about the street belonging to the king (of which the report cited two examples) is especially interesting, as it prefigured the sort of royalist strategy the insurgents of 1791 would use, when they claimed (wrongly) that the king had abolished (or modified) slavery. Such attitudes were doubtless fostered by news of genuine government decrees regarding the treatment of slaves that, in 1785, threw northern Saint Domingue into uproar. In a society where slave owners were absolute monarchs, the assertion of real monarchical authority over their masters gave slaves cause to celebrate, and perhaps to rethink their political options.80 It is unknown if the town of Cap Français, or its slave population, played an important role in the organization of the 1791 uprising. The person who quickly emerged as the revolt’s main leader, Jean-François Petecou, was the coachman of a city merchant, but he had become a fugitive in 1787 and, as a familiar face in town, he may have found it prudent thereafter to avoid Le Cap. The other principal leaders all lived in the surrounding plain within ten miles or so of the town. They would have found Cap Français a convenient place of rendezvous. But as most were coachmen, they enjoyed unusual mobility and other possibilities. In view of the foreboding that colonists felt regarding the subversive potential of the town’s population, it is ironic that there would be no urban revolt in 1791 and that no urban slave achieved prominence in the early slave revolution that swirled around city.81 This is not because none were involved in the revolt’s planning, it seems. The evidence suggests that a coordinated rising had been planned, involving town slaves and plantation slaves, but that, when the rural revolt broke out prematurely, the urban plot was stifled.82 Although the social flux and anonymity of urban environments gave slaves opportunities to conspire, the concentration of whites, and notably soldiers,

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in towns made urban revolts extremely rare in the Americas. The Haitian Revolution did little to change this pattern. One of the reasons the 1791 uprising was able to spread rapidly, however, and assume massive dimensions was the failure of Cap Français to send enough of its numerous defenders into the countryside, which was due to the fear of its panicked white residents of their black neighbors. Although Caribbean towns in the eighteenth century typically had black-majority populations, the imbalance between black and white in Cap Français, as in Saint Domingue as a whole, was extreme.83 By the 1780s, its social hierarchy of Europeans, free coloreds, and slaves followed the usual color continuum of white/brown/black but differed from the rest of the colony in the salience of its free black population. A surprisingly large proportion of the slaves, and many free blacks, were born in Africa; among them tall, apparently Muslim peoples were more common than in the countryside. During these years Cap Français became the largest single market in the Atlantic slave trade. On occasion, more newly arrived Africans died in the town awaiting sale than during the Atlantic crossing. Le Cap’s international prominence ended with the Haitian Revolution, which devastated its hinterland. At the center of the largest of American slave uprisings, the town’s enslaved and free colored inhabitants did not play a leading role in the conflict despite producing several famous revolutionaries.84 Although twice consumed by fire, in 1793 and 1802, the city remained a center of white colonial power until the end.

Chapter six

Kingston, Jamaica: Crucible of Modernity Trevor Burnard

J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur is one of the key delineators of the American national character, a man whose Letters from an American Farmer has a canonical status in early American literature. He is primarily known for his bucolic depiction of rural Pennsylvania, as the originator of the notion of America as a mostly harmonious melting pot of different ethnicities and religions, and as the author of that most famous of American questions, “What, then, is the American, this new man?” What is little appreciated is that Crèvecoeur had a more complicated, less sunny and optimistic view of national character than that customarily presented in his Letters from an American Farmer. We have become aware since the publication in English in 1995 of his unpublished work that Crèvecoeur’s America is a more complicated and darker place than that depicted in all of the letters in his famous book. The exception in Letters is Letter IX, his atmospheric portrait of Charleston, a place on the one hand seen as full of the “gayest” people in America, the “center of our beau monde,” including “a great number of valetudinarians from the West Indies, seeking for the renovation of health, exhausted by the debilitating nature of their sun, air, and modes of living,” but also seen on the other hand as being characterized by litigiousness, physical debility, moral decadence, and a brutal slave regime. The most haunting image of his description of the sights of Charleston is an infamous encounter between the narrator, James, and a tortured slave, put in a cage in a tree, left to starve to death by his master, with birds of prey picking out his eyes and attacking his flesh.1 This description of the caged slave has usually been seen as a dystopic

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rupture where the relatively coherent narrative voice of the early, sunny sections suffers an irrevocable collapse. Elizabeth Cook, for example, argues that Crèvecoeur’s belief in the cosmopolitan ideals of the Enlightenment is fatally undermined by the paradoxical status of the slave’s body as both agent of labor and agent of property, confronting the unnerved narrator with an uncanny form of rebellious agency.2 Letter IX has always proved difficult for commentators because its themes and dark tone seem to provide an abrupt and discordant disjuncture from the utopianism of the earlier letters on the American North. It seems out of place. But it is not. As Christopher Iannini notes, Crèvecoeur’s work is neither a work that offers a celebratory account of an ideal America nor a work that struggles to reconcile a set of conflicts internal to an emergent mainland society. It is instead, once we look at Crèvecoeur’s unpublished works, especially the “Sketch of a Contrast between the Spanish and the English Colonies” and “Sketches of Jamaica and Bermudas and Other Subjects,” a truly Atlantic work in which Charleston is not at the southern end of a north American mainland but at the northern periphery of an extended Caribbean that was thoroughly implicated in a global commercial revolution, based on slavery, that threatened the foundations of Enlightenment rationality.3 Crèvecoeur’s account of Jamaica was likely based on a visit to Kingston. We can see this in his attention to how business was done and to the constant crowds that attend his narrator when trying, and failing, not to be duped by the sharp practices that passed for business on the island. It can also be seen in a description of some of the cruelties of slavery, related through the person of an “English-born Lady” with whom he lodged, presumably in Kingston, and who whipped her house Negroes in what seems most likely to have been an urban setting. For Crèvecoeur, Kingston was deeply disturbing in ways that Spanish America—lethargic, indolent, superstitious, and backward— was not. Kingston was indubitably modern, a place displaying what were for Crèvecoeur the characteristics of modernity—restless wandering, corruption, and pervasive dishonesty. He noted that Kingston was a model of some sort. It was, after all, a place where there was “a great Glare of Richesses.” But his narrator was “shocked at that perpetual Collision & Combination of Crimes & Profligacy which I observed there,” the “severity Exercised agt ye Negroes” and the excitement of illicit sexuality that raised some black females to “Pomp” derived, Crevecoeur thought, from “a perversion of appetites.” In a place with no religion “save [a] few Temples,” everything was sacrificed to business and sensuality—“a

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perpetual pursuit of Gain & Pleasures seem’d to be the idol of the Island.” For the outsider and tourist, Kingston was bewildering a “Chaos of Men Negroes & things which made my Young American head Giddy.” Fighting his way “through this obnoxious Crowd,” the now not so innocent narrator reflected that “the Island itself looked like a Great Gulph, perpetually absorbing Men by the power of Elementary Heat, of Intemperance by the force of every Excess” so that “Life ressembled a Delirium Inspired by the warmth of the sun urging every Passion & desire to some premature Extreme.” His only response to these extremes, to the “Exhausting Climate” and to “the perpetual struggle subsisting between the 2 great factions which Inhabit this Island,” was to take his leave of Kingston, resolving not to think about it again.4 Thoughts of what passed in Kingston cast doubt upon the Enlightenment project of cosmopolitan adventuring. Both Letter IX on Charleston and the unpublished “Sketches of Jamaica” reveal the disillusionment of a previously innocent narrator going to decadent plantation societies.5

Kingston: An Unknown American Town It is not a surprise that Crèvecoeur’s account of Kingston is little known. A few historians have written on Kingston, notably Colin Clarke and Barry Higman, but few historians have given it sustained attention. Indeed, it is noteworthy that Port Royal—Kingston’s predecessor in the seventeenth century—and St. Jago de la Vega—the small town that was the capital of Jamaica until the nineteenth century and that was a perpetual rival to Kingston as the center of government on the island—have modern histories while the literature on Kingston is noticeably sparse.6 Kingston deserves our attention, nevertheless, because it was the leading slave port in the British Atlantic in the period of its greatest activity, with nearly 900,000 Africans arriving in the port between its founding in 1692 and the end of the slave trade in 1807.7 Many of these slaves were shipped out again to Spanish America, the locus of much of Kingston’s activities and the source of much of its wealth. A well-informed account of Britain’s American colonies in the mid-1740s determined that Jamaica was the most substantial financial contributor to the British Empire, with its trade to Spanish America at £900,000 per annum in 1745, making its total trade worth £1.5 million, compared to New England’s £1 million.8 The great wealth that sugar brought to British West Indian planters has focused historical attention overwhelmingly on the dynamic of the plantation

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system rather than on urban life. But places like Kingston were vital centers of activity in the British West Indies. Indeed, the town bears comparison with other British American towns in plantation societies, such as Charleston. Kingston comes out well of the comparison. Before and immediately after the American Revolution, it had more people than Charleston, supported a larger and more flourishing merchant class, was a center for female economic and social involvement, and was a center of free black life.9 Informed contemporaries knew that Kingston was more important than Charleston. Here’s Lowbridge Bright, a scion of a well-placed Bristol family with long connections to Kingston, on the deficiencies of Charleston on the eve of the Stamp Act crisis: I think the trade of this place is greatly overdone. Make no doubt but you might sell goods and negroes enough, but it would be impossible to get payment in any reasonable time. The gentlemen of this place are much in debt; the whole produce of the country is not more than three hundred and twenty thousand pounds sterling per annum to take off which here are full 100 stores of dry goods and ship chandlery &tc which with the negroes that are annually imported, rum from the West Indies, flour &tc from Philadelphia and new York, and the money spent in England, must necessarily exceed that sum. . . . Though the business of this place (by means of their connections) enables the natives to live genteelly, yet it would be difficult in any reasonable time to make a fortune sufficient to return to England, very few instances of which can be produced; which would be the great object I should have in view, to enable me to return as soon as possible to my native country, and settle amongst my friends.10 From the perspective of Kingston, the North American port cities were not especially impressive. Kingston was wealthier and, to some commentators at least, more beautiful than towns in British North America. Lord Adam Gordon, on a trip to British America in 1764, thought the town “very considerable, being large and well Inhabited, the Streets spacious and regularly laid out,” as befitted “the most . . . trading Town in the island.” 11 The major problem with Kingston was its mortality rate. It was, as Gordon admitted, “a very unwholesome place,” “often visited by sickness.” It was a charnel house where approximately one in five whites died every year. Just to maintain population, Kingston (a town with only a few thousand whites)

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needed to import 250 to 300 people per annum. Mortality rates were comparable to those attained in peak years of the plague in seventeenth-century London, and in crisis years Kingston’s mortality far outstripped mortality rates elsewhere in the empire.12 But despite horrific mortality, Kingston grew impressively over the eighteenth century. Between 1730 and 1788 the population increased from 4,461 to 26,748, making it the third largest town in the English-speaking Americas. The great majority of these people were slaves, who accounted for 16,659 of the population in 1788. The town was also the center of free colored life on the island with 2,690 free coloreds and 570 free blacks. The number of whites was considerable—6,539 in a white population in Jamaica that was less than 20,000.13 Not many white people may have spent time in Kingston, although my supposition is that there were a lot more people who lived and died in Kingston than we might think (parish registers note nearly eighteen thousand deaths between 1722 and 1774, suggesting that between twenty thousand and thirty thousand Europeans lived, worked, or died in the town in the second and third quarters of the eighteenth century). But for Africans and people of African descent, Kingston was one of the most important centers of Black Atlantic life in the New World. It occupied a place in relation to Jamaica that is similar to other cities and towns outlined in the chapters in this volume on Cap Français by David Geggus, Rio de Janeiro by Mariza de Carvalho Soares, Bahia by João Reis, Havana by Matt Childs, and Cartagena by Jane Landers. If we look just at the eighteenth century, when slave trading was at its height in the British Atlantic World and when the argument about the morality of slavery and especially the Atlantic slave trade became a central part of Enlightenment and colonial discourses, then Kingston’s importance for understanding the urban dynamics of slavery illustrates even broader patterns, which further underscores the need for more scholarly attention to this most important Black Atlantic port city.14 Slavery was important in Kingston in three ways. First, it was the foundation of its economy. The importation of African slaves into the Americas was the largest and most complex international business of the eighteenth century. Jamaica had an insatiable desire for slaves, which was mainly satisfied by the merchants of Kingston. Between 1700 and 1758 Kingston was the sole port of entry for Africans shipped into Jamaica and the major port for such shipments from 1758 to 1807. During this time nearly 830,000 slaves were imported into Jamaica (another 150,000 were shipped there and then sent to Spanish America). Assuming an average price per slave of £30, the total

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Table 6.1. Population in Kingston, 1730–88

1730 %a %b 1774 %a %b 1788 %a %b

Total population 4,461 Whites 1,468 Freeds 269 Slaves 2,724

5.3 N/A 14,200 6.8 26,478 10.5 17.8 32.9 4,000 31.4 28.2 6,539 35.6 26.6 6.0 1,200 40.0 8.5 3,280 43.1 3.7 61.1 9,000 4.6 63.4 16,659 7.4

N/A 24.7 12.4 62.9

Sources: Census 1730, C.O. 137/19 (pt. 2)/48; Census 1774, C.O. 137/70/88; Census 1788, 137/87, National Archives, Kew, London, “Statistics of Jamaica 1739–1775,” Long Mss., Add. Mss. 12,435, fol. 41. a

As a percentage of the total population of Jamaicans.

b

As a percentage of the total population of Kingston.

value of this trade amounted to nearly £25 million, or close to the total wealth of Jamaica in 1774. Perhaps £200,000 per annum passed through the hands of Kingston merchants.15 Indeed, Henry Bright, a Bristol factor resident in Kingston, called the trade to Africa the “chief motive of people venturing their fortunes abroad.” 16 Second, slavery was the defining status for the majority of Kingston’s population. Nearly 60 percent of Kingston’s population was slaves from the mid-eighteenth century, and as Kingston was the principal market for slave goods on the island, it was the place where slaves from throughout the island flocked. Third, slavery marked Kingston out as one site of a major transformation in eighteenth-century Atlantic life. In Kingston nearly one million Africans experienced the disorienting change from what they must have expected given their experiences of African slavery—status as nonpeople cut loose from kinship networks—to commodified persons bought and sold in open markets. Some historians argue that this transformative act of changing people into property took place upon the slave ship, and that is partly true.17 But in Kingston the transformation was completed. In other words, the process of enslaving humans that began in Africa became intensified at West African slave forts on the Atlantic, was followed a horrific crystallizing process during the Middle Passage, and finally came to a transformative conclusion with solidifying racial slavery into law, practice, and economic relations in Kingston. After arriving in Kingston, an African became a slave. Hundreds of thousands of Africans found themselves

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temporarily or permanently in Kingston at that crucial moment in their life when they became commodities.

The Transformation of African Captives into Jamaican Slaves For all the work done on slavery in the New World, we have devoted virtually no attention to that pivotal moment of sale and purchase. Contrary to what is usually thought, this was not a one-step process where planters rushed ships, bought the Africans that best suited their needs, and transferred them quickly to plantations where they “seasoned” them into enslavement. The torturous process of disorienting Africans from the world they previously knew and orienting them toward their life as racially enslaved laborers mostly took place in the merchant pens that were the New World equivalent of African barracoons. Most slaves were bought by merchants, on consignment from either British merchants or their factors in Britain (the large Kingston slave trading firm, Hibbert and Sprigg, for example, was consigned 3,358 slaves by British factors, out of total importations of 7,123 Africans arriving into Kingston between 28 September 1751 and 27 May 1752) or directly as large purchases from factors residing in Kingston, men who usually were friends of merchants, were business associates, or were the merchants themselves. The Africans whom merchants bought wholesale were conveyed to yards and pens all over Kingston in preparation for retail sale, usually to planters from the countryside, with slaves being sold to planters either as individuals or in small groups. Contrary to standard historical accounts about how Africans were sold on arrival, the process of sale was usually at least a two-stage process: slaves were bought by Kingston merchants who kept them in their urban yards before negotiating a further sale of these enslaved people to individuals who dealt with merchants in their urban shops rather than buying slaves directly off ships. Merchants, in short, had the market power to dominate the wholesale trade in slaves, forcing planters without similar market power to buy their slaves retail, from Kingston yards, rather than wholesale from slave ships. For slaves, this two-stage process of sale was crucial to their adjustment, such as it was, to life under slavery. That meant that the first experience of being a slave in Jamaica for most Africans came not on the plantation but in the Kingston merchant’s yard.18 We get some idea of the process from Olaudah Equiano’s autobiography. He describes how on arrival in the West Indies, he was “conducted immediately to the merchant’s yard, where

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we were all pent up together like so many sheep in a fold without regard to age or sex.” 19 In this respect, the slave trade made Kingston more than just a shipping point, or even a processing center. It was a place of profound human transformation. For one thing, it is probably likely, due to the way that slaves were dispersed after arrival, that enslaved people found more of their country people in urban yards than on plantations. Most planters bought only a few slaves at a time from urban merchants, meaning that their plantations, even in the early days of settlement, would seldom contain more than one or two people who had traveled together from Africa to Kingston.20 Kingston’s growth rates seem impressive but need to be placed in context. Kingston was one of the five major towns in British America, the other four being Boston, New York, Philadelphia, and Charleston. Philadelphia and New York both had more impressive rates of growth than Kingston. Philadelphia was established twenty years after Kingston’s predecessor town, Port Royal. By 1730 it had outdistanced its Caribbean competitor. It was 2.5 times Kingston’s size by 1730 and 2.9 times its size by 1774. By this time, Philadelphia was the third largest town, behind London and Bristol, in the British Empire. New York also had a larger population than Kingston by 1774. It had 25,000 people to Kingston’s 14,000 in 1774. Kingston, however, grew faster than either Boston or Charleston. Boston was double the size of Port Royal in 1680 and three times Kingston’s size in 1730. By 1774, however, it was roughly the same size as Kingston and by 1788 had 8,000 fewer people than Kingston. Charleston was similar in size to Kingston throughout most of the eighteenth century but slipped away after the American Revolution. In 1788 it had 10,000 fewer people than did Kingston. Kingston’s most impressive growth came in the 1770s and 1780s when it nearly doubled in size. If Jamaica had joined with the thirteen colonies in rebellion against Britain in 1776, Kingston would have been the third largest town in the new United States, with a population approaching that of New York and Philadelphia and appreciably bigger than that of either Boston or Charleston.21 The size and importance of Kingston means that we should pay more attention to the experience of urban slaves in Jamaica. Blacks were more likely than whites to live in the countryside, where they formed 95 percent of the population in most parishes. Nevertheless, sufficient blacks lived in Kingston to make it the urban center with the largest concentration of slaves in British America in the colonial and revolutionary period. Similar to other Black Atlantic urban cities analyzed in this volume, Kingston was probably a town in which the majority of whose population was African: it

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would seem logical that this was the case, given mortality rates and given the large slave trade to Kingston, but we have no direct evidence to confirm or deny the nature of Kingston’s slaves’ ethnic backgrounds. The dates of census taking in British North American port cities do not coincide exactly with the dates of censuses in Kingston, but Ira Berlin has calculated that there were 12,444 blacks (both slave and free) in the port towns of Boston, Newport, Providence, New York, Philadelphia, and Charleston combined between 1770 and 1784. The census of 1774 in Jamaica estimated that there were 9,000 slaves and 1,200 free people of color in Kingston. By 1788, these figures had increased to 16,659 and 3,280, respectively.22 These figures suggest that Kingston had almost as many slaves and certainly more free people of color than all the urban centers of British North America combined. Certainly, there were considerably more black people in Kingston than in Charleston, normally considered the center of black urban life in the British Atlantic World. Moreover, the numbers cited above give only a partial indication of the presence of blacks in the streets and yards of Kingston. In the 1770s, over 90 percent of the nearly 15,000 Africans arriving in Jamaica per annum via the Atlantic slave trade spent their first nights in Jamaica in merchant’s pens in Kingston. Most of these slaves were sent off to work on the sugar estates that dotted Jamaica’s landscape, but an increasing proportion of Africans remained in Kingston. The percentage of Jamaican slaves who lived in Kingston increased from 3.7 percent to 7.4 percent between 1730 and 1788, while the percentage of the rapidly growing free colored people of Jamaica who lived in Kingston rocketed from 26.6 percent to 43.1 percent in the same years. Kingston is important as the first place that Africans met whites in America and vice versa. It was, as Crèvecoeur noted, “a Chaos of Men Negroes & things.” We get some sense of the chaos of the town from the diaries of Thomas Thistlewood, who spent his first few days in Jamaica walking the streets of Kingston and jotting down his observations. He visited a slave market, where he saw “yams, cashoo apples, guinea corn, plantains &tc” and encountered some African “black girls” who “laid hold of us and would gladly have had us gone in with them.” After visiting two old inhabitants of the town and learning how to cope with the deadly climate—drink only water and eat chocolate—he started to learn about the African cultures of his new land by heading “to the westward of the Town, to see Negro Diversions—odd Music, Motions &tc. The Negroes of each nation by themselves.” 23 For Africans, recovering from the trauma of the Middle Passage, poked

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and prodded when sold on board ship or, more likely, on the Kingston waterfront, and herded into merchant pens before being resold to planters and local Kingstonians, the initial experience of Kingston may have been both bewildering and frightening. One of the many absences in the slave record is any account of what that process felt like. What I suspect, from having studied the process of sales in late seventeenth-century Port Royal (Kingston’s predecessor as principal transhipment point in Jamaica) and in mideighteenth-century Kingston, is that the character of slave sales changed over time in one important respect. Whereas in the late seventeenth century people tended to buy on their own behalf (meaning that the number of buyers at any slave sale was considerable), by the mid-eighteenth century there were clearly demarcated wholesale and retail slave markets. A relatively small number of slave purchasers, almost all of the most important being Kingston merchants, bought the great majority of African captives from slave ships docked at Kingston’s harbor. These large purchasers played an important role in shaping the early slave experience in Kingston. Africans bought in large lots may have had a greater chance than those sold in small lots to maintain links forged with shipmates and fellow countrymen. But the predominance of Kingston merchants among large purchasers may have led to the opposite effect because it is unlikely that these buyers kept slaves together for very long. It appears that the common experience for slaves bought wholesale to be sold retail was a brief residence on urban yards before rapid resale. It was in these urban yards where merchants “added value” to their human chattels by acclimating them to slavery and to Jamaica.24 Nevertheless, the isolation that newly arrived slaves felt might have been lessened by their connections with Africans eager to hear news of their homeland. Bryan Edwards noted how Kingston slaves often crowded around newly arrived Africans for news of their homeland. He commented that “oldestablished” slaves “when young people newly arrived from Africa, were sent among them, request . . . the revival and continuance of the ancient system [of receiving newcomers],” in part to replace by adoption their dead children by another country person, in part to provide wives “from their own nation and kindred” for their sons, and in part because “they expected to revive and retrace in the conversation of their new visitors, the remembrance and ideas of past pleasures and scenes in their youth.” 25 Kingston may have been a place of dislocation and isolation; but just like the routes that linked Bahia and Ouidah explored in the chapters by Robin Law and João Reis, it

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was simultaneously a place of re-formed networks, where Jamaican slaves reestablished their sense of themselves as Africans through hearing news and gossip from people newly arrived from the places from which they had been captured and stolen. The small proportion of slaves who stayed in Kingston undoubtedly had a better time in enslavement than the majority of Africans sent to toil on plantations, of whom between a quarter and one half would have died within three years of arrival.26 Nevertheless, quotidian life in Kingston for African and Creole slaves remains a woefully neglected historical topic despite the most important text for eighteenth-century Jamaica history, written by Edward Long, providing key clues and insights, which have yet to be followed with archival research.27 His comments do suggest, however, that Kingston was a lively place with more opportunities than in the countryside for enslaved people to gain autonomy, make money, and show themselves off to other slaves. Long’s brief comments also suggest, albeit obliquely, that Kingston was a particular location of slave resistance, or, more precisely, that a slave revolt in Kingston was something that incited especial fear among whites. In part, whites were fearful about slave resistance in Kingston because of the large concentration of slaves and free people of color in Kingston. In part, also, whites were worried because they felt that their relative independence made urban slaves fearsome adversaries. Finally, the geography of Kingston—a town full of wooden houses, built close together, with slaves living in yards approximate—made it particularly vulnerable, like almost all towns in the slave areas of the Americas, to fire and thus an easy place where there could be effective slave resistance.28 In 1733, for example, the Assembly was concerned about a report that “a white man and a negro were lately taken up rolling a barrel of powder in the streets of Kingston; that the negro had been committed, but had since escaped.” The Westmoreland slave owner and diarist Thomas Thistlewood reported a plot in late 1768 to burn down the town, which also caused anxiety. A long, undated letter to the custos of Kingston, Thomas French, from a white person called G. R., fallen on hard times—“I am now reduc’d to the Disagreable Necesity of living amongst Negres”—explained that Kingston slaves were planning to use gunpowder and fire to attack Kingston on 27 or 28 December 1768. Alarmingly for nervous whites, G. R. argued, “the negroes do not want for gunpowder ball and Arms they have in greate pleanty.” Of equal concern for the authorities was the ease of slave

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collusion in a town where enslaved people had relative freedom of movement and many slave yards in which to gather.29 Just as worrying were threats of plots or purported plots against white authority. The Jamaican Assembly in 1748 was especially concerned about a petition supposedly written by a slave called Cudjoe, addressed to local dignitaries, Edward Manning and Robert Penny, and titled “The Humble Petition of the Innocent Distressed Sons of Christ (commonly called negro slaves).” It turned out the petition was probably fabricated by white men “maliciously” trying to advance one political faction over another by suggesting that Penny and Manning were “friends” of discontented slaves. Nevertheless, the Assembly was sufficiently agitated to bring three white Kingstonians before it, where it denounced the petition as “a false, scandalous, malicious and seditious libel, most villainously misrepresenting the character and behaviour of several members of this house . . . [and intended] to excite mutiny and disorder, and to destroy the well-being of this island,” and it severely chastised Dr. James Smith of Kingston “now fled to the northside,” whom it declared the author of the libel and who should be prosecuted for writing it.30 Kingston was also a center of concern for worried whites during the trauma of Tacky’s revolt in 1760. The Boston Evening-Post published a letter of 16 June affirming that “most people here think this affair of the rebellion of the Negroes was to have been general, for they had elected their King and Queen; her Majesty has since been burnt at Kingston.” Though the letter writer correctly identified Cubbah, a woman whom the historian Edward Long alleged “had sat in state under a canopy, with a sort of robe on her shoulders, and a crown upon her head,” as one whom Kingston’s Akan slaves had elevated to a respected rank, he got what happened to her wrong. Cubbah was, according to Long, who seems in his text certain that the information he presents was based on fact, “seized, and ordered for transportation,” but instead she “prevail[ed] on the captain of the transport to put her ashore again in the leeward part of the island,” where she probably knew that several hundred slaves had since risen in rebellion against their masters. “She continued there,” Long noted, “for some time undiscovered.” Possibly, Cubbah may have become an Ashanti Queen Mother figure for the Akan slaves of Jamaica’s western parishes before she “at length was taken up, and executed.” 31

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Structures of Slaveholding in Kingston: Poll Tax, 1745 An understanding of the urban dynamics of slavery in Kingston can be derived from shooting a zoom lens snapshot of slavery at a specific point in time, and then employing a delayed-shutter lens over several years to examine changing slave structures. The demographic and economic patterns of slaveholding in Kingston emerge from a 1745 tax list where the number of slaves that each householder owned (and was thus liable to pay tax on) was listed. Table 6.2 details the distribution of Kingston slaveholdings among the 901 householders and 722 slave owners in 1745 who lived in the town.32 These slave owners owned 7,374 slaves, an average of 10 slaves per slave owner and 8 slaves per householder. The size of slaveholdings was lower than in the countryside, where the average slaveholding in the mid-1740s was 32 and where over two-thirds of enslaved people lived in slaveholdings containing 150 or more slaves. Nevertheless, as various chapters in this volume attest, the slave forces of Kingston slave owners were comparable to those in Havana, Bahia, and Rio de Janeiro but were larger than slave forces owned by slave owners in Charleston or Philadelphia.33 Relatively few Kingston slaves—60 in 1745—lived as solitaires, and just 612 enslaved persons lived in small slaveholdings of four or fewer slaves. Almost threefourths of Kingston’s slaves (5,381 or 73 percent) lived in slaveholdings that contained 10 or more slaves. Why did Kingston residents have so many slaves? Town residents did not need that many slaves to look after their small houses and tiny families or to assist them in their businesses, especially if they were merchants or shopkeepers. Yet there was an appreciable number of large slave owners in Kingston: 271 people owned ten or more slaves in 1745, with 91 owning more than twenty slaves and 15 having slave forces of forty or more slaves. A few of these slave owners were the proprietors of the small pens that dotted the outskirts of the town and that provided foodstuffs for Kingston and laborers for nearby sugar estates. Most of the people owning more slaves than they needed were involved in the very considerable retail trade of selling slaves. There were 25 slaveholders who kept thirty or more slaves in urban yards, almost certainly intended for resale or possibly for renting out to the surrounding pens for additional labor at harvest time. More research needs to be done here.

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Table 6.2. Structure of Slaveholding, Kingston 1745 Slaveholding size 1–4 slaves 5–9 slaves 10–19 slaves 20–39 slaves 40+ slaves

No. owners

No. slaves

245 206 165 91 15

612 1381 2,213 2,394 774

% owners 33.9 28.5 22.8 12.6 2.1

% slaves 8.3 18.7 30.0 32.5 10.5

Source: Kingston Vestry Records, 1745, IB/2/6/1, Jamaica Archives, Spanishtown, Jamaica.

The dimensions and organization of the retail trade in slaves are difficult to trace. The trade seems to have taken two forms. First, slaves straight from the ships were kept in urban yards and then transferred to plantations. Second, slaves were sold within Kingston itself. This second retail trade in slave sales was not inconsiderable. A toll book of local slave sales exists for 1742 and 1743. In those years 680 slaves were sold by Kingston residents in 494 separate sales, suggesting that approximately 5 percent of slaves sold in Kingston each year were sold in this way, with four of five being sold from one Kingston resident to another.34 Undoubtedly, these records are minimal rather than maximal figures of slave movements. Horrific levels of white mortality, with hundreds of slave owners dying each year without immediate heirs; high levels of debt, necessitating occasional emergency sales of assets; and high rates of mobility into the town would have affected where slaves lived and who owned them. Deeds of sale of property suggest extensive selling of slaves. In eight months in 1747, 286 slaves were sold and a further 67 slaves were leased in sixty-one conveyances specifically mentioning slaves, alongside an unspecified number conveyed by deed alongside the sale of real property.35

Structure of Slaveholding: Inventories The second way of examining slave structures in eighteenth-century Kingston is through analyzing inventories left by deceased Kingstonians. Between 1721 and 1786, 2,285 inventories of Kingston residents were taken, listing 31,186 slaves worth an average price of £41.54 per enslaved person. The average value of slave forces in the 1,627 inventories that contain slaves was £796.47. Inventories are not perfect sources for establishing slave

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structures, but they are the best surviving sources for the eighteenth century, outside the one poll tax list for 1745, and at least give us some figures that we can use to shape future work on Kingston slaveholding patterns. An inventory listed all personal property owned by a deceased person at the time of death. In Jamaica, appraisers of estates took particular care to list slave property, generally listing slaves by name and assigning a price to each enslaved person. The series in the Jamaica archives covers all except three years of the period between 1721 and 1786 (the missing years are for 1752–53 and 1773). These years were chosen because they correspond to the years when a parish register of births, marriages, and burials is extant for Kingston. The number of slaves does not match up to the number of enslaved people living in Kingston, as the inventories detail slave owners by residence rather than enslaved people by residence. Thus, inventories list enslaved people owned on plantations outside Kingston by wealthy merchants. A number of these merchants were very major slave owners, as noted in Tables 6.7 and 6.9. Consequently, the figures should be seen as a guide not so much to slave structures within Kingston itself as to patterns of slaveholding among Kingston residents. That Kingston residents owned many more slaves than could have been profitably used in the town demonstrates the extent to which Kingstonians were intimately tied up in the plantation sector and is testimony to the extent to which the urban and plantation circles mingled together. I have constructed six tables from data detailed in inventories, from which some speculative conclusions about slaveholding patterns in Kingston can be derived. First, as Table 6.3 shows, slavery was not a minor feature of Kingston life. Over two-thirds of inventories list enslaved people. Of course, people who left inventories tended to have property, and thus the figures recorded are biased toward the richer members of the community. Nevertheless, the extent of slaveholding is impressively high. It suggests that most householders would have owned slaves: in the 1745 poll tax list, for example, 80 percent of householders who were assessed tax owned slaves. Moreover, the likelihood that Kingston residents would own slaves increased over time. By the 1770s and 1780s, the percentage of inventories containing enslaved persons nudged up to three-quarters of all inventories. As the percentage of the population leaving inventories was probably increasing from midcentury, these figures indicate that slaveholding was becoming general in the town.

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Table 6.3. The Number of Slave Owners and the Percentage of Inventories Containing Slaves, Kingston, 1721–86 Period No.

n

1721–30 155 107 1731–40 191 152 1741–50 531 375 1751–60 409 284 1761–70 484 338 1771–80 380 277 1781–86 190 145 Total 2,285 1,627

% 69.0 79.6 70.6 69.4 69.8 72.9 76.3 71.2

Source: Inventories, Jamaica Archives, IB/11/2/12-65, Spanishtown, Jamaica.

It made sense to buy slaves. Not only could enslaved people be used to make money in a variety of urban occupations and in agricultural labor in the pens that dotted the outskirts of the town; they were very much, in the cold and calculating world of the actuarial sciences, appreciating human assets. As in Jamaica as a whole, the value of slave property in Kingston increased dramatically over time, especially in the third quarter of the eighteenth century. In the second decade of the eighteenth century, the average value of an enslaved person owned by a Kingston resident was £26.42. By the 1770s, that value had doubled, as Table 6.4 shows, to £53.23 per slave. At the same time, the likelihood that an enslaved person would die during the period of “seasoning”—the three or so years between arrival in Jamaica and becoming acclimatized, as much as slaves were ever acclimatized to life under slavery in the Caribbean—had probably declined. Data are hard to come by, but demographic extrapolations suggest that the rate of natural decrease among the slave population in Jamaica declined from over 4 percent per annum in 1700 to 2.5 percent by 1750 and to 2 percent by 1776.36 As a result of increasing slave prices, the value of enslaved property became considerable. By the 1770s, the average slave force noted in an inventory of a Kingston resident was valued at £1,363, as seen in Table 6.4. To keep this in perspective, we can note that the total wealth of an average white person in England and Wales was £42, while in British North America it was £60.37 The wealth of inventoried white men in both areas was higher than this, but not so much more as to reach into three figures. Slavery, thus, was a very good investment, in urban as much as in rural areas, even if the initial capital

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Table 6.4. Value of Enslaved Property, Kingston, 1721–86 Period na

£b £c £d

1721–30 1731–40 1741–50 1751–60 1761–70 1771–80 1781–86 Total

107 152 375 284 338 277 145 1627

42,776 58,502 170,001 242,160 338,929 377,115 129,226 1,295,426

26.42 25.70 36.67 40.37 47.38 53.23 53.11 41.54

399.78 384.88 453.34 852.68 1002.75 1362.98 891.21 796.47

ne 1,619 2,276 4,632 5,988 7,154 7,084 2,433 31,186

Source: Inventories, IB/11/2/12-65, Jamaica Archives, Spanishtown, Jamaica. Note: Sterling is converted from Jamaica currency at a rate of £1.40 Jamaica currency to £1 British sterling. a

Number of slave owners.

b

Total value of enslaved property.

c

Average price of an enslaved person.

d

Average value of an inventoried slave force.

e

Number of slaves.

outlay was large. The average value of slave forces in Kingston was 55 percent of the value of the average slave force in Jamaica as a whole. In the 1770s, the average slave force of 749 inventoried estates of slaveholders not living in Kingston was worth £2,469.23. Table 6.5 shows the impact on total wealth of rising slave prices. By the 1770s, the average value of a Kingston estate was £4,599, with estates containing enslaved persons worth £5,843. By this time, slaves accounted for a large proportion of Kingstonians’ wealth. Only debts were more valuable than slaves as components of Kingston wealth. Inventories are not especially revealing about the characteristics of the slave population in Kingston, although some inventories list occupations and what the health of enslaved people was like. One demographic characteristic that can be ascertained is gender breakdown. In Kingston, as in Jamaica as a whole, the percentage of enslaved people who were male was remarkably constant, at around 53 percent. Male rates were higher in the second quarter of the eighteenth century, at 55 percent of the slave force, but lower than the percentage of Africans imported into the island who were male. The relatively high number of females in slave forces reflects both the number of children in slave populations and also better female mortality and morbidity rates.38

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Table 6.5. Total Estate Values of Inventoried Estates and Slaves as a Percentage of Total Personal Property, Kingston, 1721–86 Period £a £b %c %d 1721–30 1731–40 1741–50 1751–60 1761–70 1771–86 Total

2,261 2,023 2,003 2,261 3,641 4,599 3,008

2,879 2,357 2,547 3,022 4,534 5,843 3,857

25 29 28 27 29 31 28

35 36 40 39 41 41 40

Source: Inventories, Ib/11/2/12-65, Jamaica Archives, Spanishtown, Jamaica. a

Average estate value, all estates.

b

Average estate value, estates containing enslaved people.

c

Percentage of value of all estates made up by value of enslaved property.

d

Percentage of value of estates containing slaves made up by value of enslaved property.

As might be expected, slave forces in Kingston were smaller than those on the island as a whole. The average slaveholder in Jamaica in this period owned 26 slaves, with the average slave force outside Kingston containing 31 enslaved persons. Most slaves—48.6 percent between 1721 and 1786—were held by slave owners who owned 150 or more slaves. The average slave owner in Kingston owned 19 enslaved persons, with 46.3 percent of slave owners owning between 1 and 5 slaves and a further 31.6 percent owning between 6 and 15 enslaved persons. Nevertheless, a number of Kingstonians were major slave owners. There were 98 people who owned between 31 and 75 slaves and 73 people with large slave forces, of over 75 enslaved persons. As Table 6.9 shows, some of the slave forces owned by Kingstonians placed them among the largest slave owners on the island. Alexander Macfarlane and Robert Stirling each had more than 750 slaves, while George Paplay and Edward Manning, each major Kingston merchants, owned over 600 slaves a piece. In sum, there were ten Kingston merchants who owned 350 or more enslaved persons. Clearly, these would not be slave forces located at Kingston but included enslaved persons on sugar estates and other properties that had been bought out of mercantile profits. Kingston merchants frequently became planters. Thomas Hibbert, for example, the largest slave trader in eighteenth-century Kingston, bought several sugar estates in St. Mary’s Parish, in north-central Jamaica. He left no inventory, but his near contemporary, Zachary Bayly, uncle of the author Bryan Edwards, did. Bayly died in 1770

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in St. Andrew Parish, just north of Kingston, with an estate worth £160,640 Jamaican currency, including 1,877 slaves, the most substantial slaveholding before the American Revolution. What these figures suggest is that Kingston merchants were significant participants in the plantation economy. Indeed, they were probably almost as significant as absentee owners of slaves and agricultural estates as were people resident in England. The greatest proportion of the 14,552 enslaved people owned by Kingston residents with 75 or more people lived on plantations rather than in town. Kingston was a commercial town, full of wealthy merchants and aspiring merchants. Some did not invest heavily in slaves relative to their overall wealth. They made their wealth from money lending, not planting. Edward Foord (d. 1777), Samuel Delpratt (d. 1784), and Richard Clarke (d. 1778), for example, were partners in the second largest slave trading concern in Kingston in the 1770s. They owned 192 slaves, but their wealth in slaves was tiny compared to the £394,574 of their total wealth of £472,591 (83.1 percent) that they had in the forms of debts lent out. The two richest partners—Foord and Delpratt—had 97 percent and 98 percent of their nonlanded wealth in the form of debts lent out. Malcolm Laing (d. 1782), Aaron Baruh Lousada (d. 1768), Jacob Lopez Torres (d. 1768), and John McLean (d. 1765) were other Kingston merchants with estates worth more than £50,000 Jamaican currency who had over 90 percent of their wealth as debts owed to them by others. On average, men in commerce owned diversified portfolios, with slaves accounting for 28 percent of their nonlanded wealth, as opposed to over 40 percent for slave-owning decedents outside Kingston. Nevertheless, slavery and commerce generally went together. Men in commerce were active slaveholders. Table 6.8 shows that over 70 percent owned slaves and that the average slave force that such slave owners had was twenty-seven. Such slave forces were considerably larger than Kingston slave forces as a whole and were not far below the average slaveholding of people in Jamaica in general. The majority of slaves owned by Kingstonians—19,967 of 31,186 (64 percent)—were owned by people in commercial occupations. The group least likely to own slaves was mariners, with under half of those leaving inventories also owning slaves. Given that mariners were on average poorer than the general population and spent much of their time at sea, away from close supervision of slaves, that nearly 50 percent of mariners owned slaves testifies the pervasiveness of slave owning in Kingston. Reflecting their relative poverty, however, those mariners who did own slaves had a great deal of their personal wealth invested in slaves—48 percent of nonlanded wealth for the average slave-owning mariner’s estate.

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Table 6.6. Gender Composition of Slave Forces Owned by Kingston Residents, 1721–86 Period

No. slaves

Male

Female

n % n % 1721–30 1731–40 1741–50 1751–60 1761–70 1771–80 1781–86 Total

1,619 2,276 4,632 5,988 7,153 7,084 2,433 31,186

861 1,251 2,568 3,322 3,909 3,756 1,290 16,957

53.2 55.0 55.4 55.5 54.6 53.0 53.0 53.2

758 1,025 2,064 2,666 3,244 3,328 1,443 14,229

46.8 45.0 44.6 44.5 45.4 47.0 47.0 46.8

Source: Inventories IB11/2/12-65, Jamaica Archives, Spanishtown, Jamaica.

The people most eager to own slaves, however, were those who were somewhat marginal in Kingston’s status system. Jews were devoted slave owners, with 81 percent of those inventoried listing enslaved persons. Women were equally only slightly less enthusiastic slave purchasers, with 80.6 percent leaving slaves in their personal property. But no group excelled free people of color as purchasers of slaves. Over 87 percent of free people owned slaves, and their slaves, at £42.05 per slave, were more expensive than slaves in general. Most significantly, investment in slave property took up 70 percent of the average nonlanded estate of free persons of color, easily the highest percentage for any category of people in Kingston.

Conclusion: Kingston and the Black Atlantic That the group that was most likely to own slaves comprised free coloreds, all of whom were people descended themselves from slaves, unsettles our established notions of how slavery is meant to work. We are confused, just as Crèvecoeur was confused when he arrived in Kingston with established opinions about how slavery militated against both wealth and also Enlightenment principles. Crèvecoeur was confused because Kingston did not conform to his established prejudices about tropical plantation areas. Slavery, he knew, was bad and led to venality among whites. It helped contribute to the lethargy and superstition that so marked out Spanish America from British America.

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But in Kingston he saw ruthless, cunning, calculating but indubitably modern, even Enlightened, slave traders and a society characterized by violence, hybridity, fluidity, and a propulsive energy that Crèvecoeur could see only as “a Chaos of Men Negroes & things.” Table 6.7. Average Size of Slave Forces Owned by Kingston Residents, 1721–86 Size of slave force Slave forces 1–5 6–15 16–30 31–75 Over 75 Total

Slaves

n % 754 514 188 98 73 1,627

46.3 31.6 11.6 6.0 4.7 100.0

n % 1,968 5,974 3,961 4,761 14,522 31,186

6.3 19.2 12.7 15.3 46.6 100.0

Source: Inventories IB11/2/12-65, Jamaica Archives, Spanishtown, Jamaica.

Table 6.8. Slave Owners and Enslaved Property by Category of Slave Owners Owner category na nb %c Merchants Gentlemen Commerce Tradesmen Doctors Planters Mariners Jews Women Free people

647 281 1034 381 87 27 198 202 320 47

483 179 742 284 61 20 93 164 258 41

74.7 63.7 71.8 74.5 70.1 74.1 47.0 81.2 80.6 87.0

No. slaves 17,801 1,568 19,967 2,646 699 721 682 3,001 2,712 282

nd £e %f 37 9 27 9 11 30 7 18 11 7

41.27 39.01 40.97 42.66 38.48 39.43 39.44 37.00 39.26 42.05

28 43 28 42 27 63 48 36 58 70

Source: Inventories IB11/2/12-65, Jamaica Archives, Spanishtown, Jamaica. Note: Categories overlap (e.g., some women were also Jews, or free coloreds). a

Number of inventoried estates in category.

b

Number of estates containing enslaved persons in category.

c

Percentage of slave owners among all estates in category.

d

Average number of slaves in estates containing enslaved persons.

e

Average price of each enslaved person in slave force.

f

Average percentage made up by enslaved people of total estate value of estates containing slaves.

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Table 6.9. Slave Forces of the Ten Kingston Slave Owners with the Largest Slave Forces, 1721–86 Name

Year

Alexander Macfarlane Robert Stirling George Papley Edward Manning Alexander Harvie William Foster Samuel Adams Jasper Hall George Richards John Nixon

1756 1764 1770 1758 1767 1757 1773 1780 1771 1775

No. slaves Total estate value (£) Slaves/TEV (%) 791 750 616 609 445 443 356 354a 352 350

74,535 76,343 135,539 67,298 95,993 56,301 29,733 45,192 54,997 45,105

49 58 22 38 30 28 56 45 33 54

Source: Inventories IB11/2/12-65, Jamaica Archives, Spanishtown, Jamaica. Note: For a nuanced discussion of these matters, see J. H. Elliott, Empires of the Atlantic World: Britain and Spain in America, 1492–1830 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006).

But it was not “Chaos” that Crèvecoeur actually saw. He saw in Kingston a quintessential Atlantic place, full of quintessential Atlantic people. David Hancock has put forward a powerful argument that the Atlantic was organized around three key attributes—decentralization, networks, and selforganization. We should not look at the Atlantic in terms of core-andperiphery or metropolis-and-margins models. There was no center to the Atlantic, although there were nodal points with their own centripetal political, economic, and cultural forces, notably in urban areas, where Atlantic peoples met, shared information, and circulated ideas, things, and people between themselves in ongoing, reciprocal, contestable networks. Kingston was one such center. A town devoted to commerce in many forms, it was full of “Negroes” as well as “things.” More than this, however, it was, for Africans who became slaves, a place of social transformation—where they began the process of turning from African captives into plantation slaves—and a place of dispersal, a funnel where they stayed, usually temporarily, before moving elsewhere. Kingston was also, however, a place of gathering, a focal point for enslaved people over the island, a place where they traded, mixed with each other, learned about the “old” country, and mingled together in ways both known and unknown to the whites who owned them. In short, Kingston was not just the center of black life in British America and a principal place of

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social interaction. It was a place of connection, a living embodiment of what Mark Peterson defines as Atlantic history, a place of “evolving conversation, a kind of transatlantic echo chamber, as ideas and practices generated indigenously in every corner of this expanding realm of communications began to merge.” 39

P art III Urban Spaces and Black Autonomy

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Chapter Seven

The African Landscape of Seventeenth-Century Cartagena and Its Hinterlands Jane Landers

Spain spent almost eight hundred years advancing its frontiers in the Iberian Peninsula, and the conquest of the last Muslim kingdom of Granada in 1492 segued into the “discovery” and conquest of new frontiers in the Americas. Spaniards viewed these events as proof of God’s will and of their own divine mission, and so they attempted to tame the “savage” and “infidel” new people they encountered in the Americas and the equally “wild” new environments they entered.1 Not surprisingly, indigenous populations resisted Spanish assumptions of superiority and dominion, and a rich historiography examines the resulting confrontations.2 But the Spaniards also found themselves in a simultaneous struggle with rebellious African slaves who, like the native populations, stubbornly clung to their own languages, beliefs, and cultural practices. Outnumbered sixteenth-century Spanish colonists lived in a state of paranoia, feeling themselves surrounded by potential enemies in the new American landscapes. As early as 1503 Governor Nicolás de Ovando complained that escaped slaves on Hispaniola could not be retrieved and were teaching the Taíno Indians “bad customs.” The maroons joined in the indigenous wars of resistance begun by Enriquillo in 1519 and then retreated with that cacique to the safety of the Bahoruco mountains, where they lived in relative autonomy into the eighteenth century.3 This early alliance may have encouraged

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the Wolof slaves who led the first known slave revolt in the Americas on Diego Colón’s sugar plantation in 1521. As Spanish Christians still battled Mediterranean Turks, the uprising of Muslim slaves from Senegambia on the Caribbean island of Hispaniola confirmed in the minds of fearful Spaniards the direct connection between African maroons with the still-threatening “Moors.” 4 Despite having experienced the first slave revolt in the hemisphere, the adventurers who fanned out across the Caribbean from Hispaniola in search of new conquests, Indian slaves, and riches all incorporated Africans in their expeditions.5 In 1526 Lucas Vásquez de Ayllón established San Miguel del Gualdape in what is today South Carolina, and Rodrigo de Bastides founded Santa Marta in present-day Colombia, which became the first Spanish city in the Kingdom of New Granada. Ayllón’s African slaves soon joined the Guale rebellion that destroyed San Miguel del Gualdape in South Carolina, and in 1531 African slaves also burned and destroyed Santa Marta. Two years later, another émigré from Hispaniola, Pedro de Heredia, founded Cartagena, also on the Caribbean coast of New Granada.6 Although in the early years they were few in number, African slaves performed critical economic functions throughout New Granada. Replicating what they had done in Hispaniola, they initially extracted gold from looted tombs of the Sinú Indians, as well as from the mines of Buriticá. As those riches were quickly depleted, Spaniards who had sustained themselves and their slaves on imported foodstuffs from Hispaniola and Jamaica finally began to establish cattle ranches and farms where slave labor proved essential. African slaves replaced Indians rowers on boats traveling the Rio Magdalena and formed early runaway communities near its course. Other Africans built the vast complex of fortifications and public works that protected Cartagena, while potentially more fortunate slaves served as domestics in the private homes and the many convents of the city.7 With the discovery of significant silver deposits in New Spain and Peru in the 1540s, the demand for slaves in the Spanish colonies rose dramatically. Cartagena, which had been designated an official port of the Spanish fleet system as early as 1537, became “by far the largest single port of [slave] debarkation in the Spanish Americas,” according to António de Almeida Mendes.8 Most of the early slave shipments into Cartagena originated from Upper Guinea (the Rivers of Guinea) and Cabo Verde. One list documents almost seven thousand slaves arriving in Cartagena from 1585 to 1590 and shows that almost six thousand of them came from those regions, while

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later shipments through São Tomé brought slaves from Lower Guinea and Angola. After the union of the Spanish and Portuguese crowns in 1580, the Portuguese Company of Cacheu began to export more slaves from Angola and the Kingdom of Kongo.9 Updating the path-breaking work of Enriqueta Vila Vilar, and expanding on the more recent work of António de Almeida Mendes, David Wheat’s new study uses previously unknown port entry records to document 463 slave ships arriving in Cartagena between 1573 and 1640. Those ships disgorged more than seventy-three thousand enslaved Africans who were recorded by port officials.10 How many more were smuggled into Cartagena cannot be known, but these numbers clearly show that the city and its hinterlands, where even fewer whites resided, quickly took on the aspect of an African landscape. When the slave ships came into port, agents from as far away as Lima would descend upon Cartagena to conduct purchases, and a number of the newly arrived slaves were subsequently transported to Portobello or to the mines of Potosí in modern Bolivia.11 The fittest of the slaves left their “floating coffins” alive and were deposited among the twenty-four slave warehouses of Cartagena, many of which were located near the wharves and the city walls near the convents of Santa Clara and Santo Domingo. Like their counterparts in Africa, many of the large traders maintained barracoons in the backyards of their own homes, some of which held two to three hundred slaves at once. Theadora de Rivera’s home and slave pen was located on Tezadello Street; that of Captain Francisco Caballero was on the main street of Cartagena; that of Captain Granzo abutted the convent of San Agustín (now the University of Cartagena); that of Gundisalvo Arias was on the Plaza of the Gaguyes; and that of the Portuguese trader Manuel Pinto de Gama was near the cathedral.12 Thus, the despicable trade in African bodies was conducted daily in plain view of the residents of Cartagena—both black and white—and in close proximity to the churches and family homes of Cartagena’s elites. It was not a pretty sight, or a healthy practice. Scurvy, dysentery, and yaws were common among arriving slaves. More deadly were typhus, measles, smallpox, typhoid, and yellow fever. Spanish officials and clerics established a series of hospitals in the city, including that of San Roque, “protector of the afflicted,” San Juan de Dios, and San Sebastián. They constructed the leprosarium of San Lázaro outside the city walls to try to contain the contagions. But incoming slave ships inevitably introduced more diseases despite the precautions. In 1651 a yellow fever epidemic swept through the crowded slums of Getsemaní and across the San Francisco bridge to Cartagena. The Jesuit

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Father Andrade described the “furious plague” that sent five hundred residents to the hospitals. Cartagena’s houses and slave ships were also converted into hospitals. He reported, “The Negroes, as the people most forgotten and neglected, suffered most. They were full of sores and worms, with no beds nor shelter and the pestilential odor that emanated from them was so vehement that it affected the head and paralyzed the sense of those who came near them.” 13 Affected by the growing misery before him, the famed Jesuit priest Alonso de Sandoval had earlier initiated a mission to evangelize and care for the newly arrived Africans. His resulting ethnographic study detailed the mistreatment, ill health, and neglect the captives suffered. He complained that slave traders and buyers in the barracoons milled around the corpses of the dead slaves “as if they were beasts.” 14 Taking the sobriquet “slave of the slaves forever,” Sandoval’s disciple, Pedro Claver, also dedicated his life to Cartagena’s African population. He and other Jesuits boarded incoming slave ships to distribute water, citrus fruits, and tobacco to the suffering slaves and attempted to minister to their physical and spiritual needs, but little could be done for many of the walking dead. Claver reportedly instructed and baptized three hundred thousand Africans during his forty-year ministry in Cartagena (1610–50), and although this figure is not supported by recent slave trade data discussed above, Claver was canonized by the Catholic Church for this still impressive effort.15 As the escalating slave trade dramatically altered Cartagena’s demography, it also transformed the seventeenth-century city into a particularly polyglot and multiethnic space. Sandoval identified at least seventy languages spoken by the Africans. As more and more Central Africans joined the mix, Father Claver learned “the language of Angola” (probably Kimbundu) and organized a team of African translators from Guinea and Angola to help with his ministry, one of whom, Calepino, was said to speak eleven African languages.16 Another interpreter, Ignacio Angola, testified that he and Alfonso Angola or Joaquin Nalua accompanied the friar on his Sunday peregrinations through the city during the Lent season carrying a standard and a cross. As the procession moved through the streets of Cartagena, slaves joined in, and when the crowd reached the Plaza de la Yerba (an open grassy area), Claver and one of his assistants delivered a sermon simultaneously in Spanish and Kimbundu. Thereafter, they questioned the black audience on doctrine and rewarded those who answered well with prizes of stamps, indulgences, and medals made in the Jesuit convent by a Wolof slave who may well have once been a Muslim.17

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By the seventeenth century Cartagena’s African population numbered between three thousand and four thousand, while the white population numbered only twenty-five hundred.18 The city’s outnumbered whites, like their counterparts in other cities of the Americas explored in this volume such as Rio de Janeiro, Bahia, and Cap Français, among others, struggled with conflicting desires for profits and security. As in those other locales, profits won the day, and slaves continued to pour into the city. Ordinances of the town council of Cartagena from the late sixteenth century onward reflect an obsession with controlling slave mobility, crime, and marronage. They contain somewhat standard prohibitions against selling alcohol to slaves and forbidding blacks to carry arms. They also restricted customary dances and drumming to designated locations, similar to the Havana urban code that relocated cabildo festivities outside the city walls, as analyzed in Chapter 4. All owners whose slaves had fled their control were required to register their names and punishments and payments for the capture of runaways. The periodic repetition of Cartagena’s slave ordinances from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century speak to their relative ineffectiveness in curbing slave’s unruly behavior.19 Cartagena’s church authorities also worried about religious crimes committed by Africans. In 1561 church officials condemned the slave women Catalina and Guiomar as well as unnamed others to be burned as witches.20 The presence of ever-growing numbers of Africans with a dizzying array of beliefs and of international merchants (many of whom were Jews or conversos, converts to the Catholic faith) made the city a potentially heretical place. In 1610 the Catholic Church established Spanish America’s third permanent tribunal of the Holy Office of the Inquisition in Cartagena, and thereafter that tribunal investigated brujería or witchcraft charges against blacks like Francisco Mandinga, Mateo Arará, and Paula Eguiluz.21 As Pablo Gómez has shown, residents of seventeenth-century Cartagena frequently sought out African-born or descended healers and ritual specialists for curing illnesses and resolving romantic and social problems. A number of these specialists practiced for many years before falling victim to Cartagena’s Inquisition. Paula de Eguiliz, whose mother was Biafran, was first condemned as a “witch, herbalist, and Muslim who is not afraid of God” by the Inquisition of Santiago de Cuba, which exiled her to Cartagena in 1623. Despite her infamy, Paula successfully reestablished her practice in Cartagena, but in 1635 Inquisitors charged her with murder for hire and sentenced her to lifelong service in a convent.22 When tried by the Inquisition in 1649, the popular herbalist Francisco Mandinga stated that he had known since birth how to heal people,

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which customarily involved sucking toads, hair, and pieces of bone from incisions he made on his patients.23 Mateo Arará’s reputation was so impressive that a mine owner from Mompox, seventy miles south of Cartagena, had once summoned him to heal his slaves, but in 1651 the Inquisition charged him with sorcery. Mateo told Cartagena’s Inquisitors that he learned his skills from his uncle Soo, a healer in the King of Allada’s court.24 Despite the general suspicions of Africans and their “heretical” practices, the numerous churches and convents of the city all owned slaves, many of whom enjoyed significant freedom to travel around the city and communicate with their compatriots, free and enslaved. Among the religious establishments in the city that owned slaves were the convents of Santa Clara, Santo Domingo, San Agustín, and San Francisco, the Compañía de Jesús (Jesuits), and the Hospital of San Juan de Dios on Espiritu Santo Street in Getsemaní. Beyond the slums of Getsemaní, through the main gate of the Media Luna or Half-Moon, lay swamps and a rugged hinterland populated from the earliest days of Spanish settlement by runaway slaves. In 1540, less than a decade after the city’s foundation, the king promulgated a royal pardon for “all the fugitive and rebellious slaves” of Cartagena.25 Despite this offer, slaves continued to run. Like their compatriots throughout the Spanish Empire, the maroons of Colombia carved out niches for themselves in the most inhospitable reaches where Spaniards did not care to live. Although rejecting Spanish dominion, these African runaways had at least occasional connection to Spanish communities through trade, banditry, warfare, diplomacy, and sometimes vassalage. The relationships maroons crafted with Spaniards were alternately parasitic and symbiotic, and theirs was a tenuous existence, requiring ingenuity and effort. Authorities complained that maroons raided Spanish settlements, enticed or stole away other slaves, and carried on contraband trade with corsairs and Spain’s enemies. The maroon communities also challenged Spanish notions of civilized living, and the desired racial and social order. When their palenques (palisaded camps) became large, fortified, and somewhat permanent, Spaniards tried to eradicate them in major military campaigns that adopted the language and character of Christian crusades. In these expeditions, St. James, the patron saint of the Spanish Reconquest, once known as Santiago Matamoros, or Mataindios, took on a new aspect as Santiago Matanegros (the Negroslayer).26 The series of Spanish wars against the complex of palenques that arose outside Cartagena de Indias were battles for territorial, religious, and racial supremacy.27 But frustrated Spaniards had only limited military success against the maroons. Like the many-headed

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Hydra, after seemingly deadly attacks, they always rose anew. Part of their longevity can be attributed to the assistance they received from the urban slaves of Cartagena and the rural slaves working on outlying estates. Together these groups collaborated to undermine the slave system, maintaining communication and complex social and military relationships under the very noses of the Spaniards.28 In 1682 the escaped slave of Don Fernando Padilla, now Captain Domingo Padilla (aka Criollo), visited the rural home of the priest Baltasar de la Fuente.29 Domingo had become the leader of a palenque called Matudere that lay deep in the Sierra María mountains, and de la Fuente reported he governed more than six hundred men, divided into four “nations,” each of which was led by a war captain of their own nation. At his meeting with the priest, Captain Domingo was accompanied by more than fifty armed men, in what might be considered a state visit. The maroons warned the priest not to seek them out and promised they would find him when they wished further contact. Thereafter, they summoned de la Fuente on a number of occasions to come to their scattered settlements, baptize the newborn, and consecrate marriages. Although disturbed by what he considered “idolatries and superstitions” he witnessed among them, the priest became the maroons’ ardent advocate. He assured the crown that the creoles led by Domingo Criollo wished to be “reduced.” The Spanish had initially used the policy of reducción to congregate indigenous populations into “human polity,” meaning Christian settlements modeled after Spanish towns, “with streets and plazas.” Christian Indian towns later became the model for free black towns such as Domingo Criollo allegedly proposed.30 Despite de la Fuente’s sympathetic reports, officials in Cartagena were alarmed by the scope of the maroon activity the priest had uncovered and by the fact that Domingo Padilla reportedly maintained communications with larger maroon communities in both Santa Marta and Panama.31 Only a year after Captain Domingo Padilla first contacted Fray de la Fuente, Juan de Pando became governor of Cartagena. The new governor was immediately besieged by complaints from local ranchers that the maroons were “appropriating” their cattle and had “usurped” three hundred gold mines in the area, so he decided on a hard-line response and mounted a large expedition to try to eradicate the troublesome network of maroon settlements along the Magdalena River. The settlements named in the resulting documents included Arenal (sandy ground or quicksand), Coco (coconut), El Limón (lemon), Tabacal (tobacco field), Espino (thorns), La Venta

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(the wind), and three with African sounding names, Duanga, Norossi, and Masu.32 Many of these palenques were already well known to frustrated Spanish officials. El Limón had been in existence since approximately the 1580s, and by the time an earlier Spanish expedition attacked in 1633, the settlement was reportedly defended by a force of two hundred men.33 Governor Pando reported that at one unnamed, but strongly fortified, settlement, a six-day march from the city, “the blacks came out to meet [their attackers] with much skill and valor” using Spanish arms they had acquired in earlier encounters as well as lances, bows, and arrows. After a hard fight, the maroons burned their own shelters, destroyed their fields of maize and cassava, and fled. The Spanish force spent the night exposed to a pouring rainstorm but the next day attacked the palenque of San Miguel Arcangel, a settlement reinforced by 450 men from other palenques. The defenders of San Miguel fought hard against the Spanish force before they, too, burned their own settlement and dispersed to associated palenques.34 Africans in the circum-Caribbean region associated the militant Archangel Michael with the Yoruba god of iron and war, Ogun, penetrator of the forests and cultivator of the land as well as a violent warrior who demands justice.35 David Wheat has documented the importation of several thousand captives from Lower Guinea into Cartagena in the mid-seventeenth century, thus placing people from Yoruba lands in the region much earlier than had previously been supposed.36 The loss of Spanish lives and the expense of mounting largely unsuccessful military expeditions against the maroons led the crown to issue a royal order in 1686 approving Domingo Padilla’s earlier peace terms: freedom and territory ruled by the maroons’ own alcaldes (mayors) and procuradores (advocates) under the supervision of a Spanish priest and justicia mayor, who would exercise ultimate legal authority over the settlement. In exchange, the maroons offered vassalage, tribute, and a promise to return future runaways. Padilla also offered his son as a hostage and pledge of good faith, just as European and indigenous monarchs might do when negotiating peace terms among rival kingdoms.37 The crown had a history of making strikingly similar bargains with maroons in Venezuela, Panama, the Viceroyalty of New Spain, and even New Granada since the early years of the century, but Spanish imperial policy also allowed local officials to use their arbitrio judicial or local judicial authority to manage local problems and deploy the formula obedezco pero no cumplo (“I obey, but I cannot comply”). Cartagena’s officials, therefore, ignored the 1686 edict to legitimate Matudere. Only in 1693 did they finally commission the Franciscan priest Fernando

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Zapata to “reduce” the maroons. The priest kept a journal of his visit to Matudere and recounted that as he approached the settlement he was met by Matudere’s war captain, Pedro Mina, out on patrol with a squad of eight to ten men whose faces were decorated with red and white paints. Father de la Fuente had also described Domingo Padilla’s troops as painted with red and white earth, and it is possible that these decorations were a reference to Shango, the Yoruba god of thunder and war. As was the case at the famous palenque of San Basilio, which was somewhat closer to Cartagena than Matudere, and also in Mexican palenques, Matudere’s war captains were all born in African and seem to have led squadrons of their own countrymen. Pedro Mina led the most numerous African nation in the settlement, and Francisco Arará, the escaped slave of Don Pedro de Anaya, led the second largest group. Pacho Congo and Miguel Pantoja (nation unstated) held subordinate military positions such as standard bearer (alférez).38 Father Zapata noted that the Minas controlled the camp’s forty-odd guns, while the creoles used lances, bows, and arrows. Zapata thought the distribution indicated the creoles’ preference for such weapons, which would seem counterintuitive. It might be more reasonable to assume that the settlement’s most able warriors merited the best weaponry. Although the priest’s perception was no doubt culturally skewed and his descriptions may have been colored by his first encounter with the maroons, he reported a definite divide between the Mina and creole elements at Matudere, locating them in different groups and in different parts of the camps and describing different activities and attitudes for each. Writing about later festivities, the priest again stressed the exoticism (read backwardness) of the Minas, whom he described as celebrating with their “customary dances.” 39 In contrast, Zapata referred to the creoles or American-born residents of Matudere, led by Domingo Padilla, as “domesticated,” presumably because of the Christianity they had demonstrated since first visiting Father de la Fuente’s home a decade earlier. In the interim, Domingo Padilla had visited the ranch of Don Diego Durango to be confessed by a visiting bishop. Father Zapata was impressed to find that the creoles of Matudere had built an “adequate” church that contained “paper images” (presumably Christian ones since he stated no objections). Later evidence showed that the priests’ cultural distinctions, and maybe those of the maroons as well, were not based simply on being African or country born. For example, Diego Biáfara and Francisco Arará served as “masters of the church” and led the Catholics in the palenque—those who “lived in Christianity, knew the prayers, sustained

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the church, and prayed the rosary,” according to Father Zapata. The priest asked for and received a demonstration of one of their services and said the maroons recited the rosary as a chorus “with devotion” and that they knew the proper responses and seemed to understand its religious meanings and tenets.40 Father Zapata urged the assembled maroons to be “reduced” and to give up hostilities against the Spaniards, and he asked to make a census of all of Matudere’s inhabitants. In response to that request, Pedro Mina rose to denounce the peace talks and refused to allow “his people” to be registered. Zapata, in turn, denounced Pedro Mina as a bad Christian and a disobedient vassal, though there is no record of him ever claiming to be a Christian or a vassal.41 Later military reports on Matudere included lists of captives taken when the settlement was finally destroyed in 1693. These reports provide important biographical data on the captives as well as information on their ethnolinguistic groups. Of the 250 maroons captured, more than 100 were either born in Africa or born to African-born parents. Among the Africans identified by nation were twenty-eight Minas, nineteen Ararás, ten Congos, nine Luangos, five Angolans, three Popos, three Yolofes (Wolofs), two Caravalíes, one Bran, one Goyo, and at least one Biáfara. Thus, the community consisted of persons from Upper and Lower Guinea as well as from West-Central Africa and reflected the diversity evident in the slave trade patterns discussed above; however, groups from Lower Guinea were in the majority. The ethnonyms in these lists, like other information in the reports, were generated during interrogations en route, in the town of Timiriguaco, and in Cartagena.42 When Spanish officials in Cartagena interrogated bozales, or persons who could not speak Spanish, they depended on the famed African translators of the Jesuit College of Cartagena, such as Andres Angola.43 Thus, it is probable that these ethnic designations came from Africans rather than Spaniards and had significance for the captured maroons.44 The Spaniards divided those persons they designated as criollos into two groups: criollos de la montaña or del monte to identify those persons born free in the palenque and criollos escapados to designate creole runaways from Spanish cities (persons who in other contexts are described as ladinos, meaning acculturated Spanish-speaking Catholics), perceived as less threatening than either of the other groups.45 Matudere’s survivors included forty women and forty-nine children. The community was obviously reproducing itself, and families had also adopted three orphans. Some of the increment also appears to have been the result of a deliberate policy to reunite family members. Captain Francisco Arará led one

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raiding party to retrieve the wife and four children of Francisco Popo, who had earlier escaped from the hacienda of Pedro Pérez. Evidence from Matudere suggests that the common complaint of Spanish officials that maroons stole women from Spanish haciendas and Indian towns was sometimes true. Francisco Arará also led the Matudere maroons in a raid against the enemy Indian town of Piojón, where they killed ten men and carried off nine Indian women and a young girl. An attack against the Indian town of Bifagua added three more women and seven boys to the Matudere population. Domingo Padilla later told Spanish officials that Matudere’s African shaman, Antonio, had ordered the capture of the nineteen Christian (Spanish) women recovered from the settlement. Like the Indian women, the Spanish women were meant to be wives for the unmarried men at Matudere. The Spanish force that attacked Matudere also brought back two other women and three children from the Pérez hacienda whose relationship to the Matudere maroons (if there was one) was not stated. Surprisingly, the Spaniards asked no questions about, nor did Padilla volunteer any details on, when or where the maroons captured the Spanish women.46 Richard Price theorized that successful maroon communities elected acculturated blacks as leaders for their valuable knowledge of the oppressor, and this may have been the case at Matudere.47 The criollo escapado named Domingo Padilla and his wife, Juana Padilla, claimed to have founded Matudere in 1681. Domingo took the title of captain, but Juana adopted the Spanish title, virreina. This choice of rank may have made a political statement as only New Spain and Peru then rated viceroys, and New Granada’s highest Spanish official was only a governor. It is also possible that Juana had been elected to the position, as the titles of “kings,” “governors,” and “presidents” were commonly used in other African-based institutions in Latin America such as sodalities and cabildos de nación explored in the chapters by Nicole von Germeten for Mexico City, João Reis for Bahia, and Matt Childs for Havana. The presumption of the title led officials who later interrogated the couple to ask husband and wife separately why Juana was called virreina, and each answered separately that it was because she was a founder of the place (fundadora).48 In its political, military, and social organization, Matudere resembled what Spaniards would have recognized as an ordered polity, and Domingo and Juana’s authority over diverse ethnolinguistic factions within their camps was similar to that exercised by Spaniards in their own multicultural cities. It should be noted, however, that although Spaniards described Domingo as a criollo and ladino, his father, Domingo, who also lived at the Matudere,

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was born in Angola.49 The Portuguese had introduced Catholicism to the region in the sixteenth century, but also guns, civil war, and an escalating slave trade. Many victims of that instability found themselves shipped across the Atlantic, and some of these Central Africans joined the earlier runaways at Matudere. Continuing infusions of African bozales into such palenques kept alive or reintroduced African traditions, and maroons such as the elder Domingo, described as muy viejos or the very old, would have provided direct knowledge about African cultures.50 The beleaguered maroons no doubt drew on both acquired knowledge of the Spanish world and well-known African patterns to meet the challenges they faced. According to Governor Martin de Cevallos, who eventually destroyed Matudere, African religious specialists (whom he called brujos or witches), using “diabolic artifacts and inventions,” including “poisoned arrowheads and cords and other demonic ideas,” had assured the maroons they were invincible. Thus, Catholicism and various forms of African religious practice coexisted in Matudere, and residents may have participated in all simultaneously, just as they did in Spanish cities throughout the Iberian Atlantic World. Witnesses later identified Matudere’s shaman as Antonio (sometimes referred to as Antonio Bomba), the escaped slave of Juan de la Peña, a Cartagena merchant and a leader of the military expeditions against the maroons. The residents of Matudere reportedly regarded Antonio as a holy man, kissed his hand to show their respect, and obeyed him in everything, including his order to kidnap the women from nearby haciendas to be their wives. Antonio had told his followers that they need not fear the Spaniards because he had a cloth full of powder, which he would set afire and make the attackers disappear.51 Harkening back to their Reconquest patterns, Spanish officials in Cartagena cited African religious practices and the captivity of Christian women to justify their military crusades against the maroons. Only a month after Father Zapata’s peaceful visit to Matudere, Governor Cevallos sent a Spanish force of some sixty men to destroy the settlement. Emboldened by Antonio’s supernatural assurance, the defenders of Matudere ambushed and defeated the Spanish troops, appropriated their weapons, and sent the commander’s testicles, wrapped in a cloth, back to the governor in Cartagena. Robin Law shows that ritual decapitation and castration of enemies were important features of warfare in contemporary Dahomey until leaders forbade the practices late in the eighteenth century. Matudere’s Arará warriors may have been practicing traditional forms of humiliation against

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defeated enemies, but such a shocking mutilation would have unnerved the already anxious townspeople.52 Almost at that very moment Cartagena’s officials were interrogating slaves about allegedly conspiring with the maroons to launch a major uprising against the capital. At a hastily convened Junta de Guerra (War Council) Don Juan de Berrio (who had lost several slaves to the palenques) testified that he overheard a mulatto who was visiting the convent of Santa Clara. The mulatto reportedly argued that blacks could not be slaves because they had not been captured in a “just war.” He further suggested that such enslavement was not the will of the church, and that if he had the money he would travel to Rome to win their freedom.53 The mulatto in question was Francisco de Vera, a free barber whose medical function of bleeder connected him to Francisco, an Arará slave who ran the dispensary at the convent. As explored in the chapter by Mariza de Carvalho Soares, barbers in the early modern world often connected diverse social groups through their medical and personal services. In the case of late seventeenth-century Cartagena, these men were human links between the religious establishments of Cartagena and their slaves, in particular those of the Arará nation.54 Another slave of the convent of Santa Clara, Joseph, testified that although the Ararás of Cartagena had no official religious brotherhood or cofradía, they nevertheless elected as their governor and king one Manuel Arará, a slave belonging to the Jesuits. According to Joseph, the Ararás regularly gathered in Manuel’s house (which may or may not have been within the Jesuit convent) to relax and talk. The informal nature and social functions of this Arara cabildo are reminiscent of the Malê brotherhood of Bahia studied by João José Reis and featured in this volume as Chapter 3. Both were unauthorized gatherings organized by the participants, not by the Catholic Church. Joseph stated that he was responsible for collecting dues from the members, which were used to bury fellow Ararás. Brothers in this underground Arará brotherhood also distributed alms to their impoverished members throughout the city, much as official Catholic cofradías did in Cartagena and other cities throughout Latin America.55 Several of Matudere’s most important maroon leaders had also made visits back to Cartagena. Captain Domingo Padilla had made at least three trips to the city, entering through the Gate of the Half Moon that separated the poor barrio of Getsemaní from Cartagena. Padilla and his son had also rendezvoused with a number of escaping slaves at that gate to take them back to Matudere, presumably with some advance planning. When Matudere’s captain Francisco Arará visited Cartagena, he actually stayed in the Convent of

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Santa Clara, which functioned seemingly as a sort of “bed-and-breakfast” for the maroons of the Arará nation. It seems unlikely that such visits would have gone completely unnoticed by the nuns.56 The criolla slave, Clara María de Leon Bonifacio, told Junta officials that she had heard that “the blacks had arms, powder, and other things” and that the maroons had planned to appear in the city on Holy Thursday. Clara claimed she had not paid any attention to these rumors. Further investigation revealed more details of the alleged plot that called for twenty-five slaves to kill the guard and sentinel and take control of the Gate of the Half Moon, while others attacked the guards at the wall. The rebels planned to set fire to a buried powder keg and kill the Spaniards who appeared to put out the conflagration. The maroons were scheduled to enter the city through the Media Luna gate, with which they were already very familiar, at an appointed hour, and together maroons and urban slaves planned to make themselves masters of Cartagena. The plot between the maroons and the slaves of Cartagena was allegedly coordinated by Francisco, the Arará slave belonging to the Convent of Santa Clara, and Francisco Arará, Matudere’s war captain, who had hidden for three days in the Convent of Santa Clara awaiting a signal to lead the rebellion. Given this link to the convent, it is possible that Captain Francisco Arará may have also been the same person Father Zapata had earlier described as a “master” of Matudere’s church. The Spaniards described the men as parientes, regarding the two Franciscos as related since they belonged to the same nation, and this may have also reflected an African view. Authorities condemned the abolitionist mulatto bleeder Francisco de Vera to death, but he escaped before the sentence could be carried out, and, shortly after, Cartagena’s black executioner died of poisoning. Within days, a black replacement met the same fate, and soon a rumor circulated that the city’s meat supply had also been poisoned.57 This was not an unlikely possibility since the job of butchering was handled by blacks in Cartagena, as in other Black Atlantic port cities.58 To settle the hysteria, Governor Martin de Cevallos himself led a second military expedition against Matudere. On May 1, 1693, the day of their patron, “the glorious apostle James,” and calling out Santiago, the Spanish forces launched a spectacular night raid on the settlement. In reported apparitions, Santiago was said to descend from the heavens on a white charger as thunder pealed and, as if on cue, a lightning bolt hit the house in which the maroons of Matudere had stored their arms and munitions. The African deity Shango

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allegedly used lightning bolts to strike down his enemies; thus, Spaniards and Africans alike may have read that event as a sign of divine intervention.59 The storehouse promptly exploded, and the light of the fires helped the Spaniards track the scattering maroons. The maroons briefly regrouped because, according to Governor Cevallos, their “witch” promised they would take the governor’s head back to their palenque. The downpour, the surprise, and the explosion, however, led many of the maroons to flee in confusion. Spanish pursuers tracked and finally caught Domingo Padilla and forty-two other residents of Matudere and rescued the nineteen “Christian” (Spanish) women they had taken with them.60 The victorious Spaniards transported the captured maroons back to jail in Cartagena, where the governor and his counselors interrogated the prisoners under oath, beginning with Domingo Padilla. In an almost epic tale, Captain Padilla recounted that twelve years earlier, he and his wife and three sons had fled slavery. They spent the first six months living in the jungles in a shelter of branches, then moved to a second spot where they built two bohios or huts. When they found that land unaccommodating, they moved a third time to the place called Matudere, where some fifty-four men and forty women were already living in huts. Padilla identified the most senior resident of that site as Bentura Paulo, so although Padilla and his wife, Juana, claimed to be Matudere’s founders, they must have only organized a preexisting settlement. By what means they did this and how they garnered the support necessary to claim leadership are unknown. In his testimony, Padilla named Francisco Arará as the war captain for Matudere, rather than Pedro Mina, and blamed him for specific murders and attacks on the nearby Indian town of Piojón. He confirmed Father Zapata’s identification of the creole Miguel as Matudere’s standard bearer.61 Once the governor and his counselors concluded their interrogations and declared the captives guilty, they dispensed punishment. Before finishing with Juana, however, Governor Martin de Cevallos brought an artist to the jail to paint the virreina’s portrait, “for the novelty,” but he caustically remarked that the man had favored her by making her appear more clean and tidy than she really was. In a second act of conquest, the governor hung Juana’s portrait in his official residence for all to see.62 The virreina, who was then approximately sixty years old, and thirty other maroons received two hundred lashes in procession through the streets of Cartagena. This group was later sent into perpetual exile to an unnamed destination. The sick, very old, and very young captives (including Domingo and Juana’s sons, Thome

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and Vizente) each received one hundred lashes within the jail before their owners were allowed to post bond and recover them. As was customary after such expeditions, the unclaimed slaves were later sold and the profits distributed as payment to their captors. And in a final statement of reclaimed space and authority, the officials of Cartagena hung and quartered thirteen of Matudere’s defenders, including Domingo Padilla, at the Plaza Matadero (Plaza of the Slaughterhouse) in Getsemaní and posted their mutilated body parts along the roads leading to the hinterlands “as an example and terror to others of this class.” 63 Surely, all who witnessed the event understood that that piece of theater did not actually reestablish Spanish control, and that just outside Cartagena maroon settlements were at that very moment reforming.64 Captain Pedro Mina had escaped capture and ruled the Matudere survivors for two more years, but in 1695, Mina too was eventually apprehended at the palenque of Norossi and deported to San Juan de Ulúa, the fortress guarding Spain’s second largest slave port of Veracruz. Slave owners across the Atlantic from Santo Domingo to Mexico City to Charleston all feared the possible alliance of urban slaves and maroons, and they reported and prosecuted such plots and conspiracies with regularity. Scholars have later considered some to have been no more than the figment of fearful white imaginations. As the examples discussed in this chapter demonstrate, however, during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, there was regular contact between the urban slaves of Cartagena and the extensive network of maroon communities that lay not far outside the city walls. Not unlike the suggestions made by David Geggus in his chapter on Cap Français regarding possible connections between urban and rural worlds of the enslaved and the later slave insurrection that ignited the Haitian Revolution, these interactions forged occasional associations into powerful weapons of resistance. Moreover, the investigation of Matudere shows that shared African ethnicities and institutions and some form of Christian identity linked these groups and provided mechanisms (and spaces) through which enslaved groups might imagine becoming masters of Cartagena.

Chapter Eight

The Cultural Geography of Enslaved Ship Pilots Kevin Dawson

Westerners were world voyagers navigating the blue deep-water seas that Africans, Asians, Amerindians, and Polynesians knew as their own waters. Yet they usually relied on local pilots to guide them through green coastal waterways and into and out of port, enabling pilots to control the waters between land and the open ocean. Newspapers, ship logs, plantation records, and travel accounts indicate that the majority of ship pilots in New World slave societies were enslaved. These slaves possessed specialized knowledge of the hydrospace, or the area beneath the surface of the water, and how rivers, tides, currents, wind patterns, waves, and surf affected navigation. As ships entered pilots’ domain, they assumed temporary command.1 Enslaved pilots connected the slave castles and barracoons of Atlantic Africa to the slave fields of the New World. They linked plantations to overseas markets, and colonies to the metropolis, protecting the prosperity of plantation slavery. Black pilots bookended slave-trading voyages. African pilots were the last link most saltwater slaves had with Africa and the first they had with the Americas. They guided slavers down African rivers, through lagoons, across coastal waters, and into the open ocean. In the Americas, enslaved pilots rode rising tides up tidal waterways, depositing Africans at slave markets. Into the slaver’s empty hold was poured the wealth of plantation slavery, which was carried into the Atlantic with the falling tide. Slave pilots were intimately familiar with the ocean’s rhythms and used their knowledge to navigate merchant and naval ships. They monopolized

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the profession in Bermuda. When Yale University professor Josiah Meigs sojourned in Bermuda during the 1790s, he reported “without skilful pilots who are black fellows educated to the business from childhood it would be impossible to enter our harbours.” 2 Enslaved pilots bound Jamaica, Great Britain’s most prosperous eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century colony, to broader Atlantic economies. Scores of pilot boats carrying a dozen or more slave pilots each jogged off Jamaica’s east end to meet approaching ships and usher them into the island’s numerous ports. Slaves also dominated the profession in the American South.3 This essay analyzes how enslaved pilots used the green waters of the Anglophone Americas during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries as a cultural space to gain unparalleled privileges. In studies of black mariners, W. Jeffrey Bolster, Michael Jarvis, and David Cecelski briefly considered enslaved pilots.4 This essay considerably extends their analysis by focusing on slave pilots and placing them in the broader rubric of Atlantic history to consider how they used specialized wisdom and skills to invert racial/social hierarchies. Pilots’ lives were marked by privileged exploitation, exchanging knowledge and abilities for the benefit of cultivating semi-independent lives within the boundaries of bondage. Many were owned by planter-merchants, who were planters directly involved in the overseas shipping of goods and usually maintained shipping facilities, like wharves and warehouses. They resided in ports, often far from their owners’ observation, and enjoyed considerable mobility and anonymity in crowded streets. Pilots hired out their services, were paid, and sometimes employed enslaved assistants. Some purchased or were granted their freedom. Aboard ship their privileges exceeded those received by slaves working in other capacities. They remained aboard ship for several hours, a couple days, and sometimes a week or more. During these periods away from their owners, pilots became temporary ship captains, permitting them to curse and command white sailors and officers in an age when blackness supposedly entailed subservience. Scientists have long used the color of waterways to distinguish marine environments. Maritime geography is often described in terms of the following imprecisely defined regions: brown water refers to navigable rivers and littoral areas; black water frequently refers to swamps; green water refers to ports, harbors, and shallow coastal waters; and blue water is the deep ocean.5 The field of maritime slavery is rapidly expanding our understanding of bondage. Most historians of maritime slavery treat the earth’s waters as one uninterrupted, uniform environment. This disregards crucial ecological variables.

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We would be remiss to ignore how geographical features, like fields, mountains, mines, and urban settings, informed slave experiences, yet we disregard marine environmental variants. By adopting other disciplines’ models of geographical organization, we can provide greater depth and nuance to our understanding of maritime bondage. We can refine our understanding of maritime slavery by examining the influences that hydrography, or marine environments, exerted on the historical process. Scholars of maritime slaves have correctly asserted that the independent character of bondmen’s labor permitted them to escape slaveholder dominance. Julius Scott explained, “The juxtaposition of plantation society and maritime culture was always a particularly uneasy one. Whereas slavery and its regime demanded a fixed status and clear boundaries, ships and the sea came to symbolize, for many people, possibilities for mobility, escape, and freedom.” But, it was hydrography that defined life, labor, and maritime culture. Maritime experiences upon the brown waters of the Mississippi, Berbice, Suriname, and Amazon Rivers differed from those upon black water swamps, green coastal waters, and the blue waters of the Atlantic.6 Borrowing from Africanists’ organization of geography into cultural spaces can enhance our conceptualization and understanding of maritime slavery. In the 1980s Africanists began redefining Atlantic Africa to clarify their analysis. They divided Africa into regions based on shared traditions, language groups, commercial interests, worldviews, and histories. Expanding on Walter Rodney’s scholarship, Boubacar Barry introduced the term “Greater Senegambia” to correct what he felt was the historiographical and geopolitical fragmentation of the region that encompasses Senegal, Gambia, Guinea Bissau, and parts of Mauritania, Mali, and Guinea Conakra. This integrative standpoint was developed because previous scholarship of individual polities resembled “a historical jigsaw puzzle. Viewed separately the pieces make little sense. Brought together, the bits of shredded data, from vignettes of personalities to social sketches and political snapshots, reveal new meanings.” John Thornton persuasively extended Barry’s theoretic framework to the rest of Atlantic Africa, dividing it into seven cultural regions. It was not just geography that shaped these cultural regions. Robert Harms documented how hydrography imposed cultural diversification and cohesion in the Congo River Basin. Members of fishing societies that worked the Congo’s brown waters hunted fish by stalking them and setting traps and led seminomadic lives as they followed their quarries’ daily and seasonal movements. Fishing the black water swamps that radiated off the river was like farming.

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Families led sedentary lives, fishing the same dam or pond for generations. The Congo River also melded cultural distinctions in the region by forcing societies to intimately interact and bend their traditions around the seasonal rise and fall of its waters.7 By conjoining the terminology of marine geography to Africanists’ conceptualization of geography, we can examine how green water permitted enslaved pilots to construct semi-independent lives within a discrete marine environment. Scholarship on maritime slavery has recently undergone a similar change. Scholars have remained reluctant to consider the ocean’s effects on human experiences. The absence of landmarks and borders makes the sea an imprecise expanse, and historians generally treat the ocean as a void in the Atlantic World—an in-between, a Middle Passage—that separated the Old World from the New and bisected European empires, while facilitating the exportation of power and importation of wealth. Historians are increasingly examining how the ocean created experiences for members of marginalized groups that did not exist ashore. For example, Marcus Rediker and Peter Linebaugh argued that the ocean was a liberating space that permitted sailors, slaves, and pirates to redefine terrestrial notions of race and status as they challenged colonial commercial capitalism. Bolster stressed that the Atlantic was a place where ideas and concepts were reimaged and people benefited from opportunities denied ashore. He showed how free black sailors used the ocean to improve their lives, gaining some economic advantages and racial parity.8 Likewise, Africanists are increasingly examining how waterways shaped commerce, urbanization, warfare, and state formation.9 This chapter enhances our understanding of water’s influence on cultural processes. Rather than treating green water as a transitory segment in transatlantic voyages, this essay considers how enslaved pilots created a counterculture in this maritime zone. Green water also constituted a border between the terrestrial and aquatic authority of two of the most oppressive regimes in the Atlantic World—slaveholders and shipmasters. Here landsmen and mariners were unsure of their authority, permitting slaves to manipulate white uncertainty. Many blue water sailors believed coastal mariners were less hardy than themselves and used the term green water as a disparaging colloquialism. Sailors regarded pilots as extensions of land-based authority distinct from themselves, making pilots a marginalized amphibious group, belonging to neither the world ashore or the world afloat. But this was a world turned upside down in which the disenfranchised used closely guarded knowledge to link sea and land, gaining sway over their immediate circumstances and broader economic activities.10

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Green water is also where most ships sank, compelling mariners to respect those protecting them from shipwreck. Through much of the eighteenth century, pilots were technically advisors without legal shipboard authority. Yet everyone knew their advice was more reliable than white cartographers’ charts and shipmasters’ navigational instruments. Hence, pilots’ advice took on the air of orders, permitting pilots to assume command. By the mid-eighteenth century most New World waterways were charted and numerous navigational guidebooks had been published, but nature quickly altered hydrospaces and ripped buoys from their markers. Consequently, surveys, even for well-traveled routes, were typically inaccurate. Pilots shunned navigational instruments and maps. They mentally charted the ever-changing hydrospace by reading the movement of surface waters, observing color variations in reefs, and plumbing the depths with lead-weighted sounding lines, and they navigated ships by lining them up with landmarks.11 Enslaved pilots used these skills to ensure vessels’ safety. On August 23, 1778, an enslaved pilot navigated the fifty-gun British warship Experiment through Hell Gate, located near Harlem, New York, “to the great astonishment of Lord [Richard] Howe,” Britain’s commander-in-chief of North America. The ship was chased into Long Island Sound by three French ships and negotiated Hell Gate to avoid capture. “At the moment of greatest danger, Sir James Wallace, the Captain gave some orders” that contradicted the pilot’s desires. Tapping Wallace on the shoulder the slave said, “ ‘[Y]ou no speak here!’ The Captain felt the full force of the brave fellow’s remonstrance” and complied.12 Hell Gate is a reef-lined strait in the East River near the point where the Harlem River and Long Island Sound converge with the East River. Strong eddies are created by conflicting riverine and tidal forces. By the late eighteenth century, currents had driven numerous vessels onto these reefs, and the Experiment was the largest ship to make “that dangerous passage.” This incident highlights how slaves appropriated authority to overturn the racial/ social hierarchy. As a nobleman and shipmaster, Wallace wielded considerable authority. If a slave working in any other capacity had similarly corrected an elite white man, he would have been deemed insolent and summarily punished. But everyone understood that the pilot controlled the ship’s destiny, so he could rebuff one of the most powerful men in the world aboard a vessel that both projected and symbolized British overseas power. Indeed, so “highly did his Lordship [Howe] appreciate the skill and adventurous spirit of

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the Negro pilot, that he settled on him an annuity of £50 for life,” legitimizing his inversion of the racial/social stratum.13 Other enslaved pilots behaved similarly. Bermudian James “Jemmy” Darrell helped push Bermuda from the backwaters of the British Empire to a colony of strategic military importance. The loss of the American colonies during the American Revolution created a void in the British North Atlantic, depriving Britain of a naval supply port between Nova Scotia and the Caribbean. This made it difficult to protect shipping during the French Revolution, when French privateers attacked British shipping off North America.14 On May 15, 1795, Vice-Admiral George Murray, commander-in-chief of the Royal Navy’s North American Squadron, approached Bermuda with a fiveship flotilla to establish a naval base. On May 17, Darrell piloted Murray’s flagship, HMS Resolution, through a coral-toothed channel called the Narrows and into what came to be called Murray’s Anchorage. This was the first warship brought into Bermuda, an accomplishment that facilitated the establishment of the Bermuda Naval Base (1795–96). This permitted Bermuda to serve as the needed base between Canada and the Caribbean, speeding the non-plantation colony’s development.15 For Darrell, this brought an end to bondage. Following Murray’s request, Governor James Crauford purchased Darrell for £150 and freed him on March 1, 1796.16 Darrell became Bermuda’s first king’s pilot, a respectable, royally appointed position with a substantial salary, which enabled him to purchase an eighteen-foot pilot boat and “a little land” where he built a “small house.” This set a precedent that other enslaved Bermudian pilots used to gain their freedom.17 Even though pilots proved invaluable to overseas shipping, or perhaps because of it, many whites resented them. Contempt for slave pilots was rooted in concepts of social and racial hierarchy. White pilots upset concepts of status long before Europeans came into contact with Africans. Shipmasters and mates were generally members of society’s upper stratums and were often described as tyrants. For example, in 1744, one former sailor proclaimed, “[A] Captain is like a King at Sea, and his Authority is over all that are in his Possession.” 18 Pilots, like sailors, were usually members of the lower echelons. When pilots assumed command of a vessel, they stood the societal hierarchy on its head, as seafaring satirist “Ned” Ward delineated in 1699, penning, “A Vessel, whilst the Pilot is on Board, is an Emblem of Feeble Monarch, where the King has a States-man in his Dominion Greater than himself, That the Prince only bears the Title, but the other the Command.” 19 If this was true

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on ships in the Thames piloted by whites, it was doubly true in the Americas aboard vessels piloted by slaves. Enslaved pilots existed on the cusp of the spectrum of negotiated authority that scholars currently use to describe master-slave relations.20 In theory, slaves’ race and status reinforced each other, making them the most degraded members of society. Centuries of maritime tradition and law predetermined pilot-captain relationships, and early modern white people were unwilling to alter this precedent, regardless of a pilot’s race or status, leaving shipmasters with little room for negotiation. Simultaneously, slaveholders and port authorities placed slave pilots outside captains’ sphere of control. Pilots also had much more leverage than field slaves—they held the safety of ships and all those aboard in their hands. They were caught in the machinery of bondage, but unlike filed slaves they could not be easily replaced. Captains commanded considerable power, but pilots could conceivably avenge abuses by accidentally sinking their ships. Officers knew it was unwise to verbally or physically assault someone responsible for the safety of the ship and their own well-being. Pilots’ persuasive powers were enhanced by white people’s inability to swim, making the specter of shipwreck more ominous. These factors permitted slave pilots to evolve as they clambered from the pilot boat, up a Jacob’s ladder, and swung themselves over the ship’s rail. They immediately ascended to the quarterdeck—symbol of maritime authority and rank— where they assumed command.21 White mariners also recognized that they were symbiotically locked in antagonistic relationships with enslaved pilots. They regarded them as racial inferiors, but as pilots navigated dangerous waters, mariners conceded that it was in their best interest to treat them like officers. They understood that one could not simultaneously behave like a pilot and a slave. If pilots acted like humble slaves, they placed vessels in danger. Hence, mariners generally accepted their authority. Even so, enslaved pilots had to remind shipmasters that they ensured their ship’s safety and had to be treated with respect. Work stoppages were an effective way of demanding deference. When pilots boarded a vessel, captains routinely gave them grog as a sign of approbation. In 1808, a British shipmaster refused to extend this decorum to Jamaican pilots. A slave pilot and his assistants boarded the ship as it approached Port Royal, proclaiming, “Give me some beef, massa, me can no take ship safe widout grog and beef.” Deeming the slave insolent, the captained determined to maintain command, retorting, “ ‘D——n you, mind the ship, you black rascal, . . . and when she is safe

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you shall have what you want.’ ” An assistant pilot used the familiar slave ploy of feigned ignorance to enforce their control over the vessel. Inquiring on the water depth, the captain asked, “ ‘What water have you got?’ ‘What water, massa? why what water do you tink we got?’ ‘D——n you,’ says the captain, ‘I say what water have you?’ ‘Why salt water, massa, to be sure.’ ‘You black scoundrel,’ says the captain in a rage, ‘tell me, again, I say, how much water, have you got?’ ‘Lord, massa, how can me tell, me have no pot to measure it wid!’ ” The captain recognized the slaves’ ability to continue this routine until his ship ran aground, compelling him to surrender his authority, grog, and beef.22 These Jamaicans demonstrate how pilots used the weapons of the weak to extract concessions from the powerful. Pretending to be too dumb to comprehend simple questions, they used a common ploy of slave tricksters to engage in a form of work stoppage perfected by white mariners.23 They feigned ignorance as part of a labor demonstration similar to those of white sailors. Scholars of maritime labor history have posited that the term “strike” derived from the collective work stoppage of London seamen in May 1768, who struck work in the same manner they would strike, or lower, sails to halt a ship’s progress.24 Simon Finger shows that in November 1766 white pilots on the Delaware River refused to conduct chips to Philadelphia, threatening the prosperity produced by Pennsylvania’s Atlantic commerce. They forced elite land- and ship-based authorities to concede to their demands by preventing East India Company tea from being shipped into port. This coincidentally averted a Philadelphia Tea Party by denying radical Philadelphia artisans the chance to challenge king and Parliament by destroying imported tea.25 Unlike white men, slaves could not openly strike without facing harsh punishment. Yet they could feign ignorance, using racist stereotypes to their advantage in winning the respect and provisions they believed to be their dues. If whites could not openly confront enslaved pilots when at the mercy of their knowledge of hazardous waters, they were less restrained once in port. Some ridiculed black pilots in print, mocking their clothing and dialects. For example, even as the Hell Gate pilot was rewarded, he was derided in print. In several accounts he was called “mungo,” a British term for slave that mocked Africans’ hair by inferring that it resembled an old, worn-out woolen rug. Mid-nineteenth-century accounts replaced “mungo” with “Sambo,” suggesting the pilot was a timid, lazy buffoon.26 An anonymous female traveler to Antigua in the early nineteenth century engaged in similar derision of slave pilots. A pilot boarded her ship as it

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approached St. John’s Harbor. She reported that the pilot was a “very pompous personage . . . who no doubt stood vastly high in his own estimation.” The man “lent upon the rail of the vessel, with his large straw hat, and gigantic snuff-box,” while “giving orders to the sailors, and discussing the news of the island.” She rendered his conversation in dialect: “ ‘Hab fine rain last night; you bring good wedder—(war for you ’tad staring dere for, you black nigger?)—yes, feber berry last month, many buckra [white people] die—(war you godo, run de ship on de shore?)—Crop bery good dis year; ship load fast ’nough—(why you no haul dat rope good?).’ ” The man safely guided the ship into the harbor, past the wreck of the mail boat Maria, which had sunk when its captain tried to enter the harbor without a pilot. Several “missionaries, and their wives and children” returning homes to Antigua drowned “almost within sight of their homes—within hearing of the church bell.” The lone female survivor watched her husband and children drown. As the traveler reported this story, her prejudice prevented her from respecting a bondman even as he averted such disaster.27 While many white people resented pilots’ inversion of the racial/social hierarchy, most accepted it because pilots provided valuable services. Brothers Thomas and John Gray Blount were prominent North Carolina merchantplanters. In early winter of 1794, their sloop, Sally, ran aground, and they offered a £60 reward for refloating the vessel. For three weeks a succession of white pilots tried unsuccessfully before a black pilot succeed. Thomas was so impressed by the “clever fellow” that he gave “him 20 dollars in addition to the £60 which he is entitled.” Prudent merchants, planters, and captains heeded such lessons. They did not conclude that pilots’ race or enslavement diminished their abilities. They could regard black pilots as racial inferiors while exploiting and rewarding their abilities.28 Pilots acquired a profound familiarity with local waterways, often while working as canoe men, fishermen, wreckers, sea-turtlers, and coastal and interisland sailors. The skills required for these jobs complemented pilotage. For example, in 1800 William Tatham reported that Virginia’s tobacco canoe men “made excellent skippers and good river pilots.” Likewise, Josiah Meigs recognized enslaved Bermudians’ complementary array of skills: “The blacks are excellent sailors, pilots and fishermen.” In 1815, an Antigua slaveholder advertised “a stout negro man, a good sailor and fisherman, capable of taking charge of a vessel, and a good pilot for this all the neighboring islands.” 29 Thomas Jeremiah of Charleston, South Carolina, provides a quintessential example of the benefits pilots reaped by marrying maritime occupations. He

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was apparently born into slavery and purchased his freedom with his pilot’s income. Jeremiah was undoubtedly an enslaved fisherman in the 1740s and used his knowledge to secure a more lucrative pilotage position in the mid1750s. He knew Charleston Harbor well yet initially possessed an imperfect understanding of the water depth necessary for ship navigation. On February 11, 1755, the South-Carolina Gazette charged that the “Jamaica Man of War” was run hard aground “by the Carelessness of a Negro Pilot (Jerry).” One year later, Jeremiah sank the merchantman Brothers Adventure. Through fishing and continued pilotage (as well as firefighting), Jeremiah improved his skills, fame, and fortune. By 1771 he was free, and his piloting skills, which were crucial to South Carolina’s naval defense and maritime trade, made him an important man in the colony. Governor Sir William Campbell proclaimed him “one of the best pilots in the harbor” who had “by his industry acquired property upwards of £1,000 sterling” and owned “several slaves.” Historian William Ryan declared, “[H]e may well have been the wealthiest man of color in the entire thirteen colonies.” 30 Pilotage was often a semiseasonal occupation, with shipping demands being greatest from spring through fall. Consequently, pilots pursued other maritime occupations during lulls. When working as watermen they did not enjoy the respect accorded pilots; however, they received considerable autonomy and wages, refreshed their knowledge of waterways, and placed themselves in a position to intercept approaching ships and solicit pilot jobs. Serving as mariners in small boats also afforded pilots more intimate understandings of the hydrospace than if they toiled high upon a ship’s decks, which helps explain why enslaved watermen came to dominate the more lucrative pilotage profession. Watermen and sailors had divergent experiences with the water. Sailors looked down upon the seascape from several feet above, while watermen interacted more intimately with the sea. Watermen skimmed across shallows a few inches above the surface, obtaining detailed views of the hydrospace. They mentally mapped the ocean’s bottom by peering beneath clear waters and watching and feeling how surface waters heaved and plunged as they moved over reefs and sandbars. Fishermen cultivated detailed understandings of water floors as they charted the movements and retreats of fish. Wreckers probably had the best understanding of the shallows. They navigated shallows looking for wrecks to salvage and were in a position to recover goods from vessels that refused their pilotage services. When diving, they viewed the waterscape from below and felt currents and tides, providing themselves with acute understandings of the depths.31

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As temporary shipmasters, pilots demanded white respect and did not hesitate to reprimand white offenders. William Nevens’s experience aboard the Ceres in 1805 exemplifies white acceptance of enslaved pilot’s authority. When Nevens was a novice New England sailor, a pilot on the British occupied island of Martinique taught him to respect slave pilots. He boarded the ship as it approached Trinity Harbor. Nevens “had before seen what I called black fellows, but they were not a consideration to this pilot.” Shocked by his wardrobe, Nevens thought he resembled “the ghost of Socrates, in a British uniform. He had on a cocked hat, red coat, white neckerchief, but no shirt, or hose a pair of yellow breeches, a yellow slipper on one foot, and a red one on the other.” Nevens “involuntarily” laughed. The pilot responded, “Who you laugh at, you bloody bitch? I let you know, I king pilot, Gor bras ye to ’ell.” With this exclamation, the slave capsized the racial/social hierarchy. He ordered Nevens to measure the water depth, which he submissively did. Turning “to the man at the wheel,” he “roared out” that he better keep a strait course. When the helmsman asked “what course he shall steer,” the pilot scoffed, steer “for dat rock tone point, where he hab a cane patch and a sugar mill on him; me no trouble with dat dam ting in de box [meaning a compass].” 32 Tellingly, the captain did not challenge the pilot, legitimizing his authority upon his ship. In an age when black insolence was usually met with white violence, this Martinican berated whites without fear of retribution.33 Enslaved pilots’ determination to be treated like free white ship officers shocked white people into quiet submission. Frederick Bayley illustrated how pilots disarmed whites, compelling them to accept their authority and affronts to the racial hierarchy. When an African-born pilot boarded Bayley’s ship as it approached Bridgetown, Barbados, he had an immediately unfavorable impression. “He was an African of ferocious aspect, and certainly not formed to create a very favorable opinion of his race in the minds of those who saw him.” However, the pilot regarded himself as whites’ equal and was treated accordingly. “He took possession of the vessel, with as much importance as if he had been a fine, rough, old English seaman bearing up Channel.” After a few cordial remarks he issued orders and cursed sailors. “ ‘Vell, captain,’ said he, ‘so you have had a fine passage: I hope de ladies below are vell; if you hab no jection I vill drink deir health.’ Accordingly he had a glass of grog given him, and then turned to work:—‘What de debil are you at dere in de fore top?—Come down dere; I vant to put about; don’t you see de wind blow?’ and then turning to the man at the helm; ‘Vy you no [s]teer [s]teady? Got dam you, Sir,—vy you no teer teady, I say?’ ” Shocked that an African

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would toast white women and curse white men, Bayley asked a bondman who boarded the ship to sell fruit: “ ‘Is that fellow free?’ ‘No massa,’ was the reply.” Bayley, who was unfamiliar with shipboard relations, marveled that an African’s nautical acumen enabled him to toast white women and curse white men. Mariners appreciated his ability to ensure their ship’s safety, allowing the slave to behave like an “English seaman bearing up Channel.” 34 Slave pilots used Western material cultural to visually communicate shipboard authority. They apparently felt their rank was comparable to that of shipmasters. Thus, it made sense to dress the part. The Martinican, like other pilots, demonstrated how clothing conveyed this ascendancy. The uniforms of naval officers and formal attire of merchantmen officers distinguished them from sailors while demanding respect. Pilots appropriated this tradition to the best of their abilities. Since slaves lacked access to full Western regalia, and perhaps believed complete uniforms were unnecessary, they pieced together discarded military and civilian formal wear, creating their own symbols of office. Westerners felt that slaves’ appropriated European formal wear in order to partake in vainglorious displays that did not conform to bond people’s debased status. When field slaves wore dress clothing, they failed to comply with white perceptions of how they should look. Slavery was a labor institution, and whites felt bond people should wear clothing that indexed their debased status. Coarse clothing, like blackness, symbolized savagery and oppression, punctuating white perceptions of Africans. When slaves wore dress clothing, many whites concluded that they challenged their debased status and assumed privileges whites reserved for themselves.35 Accounts portrayed enslaved pilots as seminaked buffoons who pieced together brightly colored articles of formal European military and civilian attire, creating an ungainly, savage appearance. A travel guide for Jamaica cautioned Britons not be shocked by their first encounter with islanders, invariably enslaved pilots. “Here the astonishment of those who never before beheld a sable visage is at its height. His uncouth appearance and apparel, combined with outlandish lingo and quant remarks, create much amusement.”36 It is important to consider why slaves wore European formal wear. Sources indicate that slaves did not fully embrace Western fashion, did not have the wherewithal to purchase complete outfits, or both. Instead, they created their sense of fashion to project personal and group beliefs. Shane White and Graham White expressed how slaves culturally imagined clothing with a “carefully constructed appearance” that was “an act of cultural bricolage,

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the imaginative mediation of an African-born slave in a new, Europeandominated environment.” Wearing the attire of nonlaboring whites permitted slaves to express pride in their appearance while providing the illusion that their lives were not defined by labor. Unlike other slaves, pilots did not labor, and like gentlemen’s attire, their idiosyncratic uniforms articulated this reality.37 Slave pilots also used extravagant clothing to lampoon white authority. New York bondman King Charles caricatured elite whites by wearing a British brigadier’s broadcloth, a scarlet jacket plastered with gold lace that stretched almost to his heels, yellow buckskins, blue stockings, and polished black shoes adorned with silver buckles while officiating at slave festivities in Albany during the 1790s and early 1800s. These sorts of fantastic ensembles enabled bond people to openly mock white authority, while unknowing whites laughed at representations of themselves.38 The ship’s quarterdeck provided pilots with a stage for their minstrel acts. Their white face was an oversized hat and bright, variegated clothing, and they acted white when they cursed and commanded. While inverting the racial/social hierarchy, they used the common comedic routine of inversion to openly mock unsuspecting elite white men. French philosopher Henri Bergson explained how “inversion of rôles” was a primary method for provoking laughter, penning, “[W]e laugh at the prisoner at the bar lecturing the magistrate; at the child presuming to teach its parents’ in a word, at everything that comes under the heading of ‘topsyturvydom.’ ” Whites were unaware that they were the butt of slave jokes, and many became infuriated by what they perceived as tasteless savagery that incorrectly copied white fashion. But pilot’s minstrel acts were performed for slaves’ benefit and not for white amusement. Bond people witnessing these routines were surely forced to contain their laughter, for they could not laugh at slaves lampooning shipmasters even as white indignation enhanced the melodrama. Hence, enslaved pilots’ renditions remained beyond white comprehension. Accounts suggest that as the eighteen and early nineteenth centuries progressed pilots wore increasingly outlandish ensembles, perhaps in attempts to outdo each other’s caricatures.39 As slave pilots mocked white people, they also formed symbiotic relationships with terrestrial and maritime authorities that provided overlapping sources of protection. Ship officers were primarily concerned with the safety of their vessel and with crew discipline, causing them to ignore the bonds of whiteness they shared with sailors. Slaves were not supposed to mock whites, but could publicly deride elements of white society scorned by elites. It was

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not uncommon for slaves, at their owners’ encouragement, to lampoon poor white southerners and the Irish in jokes. Perhaps shipmasters similarly encouraged pilots to berate crewmembers. When officers refused to stop bondmen from ridiculing sailors, they provided themselves with amusement while effortlessly reinforcing seamen’s subjugation.40 Port authorities and planter-merchants also kept pilots from being sucked under the mercy of maritime discipline. Port authorities forced captains of ships over a certain tonnage (or size) to employ a pilot and entrusted pilots with a harbor’s safety by keeping watercourses free of shipwrecks, which could obstruct maritime commerce and damage wharves and vessels. They were also trusted not to usher enemy vessels into port and were the first line of defense against seaborne epidemics, forcing ships suspected of carrying contagions to “ride quarantine” for several days with passengers and crew confined aboard ship. Late eighteenth-century changes to the pilotage profession fundamentally tilted the pilot-shipmaster relationship in the pilots’ favor. Recognizing the importance of skilled pilots to maritime commerce, port authorities increasingly shielded them from abuses that would undermine their ability to retain expert pilots. For most of the eighteenth century pilots were, in essence, independent contractors licensed, regulated, and protected, but not employed, by port authorities. During the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries port authorities increased pilots’ responsibility and power by making them conferred government employees and giving them command of vessels—formalizing the social construct that slave pilots had been forcing shipmasters to accept. For example, in Bermuda they were king’s or queen’s pilots (depending on the monarch’s gender). Early nineteenth-century U.S. law stated, “After a pilot is taken on board, the master has no longer any command of the ship till she is safe in harbour.” Hence, port authorities inverted the social/racial hierarchy by authorizing bondmen to become shipmasters. Impressing or physically abusing pilots or refusing to pay their fees resulted in criminal charges.41 Planter-merchants owned most enslaved pilots and permitted them to act like free wage laborers because of the benefits they received. Hired-out slaves gave their owners a percentage of their incomes and guided merchantmen to their owners’ wharves and warehouses, making the arrangement profitable for slaveholders.42 Enslaved pilots also projected planters’ power onto the water, strengthening their social, political, and economic power. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries white North Carolina pilots repeatedly attempted to break slaves’ near monopoly of the profession by introducing

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legislation specifically designed to bar them from pilotage and, more broadly, to prevent bond people from being hired out. Angered by efforts to restrict the use of their property, planters soundly defeated these bills. In the process, they undermined white pilots’ political influence, consolidated their power ashore and afloat, and, since merchants paid slave pilots less than their white counterparts, suppressed pilotage fees.43 As the property of powerful planters, enslaved pilots received protection denied to their white counterparts. Laws compelled shipmasters to respect slaveholders’ property, and if they harmed their possessions they could expect to face civil and criminal charges. In addition, captains who injured a slave pilot could face the unsanctioned wrath of his owner when they went ashore.44 Some bondmen used pilotage to move from anonymous obscurity to positions of privileged exploitation in which elite, white terrestrial and maritime authority rewarded and protected them, as illustrated by the case of the pilots of Hell Gate and Bermuda. On April 26, 1798, pilot James Darrell informed George Beckwith, who was Bermuda’s governor and “Commander in Chief, Vice-Admiral, etc.,” of the Royal Navy’s North American squadron, that three soldiers stationed in Georgetown stole his “Pilot Boat,” and Darrell requested its return. Beckwith expedited the request. Nor did his support of black pilots end there. In 1806, Darrell and Jacob Pitcarn, another recently freed pilot, successfully petitioned Beckwith for pay increases and the “Commissioners of His Majesty’s Navy, London” for the right to will property to their descendants.45 On June 29, 1800, Thomas Cooper, an enslaved pilot probably related to Darrell, used his relationship with Beckwith to secure his freedom. Beckwith and other elite white men and women supported Cooper’s manumission petition on the grounds that his deceased grandmother “was a white woman” and that a child’s condition of freedom followed that of the mother.46 Throughout the Americas, white people probably provided similar support to other pilots. Bermuda is a reef-ringed archipelago, and Beckwith and others recognized that black pilots facilitated Bermuda’s growing importance and prosperity. By granting freedom and other favors to enslaved pilots, these men protected shipping. Cooper’s “Yellowish Complexion” testified to his biracial status, and many knew his grandmother was white, yet he remained enslaved into adulthood. Cooper’s skills, importance to shipping, connection to Darrell, and relationships with powerful individuals permitted him to secure freedom. Had Bermudians denied Cooper his freedom, they might have

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alienated Darrell, the islands’ most valued pilot. Freeing him cost money, but the revenues pilots generated dwarfed these costs. Officials understood that their family members, their profitable occupations, and the privileges and respect bestowed upon them by white benefactors bound freed black pilots to the colony. Concurrently, pilots and Bermudian officials surely realized the risks of illegal enslavement and other forms of mistreatment if they left Bermuda. Pilots also used terrestrial connections to protect themselves from shipboard reprisals, as illustrated by Thomas Jeremiah, the Charleston, South Carolina, pilot. In 1771, probably a few short years after acquiring his freedom, Jeremiah assaulted Thomas Langen, a white ship captain, when he piloted Langen’s ship up the Cooper River. Jeremiah was convicted of assault and “Sentenced to lie in the stocks One hour & receive ten Lashes between the hours of Eight & Ten.” Jeremiah escaped punishment, however, by asking for and receiving a pardon from “Lieutenant Governor & Commander in Chief ” Sir William Bull. This incident emphasizes black pilots’ importance to colonies and how they used their positions to benefit their lives. Born a slave, Jeremiah utilized specialized wisdom to obtain freedom, economic success, and protection from legal punishment. Some fifteen years earlier, Jeremiah grounded one ship and sank another. Now he was indispensable. Bull wanted to retain one of the colony’s best pilots and spare him from public humiliation, permitting Jeremiah to go unpunished for striking a shipmaster on his own vessels.47 Enslaved pilots forged relationships with terrestrial officials that permitted them to treat shipmasters as their equals. Pilots ensured ports’ economic success while guarding against disease and attack. Bull’s pardon legitimized Jeremiah’s inversion of the racial/social stratum while indicating that he valued the convicted black pilot more than the abused white captain. There were always far more captains than pilots in a given port. More important, captains were transient figures; pilots were routinely relied-upon fixtures. Langen was a cog in the wheel of maritime commerce that could be replaced; Jeremiah was a fixture of more value than a single shipmaster. Hence, land-based officials seemingly valued black pilots more than elite, white shipmasters.48 Jeremiah’s knowledge of Charleston Harbor permitted him to retain his position even after grounding one ship, sinking another, and assaulting a white man. His rise from enslaved obscurity to a place of commercial and naval importance caused him to conclude that he was irreplaceable and above reproof, a conclusion Bull agreed with. This conviction, however, contributed

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to Jeremiah’s execution early in the American Revolution. Jeremiah was valuable, but he undercut his worth to patriots by brashly stating that he “often piloted in [British] men-of-war” and had “no objection to have been employed again in the same service.” Jeremiah was important to British shipping, but war redefined his relationship with terrestrial authority. His skills made him a threat to patriots in a British colony, and even the British governor’s pardon could not save him. Since South Carolinian patriots could not charge Jeremiah with treason for promising to pilot enemy British ships into port, they convicted him on exaggerated charges of planning a slave rebellion, which also intimidated other black pilots and advanced the colony’s military readiness. On August 18, 1775, Jeremiah was hanged and his body burned.49 His execution is part of a larger pattern in which Charlestonians fabricated claims of slave conspiracies to intimidate black residents.50 Several scholars have studied Thomas Jeremiah, focusing their analysis on events surrounding his execution. Yet his formative years as an enslaved and free pilot contributed to his execution. Philip Morgan noted that Jeremiah’s demise was due “to his unusually elevated and precarious position within Charleston society.” More important, his successes as a pilot contributed to his demise by causing him to incorrectly conclude that the highest levels of white authority always protected him. Jeremiah was uniquely situated in Charleston, but when compared to other pilots he was not anomalous. Unlike other black pilots, Jeremiah did not know his limits. He could strike a white man but could not threaten to guide enemy ships into port. One of pilots’ primary responsibilities was to protect ports against enemy vessels. Patriots regarded his promise to guide British warships into Charleston Harbor as a treasonous violation of the tenets governing the pilotage profession. It was this, and not his wealth or status, that precipitated his hanging.51 Ports formed an “urban perimeter” around colonies that afforded enslaved pilots with numerous shoreside privileges. Green water and ports conspired to undermine slaveholders’ authority by providing pilots with two parallel cultural and geographical borderlands along the cusp of slavery, colony, and empire. Here water undercut prevailing land-based institutions, providing ports with their own social arrangements that blurred the boundaries between slavery and freedom and permitted pilots to pretend to be free.52 Bond people constituted a significant portion, sometimes the majority, of a given port’s population.53 Ports did not afford pilots with the same benefits enjoyed aboard ship, but they offered a chance to become anonymous faces in multiracial urban crowds while enjoying independence away from their

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owners. Like other urban slaves, many were entrepreneurs living independent of direct white interference that dictated where they lived, what they ate or wore, who they married, and the work they performed, permitting them to become members of a virtually free labor force. Industrious slaves generated considerable incomes for themselves, enhancing the material comfort enjoyed by themselves and their family members.54 Ports were also marketplaces for news, and pilots were great purveyors, funneling information between sea and land while serving as the Atlantic eyes and ears of urban and rural slave communities. News passed by word of mouth along established maritime commercial routes, and as Julius Scott documented, free black sailors linked black communities from New England to the West Indies into what he called the “greater Caribbean.” These sailors permitted free and enslaved lands people to monitor international events. As the first shoreside contact with vessels, pilots were key figures in these networks. Pilots, mariners, and passengers exchanged colonial and overseas news. While vessels lay at anchor for hours or even days waiting to clear customs and quarantine, pilots returned ashore with the news of the world. Urban, maritime, and country slaves converged in ports. As pilots entered these pulsating communities, they disseminated Atlantic news, and slaves rapidly and accurately conveyed information inland along the arteries of their internal economies.55 Atlantic ports contained vibrant waterfront institutions that catered to the needs and desires of maritime workers regardless of race. “Socially marginal” fixtures in pilots’ lives, like taverns and brothels, provided “comparative privacy” for white and black men and women to mingle. Brothels and taverns were probably the most integrated places on earth. Alcohol and the commodified bodies of white and black women were sold to transient men regardless of race, and saloonkeepers and prostitutes served as conduits of information, gleaning news from one patron and disseminating to others.56 While mariners, passengers, and pilots sometimes had difficult shipboard relationships, ashore they often got along quite well. Enslaved pilots frequently helped disembarking whites navigate ports, conducting them to lodging places or the homes of friends and associates. Likewise, they guided whites to brothels and taverns, where they socialized together. In short, ports were multiracial communities with ties to rural, urban, and maritime workers and offered enslaved pilots numerous opportunities and considerable autonomy.57 Pilots gained autonomy not by removing themselves from white contact,

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but by serving white economic interests. Most bond people acquired autonomy by working in occupations that permitted them to escape close white observation. Shipmasters, officers, sailors, and passengers watched pilots’ every move, yet, pilots’ actions went unregulated. Barry Higman’s analysis of urban slavery reveals that autonomy was not necessarily based on white absence. He explained that urban slavery “was characterized by contradiction and ambiguity. Most urban slaves lived in more intimate contact with their owners than did rural slaves, frequently sharing their houses, eating their leftovers, and wearing their castoffs.” Yet many enjoyed considerably more freedom than rural bond people, exercising “substantial ability to organize their own time and resources and worked beyond the immediate fear of their owner’s tongue and lash.” The ratio of whites to slaves was higher in towns than in rural areas. It was greater still aboard ship. White observers judged slave pilots by their race, status, and skills. However, maritime law and planters’ sway precluded pilots from shipboard authority, while affording considerable autonomy.58 The public nature of pilotage enabled bondmen to broadcast their abilities, heightening their community standing. They displayed their abilities to those ashore and afloat. The anonymous Antigua-bound traveler documented how a pilot successfully brought ships past a shipwreck. As he navigated past the wreck, shipboard and shoreside observers were reminded of his skills. When a black pilot dislodged Thomas and John Blount’s sloop, observers knew white pilots had failed before him. Waterfront spectators could not hear slave pilots curse white mariners, but they saw these brightly clad bondmen, knowing that they dictated ship movements. Like spectators at a major sporting event, throngs of white and black Bermudians crowded the waterfront to watch James Darrell pilot HMS Resolution into port. Initially believing Murray’s fleet was an invading French force, men rushed to the waterfront to defend the colony. When the Resolution was recognized, women and children flocked to the scene. “Hundreds of boats filled with holiday folk from the country gathered” and the Resolution “was saluted from the artillery of the fort.” 59 Darrell instantly became a Bermudian icon. Whites used his accomplishments to advance the colony’s development and inspire white and black Bermudians to become pilots. Darrell’s dexterities enabled him to pass from enslaved obscurity to celebrated freedom, and slaves learned of his success, manumission, and purchase of a boat and house. Pilots’ shipboard activities were no secret to slave communities. Black people were often aboard vessels and witnessed pilots subverting captains’

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authority. They undoubtedly recounted, with much embellishment, how pilots cursed and commanded sailors and officers, which probably made pilots idolized figures of the slave community.60 The ocean is not one undivided span of water. This essay differentiates between maritime zones to demonstrate how hydrography affected human experiences. Scholarship on maritime bondage is typically linked to terrestrial slavery within its respective society. However, marine environmental factors provided the structural contours of maritime slavery much more than shoreside realities. Studying slavery within specific maritime environments exposes striking similarities irrespective of terrestrial forms of bondage. Slavery differed radically throughout the Anglophone Americas. Antigua, Jamaica, Barbados, and Martinique possessed brutal plantation systems that dwarfed those of the American South in size and violence. Bermuda was a maritime society, rather than a plantation colony. Studies of urban slavery in the American South, Brazil, and the British and Danish Caribbean generally concur that the “urban milieu” provided bond people with autonomy, mobility, and freedom distinct from their rural surrounding.61 Green water off of port cities provided an extension of that milieu, though with important variations. Scholars remain cognizant of how cultural ecology, or the relationship between a given society and its natural environment, shaped the human experience ashore, while demonstrating reluctance to consider these processes afloat. As we increasingly consider human interactions with the sea, we must consider how discrete marine ecosystems informed the historical process.62 Black peoples’ lives on green and blue water were profoundly different. Maritime regions, black people’s condition of slavery or freedom, the types of work they performed, and their connections to terrestrial institutions shaped their experiences. For example, Bolster documented how blue water provided free black sailors with social and economic opportunities denied ashore. Yet tradition barred most free black hands on blue seas from becoming officers. Green water, tradition, and law fostered an environment where enslaved pilots became de facto commanders, obtaining more shipboard authority than most sailors of any status or race ever received.63 Studies considering terrestrial relationships between slaveholders and slaves underscore our need to examine how maritime regions defined human interactions. Historians like Ira Berlin, Peter Wood, and Eugene Genovese have provided praiseworthy analytic models delineating the give-and-take relationship between agricultural slaves and slaveholders. Yet their theories

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are incongruent with the experiences of enslaved pilots. Relationships between enslaved pilots and captains were not predicated on the same give-andtake regimens field slaves were subjected to. Historians have long examined how slaveholder-slave relations were defined by “reciprocal obligations defined from above.” Slave owners granted privileges to make bond people more dependent, maximize production, and create the illusion of joyful subordination. Slaveholders dispensed privileges at their discretion, and as they did so they melded master-slave associations to suite their needs.64 Pilots and shipmasters forewent the daily routines and gestures that demarcated land-based master-slave relationships. Accounts reveal that shipmasters could not significantly alter their relationships with pilots. Maritime tradition and law predetermined the conditions of pilot-captain relationships, irrespective of the pilot’s race and status, compelling shipmasters to treat pilots with respect. Terrestrial authority strengthened the position of enslaved pilots. In the eighteenth century most captains understood that time did not permit them to negotiate relationships with each pilot who boarded their vessel, allowing bondmen to immediately assume command. When shipmasters sought to redefine this relationship, pilots utilized familiar tools of the weak. They could, like our Jamaican pilots, withhold their services through feigned ignorance to demonstrate that they would not negotiate with captains, forcing them to acquiesce. Similarly, pilots could claim that conditions were too perilous—the tide was too low, currents or winds too strong, visibility too poor—to safely bring a ship into port. If a captain attempted to bring his vessel into port against the pilot’s advice, he risked inciting mutiny among sailors who did not want to place their lives in jeopardy. As late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century port authorities transformed pilots into government employees who assumed shipboard command, they officially inverted the social/racial hierarchy. Hence, enslaved pilots were able to step upon deck, proclaim themselves “king pilot,” and act like an “English seaman bearing up Channel.” 65 Enslaved pilots capsized ideas of race and slavery while at sea; whites righted them ashore. Pilots’ shipboard authority was ephemeral and dissipated as they climbed back over the ship’s rail, descended the Jacob’s ladder, and set foot in an awaiting pilot boat. When they reached shore they were urban slaves divested of their anomalous authority. Ashore they no longer controlled white people’s immediate destiny, and probably faced swift and severe retribution for cursing, mocking, or striking white men. Enslaved pilots challenged the supremacy of the dominant culture,

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exchanging their skills for lives of privileged exploitation. But their autonomy was measured in hours and days. They, like all slaves, were owned and exploited. Slavery was a labor institution, and the privileges granted to slaves were designed to extract knowledge and wealth from their minds and bodies. They generated wealth for their owners, shipping companies, and manufacturers while helping to sustain Atlantic economies that generated state, colonial, national, and imperial wealth. Some used pilotage to secure their freedom; most died as they had lived—enslaved.

Chapter Nine

Slavery and the Social and Cultural Landscapes of Luanda Roquinaldo Ferreira

On July 10, 1771, Manoel de Salvador, a slave living in Luanda, was arrested on the accusation of committing a burglary. To defend himself, he laid out a set of startling arguments. According to Salvador, he had been “shipped from this city [Luanda] together with his mother and his brother to Rio de Janeiro when he was a child, and later he returned to this city [Luanda] and his brother stayed in Rio de Janeiro.” 1 In addition, he claimed that the significant amount of money that the Luanda authorities found at his house was “brought [to Luanda] by his friends from Brazil” and was the proceeds of the sale in Rio de Janeiro of “straws, pipes, and mats that he [Salvador] shipped to Brazil.” 2 In Luanda, Salvador used the money to purchase nice clothes and dispense gifts to several girlfriends. In Salvador’s words, “to some [women] he would give two hundred and fifty réis and to others he would give two hundred réis.” 3 The incident that led to Salvador’s arrest began when several female slaves of Manoel da Silva Machado Palhares, the Portuguese owner of a tavern in Luanda, ran out of Palhares’s house and screamed for help during the night of July 10, 1771. Three black soldiers, part of the police force that regularly patrolled the streets of Luanda, intervened and took Salvador into custody. In addition to a cloth bag that would presumably be used to carry stolen items from the house, two Dutch knives were found with Salvador.4 According to Salvador’s description of his actions on the night of the alleged burglary, his owner sent him to the house of João dos Santos to deliver a letter, after which

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he returned home to deliver Santos’s answer to his owner. He subsequently left again to take a walk and was joined by his friend Joaquim, another slave. The two men went to a tavern, and Joaquim drank some rum. Later, Joaquim returned home but Salvador stayed longer because he “was trying to date a young slave woman called Tereza that belonged to the owner of the tavern [Palhares].” 5 In order to find Tereza, Salvador decided to enter Palhares’s house, which was next to the tavern. Already inside the house, he was forced to hide underneath the bed after noticing that Palhares was at home. According to Salvador, he wanted to wait for the owner of the house to leave “so he could talk to the black woman and stay with her until late at night.” 6 After returning home briefly to deliver the letter, Salvador did not stay long “because if he did it, the door would be closed and he would miss the chance to enter the tavern.” Although authorities became suspicious from the onset of Salvador’s version of why he had entered Palhares’s house, a series of testimonies and cross-examinations with key witnesses further undercut Salvador’s explanations. During a cross-examination with Joaquim, the slave who had met Salvador on the night of his arrest, Salvador became “vacillating and confused” after Joaquim denied meeting him or drinking with him at the tavern. Furthermore, his owner, João Sylva Franco, denied having sent him to deliver a letter to someone in Luanda. The biggest blow to his credibility came when he was accused of a series of burglaries that had recently taken place in Luanda, including the high-profile looting of the warehouse of the Portuguese-controlled Company of Pernambuco, which was responsible for shipping 30 percent of the slaves exported from Luanda and owned the largest warehouse in town.7

The Social Milieu of Taverns in Angola Salvador’s interactions with various slaves and masters in Luanda reflected the urban dynamics of taverns and nightlife that troubled colonial officials in port cities throughout the Black Atlantic. Beginning in 1759, a local chamber regulation required taverns to close at 7 p.m. during weekdays and remain closed on Sundays and religious holidays.8 Faced with resistance by owners and patrons, city officials decided to allow taverns to remain open until 9 p.m.9 However, existing regulations were frequently violated, and it would not be surprising if the tavern that Salvador went to remained open later than the time allowed by law. In fact, taverns that closed doors to the

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general public were regularly converted to gambling places attended by loyal patrons—sometimes the very police officers charged with enforcing the law.10 In addition to bringing together individuals who belonged to the lowest echelons of Luanda society, taverns constituted prime targets for burglaries since they stored material goods and food supplies. While the merchandise such as alcohol, textiles, and other goods served as an exchange medium in the interior of Angola to purchase slaves, food supplies and perishable items were mostly sold to the Luanda population. In fact, taverns held an effective monopoly over the sale of several products, such as olive oil, vinegar, and alcohol, a situation that led to manipulation of prices and was detrimental to the Luanda population.11 To make matters worse, there was frequent adulteration of foodstuffs through additives and the sale of poor-quality products. In 1784, half of the taverns in Luanda were fined due to the adulteration of the quality and weight of products they sold.12 Twelve years later, the charges revolved around the addition of water and pepper to alcohol brought from Brazil.13 In 1801, the owner of a tavern received a fine after a judge came down sick after eating olive oil fraudulently mixed with peanut oil.14 Similar to the multiethnic urban community of Ouidah described by Robin Law in his chapter in this volume, many tavern owners were not originally from Luanda. By the end of the eighteenth century, most merchants traded primarily in slaves but also owned taverns on the side. Similarly, many degredados who had been sent to Luanda due to criminal, religious, and political crimes also became tavern owners. Because nonnatives were seen as uncommitted to the well-being of the local community and focused only on maximizing profits from their business, the administration decided, in 1740, that only permanent residents of the city would be allowed to operate taverns.15 The regulation, however, had little if any impact on foreign ownership of taverns. For example, in 1759, Governor Antonio de Vasconcellos stated, “[I]f this business were correctly regulated, many honest [and native] couples would be able to make a living out of it.” 16 Echoing the criticism that their owners were mostly foreigners, the historian Elias Alexandre da Silva Corrêa, who lived in Luanda in the 1770s, criticized owners of taverns as “vagabond transients.” 17 As late as the 1820s, taverns set up by newcomers from Brazil were a fixture in Luanda and provoked bitter complaints from local merchants.18 In the case of the arrested slave Salvador, by admitting that he had been to a tavern, he inadvertently raised authorities’ suspicions about him. Taverns were widely seen as places where misfits and castoffs congregated and plotted

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their thieving activities. In fact, the bad reputation of taverns had prompted the town council to spearhead a campaign to limit the number of taverns in town and restrict ownership to married couples. According to the regulation, “there could not be more than twenty taverns and these would have to be owned and occupied by married people.” 19 Although the decision to limit the number of licensed taverns seems to have worked, it did not eliminate the generally negative view that authorities held of them. In 1818, taverns were described as “places where outcasts sent to Angola from the kingdom [of Portugal] to serve time for crimes” gathered before “fanning out to the streets of this city [Luanda] to disrupt [the] public order.” 20 In order to curb excesses by patrons, authorities instructed the commander of forces patrolling Luanda’s streets to arrest anyone gambling at taverns during the day.21 Four decades later, in a scathing assessment provoked by a wave of crimes, the local chamber indicated that “there were an innumerable number of taverns in alleys and streets of the city where slaves congregate to sell goods stolen from their owners and plot crimes.” 22 As demonstrated by several incidents, the negative view of taverns had roots in reality. In 1824, for example, a free man named João Silva was arrested at a tavern that belonged to Maria Eugênia after “engaging in disorderly conduct with the people at the tavern, calling them bad names, insulting the owner of the tavern, and holding a knife in his hands.” 23 In 1853, two soldiers were injured after engaging in a brawl at a tavern that belonged to a woman named Maria Joaquina, also known as Santa (saint). The incident occurred at Cidade Alta, the section of Luanda where most of the political and administrative buildings were located, and prompted the administration to determine that “all taverns were to be under surveillance because of the many incidents in which the police is forced to intervene to seize stolen merchandise and to prevent public unrest.” 24 In the following year, however, Marcos Gonga, a black man, was insulted and badly beaten by a soldier of the Luanda battalion at another tavern. The incident began after Gonga ordered a cup of coffee, which prompted the soldier to ask aloud if “black people also drank coffee.” As a liberto, Gonga was widely perceived as a slave. In fact, he held intermediary status between slavery and freedom created by the Portuguese state in 1854, when Portugal took the first, and largely failed, step to abolish slavery in Angola. According to the law, Gonga would have had to work for seven years for his master to become a free person. To answer the clear objection to his presence at the tavern, he replied that “if a black person had money, he could also [go to a tavern and]

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drink coffee.” The answer led to a brawl in which Gonga was left with deep cuts to his right ear and left arm.25 As was true in port cities throughout the Atlantic, Luanda’s taverns were centers of cross-racial, rowdy, and sometimes illegal activities.

Slaves and Free People In his first testimony, Salvador claimed “that he was a slave of the lieutenant (tenente) João Sylva Franco, with whom he used to live.” 26 Although Salvador lived with his owner, the vast majority of the enslaved residents of Luanda actually lived in senzalas, also known as cubatas.27 While “the houses of the whites are of lime and stone; those of the blacks [cubatas] [were] of mud and straw.” 28 According to a late eighteenth-century report by a governor of Angola, “senzalas denote the dwellings for slaves who do not live with their owners.” 29 Similar to the bustling Atlantic port cities of the Americas explored in this volume by João Reis for Bahia, Mariza de Carvalho Soares for Rio de Janeiro, David Geggus for Cap Français, and Matt Childs for Havana, it was common for some slaves to live on their own and then pay their masters their earnings, usually on a weekly basis. In addition to enslaved individuals, most of the free black and mixed-race population also lived in cubatas. As acknowledged by authorities, “except for a few merchants, the remainder of the population was poor and did not have the means to build houses of stone.” In fact, cubatas were so numerous that if they had been demolished, Luanda would have become an empty city.30 In 1849, there were 1,258 cubatas in town.31 A partial survey that measured only civilian slave owners and slaves “who could take up arms” indicated that up to two-thirds of the population of the city comprised slaves in 1773.32 A more comprehensive and reliable census taken eight years later showed that the slave population stood at 5,329—over half of the city’s population.33 Similar to the data examined by Trevor Burnard for Kingston and David Geggus for Cap Français, the enslaved urban population often swelled in Luanda when yards at merchants’ houses filled with their human cargo while waiting for shipment to Brazil. The large population of slaves in Luanda as both permanent residents owned by city dwellers and the transient population was not lost on contemporaries. In the seventeenth century, for example, two missionaries reported “a prodigious multitude of blacks, whose number is not known. They serve

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as slaves to the whites, some of whom have fifty, some a hundred, two or three hundred, and even three thousand.” 34 A few decades later, another missionary stated, “[T]he negroes which inhabit this city [Luanda] and kingdom [Angola], except some few that are free as being natives, they are all slaves to the whites.” 35 In a sign of the level of social stratification that percolated throughout Luanda society at the time, “the slaves, both men and women, kneel when they speak to their master.” 36 Despite the existence of free workers who received salaries, enslaved individuals formed the bulk of the labor force in Luanda. In 1772, each civilian white settler in the most populous neighborhood of Luanda—Nossa Senhora dos Remédios—owned on average three slaves “who could take up arms.” 37 If the census had included domestic slaves, the number would almost certainly have been much higher. In the wealthiest households, the number of domestic servants, including slaves and some free individuals, could reach up to forty.38 In fact, the largest slave owners in Luanda possessed so many slaves that the administration once considered forcing them to relocate some of their slaves to work on nearby farms (arimos). In case of reaction to this project by slaves, the administration recommended that they deport the recalcitrant slaves to Brazil.39 Between 1823 and 1832, almost half of the slaves living in the Rosário neighborhood were tailors, seamstresses, barbers, carpenters, washers, and so on.40 Like those residing in other cities throughout the Atlantic, Luanda slaves could be rented out by their owners, or some slaves sought out individuals able to pay the slaves for their work. “When their master have no use for them, they go work with anyone who wants them . . . and they bring home their earnings.” 41 Slaves who belonged to the convents of Luanda, for example, were particularly sought after because they were highly skilled in carpentry and artisanship, and they earned five hundred réis daily in the 1820s.42 The colonial and town governments themselves were major employers of slaves. Thus, Bernardo José da Costa, a major in the army and commander of the fort of Penedo in Luanda, sought to sell to the administration a slave who was a highly skilled carpenter and who had already been earning four hundred réis monthly to work for the government.43 Furthermore, enslaved individuals would travel to Luanda from Cabinda, which was located north of the Congo River, to “work as rowers on boats of private citizens, staying as long as they wanted and giving little or nothing [of their salaries] to their owners,” according to a nineteenth-century observer.44 On the streets of Luanda, a myriad of slaves would carry white settlers

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around the city in hammocks. “The whites when [they] go about town are followed by two blacks, with a hammock of net-work, which is the convenience used for carrying people even when they travel.” 45 In addition to providing a significant portion of the labor force in Luanda proper, slaves toiled on arimos located in regions around the city similar to the Bahian Recôncavo of Salvador, where most of the food supply for the city was produced. “Some [slaves] are sent to the arimos about one or two days journey off from the city, as to Bengo and Dande, which are well watered with rivers . . . others of these slaves are sent to fishing, whereby their masters maintain his family, and sells more what he has more than sufficient for that purpose.” 46 By the end of the eighteenth century, the number of slaves working on the arimos might have been in the thousands. In 1782, for example, a merchant who had recently relocated back to Lisbon declared that his investments included farms along the Bengo River, which counted almost 150 Africans working as slaves.47 Three years later, the Portugal-born Caetano Gonçalves da Gama stated that he was the owner of sixteen arimos in Bengo and Kilanda, where approximately 110 enslaved Africans toiled.48 On slave ships, a large number of sailors were enslaved individuals who belonged either to merchants or to the owners of the ships and their captains. In 1798, a Benguela merchant said, “I declare that I gave a young slave called João to captain José da Silva Teixeira to learn to be a sailor.” 49 The Desengano—which belonged to the Brazilian slave dealer Francisco Ferreira Gomes—was managed by “nine white individuals and fifteen slaves boçais.” 50 Occasionally enslaved sailors made claims to freedom by their work as sailors. For example, in 1776 Francisco de Paula requested his freedom on the grounds that he had worked for twenty-seven years on ships that belonged to Anselmo da Fonseca Coitinho—a wealthy mixed-race merchant born in Luanda. These ships sailed to Asia, Brazil, Europe, and Africa, and some of the slaves working on them were not even born in Angola. As a native of Rio de Janeiro, De Paula was certainly better traveled than his owner, who never left Angola.51 Many female slaves in Luanda were forced into prostitution by their owners, a situation seen in other Black Atlantic port cities. According to a report from 1770, “[I]t was not strange for a female slave owner to put her slave to work as a prostitute, regardless of [whether] she were mixed-race or black, nor would an impoverished mother refrain from it.” 52 According to historian Corrêa, there was a “multitude of female slaves, useless for household work, who lived in full liberty beyond owners’ control.” 53 While some reports

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indicated that prostitution was fostered by slave owners’ financial inability to provide food for their slaves, others stated that it was a mechanism that allowed owners to increase the number of slaves that they possessed.54 There is strong evidence, however, that owners were mostly driven by financial gains derived from the work their female slaves performed as prostitutes. A governor of Angola noted that slaves would “consult with their owners which prices they should charge” for their work as prostitutes.55 In fact, a slave owner was once called a pimp (alcoviteiro) by officials after requesting ownership of two newborns of a female slave who had been “rented” to an African man in Benguela.56 Corresponding to urban market practices that also existed in the Americas, many of the female slaves for hire were street vendors (kitandeiras), a group that also included free women. In Luanda, they sold goods that might include dried fish and palm oil, as well as expensive items such as Indian textiles and china. Kitandeiras’ business was bustling enough to undercut business by licensed taverns and prompt authorities to either ban or regulate their activities. After an unsuccessful attempt at a comprehensive ban in 1765, the local chamber (Câmara Municipal) established in 1771 that owners who allowed slaves to work as kitandeiras would lose not only the goods but also the slaves. 57 Neither of the laws was successful. In fact, only one year after the 1771 law, kitandeiras were accused of “setting up shops on the street, trading intensely and working even during holidays, causing serious financial damage to the merchants and individuals that sell in stores licensed by the local chamber.” 58 By the early nineteenth century, after a failed attempt to limit the number of days kitandeiras could work per week, the administration created a market—known as Kitanda Grande—exclusively for street vendors at a central place in town near the church of Nossa Senhora dos Remédios.59 By no means, however, was the administration able to fully regulate the work of kitandeiras. Similar to the Bahian cantos analyzed in the chapter by João Reis, the kitandas poignantly demonstrated the significant degree of marketing and purchasing power wielded by enslaved African hands. Attempts at controlling the urban marketing practices often resulted in complaints from masters who regarded such regulations as limiting the income-generating potential of their slaves. For example, a merchant filed a complaint to the administration in Benguela when “an officer prohibited his [enslaved] kitandeiras from selling goods on the street.” Instead of supporting the officer, the Benguela administration invoked the example of Luanda, where kitandeiras

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worked on the streets “without violating any law” and allowed kitandeiras to continue selling goods on the streets of Benguela.60 In 1851, the number of Luanda kitandeiras stood at approximately 118.61 The administration established four kitandas and the days when they could open, but the bishop of Luanda complained to the administration that the kitanda located near the Igreja dos Remédios was open on holy days.62 Finally, Luanda slaves could also be given highly specialized tasks that would take them far away from the port city. For example, merchants would rely on slaves to work as commercial agents—pumbeiros—in the interior of Angola. These slaves would frequently stay away from their owners for months, if not years. Enslaved individuals were also employed as financial accountants (caixeiros) who held key information about their owners’ businesses. This is demonstrated by instructions that Manoel Lourenço Ferreira, a merchant who lived in Mbaka, wrote in his will in 1759. According to Ferreira, all his slaves were to be sold after his death, except Damião, “who will not be sold so that he can help identify all the people who owe me money.” 63 Decades later, a governor of Angola pointed out that “ordinarily in this kingdom [Angola] many merchants employ slaves as caixeiros in their stores.” 64

Law, Language, and Schools With the large number of slaves in Luanda, social control and punishment of enslaved individuals were paramount issues. Governor of Angola Miguel Antonio de Mello argued that “the largest number of disorders that the slaves commit here grows out of the fact that their owners neglect to educate them and curb their excesses and vices.” 65 In the view of the eighteenth-century historian Corrêa, slaves were treated with a high degree of relative “leniency” by authorities, a view that is not backed up by the bulk of the accounts about treatment of slaves in Luanda.66 The issue of how frequently slaves were to be punished and who was to be in charge of punishment lay at the heart of these assessments. In 1796, due to physical punishment that was deemed excessive, the administration ordered the sale of Manoel do Rosário by his owner.67 Two years later, Governor Miguel Antonio de Mello complained to a slave owner who was his neighbor about a session of physical punishment that lasted more than one hour.68 By and large, however, owners exercised wide discretion in the matter. In fact, only at the end of the eighteenth century did

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a high-ranking colonial official call for regulating slave punishment and making it the responsibility of public authorities.69 The first step of the gradual shift toward state oversight came with the creation of a Pelourinho where slaves could be publicly punished on the request of their owners. In 1846, for example, Mateus Guellette requested that authorities punish one of his slaves for being “a brazen, thief and drunk.” 70 As demonstrated by two enslaved individuals who suffered a public flogging after drinking alcohol excessively and brawling, the Pelourinho was also utilized to punish slaves who engaged in disorderly conduct in town.71 In general, after being punished, slaves were returned to their owners. By the mid-nineteenth century, however, the low number of slaves punished in the Pelourinho of Luanda—some twenty slaves between February and October 1847—suggests that punishment was still largely conducted by owners.72 In 1853, the administration issued a regulation that prohibited owners from carrying out punishment altogether and made it the administration’s responsibility. In order to request punishment, owners had to prove that their slaves had perpetrated a crime or been disobedient.73 The legislation, however, was by no means sufficient to keep owners from punishing their slaves. Returning briefly to the case that opened the chapter, but this time to illustrate the process of enacting justice and punishments on slaves, after his arrest, the slave Salvador was immediately brought before the juiz pela ordem (judge for the social order). The judge was Bernardo Nunes Portela, a Portuguese man who held a law degree from the prestigious University of Coimbra and who came to Luanda as an exile—degredado—to serve a sentence. Initially prohibited from practicing law because of his penchant for “intrigues and a malign animus,” Portela later rose to the position of judge and eventually became one of the most powerful merchants in town.74 Unsurprisingly, there were glaring contradictions between Salvador’s testimony and that of his accuser, Palhares. According to Palhares, Salvador sneaked into his house, hid underneath his bed, and attacked him after being caught. Although he was not physically wounded, he said that the attacks were so severe that he had two holes in his shirt.75 Palhares’s first testimony was short on details, but one of the witnesses later summoned by authorities, Caetano Mathias Leitão, a forty-six-year-old Luanda-born colonel, was more elaborate. According to Leitão, Palhares was in bed and at first “thought that there was a cat underneath his bed, and when he saw that it was a man, he got up and ran back to the shop to grab a machete (catana), but then he [Palhares] was assaulted.” 76

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Since judge Portela spoke only Portuguese, an interpreter was appointed so Salvador could give his testimony in Kimbundu, an African language widely spoken in Luanda. The language barrier that prevented Portela from speaking directly to Salvador illustrates broader issues created by the linguistic patterns in Luanda. Seven years prior to Salvador’s arrest, the administration had recommended that owners require “slaves to speak the dominant language [Portuguese],” as was done “in Brazil,” thus relegating Kimbundu to “the backlands [sertões]” or to “blacks’ use among themselves.” 77 Despite several attempts to strengthen the use of the Portuguese language, however, Kimbundu remained the primary language even for the white and mixedrace population. The governor of Angola issued a public order, complaining, “It is very unacceptable that noble white families do not use the Portuguese language at home and do not teach their offspring to speak that language, thus preventing the latter from the good lessons they could draw from reading good books, choosing instead the Kimbundu language, which is only necessary in the sertões.” 78 Two decades later, a high-ranking judicial official stated, “[A]mong the issues that to me seem abusive in this city and conquista, is the widespread use of the Kimbundu language.” 79 As stated by Corrêa, the “dominant language [of Luanda] was Kimbundu.” 80 Significantly, laws issued by the Luanda administration were written in Portuguese but publicized on the streets of Luanda in Kimbundu. Despite the fact he did not speak Portuguese, Salvador was repeatedly characterized as a culturally assimilated slave (ladino). By doing so, authorities were tacitly acknowledging that his command of the Portuguese language was not necessary to measure cultural assimilation. Similar to the employment of the term in Brazil as analyzed by João Reis, ladino did not necessarily equate to the term “creole,” even though slaves such as Salvador and freedmen such as Domingos Sodré could deftly navigate the Bahian and Luanda worlds dominated by a creolized Portuguese culture. The predominance of Kimbundu speakers grew out of the fact that the majority of people in Luanda were Mbundu people, as well as from the similarity between the Kimbundu language and other languages spoken by nonMbundu peoples living in town. For example, enslaved individuals brought from the Lunda territories east of the Kwango River were said to learn Kimbundu during the grueling and lengthy trip to the coast due to the similarity between Kimbundu and Chokwe.81 In addition, the spread of Portuguese was weakened due to the absence of an effective school system. Since the midseventeenth century, if not earlier, formal education had been in the hands

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of the Jesuits.82 In the seventeenth century, the Jesuits created a school that “rivaled the most sumptuous of Europe . . . and had three classes for reading; the two first classes in Latin.” A few years after it was created, more than one hundred individuals—many of them free blacks—had been trained in the college, the vast majority becoming clergy in churches in Luanda and the interior of Angola.83 However, even tutors at the Jesuit college largely neglected the Portuguese language because they realized that it would be less relevant than local languages in their missionary work. To make matters worse, the 1759 expulsion of the Jesuits led to the dismantling of the Jesuit college, and a further decline in what limited advances had been made to teach more widely in the Portuguese language.84 During the administration of Governor Francisco de Souza Coutinho in the second half of the eighteenth century, attempts to create a school system failed to increase the number of individuals with access to formal education. In 1770, the administration created two public schools “for the rich and poor children.” 85 Three years later, there were up to “one hundred students in each one of the [two] schools, the majority mixed-race individuals [mulattoes and fuscos, a Portuguese word used to refer to mixed-race individuals], blacks and only a few whites.” 86 In 1784, the administration requested the hiring of “two or three masters of reading and writing, who could be found in the country [Angola].” 87 Despite such improvements, access to education remained very limited. For example, girls were not allowed to attend classes in the public schools. As a result, “women are educated by black women without good customs and religion, and black women teach them their language, customs, and sentiments, and thus many white women do not speak nor understand the Portuguese language.” 88 In 1785, due to efforts by the wife of Governor Mossamedes, a system of private tutoring was established for female youth in Luanda.89 At first, slaves were to be allowed to attend the two public schools created in 1770, as long as they had the “right circumstances” and produced a written authorization from their masters.90 However, no slave was ever actually allowed to enroll. Although they were later allowed to take classes with the two tutors hired for women (if their owners paid for it), slaves were to be trained only in domestic tasks (ironing, sewing, and cooking) and were not to be taught how to read and write.91 More important, the hegemony of Kimbundu was reflective of broader cultural and social patterns in town. More than two hundred years after Portugal established the colony, the limited use of the Portuguese language caused one colonial official to conclude, “Angola

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in many ways did not seem like an old colony but rather a territory that had been recently conquered.” 92 Beyond language alone, other cultural institutions of colonization testify to the Portuguese presence in Luanda. For example, the city was dotted with several churches and four convents that belonged to the religious orders that operated in Angola (Marians, Jesuits, Capuchins, and Franciscans). The churches and missionary orders received direct support from the local administration, sometimes through revenues generated by shipping slaves to Brazil. For example, part of the money to build the church of Nossa Senhora do Rosário derived from a license that the brotherhood in charge of building the church received to dispatch one slave vessel to Brazil each year. Furthermore, at least part of the funding that supported missionary work in the interior derived from licenses to ship slaves to Brazil that the local government had awarded to the Junta of Missões (Missionary Board).93

Religion and African Culture As explored by Nicole von Germeten for Mexico City, James Sweet for Lisbon, Matt Childs for Havana, João Reis for Bahia, and Jane Landers for Cartagena, one of the dominant cultural institutions in the Iberian Black Atlantic was the Catholic Church. At the churches and convents in Luanda, there were several brotherhoods, some of which limited membership to certain groups of society. For example, according to an ecclesiastical source of the eighteenth century, there was “a brotherhood that would only admit Portuguese individuals as members and [another brotherhood] that would only admit native born [Africans] as a special grace.” 94 Despite these policies, the impact of the Catholic Church and religious orders on the social and cultural order of Luanda was indelible. The brotherhood of the Misericórdia managed the sole hospital in town, where it assisted up to six hundred people a year by the end of the seventeenth century.95 More important, as stated by seventeenthcentury historian Antonio de Oliveira Cadornega, “even free and enslaved blacks have their brotherhood of Our Lady of Rosary that is housed in a chapel and where they organize ceremonies.” 96 By the end of the eighteenth century, the Rosary brotherhood received financial support from the Luanda administration to maintain a chapel (ermida) and organize social activities for their members and the large black population in town.97 Both the Catholic Church and brotherhoods strayed away from orthodoxy,

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as Africans infused them with a local flavor that deeply disturbed European observers. In 1759, for example, a report indicated that no person in Luanda was “versed in religion, including the clergy,” some of whom had been trained locally.98 Later, the eighteenth-century historian Corrêa pointed out that despite the large and frequent processions that the brotherhoods organized, these were “celebrations without religion.” 99 At the end of the eighteenth century, the Luanda bishop described the services as “a sacrilegious mixing of superstition and religion.” 100 Furthermore, the capacity of the Catholic Church to influence local society was severely hampered by perennial understaffing. In 1784, arguing that missionary work in the interior would not advance without “natives of the country being ordained,” authorities called for the creation of a seminary.101 Four years later, with only twelve priests in Luanda, not all actively involved in missionary work, the situation remained essentially the same.102 Despite the European influence on Luanda, several examples demonstrate how African culture penetrated the different spheres of private and public life in town. In times of difficulties, droughts, or food supply shortages, the city filled with kibangos, shrines dedicated to the worship of African religious entities and gods. There were attempts to curb such practices, including the arrest of fourteen black women and men in 1784.103 But these efforts only temporarily stopped the worship of such deities and did not modify long-held religious practices. To settle legal disputes ranging from theft to adultery and accusations of witchcraft, instead of resorting to the legal apparatus established by the Portuguese, residents of Luanda would sometimes rely on the juramento of Ndua, also widely used in the Luanda hinterlands, which required litigants to drink a poisonous herbal concoction that would sometimes result in death. The parties would come before an African judge, usually a healer, who would hear their pleas and then prepare the beverage. The first person to expel (vomit) the beverage would be set free. The culprit would have to drink another portion of the beverage at the expense of his or her own life. If the person did not die, heavy penalties—including enslavement—would ensue.104 In Luanda, the juramento was used by Lourenço Agostinho to clarify suspicions of adultery by his lover, Ana Correa da Costa, a free black woman. Agostinho arranged for and was present when Costa and her alleged lover, also a free African, underwent the ritual practice.105 Another example is that of Suzana de João, a slave living on a Bengo farm owned by the Luanda merchant Manoel Simões Colaço, who underwent the ritual twice because she

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was accused of stealing a chicken.106 By the mid-eighteenth century, as shown by the historian Jan Vansina, the Luanda administration had succeeded in banning the juramento of Ndua in town.107 However, the practice remained deeply entrenched in the social and cultural landscape of communities near the city. The ongoing use of the practice is indicated by the brothers Ambrózio Baltazar and João Baltazar. After the brothers had been “physically assaulted due to accusations of being witches,” they petitioned the Luanda administration for special permission to take the juramento to clear their names.108 Even slaves who belonged to the Jesuit college held on to African traditions. José Inácio, a slave barber at the school, is a case in point. Inácio “was married to Izabel Inácio, who also belonged to the Jesuit college, and they were both natives of [Luanda].” He was “the son of Inácio and Mísia, who had also been slaves of the Jesuit school.” Despite links to the Jesuits spanning two generations, Inácio consulted a Mbundu healer—ganga—when his wife fell ill. “The healer did ceremonies with his hands and said he knew which disease was afflicting Inácio’s wife; a disease known as casuto, for which the healer recommended some crushed sticks to boil and bathe in.” During deposition to the Inquisition, Inácio added that the treatment did not work and that the healer was a slave of Captain Manoel Simões Colaço—one of the wealthiest slave dealers in town.109 In another example drawn from the Inquisition files, Gregório Pascoal, a slave of the Catholic priest João Rodrigues da Rocha, stated, “His neighbor had taken him to see a ritual in which a goat was slaughtered to honor someone who had died.” Gaspar acknowledged he had taken part in the ceremony by eating the goat and stated that the ceremony was performed by gangas. According to him, the healer who conducted the ceremony was a slave who belonged to the highest military authority in Luanda.110 As explored in the chapters by Matt Childs for Havana, Jane Landers for Cartagena, and David Geggus for Cap Français, religious festivals and ceremonies frequently provided a venue for slaves and free blacks to congregate together, and authorities often complained about their loud and excessive celebrations, which they feared could lead to acts of resistance. In 1798, Manoel Teixeira, an official in Calumbo located close to Luanda, “was writing a letter to the Governor of Angola but could not do it because of the noise of the drumming played by blacks [slaves].” When the official asked the slaves to stop the drumming, they not only refused aggressively but also promised retribution for previous punishment inflicted on them by Teixeira. According to the official, who was a black man, “they called me negro like them and said

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they would not obey me, since they were slaves of Francisco Inácio, and said they would flog me to take away my pride (xibanca).111 In 1822, a regulation determined that slaves who went out at night without a pass would be enlisted in the army, but in the following year there were complaints about balls and festivities promoted at night by slaves.112 Festival gatherings by slaves were so frequent that the administration once even paid financial compensation to individuals who filed complaints about disorderly conduct that occurred during one of these balls.113 As stated by one colonial official posted in Angola, there was a “bad habit of the majority of the residents of wasting their nights in batuques and algazarras, with grave inconvenience of those who are not vagabonds (vadios), who cannot rest from their daily works.” 114 Many of these festivities were in reality part of religious ceremonies that African residents performed after the death of someone from the community, as reported by an eyewitness in 1858.115 These ceremonies were known as entambes and commemorated the passing of relatives or acquaintances. “Whites (and I say it with horror) take advantage of it without reason and discernment; these entambes were in fact the center of disorder, of public dissolution, thieveries, and the most scandalous superstitions.” 116 Entambes would inevitably lead to gatherings of relatives and friends at the house of the deceased. As stated by Corrêa, “[T]he lamentations are sung on the streets in the language of the country [Kimbundu] by the slaves of the deceased. Like ambulant machines, they use their chants to warn relatives [of the deceased] in other parts of the city.” 117 Remarking on the pervasiveness of entambes, a governor of Angola remarked on “some customs learned from slaves that are based on superstitious veneration that is contrary to the purity of our truthful religion.” 118 In addition to entambes, public gatherings by residents of Luanda also took place during ceremonies to eliminate diseases afflicting people. According to an Inquisition officer, “almost all white and black women rely on witches when they are ill.” 119 An incident involving Antônio de Freitas Galvão sheds light into the so-called “witchcraft” that so alarmed authorities. A black man born in Luanda, Galvão was a captain in the Benguela military forces. In 1722, Ignácio Paulo da Silva, a man born in Pernambuco who was also in the military, was drawn outside his home by the sound of drums played by slaves participating in a ceremony in Galvão’s house. When Silva asked what was going on, the enslaved women replied that “the party was to provide entertainment for Galvão’s daughter, Natarcia, who wanted to enjoy herself (folgar).” 120

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Because the ceremony began during the day and lasted until late at night, it became a sensation in town. “Almost all the slaves in town attended,” as did the white people. A local priest, Francisco Lopes Porto, noticed but “pretended nothing unusual was happening because it was not unusual for black people to celebrate in such way.” The following day, however, the same priest was told by one of the attendants that the ceremony honored the soul— Zambi—of the deceased wife of Galvão. As the African healer brought from nearby Dombe to preside over the ceremony explained, her soul was to blame for the illness that afflicted Galvão.121 Still a very young child, Galvão’s daughter was dressed in a special garment and presided over the ceremony to honor “her defunct mother.” Several Mbundu musical instruments were used, and participants ate a bezerro (goat) that had been sacrificed.122 According to one of the witnesses, Galvão “was used to relying on African ceremonies, that local people call xinguillamento, which are the same as invoking the devil.” 123 A witness, Manoel Simões, a commander in Benguela who had held positions in several places in Angola for forty years, gave testimony that provided insight into the mind-set of locals. He said that if asked about such practices, Africans would “answer that they did not constitute sin because they had been used for centuries and that God allowed anyone to use the means necessary to remedy afflictions.” 124 In addition to ceremonies to honor the dead and keep diseases away, residents of Luanda gathered together in a festive way at the end of a ceremony known as alembamento, which preceded weddings. During the alembamento, the families of the bride and groom negotiated the payment of the bride’s dowry. In the meantime, the bride was kept in seclusion for eight days and underwent an initiation ritual known as kikumbe, which was followed by a three-day celebration. After undergoing the kikumbe, the bride was considered ready for the beginning of sexual life and could then marry.125 Kikumbes were so commonly practiced in Luanda that owners of slaves often received dowries for their female slaves.126 More important, there is strong evidence that African culture so thoroughly penetrated the Luanda social and cultural landscape that white and mulatto residents of the city would end up incorporating it. In the 1780s a judicial official reported with considerable shock that [s]ome white women, almost all mulatto women, and the black women did not dress in the European way, wrapping themselves in Indian textiles [chitas and lenços], from five to eight different quality

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and colors. . . . [O]nly white women show their hair as some of the mulatto women and black women wrap their heads with colorful cloth, only wearing simple adornos. Very few go to mass, even white women, and some did not confess. Except for black women, they [white and mixed-race women] would choose to stay at home during the day. For leisure or mourning the dead, they would use “savage” musical instruments, amidst loud mourning and native (gentílicas).127 Four years later, another scathing report indicated that “the many mulattoes and few whites that live in Luanda are culturally as black as the black people who live in town.” 128 A Capuchin priest who visited Luanda at the end of the seventeenth century complained that Portuguese women who grew up “among blacks, suffer[ed] themselves to be so much perverted that they scarcely retain anything white about them except their skins.” 129

Manoel Salvador: Slave or Free Person? By way of concluding this chapter on Luanda as a Black Atlantic port city, we can return to the case of Manoel Salvador to ask several central questions about divisions between freedom and slavery in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries so thoroughly connected by the routes of the transatlantic slave trade. In the process of convincingly establishing that Salvador had committed several crimes in Luanda, authorities began investigating whether he was truly an enslaved individual. The suspicion arose after Sebastião José Martins Ribeiro, the owner of a shop, testified that Salvador had “redeemed himself from slavery with money he gave to Lieutenant João da Silva Franco.” 130 Enslaved Africans who worked on their own were certainly able to accumulate some degree of wealth and purchase their freedom in Luanda, in much the same fashion that the legal practice of cortación/ cortacão produced a large free population of color in Latin America. For example, Andreza Paulo paid 300,000 réis for her freedom in 1856.131 In the same year, Francisca Garcia paid 150,000 réis.132 Two years later, Bernarda Manoel paid 80,000 réis to become a free woman.133 However, Salvador’s case presented a strange twist because instead of using his wealth to become a free person, he claimed to have given money to someone—João da Silva Franco—to buy him from his first owner, Henrique Francisco da Matta. According to Salvador’s own testimony during the criminal case investigating

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his thefts, “it had never occurred to me to become free because slavery was good to me.” To clarify, authorities summoned Matta, who confirmed that he had sold Salvador to João da Silva Franco.134 Franco himself strongly suggested that Salvador was not a slave. While admitting he had purchased Salvador, Franco said Salvador did not work for him as a slave. In fact, he said that Salvador “could go away if he wanted because he was now a free man.” 135 The revelation made authorities return to questioning Salvador once again. Although initially denying what Franco had said, Salvador eventually confessed that he had “given it [money] to João da Silva Franco to buy him [Salvador].” 136 Authorities questioned why he chose slavery over freedom, “since it is sure that all slaves wish their freedom,” and Salvador responded that “he wanted to stay in his land and that he wanted to serve” Franco as a slave. To the question of whether he lived with Franco as a slave or a free man, Salvador said, “[H]e served as a slave but was treated as a free man.” 137 The details about the transaction convinced authorities that Salvador was a former slave who had freed himself by using money generated by his criminal activities. To deny this, Salvador claimed that he had been “shipped from this city [Luanda] together with his mother and his brother to Rio de Janeiro when he was a child, and later he came to this city [Luanda] and his brother stayed in Rio de Janeiro.” His brother was named João Martins and would send from Rio de Janeiro “some pastries, which he [Salvador] ordered him to buy with the proceeds of the sale in Rio of pipes, and mats that he would ship from this city [Luanda].” 138 The pastries received from Rio were sold in Luanda. In addition, his brother had three times sent him Brazilian money (patacas), totaling 52,400 réis. The money resulted from the sale in Rio of goods Salvador shipped from Luanda to Rio. Although authorities were fully convinced that Salvador had burglarized not only the warehouse of the Company of Pernambuco but also several properties in Luanda, they neither discredited him nor seemed particularly skeptical about his claim of returning to Angola after having been shipped as a slave to Brazil. The reaction was a reflection of the unusual mobility across the Atlantic of free and enslaved individuals. Many individuals traveled back and forth across the Atlantic, although it was by no means a journey that could be undertaken by most slaves shipped from Luanda.139 Often the trip was made possible by professional activities performed by slaves, such as bookkeeping or domestic service. In 1826, for example, José Nicolau Ferreira said that he would need to take to Rio de Janeiro a slave he had inherited from

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his father because he was his bookkeeper (caixeiro) and because “he lacked the means to stay in Benguela.” 140 Crossing the Atlantic was an easier endeavor for culturally assimilated slaves (ladinos) who worked as domestic servants. In 1822, for example, Manoel Pires Chaves asked the government of Benguela for permission to send back a female slave who had recently accompanied his wife on the trip from Rio de Janeiro.141 In 1828, Manoel Joaquim da Guerra “requested the license to send a ladina female slave to Rio de Janeiro.” 142 In the same year, Henriques Barreto “requested a license to send to Rio de Janeiro one of his slaves, Ana.” 143 In 1829, Francisco Marques de Oliveira “requested a license to travel to Rio de Janeiro and take with him one slave,” 144 and Lázaro Teixeira de Souza requested a “license to resend to Rio de Janeiro Faustina, one of his slaves.” 145 In Brazil, these slaves would learn specific skills and then return to Angola. Thus, José Pedro Cota requested a license to send a female slave named Felícia and her daughter Mariana—very likely his daughter as well—to Rio de Janeiro to be educated.146 While undoubtedly these represent exceptional cases in navigating the treacherous and deadly routes of the transatlantic slave trade that most commonly turned Africans into factors of labor in the New World, the examples of such skilled and resourceful people as Manoel Salvador also indicate that human migration also went back across the Atlantic from Brazil to Luanda with regular frequency. Furthermore, there were also Brazilian-born slaves who accompanied their masters to Luanda and then returned to America. A few cases provide specific examples. In 1807, Antonio José da Silva Lisboa, a Portuguese merchant operating out of Luanda, wrote in his will that he was freeing “Teodora, parda (mixed race) and born in Rio de Janeiro, who will receive two hundred réis, another female slave born in Benguela, Joaquina, and Roza Benguela, who is currently pregnant.” Lisboa stated that both Teodora and Roza Benguela would be allowed to travel to Rio de Janeiro if they so wished. António Francisco Gomes seemed to imply the same situation in a petition in 1823, when he “requested a license to travel to Rio de Janeiro and take with him a ladino slave that he had brought from Rio.” 147 Indeed, some slaves crossed the Atlantic more than twice. In 1795, while specifically instructing the executor of his will to ship to Brazil a ladino slave, a merchant stated that this slave had already been to Brazil.148 When Manoel Pires Chaves applied for a license to send two female slaves to Rio de Janeiro, he mentioned that it would not be the first time that they had been there.149 These two cases were by no means the only ones. In 1825, Francisco de Paulo,

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an itinerant trader (volante), requested a license to return to Rio de Janeiro with a slave named António.150 In fact, the same remark was made by José Nicolau Ferreira when he applied for a license for three female slaves to be allowed to travel with him to Brazil in 1826.151 Three years later, Josefa Angélica “requested a license to take to Rio de Janeiro her ladina female slave Dionízia, who had already been to Rio.” 152 There were even cases of slaves being allowed to travel by themselves. In at least one case, Caetano José, “a slave of Captain Joaquim António Ferreira, a merchant from Rio de Janeiro, requested a license to travel to Rio de Janeiro.” 153 A variety of reasons would also lead free black and mixed-race individuals to travel to Brazil. Josefa Maria and Ana Maria, two free black women from Luanda, requested a license to travel to Rio de Janeiro in 1825.154 In the following year, Maria Francisca da Conceição, a free black woman from Benguela, followed suit.155 Neither case specifies why the trips were taking place. However, the cases of Manoel António, Joaquim Francisco, Jacinto João, and João Manoel illustrate why free Africans would travel to Brazil. Luanda residents, these four free black men were given licenses to travel to Rio de Janeiro and stay there for two years. While Manoel António and Joaquim Francisco stated that the reason why each wanted to travel to Rio was to learn how to be a jeweler (ourives), Jacinto João wished to learn how to become a tailor and João Manoel’s goal was to become a cooper.156 Three weeks later, two other free blacks—Manoel João and José Francisco—also requested licenses to travel to Rio de Janeiro to learn how to be sailors.157 Furthermore, there were also individuals who justified requesting licenses on the grounds that they needed to travel to Rio for educational purposes, a justification commonly used by parents to request licenses to send their children. This was the case of the free mixed-race woman Guiomar de Góes, who in 1831 obtained a license for her son Manoel de Sacramento e Souza to stay in Rio for one year. The same justification was frequently used by slave traders to send their children to Brazil, and this was also the case of Felix de Souza of Ouidah as described in the chapter by Robin Law. In addition to undertaking educational training or learning technical skills, free blacks traveled to Brazil also to conduct business. Thus, Francisco António signed a guarantee document (fiança) promising to return to Angola after one year in Rio de Janeiro “to deal with his business.” 158 Business was also the justification utilized by Pedro Francisco, who was described as a “free black from the backlands of Angola and resident in Luanda.” 159 Like António and Francisco, at least fifty-eight other free blacks, nine of them women, were

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given licenses to travel to Rio de Janeiro and Recife for business. Three of them—Pedro Zombo, Garcia Zombo, and Álvaro Zombo—seemed to be members of the same family and traveled to Rio together.160 On average, these individuals were allowed to stay away from Luanda for two years. Regardless of the reason for traveling to Brazil, all these individuals had to pay a thirty réis fee and promise to return to Luanda once the allotted time authorities allowed them to stay abroad had lapsed. If they did not return or for any reason delayed their return to Luanda without previous authorization, they would be charged fines that amounted to one conto and two hundred réis. Although the colonial agents who approved these trips did not seek to obtain such fees from free blacks who lacked the financial means, several other wealthy individuals had to comply with this regulation. In Salvador’s case, thus, the problem did not lie with this argument that he had been able to return to Luanda after being sold into slavery in Rio de Janeiro. Ultimately, the problem was that the amount of money that the police found in Salvador’s possession could not have resulted from street trading only in Luanda. Since his brother was a slave, it seemed implausible that he would have been able to send so much money in gold to Luanda. When authorities questioned him about the issue, Salvador replied that he “knew neither whether his brother was a slave at the moment nor if he could send him the money.” The money had been brought to Luanda by “a black man called Miguel, a sailor on the ship of captain Manoel da Costa Pinheiro.” In his testimony, however, Miguel said that he “did not know the black man [Salvador] and that he neither brought letter, orders [encomendas] or any other thing from Brazil . . . neither has he taken any letter from this city [Luanda] to any black person in Brazil.” 161 As for Manoel Salvador’s slave owner Franco, after being asked why he did not grow suspicious at the amount of money that Salvador gave to him, he said he believed the money and nice cloth that Salvador had were results of his business with his brother in Brazil. The police did not believe him and made him an accomplice of Salvador in the crimes in Luanda.162

Chapter ten

African Barbeiros in Brazilian Slave Ports Mariza de Carvalho Soares

For many decades, Latin American historians did not argue, debate, or investigate in detail where African slaves came from. Only during the last decades have scholars begun to emphasize the different experiences of enslavement for individuals who were born as slaves in the Americas from those who arrived as adults from abroad or realized that even those who experienced slavery in Africa could differently understand its meaning and practice in the Americas. Also only recently have scholars of slavery in the Americas begun to consider African history as a crucial component in understanding slavery in Latin America. The history of slavery in the Americas can ignore Africa and Africans no longer. This new approach to slavery has resulted from the confrontation of two different fields of study: the history of slavery itself and the history of the African diaspora. The problem now is to understand in detail the everyday lives of those Africans who ended up in the Americas under slavery. This chapter explores this point by examining African barbeiros (barbers) living in the city of Rio de Janeiro during the 1820s, the decade Brazil first outlawed the transatlantic slave trade. First, it examines barbeiros over the longue durée and around the Atlantic, then focuses on the local role of barbeiros in Rio de Janeiro. This chapter emphasizes that research connecting Black Atlantic port cities and differentiating their local institutions can illuminate understudied issues relating to the African diaspora during the era of the slave trade. Historians of Atlantic slavery, the African diaspora, and related topics analyze the social processes that provoked, resulted from, and followed the dispersal of twelve and a half million persons across the Atlantic basin. Robin

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Law and Paul Lovejoy have researched Baquaqua and his trips in Brazil, Haiti, and the United States; Ira Berlin has analyzed “Atlantic creoles”; and, in The Many-Headed Hydra, Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker have highlighted the mobility and circulation of people around the Atlantic.1 By contrast, this chapter looks at African-born slaves who resided in a single American place, examining how their African backgrounds may have blended—or failed to blend—with what they learned and experienced in the Americas. This requires balancing attention to individuals, to social groups, and to institutions, as well as attending to both African and Latin American history. The study of Atlantic port cities offers the possibility of observing how the different “heads of the hydra” can talk to each other, enlarging our collective understanding of the Atlantic World. The debate is no longer about if Africans rebuilt their lives in the diaspora but how they did it in each place and time. What I argue in this chapter is that by focusing on barbeiros in Rio de Janeiro as a case study, I am searching not for an “Atlantic culture” but for an operative Atlantic attitude of mixing cultural practices and crossing formal boundaries to build the situational frames within which individuals interacted. The barbeiros of Rio de Janeiro arrived from African ports with distinctly different backgrounds, but over time they forged close links with the people and institutions of Rio: not least among them the Portuguese Royal Medical College to which the African barbeiros belonged, as I demonstrate here.2 In recent decades, historians have paid increasing attention to the conditions that attended the transportation of slaves from Africa to the Americas.3 However, while we have learned much about enslaved victims and the Europeans involved with them, we know little about the many institutions that remained invisible behind the trade itself. Connections between the Portuguese Royal Medical College and the Atlantic slave trade have not received adequate attention, nor have the corresponding institutions in Britain, France, or other nations involved in the Atlantic slave trade. Stated another way, the mortality of the slave trade has long been a topic of demographic historians, but the medical practices that emerged, evolved, and responded to these dying captives has yet to attract significant scholarly attention. The rules and norms governing these matters varied by nation and across time, and they have been addressed differently in separate national historiographies of the slave trade and of medicine. This chapter focuses on barbeiros who served not only as barbers but also as bloodletters, performing minor surgeries to heal slaves and free people both in Rio de Janeiro and on board slave ships during the era

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of the Atlantic slave trade. For their skills, these barbers were called barberbleeders (barbeiros-sangradores), or simply barbeiros. Barbeiros-sangradores first caught my attention many years ago when I discovered that a group of Mina-Mahi former slaves in Rio de Janeiro were barbeiros.4 In the 1780s they organized a Catholic brotherhood to worship Nossa Senhora dos Remédios (“Our Lady of the Remedies”) and also participated in a military body known as the Regimento dos Pretos (“Black Militia”).5 Up to the seventeenth century, barbeiros in the Portuguese Atlantic— as well as their British, French, Spanish, and Dutch counterparts—treated external diseases, practiced dentistry, and bled patients. Over the course of this century, surgeons occupied a progressively higher social position.6 European states began requiring practicing physicians and surgeons to possess diplomas or affiliations with institutional bodies. During the same period, barbeiros (barbers, or barbiers in French) came to be regarded as unfit to perform bleedings and small surgeries. In Brazil, however, the profession of barbeiro existed until at least the end of the nineteenth century, and some former African slaves probably continued to work as barbeiros after this point. In Portugal, physicians received their diplomas from the University of Coimbra, the only medical school in the Portuguese Empire. Surgeons and even barbeiros also had some expertise in the Western academic medicine of the time. But conversely, up to the seventeenth century, surgeons (cirurgiões) and barbeiros had no diplomas—only employment licenses. Licenses for barbeiros could be either short-term (provisões), usually valid for a year or for a single trip, or permanent (cartas). Many barbers never obtained a carta, and many probably never even had a temporary license. The cost of licenses was usually paid by owners (or captains) of ships and barbershops, not by the slaves themselves. Those licenses involved formal training, passing exams, and wining official recognition in the form of a carta. Either the Portuguese Royal Medical College or city councils (câmaras) issued these licenses, which allowed barbeiros to bleed and treat people at authorized sites called oficinas overseen by a master barber (oficial de barbeiro). They also worked at sea, in particular on board slave ships. In places where surgeons and physicians were available, like hospitals, barbeiros worked under their supervision; in all others they worked independently. But cartas also offered distinction and status: many barbers who were licensed when still slaves went to the trouble of applying for a new carta that stated their change in status after acquiring freedom. Barbeiros with permanent licenses (cartas), temporary licenses

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(provisões), or no license at all worked all over Rio de Janeiro. The number and proportion present are difficult to estimate. The social makeup of barbeiros changed significantly over the course of the colonial period in Brazil (1530–1808). Up to the seventeenth century, most barbeiros were “white” and free people. During the seventeenth century, the proportion of black barbeiros (meaning slaves) increased substantially. Throughout the eighteenth century and by the early nineteenth century, most appear to have been black, and the majority were African-born slaves.7 Colonial Brazil had no medical schools, and the resulting shortage of physicians is usually taken as the reason why barbeiros persisted in performing minor surgeries for so long there. Medical schools were established first in Bahia and then in Rio de Janeiro at the Military Hospital, both immediately after the arrival of the Portuguese Royal Court in 1808. The Brazilian National Archives houses an important collection of work licenses for barbeiros. They belong to the collection of the Royal Medical College (then called Fisicatura Mór do Reino), which accompanied the Portuguese Court to Rio de Janeiro, and licensed barbers (barbeiros), midwives (parteiras), and surgeons (cirurgiões). This collection comprises the period from 1809 to 1828, when barbeiros coexisted with surgeons and with the first generation of graduates of the Medical School. In 1828 the Brazilian Empire finally scrapped the Fisicatura Mór in favor of a more modern institution. From 1809 to 1828, the Fisicatura Mór issued approximately one hundred fifty licenses for barbeiros, despite a strong campaign mounted by the recently created Medical School against the barbeiros.8 Because the collection of licenses spans only the years between 1809 and 1828,9 we run the risk of expanding our conclusions about barbeiros. More risky yet is to assume that surgeons had always been on board slave ships since this collection demonstrates that Portuguese and Brazilian slave ships had barbeiros instead of surgeons. When dealing with the transatlantic slave trade, one cannot limit one’s analysis to a particular national history or the history of slavery, even when focusing on a single city, such as Rio de Janeiro. Thus, the interrelation between Brazilian barbeiros, institutions of slavery, and medical institutions is the reason why the study of barbeiros provides a useful perspective on slave life in Rio de Janeiro. The population of Rio de Janeiro in 1789 numbered 19,578 free, 8,812 freed, and 14,986 enslaved persons, constituting a total population of 43,376 inhabitants. By 1821 the population reached 79,321, and in 1838 the total was 97,162 persons, with a slave population of 37,137.10 Considering these

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Figure 10.1. Debret’s Barbiers ambulants [Ambulant barbers in the streets of Rio de Janeiro]. Jean-Baptiste Debret, Voyage Pittoresque et Historique au Brésil, ou Séjour d’un artiste français au Brésil, depuis 1816 jusqu’en 1831 inclusivement, époques de l’avenement et de l’abdication de S.M. don Pedro,premier fondateur de l’Empire brésilien, 3 vols. (Paris: Didot Frères, 1834–39), vol. 2, plate 12. Courtesy of National Library of Brazil.

numbers, Rio at the time can reasonably be described as one of the major Atlantic slave cities. This was a fact that caught the attention of many foreign travelers, as was true for travelers to other Atlantic port cities discussed in this volume and addressed in the chapters by João Reis for Bahia, Trevor Burnard for Kingston, and Matt Childs for Havana. In Rio de Janeiro, as in other Atlantic ports, travelers, in particular foreign artists, produced numerous engravings and illustrations that depict slave life. The French painter Jean-Baptiste Debret came to Rio de Janeiro in 1816 to teach history painting at the Academy of Fine Arts and lived there until 1831. During the 1820s, he dedicated a great deal of attention to the city’s slaves, depicting them in different occupations and focusing especially upon enslaved street workers. Back in Paris, he published what would become the most important collection of images representing slave life in Rio de Janeiro,

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Figure 10.2. Debret’s Boutiques des barbiers [Barbershop in Rio de Janeiro]. Jean-Baptiste Debret, Voyage Pittoresque et Historique au Brésil, ou Séjour d’un artiste français au Brésil, depuis 1816 jusqu’en 1831 inclusivement, époques de l’avenement et de l’abdication de S.M. don Pedro, premier fondateur de l’Empire brésilien, 3 vols. (Paris: Didot Frères, 1834–39), vol. 2, plate 13. Courtesy of National Library of Brazil.

and indeed in Brazil as a whole. His work figures prominently in this chapter as a contemporary visual source to augment textual records of barbeiros in Rio. Modern Brazilian representations of slavery have been strongly shaped by Debret’s images.11 The most familiar depiction of barbeiros shows them shaving a man, as in Debret’s work. Yet the images that are of greatest interest for the purposes of the present discussion are those that depict barbershops and bloodletters. The artist gives no information about the exact location of the barbershop he depicts. It could have belonged to anyone, including Diogo Lopes, a former slave who received his carta in 1816 and earned the title of “master” (mestre de barbeiro) when he already owned a barbershop on Valongo Street, the heart of the slave market in Rio.12

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Figure 10.3. Monteiro’s Barbershop in Luanda. Joachim John Monteiro, Angola and the River Congo (London: Macmillan and Co., 1875), vol. 2, plate XII, p. 147. Author’s collection.

Debret’s image is likely the only surviving visual source that offers a detailed view of a barbershop in nineteenth-century Rio de Janeiro. It contains an announcement hanging on the wall that describes the expertise of a barbeiro: “Barber, hairdresser, bleeder, dentist.” This image probably corresponds not only to the barbershops of early nineteenth-century Rio, but also to those of the late eighteenth century. According to eighteenth-century sources, barbeiros also sewed socks and shaped knives and scissors. The will of the Mina barber Luiz Francisco do Couto lists a debt of six patacas for the repair of some socks.13 A slave who can be seen sewing a sock on the left side of figure 10.2 testifies to the care and accuracy with which Debret observed and recorded what he saw in Rio. Barbershops could be found in various places around the Portuguese Empire. An example comes from Joachim John Monteiro, a mining engineer and zoologist resident in Angola for some years during the early 1860s. He wrote a long report about his travels that contains a depiction of an Angolan barbershop.14 Unfortunately, Monteiro’s account offers few details about the local role

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of barbeiros. It does, however, affirm that barbering was a common practice in Angola: At several places may be seen open barber’s shops for the natives, distinguished by a curious sign, namely, two strips of blue cloth edged with red, about three or four feet and six inches wide, stretched diagonally over the entrance. Inside, a chair covered with a clean white cotton cloth—with the threads at the ends pulled out for about four inches, to leave a lace-like design, called “crivo”—invites customers to enter and sit down, and have their heads shaved quite bare, the usual custom at Loanda, particularly of the negro women.15 Monteiro’s description of bleeders in Angola is very accurate. He says the Angola natives were “very fond of being cupped for any pain” and that it was rare to see men and women whose back or shoulders did not bear signs of this operation.16 He states, “Bleeding seems to suit the negro constitution admirably, and the Bunda-speaking natives are very skilful in the use of the lancet, often with dreadfully blunt instruments.” Monteiro was in a very good position to describe bleeders since he shared a close relationship with one of them: One of the natives in my service at Cambambe was a capital hand at bleeding, but his lancet was in such shocking conditions, that I took some pains to sharpen it properly on a hone: the first time he used it afterwards, he nearly killed the man he operated upon, for, accustomed to find considerable resistance to its blunt point, he applied the same force to it when sharpened. He told me confidentially that he was much obliged to me for “fetishing” the lancet, as he was sure I had not made it so sharp by merely grinding on a stone, and he also told me that no blood-letter would be able to compete with him.17 His description is not accurate enough to demonstrate the connections between the barbershops and the practice of bleeding he describes. It is interesting to reflect that most West-Central African barbeiros working on the slave ships under Fisicatura control likely had acquired the therapeutic methods mentioned by Monteiro in Brazil or Angola. I am not considering here the background they could have also brought from different African therapeutic practices. Another way to link the barbeiros of Angola to those of Rio de

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Janeiro is by considering the frequently overlooked trade in leeches. Once more according to Monteiro: Leeches are extremely abundant in the fresh-water lagoons of Angola, and are much used by the Portuguese. In former days, when there was more intercourse between Angola and the Brazils, leeches were an important article of export, as they fetched a high price in the latter country. I have often bought a large clay-pot full of fine leeches for a few fathoms of cotton cloth.18 Similar to the issues explored in the chapter by Roquinaldo Ferreira and the particular example of Manoel Salvador and his experiences in Luanda and Rio, the unexplored trade in leeches connecting African and Brazilian barbeiros and their leeches offers another example of the multiple cultural ties that linked African and American port cities.

Barbers and Surgeons in the Longue Durée Historical scholarship has revealed the rich variety of documentary sources relating to slave ship voyages between Africa and the Americas. Harms and Rediker, in particular, have examined in detail the important role of surgeons in these voyages.19 Surgeons were typically more literate than their fellow crewmembers, and as a result they tended to produce many of the written accounts of slave ship voyages. Despite the innovative employment of these sources by historians, the question of slave mortality during the Middle Passage has long been approached from the vantage point of diseases and epidemics.20 Somewhat surprisingly, only rarely have scholars considered the expertise and the background of those barbers and surgeons who treated the slaves. The records of a slave ship that left Mozambique in 1845 provide an excellent example of a surgeon’s expertise as a factor in slave mortality. The British navy seized the ship and arrested the crew, allowing the ship’s cargo of slaves to stay on board. Tragically, the captive human cargo died in greater numbers under the care of the British than they had previously.21 While the British, Dutch, and French frequently employed surgeons on their slave ships, the ships that crossed the Atlantic from Brazil rarely had surgeons or physicians on board.22 As early as the sixteenth century, sources about voyages between Brazil and Africa mentioned Catholic priests on

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board, but not surgeons. Instead, they had barbeiros, although these were probably not even listed among the crew as barbeiros.23 When barbeiros were not available, the ships typically had healers (curadores). Usually when eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British and French sources refer to barbers (barbeiros in Portuguese) in Europe, they mean those who performed shaving and hair cutting, not bleeders (sangradores). Conversely, when Brazilian eighteenth- and nineteenth-century sources mention barbeiros, they mean people who had a license not only to bleed (sangrar), but also to perform some minor surgeries and dental work. To understand the role of barbeiros in the slave trade to Rio, we now need to enlarge the scope of our inquiry beyond the confines of the historiography of the Atlantic slave trade. This first requires approaching barbeiros from the perspective of the history of Western medical practice, particularly the transformations that medicine underwent as it moved from an unregulated activity to one that was practiced by professionals in formal institutions. In the seventeenth century medicine was still in the process of being institutionalized.24 In Portugal and throughout the Portuguese Empire, all barbeiros were under the authority of the Royal Medical College of Lisbon and received some technical training. Surgeons, for their part, gained professional legitimacy at the expense of barbeiros over the course of the seventeenth century, winning the right to a diploma, while barbers continued to practice under the less prestigious imprimatur of licenses. Surgeons often set their sights on holding coveted positions with the Portuguese navy and armed forces.25 The late seventeenth century marked a turning point for barbeiros throughout the Portuguese Empire. Embedded in a social hierarchy that largely disregarded their expertise, barbeiros could not become surgeons, and even among surgeons only a small percentage could win the privilege of entering the navy or army. Thus, by the eighteenth century, surgeons had established a place for themselves in the emerging institutional hierarchy of modern medical practice, while barbeiros were eventually excluded. By the time of the 1828 revolution at Porto, barbeiros had been officially banned from the armed forces in favor of surgeons.26 Considering the demographics of the Atlantic slave trade, one can conjecture that these changes in the Western medical field affected Portuguese, French,27 and British barbers and surgeons in different ways.28 While the Portuguese imperial expansion began in the fifteenth century—an era when barbers and bleeders were still regular professionals and surgeons had not ascended—British and French individuals moved into the slave trade at

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the very moment when barbers were being expelled from the medical field. This might indicate a rationale for their relative absence in French and British colonial records. They were already in the process of being disregarded in Europe and thus never moved to the colonies as a unified professional corps—although this by no means indicates that they were not present under a different label, probably “healer.” Barbeiros lost prestige in Portugal, but they were still useful aboard the slave ships. The Portuguese governor of Angola, Luis César de Meneses (1697–1701), bucked regulations to enlist a “soldier” to “heal” the slaves of his own ships, which regularly crossed the Atlantic between Angola and Brazil. This soldier was not even a barber, just a healer. Meneses, like most other Portuguese colonial governors and representatives, was a successful commodities trader who resided in Angola from 1697 to 1701. Once, when sick in Luanda, he found great relief from a barber who bled him four times.29 There was a Portuguese surgeon in Luanda at the time, but bleeding was not his task. In 1793, Luis Antonio de Oliveira Mendes presented a long report about the slave trade in Angola to the Academy of Sciences in Lisbon that states that slaves on board were still being treated by “black bleeders”—whom he called “awful surgeons” 30—since physicians and surgeons were too expensive. These were surely barbeiros (instead of physicians or surgeons). Joseph Miller argues that from the late eighteenth century, the Portuguese crown increased supervision of slave ships, including inspections for provisions and hygiene. According to Miller, greater interest in the high mortality on board slave ships in the 1780s gave rise to a new customs service charged with the responsibility of registering the information supplied by captains regarding onboard mortality. He also informs us that at the time “trained physicians began to influence policy with regard to the trade in Africa and Brazil, and surgeons backed up chaplains on the ships.” As a result, by the early nineteenth century “these new initiatives extended even into the field of public health.” Miller writes that these captains “customarily hired as nurses and surgeons African healers who could understand the slaves’ language.” 31 Yet the individuals that Miller (in common with other English-language historians) refers to as “healers” would probably have been barbeiros, and frequently those called “surgeons” as well. The difference between healers (curadores) and barbeiros is that healers were informal practitioners and barbeiros were qualified by the Royal Medical College. In addition, clients served to informally “certify” some healers by trusting them to perform medical practices even when they did not have the formal license to work as barbeiros.

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Miller’s conclusion is most certainly accurate for overall trends, but it is also true that royal regulations were not always implemented. The long employment of barbeiros in Brazil beyond the enactment of such prohibitive regulations demonstrates the crown’s inability to enforce such provisions. This means that while in Portugal and other European countries free barbers who could not ascend to the rank of surgeon declined in numbers throughout the early modern period, in Brazil barbeiros remained in high demand until the close of the nineteenth century. They occupied the lower social ranks, treating slaves on board ships or in the markets, performing tasks surgeons and physicians did not want to perform. In his innovative The Black Man in Slavery and Freedom (1982), the historian A. J. R. Russell-Wood argues that blacks and mulattos enjoyed a kind of monopoly of the profession of barbeiro in Brazil. He identified thirty-eight barbeiros in Bahia from 1741 to 1749, all “colored” (de cor); seventeen were slaves. He found thirty-three barbeiros who were recorded between 1810 and 1822, all “colored,” and twenty of them were slaves.32

The Fisicatura Mór, the Portuguese Royal Medical College in Rio de Janeiro (1809–28) The biggest difference between Brazil and other nations, including Portugal, with regard to barbers and surgeons is that in Brazil barbeiros could receive official authorization to treat external injuries, to bleed patients, and to remove teeth up until the nineteenth century. What is particularly relevant in the analysis to follow is that Rio de Janeiro, where a number of barbeiros were concentrated, was the most important Brazilian port of disembarkation of African slaves during the early nineteenth century.33 After 1809 the Portuguese Royal Medical College, then called Fisicatura Mór do Reino (transferred from Lisbon to Rio de Janeiro), issued all licenses for barbeiros and surgeons in Rio, including those delivered to Bahia, where exams could also take place.34 On October 18, 1809, a royal decree granted authority to bestow the status of second lieutenant (alferes) to barbeiros working with military surgeons of militias, provided they completed a recently created course on theoretical and practical anatomy.35 It is interesting to note that most barbeiros at this time were slaves or former slaves; hence, this new regulation opened an avenue for those skilled men to climb up social ranks that had previously been

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more restricted. The decree sought to organize the medical field in Rio, separating military barbers from all others. The School of Anatomy, Surgery and Medicine of Rio de Janeiro (Escola Anatômica, Cirúrgica e Médica do Rio de Janeiro) was housed in the Military Hospital, where it stayed until 1813, when the Regent D. João created, at the same place, the Medical Academy of Surgery of Rio de Janeiro (Academia Médico Cirúrgica do Rio de Janeiro), which only in 1832 became the School of Medicine (Faculdade de Medicina).36 In other words, it was not until 1832 that the Academy of Surgery was able to confer diplomas. Equally noteworthy were the very close ties between the medical field and the military demonstrated in this instance. As stated earlier, the urban population of Rio de Janeiro grew from 79,321 in 1821 to 97,162 in 1838.37 It is hard to say how many barbeiros where working in the city at the time.38 For the second half of the nineteenth century the Almanak Laemmert (1844–89) provides some information regarding their numbers, although it is almost certainly fragmentary: thirteen in 1845, twenty-seven in 1845, twenty-nine in 1850, sixty-one in 1855, eighty-eight in 1860, fifty-nine in 1865, eighty-seven in 1870, seventy in 1875, one hundred in 1880, back to seventy in 1885 (perhaps due to some miscounting), and finally two hundred seven in 1889, one year after the formal end of slavery in Brazil.39 Starting 1846, the City Council of Rio de Janeiro (Senado da Câmara) stopped registering barbeiros and sangradores, but the later lists of the Almanak provide a clear indication that the campaigns of the Medical School against barbeiros had little effect before 1889.40 The number of barbers did not decrease in tandem with the number of slaves in Rio: instead, it grew with the city’s population (although more work is needed to confirm these general demographic patterns). An additional problem, still unanswered, concerns the nature of barbers’ work: we do not know in what proportions of time a barbeiro was bleeding people in the city, working on board slave ships, or shaving people in the streets and barbershops. No serial data appear to exist for barbeiros in the eighteenth century. Yet the data relating to individuals reveal one interesting trend: the members of the above-mentioned Mina-Mahi brotherhood. I possess no information about any of them working on board slave ships, but we may conjecture that at least some of them did, especially early in their careers. Two, Ignacio Monte and Gonçalo Cordeiro, belonged to the so-called black militia and could have worked at the Military Hospital. The former was a captain (capitão) and the other a second lieutenant (alferes).41 Two important developments shaped the barber profession in 1828:

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the Brazilian Empire, which declared independence from Portugal in 1822, finally replaced the old Portuguese Royal Medical College with a new national institution for public health. At the same time, increasing abolitionist sentiment throughout the Atlantic World generated the first Brazilian legislation against the Atlantic slave trade. Yet considering the total of thirtyseven temporary licenses for barbeiros to work on board slave ships issued in 1828 alone, one can conclude the slave trade was still operating regularly, as proven by the volume of documented slaves imported to Rio. According to Tania Pimenta, the first historian to examine this collection of licenses at the Brazilian National Archive in Rio de Janeiro, a total 163 barbeiros received different licenses; 98 (60 percent) of them were slaves and the rest freed at some point in time, but none of them had been born free.42 Considering the temporary licenses of those who embarked in 1828, we find six licenses for freed slaves and thirty-one for slaves. Pimenta did not separate African-born barbeiros from those born in Brazil, but her list of the 1828 licenses reveals 144 transplanted Africans, 56 of them freed and 88 slaves.43 Most of those who worked on board slave ships were slaves, while most of those licensed to work in the city were freed, working in street stalls or in barbershops. We can assume that younger barbeiros trained with the elders from whom they got their skills worked on ships or in the streets, often without licenses, while more senior barbers (some of whom had the title of masters) sought cartas and worked in more respectable barbershops, and not frequently on board. Barbershops reunited barbeiros in many places, in particular downtown and around the slave market that survived until 1830.44 The strong links among barbeiros in Rio de Janeiro and their organized groups can be identified in several instances, including the Mina barbers brotherhood of Nossa Senhora dos Remédios. The Mina black José do Santos Martins was a barbeiro in Rio de Janeiro who passed away in 1801. His inventory listed eleven slaves, including two barbers like him. He was close to the above-mentioned captain Ignacio Monte, who had a barbershop.45 We cannot be certain whether they were merely “brothers” at the brotherhood or worked together in Monte’s barbershop, at least until 1783, when Monte passed away. Among those who embarked in 1828 with temporary licenses, forty-two were transplanted Africans, thirty-five Brazilian slaves, and seven former slaves.46 Despite the fact that barbeiros could not apply for new licenses after 1828, they kept working, and some of them received licenses from the City Council.47 Brazilian legislation against the illegal Atlantic slave trade dates to 1826, becoming more strict after 1830.48 Barbers involved with the Atlantic

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slave trade had an increasingly risky job and could go to jail together with illegal traders who needed them to reduce diseases and death. All African-born slaves and former slaves, including those from Congo, Angola, and Benguela, stated their place of birth when they applied for a license. Almost all of them worked on the same slave routes that they themselves had survived during their own passage from Africa to Brazil, and as barbers they docked at the same ports they embarked from years before. We can never know how they felt about this occupation, but there is no doubt they could not only treat diseases but also, better than others, understand and interact with both the crew and the slaves on board, help as linguistic and cultural translators, and thus help with purchasing new slaves.49 This means that even when the campaign for abolition was gaining force in Rio de Janeiro, African barbers were still embarking on illegal slave ships and sustaining the condemned practice of slavery by filling a professional role that had been condemned by the medical establishment and was no longer acceptable for physicians and surgeons. Despite all this, while the Medical School was pushing the Brazilian royal administration to prohibit barbeiros, a few surgeons and physicians along with slave traders were still working to support the slave trade and the old medical practices. Until 1830 very well-known physicians and surgeons were openly involved in the Atlantic slave trade, working at the Valongo, the city slave market, interfering with new legislation regarding public health to continue slavery in the new context of the Brazilian Empire.50 In summary, despite all the prohibitions and changes in favor of ending the slave trade, and even though many barbeiros at one point in their lives were victims of the transatlantic slave trade, it was the slave trade itself that offered them economic opportunities both in Rio de Janeiro and on board slave ships. This is the point that makes Brazilian slave ports different from all others around the Atlantic. Since in France and England barbers were dismissed early on by the medical establishment, they never coalesced as a unified professional body in the New World. Thus British and French “healers,” “black doctors,” and so on worked under the authority of surgeons. In Brazil, the persistent role of barbeiros is not the result of a lack of surgeons (as is usually argued) or of the late inauguration of the medical field. The fact is that barbeiros filled an important role in Brazilian society: on board of slave ships after 1830 they were available to do the base and, ultimately, illegal job of treating slaves and preparing them to be sold in the legal or illegal markets of the Atlantic cities. In Rio they could also treat slaves in the city and its environs, including in rural areas where illegal African slaves ended up. It is no

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coincidence that the proportion of African-born enslaved barbers increased over time. The Valongo market was closed in 1830, and the profession in the city probably entered difficult times after that date. It is safe to assume that many barbeiros were working beyond the scope of record keepers and outside the law—a fact that makes it remarkably difficult for the historian to track them, like all contraband trade and illicit services. It was an increasing risky and socially stigmatized profession that free people (either “white” or “black”) did not want to join.

African Barbeiros in Rio de Janeiro The documents from the colonial Portuguese Medical College, called at the time the Fisicatura Mór do Reino, yield some statistics for barbeiros in Rio. Among the slaves with a permanent license was João Benguela, who received his carta in 1819. His master was Joaquim Antonio Ferreira, and they both lived in Rio de Janeiro. Ferreira was a prominent merchant (comerciante de grosso) who owned five other barbeiros with temporary licenses issued in 1828: Frederico Angola, João Benguela, Manoel Congo, Paulo Cabinda, and Vitorino Angola. Among thirty-one licenses issued in 1828, his slaves received six, or roughly 20 percent. An interesting detail is that all of these barbeiros were Africans from the west-central coast, where Ferreira had his commercial contacts. The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database identifies him as the co-owner of a single ship, the Caçador, in a voyage dated 1829, with a total of 302 slaves landing in southeastern Brazil.51 A merchant would not need six barbers for a single trip, perhaps indicating that Ferreira regularly contracted out his enslaved barbeiros to slave traders. Table 10.1. Total of Permanent Licenses (Cartas) for Former Slaves (Forros) by Place of Employment (1809–28)

Mina

Jeje

Angola

S. Tomé Calabar

Benguela Total

Rio de Janeiro 2 1 1 4 Bahia 6 16 22 Other cities 1 1 1 3 Unknown places 2 2 7 1 1 13 Total 9 19 10 1 1 2 42 Source: Arquivo Nacional, Fisicatura Mór do Reino, códice 145.

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Table 10.2. Total of Permanent Licenses (Cartas) for Slaves by Place of Employment (1809–28)

Mina Jeje Angola S. Tomé Calabar Benguela Tapa Congo Nago Rebolo Total

Rio de Janeiro 2 4 3 1 10 Bahia 5 10 2 1 1 19 Other cities 1 1 2 Unknown places 3 6 5 1 2 1 18 Total 11 16 12 1 3 1 2 2 1 49

Source: Arquivo Nacional, Fisicatura Mór do Reino, códice 145.

As noted above, these were difficult years for slave traders who remained involved in illicit trading. Joaquim Antonio Ferreira had many reasons to hide his involvement with commerce in “human flesh.” He was born in Portugal in 1777 and later came to Rio de Janeiro. In 1813 he was already a member of Santa Casa de Misericórdia in Rio, an elite fraternity that elected him its director (provedor-mor) in 1828. In 1814 he became a captain of the militia (the Regimento de Infantaria de Milícias). In 1819 he resigned from the militia, the same year his first barbeiro got a permanent license to work. He had become a comendador of the Ordem de Cristo, a very distinguished merchant, and a member of the highest chamber of commerce (Real Junta do Comércio). In 1854 the emperor named him First Viscount of Guaratiba. He passed away in 1859 as a bachelor, with his nephew as heir. This apparently impeccable biography had a hidden side he worked hard to shield from the records. Ferreira may have traded about twenty-five thousand slaves from Africa to Brazil.52 Why did a wealthy merchant and viscount in retirement need six skilled barbeiros? According to Henrique Batista, a scholar who is working on a biography of Ferreira, he arrived in Rio de Janeiro in 1796 and began a successful commercial career as an employee of the very important trader João Gomes Vale, one of the biggest merchants in Rio de Janeiro, and later became a slave merchant himself.53 Batista also found documentary evidence on Ferreira in the ecclesiastical records of the parish of Santa Rita, where the recently arrived slaves who died in the Valongo market were buried (Cemitério dos Pretos Novos or Cemitério do Valongo). Among 1,197 slaves buried in this cemetery between 1824 and 1828, 433 of them were buried in 1828.54 The high rate of mortality for enslaved Africans that accompanied their arrival in

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Rio, similar to patterns discussed in the chapter by Trevor Burnard on Kingston and David Geggus for Cap Français, was reason enough for Ferreira to have a barber—or even six. Ferreira maintained his contacts in Benguela after 1830. The Jornal do Commercio reported that the embarcation (an escuna) Mariana brought him some trade goods from there, including 230 gamelas (a kind of wooden large bow) and 875 teeth of ivory.55 “Ivory” was a common euphemism used to conceal illegal slave trading at the time.56 Ferreira is listed as the owner of only one ship, together with Luiz Antonio Batalha, who was the captain in most of Ferreira and Vale’s voyages. Together with Joaquim Antonio Ferreira, Luiz Antonio Batalha, and João Gomes Vale, the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database also mentions João Antonio Ferreira.57 Considering his commercial links with Benguela, it is not surprising that two of his barbeiros came from this port. While living in Rio de Janeiro, Ferreira engaged with two different and equally important networks: the commercial and the military. Barbeiros were part of both, which may be why he employed them. Other ship owners and captains hired barbeiros, but many preferred to buy them, thus gaining better control over what they knew and did. Manoel Vicente da Silva, for example, was a captain at least from 1803 to 1810,58 and also the owner of Domingos Silva, a slave from Angola who received a carta in 1810. Captain João Batista Coelho owned the enslaved barbeiro Joaquim Batista, a jeje man (from the Bight of Benin) living in Bahia, who received his carta in 1809. Coelho captained eleven voyages between 1804 and 1824; in two of them he was also the owner of the ships Divina Pastora and Providência.59 He routinely sailed to Mina Coast ports, where a jeje barber’s knowledge of the area and its ports would have been particularly useful. None of those barbers are mentioned among the crews of those embarkations or registered in the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database.

An African Therapeutic Practitioner in the Streets of Rio de Janeiro Besides the barbeiros listed in the documentation of the Fisicatura, there are other therapeutic practitioners who were probably also barbeiros whose identities will probably remain unknowable. This is the case of the “Cirurgião Negro” depicted by Debret. He is probably a Hausa, Yoruba, or Nupe

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(Tapa in Brazil) slave or former slave.60 Despite the fact that Rio de Janeiro, unlike Bahia (see João Reis’s chapter in this volume) was not a major market for Muslim slaves, some did end up in Rio after 1804.61 Debret’s Black Surgeon image is followed by a concise description of the scene written by Debret himself. He claimed that each neighborhood (bairro) in the city had a “black surgeon.” He probably termed the therapeutic practitioners a surgeon because, as said before, in France barbiers no longer existed in this sense.62 Given that information on nineteenth-century African therapeutic practitioners is hard to come by, I try here a risky shift to modern African societies based in some important anthropologists who visited Africa during the twentieth century providing significant information about different methods for bleeding. I mention Siegfried Frederick Nadel for West Africa and Victor Turner for West-Central Africa. I first focus here on two examples, one from the Ndembu and the other from Hausa medicine. Nadel argued after his research in Nigeria during the 1930s that Nupe barbers had the same skills as foreign barber-surgeons, but only Hausa barber-surgeons were able to perform uvula removal.63 Turner lived in Angola in the 1950s and reported that in Luanda he observed that Ndembu healers made use of horns in cupping sessions.64 Nadel and Turner reported the widespread use of horns for cupping in several African peoples, though they used different techniques and relied on cupping to treat different disorders. Considering the available literature on African barber-surgeons, we can hazard a guess that Debret could have observed Hausa medical practices. Debret never mentioned that his “black surgeon” was Hausa, but his description accords with pictures and descriptions of barbers in West Africa, where Hausa medical practices were widespread. The role that Debret’s “black surgeon” plays reproduces a very common scene in West Africa among Hausa barbers—a role that Debret almost certainly did not know about and thus could not have copied from other sources. Debret wrote a detailed description of his surgeon, demonstrating that he lingered, observing the scene for a considerable amount of time while the man performed his duties. The image shows three men, probably slaves, with horns that the Hausa call kaho on their bodies.65 The anthropologist Lewis Wall provides some interesting explanations for the role of what he calls “therapeutic practitioners” (the Hausa call them wanzami), demonstrating that among Hausa the idea of illness and well-being involved a complex conception that they call magani. Among the Hausa, magani is a notion related to the idea of “remedy” as a way to prevent or

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correct what is out of order. Once magani puts things in order, one enjoys lafiya, or well-being.66 Wall’s explanation about magani is very helpful: Magani is a “remedy,” a “corrective,” an “active restorer of a disrupted state” or a “prophylactic against trouble.” Magani is thus perhaps best defined as “that which restores lafiya,” or “which ensures lafiya.” As such, magani can refer to anything which corrects or prevents an undesirable condition. . . . Thus magani can be the application of cupping horn by a barber or the splinting of a broken limb by a bonesetter. It can be the herbal powder given by a healer to remedy an illness or a Koranic charm worn to ensure (it is hoped) success as a market trader, sexual attractiveness, or popularity. In common usage magani generally refers to substances which are thought to possess powers that can bring these things to pass.67 The wanzami is an important therapeutic practitioner who performs the functions of both barber and surgeon. As a barber his principal occupation is shaving the heads of village men and boys at regular intervals. . . . In addition to his cosmetic functions as a barber, however, the wanzami performs a number of minor surgical operations.  .  .  . Hausa surgery is rudimentary at best. There are no procedure that could compare, for example, with the delicate trephinations performed by the Arabs of Algeria described by Hilton-Simpson (1922). The most common Hausa surgical procedure is cupping, known as kaho or “horn,” in reference to the barber’s cupping horn. . . . The procedure itself is simple and straightforward. First the part of the body to be cupped—usually the back, shoulder, neck, or chest—is washed. Then the cupping horn, a simple cow’s horn with a small hole bored into the top to allow for suction, is placed over the area to be treated and the air is sucked out, creating a partial vacuum inside.68 According to Wall the Hausa wanzami bled patients by cupping and also performed some minor surgical procedures such as circumcision, uvulectomy, and tattooing (jarfa).69 This appears to match what the “black surgeon” depicted by Debret was doing. Despite the fact that the barber’s physical representation is not the focus here, it is at least curious to note his feet, the abnormal shape of which demonstrates that he probably had sickle-cell anemia, a very common disease in West Africa, though not as common

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Figure 10.4. Debret’s Le Chirurgien Nègre [Black surgeon]. Jean-Baptiste Debret, Voyage Pittoresque et Historique au Brésil, ou Séjour d’un artiste français au Brésil, depuis 1816 jusqu’en 1831 inclusivement, époques de l’avenement et de l’abdication de S.M. don Pedro, premier fondateur de l’Empire brésilien, 3 vols. (Paris: Didot Frères, 1834-39), vol. 2, plate 65. Courtesy of National Library of Brazil.

in West-Central Africa, where most African slaves in Rio de Janeiro came from.70 The plate shows four men being treated with three different medical procedures: the surgeon is cupping one of them on his back and two on the forehead, and a fourth one is cloaked in a white sheet. The man with horns on his back has apparently been there for some time since several horns have already been removed and others remain on his back bleeding out. Wall’s description of the procedure in Hausaland can help us comprehend some of the actions depicted as part of the treatment in Rio de Janeiro: The procedure itself is simple and straightforward. First the part of the body to be cupped—usually the back, shoulder, neck, or chest—is washed. Then the cupping horn, a simple cow’s horn with a small hole bored into the top to allow for suction, is placed over the area to be

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treated and the air is sucked out, creating a partial vacuum inside. . . . Blood is gradually drawn out of the shallow cuts made by the barber and coagulates inside the horn.71 The two men with horns on their forehead apparently are being treated for a kind of headache called jiri, related to the “hot blood”: Severe headache in temporal area or over the eye—condition called jiri—often accompanied by dizziness (juwa), is seen as due to “hot blood” or to the rushing and pounding of the blood in the afflicted region, and may also be treated by cupping or bleeding.72 The final man, covered with the white sheet—who to us might look abandoned—is certainly under the barber’s watch, perhaps recovering his lafiya, or well-being. Sick individuals lose lafiya. To bleed, to use herbs, to do amulets, and to practice Koranic witchcraft are all magani—that is, methods with which a surgeon might restore lafiya. Once again according to Wall: Lafiya is a Hausa work generally translated as “health.” .  .  . however, lafiya embraces a range of meanings that extends beyond the English notion of “health” to include the proper ordering, correct structuring, and general well-being of the social order and the individual’s relations within it, as well as the state of wellness in the human body.73 To be clear, one cannot be sure that Debret’s “black surgeon” was Hausa, but the work depicted in the plates strongly suggests that he worked in Hausa traditions that he could have learned in Africa or later in Brazil.74 To reinforce this possibility, the man depicted is working on the street, like wanzami did, and not in a barbershop, as was typically the case with the mentioned barbeiros. On the list of barbeiros who received licenses to work between 1809 and 1828, I found many references to Angola, Mina, and Nago. There was no specific mention of Hausa barbers, even on the list for Bahia, where most barbers were instead from West Africa (Mina or Jeje). A single Nupe barber is listed in Bahia: Constantino, who got his license to work after being examined in Bahia in 1828, and who was a slave of the Bahian trader Francisco Pires Guimarães.75 Debret’s plate is a valuable source since we have no other information or visual documentation

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about the particular way African healers and barbers worked and in what measure they learned and adopted African and Western medicine on an individual level. This image opens an avenue to the search for African barbers working at slave markets and on board slave ships through the port cities of the Black Atlantic. The most important issue here is how African barbers worked on board slave ships between Rio de Janeiro and Luanda, Benguela, and Ca­ binda, the main ports for the slave trade during the first half of the nineteenth century, and the point of embarkation for the majority of barbers and the slaves in Rio de Janeiro. If Hausa medicine could be identified, probably as very unusual for Debret at the time, many more regular practices by healers and barbeiros of different West-Central African backgrounds (Congo, Cabinda, Benguela) would be there. The most important point is to conclude that among them an important number received Western training and could get licenses and cartas to work under the formal recognition of the medical institutions. The main challenge in writing about slavery in Rio de Janeiro via the therapeutic practices focusing of barbeiros is that of determining when they stopped working as bleeders but continued to practice their modern duties of trimming hair and beards.76 After the 1850s, African barbeiros probably remained in the city but no longer participated in transatlantic slaving voyages. In the 1860s the photographer Christiano Jr. photographed a barber shaving a man in the streets of Rio de Janeiro.77 By the late nineteenth century, there is no evidence they still worked in their earlier capacities of providing various medical services. They resisted the Medical School campaigns in the 1830s because traders still needed them. During the second half of the nineteenth century they probably lasted as healers (curadores) and died a “slow death” together with slavery itself, which persisted in Brazil until 1888.78

Final Comments If, in Europe, white and free barbers seldom rose in social rank, one can surmise that it was no easier for barbers who were African slaves or former slaves. In Europe and also in the Caribbean, surgeons were involved in the slave trade from the late seventeenth century, and barbers had no formal role in the new medical field. In Brazil they enjoyed a much longer life than in any other American or European place. What is unique about those

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barbeiros from different parts of Africa is that they employed their cultural backgrounds and Western professional skills they acquired under slavery in the service of the Atlantic slave trade. Many of the 144 African barbeiros who applied to the Fisicatura had a kind of itinerant life around the Atlantic, but they were also firmly grounded in Rio de Janeiro as their home base of operations, building a place for themselves within the Western world. Most of the African barbeiros declared the place in Africa they came from in the records of the Fisicatura, which allows us to trace their routes as slaves and professionals.79 Following their lives, I have argued that the profession lasted long in Brazil and particularly in Rio de Janeiro, up to the end of the Atlantic slave trade in Brazil (1850), and even up to the final end of slavery (1888). The acceptance of those professionals who worked in parallel with the modern medical institutions is an example of how the slave trade and the institutions involved in slavery should be scrutinized alongside the trade itself to achieve a more inclusive understanding of slavery in the Atlantic World. In conclusion, the comprehension of the Atlantic slave cities and their ports cannot rise from general approaches or straight local approach, but only by taking things in connection. For this reason, one Atlantic port is not a loose place but part of a huge multidimensional puzzle that allows us to see slavery on the move, through space and across time.

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Chapter eleven

The Hidden Histories of African Lisbon James H. Sweet

But whatever I may believe, don’t you begin to think that Portugal is rather too much in the neighbourhood of Africa? —Italian traveler Giuseppe Marco Antonio Baretti, 17701

The Monument to the Discoveries overlooking the Rio Tejo, with the faces of Portugal’s early overseas explorers permanently etched in stone, acts as a memorial to Portugal’s imperial greatness—a testament to a glorious past in which Portuguese invention and bravery brought extraordinary wealth to the metropole, inspiring the envy of other Europeans. As most people know, Portuguese imperial supremacy was short-lived, as they were soon surpassed, in short order, by the Spanish, the Dutch, and the English. Nevertheless, the Monument to the Discoveries marks Portugal’s heritage and legacy for the modern world—a way of proudly asserting the country’s crucial role in the emergence of a new global order. This ossified, outward projection of Portugal as a cradle of early modern European innovation and discovery belies the complex set of human relations spawned by these early encounters, not only in overseas colonies like Brazil, but in the very heart of the metropole. In a bitter irony, the histories of some of Portugal’s earliest colonial subjects are literally buried beneath the feet of those who soak in its monumental history and its many beauties. In 2008, just outside the old walls of the city of Lagos in the southern part of Portugal, archaeologists discovered the remains of 155 slaves buried in an old trash heap. Lagos was the kingdom’s most important slave market in the

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late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, precisely the period to which the archaeologists date the burial site. Given their status as slaves, it is not surprising that these 155 individuals were discarded as rubbish. Indeed, most of the bodies appear simply to have been thrown into the pit without any regard for how they landed, a practice that was not uncommon in sixteenth-century Portugal. What should draw our attention, however, is the small details that defined individual skeletons. More than 25 percent of the skulls showed signs of intentional dental modification, indicating the likely West African origins of most of the slaves. At least one was buried with several rings on his fingers and a necklace around his neck. One woman was buried with her recently born infant in her arms. And at least three were thrown into the trash heap with their hands and feet bound.2 These small details speak to both the beauty and the barbarity of African slavery in early modern Portugal, traits that are buried as deeply in the sediment of the country’s history as in its very ground. Since the 1990s, Portugal has begun to recognize itself as a multicultural, multiracial country, the pace quickened by immigration from former African colonial holdings, North Africa, and, more recently, West Africa. Yet in the historical consciousness of the country, there seems to be something of a collective amnesia about its diverse, often exploitative, past. Imperial history has largely been reduced to Portugal’s glorious era of “discoveries,” on the one hand, and “things that happened in the colonies,” on the other, as if the metropole remained hermetically sealed from the human influences of the colonies. To some extent, this is true. For about a century and a half, from Brazil’s independence until the 1970s, few colonial subjects arrived in the metropole. This gave the impression that Portugal was a predominantly “white” country. Meanwhile, the histories of the colonies emphasized Luso-Tropicalism and the “plasticity” of race, where Portuguese men mixed and mingled with colonial women in ways that blunted the sharp racial edges defining other European imperialisms. Thus emerged two uneasy, and perhaps contradictory, national myths: Portuguese people were firmly antiracist, but Portugal itself remained almost exclusively “white.” Lost in these incongruent “truths” were the realities of African slavery and its impacts on Portugal, especially prior to the nineteenth century. When I first arrived in the Portuguese National Archives to do research in the early 1990s, I was told by several scholars and archivists that all of the material on slavery was located in the Brazilian collections, because “slavery didn’t exist in Portugal.” In a polemic in a Lisbon newspaper in 2000, Duarte Pio,

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the Duke of Bragança, argued that scholarly works on Portuguese slavery were a “falsification of history” and part of a “war which some countries launched against Portugal.” 3 In particular, the duke targeted American and English scholars for advancing these distortions. More recently, in contrast to the popular interest generated by archaeological discoveries like the African Burial Ground in New York or the Valongo slave market in Rio de Janeiro, the Portuguese media largely ignored the findings of the African burial site in Lagos. The most widely read newspaper in the country reported the discovery of the site only three years after archaeologists first unearthed it. The headline announcing the find described it as a “cemetery,” sanitizing the vulgar manner in which the African bodies were discarded. Perhaps even more telling were the online responses to the article. Doubting that the Portuguese actually traded slaves, several of the newspaper’s readers hypothesized that the Africans must have arrived via Arabs or North Africans. Another reader suggested that the Africans were not slaves, but were likely among hundreds of mass burials during an outbreak of the bubonic plague.4 Left unanswered in all of this denial of African slavery is the question of exactly why the Portuguese seem so reluctant to embrace the topic as a part of their own historical heritage.5 This question seems particularly salient in the context of England’s very recent public engagement with its own slaving past. Though the two-hundredth anniversary of the abolition of the slave trade in 2008 focused largely on British humanitarianism, slavery became an integral part of the public discourse in politics, schools, museums, newspapers, television, and film, a stark contrast to the absence of such discourse in Portuguese society. The ongoing challenges of writing slavery into the history of Portugal are crucial for framing any exploration of the history of the Black Atlantic in Lisbon. Portugal’s collective national amnesia toward the topic of slavery has resulted in a dearth of historical literature on the black experience in the country, writ large, let alone in Lisbon itself.6 That literature that does exist is mostly limited to the earliest periods—the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. The historiography on blacks in Portugal during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries is practically nonexistent. In this chapter, I provide a brief overview of some potential avenues and possibilities for studying black life in Lisbon in the eighteenth century. There are a range of sources that speak to these issues; this is only a beginning. Indeed, I am confident that a systematic and sustained research agenda could reveal a vibrancy to black Lisbon surpassing

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all other ports cities in Europe during the period, and perhaps even some American ports. The most obvious starting point for any such inquiry is demographics: how many African-descended people lived in Lisbon during the eighteenth century? In the absence of quantitative work in parish archives, this is a difficult question to answer. By the middle of the century, Lisbon was one of the largest cities in Europe, boasting a population approaching two hundred thousand.7 African-descended slaves made up only a small portion of the population, probably not more than 5 percent.8 However, there was a sizable freed black population, in addition to various mixed-race folk. Certainly, for other Europeans traveling to Lisbon, it seemed to be a “black” space. For example, in 1760, an Italian traveler noted, One of the things that most surprises a stranger as he rambles about this town, is that great number of Negroes who swarm every corner. Many of these unhappy wretches are natives of Africa, and many born of African parents, either in Portugal or in its ultramarine dominions. No ship comes from those regions without bringing some of either sex, and, when they are here, they are allowed to marry not only among themselves, but also with those of a different colour. These cross-marriages have filled the country with different breeds of human monsters. A black and a white produce a mulatto. Then a mulatto joins with a black or a white, and two other creatures are engendered, both called mestices. Then the mestices white join with the mestices black, or with true blacks, true white, or mulattos; and all branch out into so many and various kinds, that it becomes very difficult, if not impossible, to distinguish them by peculiar names, though they are all discriminated by their peculiar hues. To such a degree the original breed is here depraved.9 If the Italian viewed Lisbon as a racial “house of horrors,” an English observer in the 1770s was a little more cautious. He estimated that “about one fifth of the inhabitants of Lisbon consists of blacks, mulattoes, or of some intermediate tint of black and white.” 10 This figure is probably very close to being accurate. At the beginning of the eighteenth century, a French traveler claimed that there were thirty thousand “Negros and Moors” in Lisbon.11 If we assume a black slave population of around ten thousand (roughly 5 percent of the overall population), combined with a free(d) population of color

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approaching twenty thousand, most living in the city’s center, we can estimate that roughly one-fifth of Lisbon’s eighteenth-century population consisted of people of color. Whatever the exact numbers, outsiders perceived that the black genetic contribution was changing Lisbon irrevocably. The Italian ultimately concluded, “These strange [racial] combinations have filled this town with such a variety of odd faces, as to make the traveller doubt whether Lisbon is in Europe; and it may be foreseen, that in a few centuries not a drop of pure Portuguese blood will be left here, but all will be corrupted between Jews and Negroes.” 12 Ironically, the “strange combinations” of white Portuguese and others eventually erased the “Jews and Negroes,” rather than the other way around, in a metropolitan variation of what would come to be known as “whitening” in the colonies. Nevertheless, despite the erasure of blacks from Lisbon’s genetic and historical past, they have not been completely erased from the city’s physical landscape. Even as tourist attractions like the Monument to the Discoveries draw the preponderance of historical attention, one small neighborhood still retains discernible elements of its black past. Located in the present-day parish of Santa Catarina, the neighborhood of Mocambo was Lisbon’s black and laboring quarter from at least the sixteenth century. Mocambo, aptly named after the Kimbundu word for “hideout,” was situated in Lisbon’s northwest quadrant. Though the term bore a specific Kimbundu meaning, it had come to be associated with runaway slave communities in the Portuguese Atlantic World, particularly in Brazil. Likewise in Lisbon, Mocambo had long been a refuge for the city’s African-descended population, as well as a popular destination for runaway slaves from Portugal’s interior.13 The neighborhood’s principal thoroughfare, Rua do Poço dos Negros (Street of the Blacks’ Pit), refers to the old slave burial pit that had once existed there. In 1515, King Dom Manuel I ordered the opening of the burial ground to combat the health hazards caused by rotting African corpses abandoned in various places across the city. The king’s description of African burials in Lisbon prior to 1515 eerily reflects the findings of the archaeologists in Lagos nearly five hundred years later. The king wrote, “We are informed that the slaves that die in this city, brought from Guinea . . . are not buried as well as they should be . . . and they are thrown on the ground in such a manner that they are discovered . . . and eaten by dogs; and a large number of these slaves are thrown on the dung heap  .  .  .  and still others in the fields of farms.” 14 By the eighteenth century, Lisbon’s Mocambo burial pit was gone, but the street name remained. The neighborhood’s other streets, named after Jews,

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fishermen, ship builders, boilers, and sheriffs, give a clear flavor of the cosmopolitan and laboring backgrounds of those who populated this section of Lisbon during the early modern period.15 Most of the neighborhood’s residents worked along the riverfront, where small shacks dotted the terrain from as far back as the sixteenth century. In some of these, people grilled sardines to feed the various “men and negros who work on the river.” 16 In others, prostitutes tried to lure customers.17 As might be expected of a tough, working people’s neighborhood, Mocambo spawned its share of indigents, vagabonds, and street hustlers, arriving from all corners of the empire. For example, in 1747, the judicial magistrate of Mocambo ordered the arrest of twenty-five-year-old Ignácio Xavier Flores, a single man from the island of Faial in the Azores. Authorities discovered Flores carrying a knife illegally, for which the crown sentenced him to ten years of galley labor. Flores escaped the galleys and returned to Mocambo, where he teamed up with a nineteen-year-old mixed-race man (pardo) Manuel Antônio and twenty-year-old black man (preto) Sebastião Telles, both former slaves from Bahia, Brazil. Together, the three men were arrested in 1752 for stealing a watch and for “associating with other thieves.” 18 Mocambo was also widely known as a spiritually powerful space, perhaps as an embedded, communal memory of the dead Africans who were buried there years earlier. In fact, Mocambo’s main crossroads (encruzilhada) at São Bento was considered the most potent in the city.19 At night, people gathered there to invoke the powers of the spirit world for the purposes of divining and healing. For example, in 1730, the African-born (Ouidah) slave José Francisco Pereira buried several bolsas de mandinga at the crossroads of São Bento to aid in their empowerment.20 The bolsa de mandinga was a powerful talisman, usually worn around the neck, which could protect the wearer from harm, provide luck in games of chance, and so on.21 Pereira worked closely with another Ouidah slave, João Francisco Pedroso, in the manufacture and sale of bolsas. The two men apparently formed part of a much broader network in the city. Between them, Pereira and Pedroso named more than half a dozen accomplices in Lisbon, all of whom had ties to Brazil. Moreover, Pedroso claimed that there were many other mandingueiros in Lisbon whose names he could not remember.22 If the neighborhood of Mocambo was a cosmopolitan and black, mostly freed space, much of the city’s remaining African-descended population consisted of slaves. It is often assumed that Lisbon’s slaves arrived from Brazil; however, some came directly via the slave trade from Africa. For example,

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between 1725 and 1735 almost two thousand Africans arrived in the city on slave ships contracted explicitly for the Lisbon trade.23 Not all of Lisbon’s servants were black. Though African-descended slaves made up the vast majority, there were also East Indians, Chinese, Turks, Moors, and even poor Portuguese who filled the servile ranks. The latter “white” servants were deemed to be particularly problematic. As one French traveler in 1730 put it, “The majority of servants are composed of negro slaves, particularly in the houses of those Portuguese wealthy enough to buy them. They prefer them to white servants because they are more docile, cowed by the fear of being sold to work in the mines [of Brazil]. In general, white servants are more roguish and more insolent. It is said, however, that when they are good, for their dedication and competence, they are the best servants in the world.” 24 Just as the wealthy made distinctions among the different types of servants racially, so they made similar distinctions among different groups of African nations. Like their slave-owning brethren in Brazil, Lisbon slave masters esteemed Mina slaves more highly than Angolans. Brazilians extolled the “good luck” brought by Mina slaves, especially in their mining ventures. Meanwhile, the Portuguese believed the West Africans were harder workers than their Central African counterparts: “The rein of Angola, tributary to the King of Portugal, furnishes negros, but they are not as apt for work as those from the Guines, and for that reason the Portuguese desire them little.” 25 Black slaves engaged in a variety of forms of urban labor. Women cleaned and whitewashed houses, laundered clothes, carried their masters’ waste buckets to dump into the river, and hauled fresh water from the city’s fountains to their masters’ houses. Men carried sedan chairs and pushed carts through the streets, hauled wood to the shipyards, and cleaned sewers. In general, the Portuguese associated black slaves with the filthiest, most arduous forms of labor. A common insult was to pretend to sneeze whenever a black slave passed in the streets.26 At the same time, many slaves, perhaps the majority, worked in close contact with their masters as personal body servants, coachmen, cooks, and artisanal apprentices. These occupations were not as physically taxing as the backbreaking labor of Brazil’s mines and cane fields. Some of Lisbon’s enslaved apparently understood the relative ease of their condition. As suggested in the earlier passage by the French traveler, the threat of colonial rendition “to work in the mines” loomed large, acting as a curb on “insolent,” resistant behavior. Regardless of the broad stereotypes, Lisbon’s enslaved did resist their condition, sometimes violently. For example, in 1750, Antônio da Costa, the

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Angolan slave of a Lisbon merchant, was sentenced to ten years in the king’s galleys for attempting to stab his master with a knife.27 Black slaves also ran away from their masters with some degree of frequency. One might even argue that the opportunities created by Lisbon’s cultivated, metropolitan environment—the very conditions that supposedly made slavery “easier” there than in Brazil—actually made slavery all the more intolerable. For those with education and skills, the shackles of enslavement stifled creativity, growth, and aspiration. In 1743, eighteen-year-old Antônio Mina had already learned to read and play the trumpet. In spite of his apparent good fortune, Antônio ran away from his master, Francisco Roberto. Nearly a month later, Antônio remained at large, prompting Roberto to post a runaway slave notice in Lisbon’s weekly newspaper.28 Similarly, just a year earlier, in June 1742, Luís São Tomé, a domestic slave and cook, fled his master’s house in the Benfica neighborhood of Lisbon. According to Luís’s master, Dom Afonso Manuel de Meneses, Luís “bakes very well,” but “when he walks and talks he sticks his chest out, and he is very easily angered.” By adopting the posture and attitude of a free man, Luís publicly defied his social status. Meneses no doubt considered such behavior intolerable, demanding, instead, deference and docility. Apparently, a defiant Luís refused to accept these daily indignities, eventually abandoning his servitude altogether. He was still on the run six months later when Meneses advertised his flight.29 Similar to fugitive slaves in the Black Atlantic port cities of the Americas, fugitive slaves in Lisbon could blend into and pretend to be a part of the freed population that thrived in urban areas. Opportunities to earn manumission existed for some slaves, especially female domestic workers. Just as was the case in urban Brazil and other Atlantic port cities discussed in the chapters by João Reis, David Geggus, and Trevor Burnard, slave masters often allowed women to cook, clean, and sew on their own accord, in exchange for regular cash payments. In Lisbon, “one sees many slave women and  .  .  .  masters who own them in relatively large numbers, not for their service but as instruments of a lucrative exploration. This business consists of putting them to work in the city, the negras receiving payment of fifteen to eighteen soldos per day. Everything that the negras receive beyond this last amount is theirs to keep for dressing themselves and eating, since their masters are only obligated to give them shelter. These pretas alone have the whitewashing and cleaning of houses to themselves, and those that . . . save their money in few years have enough for their alforria.” 30 The emphasis here on the financial opportunities available to female slaves in Lisbon suggests that they were more likely than men to build wealth and

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to earn their freedom, much as was the case in other port cities of the Black Atlantic. The mobility of Lisbon’s enslaved, combined with broader perceptions of the danger of the city’s streets, suggests that the city’s thoroughfares might very well have been considered “black” spaces, not unlike what occurred in Havana, Rio de Janeiro, Salvador, Cap Français, and Kingston, as described in other chapters of this volume.31 One prominent Portuguese historian describes Lisbon’s streets as a “veritable anthill of beggars,” thieves, and idlers during the eighteenth century.32 Elites rarely ventured out alone on foot. Their horse-drawn carriages rambled through the crowded streets, often with reckless disregard for pedestrians. In 1742, for example, a royal carriage ran over a young mulatto (mulatete), “immediately spilling his brains out” on one of the city’s busiest avenues.33 The wealthy feared the hoi polloi of the streets, but they were not above hiring blacks to carry out acts of criminal vengeance on their behalf. In 1699, one traveler commented, “Residents of Lisbon do not go into the street without sword, dagger, and knife. . . . If one has rancor with any person he orders that person to be killed by a negro or moor . . . who perform these missions in exchange for little money. The preto will not miss the occasion of encountering him in the street, where he will follow him closely. . . . As soon as he has a chance, he will give him a sideways stab and take refuge in a church for the time necessary for the thing to calm down.” 34 More than twenty years later, in a sermon at the Igreja dos Caetanos in Lisbon, Catholic priest Rafael Bluteau decried Lisbon’s crime and murder rates. He also blamed the cycle of violence on elite impunity: “In Lisbon, negros and villains, when they do not have godfathers, will perhaps be punished; for ‘good’ men, when they do evil, rarely is there punishment.” 35 A quick survey of those banished to the king’s galleys seems to confirm Father Bluteau’s suspicion that blacks were punished disproportionately. In an admittedly small sample of 133 men condemned to galley labor between 1750 and 1752, only 41 percent were “white” Portuguese, while almost 15 percent were either enslaved or freed blacks.36 The remainder were other Europeans, Moors, and one Brazilian. Among the Portuguese only, blacks represented one-quarter of those condemned to galley labor. These black convicts could be seen in Lisbon’s public spaces as parts of chain gangs, working in backbreaking projects on behalf of the Portuguese crown—cleaning sewers, hauling wood to the docks for shipbuilding, and loading food and ballast onto ships.37 Most of these black galley laborers were convicted for carrying illegal weapons, usually knives. Others had run away from their masters and

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were living as “vagabonds” before being arrested. Still others were convicted of petty thefts. At least one of these “thefts” was apparently motivated by passions of the heart. In November 1750, the slave José da Silva ran away from his master, Thomas da Silva. He then tried to “steal” the female slave of Luís Tavares Toscano, so she could run away with him. Authorities captured Silva and condemned him to three years in the king’s galleys.38 Silva served almost two-thirds of his sentence before escaping the chain gang. He was again captured and condemned to six years in the galleys, doubling his original sentence.39 In total, Silva faced eight years of incarceration and hard labor, seemingly just because of his desire to live freely with his enslaved lover. If Lisbon’s African-descended population appeared prominently as servants, slaves, convicts, and vagabonds, they also populated the city’s public spaces as entertainers and performers for the well-heeled nobility. At the most basic level, Africans might be asked to give an impromptu performance in the streets. In the 1750s, an Italian traveler strolling along the Tejo River “enjoyed the sight of two Negros swimming and playing gambols in the water.” He later wrote, “Had I never seen blacks before, I had mistaken them for some particular species of fish. They sprang out of the water and wheel’d upon it, as tumblers do upon firm ground. For a few reis I made them sing several songs in their Mosambique language, of which I comprehended nothing but that they were in rhyme.” 40 In more formal public settings, such as bullfights or religious festivals, Africans played integral roles in the dramatic and performative aspects of the proceedings. Throughout the eighteenth century, Africans sang, danced, and acted as part of the entertainment that preceded bullfights. Not unlike the cabildos de nación festivals described in the chapter by Matt Childs that often caught the attention of Havana tourists, foreign travelers in Lisbon also commented on the use of Africans in festivals and performances. For example, in the 1720s, a Frenchman attending a bullfight described “two negro kings with their courts composed of pretos and pretas who danced for a long time those lascivious and infamous dances . . . that disturb me. The Portuguese, however, were full of enthusiasm.” 41 Nearly forty years later, in 1760, an Italian described a well-choreographed battle between Africans and Amerindians: As the [Portuguese] King came in, two trimphal cars very meanly adorned entered the area [at Campo Pequeno], each drawn by six mules. Eight black Africans were upon one, and eight coppercoloured Indians upon the other. They made several caracoles round;

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then all leapt from the cars and bravely fought an obstinate battle with wooden swords one band against the other. The Indians were soon slain by the Africans, and lay extended a while on the ground, shaking their legs in the air as if in the last convulsions, and rolling in the dust before they were quite dead. Then, like Baye’s troops in the Rehearsal, both the dead and the living went to mix with the croud, while the cars drove away amidst the acclamations of the multitude, and made room for the two knights that were to fight the bulls.42 During religious festivals, Africans were less the subjects of the Portuguese exotic imaginary than active, vocal, partisans celebrating their patron saints. Ibero-African Catholic brotherhoods originated in Lisbon as early as the fifteenth century, eventually spreading to the Americas, as described in Nicole von Germeten’s chapter on Mexico City. These African brotherhoods persisted in Lisbon well into the eighteenth century. On October 1, 1730, the brothers of Nossa Senhora do Rosário celebrated their saint’s day with a massive celebration in Igreja do Salvador in the Alfama section of Lisbon. At the entrance to the church was a group of musicians who played “with a bizarre dissonance.” These included “three marimbas, four piccolos, two fiddles, [and] more than 300 berimbaus, tambourines, congos, and cangáz (canzás), instruments that they use.” 43 The majority of the celebrants represented the Angola nation; however, the “king” of the Angolas, a man named Simão, did not neglect his Mina counterparts. Indeed, Simão purportedly sent a letter to the Mina king, inviting him to sing the “Zaramangoè” and dance the fofa in their procession.44 In his letter of invitation, the Angolan king addressed the Mina king as his “cumpadra Re Mina Zambaiampum tatè,” or his “godfather, Mina King, Father Nzambi Mpungu.” Entwined in this title of grandeur are several fascinating cultural strands. At a macro level, the string of titles used to address the Mina king was very much in keeping with a sense of deference and respect toward elevated or noble status, both in Africa and in Europe. The words “godfather” and “king” represented a filial connection and a political one, both emanating out of Portuguese language and cultural imperatives. However, the invocation of Nzambi Mpungu, the ancestral creator and “supreme being” in Central African belief, suggests an interesting insertion of the Mina king (in Portugal) into the cosmology of Central Africans. The addition of the Kimbundu word tatè, or “father,” again invokes the filial connection felt by the Angolan King Simão toward his Mina counterpart.45 Whether or not this “letter” of invitation was actually written by the

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Angolan Simão remains unclear. Not unlike the nineteenth-century newspaper O Alabama, which published stories on the religious practices of Africans in Bahia, Brazil, the periodical in which the invitation appeared, Folheto de Ambas Lisboas, published a range of satires, parodies, and other “humorous” vignettes. Simão’s letter is written in the “lingua de negro,” a corrupt version of Portuguese that one might argue was a simple mockery of African illiteracy. If this was the case, the letter still reveals a deep understanding of specific African national differences—in language, music, dance, and religion—even in mid-eighteenth-century Lisbon. King Simão, or his Portuguese ghost writer, attempted to bridge these cultural differences through Central African gestures of respect. Arguably, an invented letter of invitation, written by a Portuguese, would represent more powerful evidence of Central African cultural vibrancy in Lisbon than one actually written by an Angolan. Either way, for Portuguese readers to understand the cultural implications of the description, they must have been thoroughly conversant in Central African ideas, an indication that Kimbundu language and culture not only arrived via enslaved Africans, but thrived even among Lisbon’s literati. That this culture seeped into local literature demonstrates just how “Angolan” Portugal had become, inverting our normal assumptions of one-way cultural flows from masters to slaves. Another example of this kind of hybrid Portuguese–Central African Catholic cultural exchange can be found in the published account of a fictional conversation between a Portuguese priest and a “Preto.” The Preto first presents himself to the Catholic priest, addressing him as “sioro ganga” or “Senhor Ganga”—“ganga” being the Kikongo and Kimbundu word for diviners, healers, and priests. The priest returns the greeting and asks the Preto his name. The Preto answers, “My name is Bento, sir.” The priest’s response is a clever play on words tying the name “Bento” to black devotion of “São Bento” (Saint Benedict). Though the priest mocks the Preto in a “humorous” play on words for a Portuguese audience, the depth of understanding of African realities in Lisbon—the importance of the “ganga,” the widespread black devotion to Saint Benedict—reveals just how intertwined Portuguese and Central African culture could be in everyday life. Not all African interactions with the Catholic Church took place through the cultural idioms of Africa; nor did the Portuguese always treat African devotion with such mocking disrespect. Africans and Portuguese were also very much implicated in one another’s “separate” institutions in Lisbon. For example, some African slaves expressed a level of Catholic piety that exceeded

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that of their Portuguese masters. In 1727, the Angolan slave Vicencia Monica appeared before the Portuguese Inquisition to denounce a Portuguese man, Henrique de Lemos. Lemos had married Vicencia’s mistress, Dorothea de Ataide, less than a year earlier. During the brief time Vicencia served the newly married couple, she was distressed to see that Lemos ate meat on Fridays and Saturdays, refused to attend Mass with his wife, and desecrated an image of Saint Anthony.46 Vicencia also complained that Lemos refused to allow her and another slave, Roza, to attend Mass. Though Vicencia’s denunciation of Lemos never reached a full trial, her expression of Catholic faith and her willingness to address her grievances through the system of ecclesiastical justice demonstrate the depths of her devotion to a Portuguese Catholic religious orthodoxy.47 Likewise, even though Portuguese subjects ridiculed black brotherhoods and even feigned fits of sneezing as their processions passed through the streets of Lisbon, the Portuguese royal family endorsed some of these celebrations in very public ways.48 For example, in April 1744, the black brotherhood of Nossa Senhora de Guadalupe celebrated Saint Benedict with a three-day festival. The festival almost certainly included some of the same raucous singing, dancing, and musical processions that characterized the celebrations for Nossa Senhora do Rosário discussed earlier in this chapter. Nevertheless, on the second day of the feast, the king and queen of Portugal graced the brothers with their sober and illustrious presence. In return, the brotherhood bestowed the honorific title of lifelong office (Juiz perpetuo) on King João V. The occasion was later reported in the official royal gazette, thereby signaling the king’s embrace of African Catholicism to his mostly white metropolitan subjects.49 Of course, one might argue that, in these religious exchanges, the protagonists used the Catholic Church to achieve other, ulterior motives, alongside their devotional or spiritual ones. In the case of Vicencia Monica, she claimed that Henrique de Lemos abused all of the women and children in their house, tying them up, gagging them, whipping them with a chicote. In the absence of a physical response to this abuse, perhaps she hoped Church authorities would condemn her master’s heretical behavior and apply inquisitorial justice. In the case of King João V, his strong endorsement of the black brotherhood was contingent on the brothers’ avowed devotion to the Catholic Church and on their deference to the king’s sovereignty. The king’s patronage rested entirely on the Africans’ subjectivity. Ultimately, the “taming” of Africans to God’s law was a testament to the glory and power of the king,

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to be celebrated by the crown through public displays of noblesse oblige. In return, Africans were able to carve out their own social and cultural spaces, sanctioned by the crown, often up and against the vitriol of its white metropolitan subjects. In this way, an absolutist crown sometimes served as both master and protector of African interests in the heart of the metropole. This very brief, composite overview of black life in eighteenth-century Lisbon is meant only as a suggestive starting point for those who might wish to engage in more dedicated research projects. There are rich veins of economic, social, and cultural history of African and African-descended peoples in Lisbon that remain to be tapped. My overall goal here has been modest: to demonstrate the extent to which blacks were etched into the historical landscape of the city, not just as colonial appendages, but as central players in metropolitan affairs. I have largely avoided discussions of the “circulation” of Africans through Lisbon; however, these circulations also contributed mightily to Lisbon’s identity as a Black Atlantic port. The seaborne connections to Africa and Brazil brought a steady stream of black travelers and sailors to Lisbon. The network of six African mandingueiros, mentioned earlier, was probably only a small sample of a much broader network. Evidence suggests that at least thirty different, mostly African-born, men were connected by this trade in mandingas, stretching from Africa, to Brazil, to Portugal. Another Ouidah slave, Luís de Lima, named twenty-five different slaves with whom he conspired to manufacture bolsas in Porto during the same period the Lisbon network was uncovered. Some of these mandingueiros had traveled to Lisbon.50 At least eighteen had once lived in Brazil; two were the slaves of Englishmen; and two more worked on merchant ships.51 Clearly, this network of mandingueiros with ties to Brazil highlights the fluidity between colonial Brazil and metropolitan Lisbon. Lisbon was the primary destination of merchants and colonial officials returning to Portugal, often with their slaves in tow. But Portuguese merchants and government officials were not the only ones who carried Africa to the metropole via the Atlantic. For instance, in the late 1750s, a teenage slave named José accompanied his young masters when they left Brazil for university studies at Coimbra. He served them there, eventually running afoul of the Inquisition when he was overheard to say that there was no such thing as hell.52 Other blacks arrived in Portugal through the criminal institutions of crown and Church. In 1744, the Portuguese Inquisition sent two Africans, one black creole, and one Brazilian Indian to Lisbon to stand trial for crimes committed in Brazil. The

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two Africans were eventually banished to southern Portugal, where they each continued the divining and healing practices that landed them in trouble in the first place.53 Other blacks arrived, not necessarily from Brazil, but as servants of English merchants conducting business in Lisbon. Some of these blacks were part of the mandinga network. Others denounced their English masters for not allowing them to practice the Catholic faith in Lisbon.54 And still others became pirates. In 1755, the “black Englishman” Bristol Grefe (Griffin?) was condemned to ten years in the galleys for piracy at sea.55 Altogether then, one can see the broad contours of an extremely vibrant black presence in Lisbon during the eighteenth century, both at the local, institutional level and at the level of broader Atlantic circulations. When considered alongside the handful of studies that demonstrate the importance of the black presence in Lisbon during the sixteenth century, we can begin to link African-descended influences that persisted in the city for hundreds of years. To ignore African slavery or the profound importance of Africandescended peoples in Portugal prior to the nineteenth century is to succumb to the “monumentality” of the “discoveries,” literally burying Africans in the trash heaps of history. To be sure, maritime exploration should be celebrated, but not simply as elaborations of Portuguese genius, wealth, and Christian charity. The human dimensions of imperial expansion directly affected the metropole, bringing significant numbers of African slaves to places like Lisbon. Both enslaved and freed peoples of African descent helped to shape the social relations and cultural expressions of the city, even as they often suffered under the yoke of slavery, Portuguese absolutism, and merchant might. The histories of these Africans and their descendants deserve to be highlighted as part of Lisbon’s history. They are not histories etched in stone, like those of the explorers and the forefathers of the current Duke of Bragança. Rather, they are woven deeply into the tapestry of the country—in its streets, neighborhoods, language, music, and dance. Often hidden in plain view, these histories reveal a different kind of glory, one of human resilience, persistence, and survival.

Chapter Twelve

Black Brotherhoods in Mexico City Nicole von Germeten

As explored in other chapters in this volume that focus on port cities in the Iberian Black Atlantic, this chapter analyzes seventeenth-century Mexico City confraternities that had an African or Creole membership or were described in colonial documentation as founded and led by negros or mulatos.1 Confraternities helped seventeenth-century Africans and descendants of Africans survive through fostering community and providing health care and burials, and later encouraged a degree of upward social mobility. They also created a cultural, religious, and spiritual phenomena I call Afro-Mexican Baroque piety, which emphasized women’s leadership and penitence and participants’ humble, even enslaved status.2 In Mexico City, Afro-Mexicans very rarely organized brotherhoods connected to their place of origin in Africa, but instead asserted their American birth or Creole identity to achieve goals for their community. In fact, as early as 1568, a group of men who described themselves as mulatos and the “sons of black men and Indian women or black women and Spanish men” petitioned the king to found a hospital that served their needs.3 While it has been the focus for well-known English-language historical studies of Africans in New Spain,4 Mexico City is not an easy place for historians to explore the history of Afro-Mexican confraternities. Parish archives or the records of bishops and the courts connected to them offer historians the best documents for understanding confraternities, but these repositories have either been lost or destroyed or are very difficult to access in Mexico City. Because their historical archives have better survived the centuries, northern Mexican mining towns, such as Zacatecas, and regional centers, such as

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Morelia, offer a much more detailed panorama of Afro-Mexican spiritual and family life from the 1500s to the twentieth century. It is also important to note that the history of Mexico City confraternities differs from what can be traced in regional archives. We cannot precisely pinpoint Mexico City population numbers (much less specifics for slaves versus free people or exact numbers of slaves who came from various African regions) for the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, but historians believe that Africans and their descendants definitely outnumbered Spaniards in this important administrative center well into the 1600s.5 Contemporary population figures should not be trusted because at this time they were used to prove points or push agendas. Also, it is very difficult to ascertain how observers divided the different categories of residents they identified, or where they drew their boundaries around the city. For example, the petitioners mentioned above claimed that six thousand mulatos lived in Mexico City in 1568, perhaps exaggerating their numbers to stress their need for a hospital. In 1570, historians say that around twelve thousand AfroMexicans lived in Mexico City, and by 1646 this number had grown to almost sixty-three thousand, although the latter figure includes the surrounding region as well.6 In 1612, one traveler asserted that the city was home to fifty thousand blacks and mulattos, fifteen thousand Spaniards, and eighty thousand Indians.7 In 1698, the Italian traveler Gemelli Careri observed that negros and mulatos dominated the numbers of people he observed on Mexico City streets. He offered an estimate of one hundred thousand residents in the city. Historians guess that thirty thousand indigenous people lived in Mexico City through the 1600s, so, given this figure, Spaniards, Africans, and their descendants (both free and enslaved) represented over two-thirds of the inhabitants. We do know that the majority of Africans in New Spain came from Central Africa, especially in the period from 1580 to 1640. An obvious trend was toward a growth in the free population of color, as slaves from Africa rarely came to New Spain after 1640, and a wide swath of the population tended toward sexual unions across racial lines, creating a large racially mixed group often described as castas. Into the eighteenth century, the city continued to grow in population, with an increase of Spaniards, Natives, and free people of color, while the numbers of Africans and enslaved individuals suffered a gradual decline after 1640. This chapter mirrors the broad trend toward free status by presenting snapshots of historical moments taken from the surviving documentation related to Afro-Mexican confraternities, which demonstrate a tendency, over

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one or two generations, to deemphasize African ethnic or geographic labels, instead taking on, whether voluntarily or due to official suggestions or pressure, the personal and confraternal designations of negro and mulato. Black confraternity participants also might have continued the use of the terms negro and mulato to describe their brotherhoods in an effort to protect their resources from Spanish takeover, as was the case in smaller towns in New Spain.8 The surviving (although very fragmented) evidence suggests that black residents of Mexico City most valued the health care and burials provided by confraternities, as opposed to an explicitly stated association with African ancestry. In the early 1600s, in search of a slave conspiracy, colonial authorities targeted Afro-Mexican confraternities as seedbeds for rebellions, but this moment soon passed, and other evidence suggests a desire to follow Catholic customs for these organizations.9 In Mexico City, many Afro-Mexicans participated in blood brotherhoods, or cofradías de sangre, lay Catholic organizations whose ceremonial year climaxed in flagellant, penitential processions during Holy Week. Cofradías de sangre flourished internationally in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Crossing both the Atlantic and the Pacific, blood brotherhoods appeared in the Americas, Asia, and Africa as early modern Iberians extended their influence worldwide. Scholars have offered many explanations for the increased popularity of penitential confraternities beginning in the sixteenth century and their persistence well into the eighteenth century.10 In medieval Spain, confraternities often helped strengthen the Christian presence in towns and cities recently taken from Islamic control.11 Lay brotherhoods developed as cities were founded and settled in both reconquista-era Spain and throughout Spain’s empire in the New World, helping new settlers integrate into the urban milieu. In the city of Zamora, a strategic town during the reconquista and an important pilgrimage way station, Maureen Flynn argues that confraternities successfully helped “incorporate . . . diverse elements into society.” Flynn refers to Iberians moving from other parts of the peninsula, but medieval brotherhoods were also organized around origins outside Spain: the brotherhood traditionally comprising blacks living in Seville survives to the present day.12 Iberian brotherhoods could represent specific groups or trades within urban society or affiliations with local parishes. Naturally the Spanish, viewing their empire as based on cities, took this effective urban institution with them to the Americas. Spaniards living outside Spain, whether in Europe or the Americas, enthusiastically participated in Catholic brotherhoods and also encouraged colonial subjects and recent converts to Christianity

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to do the same. By means of their overseas empires, both Spain and Portugal created a web of international brotherhoods, maintaining links to their hometowns as they traveled and settled throughout the world.13 While their organizations are more difficult to document, Afro-Iberians were also active in confraternities and maintained ties to their hometown brotherhoods in Spain even if they settled in distant regions of the world. Evidence suggests that Africans and their descendants in colonial Latin America enjoyed a connection to international brotherhoods, along with a vibrant confraternal life in their towns of residence. Penitential brotherhoods may have appealed to Catholics internationally due to their function as offering an opportunity to make a physical, social, and public manifestation of suffering for the sake of one’s soul, in imitation of Christ’s Passion and a challenge to the corruption of the city. Before 1520, according to William Christian and Flynn, flagellation in Spain was done in response to a crisis (such as a plague outbreak) or the sermons of an inflammatory street preacher like Vincent Ferrer, but there were no institutionalized cofradías de sangre.14 Between 1520 and 1575, penitential confraternities dedicated to the True Cross or the Blood of Christ were officially instituted in cities throughout both Spain and New Spain.15 In both old and New Spain, Vera Cruz (the name refers to Jesus Christ’s cross and thus implies suffering in imitation of Christ) confraternities were connected to Franciscan or other religious orders and had hundreds or even thousands of members. Their popularity continued to grow with new foundations throughout the sixteenth century. In Spanish cities such as Toledo or Jaén, several different penitential advocations coexisted, which was also the case for Mexico City flagellant confraternities founded by Africans and their descendants. Processions in Europe and New Spain included flagellants and marchers carrying candles. For this reason, black brotherhoods throughout New Spain referred to their processions as “de luz y sangre [of light and blood].” Pious processions helped increase the Christian reputation of each city as marchers sacralized the streets with every painful step.16 While the thirteen Afro-Mexican confraternities that have left some documental traces in Mexico City focused on fostering sociability and funding health care and burials, at least half of them also had a penitential function, carrying out these Catholic understandings of suffering and redemption. The dominant geographic point of origin of the population of African descent for seventeenth-century New Spain was the Kongo/Angolan region of Central Africa. Scholarship by John Thornton and Linda Heywood highlights

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“a range of cultural familiarity with Christian beliefs and European cultural traditions that were common to many Central Africans coming into [the] Americas.” 17 This allowed for a smoother transition into the Catholic milieu for those Central Africans enslaved in New Spain. Heywood and Thornton also stress that West-Central Africans had an “engagement with European culture” dating to the late fifteenth century, and a much “more uniform set of beliefs and practices than any of the other regions of Atlantic Africa.” 18 Thornton states that the Kingdom of Kongo was converted in 1491, and by the 1630s European observers assumed that the king, nobility, and people in general in this kingdom were Catholic.19 As will be explored further below, although undoubtedly Central Africans and their descendants participated in Catholic brotherhoods in Mexico City, they did not openly or officially connect their place of origin to their official confraternity designations. Given the surviving documentation, it seems that Central Africans in New Spain’s capital did not organize Catholic brotherhoods divided from other brotherhoods according to African geographic designations, but instead integrated into these institutions as baptized Catholics. The brotherhoods maintained by their descendants differed little from Hispanic organizations, other than perhaps a greater influence on providing health care, an ongoing need. However, even if Central African origins were not highlighted in a way that made them obvious to Spanish scribes, Central African ideas about community and a social experience of suffering and expiation may have drawn Africans in New Spain to penitential brotherhoods, and certainly the idea of communal societies addressing health and mortality was familiar to many Africans in New Spain. Some Central Africans probably took part in social and religious brotherhoods and sisterhoods before crossing the Atlantic, and they may have even brought the experience of Christian self-mortification with them to the Americas. In the late seventeenth century, a Capuchin friar in the Kingdom of Kongo reported that Christians in Soyo practiced “the Discipline” on a weekly basis and used chains for flagellation during Maundy Thursday (the Thursday before Easter Sunday, traditionally celebrated as the “sad” day before Christ’s crucifixion) processions.20 In the early modern Christian Kongo, Thornton documents societies referred to as kimpasi, the Kikongo word for suffering. Communities asked for the formation of these societies and the construction of edifices used for their rituals to remedy local disasters. Women were active leaders in the kimpasi societies, as they were in Afro-Mexican sodalities (which were in effect brotherhoods and sisterhoods).21 From Thornton’s account, it appears that Africans valued group

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rituals, pain, and personal transformations as a way to address life’s difficulties.22 Non-Christians in Central Africa also used brotherhoods to organize their worldly affairs.23 For a later time period in Brazil, James Sweet found an account of flagellation (in this case done with a chicken) as part of a healing practice involving a free Angolan man, possibly derived from the practices of African healing societies. Sweet notes that some Africans in Brazil may have associated Catholic brotherhoods with these healing societies, suggesting an enduring connection between healing, brotherhoods, and penitence. Africans also tied physical suffering to spiritual disturbances, and sought healers to remedy their pain through ritual.24 Unfortunately, Afro-Mexican confraternities did not leave historians the well-preserved paperwork that survives for wealthier brotherhoods in New Spain or Europe. Not unlike other brotherhoods in sixteenth-century Havana and Cartagena as mentioned in the chapters by Matt Childs and Jane Landers, black brotherhoods in Mexico City failed to preserve their earliest documents, including constitutions stating dates of foundation. Although many were founded in the early 1600s, most confraternity documentation comes from the second half of the seventeenth century, especially during Francisco Aguiar y Seixas’s tenure as archbishop of Mexico City (1680–98).25 Aguiar y Seixas was one of the few clerics in New Spanish history to actively encourage African participation in the Catholic Church, especially through his approval of official foundations of black confraternities from Taxco to Acapulco. His penchant for confraternities led him occasionally to join new, humble brotherhoods as their first asiento (seat) or member.26 Aguiar y Seixas’s confessor/biographer Joseph Lezamis wrote that the archbishop was courteous and humble around “mestizos, mulattos and even Indians,” whom he allowed to sit in his presence.27 In statements preserved in confraternity record books, Aguiar y Seixas described confraternal indulgences “as such a great treasure, and confraternities so necessary for the instruction of the Christian doctrine to all kinds of people.” 28 The archbishop stressed how confraternities could provide routes to salvation and viewed education in the catechism as one of confraternities’ main responsibilities, “extremely necessary for all kinds of people, in particular the very small [pequeñuelos], coarse people, and those of less understanding, of which there are many in the towns of the Archbishopric.” In addition to encouraging the official foundation of new confraternities and promising graces and indulgences for all foundations, Aguiar y Seixas emphasized that confraternity membership was open to all. He wrote “all can join as members, any person of both sexes, of any age, state, quality or

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condition” adding that “[a]ny type of person, if they are Spanish or otherwise, and know how to read” should receive published indulgences from priests. Not unlike Alonso de Sandoval, a seventeenth-century Jesuit who spent most of his life baptizing African slaves in Cartagena, Aguiar y Seixas viewed confraternities as beneficial and already successful institutions useful in extending the original goals of spiritual conquest beyond Indians to African slaves and their descendants. Although they left only scattered evidence of their existence, AfroMexican confraternities in the viceregal capital were active, prolific, and long-lasting. Every existing document or fragment of a document relating to black brotherhoods testifies to their vibrancy and longevity, demonstrating that black and mulato brotherhoods were as diverse in seventeenth-century Mexico City as they were in Lima, where Frederick Bowser documented fifteen Afro-Peruvian brotherhoods in 1619. Limeño and New Spanish black brotherhoods were either based in parish churches or affiliated with the Jesuits or the Augustinian, Mercedarian, Franciscan, or Dominican mendicant orders.29 It is a challenge to list all of the black brotherhoods founded in colonial Mexico City, even though occasionally the authorities attempted to list the confraternities functioning in the New Spain’s capital. These official surveys do not provide an accurate panorama of confraternal activity among nonwhite residents. The exception is one account from 1666 that describes an impressive number of casta brotherhoods. Isidro Sariñana, a parish priest of the Santa Veracruz church, noted that sixteen confraternities “of blacks, mulattos, chinos [Filipinos] and Tarascan Indians” made processions that year, in order of seniority.30 The confraternities were divided by their black standards, covered in embroidery and images of their advocations. The brothers and sisters wore mourning clothes and carried large candles. In my research, I have identified thirteen black brotherhoods founded in Mexico City before 1706, but not all of these were mentioned in surveys done during the colonial era. Some may have lasted only a few years, others definitely changed their location, and others possibly went by a variety of names. In contrast to Sariñana, a 1706 list of confraternities based in all convents, churches, and hospitals in Mexico City gives the impression of a steep decline in black brotherhoods.31 Only two confraternities listed in 1706 were identified as “de negros o mulatos.” These were the confraternity of the Precious Blood of Christ in the parish church of Santa Catarina Martir (linked to a Spanish confraternity of the same name) and the confraternity dedicated to Saint Joseph in the Mercedarian church.

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The Franciscan-based San Benito Palermo brotherhood was mentioned, but not described any further. However, other colonial documents prove this survey to be inaccurate and indicate that other traditionally black brotherhoods were active well into the eighteenth century. In fact, a 1788 document listing existing confraternities (and taking a disparaging tone when referring to these remaining organizations labeled as founded by morenos or pardos) states that three black brotherhoods remained in Mexico City by the end of the 1700s. These survivors were the confraternities dedicated to San Benito Palermo, Santa Efigenia, and Christ of the Expiration. All three of these organizations also existed in 1706. Confraternities known to be Afro-Mexican in the seventeenth century, including the Expiration of Christ, San Nicolás, and the Exaltation of Christ, were all listed in the 1706 survey, but not given a race label. Because other documents suggest these brotherhoods continued to have black leadership and membership into the late eighteenth century, this lack of racial designation suggests a rushed or cursory survey and a lack of official interest in Afro-Mexican confraternities by 1706. While brotherhoods were viewed as possible centers for rebellious and anti-Spanish activity in the early 1600s, this fear no longer existed in the eighteenth century.32 The 1612 alleged Afro-Mexican conspiracy is a difficult topic to discuss, given the paucity of reliable sources, but a few details are pertinent to giving a sense of confraternal history in this era.33 From 1608, authorities feared the organization and leadership that seemed to emerge out of black confraternity gatherings. Their fears were realized in 1612, as allegedly fifteen hundred Afro-Mexicans attended the funeral procession for a slave woman who might have died due to her master’s abuse. A confraternity leader from the black brotherhood based at the Our Lady of Mercy church organized the march, which ended in an attack on the archbishop’s palace and the building occupied by the local tribunal of the Holy Office of the Spanish Inquisition. According to the surviving accounts, black confraternities and especially certain leaders continued to focus on planning rebellion even after the leaders of the destructive marched suffered public corporal punishment. Clerics from the confraternity’s church could not control the funerals and the dances and ceremonies that took place in connection to funerals. According to some Portuguese informers who understood the slaves who spoke in the language of Angola, the next step was a violent attack on Spaniards during the extensive processions in the week before Easter. Not surprisingly, the authorities forbade any gatherings of Africans, and they also prohibited any blood brotherhoods from marching in Holy Week processions regardless of membership.

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Nor was anyone allowed “to flagellate any other person.” 34 The leaders of all Afro-Mexican brotherhoods were arrested, but they supposedly continued their planning and gatherings, even creating a festive environment in prison. This mood changed as the authorities claimed to find hidden weapons, reacting by tyrannically hanging thirty-five accused conspirators, including at least seven women. Six of the bodies were drawn and quartered, and the rest were posthumously decapitated, to create a horrific display around the city. Although the details are very untrustworthy, it seems that during these events, African place of origin, or even free versus enslaved status or Creole versus African birth, was not a major factor determining participation. It is also important to note that the bans on black brotherhoods and penitential processions were soon lifted or ignored—some of the confraternity history that we trace later in this chapter took place just before or after these events without any noticeable prohibitions. Notwithstanding this example, the scattered surviving documentation from Mexico City black brotherhoods rarely records any connection to violence, but instead a strong desire to comply with Catholic confraternity norms. At least four Afro-Mexican penitential confraternities were founded in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries and continued their activities past the mid-1600s. A group of free and enslaved Afro-Mexicans, led by a free mulato, was so eager to march in the 1601 Holy Week processions, playing trumpets and ringing a bell while carrying a green cross and a float depicting the crucifixion, that they went out without a license and even had the audacity to walk in front of a more established Spanish brotherhood.35 We do not find many conflicts relating to colonial race labels, although these labels were usually appended to the confraternity’s advocation (whether this was by free choice of the members or by imposition of the authorities is not clear). This contrasts with confraternities in smaller towns, where confraternity members made a point of claiming the labels mulato or negro as they struggled for autonomy from local Spaniards.36 Africans undoubtedly created undocumented or informal brotherhoods linking members of specific ethnicities, or a multitude of ties created in Africa or on board slave ships, but surviving records testify that only one confraternity asserted a connection to African ethnic identity in its interaction with colonial bureaucrats. This was the brotherhood in the Hospital of the Immaculate Conception founded by Hernán Cortés shortly after the conquest (always referred to in the confraternity’s records as the Marques del Valle).37 Some documentation exists for the Immaculate Conception

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brotherhood because of a dispute that took place in the 1630s and 1640s over the income from a house donated to the confraternity. The house was owned earlier in the century by a man called Juan Roque, described as the cabeza de la nación sape.38 This title refers to Roque’s designation as the leader of the local zapes or çapes, at least in terms of their activities connected to the Conception brotherhood.39 Unlike those of other cities explored in this book, this is a unique case because no other evidence from Mexico City (or in fact all of New Spain) proves that confraternities in the viceregal capital made a point to highlight their African origins during their interactions with colonial authorities. The ethnic label “zape” was used in the early modern Iberian world to refer to Africans from coastal Sierra Leone. The term “zape” was common enough to be used by Lope de Vega as a term of insult in his 1611 play titled El Santo negro Rosambuco de la ciudad de Palermo, dedicated to Benedict of Palermo, a saintly friar with enslaved African parents who lived in sixteenth-century Italy.40 Zapes became embroiled in the slave trade due to mid-sixteenth-century struggles with Mande speakers from the interior. The Portuguese took advantage of these hostilities to buy prisoners of war as slaves in Sierra Leone before developing a steadier source of slaves from Central Africa. During the peak of the slave trade to Mexico, from 1580 to 1640, most slaves arriving in Veracruz were labeled as from Congo or Angola, in reference to the frequency of Central African geographic origins in this era. However, aging members of other ethnicities, including zapes, lived among the African-born population in mid-seventeenth-century Mexico City. During his lifetime, Roque married a zape woman and had a daughter. His entire family was free by the time of his death in 1623, and his daughter married a mulatto tailor named Juan Fraile. In 1634, the Immaculate Conception brotherhood argued before the authorities that, after the death of Roque’s daughter Ana María four years earlier, they owned the property in question and its income, although a priest had been collecting rent since Ana María’s death. The statements made by witnesses reveal the strong zape community that existed in seventeenth-century Mexico City, forged through lifelong friendships and surrogate family ties.41 When Ana María’s husband tried to force her to sell Roque’s houses, she turned to zape elders and brotherhood members for help. When a close friend of her father advised her to submit to her husband’s authority and sell the house, the rest of the zape brothers gathered together to strengthen their position and defend what they believed was their property, inherited from her father Juan Roque.

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In 1644, conflicts again arose over Juan Roque’s donation. At this time, a man called Juan Bautista, a free black given the ethnic designation of Jolof, had been maintaining the house and collecting the rent for ten years. Zape confraternity brothers decided it was now time to reclaim their property.42 In several bitter exchanges before the ecclesiastical judge in charge of pious bequests, witnesses for each side presented their idea of how ethnic identity related to involvement in the Immaculate Conception confraternity and its properties. The witnesses’ statements illustrate that the brotherhood and its house brought together a community of Africans of various ethnicities. In 1644, the zapes retained this ethnic label and continued to lead a branch of the brotherhood. The judge asked that they bring forward three witnesses to prove they could speak as zape leaders. The witnesses identified themselves as men from the “bañol, biojo and terranova nations.” 43 Each individual was a brother of the Immaculate Conception, in the branch of the confraternity associated with their place or culture of origin. They also stated that each nación named a cabeza or “head [leader]” and deputies each year, who governed each division. This is the only evidence we have to show that African cultural, language, or geographic divisions affected Mexico City confraternities. The tenants of Roque’s house were almost entirely women described as negras esclavas.44 By 1668, this community of Africans identified as zapes no longer existed, according to statements made by the leaders who called themselves morenos oficios of the Immaculate Conception brotherhood.45 This younger creolized generation also showed no interest in maintaining connections relating to African ethnic labels, and in fact spoke insultingly of their African-born elders, a common rhetorical strategy among second-generation Creoles that emphasized their desire to present generational conflict and disassociation with African founders to Spanish authorities, if it served their purpose. According to the brotherhood leadership in 1668, the seven castes of black bozales that participated in the confraternity twenty years before had declined because many of these participants had either died or left to join other brotherhoods. Only three elderly men remained from this earlier era, and, in the opinion of the petitioners, these three were “incapable” and should not be entrusted with the keys to the Immaculate Conception chapel, where they stored their books, ornaments, and papers. Two of the “old men” were described as bozales, and the third was called Domingo Criollo. The petitioners asked that the confraternity be reorganized to open membership to “brothers and benefactors of different castes and nations, including mulattos, Creole

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blacks and bozales, who wanted to join.” This broad membership would be more in line with the norm for Mexico City black brotherhoods. When the two bozales did not respond to an official request to turn in any documents relating to the brotherhood, handing over their control to members who were “more capable in the use and good customs for serving God,” the petitioners described them as “incapable people of little intelligence due to their [lack of understanding of the Spanish] language.” 46 However, several days later, all of the brotherhood’s leaders gathered in the Immaculate Conception Hospital. Around fifteen of those present formed the “creole faction [parcialidad],” while five others were designated as the “faction of those from Guinea” or “blacks from the elders’ caste [negros de la casta de los viejos].” 47 Each faction appointed their own leaders. Although the viejos made no objections to the fact that they now shared access to confraternity resources, other members denounced these elections, stating that one of the elected officials often “made noises and riots, such that it is notorious that he has been excluded from and thrown out of other confraternities in this city due to scandal.” 48 The ecclesiastical judge decided against ruling on this petition, leaving the outcome of this statement unknown. Even without more information, this case reveals a moment of conflict as the Immaculate Conception brotherhood gradually lost its function as a complex organization bringing together Africans who shared various ethnicities, each with their own leadership. By 1681, no trace of these factions remained in the documents the confraternity submitted to church officials.49 Over the course of two or three generations, this brotherhood lost its connection to the zape label, even though the original dispute over Juan Roque’s house had helped emphasize their community ties. The younger leaders denounced their elders and sought to diminish their power by emphasizing behavior perceived as resistant to Hispanic influences. Also they wished to increase the brotherhood’s numbers through a broader, Afro-Mexican membership, perhaps indicating that this was where they placed some sense of their personal identity and social connections. As is often the case with confraternities, most conflicts have to do with finances on the surface, but can reveal deeper issues below. Most brotherhoods founded and led by Africans and their descendants, as mentioned in the chapters on Havana, Lisbon, Cartagena, Bahia, and Rio de Janeiro, channeled their limited resources toward providing health care for their members, festivities associated with their patron saint and religious holidays, and paying for their funeral masses and burials. In general, it is clear that the penitential brotherhoods of Mexico City yearly calendar peaked

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during Holy Week, when they marched in flagellant processions. The names of seven Mexico City brotherhoods attest to their penitential function: the Expiration of Christ, founded in 1602 and located in the Dominican convent; Our Lady of Anguish, in the Franciscan convent; the Exaltation of the Holy Cross, in the Santa Veracruz parish church; Ecce Homo, in the Trinidad parish church; the Precious Blood of Christ, in the Saint Catherine Martyr parish church; Saint Nicolás Tolentino of Mount Calvary, in the Augustinian convent (first documented in 1628); and the Bloodshed (derramamiento) of Christ, a second black brotherhood located in the Dominican convent.50 Beyond their names, all of which highlight moments in the Passion story, documents reveal a few scant details of the importance of penitential processions for Afro-Mexican brotherhoods. In most cases, these details resemble the activities documented for European confraternities, but the Afro-Mexican processions also included women and slaves, as was also the custom in black brotherhoods in early modern Spain.51 For example, on March 6, 1671, the leaders of the brotherhood of the Expiration of Christ founded by negros y mulatos met to organize their “blood procession” as was customary.52 Leading members of the brotherhood were appointed to carry their bell, their official standard, depicting an image of Christ, and a banner portraying an image of the Virgin Mary. The last item was entrusted to a madre mayor, or the leading female member of the confraternities in the company of other madres, or active women. Although no definition exists for the office of madre mayor, these female leaders had important roles in processions, nursing, and maintaining the confraternity’s image. Very infrequently did Afro-Mexican openly hold offices related to finances, although women in New Spain were powerful when it came to owning businesses and making property transactions.53 In this particular example, other cofrades (members of the confraternity) carried candles and several members donated money, adding up to thirty pesos, to fund the procession. Expiration of Christ strove for flexibility to accommodate the needs of their enslaved members: Mauricio Pacheco, the “the black deputy in charge of the Holy Cross paso [or the large image carried on a heavy float by men in the procession]” asked that the day of their procession be moved because “it was a work day and all of the brothers of said paso are slaves who must attend to their masters.” 54 In 1693, the same confraternity, now described as founded by pardos, petitioned the diocesan court for a license to have their annual “procession of light and blood on Friday of Holy Week.” 55 The judge approved their request for a “procession of blood and penitence.”

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In 1686, a group of negros (as noted by the scribe taking down the request) asked for approval of a few modifications to their set of rules, or constitution, for the confraternity dedicated to the Precious Blood of Christ, officially founded in 1634 in the parish church of Santa Catarina Martir.56 Based in the ecce homo chapel of the church, the brotherhood’s constitution stated that they were governed by a rector, a deputy, and a majordomo. These offices could be exchanged between negros and mulatos with no conflict, suggesting that members did define themselves along these lines and wanted to diffuse conflict that emerged around these labels. Thirty-three members were called founders and passed on this status to their adult sons when they died, to maintain the sacred number symbolic of the years of Jesus Christ’s life.57 Each brother had to pay for wax used in their Maundy Thursday procesión de disciplina. In 1693, the leaders of the Precious Blood brotherhood again met to reorganize their constitution.58 In this document, the brothers of the Precious Blood of Christ were described variously as morenos, pardos, negros, or mulatos.59 One of the reforms they wanted to institute was the appointment of a mayoral (foreman) to organize their annual “light and blood procession.” The foreman had to appoint suitable madres mayors, female leaders among the women in the group, to take part in the pasos dedicated to Our Lady, the Holy Ecce Homo, and Jesus the Nazarene. The procession in general included sixty men carrying candles walking with the floats related to the Precious Blood of Christ, depictions of Saint John the Baptist, Christ of the Column, and the other floats mentioned above. In preparation for the 1694 Maundy Thursday procession, a free black man called Domingo de Olmos received twenty-five pesos from the confraternity in order to supply wax for candles for ninety marchers.60 As was the case with confraternities founded by Africans and their descendants throughout New Spain, women of African descent played a leadership role in these organizations.61 The evidence above indicates that women marched in processions, and in some cases female members even participated in the ritual of flagellation during Holy Week processions. For example, a Coyoacan brotherhood with mestizo, mulatto, and black membership and the advocation of the Holy Cross received papal indulgences as a flagellant brotherhood whose members, men as well as women, disciplined themselves on Good Friday.62 Women’s participation led to a variety of conflicts, including over valuable possessions owned by a brotherhood. In 1667, the rector and majordomo of Expiration of Christ demanded that the mulata María de

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Segovia return a silver crown belonging to their image of the Virgin, along with a large silver vase. Segovia served as madre mayor for many years, and in this case this office apparently meant that she was in charge of the items connected to the Virgin’s image and processional float. Apparently the male officials had asked her several times for these valuable bienes, with no response.63 When women took part in a brotherhood’s public activities, male members sometimes felt the need to publicly define their ideas of propriety, demanding, at least officially, that the female members abide by the rules of proper decorum according to Spanish sensibilities.64 However, men on their own also caused disturbances in processions, and reactions to these “scandals” demonstrate the sometimes tense atmosphere when Afro-Mexicans took to the streets in an organized group. In 1647, the black rector of the San Benito Palermo brotherhood demanded that the slave Francisco be expelled for causing disturbances in the meeting before their procession.65 Apparently, Francisco shouted and disrupted the cabildo due to issues over carrying the brotherhood’s standard. The ecclesiastical judge agreed the slave should be expelled. While Francisco’s status as a slave may have been an issue, it was not uncommon for race to play a role in confraternity disputes in New Spain. For example, brothers of the Santo Crucifijo confraternity based in the Santa Clara convent, who called themselves chinos (Filipinos), complained of raucous behavior and shouting in their 1647 Maundy Thursday “blood procession.” 66 They asked that mulatos, negros, mestizos, and “other people” be fined and censured if they disturbed the brotherhood, or became involved in the procession in any way. Before these outsiders began interfering, the chinos had made their “blood procession with their well-known reverence and devotion.” 67 Processions could become violent, even beyond noisy scandals. Jhoana de Laya, labeled mulata by the scribe present, believed that a blow her husband received in a 1657 procession led to his death.68 Her husband served as the rector for the San Roque brotherhood based in the San Lázaro hospital. During their Lenten procession, he was punched and robbed for the pesos he carried to pay for the procession. Jhoana de Laya demanded that the murderers be excommunicated. The standard directions for order and solemn decorum in processions may have taken on an elevated importance for this reportedly raucous brotherhood when, in 1677, don Juan Diego de la Barrera, in a complaint regarding San Roque’s accounts, reminded the confraternity’s leaders of the necessity to “carry out their procession precisely and punctually in virtue of holy obedience.” 69

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In sixteenth-century Spain, many individuals invested a great deal of time, money, and social capital in arranging their funerals, requiring the attendance of at least one, if not several, confraternities.70 This function was also very important for both male and female members of Mexico City black brotherhoods in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, as can be seen in a handful of petitions made by deceased members’ heirs. These disputes provide additional evidence for the slippery negotiation of confraternal racial designations. In 1667, Victoria de la Cruz petitioned the ecclesiastical judge Antonio de Cárdenas Salazar to command the majordomo of the cofradía dedicated to the Expiration of Christ, located in the Santo Domingo convent church, to give her ten pesos for her father’s funeral.71 While this document claims this was a mulato brotherhood, earlier in this chapter we have seen that it was also referred to as encompassing blacks and mulattos. Victoria de la Cruz claimed that her father, Antonio de la Cruz, “the deceased black man,” paid his dues, so she was owed this money upon his death. In this case, it is not clear why the daughter did not receive the money. Another petition in 1694 requested that the same brotherhood pay Joseph de Rojas the ten pesos he was owed after the death of his brother, Nicolás de Rojas, a founder of the Expiration of Christ.72 In 1684, a free black man called Agustín Francisco de Aruña claimed that the Ecce Homo brotherhood located in the Trinity Church refused to bury his wife, a mulata blanca, because they claimed that they were not supposed to bury mulatos.73 The judge don Diego de la Sierra ordered that Ecce Homo’s majordomo give Aruña ten pesos in oro común and four pesos for funeral candles, as decreed in the confraternity’s constitutions. In this case, it seems that a confraternity with officially Spanish membership did not want to extend their duties, even if dues had been paid, to nonwhite members. In their last wills and testaments, many Spaniards demonstrated their continuing devotion to particular confraternities, parish churches, images, or convents in Spain, regardless of how much time they spent in the Americas. Although these kinds of transatlantic Christian loyalties are more difficult to document for Africans and their descendants, who, due to their poverty, were less likely to leave wills, a handful of examples indicate that individuals of African descent also valued their confraternity membership as they traveled around the Spanish Empire. When Pascual Díaz, described as a mulato tratante en mercaderías, died in Mexico City in 1643, he hoped to solidify his transatlantic confraternal ties.74 Díaz was a native of Ayamonte, Spain (a coastal town very close to the southern border between Spain and Portugal).

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In Ayamonte, he belonged to three confraternities. Upon his death, he bequeathed twenty pesos to each of them. These brotherhoods were dedicated to the Virgin of Succor, the Virgin of Anguishes, and Holy Christ of the Solitude, which he described as “a brotherhood of the people of the sea.” 75 Díaz also demonstrated devotion to brotherhoods in Mexico City, but these were not limited to those dominated by negros or mulatos. He asked that the executors of his last will and testament donate five ducats to the arch-confraternity of the Santa Veracruz so he could join the brotherhood posthumously. He also requested that the appropriate donation for posthumous membership be made to the confraternity of the Most Holy Sacrament located in Mexico City’s cathedral. In contrast to these bequests made to high-profile Spanish brotherhoods, Díaz donated twelve pesos to the “blacks’ chapel in the Dominican convent to help with their work.” 76 The executor of Díaz’s bequests in Mexico City was a woman named Isabel, described as a pastelera mulata. She provided several receipts to prove that she had used money she received from Díaz to pay for several masses to be said in churches around Mexico City. She confirmed that Díaz’s twelve pesos went to the morenos’ chapel in the Dominican convent, specifying that she gave them to the “work on the chapel of Our Lady of the Consolation and the derramamiento de sangre de nuestro señor Jesus Cristo.” In return for this donation, Díaz was also granted membership in this brotherhood. He was buried in the College of San Juan Letran, accompanied by children from the college who carried fourteen reales worth of candles. This case demonstrates that, when possible, Afro-Latin Americans actively maintained their own transatlantic connections, and brotherhoods were a key institution in this process. A handful of documents testify to the way confraternities helped some Afro-Mexican individuals plan for their death. This was especially useful for people who did not have enough property to justify paying for drawing up an official last will and testament. In effect, confraternity membership provided a sense of confidence that one’s funeral and burial would have some dignity and ceremony, reassurance that wealthier people might derive from writing a detailed will. In the early eighteenth century, the certificate of membership or patente given to members by the moreno brotherhood of the Bloodshed of Christ founded in the Dominican Church stated dues of half a real every week and four reales of wax annually.77 In return, members received twentyfive pesos for their funeral and a mass said for their souls. In a patent dating from 1719, the brotherhood’s leaders wrote that Inés Simona de Peralta had been a member for more than fifty years. The document also confirms

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her heirs received the money for her burial. Fifteen patents exist from this confraternity, dating from the 1720s and 1730s.78 Although some of these patents are illegible, at least nine certify women’s membership.79 At this time, members paid two reales as a joining fee, the same ongoing dues as earlier in the century, and along with the twenty-five pesos of compensation for burial, the patent stated that members received a casket, shroud, and wax at their funeral. Members were also obligated to attend mass, fiestas, and sufragios, or the regular masses said for the souls in Purgatory. Brothers and sisters (the patent mentions the cofradía was founded by “morenos, asi hombres como mujeres [blacks, men along with women]”) who neglected their duties for four months would not receive these benefits. In return for paying a two-real joining fee and a half a real every week, members of the brotherhood dedicated to the black saint Benedict of Palermo received ten pesos when they died and a funeral including candles.80 Some Afro-Mexicans were wealthy enough to organize and pay for a scribe to take down their official last will and testament. The surviving documents demonstrate a range of attitudes, from disinterest in confraternities and funeral services, to heavy involvement in this institution, supported by significant contributions of both time and money. Juan Roque, whose will survives due to the conflict over his house, asked for burial in either the hospital of the Immaculate Conception or his parish church. He requested that his zape confraternity brothers march in his funeral procession, along with members of the confraternity of the Holy Sacrament based in his parish church, and twelve additional mourners. He asked for a sung requiem at his funeral mass, which should have two clerics present. He also requested that a total of 74 masses be said for his soul and the souls of his wife and others. In 1651, a man called Juan Congo requested that the members of the Saint Benedict brotherhood march in his funeral procession. Afro-Mexican testaments show a range of confraternity choices—some wealthy individuals founded their own brotherhoods, others participated in organizations designated as pardo, and others showed a devotion to the more prominent Spanish confraternities.81 Given that almost every black brotherhood in seventeenth-century Mexico City provided health care to their members, this service may have represented the best medical care available to less wealthy Afro-Mexicans. A 1628 petition from the San Nicolás Tolentino confraternity discussed needing money to pay for doctors, pharmacists, and burials. In 1669, the majordomo of the same organization was concerned about paying for “doctors, surgeons

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and master pharmacists for curing the brothers.” 82 Evidence from 1688 indicates that membership in the Saint Benedict confraternity provided the benefit of care by a surgeon and pharmacist. The Precious Blood brotherhood’s 1686 constitution decreed that in exchange for their dues “said brothers and sisters will be attended by a doctor and a surgeon to cure their ailments and sicknesses and a pharmacist who, by virtue of the prescriptions they sign, they will be given medicine for necessary cures.” 83 Into the eighteenth century, Precious Blood’s patents confirmed that “the confraternity was obligated to give the sister [in this case, a woman called Sebastiana Catharina] when she is sick, doctor, surgeon and pharmacist to cure her.” 84 In the accounts for the financial year spanning 1726 and 1727, the majordomo received over two hundred pesos in receipts from Doña Manuela Cortés for medicines that she gave sick members.85 Confraternity accounts from 1672 indicate that Our Lady of Anguishes owed pharmacists over fifty pesos for various prescriptions.86 In the same year, documents show that the Bloodshed of Christ brotherhood had a monthly account with a pharmacist.87 Even in 1788, the Santa Efigenia brotherhood, which apparently had not had an official meeting in five years, maintained a running account with doctors, surgeons, and a pharmacist.88 The confraternity also owed doña Rafaela, widow of the pharmacist don Joseph de Zepeda, three hundred pesos. Perhaps the last confraternity in Mexico City founded by Afro-Mexicans was dedicated to Our Lady of Sorrows and based out of the San Juan de Dios hospital. In 1706 (fourteen years after another serious revolt in Mexico City, this time not specifically led by Afro-Mexicans), a group of thirty-three mulato men drew up a set of rules that placed a strong emphasis on their conscientious devotion to this image and their own characters as law abiding, peaceful men.89 Members had to pay nine reales to join and one real a month in dues, and in return they would receive decent funerals worth twenty-five pesos, as would their wives. The rules demanded immediate expulsion for all members who fell behind in their dues or who did not carry out their duties to the brotherhood. They also promised to behave charitably to those suffering in San Juan de Dios hospital. This assertion of a high standard of behavior can be found in other documentation generated by mulato confraternities in other regions of New Spain, often in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, an era when the Afro-Mexican population was generally free from enslavement and looking to establish their status in Hispanic society.90 In the late eighteenth century, Bourbon-era reformers, in both church and state, not only took more care to document confraternity accounts but

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also began to look askance at penitential processions. This is not entirely surprising, given the examples presented above noting the violence that did occur during these crowded, energetic public marches. In an effort to control Holy Week processions, which they viewed as full of drunks of indeterminate race, clerical reformers in 1771 “advised penitents to march with a rope around their necks, a crown on their heads, and a candle in their hands,” but to flagellate only in private. The priests and friars expressed shame for what they viewed as barbaric flagellation practices commonly done in Mexico City during Holy Week.91 Charles III forbade flagellation and carrying crosses in processions in 1777, issuing a decree that also prohibited processing with a hooded face and nighttime processions. However, private penitential devotions were encouraged.92 In contrast to both the king’s problem with covered heads and the church council’s disgust with extreme penitence in processions, in 1790 New Spain’s Viceroy Revillagigedo, who was the king’s representative in the largest and most important territory of Spanish America at this time, found it disgusting that many people processed on Corpus Christi “almost nude.” 93 Unfortunately, poverty caused the members of Indian brotherhoods to lack funds for sufficient clothes, while “the brothers of the confraternities and brotherhoods of Spaniards and castas always present themselves decently” wearing “shoes, stockings, a decent cape, and with their heads uncovered.” The viceroy’s polarizing comments highlight the trend away from serving as possible foci of rebellion toward respectability and adherence to Spanish confraternal traditions that can be seen in the examples presented here. The popularity of confraternities did not decline in New Spain over the course of the colonial era. In fact, archival evidence suggests that certain regional confraternities, originally founded by African slaves, persisted into the twentieth century, even while similar groups in Mexico City disappeared.94 The history of black brotherhoods in towns and villages throughout New Spain (these institutions can be found from Parral in the modern border state of Chihuahua to as far south as Oaxaca) contrasts sharply with Mexico City. This variety is one of the many reasons that studying Afro-Mexican confraternities and life in general outside the capital can teach us more than concentrating on one large city, just because it had the most inhabitants and was a center for Spanish government. Ignoring the complex and diverse regional experience of Afro-Mexican sodalities, it has been argued that in 1700s New Spain (especially Mexico City and Veracruz), as Catholicism became more “modern,” the popularity of

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confraternities declined, in line with a persistent notion of “a steady progress, from the Renaissance onward, of rationalization and secularization.” 95 This story of modernization with a focus on the increasing importance of individual piety minimizes the critical role of brotherhoods into the nineteenth century and suggests a narrative of progress away from an outmoded, imported Spanish Baroque Catholicism. In contrast, an in-depth study of AfroMexican confraternities reveals centuries of lavish ceremonies surrounding funerals and a continuing desire for large public processions, as well as the more mundane need for health care. These public and private expressions demonstrate Afro-Mexican values and how they wished to present themselves on the streets of their towns and cities. The long and conflicted history of Afro-Brazilian brotherhoods (encompassing the seventeenth to the twenty-first centuries) offers another example of the enduring importance of religious organizations for slaves and their descendants, especially in terms of community formation and self-definition.96 As can be seen throughout this volume, Catholic brotherhoods play an essential role in for understanding the experience of Africans and their descendants in Latin America well into the nineteenth century.

Notes

Introduction 1. Vincent Carretta, ed., The Interesting Narrative and Other Writings (New York, 2003), 116–17. 2. See, for example, Kristin Mann, “Shifting Paradigms in the Study of African Diaspora and of Atlantic History and Culture,” Slavery & Abolition 22, no. 1 (2001): 3–21. This general point is developed in greater detail in James Sidbury and Jorge CañizaresEsguerra, “Mapping Ethnogenesis in the Early Modern Atlantic,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 68 (Apr. 2011): 181–208, and Sidbury and Cañizares-Esguerra, “On the Genesis of Destruction, and Other Missing Subjects,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 68 (Apr. 2011): 240–46. 3. See W. Jeffrey Bolster, Black Jacks: African American Seamen in the Age of Sail (Cambridge, Mass., 1998) for the role of black mariners in the eighteenth-century Atlantic. 4. For a few works that illustrate these themes, see Philip D. Morgan, “Black Life in Eighteenth-Century Charleston,” Perspectives in American History, n.s. 1 (1984): 187– 232; James Sidbury, Ploughshares into Swords: Race, Rebellion and Identity in Gabriel’s Virginia, 1730–1810 (Cambridge, 1997); Shane White, Somewhat More Independent: The End of Slavery in New York City, 1770–1810 (Athens, Ga., 1991); Richard Graham, Feeding the City: From Street Market to Liberal Reform in Salvador, Brazil, 1780–1860 (Austin, Tex., 2010); Mary C. Karasch, Slave Life in Rio de Janeiro, 1808–1850 (Princeton, N.J., 1987); James H. Sweet, Domigos Álvares, African Healing, and the Intellectual History of the Atlantic World (Chapel Hill, N.C., 2011). See the bibliographic essay at the conclusion of this volume for further reading. 5. Robin Law, Ouida: The Social History of a West African Slaving “Port,” 1727–1892 (Athens, Ohio, 2004); Joseph Calder Miller, Way of Death: Merchant Capitalism and the Angolan Slave Trade, 1730–1830 (Madison, Wis., 1996); Stephen Behrendt, A. J. H. Latham, and David Northrup, The Diary of Antera Duke, an Eighteenth-Century African Slave Trader (New York, 2010); Cyril Daryll Forde, Efik Traders of Old Calabar, Containing the Diary of Antera Duke, an Efik Slave-Trading Chief of the Eighteenth Century, Together with an Ethnographic Sketch and Notes and an Essay on the Political Organization of Old Calabar, by G. I. Jones (London, 1956); Randy J. Sparks, The Two Princes of Calabar: An Eighteenth-Century Atlantic Odyssey (Cambridge, Mass., 2004).

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6. For the best analysis of this process of dislocation and the ways different African peoples responded to it, see Joseph C. Miller, “Retention, Reinvention, and Remembering: Restoring Identities through Enslavement in Africa and under Slavery in Brazil,” in Enslaving Connections: Changing Cultures of Africa and Brazil during the Era of Slavery, ed. José C. Curto and Paul E. Lovejoy (New York, 2004), 81–121. 7. Some historians of urban slavery choose to emphasize the close white supervision of black labor in cities rather than the large concentration of enslaved people; see, for example, Philip D. Morgan, “British Encounters with Africans and AfricanAmericans, circa 1600–1780,” in Strangers within the Realm: Cultural Margins of the First British Empire, ed. Bernard Bailyn and Philip D. Morgan (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1991), 190–91. For the population figures in this paragraph, see the essays by Sweet, Burnard, Geggus, and Landers in this volume, and Sidbury, Ploughshares into Swords (for Richmond). 8. Here we are building on Miller, “Retention, Reinvention, and Remembering.” For an extension of this analysis to the Atlantic World more generally, see Sidbury and Cañizares-Esguerra, “Mapping Ethnogenesis in the Early Modern Atlantic” and “On the Genesis of Destruction.” 9. On the weakness of the early modern European (and imperial) state, see the classical statement by John Elliott, “A Europe of Composite Monarchies,” Past and Present 137 (1992): 47–71. For a concrete empirical demonstration of the analytical vacuousness of the colonial “state” as an abstraction, see John H. Coatsworth, “The Limits of Colonial Absolutism: The State in Eighteenth Century Mexico,” in Essays in Political, Economic and Social History of Colonial Latin America, ed. Karen Spalding (Newark, N.J., 1982). For a powerful analysis of the early modern colonial state as no more than individuals, families, and interethnic networks pitted against each other through ritual displays of pageantry (and violence), see Alejandro Cañeque, The King’s Living Image: The Culture and Politics of Viceregal Power in Colonial Mexico (New York, 2004). For a sustained argument for the inability of the early modern British state to impose its wishes on American possessions, see Jack P. Greene, Peripheries and Center: Constitutional Development in the Extended Polities of the British Empire and the United States, 1607–1788 (Athens, Ga., 1986); and Jack P. Greene, Negotiated Authorities: Essays in Colonial Political and Constitutional History (Charlottesville, 1994). 10. See, for example, Herman L. Bennett, Colonial Blackness: A History of AfroMexico (Bloomington, 2009). 11. Philip D. Curtin, The Rise and Fall of the Plantation Complex: Essays in Atlantic History (Cambridge, 1990). 12. Walter Johnson, Soul by Soul: Life inside the Antebellum Slave Market (Cambridge, Mass., 1999) and Walter Johnson, ed., The Chattel Principle: Internal Slave Trades in the Americas (New Haven, 2004). 13. Vincent Brown, “Social Death and Political Life in the Study of Slavery,” American Historical Review 114 (Dec. 2009): 1231–49. Also see Alexander X. Byrd, Captives and Voyagers: Black Migrants across the Eighteenth-Century British Atlantic World (Baton

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Rouge, 2008) and Stephanie Smallwood, Saltwater Slavery: A Middle Passage from Africa to American Diaspora (Cambridge, Mass., 2007). 14. Carretta, Interesting Narrative, 172. Chapter 1 This chapter draws on arguments first put forward in the first edition of my Africa’s Discovery of Europe (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001) and expanded in my “Becoming African: Identity Formation among Liberated Slaves in Nineteenth-Century Sierra Leone,” Slavery and Abolition 27 (April 2006): 1–21. The author is grateful to the publishers of these works for permission to reuse some of that material here. 1. Peggy K. Liss and Franklin W. Knight, “Introduction,” in Atlantic Port Cities: Economy, Culture, and Society in the Atlantic World, 1650–1850, ed. Franklin W. Knight and Peggy K. Liss (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1991), 1–11. 2. Joseph C. Miller, Way of Death: Merchant Capitalism and the Angolan Slave Trade, 1730–1830 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1988); Robin Law, Ouidah: The Social History of a West African Slaving Port, 1727–1892 (Oxford: James Curry, 2004); George E. Brooks, Eurafricans in Western Africa: Commerce, Social Status, Gender, and Religious Observance from the Sixteenth to the Eighteenth Century (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2003); John Thornton, Africa and Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World, 1400–1680 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992); David Northrup, Africa’s Discovery of Europe, 1450–1850, 3rd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013); Stephen Behrendt, John Latham, and David Northrup, The Diary of Antera Duke, an Eighteenth-Century African Slave Trader (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010). One could add works on Cape Town, but that “tavern of the seven seas” seems more Indian Ocean than Atlantic in its orientation before 1800. 3. In addition to the chapters in this volume, see Jacob M. Price, “Summation: The American Panorama of Atlantic Cities,” in Atlantic Port Cities: Economy, Culture, and Society in the Atlantic World, 1650–1850, ed. Franklin W. Knight and Peggy K. Liss (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1991), 273, who reports that in the mid-1700s blacks constituted 90 percent of the population of Cartagena, 71–76 percent in SaintDomingue towns, 65–75 percent of Guadeloupe’s two towns, 50 percent of Kingston (Jamaica), 28 percent of Buenos Aires, and 21 percent of New York. 4. Rosanne Marion Adderley, “New Negroes from Africa”: Slave Trade Abolition and Free African Settlement in the Nineteenth-Century Caribbean (Bloomington: Indiana University Press 2006), 236, emphasis added, and passim. 5. John Peterson, Province of Freedom: A History of Sierra Leone, 1787–1870 (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1969), 17–44. 6. Great Britain, Parliamentary Papers (hereafter PP) 1825 (520) xxv, Sierra Leone, Accounts, Census 8 July 1820. 7. PP 1850 (53) ix, Report . . . on the African Slave Trade, 98–99. 8. Christopher Fyfe, A History of Sierra Leone (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1962), 127–28.

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9. PP 1825 (520) xxv, Sierra Leone, Accounts, Census 8 July 1820. 10. Fyfe, History, 254. 11. Philip D. Curtin, “The Narrative of Joseph Wright,” in Africa Remembered: Narratives by West Africans from the Era of the Slave Trade, ed. Philip D. Curtin (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1968), 332–33. The narrative was written in 1839, a decade before Wright’s ordination. 12. Fyfe, History, 201. 13. Peterson, Province of Freedom, 61–62; Mavis C. Campbell, Back to Africa: George Ross and the Maroons: From Nova Scotia to Sierra Leone (Trenton, N.J.: Africa World Press, 1993), xviii. 14. Fyfe, History, 55, 69, 77, 172, 213 (quote), 236–37. Fourah Bay College later became the University of Sierra Leone. 15. Christopher Fyfe, Africanus Horton, 1835–1883: West African Scientist and Patriot (New York: Oxford University Press, 1972). People from the Roman province of Africa, i.e., the Maghrib, had first used “Africanus” in their names, for example, the historian Sextus Julius Africanus (ca. 160–ca. 240 CE). 16. In calculating these data, I have counted Koelle’s separate entries for different dialects as a single language and excluded languages spoken by voluntary immigrants to the colony. For a fuller treatment see Philip D. Curtin and Jan Vansina, “Sources of the Nineteenth Century Atlantic Slave Trade,” Journal of African History 5 (1964): 191–208. 17. S. W. Koelle, Polyglotta Africana, or a Comparative Vocabulary of Nearly 300 Words and Phrases in More Than 100 Distinct African Languages (London: Church Missionary House, 1854), 5. Koelle’s dialects of Aku are Ota, Egba, Ijesa, Yoruba, Yagba, Eki, Ijuma, Oworo, Ijebu, Ife, Ondo, and Jekiri. 18. W. B. Baikie, Narrative of an Exploring Voyage Up the Rivers Kwóra and Bínue in 1854 (London: John Murray, 1856), 307–8; Koelle, Polyglotta, 8–9. 19. Fyfe, History, 119–20, 127, 138. 20. Jacob Boston Henzeley, in Sierra Leone Inheritance, ed. Christopher Fyfe (London: Oxford University Press, 1964), 143. 21. Fyfe, History, 170–72, 233–35, 292–94. 22. Fyfe, History, 233–34. Fyfe also points out that Hausa often exercised great influence over Yoruba speakers in the Americas; see also Robin Law and Paul Lovejoy, “The Changing Dimensions of African History: Reappropriating the Diaspora,” in Rethinking African History, ed. Simon McGrath et al. (Edinburgh: Centre for African Studies, University of Edinburgh, 1997), 191. 23. Peterson, Province of Freedom, 220–28; Fyfe, History, 233–34. 24. John Thornton, Africa and Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World, 1400– 1800, 2nd ed. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 219–21, argues that some Africans may have carried Christianity to the Americas from Angola and parts of West Africa where Christianity had been adopted as early as the 1480s, but no instance of this process has been detected in nineteenth-century Sierra Leone. 25. Great Britain, Colonial Office, CO267/204, Acting-Governor [Benjamin] Pine’s

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Annual Report on the Colony of Sierra Leone for 1847, in Fyfe, Sierra Leone Inheritance, 151–53. 26. PP 1850 (53) ix, Report . . . on the African Slave Trade, 102, testimony of Thomas Maxwell, 14 May 1849; for another Muslim convert to Christianity, see “Autobiography of Omar ibn Seid, Slave in North Carolina, 1831,” American Historical Review 30 (1925): 791–95. 27. Fyfe, History, 292. 28. Church Missionary Society archives, CMS/CA 1 M7, Report of the West Africa Mission, 1834, by the Rev. J. Raban, 155; Pine, Annual Report, 1847, 151–53. 29. Leo Spitzer, The Creoles of Sierra Leone: Responses to Colonialism (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1974), 10–11. 30. Spitzer, Creoles, 12–13. “Creole” had originally referred to the children of Liberated Africans born in the colony. 31. Peterson, Province of Freedom, 212–20, 238–50; Olumbe Bassir, “Marriage Rites among the Aku (Yoruba) of Freetown,” Africa: Journal of the International African Institute 24, no. 3 (1954): 251–56. 32. David Northrup, Indentured Labor in the Age of Imperialism, 1834–1922 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 45–50. 33. J. D. Y. Peel, Religious Encounter and the Making of the Yoruba (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000). 34. Peel, Religious Encounter, 248–49, 288, 293, 305. 35. Adrian Hastings, The Church in Africa 1450–1950 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), 451. 36. Peel, Religious Encounter, 24; Jean Herskovits, “The Sierra Leoneans of Yorubaland,” in Africa and the West: Intellectual Responses to European Culture, ed. Philip D. Curtin (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1972), 79. 37. Peel, Religious Encounter, 272, 277. Chapter 2 1. The present chapter builds upon earlier research on the history of Ouidah: see esp. Robin Law, Ouidah: The Social History of a West African Slaving “Port,” 1727–1892 (Oxford: James Currey, 2004). 2. The original/correct indigenous name of the town is Glehue. Local people nowadays still use this term when speaking in the local language, Fon, but Ouidah when speaking in French. 3. See Law, Ouidah, 73–74. 4. See Robin Law, “Ouidah: A Pre-Colonial Urban Centre in Coastal West Africa,” in Africa’s Urban Past, ed. David M. Anderson and Richard Rathbone (Oxford: James Currey, 2000), 85–97. 5. For whom, see Robin Law, “Francisco Felix de Souza in West Africa, 1800–1849,” in Enslaving Connections: Changing Cultures of Africa and Brazil during the Era of Slavery, ed. José C. Curto and Paul E. Lovejoy (Amherst: Humanity Books, 2004), 187–211.

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6. Another comparable case is that of Accra, which hosted Dutch, English, and Danish forts. See John Parker, Making the Town: Ga State and Society in Early Colonial Accra (Oxford: James Currey, 2000). 7. Robin Law, “The Evolution of the Brazilian Community in Ouidah,” Slavery & Abolition 22, no. 1 (2001): 22–41. 8. Viz., the Sangronio family, descended from the Cuban slave trader Juan José Zangronis (d. 1843), and the Toubiaz family, descended from a returned ex-slave from Cuba; see Law, Ouidah, 173, 181. 9. J. A. Skertchly, Dahomey as It Is (London, 1874), 174. 10. Viz., Aguidissou (aka da Costa), from São Tomé; Joaquim, from Angola. 11. Paul Serval, “Rapport sur une mission au Dahomey,” Revue maritime et coloniale 59 (1878): 195. 12. Law, Ouidah, 177–78. 13. Robin Law and Kristin Mann, “West Africa in the Atlantic Community: The Case of the Slave Coast,” William and Mary Quarterly 56, no. 2 (1999): 307–34; Robin Law, “The Port of Ouidah in the Atlantic Community, 17th to 19th Centuries,” in Atlantic History: History of the Atlantic System 1580–1830, ed. Horst Pietschmann (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2002), 349–64. 14. In Fon the concept of “ethnicity” (and indeed “nationality”) can be expressed only, by a very rough approximation, through the term kún (or kúnkàn), which strictly means “lineage,” and refers narrowly to biological descent: see B. Segurola and J. Rassinoux, Dictionnaire Fon-Français (Cotonou: Société des Missions Africaines, 2000). 15. See Robin Law, The Slave Coast of West Africa, 1550–1750: The Impact of the Atlantic Slave Trade on an African Society (Oxford: Clarendon, 1991), 70–72. 16. More precisely, “Fon” was the original name of the state; “Dahomey” was originally the name of the royal palace but applied by extension to the state. 17. In this process, a key text was Maximilien Quénum, Au Pays des Fons: Us et coutumes du Dahomey (1938; 3rd ed., Paris: Maisonneuve et Larose, 1983). 18. For discussion of traditions relating to the foundation of Ouidah, see Law, Ouidah, 20–24. 19. The inhabitants of Tovè are said to have been dispersed by the Dahomian conquest in 1727, but subsequently returned to resettle there under Dahomian rule. 20. Despite the similarity of names, Kpase and Kposi are understood locally to be two distinct persons. 21. Kposi then reestablished the Hula (aka Djeken) kingdom at Godomey, to the east; after this in turn was destroyed by the Dahomians in 1732, the seat of the Djeken monarchy was displaced further eastward to Ekpè, and subsequently to Kétonou. 22. On this and other early references to the Hula ethnicity, see Luis Nicolau Parès, “The Hula ‘Problem:’ Ethnicity on the Pre-colonial Slave Coast,” in The Changing Worlds of Atlantic Africa: Essays in Honor of Robin Law, ed. Toyin Falola and Matt D. Childs (Durham, N.C.: Carolina Academic Press, 2009), 323–46. 23. Details on the origins/ancestry of Ouidah families are generally taken from a

Notes to Pages 46–50

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survey by a French colonial official in 1917, revised and elaborated by a local historian in the 1950s: Reynier, “Éléments sur la réorganisation du commandement indigène à Ouidah” (1 Dec. 1917), published in Mémoire du Bénin 2 (1993): 29–73; Casimir Agbo, Histoire de Ouidah du XVe au XXe siècle (Avignon: Maison Aubanel Père, 1959). Further information was obtained from the writer’s own fieldwork in Ouidah in several visits between 1994 and 2001. 24. For traditions of the Quénum family, including its claim to descent from the Weme royal family, see Maximilien Quénum, Les Ancêtres de la famille Quénum: Histoire de leur temps (Langres: Domonique Quéniot, n.d. [1981]). 25. Robin Law, “Between the Sea and the Lagoons: The Interaction of Maritime and Inland Navigation on the Pre-colonial Slave Coast,” Cahiers d’études africaines 29 (1989): 209–37. 26. Paul Hair, Adam Jones, and Robin Law, eds., Barbot on Guinea: The Writings of Jean Barbot on West Africa, 1678–1712 (London: Hakluyt Society, 1992), ii, 529; John Adams, Remarks on the Country Extending from Cape Palmas to the River Congo (1823; repr., London: Frank Cass, 1966), 239. 27. Law, Slave Coast, 148–50. 28. William Bosman, A New & Accurate Description of the Coast of Guinea (1705; repr., London: Frank Cass, 1967), 50–51. 29. Law, Ouidah, 75. 30. Thomas Phillips, “A Journal of a Voyage Made in the Hannibal of London,” in A Collection of Voyages & Travels (London: Awnsham & John Churchill, 1732), vi, 219; Bosman, New & Accurate Description, 375. 31. Silke Strickrodt, “Afro-European Trade Relations on the Western Slave Coast, 17th to 19th Centuries” (Ph.D. thesis, University of Stirling, 2003), 73–91. 32. For traditions of the de Souza family, see Simone de Souza, La Famille de Souza du Bénin-Togo (Cotonou: Éditions du Bénin, 1992). 33. Fieldwork, Antonio Kokou Adekpeti de Souza compound, Ouidah, 12 Dec. 2001. 34. On “Mina” as an ethnonym in this region, see further Robin Law, “Ethnicities of Enslaved Africans in the Diaspora: On the Meanings of ‘Mina’ (Again),” History in Africa 32 (2005): 247–67. 35. For the case of Lagos, see Robin Law, “Towards a History of Urbanization in Pre-colonial Yorubaland,” in African Historical Demography, ed. Christopher Fyfe (Edinburgh: Centre of African Studies, University of Edinburgh, 1977), 260–71. 36. See generally Robin Law, “Introduction,” in From Slave Trade to ‘Legitimate’ Commerce: The Commercial Transition in Nineteenth-Century West Africa, ed. Robin Law (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), esp. 7, 17–18. 37. Skertchly, Dahomey, 45. 38. Edna G. Bay, Wives of the Leopard: Gender, Politics & Culture in the Kingdom of Dahomey (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1998), 187–92. 39. Oral evidence from Justin Fakambi, Ouidah, 3 Dec. 2001.

276

Notes to Pages 50–53

40. U.K. House of Commons Parliamentary Papers, Correspondence Relating to the Slave Trade, 1855–56, Class B, encl. 5 in no. 10, Acting Consul McCoskry, Lagos, 19 Aug. 1855. 41. Law, Slave Coast, 189–90. 42. Reynier, “Éléments sur la réorganisation,” 33; Agbo, Histoire de Ouidah, 185–86. 43. C6/25, Levesque, Juda, 4 Apr. 1723, Archives Nationales de la France, Section d’Outre-Mer, Aix-en-Provence. 44. Though there is recollection of the Tchamba in other coastal towns of the region; see Alessanda Brivio, “ ‘Nos grands pères achetaient des esclaves . . .’: Le culte de Mami Tchamba au Togo et Bénin,” Gradhiva: Revue d’anthropologie et de muséologie (Musée de Quai Branly, Paris), nouvelle série 8 (2008): 65–79. 45. Robin Law and Paul Lovejoy, eds., The Biography of Mahommah Gardo Baquaqua, 2nd ed. (Princeton, N.J.: Markus Wiener, 2007), 148. 46. Francesco Borghero, Journal de Francesco Borghero, premier missionnaire du Dahomey (1861–1865), ed. Renzo Mandirola and Yves Morel (Paris: Karthala, 1997), 114 [1 Sept. 1862]. 47. Phillips, “Journal,” 228. 48. Robin Law, The Kingdom of Allada (Leiden: Research School CNRS, 1997), 90–92. 49. Parker, Making the Town, 10–14; Harvey M. Feinberg, Africans and Europeans in West Africa: Elminans and Dutchmen on the Gold Coast during the Eighteenth Century (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1989), 106. 50. See Law, Ouidah, 168. 51. John Duncan, Travels in Western Africa in 1845 & 1846 (1847; repr., London: Frank Cass, 1968), i, 185; Frederick E. Forbes, Dahomey and the Dahomans (1851; repr., London: Frank Cass, 1966), ii, 71–72. 52. For the prominence of Yoruba in the Brazilian repatriate community, in Ouidah, and elsewhere, see Robin Law, “Yoruba Liberated Slaves Who Returned to West Africa,” in The Yoruba Diaspora in the Atlantic World, ed. Toyin Falola and Matt D. Childs (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004), 349–65. Such Brazilian Yoruba played a central role in the construction of the Yoruba as a “transatlantic nation”: J. Lorand Matory, “The English Professors of Brazil: On the Diasporic Roots of the Yoruba Nation,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 41 (1999): 72–103. 53. On Antonio d’Almeida, see Pierre Verger, Os libertos: Sete caminhos na liberdade de escravos na Bahia no século XIX (Salvador, Bahia: Corrupio, 1992), 48–53. 54. Probably translating the Fon word kúnkàn (see note 14). 55. Agbo, Histoire de Ouidah, 183–221 (partly based on the earlier study by Reynier, “Éléments sur la réorganisation”). 56. This family (Avloko) is described as of “race Pedah,” which is a variant form of “Hueda”; but the distinction is evidently deliberate, the reference here being to HuedaHenji, the community of refugees from the Dahomian conquest formed to the west, on the shore of Lake Ahémé.

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57. Émile Ologoudou, “Le principe-origine dans les civilisations négro-africaines: Le cas de Ouidah,” in Almanach de Ouidah: Actes de pré-colloque ORIGINES tenu à Ouidah au 23 au 27 septembre 1985. Les Voies de la Renaissance de Ouidah, ed. Union Générale pour le Développement de Ouidah (Caen: Éditions Kanta, 1985), 31–46. 58. Germain Kadjia, “Les communautés de base de Ouidah: Leurs origines et leurs apports,” in Union Générale pour le Développement de Ouidah, Almanach de Ouidah, 49–60. 59. Agbo, Histoire de Ouidah, 221–96. 60. Archibald Dalzel, The History of Dahomy (1793; repr., London: Frank Cass, 1967), xviii. 61. It is argued that the Gbe languages are so closely related that they should be regarded as dialects of a single language, rather than as a family of related languages. However, Gen and Ewe are less closely related than the other dialects, which can be classified together to form a third coordinate branch: Hounkpatin Capo, “Le Gbe est une langue unique,” Africa 53 (1983): 47–57; idem, “Elements of Ewe-Gen-Aja-Fon Dialectology,” in Peuples du Golfe de Bénin: Aja-Ewe (Colloque de Cotonou), ed. François de Medeiros (Paris: Karthala, 1984), 167–78. 62. Agbo, Histoire de Ouidah, 256–57. 63. Borghero, Journal, 48, 251. 64. Agbo, Histoire de Ouidah, 219. 65. Marie Lima herself lived until 1948. Oral evidence, from Eulalie Dagba, a granddaughter of Marie Lima, 9 Dec. 2001. 66. Agbo, Histoire de Ouidah, 276–80, 294. 67. Ibid., 278–79. 68. “Nago” constituted around 30 percent of African-born slaves and freemen in Bahia in the 1830s, when they were involved in a major insurrection of slaves: João José Reis, Slave Rebellion in Brazil: The Muslim Uprising of 1835 in Bahia, trans. Arthur Brakel (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993). 69. For a fuller account, see Law, Ouidah, 88–98. 70. Christian Merlo, “Hiérarchie fétichiste de Ouidah (Inventaire ethnographique, démographique et statistique des fétiches de la ville de Ouidah, Dahomey),” Bulletin de l’IFAN, série B 2, nos. 1–2 (1940): 1–84. 71. Agbo, Histoire de Ouidah, 68. 72. Abbé Laffitte, Le Dahomé: Souvenirs de voyage et de mission (Tours: Alfred Mame et fils, 1873), 97. 73. “Relation du royaume de Judas en Guinée,” ms. 104 [ca. 1715], 58, Archives Nationales, Section d’Outre-Mer, Dépot des Fortifications des Colonies, Côtes d’Afrique. For the Yoruba origins of Fa, see also Bernard Maupoil, La Géomancie à l’ancienne Côte des Esclaves (Paris: Institut d’Ethnologie, 1943), 32–51. 74. See Léon-Pierre Ghézowounmè-Djomala Dagba, La Collectivité familiale Yovogan Hounnon Dagba de ses origines à nos jours (Porto-Novo: Imprimerie Rapidex, 1982). 75. Cf. Reynier, “Éléments sur la réorganisation,” 37.

278

Notes to Pages 57–60

76. Said to have been introduced into Dahomey in the reign of King Agaja (d. 1740), following a smallpox epidemic: A. Le Herissé, L’Ancien royaume du Dahomey: Moeurs, religion, histoire (Paris: Émile Larose, 1911), 128. 77. Ibid., 118. 78. Laffitte, Le Dahomé, 98; Merlo, “Hiérarchie fétichiste,” 28. “Adjigo” was the name of the clan of Gold Coast origin that founded Little Popo/Aného: Strickrodt, “AfroEuropean Trade Relations,” 78, 200. 79. Alfred Métraux, Le Vaudou haïtien (Paris: Gallimard, 1958), 22. 80. Oral evidence, Azilinon compound, Ouidah, 14 Sept. 2000. 81. Richard F. Burton, A Mission to Gelele, King of Dahome (London: Tinsley Brothers, 1864), i, 90. 82. For the Catholic mission in Ouidah, including its relationship with the Brazilian community, see Christiane Roussé-Grosseau, Mission Catholique et choc des modèles culturels en Afrique: L’exemple du Dahomey (1861–1928) (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1992); Rosario Gordano, Europei a Africani nel Dahomey e a Porto-Novo: “Il periodo della ambiguità” (1850–1880) (Turin: L’Harmattan Italia, 2001). 83. Robin Law, “Islam in Dahomey: A Case Study of the Introduction and Influence of Islam in a Peripheral Area of West Africa,” Scottish Journal of Religious Studies 7, no. 2 (1986): 95–122. 84. Laffitte, Le Dahomé, 99. 85. Joseph Adandé, “Le gelede à Ouidah: Mieux vaut tard que jamais,” in Ouidah à travers ses fêtes et patrimoines familiaux, ed. Alexis Adandé (Cotonou: Éditions du Flamboyant, 1995), 65–82. 86. Joël Noret, “Mémoire de l’esclavage et capital religieux: Les pérégrinations du culte egun dans la région d’Abomey,” Gradhiva, nouvelle série 8 (2008): 48–63. 87. Agbo, Histoire de Ouidah, 187. 88. J. D. Y. Peel, Religious Encounter and the Making of the Yoruba (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000); Robin Law, “Local Amateur Scholarship in the Construction of Yoruba Ethnicity, 1880–1914,” in Ethnicity in Africa: Roots, Meanings and Interpretations, ed. Louise de la Gorgondière and Sarah Vaughan (Edinburgh: Centre of African Studies, University of Edinburgh, 1996), 55–90. 89. Matory, “English Professors of Brazil.” 90. See Strickrodt, “Afro-European Trading Relations,” 188–200; Caroline SorensenGilmour, “Badagry 1784–1862: The Political and Commercial History of a Pre-colonial Lagoonside Community in South-West Nigeria” (Ph.D. thesis, University of Stirling, 1995), chap. 9. 91. In the Hueda kingdom before 1727, there is more evidence of internal divisions, though the sources do not make clear how far these affected the town of Ouidah specifically, and they do not explicitly refer to ethnicity as a factor in them: Robin Law, “ ‘The Common People Were Divided’: Monarchy, Aristocracy and Political Factionalism in the Kingdom of Whydah, 1671–1727,” International Journal of African Historical Studies 23, no. 2 (1990): 201–29.

Notes to Pages 60–65

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92. G. I. Jones, “The Political Organization of Old Calabar,” in Efik Traders of Old Calabar, ed. Daryll Forde (London: International African Institute, 1956), 116–60; Adefioye Oyesakin, “Preliminary Notes on Zangbeto: The Masked Vigilante Group among the Ogu in Badagry,” in Badagry: A Study in History, Culture and Traditions of an Ancient City, ed. G. O. Ogunremi, M. O. Opeleye, and Siyan Oyeweso (Ibadan: Rex Charles, 1994), 165–75. 93. Bay, Wives of the Leopard, 24. 94. Laffitte, Le Dahomé, 97; Forbes, Dahomey, i, 176. 95. Robert Norris, Memoirs of the Reign of Bossa Ahadee, King of Dahomy (1789; repr., London: Frank Cass, 1968), 2, 105n. 96. Sandra Barnes, “The Organization of Cultural Diversity in Pre-colonial Communities of West Africa” (paper, African Studies Association meeting, 1991). 97. Though the traditional account implicitly places it earlier, in the time of the first de Souza: Marcel Gavoy “Note historique sur Ouidah, par l’Administrateur Gavoy (1913),” Études dahoméennes 13 (1955): 66. 98. Journal of Vice-Consul Louis Fraser, 5 Dec. 1851, FO84/886, National Archives, London. 99. Agbo refers to the period of Dahomian rule as the Fon/Dahomian “occupation”: Histoire de Ouidah, 45. 100. A rival body, the Union Générale des Gléhouénous (from Glehue, the indigenous name of Ouidah), was open to all Ouidah people. 101. E.g., Abbé Pierre Bouche, Sept ans en Afrique occidentale: La Côte des Esclaves et le Dahomey (Paris: Librairie Plon, 1885), 347. 102. Robin Law, “The Evolution of the Merchant Community in Ouidah,” in Ports of the Slave Trade (Bights of Benin and Biafra), ed. Robin Law and Silke Strickrodt (Stirling: Centre of Commonwealth Studies, University of Stirling, 1999), 55–70. Chapter 3 1. Two outstanding works on the Recôncavo plantations from the sixteenth through the mid-nineteenth century are Stuart B. Schwartz, Sugar Plantations in the Formation of Brazilian Society: Bahia, 1535–1835 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), and B. J. Barickman, A Bahian Counterpoint: Sugar, Tobacco, Cassava, and Slavery in the Recôncavo, 1780–1860 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998). 2. Report to the Prince Regent by Joaquim Ferreira da Costa, ca. 1800, Biblioteca Nacional, Rio de Janeiro (hereafter BNRJ), I, 31, 30, 83. 3. João José Reis, Rebelião escrava no Brasil: A história do levante dos malês em 1835, 2nd ed. (São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 2003), 24, 27. 4. Robert Avé-Lallemand, Viagens pelas províncias da Bahia, Pernambuco, Alagoas e Sergipe (1859) (Belo Horizonte: EDUSP, 1980), 22, 31. 5. David Eltis and David Richardson, “A New Assessment of the Transatlantic Slave Trade,” in Extending the Frontiers: Essays on the New Transatlantic Slave Trade Database, ed. David Eltis and David Richardson (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008), 50.

280

Notes to Pages 65–69

6. Not only the volume but also the proportion of slaves from West Africa entering Bahia should be revised upward in the second edition of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database (TSTD). Based on partial population surveys and probate, police, and other records, students of slavery in nineteenth-century Bahia found that the distribution of slaves according to their African origins is not in agreement with what is available in the online TSTD. The TSTD found that over 79 percent of slaves who disembarked in Bahia between 1816 and 1831 were from West-Central Africa and Mozambique, while they appear to be less than 30 percent in probate records for the same period. The latter proportion is much closer to reality. After the official prohibition in 1831, when traders did not have to hide their destination any longer—now having to hide their transatlantic trade in slaves altogether—the proportion of slaves entering Bahia from ports at the Bight of Benin jumps to 66.5 percent in the TSTD, which is a better representation of the actual proportion. 7. Raimundo Nina Rodrigues, Os africanos no Brasil (São Paulo: Companhia Editora Nacional, 1976), 107–8, 147. 8. A 1749 census of the mining region of Rio de Contas, for example, sometimes registered slaves as “Matheus Benguella, born in (natural de) Angola,” “João Monjollo, born in Angola,” “Miguel Mazangano, born in Angolla,” “Josepha Fon, born in the Mina Coast,” “Ventura Jeje, born in the Mina Coast,” and even “Manoel Crioullo, born in Angola” (probably born in a Portuguese settlement in the region). For Salvador between 1700 and 1750, a sample from probate records of 623 African-born slaves lists 158 Mina, 94 Angola, 68 Calabar, 36 Ardra (Allada), 30 Jeje, 20 Benguela, 17 São Tomé, 11 Cabo Verde, and 10 Moçambique, considering only two-digit figures. In addition, 45 were listed as “Costa” (Coast) and 35 as Guiné, terms that could mean anywhere in Africa. I wish to thank Daniele Santos de Souza for sharing her database with me. For details on Rio’s African nations, see Mary Karasch, Slave Life in Rio de Janeiro, 1808–1850 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1987), chap. 1. On identifying African nations in Bahia, see Maria Inês C. de Oliveira, “Quem eram os ‘negros da Guiné’? A origem dos africanos na Bahia,” Afro-Ásia 19/20 (1997): 37–73. For the Yoruba in West Africa, see Robin Law, “Ethnicity and the Slave Trade: ‘Lucumi’ and ‘Nagô’ as Ethnonyms in West Africa,” History in Africa 24 (1997): 205–19. For an “Atlantic” survey of the use of the term “Mina”, see Robin Law, “Etnias de africanos na diáspora: Novas considerações sobre o termo ‘mina,’ ” Tempo 10, no. 20 (2006): 109–31. 9. “Relação dos Africanos Libertos residentes na Freguesia de Santana [1849],” APEBa, Escravos, maço 2898. For the situation in 1835, see Reis, Rebelião escrava, 400– 417. African residential arrangements are also discussed by Maria Inês C. de Oliveira, “Viver e morrer no meio dos seus: Nação e comunidades africanas na Bahia do século XIX,” Revista USP 28 (Dec. 1995/Feb. 1996): 175–93. 10. Mieko Nishida, “Manumission and Ethnicity in Urban Slavery: Salvador, Brazil, 1808–1888,” Hispanic American Historical Review 73, no. 3 (Aug. 1993): 372 n. 41; Isabel Cristina F. dos Reis, “A família negra no tempo da escravidão: Bahia, 1850–1888” (Ph.D. diss., Universidade de Campinas, 2007), 102.

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11. Maria José Andrade, A mão-de-obra escrava em Salvador de 1811 a 1860 (São Paulo: Corrupio, 1988); Cecília Moreira Soares, “As ganhadeiras: Mulher e resistência negra em Salvador no Século XIX,” Afro-Ásia 17 (1996): 57–71; Maria Inês Côrtes de Oliveira, O liberto: Seu mundo e os outros (São Paulo: Corrupio, 1988); and Ana de Lourdes Costa, “Ekabó!: Trabalho escravo e condições de moradia e reordenamento urbano em Salvador no século XIX” (MA diss., Faculdade de Arquitetura da UFBa, 1989). 12. João José Reis, “ ‘The Revolution of the Ganhadores’: Urban Labour, Ethnicity and the African Strike of 1857 in Bahia, Brazil,” Journal of Latin American Studies 29, no. 1 (1997): 355–93; Reis, “Street Labor in Bahia on the Eve of the Abolition of Slavery,” in Africa and the Americas: Interconnections during the Slave Trade, ed. José Curto and Renée Soulodre La France (Trenton, N.J.: Africa World Press, 2005), 141–72; Reis, “Ethnic Politics among Africans in Nineteenth-Century Bahia,” in Trans-Atlantic Dimensions of Ethnicity in the African Diaspora, ed. Paul Lovejoy and David Trotman (London: Continuum, 2003), 240–64. 13. Reis, “ ‘Revolution of the Ganhadores,’ ” 470–71. 14. Reis, Rebelião escrava, 24. 15. Reis, Rebelião escrava, 292, 365–67. 16. Arquivo Nacional, Lisbon, “Chancelarias Antigas: Ordem de Cristo: D. Maria,” livro 5, fols. 51v–60. 17. Reis, “Ethnic Politics,” 244. 18. Parecer do Desembargador Ouvidor Geral do Crime a D. Rodrigo José Nunes, 11 Sept. 1784, APEBa, Cartas ao governo, 1780–84, maço 176. 19. APEBa, Inventário e testamento, no. 3/1343/1812/62. On African freed persons’ participation in Catholic brotherhoods, see Oliveira, O liberto, chap. 3. 20. João José Reis, Domingos Sodré, um sacerdote africano: Escravidão, liberdade e candomblé na Bahia do século XIX (São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 2008), 251–53. 21. See Lisa Earl Castillo and Luis Nicolau Parés, “Marcelina da Silva e seu mundo: Novos dados para uma historiografia do candomblé ketu,” Afro-Ásia 36 (2007): 111–52. On Dankô, see Renato da Silveira, O candomblé da Barroquinha: Processo de constituição do primeiro terreiro baiano de Keto (Salvador: Maianga, 2006), 494. Dankô is probably related to the ndakó gboyá ancestor spirit rituals of the Nupe. See S. F. Nadel, Nupe Religion (London: Routledge Kegan Paul, 1954). 22. See João José Reis, “Candomblé in Nineteenth-Century Bahia: Priests, Followers, Clients,” in Rethinking the African Diaspora: The Making of a Black Atlantic World in the Bight of Benin and Brazil, ed. Kristin Mann and Edna G. Bay (London: Frank Cass, 2001), 116–34; Rachel E. Harding, A Refuge in Thunder: Candomblé and Alternative Spaces of Blackness (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000); and Luis Nicolau Parés, A formação do candomblé: História e ritual da nação jeje na Bahia (Campinas: Editora da UNICAMP, 2006). 23. On the geography of Candomblé in the second half of the nineteenth century, see Jocélio Teles dos Santos, “Candomblés e espaço urbano na Bahia do século XIX,” Estudos Afro-Asiáticos 27, nos. 1–3 (Jan.–Dec. 2005): 205–26.

282

Notes to Pages 74–81

24. O Alabama, 24 Nov. 1870; Dale Graden, From Slavery to Freedom in Brazil: Bahia, 1835–1900 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2006), 121–22. 25. “Ofício do Governador Conde da Ponte para o Visconde de Anadia [. . .],” Bahia, 7 Apr. 1807, Anais da Biblioteca Nacional do Rio de Janeiro 37 (1918): 450–51. The original manuscript is in the Arquivo Histórico Ultramarinho, Lisbon, Baía, cx. 149, doc. 29815. Data from newspaper’s slave fugitive advertisements show that slaves born in Brazil fled proportionately more often than those born in Africa. 26. O Alabama, 6 May 1869. 27. O Noticiador Catholico 2, no. 89 (1850): 365, emphasis added. 28. O Alabama, 2 Sept. 1868. 29. Reis, Domingos Sodré, 21–52, 167–80. 30. Luís Nicolau Parés, “The ‘Nagôization’ Process in Bahian Candomblé,” in The Yoruba Diaspora in the Atlantic World, ed. Toyin Falola and Matt D. Childs (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004), 185–208; Parés, A formação do candomblé, chap. 4; Vivaldo da Costa Lima, A família-de-santo nos candomblés jeje-nagôs da Bahia (Salvador: Corrupio, 2003), 74; Silveira, O candomblé da Barroquinha. 31. João José Reis, “La révolte Haoussa de Bahia en 1807: Résistence et contrôle des esclaves au Brésil,” Annales: Histoire, Sciences Sociales 61, no. 2 (2006): 383–418. 32. Relação dos pretos do levantamento, 7 Jan. 1809, Arquivo Nacional (AN), IG1, 122. 33. Inspector de tropas ao Rei, 26 June 1809, AN, IG1, 112. 34. Cópia do acórdão proferido contra os confederados homens pretos naturais da costa da Mina de nação haussá, BNRJ, II, 33, 21, 72. 35. Reis, Rebelião escrava, chap. 10. 36. Reis, Rebelião escrava, 291–93. 37. Marshall Sahlins, “Two or Three Things That I Know about Culture,” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 5, no. 3 (1999): 415. I am not convinced by the arguments against the use of the concept of identity advanced in Roger Brubaker and Frederick Cooper, “ ‘Beyond ‘Identity,’’’ Theory and Society 29 (2000): 1–47. 38. Yoruba seems to have become a lingua franca among Africans in Bahia in the 1840s. Francisco Adolfo Vanhagen, História geral do Brasil, 6th ed. (1854; repr., São Paulo: Melhoramentos, 1956), 1:224. 39. Reis, “Street Labor in Bahia,” 155–57. 40. Rodrigues, Os africanos, esp. chap. 4. 41. Lima, A família-de-santo. 42. See J. Lorand Matory, The Black Atlantic Religion: Tradition, Transnationalism, and Matriarchy in the Afro-Brazilian Candomblé (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2005), esp. chap. 1; Lisa Earl Castillo, “Entre memória, mito e história: viajantes transatlânticos da casa Branca,” in Escravidão e suas sombras, ed. João José Reis and Elciene Azevedo (Salvador: Edufba, 2012), 65–110; and Castillo and Nicolau Parés, “Marcelina da Silva e seu mundo.” 43. Reis, Domingos Sodré. Confirmation that Sodré fought in the war of independence

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in Bahia appears in the English version of this book, to be published by Cambridge University Press. 44. In a sample of seventy-one marriages involving African freed persons, sixty-two were between Africans, five between Africans and creoles, two between Africans and mulattos, and two between Africans and whites. See Oliveira, O liberto, 55. Chapter 4 1. For treatments of these historical issues, see Alejandro de la Fuente, with the collaboration of César García del Pino and Bernardo Iglesias Delgado, Havana and the Atlantic in the Sixteenth Century (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008); David Murray, Odious Commerce: Britain, Spain and the Abolition of the Cuban Slave Trade (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980); Laird W. Bergad, Fe Iglesias García, and María del Carmen Barcia, The Cuban Slave Market, 1790–1880 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995); Ada Ferrer, “Cuba en la sombra de Haití: Noticias, sociedad y esclavitud,” in El rumor de Haití en Cuba: Temor, raza y rebeldía, 1789–1844, ed. Maria Dolores González-Ripoll Navarro et al. (Madrid: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, 2004); Marc C. McLeod, “Undesirable Aliens: Race, Ethnicity, and Nationalism in the Comparison of Haitian and British West Indian Immigrant Workers in Cuba, 1912–1939,” Journal of Social History 31, no. 3 (1998): 599–623; Jafari Sinclaire Allen, “Looking Black at Revolutionary Cuba,” Latin American Perspectives 36, no. 1 (Jan. 2009): 53–62; and Frank Andre Guridy, Forging Diaspora: Afro-Cubans and African Americans in a World of Empire and Jim Crown (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010). 2. For a discussion of the Cuban cabildos de nación, see María del Carmen Barcia, Los Ilustres Apellidos: Negros en la Habana Colonial (Havana: Ediciones Boloña, 2008); Rafael L. López Valdés, Pardos y morenos esclavos y libres en Cuba y sus instituciones en el caribe Hispano (San Juan: Centro de Estudios Avanzados de Puerto Rico y el Caribe, 2007); Philip A. Howard, Changing History: Afro-Cuban Cabildos and Societies of Color in the Nineteenth Century (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1998); Pedro Deschamps-Chapeaux, “Cabildos: Solo para esclavos,” Cuba 7, no. 69 (Jan. 1968): 50–51; Israel Moliner Castañeda, Los Cabildos Afrocubanos en Matanzas (Matanzas: Ediciones Matanzas, 2002); Carmen Victoria Montejo-Arrechea, Sociedades de instrucción y recreo de pardos y morenos que existieron en Cuba colonial: 1878–1898 (Veracruz: Instituto Veracruzano de Cultura, 1993); Montejo-Arrechea, Sociedades Negras en Cuba, 1878–1960 (Havana: Editorial de Ciencias Sociales, 2004), 13–45; Fernando Ortiz, Los cabildos y la fiesta afrocubanos del Día de Reyes (1921; repr., Havana: Editorial de Ciencias Sociales, 1992); Fannie Theresa Rushing, “Afro-Cuban Social Organization and Identity in a Colonial Slave Society, 1800–1888,” Colonial Latin American Historical Review 11, no. 2 (Spring 2002): 177–201; Jane G. Landers, Atlantic Creoles in the Age of Revolutions (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2010), 144–51. These societies had become so common that that they received their own entry in an 1836 Cuban dictionary; see Esteban Pichardo, Diccionario provincial de voces cubanas (Matanzas: Imprenta de la

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Real Marina, 1836), 43. Some of the ideas and issues in this chapter I dealt with in Matt D. Childs, “ ‘The Defects of Being a Black Creole’: The Degrees of African Ethnicity in the Cuban Cabildos de Nación,” in Slaves and Subjects: Blacks in Colonial Latin America, ed. Jane A. Landers and Barry Robinson (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2006), 209–45; and “Gendering the African Diaspora in the Iberian Atlantic: Religious Brotherhoods and the Cabildos de Nación,” in Women of the Iberian Atlantic, ed. Sarah E. Owens and Jane E. Mangan (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2012), 230–62. 3. For a political and ethnolinguistic map of the Bight of Biafra and the slave trade to the Caribbean in the second half of the eighteenth century, see David Eltis and David Richardson, Atlas of the Transatlantic Slave Trade (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010), 125–32, and in particular maps 83 and 85–88; also see Alexander X. Byrd, Captives & Voyagers: Black Migrants across the Eighteenth-Century British Atlantic World (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2008), 17–31. For the location of Nri, see Byrd, Captives & Voyagers, 12 (map). 4. http://www.slavevoyages.org/tast/resources/slaves.faces (accessed 7 Mar. 2011). For how historians have used these interviews with “liberated” slaves to study the African diaspora, see Rosanne Marion Adderley, “New Negroes from Africa”: Slave Trade Abolition and Free African Settlement in the Nineteenth-Century Caribbean (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006); and David Eltis and Ugo Nwokeji, “The Roots of the African Diaspora: Methodological Considerations in the Analysis of Names in the Liberated African Registers of Sierra Leone and Havana,” History in Africa 29 (2002): 365–79. 5. There is an ongoing debate about the accuracy of these ethnic labels for understanding African culture in the Americas. Much of the debate, however, focuses on how historians have dealt with European labeling of African ethnicity in the Americas, rather than debating sources where Africans gave testimony listing their ethnicity. For different perspectives on what these ethnic terms reveal about slaves in the Americas, see Robin Law, “Ethnicity and the Slave Trade: ‘Lucumi’ and ‘Nago’ as Ethnonyms in West Africa,” History in Africa 24 (1997): 205–19; Peter Caron, “ ‘Of a Nation Which the Others Do Not Understand’: Bambara Slaves and African Ethnicity in Colonial Louisiana, 1718–60,” Slavery and Abolition 18, no. 1 (April 1997): 98–121; Douglas B. Chambers, ‘“My Own Nation’: Igbo Exiles in the Diaspora,” Slavery and Abolition 18, no. 1 (1997): 72–97; David Northrup, “Igbo and Myth Igbo: Culture and Ethnicity in the Atlantic World, 1600–1850,” Slavery and Abolition 21, no. 3 (Dec. 2000): 1–20; Paul E. Lovejoy, “Identifying Enslaved Africans in the African Diaspora,” in Identity in the Shadow of Slavery, ed. Paul E. Lovejoy (London: Continuum, 2000), 1–29; Russell K. Lohse, “Slave Trade Nomenclature and African Ethnicities in the Americas: Evidence from Early Eighteenth-Century Costa Rica,” Slavery & Abolition 23, no. 3 (Dec. 2002): 73–92; Gwendolyn Midlo Hall, Slavery and African Ethnicities in the Americas: Restoring the Links (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005); Robin Law, “Ethnicities of Enslaved African in the Diaspora: On the Meanings of ‘Mina’ (Again),” History

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in Africa 32 (2005): 247–67; Joseph C. Miller, “Retention, Reinvention, and Remembering: Restoring Identities through Enslavement in Africa and under Slavery in Brazil,” in Enslaving Connections: Changing Cultures of Arica and Brazil during the Era of Slavery, ed. José E. Curto and Paul E. Lovejoy (Amherst, N.Y.: Humanity Books, 2004), 81–121; Trevor Burnard, “The Atlantic Slave Trade and African Ethnicities in Seventeenth-Century Jamaica,” in Liverpool and Transatlantic Slavery, ed. David Richardson (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2007), chap. 6; and James H. Sweet, “Mistaken Identities: Olaudah Equiano, Domingos Alvares, and the Methodological Challenges of Studying the African Diaspora,” American Historical Review 114, no. 2 (Apr. 2009): 279–306. 6. Sidney W. Mintz and Richard Price, The Birth of African-American Culture: An Anthropological Perspective (1976; repr., Boston: Beacon, 1992), 18–19. 7. See, for example, Richard Price, “The Miracle of Creolization: A Retrospective,” New West Indian Guide 75, nos. 1–2 (2001): 35–64; Ira Berlin, Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap, 1998); Philip D. Morgan, Slave Counterpoint: Black Culture in the Eighteenth-Century Chesapeake and Lowcountry (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998); David Eltis, Philip Morgan, and David Richardson, “Agency and Diaspora in Atlantic History: Reassessing the African Contribution to Rice Cultivation in the Americas,” American Historical Review 112, no. 5 (Dec. 2007), 1329–58; for a restatement and refinement of the creolization thesis, see Sidney W. Mintz, Three Ancient Colonies: Caribbean Themes and Variations (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2010). 8. See, for example, Joseph Miller, Way of Death: Merchant Capitalism and the Angolan Slave Trade, 1730–1830 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1988); Paul Lovejoy, Transformations in Slavery: A History of Slavery in Africa, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000); Michael A. Gomez, Exchanging Our Country Marks: The Transformation of African Identities in the Colonial and Antebellum South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998); Robin Law, “The Evolution of the Brazilian Community in Ouidah,” Slavery & Abolition 22, no. 1 (Apr. 2001): 22–41; John Thornton, Africa and Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World, 1400–1800, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998); David Eltis, The Rise of African Slavery in the Americas (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000); James H. Sweet, Recreating Africa: Culture, Kinship, and Religion in the African-Portuguese World, 1441–1770 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003). 9. For the role of cabildos in Afro-Cuban religious history, see, for example, David H. Brown, Santeria Enthroned: Art, Ritual, and Innovation in an Afro-Cuban Religion (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), chap. 2; María Teresa Veléz, Drumming for the Gods: The Life and Times of Felipe García Villamil, Santero, Palero, and Abakuá (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2000), 7–9; George Brandon, Santeria from Africa to the New World: The Dead Sell Memories (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993), 74–75. For the cabildos and acts of rebellion and resistance, see, for example, Matt D. Childs, The 1812 Aponte Rebellion in Cuba and the Struggle against Atlantic Slavery (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006), chaps. 3 and 4; Robert

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L. Paquette, Sugar Is Made with Blood: The Conspiracy of La Escalera and the Conflict between Empires over Slavery in Cuba (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1988), 125. Philip Howard’s Changing History comes closest to balancing an examination of how the cabildos functioned with their role in acts of resistance, but most of his focus is on explaining the latter. 10. To date I have been unable to locate an original or a contemporary copy of the 1792 urban code. Some articles of the 1792 urban code as they relate to the cabildos have been reproduced in Ortiz, Los cabildos, 7–8; a discussion of article 39 of the 1792 urban code can be found in Barcia, Los Ilustres Apellidos, 123. The 1792 urban code is often referenced in the archival documents that I use for this chapter. 11. Some of the cases produced in response to the 1792 urban code include “José Xavier Mirabal y consortes contra Domingo Acosta y socios sobre pesos, trata del cabildo de Apapa” (1808–30), Archivo Navional de Cuba, Havana (hereafter ANC), fondo Escribanía D’aumy (hereafter ANC-ED), leg. 583, no. 5; “La nación mina contra Juana de Mesa” (1797), ANC-ED, leg. 673, no. 9; “La nación mina guagni contra Salvador Ternero sobre cuentas” (1794–97), ANC-ED, leg. 893, no. 4; “La nación mina guagni contra Salvador Ternero sobre que de cuentas del producido del cabildo de la misma nación” (1794), ANC, fondo Escribanía Ortega (hereafter ANCEO), leg. 65, no. 11; “La nación Caravali Umugini sobre división con la Osso y con la misma Umugini, y liquidación de cuentas con el capitán Pedro Nolasco Eligió” (1805–6), ANC, fondo Escribanía de Gobierno (hereafter ANC-EG), leg. 123, no. 15-A. 12. ANC-ED, leg. 583, no. 5, fols. 99–100; ANC-ED, leg. 673, no. 9, fols. 1–1v, 13; “Expediente de cuentas que produce Tomás Betancourt de las cantidades que han entrado en su poder del cavildo Caravali Oquella” (1804), ANC-EO, leg. 3, no. 8, fol. 3. 13. “Juan Nepomuceno Montiel y Rafael Arostegui como apoderados en la nación Lucumi Llane contra Agustina Zaraza y Antonio Ribero sobre la extracción de pesos que hicieron de la caja de la nación” (1807–10), ANC, Escribanía de Cabello (hereafter ANC-EC), leg. 64, no. 6, fol. 60; “Tomás Poveda, Clemente Andrade, Antonio de Prucia, Joaquín de Soto y Antonio María Lisundia contra el moreno José Arostegui sobre que cuentas de caja del cavildo” (1805), ANC-ED, leg. 336, no. 1, fol. 23. 14. ANC-EG, leg. 123, no. 15A, fol. 5; “La nación mina guagni contra Salvador Ternero sobre que de cuentas del producido del cabildo de la misma nación” (1794), ANC-EO, leg. 65, no. 11, fols. 6–7. 15. ANC-ED, leg. 583, no. 5, fol. 207; ANC-EG, leg. 123, no. 15A, fol. 5v. 16. ANC-ED, leg. 336, no. 1, fol. 22; ANC-ED, leg. 893, no. 4, fol. 61v; “La nación Caravali Induri sobre nombramiento de capataz del cavildo del Santo Cristo de Buen Viaje” (1802–6), ANC-EG, leg. 125, no. 3, fol. 164. 17. Mariza de Carvalho Soares, Devotos da cor: Identidade étnica, religiosidade e escravidão no Rio de Janeiro, século XVIII (Rio de Janeiro: Civilização Brasileira, 2000); also see Linda M. Heywood, “The Angolan-Afro-Brazilian Cultural Connections,” Slavery & Abolition 20, no. 1 (Apr. 1999): 9–23; Elizabeth W. Kiddy, “Ethnic and Racial

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Identity in the Brotherhoods of the Rosary of Minas Gerais, 1700–1830,” The Americas 56, no. 2 (Oct. 1999): 221–52. 18. Frederick P. Bowser, The African Slave in Colonial Peru, 1524–1650 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1974), 249–50, 339. 19. Nicole von Germeten, Black Blood Brothers: Confraternities and Social Mobility for Afro-Mexicans, foreword by Stephen W. Angell and Anthony B. Pinn (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 2006). 20. Leslie B. Rout, Jr., The African Experience in Spanish America, 1502 to the Present Day (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976), 136; Jane Landers, Black Society in Spanish Florida, foreword by Peter H. Wood (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1999), chap. 5; George Reid Andrews, The Afro-Argentines of Buenos Aires, 1800–1900 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1980), 142–51; Oscar Chamosa, “ ‘To Honor the Ashes of Their Forebears’: The Rise and Crisis of African Nations in the Post Independence State of Buenos Aires, 1820–1860,” The Americas 59, no. 3 (Jan. 2003): 347–78. 21. Ortiz, Los cabildos, 6; Montejo-Arrechea, Sociedades de instrucción, 14–16. 22. Landers, Black Society in Spanish Florida, 109. 23. De la Fuente, Havana and the Atlantic, 161–70. 24. “El Obispo Morell de Santa Cruz oficializa los cabildos africanos donde nació la santería, convirtiéndolos en ermitas,” Havana, 6 December 1755, in Levi Marrero, Cuba: Economía y sociedad, del monopolio hacia la libertad comercial (1701–1763) (Madrid: Editorial Playor, 1980), 8:159. 25. Howard, Changing History, 27. In an earlier treatment on the topic, I concluded, “[B]y the late 1700s, if not earlier, it appears cabildos and Catholic brotherhoods had taken on different social functions that had earlier overlapped in Cuba’s history.” Childs, “ ‘Defects of Being a Creole,’ ” 214. 26. Landers, Atlantic Creoles, 145–50, esp. 145n21 and 148. 27. ANC-EC, leg. 147, no. 1, fol. 12v, 63. A large corpus of parish records have been digitized by a team assembled by Jane Landers, including records from the church of Santo Cristo de Buen Viaje, see “Ecclesiastical Sources and Historical Research on the African Diaspora in Brazil and Cuba,” http://diglib.library.vanderbilt.edu/esss.pl (accessed 15 Feb. 2011). 28. ANC-EG, leg. 125, no. 3, fol. 1. 29. ANC-ED, leg. 583, no. 5 [folio numbering destroyed due to deterioration of document]; ANC-EO, leg. 6, no. 1, fol. 1. 30. ANC-ED, leg. 336, no. 1, fol. 22. 31. ANC-ED, leg. 583, no. 5, fol. 50v. 32. Antonio Bachiller y Morales, Los Negros (Barcelona: Gorgas y compañía, 1887), 114–15; Ortiz, Los cabildos, 4–6; Montejo-Arrechea, Sociedades de instrucción y recreo de pardos y morenos, 12–13; Dechamps-Chapeaux, “Cabildos,” 51; Dechamps-Chapeaux, “Sociedades: La integración de pardos y morenos,” Cuba 7, no. 71 (Mar. 1968): 54; Howard, Changing History, 21–25. 33. Paul E. Lovejoy and David Richardson, “Trust, Pawnship, and Atlantic History:

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Notes to Pages 92–94

The Institutional Foundations of the Old Calabar Slave Trade,” American Historical Review 104, no. 2 (Apr. 1999): 347–49; also see the discussion in Randy J. Sparks, The Two Princes of Calabar: An Eighteenth-Century Atlantic Odyssey (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2004), esp. 59–60. 34. Lovejoy, “Identifying Enslaved Africans,” 8; Howard, Changing History, 48, 53, 68–69, 109–10. The classic treatment of the Abakuá in Cuba remains Lydia Cabrera, La Sociedad Secreta de Abakuá, narrada por viejos adeptos (Havana: Ediciones, C. R., 1959). 35. Stephan Palmié, “Ecué’s Atlantic: An Essay in Methodology,” Journal of Religion in Africa 37 (2007): 275–315. 36. Ivor L. Miller, Voice of the Leopard: African Secret Societies and Cuba (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2009); and Paul E. Lovejoy, “Transformation of Ekpe Masquerade in the African Diaspora,” in Carnival: “People’s Art” and “Taking Back the Streets,” ed. Christopher Innes (forthcoming). 37. Peter Morton-Williams, “The Yoruba Ogboni Cult in Oyo,” Africa 30 (1960): 362–74; J. A. Atanda, “The Yoruba Ogboni Cult: Did It Exist in Old Oyo?,” Journal of the Historical Society of Nigeria 6, no. 4 (1973): 365–72; Robin Law, The Oyo Empire, c. 1600–c. 1836: A West African Imperialism in the Era of the Atlantic Slave Trade (Oxford: Clarendon, 1977), 61. For Yoruba imports into Cuba, see David Eltis, “The Diaspora of Yoruba Speakers,” in The Yoruba Diaspora in the Atlantic World, ed. Matt D. Childs and Toyin Falola (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005), 17–39. 38. Toyin Falola and Adebayo Akanmu, Culture, Politics, & Money among the Yoruba (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction, 2000), 131–39. 39. From the existing documentation consulted for the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, the African background of cabildo religious practices remains difficult to specify. To my knowledge there have yet to be discovered or analyzed any sources documenting or explaining in detail the religious rituals of these societies similar to what historians James Sweet, Laura Lewis, Alida Metcalf, Laura de Mello e Souza, and Joan Cameron Bristol have been able to elucidate through a careful reading of inquisitional records for Africans in other locations of colonial Latin America. See Sweet, Recreating Africa; Laura A. Lewis, Hall of Mirrors: Power, Witchcraft, and Caste in Colonial Mexico (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2003); Alida C. Metcalf, Go-Betweens and the Colonization of Brazil, 1500–1600 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2005); Laura de Mello e Souza, The Devil and the Land of the Holy Cross: Witchcraft, Slavery, and Popular Religion in Colonial Brazil, trans. Diane Grosklaus Whitty (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2003); Joan Cameron Bristol, Christians, Blasphemers, and Witches: Afro-Mexican Ritual Practice in the Seventeenth Century (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2007). 40. ANC-ED, leg. 893, no. 4 [folio numbering destroyed due to deterioration of document]. 41. ANC-ED, leg. 673, no. 9, fol. 13. 42. ANC-EG, leg. 123, no. 15, fols. 4–4v. 43. ANC-EG, leg. 123, no. 15A, fols. 1–1v.

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44. ANC-Escribanía de Valerio (hereafter ANC- EVal), leg. 671, no. 9873, fols. 1–1v. 45. ANC-EO, leg. 6, no. 1. 46. ANC-EG, leg. 277, no. 5, fols. 1–1v. 47. The 1789 Real Cédula declaring free trade in slaves can be found in Archivo General de Indias, Seville, fondo Indiferente General, leg. 2823. 48. Gloria García, “Importación de esclavos de ambos sexos por varios puertos de Cuba, 1763–1820,” in Historia de Cuba: La colonia, evolución socioeconómica y formación nacional de los origines hasta 1867, ed. María del Carmen Barcia, Gloria García, and Eduardo Torres-Cuevas (Havana: Editorial Política, 1994), 471–73, table 11; Juan Pérez de la Riva, El Monto de la Inmigración Forzada en el siglo xix (Havana: Editorial de Ciencias Sociales, 1979), table 3; David Eltis, Economic Growth and the Ending of the Transatlantic Slave Trade (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), 245. The second edition of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database (TSTD2) by Eltis et al. provides a much lower figure of 213,796 for reasons that remain unclear when compared to other estimates, http://slavevoyages.org/tast/assessment/estimates.faces (accessed 7 Mar. 2011). In addition, the discrepancy between earlier estimates and TSTD2 does not seem to be explained or addressed in David Eltis and David Richardson, “A New Assessment of the Transatlantic Slave Trade,” in Extending the Frontiers: Essays on the New Transatlantic Slave Trade Database, ed. David Eltis and David Richardson (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008), 1–60, esp. 48–51, table 1.8; and Oscar Grandío Moreaguez, “The African Origins of Slaves Arriving in Cuba, 1789–1865,” in Eltis and Richardson, Extending the Frontiers, 176–204. 49. See the summary census figures in Kenneth F. Kiple, Blacks in Colonial Cuba, 1774–1899 (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1976), 88–95. 50. García, “Importación de esclavos,” 471–73, table 11. 51. James Edward Alexander, Transatlantic Sketches, Comprising Visits to the Most Interesting Scenes in North and South America, and the West Indies: With Notes on Negro Slavery and Canadian Emigration (Philadelphia: Key and Biddle, 1833), 331. 52. Cristobal Govin to Someruelos, Havana, 5 September 1804, ANC-EVarios, leg. 211, no. 3114. 53. ANC-EVarios, leg. 211, no. 3114, fols. 9v–12. 54. ANC-EO, leg. 3, no. 8, fols. 3v and 18. 55. ANC-EG, leg. 123, no. 15A, fols. 6–6v and 20–20v. 56. Robert Francis Jameson, Letters from the Havana during the Year 1820; Containing an Account of the Present State of the Island of Cuba and Observations on the Slave Trade (London: John Miller, 1821), 21–22. 57. John G. F. Wurderman, Notes on Cuba (1844; repr., New York: Arno Press, 1971), 83. 58. Frederika Bremer, The Homes of the New World: Impressions of America, trans. by Mary Howitt (New York: Harper, 1853), 2:379. 59. Gerónimo Valdés, Bando de gobernación y policía de la Isla de Cuba (Havana: Imprenta del gobierno y capitanía general por S.M., 1842), 25.

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Notes to Pages 96–101

60. ANC-EG, leg. 123, no. 15A, fol. 5v. 61. ANC-EG, leg. 125, no. 3, fol. 167. 62. ANC-ED, leg. 336, no. 1, fol. 23. 63. ANC-EC, leg. 64, no. 6, fol. 60. 64. ANC-EG, leg. 123, no. 15A, fols. 5v–6. 65. Valdés, Bando de gobernación, 25. 66. ANC-ED, leg. 583, no. 5, fols. 51–51v. 67. ANC-EValerio, leg. 671, no. 9873. 68. ANC-EC, leg. 64, no. 6, fol. 60. 69. ANC-ED, leg. 336, no. 1, fols. 38v–39v. 70. ANC-ED, leg. 398, no. 23, fol. 6. 71. ANC-ED, leg. 439, no. 16, fols. 51–51v. 72. “Pedro Real Congo, Capataz del Cabildo, representa a su paisana María Luisa González,” Havana, 21 April 1854, reproduced in Gloria García Rodríguez, comp., La esclavitud desde la esclavitud: La visión de los siervos (México: Centro de Investigación Científica “Ing. Jorge L. Tamayo,” A.C., 1996), 163. On the issue of “papel,” see Alejandro de la Fuente, “Slaves and the Creation of Legal Rights in Cuba: Coartación and Papel,” Hispanic American Historical Review 87, no. 4 (Nov. 2007), 659–92. 73. ANC-EG, leg. 125, no. 3, fol. 167. 74. ANC-ED, leg. 336, no. 1, fol. 22v. 75. ANC-ED, leg. 336, no. 1, fols. 22–22v. 76. ANC-ED, leg. 3, no. 8, fol. 3v. 77. ANC-ED, leg. 336, no. 1, fols. 22–22v. 78. ANC-EO, leg. 6, no. 1, fol. 1v. 79. ANC-ED, leg. 893, no. 4, fol. 61v. 80. Valdés, Bando de gobernación, 40. 81. ANC-ED, leg. 583, no. 5, fols. 99–100. 82. ANC-EO, leg. 3, no. 8, fols. 3–3v. 83. ANC-ED, leg. 673, no. 9, fols. 1–1v, 13. 84. ANC-EG, leg. 123, no. 15 [folio numbering destroyed due to deterioration of document]. 85. ANC-EG, leg. 125, no. 3, fols. 161–62. 86. See, for example, Diario de la Habana, 3 February 1812, 3; for an analysis of newspaper slave sales, see Antonio Núnez Jiménez, Los esclavos negros (Cuba: Fundación de la Naturaleza y el Hombre, 1998), 79–148. 87. José C. Moya, “Immigrants and Associations: A Global and Historical Perspective,” Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 31, no. 5 (Sept. 2005): 839. Chapter 5 1. Population data are discussed in David Geggus, “The Major Port Towns of SaintDomingue in the Later Eighteenth Century,” in Atlantic Port Cities: Economy, Culture, and Society in the Atlantic World, 1650–1850, ed. Franklin W. Knight and Peggy K. Liss

Notes to Pages 102–103

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(Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1991), 87–116. These and the following figures distinguish the urban area from the rural parts of Cap Français parish and make allowances for undercounting in the censuses. 2. Absolutely invaluable is the description in M. L. E. Moreau de Saint-Méry, Description topographique, physique, civile, politique et historique de la partie française de l’isle Saint-Domingue, 3 vols., ed. B. Maurel and E. Taillemite (1797; repr., Paris: Société de l’histoire des colonies françaises, 1958). For an excellent modern portrait, see Jeremy Popkin, You Are All Free: The Haitian Revolution and the Abolition of Slavery (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 53–68. 3. David Geggus, “El desarrollo urbano de Saint Domingue en el siglo XVIII,” in Nuevas perspectivas en los estudios sobre historia urbana latinoamericana, ed. Jorge Hardoy and Richard M. Morse (Buenos Aires: Instituto Internacional de Medio Ambiente y Desarrollo, 1989), 195–222. 4. Anne Pérotin-Dumon, “Population, travail et urbanisme,” Bulletin du Centre d’Histoire des Espaces Atlantiques 6 (1993): 204; Howard Rice and Anne Brown, eds., The American Campaigns of Rochambeau’s Army (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1972), 1:96–99, 176; Philadelphia General Advertiser, 4 Oct. 1791. 5. David Geggus, “Urban Development in Eighteenth-Century Saint Domingue,” Bulletin du Centre d’Histoire des Espaces Atlantiques 5 (1990): 224. 6. Dominique Rogers, “Les libres de couleur dans les capitales de Saint-Domingue: Fortune, mentalités et intégration à la fin de l’Ancien régime (1776–1789)” (Thèse de doctorat de l’université, Université de Bordeaux III, 1999). Stewart King, Blue Coat or Powdered Wig: Free People of Color in Pre-Revolutionary Saint Domingue (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2001), and Susan Socolow, “Economic Role of the Free Women of Color of Cap Français,” in More Than Chattel: Black Women and Slavery in the Americas, ed. David Barry Gaspar and Darlene Clark Hine (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996), 279–97, also shed light on the same topic. 7. Geggus, “Urban Development,” 199, 211. 8. Cp. Michel-René Hilliard d’Auberteuil, Considérations sur l’état présent de la colonie française de Saint-Domingue, 2 vols. (Paris, 1776–77), 2:111, and Moreau de SaintMéry, Description, 1:102. 9. See Rogers, “Les libres de couleur,” 514. The infamous system of 11 racial categories described in Moreau de Saint-Méry, Description, 1:86–103, and sometimes misunderstood as 128 categories, was never widely used. 10. It probably derived from the freeing of slaves who participated in the 1697 attack on Cartagena. Free black marital endogamy was also extreme in the north but absent in the south: Rogers, “Les libres de couleur,” 558; John Garrigus, Before Haiti: Race and Citizenship in French Saint-Domingue (New York: Palgrave, 2006), 72. 11. Archives Nationales d’Outre-Mer, Aix-en-Provence (hereafter ANOM), G1/509, 1771 census; Geggus, “Major Port Towns,” 105, 108. 12. Doris Garraway, The Libertine Colony: Creolization in the Early French Caribbean (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2005), 230.

292

Notes to Pages 103–105

13. Bibliothèque Mazarine, Paris, Ms 3453, fols. 4, 8–9; ANOM, F3/74, fol. 76; Moreau de Saint-Méry, Description, 1:104–10; Delafosse de Rouville, Éloge historique du chevalier Mauduit-Duplessis (1817; repr., Port-au-Prince: Fardin, 1983), 76–81; Justin Girod de Chantrans, Voyage d’un Suisse dans différentes colonies d’Amérique (1785; repr., Paris: Tallandier, 1980), 152–54. 14. [François Laplace], Réflexions sur la colonie de Saint-Domingue, 2 vols. (Paris, 1796), 1:162; Yvan Debbasch, Couleur et liberté: Le jeu du critère ethnique dans l’ordre juridique esclavagiste (Paris: Dalloz, 1967), 76–77, 96–97; Rice and Brown, American Campaigns, 1:98–99. 15. Hilliard d’Auberteuil, Considérations, 2:42; Girod de Chantrans, Voyage, 154; Moreau de Saint-Méry, Description, 1:106; Félix Carteau, Soirées bermudiennes, ou entretiens sur les événemens qui ont opéré la ruine de la partie française de l’isle SaintDomingue (Bordeaux: Pellier-Lawalle, 1802), 95–96; ANOM, État Civil, Cap Français, 1777–88. 16. “Even the women seemed to renew a fondness long repressed for the whites, in favor of the meanest of the American sailors,” observed an English visitor in 1799: Marcus Rainsford, An Historical Account of the Black Empire of Hayti (London: Albion Press, 1805), 213–28. See also Vita privata politica e militare di Toussaint-Louverture, scritta da un uomo del suo colore (Milan, 1802), 61–62; The Port-Folio (Philadelphia) ser. 3, 5 (1811): 131, 135–36; Hénock Trouillot, Les Origines sociales de la littérature haïtienne (1962; repr., Port-au-Prince: Fardin, 1986). 17. ANOM, G1/495, cadastral survey, 1776. 18. Ibid.; Socolow, “Economic Role,” 282–84; Rogers, “Les libres de couleur,” 128–41. 19. There were 8.25 livres coloniales (a gourde) to the peso fuerte (or gordo), on which the U.S. dollar was modeled. Averaging in the 50,000s, prices for domestic and commercial premises at this time ranged from about 5,000 to more than 170,000 livres: État détaillé des liquidations opérées par la commission  .  .  .  de l’indemnité de SaintDomingue, 6 vols. (Paris, 1828–33). 20. Contracts of 1 September 1787 and 17 January 1788, in ANOM, SDOM 868 and 869. Also known as Marie-Françoise Estève, she seems to have once belonged to the city magistrate that sold her the house. She was perhaps related to the black cooper, Jean-Baptiste Mouton. She owned at least two coopers herself. During the revolution she became an export-import merchant and was a prominent figure in the city’s new multiracial elite. An arbiter of fashion and reputed mistress of Toussaint Louverture, she married a French official, who named a ship after her. See Historical Society of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, Bunel Papers. 21. Socolow, “Economic Role,” 285–89; Rogers, “Les libres de couleur,” 102–3, 115, 171, 193–97. 22. Rogers, “Les libres de couleur,” 127–28. 23. King, Blue Coat, 108, 265; Rogers, “Les libres de couleur,” 577–78. 24. ANOM, F3/126, fols. 408–9, “Mémoire sur le défaut de police des nègres, particulièrement dans la ville,” 2 June 1785; Moreau de Saint-Méry, Description, 1:103–4.

Notes to Pages 105–107

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Apart from a few cooks, hardly any free men, and few free women, worked as domestic servants in the towns. 25. Archives Départementales de Seine-et-Marne, Dammarie-les-Lys, B 545, Police des Noirs, decree of 9 August 1777. 26. Archives Nationales, Paris (hereafter AN), Fonds Particuliers, 27 AP/12, dossier 2. Le Cap had more than fifty legal gambling houses and sixty billiard halls. Belley’s conviction was quashed on appeal owing to faulty police paperwork. The portrait appears on the covers of several modern books. 27. Rogers, “Les libres de couleur,” 172–73. 28. ANOM, Notsdom (old style) 201, 1 June 1788. ANOM, Notsdom (old style) 1522, 7 Jan. 1786, and Rogers, “Les libres de couleur,” 680, describe him as mulâtre but numerous other sources describe him as black. 29. As in the famous case of Olaudah Equiano, some evidence calls into doubt Belley’s African origins; see Alfred Nemours, Histoire de la de famille et de la descendance de Toussaint-Louverture (Port-au-Prince: Imprimerie de l’État, 1941), 33–35. On Desrouleaux, see Moreau de Saint-Méry, Description, 1:529. 30. ANOM, SDOM 525, 22 and 24 February 1779. The numerous Leveillés in Le Cap are easily confused. King, Blue Coat, 178, mixes up Jean-Baptiste, Sr. and Jr., and the revolutionary general Jean-Pierre. Rogers, “Les libres de couleur,” 330–39, shows that Dahomet and Mambo were the names most commonly chosen for manumittees in Le Cap, although notaries had the preponderant influence on name choice. 31. ANOM, B199, 12 Mar. 1789, and F3/196, fol. 300; Moreau de Saint-Méry, Description, 1:411–15. 32. ANOM, État Civil, Cap Français, 5 Jan. and 3 Nov. 1788; ANOM, Notsdom (oldstyle) 200, 22 Jan. 1788; Notsdom 203, 26 Dec. 1788; Notsdom 1522, 7 Jan. 1786. 33. King, Blue Coat, 226–65. King’s case rests primarily on the tendency of northern free blacks who were corporals, sergeants, or quartermasters to cite in legal documents their militia rank or their wartime service in the Chasseur regiments raised in 1779–80. This probably reflected their humble origins and low status; wealthier men of color did not bother to do so, as noted in Garrigus, Before Haiti, 214, 353. 34. King, Blue Coat, 277–78, wrongly lists drum-major Jacques Coidavid as resident in Port-au-Prince, and Jean-Baptiste Leveillé Sr. as a Chasseur Volontaire. 35. ANOM, E396, decision of the Conseil du Roi, 19–20 Mar. 1789. Although Ogé owned only a share of his mother’s plantation, Stewart King includes him in his “planter elite,” supposedly distinguished by conservative business practices, rather than his more capitalistic “military elite.” Ogé scarcely appears in Dominique Rogers’s study, where (p. 198) he is identified as white. 36. AN, Section Moderne, Dxxv 58/574, interrogation of Ogé, 20 January 1791. 37. Rogers, “Les libres de couleur,” 558, 578. My own colony-wide sample of 166 free colored marriages shows an identical breakdown. 38. Michel Mina, Adresse à l’Assemblée nationale par les hommes de couleur libres de Saint-Domingue (n.p., n.d.), 109–10.

294

Notes to Pages 107–111

39. AN, Section Moderne, Dxxv 58/574, interrogation of Ogé, 20 Jan. 1791. 40. Rogers, “Les libres de couleur,” 520–24, 544–46, 589–94. Surprisingly, 11 percent of Cap Français marriage contracts that Rogers found were interracial, but she acknowledges the sample is not representative. In 1783, 465 marriages were celebrated in the colony: only 6 were racially mixed, and all occurred in isolated south-coast parishes. See Affiches Américaines, Feuille du Cap Français, 22 Mar. 1785. Only 3 of the 166 marriages mentioned above, Note 37, were interracial. 41. ANOM, G1/509, 1775 census. People older than twelve were classed as adults. 42. Affiches Américaines, Feuille du Cap Français, 22 Mar. 1785. The burial statistics should exaggerate the sex ratio, as men suffered higher death rates than women. 43. David Geggus, “Slave and Free Colored Women in Saint Domingue,” in Gaspar and Hine, More Than Chattel, 259–60. 44. ANOM, SDOM 788–90, 855–58, 865–70; Socolow, “Economic Role.” The latter data were used for information on ethnicity and gender, but not racial intermixture or price, on which the essay provides incomplete information. 45. ANOM, SDOM 868, inventory, 7 Aug. 1787. I omitted the workers listed on this inventory who presumably worked outside the town, such as lime burners, brick makers, and farmers. Most lived at the town’s southern entrance in the contractor’s storage buildings: Moreau de Saint-Méry, Description, 2:547. 46. See Moreau de Saint-Méry, Description, 1:59–60. 47. On ethnic preferences, see David Geggus, “Sugar and Coffee Cultivation in Saint Domingue and the Shaping of the Slave Labor Force,” in Cultivation and Culture: Labor and the Shaping of Slave Life in the Americas, ed. Ira Berlin and Philip Morgan (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1993), 84–88. 48. David Geggus, “On the Eve of the Haitian Revolution: Slave Runaways in Saint Domingue in the Year 1790,” Slavery and Abolition 6 (1985): 112–28; Jason Daniels, “Marronage in Saint Domingue” (M.A. thesis, University of Florida, 2008), 78–79, 100. 49. Moreau de Saint-Méry, Description, 1:44. See the data in Geggus, “Sugar and Coffee,” 78–79; David Geggus, “Indigo and Slavery in Saint Domingue,” Plantation Society in the Americas 5 (1998): 189–204; David Geggus, “The Sugar Plantation Zones of Saint Domingue and the Revolution of 1791–1793,” Slavery & Abolition 20 (1999): 31–46; Keith Manuel, “Slavery, Coffee, and Family in a Frontier Society” (M.A. thesis, University of Florida, 2005). 50. Antonio Sánchez Valverde, Idea del valor de la isla Española (1785; repr., Santo Domingo: Editora Nacional, 1971), 255. 51. Gabriel Debien, Les esclaves des Antilles françaises aux XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles (Basse-Terre: Société d’Histoire de la Guadeloupe, 1974), 44; Geggus, “Sugar and Coffee,” 85–88. 52. On average height, see Geggus, “Sugar and Coffee,” 83. By North Province standards, Hausa were also slightly overrepresented in the urban sample. 53. Moreau de Saint-Méry, Description, 1:47–49; Michael Gomez, Black Crescent: The Experience and Legacy of African Muslims in the Americas (Cambridge: Cambridge

Notes to Pages 111–116

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University Press, 2005), 11–12, 163. In the plain, about ten miles from Cap Haïtien, there existed into the late twentieth century a Mandingue, quasi-Islamic Société du Roi Mahomet, completely overlooked by historians of American Muslims. See Gerson Alexis, Lecture en anthropologie haïtienne (Port-au-Prince: Presses Nationales d’Haïti, 1970), 173–85. 54. Of the very tall ethnies only the pagan Bambara were underrepresented in the urban sample. 55. David Geggus, “The French Slave Trade: An Overview,” William & Mary Quarterly 58 (2001): 119–38. 56. Affiches Américaines, 12 Feb. 1785. As this source gives a lower number of arrivals than some others do, mortality may have been even higher. 57. ANOM, F3/128, fols. 156–59; Moreau de Saint-Méry, Description, 2:543–44. Town maps continued to mark the “Bazar,” however: Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris (hereafter BN), Cartes et Plans, “Plan de la ville du Cap François” (1789). 58. David Geggus, “La traite des esclaves aux Antilles françaises à la fin du 18me siècle: Quelques aspects du marché local,” in Négoce, Ports et Océans, XVIe–XXe siècles: Mélanges offerts à Paul Butel, ed. Silvia Marzagalli and Hubert Bonin (Bordeaux: Presses Universitaires de Bordeaux, 2000), 235–45. 59. César de La Luzerne, Mémoire envoyé le 18 juin 1790 au comité des rapports de l’Assemblée nationale (Paris, 1790), 70; Geggus, “French Slave Trade,” n. 39. 60. Socolow, “Economic Role,” 281, reports the price of one twenty-year-old black woman as 19,128 livres, but the figure was in fact 1,980 livres: ANOM, SDOM, 25 Oct. 1784. 61. Sample of 751 slaves described above. 62. [François Laplace], Histoire des désastres de Saint-Domingue (Paris, 1795), 112– 13; Jean-Baptiste Picquenard, Zoflora ou la bonne négresse (Paris, 1799), 1:78–79. 63. ANOM, F3/126, fols. 408–9, Chambre d’Agriculture report, 2 June 1785. 64. BN, Cartes et Plans, town map of 1785; Moreau de Saint-Méry, Description, 1:426–31; Rogers, “Les libres de couleur,” 434–35. 65. ANOM, C9A/165, cases from 26 Oct. 1785, and 1 June 1786. 66. The black governor Toussaint Louverture would later echo the same critique after the ending of slavery. In a proclamation issued from Le Cap in Nov. 1801, he castigated the urban population for its laziness, love of luxury, and negligent parents, whose children wore “rags and jewelry” and became “vagabonds and prostitutes” by the age of twelve. See BN, Manuscrits, Nouvelles acquisitions françaises 14879, fol. 231. 67. J. Abeille, Essai sur nos colonies, et sur le rétablissement de Saint-Domingue (Paris, 1805), 95; Charles Malenfant, Des colonies et particulièrement de celle de Saint-Domingue (Paris, 1814), 195–97; Picquenard, Zoflora, 1:78–79; Histoire des désastres, 112–13; Moreau de Saint-Méry, Description, 1:60, 62, 475–76. 68. Moreau de Saint-Méry, Description, 1:433–36; Geggus, “Urban Development,” 204–5. Some town slaves bought or stole produce on its way to market, so they could sell it themselves: ANOM, F3/126, fols. 408–9.

296

Notes to Pages 116–122

69. Réponse des députés des manufactures et du commerce de France (Paris, 1789), 8; Moreau de Saint-Méry, Description, 1:435; Bibliothèque Mazarine, Paris, Ms 3453, f. 71. 70. Girod de Chantrans, Voyage, 152–55. 71. Moreau de Saint-Méry, Description, 1:475, 2:544. A 1758 law banned both activities; the Code Noir of 1685 had already banned carrying cudgels. 72. David Geggus, “Haitian Voodoo in the Eighteenth Century: Language, Culture, Resistance,” Jahrbuch für Geschichte von Staat, Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft Lateinamerikas 28 (1991): 32–35. 73. Moreau de Saint-Méry, Description, 1:68. 74. ANOM, F3/133, fols. 478–79. 75. Geggus, “Haitian Voodoo,” 40–43. 76. Sue Peabody, “ ‘A Dangerous Zeal’: Catholic Missions to Slaves in the French Antilles, 1635–1800,” French Historical Studies 25 (2002): 82. 77. Moreau de Saint-Méry, Description, 1:338; Carteau, Soirées bermudiennes, 81. 78. ANOM, F3/126, fols. 408–10, Chambre d’Agriculture report, 2 June 1785. 79. A lower-class white neighborhood on the seafront, Petit Carénage was the northernmost part of Le Cap, almost a separate village. The other two districts were just beyond the outskirts of Cap Français, at points where gorges opened into the mountains. The kalinda is a dance associated in some parts of the Caribbean with stick-fighting contests. 80. David Geggus, Slave Resistance Studies and the Saint Domingue Slave Revolt (Miami: FIU Occasional Papers Series, 1983), 12–13; Gene Ogle, “The Trans-Atlantic King and Imperial Public Spheres: Everyday Politics in Pre-Revolutionary Saint-Domingue,” in The World of the Haitian Revolution, ed. David Geggus and Norman Fiering (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2009), 89–91. 81. Henry Christophe, future revolutionary general and king of Haiti, was maître d’hôtel at one of Le Cap’s leading inns but played no part in the slave uprising and probably fought against it in the town militia, despite misleading comments he made later in life. The free black Jean-Baptiste Cap did side with the insurgents but was captured early on trying to win over local slaves. One of the Leveillés, probably Jean François Édouard, became a local insurgent leader in Grande-Rivière parish where he owned land. Toussaint Louverture lived in Cap Français parish but a few miles outside the town. 82. David Geggus, Haitian Revolutionary Studies (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002), 87–88, 91–92. 83. Geggus, “El desarrollo urbano,” 198, 217. 84. Note that Vincent Ogé chose the mountains to launch his rebellion and that Le Cap’s free coloreds politely declined his invitation that they join him: AN, Section Moderne, Dxxv 58/574, interrogation of Ogé, 20 Jan. 1791. Chapter 6 1. J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur, Letters from an American Farmer, ed. Susan Manning (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997). For an intriguing interpretation of

Notes to Pages 123–125

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Letter IX, see Jennifer Rae Greeson, “The Figure of the South and the Nationalizing Imperatives of Early United States Literature,” Yale Journal of Criticism 12 (1999): 209–48. 2. Elizabeth Heckendorn Cook, Epistolary Bodies: Gender and Genre in the Eighteenth-Century Republic of Letters (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996), 160–67. 3. [M. G. St. J. de Crèvecoeur] J. Hector St. John, “Sketches of Jamaica and Bermudas and Other Subjects,” in More Letters from the American Farmer: An Edition of the Essays in English Left Unpublished by Crèvecoeur, ed. Dennis D. Moore (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1995), 106–13; Christopher Iannini, “ ‘An Itinerant Man’: Crèvecoeur’s Caribbean, Raynal’s Revolution, and the Fate of Atlantic Cosmopolitanism,” William and Mary Quarterly 61 (2004): 201–34. 4. St. John, “Sketches of Jamaica,” 107–8 5. Crèvecoeur, however, include a softened version of his account of a morally corrupt and corrupting Jamaica in his [M. G. St. J. de Crèvecoeur] J. Hector St. John, Lettres d’un cultivateur americain, 2 vols. (Paris, 1784), 229–40. 6. Colin G. Clarke, Kingston, Jamaica: Urban Development and Social Change, 1692–1962 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975); B. W. Higman, “Jamaican Port Towns in the Early Nineteenth Century,” in Atlantic Port Cities: Economy, Culture, and Society in the Atlantic World, 1650–1850, ed. Franklin W. Knight and Peggy K. Liss (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1991), 117–48. For works that pertain to Kingston, see also Trevor Burnard, “ ‘The Grand Mart of the Island’: The Economic Function of Kingston, Jamaica in the Mid-Eighteenth Century,” in Jamaica in Slavery and Freedom: History, Heritage and Culture, ed. Kathleen E. A. Monteith and Glen Richards (Kingston, Jamaica: UWI Press, 2002), 225–41; Wilma Bailey, “Kingston 1692–1843: A Colonial City” (Ph.D. diss., University of the West Indies, 1974); Sheena Boa, “Urban Free Black and Coloured Women: Jamaica 1760–1834,” Jamaican Historical Review 18 (1993): 1–6; and James Robertson, “A 1748 ‘Petition of Negro Slaves’ and the Local Politics of Slavery in Jamaica,” William and Mary Quarterly 67 (2010): 319–46. 7. Trevor Burnard and Kenneth Morgan, “The Dynamics of the Slave Market and Slave Purchasing Patterns in Jamaica, 1655–1788,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 58 (2001): 205–28. 8. Kenneth Morgan, “Robert Dinwiddie’s Reports on the British American Colonies,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 65 (2008): 305–46. 9. For eighteenth-century Charleston, see, inter alia, Philip D. Morgan, “Black Life in Eighteenth-Century Charleston,” Perspectives in American History, n.s., 1 (1984): 187–232; S. Max Edelson, Plantation Enterprise in Colonial South Carolina (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2006), chap. 4; Robert Olwell, “ ‘Loose, Idle, and Disorderly’: Slave Women in the Eighteenth-Century Charleston Marketplace,” in More Than Chattel: Black Women and Slavery in the Americas, ed. David Barry Gaspar and Darlene Clark Hine (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996); and Emma Hart, “ ‘The Middling Order Are Odious Characters’: Social Structure and Urban Growth in Colonial Charleston, South Carolina,” Urban History 34 (2007): 209–26. 10. Lowbridge Bright, Charleston, to Henry Bright, Bristol, 30 March 1764, in

298

Notes to Pages 125–130

Kenneth Morgan, ed., The Bright-Meyler Papers: A Bristol-West India Connection, 1732– 1787 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 388–89. 11. Lord Adam Gordon, in Newton D. Mereness, ed., Travels in the American Colonies (New York: Macmillan, 1916), 377. 12. Trevor Burnard, “ ‘The Countrie Continues Sicklie’: White Mortality in Jamaica, 1655–1780,” Social History of Medicine 12 (1999): 53–59. For a work that takes these empirical data and uses them for a cultural history of death in Jamaica, see Vincent Brown, The Reaper’s Garden: Death and Power in the World of Atlantic Slavery (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2008). 13. For data and sources on Kingston’s population, see Burnard, “Grand Mart” and “Countrie Continues Sicklie.” The principal primary sources used in this chapter are Kingston Parish Registers, 1722–75, Island Record Office, Twickenham, Jamaica, Kingston Vestry Minutes, Poll Tax Lists, 1745–79, IB/2/6/1–7, and Inventories, IB1/11/3/1– 65, 1674–1785, Jamaica Archives, Spanish Town, Jamaica. Population figures are derived from Census 1730, C.O. 137/19 (pt. 2)/48; Census 1774, C.O. 137/70/88; Census 1788, 137/87, National Archives, Kew, London, “Statistics of Jamaica 1739–1775,” Long Mss., Add. Mss. 12,435, fol. 41, British Library. 14. See Mary Karasch, Slave Life in Rio de Janeiro (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1987). 15. Burnard and Morgan, “Dynamics of the Slave Market.” 16. Henry Bright, Kingston, to Richard Meyler II, Bristol, 25 July 1750, in Morgan, Bright-Meyler Papers, 226. 17. Stephanie Smallwood, Saltwater Slavery: A Middle Passage from Africa to American Diaspora (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2007). 18. “A List of Vessells Arrived at Jamaica from the Coast of Africa . . . ,” D.M. 1061, Bristol Library, cited in Burnard and Morgan, “Dynamics of the Slave Market,” 212–13. 19. Olaudah Equiano, The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African (Dublin, 1791), 57. 20. See Trevor Burnard, “The Atlantic Slave Trade and African Ethnicities in Seventeenth Century Jamaica,” in Liverpool and Transatlantic Slavery, ed. David Richardson, Suzanne Schwarz, and Anthony J. Tibbles (Liverpool University Press: Liverpool, 2007), 139–64. 21. For urbanization in early America, see John J. McCusker and Russell R. Menard, The Economy of British America 1607–1789 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1985), chap. 11; Gary B. Nash, The Urban Crucible: The Northern Seaports and the Origins of the American Revolution (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1986); and Stephen J. Hornsby, British Atlantic, American Frontier: Spaces of Power in Early Modern British America (Lebanon, N.H.: University Press of New England, 2004), chap. 5. 22. Ira Berlin, Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1998), 374. 23. Cited in Trevor Burnard, Mastery, Tyranny, and Desire: Thomas Thistlewood and

Notes to Pages 131–138

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His Slaves in the Anglo-Jamaican World (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004), 2–3. 24. Burnard and Morgan, “Dynamics of the Slave Market.” 25. Bryan Edwards, The History, Civil and Commercial, of the British Colonies in the West Indies (London, 1801), 2:155. 26. Richard B. Sheridan, Doctors and Slaves: A Medical and Demographic History of Slavery in the British West Indies, 1680–1834 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 131–34. 27. Edward Long, History of Jamaica . . . , 3 vols. (London, 1774; reprint., Frank Cass, 1970). 28. For similar fears in colonial New York, see Jill Lepore, New York Burning: Liberty, Slavery, and Conspiracy in Eighteenth-Century Manhattan (New York: Knopf, 2005). 29. “G. R. to Thomas French, Esquire, in Kingston” [ca. 1769], C.O. 137/35/238, The National Archives, Kew, London. 30. Journals of the Assembly of Jamaica, 3:23; 4:122–26. See Robertson, “Petition of Negro Slaves.” Thistlewood is cited in Burnard, Mastery, Tyranny, and Desire, 140. 31. Boston Evening-Post, 16 June 1760; Long, History of Jamaica, 2:455. See also Journals of the Assembly of Jamaica, December 5–6, 1760, 5, C.O. 140/40, fols. 233–4, The National Archives, Kew, London. 32. Kingston Vestry Records, 1744–9, IB/2/6/1, Jamaica Archives, Spanishtown, Jamaica. The number of slaves listed in the tax list is larger than the number in other tallies. In the census of 1730, Kingston is noted as having 2,724 slaves, and in 1740 the number of slaves noted in a poll tax for that year is 4,534. It is difficult to reconcile the differences. I tend toward thinking the larger number more accurate, both because the tax list is more detailed and also because there does seem to be a correlation between the numbers of slaves listed in the tax list and the numbers of slaves noted in inventories. The total corresponds with that calculated by Edward Long, who suggested that the number of “negroes” in Kingston increased from 3,811 in 1734 to 4,534 in 1740, before peaking at 7,749 in 1745 and falling to 6,186 in 1761 and 5,779 in 1768. Long, History of Jamaica, 2:120. Long derived his figures from poll tax lists, as recorded in the Long Papers, British Museum, Add. Mss., 12,434/14–15 and 12,345/31–32. 33. Hornsby, British Atlantic, American Frontier, chap. 5. 34. Toll Book, 1738–1743, Kingston Vestry Records, IB2/6/272, Jamaica Archives. 35. Burnard and Morgan, “Dynamics of the Slave Market,” 222. 36. Robert William Fogel, Without Consent or Contract: The Rise and Fall of American Slavery (New York: Norton, 1999), 124. 37. Trevor Burnard, “ ‘Prodigious Riches’: The Wealth of Jamaica before the American Revolution,” Economic History Review 54 (2001): 520. 38. According to the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database, the percentage of African captives landing in Kingston, 1721–84, who were male (admittedly from a small sample of 151 voyages) was 64.4 percent. http://www.slavevoyages.org/tast/database/search. faces.

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Notes to Pages 144–148

39. This paragraph is indebted to David Hancock, “The Triumphs of Mercury: Connection and Control in the Emerging Atlantic Economy,” Londa Schiebinger, “Scientific Exchange in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World,” and Mark A. Peterson, “Theopolis Americana: The City-State of Boston, the Republic of Letters, and the Protestant International, 1689–1739,” all in Soundings in Atlantic History: Latent Structures and Intellectual Currents, 1500–1830, ed. Bernard Bailyn (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2009), 115–21, 322–28, 368–70. Chapter 7 An earlier version of this chapter was presented in Bogotá and published as “Conspiradores esclavizados en Cartagena en el siglo XVII,” in Afrodescendientes en las américas: Trayectorias sociales e identitarias: 150 años de la abolición de la esclavitud en Colombia, ed. Claudia Mosquera, Mauricio Pardo, and Odile Hoffman (Bogotá, 2002), 181–93. 1. Lyle N. McAlister, Spain and Portugal in the New World, 1492–1700 (Minneapolis, 1984), 3–10, 89–107. 2. Donna J. Guy and Thomas E. Sheridan, eds., Contested Ground: Comparative Frontiers on the Northern and Southern Edges of the Spanish Empire (Tucson, 1998). 3. Ida Altman, “The Revolt of Enriquillo and the Historiography of Early Spanish America,” Americas 63 (Apr. 2007): 587–614; Jane Landers, “The Central African Presence in Spanish Maroon Societies,” in Central Africans and Cultural Transformations in the American Diaspora, ed. Linda M. Heywood (New York, 2002), 227–41; Lynne A. Guitar, “Cultural Genesis: Relationships among Indians, Africans, and Spaniards in Rural Hispaniola, First Half of the Sixteenth Century” (Ph.D. diss., Vanderbilt University, 1998). 4. Slave Codes, Santo Domingo, Jan. 6, 1522, patronato 295, Archivo General de Indias, Seville, Spain (hereafter AGI). The revolt caused Spain to forbid temporarily the importation of Africans from areas of Muslim influence. Carlos Estéban Deive, Los guerrilleros negros: Esclavos fugitivos y cimarrones en Santo Domingo (Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic, 1989), 11–42. In 1522 Christian Rhodes fell to the Turks, so the fear of Muslims was very much alive, and sixteenth-century Franciscan missionary drama included plays titled The Conquest of Rhodes and The Conquest of Jerusalem. Max Harris, “Disguised Reconciliations: Indigenous Voices in Early Franciscan Drama in Mexico,” Radical History Review 53 (1992): 13–25. 5. Jane Landers, Black Society in Spanish Florida (Urbana, 1999), chap. 1; Matthew Restall, “Black Conquistadors: Armed Africans in Early Spanish America,” Americas 57 (Oct. 2000): 171–205. 6. On San Miguel del Gualdape, see Peter Wood, Black Majority: Negroes in South Carolina from 1670 through the Stono Revolt (New York, 1974), chap. 12; on Bastides in Hispaniola, see Lynne Guitar, “Willing It So: Intimate Glimpses of Encomienda Life in Early-Sixteenth Century Hispaniola,” Colonial Latin American Historical Review 7, no. 3 (1998): 244–63; Nicolás del Castillo Mathieu, “Población aborigen y conquista,

Notes to Pages 148–150

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1498–1540,” in História Económica y Social del Caribe Colombiano, ed. Adolfo Meisel Roca (Santa Fe de Bogotá, 1994), 43, 25. 7. Mathieu, “Población aborigen,” 44–45; and María del Carmen Borrego Plá, “La conformación de una sociedad mestiza en la época de los Austrias, 1540–1700,” Meisel, História Económica y Social, 66–68. 8. António de Almeida Mendes, “The Foundation of the System: A Reassessment of the Slave Trade to the Spanish Americas in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries,” in Extending the Frontiers: Essays on the New Transatlantic Slave Trade Database, ed. David Eltis and David Richardson (New Haven, 2008), 63–94. 9. María del Carmen Borrego Plá, Cartagena de Indias en el Siglo XVI (Seville, 1983), 58–61, 423–35. 10. Mendes, “Foundation of the System”; Enriqueta Vila Vilar, Hispanoamérica y el comercio de esclavos: Los asientistas portugueses (Seville, 1977); David Wheat, “The Afro-Portuguese Maritime World and the Foundations of Spanish Caribbean Society, 1570–1640” (Ph.D. diss., Vanderbilt University, 2009), chap. 3. 11. Linda A. Newson and Susie Minchin, From Capture to Sale: The Portuguese Slave Trade to Spanish South America in the Early Seventeenth Century (Leiden, 2007); Borrego Plá, “La conformación,” 68. 12. David L. Chandler, “Health Conditions in the Slave Trade of Colonial New Granada,” in Slavery and Race Relations in Latin America, ed. Robert Brent Toplin (Westport, Conn., 1974), 51–86. Other slave houses were located on Calle del Tejadillo and Calle de Alcíbia. Nicolás del Castillo Mathieu, La llave de las Indias (Bogotá, 1981), 216. 13. Quote from Angel Valtierra, San Pedro Claver, el santo que libertó una raza, 2nd.ed. (Cartagena, 1964), 233–34. Chandler, “Health Conditions”; Tulio Aristizábal Giraldo, S.J., Iglesias, Conventos y hospitales en Cartagena colonial (Bogotá, 1998), 37– 38; Pablo F. Gómez, “Bodies of Encounter: Health, Illness and Death in the Early Modern African-Spanish Caribbean” (Ph.D. diss., Vanderbilt University, 2010). 14. Alonso de Sandoval, Un tratado sobre la esclavitud, ed. Enriqueta Vila Vilar (Madrid, 1987), published originally as De Instauranda Aethiopum Salute (Seville, 1627); Alonso de Sandoval, Treatise on Slavery: Selections from De Instauranda Aethiopum, ed. and trans. Nicole von Germeten (Indianapolis, 2008); Chandler, “Health Conditions”; Margaret M. Olsen, Slavery and Salvation in Colonial Cartagena de Indias (Gainesville, 2004). 15. Anna Maria Splendiani and Tulio Aristizábal, S.J., ed., San Pedro Claver: Processo de canonization, traducción, comentario y notas (Santa Fe de Bogotá, 2000). 16. Mathieu, La llave de las Indias, 220. The Jesuit order in Lima published catechisms and prayer books in Kimbundo for distribution throughout the Spanish colonies. Among Claver’s interpreters were Andrés Sacabuche (Angola), Ignacio Alvanil (Angola), Alfonso Angola, José Monzolo (Congo), Francisco Yolofo (Wolof), Manuel Viáfara, Domingo y Diego Folupo, Ignacio Soso (Zape), Lorenzo Zape, Antonio Balanta, Francisco and Domingo Bran, and the impressive Calepino. Eduardo Lemaitre, Historia general de Cartagena (Bogotá, 1983), 138–47.

302

Notes to Pages 150–153

17. Splendiani and Aristizábal, San Pedro Claver, 112–13. 18. María Cristina Navarrete, Historia social del negro en la colonia Cartagena: siglo XVII (Santiago de Cali, 1995), 25. 19. Ordenanzas del Buen Gobierno, Cedulario de Cartagena, Tomo II, fols. 30–67, cited in Borrego Plá, Cartagena de Indias, 433–523. 20. Negros y Esclavos, Bolívar VI, 1561, f. 273–356, Archivo General de la Nación, Bogotá. 21. Mathieu, La llave de las Indias, 214–16; Gómez, “Bodies of Encounter,” chap. 3. 22. Gómez, “Bodies of Encounter,” 169, 178. 23. Ibid., 189–90. 24. Ibid., 180–85. 25. Roberto Arrazola, Secretos de la historia de Cartagena (Cartagena, 1967), 242. 26. Jane Landers, “Una cruzada americana: Expediciones españolas contra los cimarrones en el siglo XVII,” in Pautas de convivencia étnica en la América Latina colonial (Indios, negros, mulatos, pardos y esclavos), ed. Juan Manuel de la Serna (Mexico City, 2005), 73–89; Marc Simmons, “Santiago: Reality and Myth,” in Santiago: Saint of Two Worlds, ed. Marc Simmons, Donna Pierce, and Joan Myers (Albuquerque, 1991), 1–29. 27. Kathryn Joy McKnight has transcribed and annotated documents from Patronato 234, ramo 7, no. 2, AGI, reporting the Spanish attack on the palenque of Limón. Kathryn Joy McKnight, “Gendered Declarations: Testimonies of Three Captured Maroon Women, Cartagena de Indias, 1634,” Colonial Latin American Historical Review 12 (Fall 2003): 499–527. Also see, from the same source, Kathryn Joy McKnight, “Confronted Rituals: Spanish Colonial and Angolan ‘Maroon’ Executions in Cartagena de Indias (1634),” Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History 5, no. 3 (2004): 1–19. 28. Other nearby palenques known to Spanish officials at the time included Joyanca, Arroyo Piñuela, Sanaguall, Ambuyla, Gabanga, one led by Manuel Mula, and another by Manuel Embuyla. Navarrete, Historia social del negro, 20. Additional maroon communities are discussed in Orlando Fals Borda, Historia Doble de la Costa, Tomo I, Mompox y Loba (Bogotá, 1979), 52–54. 29. De la Fuente recounted the meetings he had with Padilla in 1682 in a printed memorial. Memorial de Fray Balthasar de la Fuente, Nov. 26, 1690, Santa Fe 213, AGI. For more on this priest, see Jean-Pierre Tardieu, “Un proyecto utópico de manumisión de los cimarrones, ‘del palenque de los montes de Cartagena en 1682,’ ” in Mosquera, Pardo, and Hoffman, Afrodescendientes en las américas, 169–80. 30. Declaration of Emperor Charles, 1538, cited in McAlister, Spain and Portugal, 172. The Council of the Indies subsequently approved de la Fuente’s recommendation. Representation of the Council of the Indies, Mar. 7, 1691, Santa Fe 213, AGI. The distant crown was often more amenable to legitimating maroon towns than were the more vulnerable local officials of the Americas. Jane Landers, “Cimarrón and Citizen: African Ethnicity, Corporate Identity, and the Evolution of Free Black Towns in the Spanish Circum-Caribbean,” in Slaves, Subjects, and Subversives: Blacks in Colonial Latin America, ed. Jane G. Landers and Barry M. Robinson (Albuquerque, 2006), 111–45.

Notes to Pages 153–156

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31. Memorial de Fray Balthasar de la Fuente, Nov. 26, 1690. 32. Report of Governor Juan de Pando, May 1, 1683, Santa Fe 213, AGI. 33. Patronato 234, ramo 7, no. 2, AGI. See also McKnight, “Gendered Declarations” and “Confronted Rituals.” 34. Report of Governor Juan de Pando, May 1, 1683. 35. Sandra T. Barnes, ed., Africa’s Ogun: Old World and New (Bloomington, 1989); Robert Farris Thompson, Flash of the Spirit: African and Afro-American Art and Philosophy (New York, 1984), 52–57; Entrada y Derrota del Palenque de Matudere, Santa Fe 213, fols. 41–274, AGI. María del Carmen Borrego Plá’s study of these communities focused on Spanish military and political campaigns against them but did not mine the rich ethnographic material in the same documents. She also misidentified the settlement of Matudere as Matubere. María del Carmen Borrego Plá, Palenques de negros en Cartagena de Indias a fines del siglo XVII (Seville, 1973). 36. Wheat, “Afro-Portuguese Maritime World,” 116–18, 255–56. Also see Toyin Falola and Matt D. Childs, eds., The Yoruba Diaspora in the Atlantic World (Bloomington, 2004). 37. Memorial de Fray Balthasar de la Fuente, November 26, 1690. These terms were almost identical to those Viceroy Velasco and Yanga (Ñanga) agreed to in New Spain a century earlier. Commissary of Veracruz to the Inquisition in Mexico City, Inquisición, vol. 283, fols. 186–87, Archivo General de la Nación, Mexico. They also replicate the terms achieved in 1612 by Domingo Bioho, aka King Benkos, ruler of the most famous of New Granada’s early seventeenth-century palenques, La Matuna. Anthony McFarlane, “Cimarrones and Palenques: Runaways and Resistance in Colonial Colombia,” Slavery and Abolition 6 (1985): 134–35. 38. Father Fernando Zapata to Governor Martín de Cevallos, April 21, 1693, Santa Fe 213, fols. 263–69v, AGI. Pedro’s wife, Theresa, was also a Mina, and the couple had three sons and two daughters living with them. 39. Ibid. John Thornton describes dances as a central element of military training and war preparations in the Kongo. John K. Thornton, “African Dimensions of the Stono Rebellion,” American Historical Review 96 (1991): 1112–13 and “African Soldiers in the Haitian Revolution,” Journal of Caribbean History 25 (1991): 58–80. 40. Father Fernando Zapata to Governor Martín de Cevallos, April 21, 1693, Santa Fe 213, AGI. 41. Ibid. 42. Report of Martín de Cevallos, May 29, 1693, Santa Fe 213, AGI. The information for this section comes from two large bundles: Santa Fe 212, which contains “Autos sobre la reducción y pacificación de los negros fugitivos y fortificados en los palenques de la Sierra de María, 1691–1695,” and Santa Fe 213, which contains “Entrada y derrota de Matuderé.” 43. Patronato 234, ramo 7, no. 2, AGI, fol. 161, Declaration of Domingo Anchico. I am indebted to David Wheat for sharing his translation of this document with me. It was common practice in Spanish legal cases to employ African translators if the witness

304

Notes to Pages 156–161

could not speak proper Spanish, and this would be noted in the document. See Landers, Black Society. For more on the common use of African translators in Iberian locales, see Dale T. Graden, “Interpreters, Translators, and the Spoken Word in the NineteenthCentury Transatlantic Slave Trade to Brazil and Cuba,” Ethnohistory 58, no. 3 (Summer 2011): 393–419. 44. The debates about ethnic designations and their meaning are legion. See, for example, the excellent essays in Falola and Childs, Yoruba Diaspora and Gwendolyn Midlo Hall, Slavery and African Ethnicities in the Americas: Restoring the Links (Chapel Hill, N.C., 2005). 45. Report of Martín de Cevallos, May 29, 1693. 46. Ibid. 47. Richard Price, Maroon Societies: Rebel Slave Communities in the Americas (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973), 16–22. See also Price’s Alabi’s World (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990). Alabi was the key leader of the Saramakans and respected despite his conversion to Christianity specifically because of his knowledge of the oppressor. Others also make this point about Zumbi, the famous maroon leader of Palmares, the contemporary Brazilian quilombo. See Mary Karasch, “Zumbi of Palmares: Challenging the Portuguese,” in The Human Tradition in Colonial Latin America, ed. Kenneth J. Andrien (Wilmington, Del., 2002), 104–20, and Jane Landers, “Leadership and Authority in Maroon Settlements in Spanish America and Brazil,” in Africa and the Americas: Interconnections during the Slave Trade, ed. José C. Curto and Renée Soulodre-La France (Trenton, N.J., 2005), 173–84. 48. Report of Martín de Cevallos, May 29, 1693. The palenque of Limón, destroyed by Spanish forces in 1633, was ruled by a creole woman named Leonor, who bore the title queen. McKnight, “Confronted Rituals.” 49. Report of Martín de Cevallos, May 29, 1693. 50. Ibid. 51. Ibid. 52. Ibid.; Robin Law, “ ‘My Head Belongs to the King’: On the Political and Ritual Significance of Decapitation in Pre-Colonial Dahomey,” Journal of African History 30 (1989): 399–415. 53. Junta de Guerra, Testimony of Don Juan de Berrio, Apr. 30, 1693, Santa Fe 212, AGI. 54. Ibid. 55. Ibid. Testimony of Joseph of Santa Clara, May 1, 1693, Santa Fe 212, AGI. 56. Testimony of Joseph of Santa Clara, May 1, 1693. 57. Junta de Guerra, Apr. 30, 1693; Governor Martín de Cevallos to the King, July 2, 1693, Santa Fe 213, AGI. 58. In 1645 Cartagena’s slaughterhouse employed four black slaves, one mulatto slave, and one free black. Navarrete, Historia social del negro, 35. 59. Henry John Drewel, John Pemberton III, and Rowland Abiodun, Nine Centuries of African Art and Thought (New York, 1989).

Notes to Pages 161–164

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60. Report of Sancho Ximeno, Sept. 22, 1695, Santa Fe 212, AGI. These records are strangely silent on the rescued Christian women. Their names are not given, nor is there information on how long they had been held captive by the maroons. It is possible Spanish authorities were trying to shield them from suspicion or dishonor. Borrego Plá, Palenques de negros, 107. 61. Declaration of Domingo Padilla, Captain of the Palenque, Cartaxena, May 11, 1693, fols. 387–92v, included in Report of Martín de Cevallos, May 29, 1693. 62. Martín de Cevallos to Antonio Ortíz de Talora, May 29, 1693, Santa Fe 213, AGI. 63. Report of Martín de Cevallos, May 29, 1693. 64. As anthropologists and linguists have shown, at San Basilio, African-derived language and culture were kept alive for centuries, surviving to this day. For a modern ethnographic study of the community, see Aquiles Escalante, El palenque de San Basilio: Una comunidad de descendientes de negros cimarrones (Barranquilla, 1979). On the palenquero language, see Armin Schwengler, “Chi ma nkongo”: Lengua y rito ancestrales en El Palenque de San Basilio (Colombia) (Frankfurt, 1996). Chapter 8 1. W. Jeffrey Bolster, Black Jacks: African American Seamen in the Age of Sail (Cambridge, 1997), 132; Daniel M’Kinnen, A Tour through the British West Indies (London, 1804), 147, 203. 2. Quoted in Ezra Stiles, Extracts from the Itineraries and other Miscellanies of Ezra Stiles (New Haven, 1916), 535, 537; Susette Harriet Lloyd, Sketches of Bermuda (London, 1835), 19–20; Matilda Charlotte Houston, Texas and the Gulf of Mexico or Yachting in the New World (Philadelphia, 1845), 281; Michael J. Jarvis, “Maritime Masters and Seafaring Slaves in Bermuda, 1680–1783,” William and Mary Quarterly 49, no. 3 (July 2002): 606. 3. Bernard Martin, Jamaica, as It Was, as It Is, and as It May Be (London, 1835), 14, 21; Theodore Foulks, Eighteen Months in Jamaica: With Recollections of the Late Rebellion (London, 1833), 22, 24; Philip Wright, ed., Lady Nugent’s Journal of Her Residence in Jamaica from 1801 to 1805 (Kingston, 2002), 25; Edward Long, The History of Jamaica, 3 vols. (London, 1774), 2:41–42; William Williams, Mr. Penrose: The Journal of Penrose, Seaman (Bloomington, 1969), 43, 79; Matthew Lewis, Journal of a West Indian Proprietor Kept during a Residence in the Island of Jamaica (1834; repr., Oxford, 1999), 34–35; Douglas Hall, ed., In Miserable Slavery: Thomas Thistlewood in Jamaica, 1750–86 (London, 1989), 11, 190; Virginia Gazette (Purdie and Dixon), Nov. 3, 1768; Frederick Law Olmsted, A Journey in the Seaboard Slave States; With Remarks on Their Economy (London, 1856), 307. 4. Bolster, Black Jacks; David S. Cecelski, Waterman’s Song: Slavery and Freedom in Maritime North Carolina (Chapel Hill, 2001); Jarvis, “Maritime Masters.” 5. Michael Lindberg and Daniel Todd, Brown-, Green- and Blue-Water Fleets: The Influence of Geography on Naval Warfare, 1861 to the Present (Westport, Conn., 2002); G. Carleton Ray, “Coastal-Zone Biodiversity Patterns,” BioScience 41, no. 7, Marine Biological Diversity (Jul.–Aug. 1991): 491; Joanna K. York, Barbara A. Costas, and George

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B. McManus, “Microzooplankton Grazing in Green Water: Results from Two Contrasting Estuaries,” Estuaries and Coasts 34, no. 2 (Mar. 2011): 373–85; National Research Council (U.S.), Committee on Oceanography, Recommended Interim Procedures for Measurements in Biological Oceanography (Washington, D.C., 1964), 5; author’s observations during decades of sailing, surfing, and freediving. 6. Julius S. Scott, “Afro-American Sailors and the International Communication Network: The Case of Newport Bowers,” in Jack Tar in History: Essays in the History of Maritime Life and Labour, ed. Colin Howell and Richard Twomey (Fredericton, 1991), 38; Marcus Rediker, Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea (Cambridge, 1987); Bolster, Black Jacks; Cecelski, Waterman’s Song. 7. Walter Rodney, History of the Upper Guinea Coast, 1545–1800 (New York, 1970); Boubacar Barry, Senegambia and the Slave Trade (1988; repr., Cambridge, 1998), xi, xvi; John Thornton, Africa and Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World, 1400–1800 (Cambridge, 1992), xiv, 184–92, esp. 191–92; Robert W. Harms, River of Wealth, River of Sorrow: The Central Zaire Basin in the Era of the Slave and Ivory Trade, 1500–1891 (New Haven, 1981); Robert Harms, Games Against Nature: An Eco-Cultural History of the Nunu of Equatorial Africa (Cambridge, 1987), esp. 110. 8. Rediker, Deep Blue Sea; Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker, Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic (Boston, 1990); Bolster, Black Jacks. For other examples, see W. Jeffery Bolster, “Putting the Ocean in Atlantic History: Maritime Communities and Marine Ecology in the Northwest Atlantic, 1500–1800,” American Historical Review 113 (Feb. 2008): 20n5. Sailors similarly created a counterculture by accepting same-sex relationships aboard ship, while considering them reprehensible ashore. William Benemann, Male-Male Intimacy in Early America: Beyond Romantic Friendships (London, 2006), 57–92. 9. For examples, see Harms, River of Wealth; Harms, Games Against Nature; Joseph C. Miller, Way of Death: Merchant Capitalism and the Angolan Slave Trade, 1730–1830 (Madison, 1988); Sandra E. Green, Gender, Ethnicity, and Social Change on the Upper Slave Coast: A History of the Anlo Ewe (London, 1996); Emanual Kwaku Akyeampong, Between the Sea and the Lagoon: An Eco-social History of the Anlo of Southeastern Ghana c. 1850 to Recent Times (Oxford, 2002); Robin Law, Ouidah: The Social History of a West African Slaving “Port,” 1727–1892 (Oxford, 2004); Kristin Mann, Slavery and the Birth of an African City: Lagos, 1760–1900 (Bloomington, 2007); James F. Searing, West African Slavery and Atlantic Commerce: The Senegal River Valley, 1700–1860 (Cambridge, 1993); Ralph A. Austen and Jonathan Derrick, Middlemen of the Cameroon Rivers: The Duala and Their Hinterland, c. 1600–c. 1900 (Cambridge, 1999); Carina E. Ray and Jeremy Rich, eds., Navigating African Maritime History (St. John’s, 2009). 10. Simon Finger, “ ‘A Flag of Defyance at the Masthead’: The Delaware River Pilots and the Sinews of Philadelphia’s Atlantic World in Eighteenth Century,” Early American Studies 8 (Spring 2010): 387–93. 11. For example, see William Tatham, “Copy of Manuscript Report by William Tatham on Survey of the Coast of North Carolina from Cape Hatteras to Cape Fear”

Notes to Pages 167–169

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(unpublished manuscript, 1806), 50, North Carolina Collections, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina; Robert C. Leslie, Old Sea Wings, Ways, and Words, in the Days of Oak and Hemp (London, 1890), 249. 12. R. Lamb, Memoir of His Own Life; Serjeant in the Royal Welch Fuzileers (Dublin, 1811), 249–50; Thomas Lewis O’Beirne, A Candid and Impartial Narrative of the Transactions of the Fleet, Under the Command of Lord Howe (London, 1969), 37. 13. Lamb, Memoir, 249, 250; U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, “The Conquest of Hell Gate” (New York, n.d.). 14. Henry C. Wilkinson, Bermuda from Sail to Steam, 1784 to 1901, 2 vols. (London, 1973), 1:99; Malcolm Lester, “Vice-Admiral George Murray and the Origins of the Bermuda Naval Base, 1794–96,” Mariner’s Mirror 94, no. 3 (2008): 285–97. 15. Bermuda Gazette and Weekly Advertiser, May 16 and 23, 1795; Wilkinson, Bermuda, 1:99–101; Lester, “Vice-Admiral George Murray,” 290–91. 16. Minutes of Council and Assembly of Bermuda, 1788–1796, Oct. 8, 1795, 143, 146–47, Bermuda Archives; Book of Miscellanies, 3:214–15, 307–8, 319–20, Bermuda Archives. 17. “Pilot Darrell’s Will,” RG/1001/0015, Book of Wills, 15:59, Mar. 17, 1815, Bermuda Archives; “Petition of the Pilots at Bermuda to Commissioners of the Navy, London c. 1806 [n.d.],” Fay and Geoffrey Elliott Collection, Bermuda Archives; “Pilot’s Memorial at Bermuda to Hon. Geo. Berkeley, Vice Admiral of the White,” Dec. 11, 1806, Fay and Geoffrey Elliott Collection, Bermuda Archives; “Report Darrell Boat Theft,” Apr. 26, 1789, Book of Miscellanies, 167, Bermuda Archives; Wilkinson, Bermuda, 1:101, 384; “A King’s Pilot,” Sailor’s Magazine and Nautical Intelligencer (London, 1840), 2:207; Richard Cotter, Sketches of Bermuda: Or Somers’ Island (London, 1828), 15–18. 18. Matthew Bishop, The Life and Adventures of Matthew Bishop (London, 1744), 78; Rediker, Deep Blue Sea, 205–53, esp. 208–9; Ralph Davis, The Rise of the English Shipping Industry in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries (London, 1962), 131–32. 19. Edward Ward, “A Trip to New England” (1699), in Five Travel Scripts, Commonly Attributed to Edward Ward; Reproduced from the Earliest Editions Extant (London, 1861), 4, 9; Rediker, Deep Blue Sea, 293, 295–96. For negative perceptions of white pilots, see Finger, “ ‘Flag of Defyance,’ ” 386, 392–93; Leslie, Old Sea Wings, 249; Olmsted, Journey in the Seaboard Slave States, 562–63; J. E. Alexander, Transatlantic Sketches: Comprising Visits to the Most Interesting Scenes in North and South America, and the West Indies (Philadelphia, 1833), 3–5; James Fenimore Cooper, The Pilot: A Tale of the Sea (New York, 1898), 21. 20. For example, Eugene D. Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made (New York, 1972); Peter Wood, Black Majority: Negroes in Colonial South Carolina from 1670 through the Stono Rebellion (New York, 1974), esp. 97; William Dusinberre, Them Dark Days: Slavery in the American Rice Swamps (Oxford, 1996), 176–210; Ira Berlin, Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America (London, 1998), 2–6, 66. 21. Jarvis, “Maritime Masters,” 606; Bolster, Black Jacks, 131–44; Kevin Dawson,

308

Notes to Pages 170–172

“Enslaved Swimmers and Divers in the Atlantic World,” Journal of American History 92, no. 4 (2006): 1327–55; Kevin Dawson, “Swimming, Surfing, and Underwater Diving in Early Modern Atlantic Africa and the African Diaspora,” in Ray and Rich, Navigating African Maritime History, 81–116. 22. John Lambert, Travels through Canada, and the United States of North America, 2 vols. (London, 1814), 2:293–94; Foulks, Eighteen Months in Jamaica, 24; Leslie, Old Sea Wings, 247–48, 252. 23. Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll, 218–19, 582–83; Lawrence W. Levine, Black Culture and Black Consciousness: Afro American Folk Thought from Slavery to Freedom (Oxford, 1977), 126–33, 254–55; Charles Joyner, Down by the Riverside: A South Carolina Slave Community (Urbana, 1984), 172–95. 24. C. R. Dobson, Masters and Journeymen: A Prehistory of Industrial Relations, 1717–1800 (London, 1980), 19, 25–26, 154–70; Bolster, Black Jacks, 87–88; Rediker, Deep Blue Sea, 110, 205–6. 25. Finger, “ ‘Flag of Defyance,’ ” 387, 399–408, esp. 387, 402. 26. “Mungo3,” in Oxford English Dictionary, ed. J. A. Simpson and E. S. C. Weiner (Oxford, 1989); Wm. Hardman, “America Seventy Years Ago: An Imaginary Tour,” Once a Week: An Illustrated Miscellany of Literature, Art, Science, & Popular Information 9 (June–Dec. 1863): 219; Mahlon Dickerson, “Fortifications of the United States,” in Register of Debates in Congress: Comprising the Leading Debates and Incidents of the First Session of the Nineteenth Congress: Together with an Appendix Containing the Most Important State Papers and Public Documents to Which the Session Has Given Birth: To Which Are Added, the Laws Enacted during Session, with a Copious Index to the Whole, 14 vols. (Washington, D.C., 1826), 2:789. 27. Anonymous, Antigua and the Antiguans: A Full Account of the Colony and Its Inhabitants from the Time of the Carib to the Present Day, 2 vols. (London, 1844), 1:154–59. 28. Thomas Blount to John Gray Blount, Dec. 21, 1794, Gray Blount Papers, North Carolina State Archives, Raleigh; Alexander, Transatlantic Sketches, 1:3–4, 11. 29. G. Melvin Herndon, ed., William Tatham and the Culture of Tobacco: Including a Facsimile Reprint of an Historical and Practical Essay on the Culture and Commerce of Tobacco (Coral Gables, 1969), 211, quoted in Stiles, Extracts from the Itineraries, 535, 537; The Weekly Register (Antigua), May 20, 1815, in B.W. Higman, Slave Populations of the British Caribbean, 1807–1834 (Baltimore, 1984), 175; Bolster, Black Jacks, 16, 23, 133; Jarvis, “Maritime Masters,” 606; “Petition of the Pilots at Bermuda to Commissioners of the Navy.” 30. South-Carolina Gazette, Feb. 6–13, 1755, Oct. 6–13, 1766, June 20, 1768; SouthCarolina Gazette, Extraordinary, May 6, 1756; K. G. Davies, ed., Documents of the American Revolution, 1770–83, Colonial Office Series, 21 vols. (Dublin, 1976), 11:95; William R. Ryan, The World of Thomas Jeremiah: Charleston on the Eve of the American Revolution (Oxford, 2010), 7; J. William Harris, The Hanging of Thomas Jeremiah: A Free Black Man’s Encounter with Liberty (New Haven, 2009), 93–95; Philip D. Morgan, “Black Life in Eighteenth-Century Charleston,” Perspectives in American History, n.s. 1

Notes to Pages 172–177

309

(Cambridge, 1984): 213. For Jeremiah’s status as a slave, see Philip D. Morgan, American National Biography (New York, 1999), 12:1. 31. Author’s observations garnered during decades of surfing, sailing, and freediving. For different ways slaves and slaveholders perceived environments, see Rhys Isaac, The Transformation of Virginia, 1740–1790 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1982), 52–57. 32. William Nevens, Forty Years at Sea: Or a Narrative of the Adventures of William Nevens (Portland, Maine, 1846), 65–66; Bolster, Black Jacks, 138–39. 33. Bolster, Black Jacks, 132, 139. Free and enslaved Caribbean watermen also mocked and picked fights with sailors. Houston, Texas, 39; Cynric Williams, A Tour through the Island of Jamaica: From the Western to the Eastern End in the Year 1823 (London, 1826), 204–5. 34. Frederick William Naylor Bayley, Four Years’ Residence in the West Indies: During the Years 1826, 7, 8, and 9 (London, 1833), 25–26. 35. Shane White and Graham White, “Slave Clothing and African-American Culture in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries,” Past & Present 148 (Aug. 1995): 149– 86; Richard Dunn, Sugar and Slaves: The Rise of the Planter Class in the English West Indies, 1624–1713 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1972), 263; Berlin, Many Thousands Gone, 160; Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll, 555–60; Richard C. Wade, Slavery in the Cities: The South, 1820–1860 (Oxford, 1964), 125–29; Betty Wood, Women’s Work, Men’s Work: The Informal Slave Economies of Lowcountry Georgia (Athens, 1995), 137. 36. Martin, Jamaica, 14, 21. 37. White and White, “Slave Clothing,” esp. 164–65, 174; William D. Pierson, Black Yankees: The Development of an Afro-American Subculture in Eighteenth-Century New England (Amherst, 1988), 11, 120–21, 154–55; Wood, Women’s Work, 60–61, 66, 174; Wade, Slavery in the Cities, 125–31; Bolster, Black Jacks, 140. 38. White and White, “Slave Clothing,” 162–64. 39. Henri Bergson, Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic (New York, 1911), 94. Scholarship on the cakewalk similarly indicates that slaves lampooned whites. Brooke Baldwin, “The Cakewalk: A Study in Stereotype and Reality,” Journal of Social History 15, no. 2 (Winter 1981): 205–18. 40. Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll, 22–23, 582. 41. Joseph Blunt, The Merchant’s and Shipmaster’s Assistant: Containing Information Useful to the American Merchants, Owners, and Masters of Ships (New York, 1832), 200– 38, esp. 172–73, 227–29; Finger, “ ‘Flag of Defyance,’ ” 387–94, 407; Wilkinson, Bermuda, 1:384; Walter Clark, ed., The State Records of North Carolina, 26 vols. (Goldsboro, N.C., 1905), 11:803–4, 24:502–3; Jarvis, “Maritime Masters,” 606. 42. Wade, Slavery in the Cities, 29–54; Higman, Slave Populations, 246. 43. James Howard Brewer, “Legislation Designed to Control Slavery in Wilmington and Fayetteville,” North Carolina Historical Review, 30 (Apr. 1953), 163–64; Cecelski, Waterman’s Song, 49–50; Clark, ed., Records of North Carolina, 24:15; William L. Saunders, ed., The Colonial Records of North Carolina, 10 vols. (Goldsboro, N.C., 1905), 9:803–4; “Petition of the Pilots at Bermuda to Commissioners of the Navy.”

310

Notes to Pages 177–180

44. Thomas D. Morris, Southern Slavery and the Law, 1619–1869 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1996), 165–81, 196–208. 45. “Report Darrell Boat Theft,” Apr. 26, 1789, Book of Miscellanies, 167, Bermuda Archives; “Pilot’s Memorial at Bermuda to Hon. Geo. Berkeley, Vice Admiral of the White,” Dec. 11, 1806, Fay and Geoffrey Elliott Collection, Bermuda Archives; “Petition of the Pilots at Bermuda to Commissioners of the Navy.” 46. “Certificate of Freedom: Thomas Cooper,” Jan. 29, 1800; Book of Miscellanies, 214–15, Bermuda Archives; Michael J. Jarvis, In the Eyes of All Trade: Bermuda, Bermudian, and the Maritime Atlantic World, 1680–1783 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 2010), 30–31; Virginia Bernhard, Slaves and Slaveholders in Bermuda, 1616–1782 (Columbia, 1999), 50–52. 47. Secretary of State Miscellaneous Records, book 00, pt. 2, 624, South Carolina Department of Archives. 48. Stuart B. Schwartz, Sugar Plantation in the Formation of Brazilian Society: Bahia, 1550–1835 (Cambridge, 1985); Jenny Bourne Wahl, The Bondsman’s Burden: An Economic Analysis of the Common Law of Southern Slavery (Cambridge, 2002) 54; David T. Gleeson, The Irish in the South, 1815–1877 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 2001), 33, 37–38, 139. 49. Davies, Documents of the American Revolution, 11:95; Harris, Hanging of Thomas Jeremiah, esp. 1; Peter H. Wood, “ ‘Taking Care of Business’ in Revolutionary South Carolina: Republicanism and the Slave Society,” in The Southern Experience in the American Revolution, ed. Jeffrey J. Crow and Larry E. Tise (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1978), 283–86; Morgan, “Black Life in Eighteenth-Century Charleston,” 213. 50. Michael P. Johnson, “Denmark Vesey and His Co-conspirators,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser. 58, no. 4 (Oct. 2001): 915–76; Kevin Dawson, “Primus Plot,” in The South Carolina Encyclopedia, ed. Walter Edgar (Columbia, 2006), 755–56. 51. Morgan, “Black Life in Eighteenth-Century Charleston,” 213. 52. Wade, Slavery in the Cities, 3; Gary B. Nash, The Urban Crucible: The Northern Seaports and the Origins of the American Revolution (1979; repr., Cambridge, 1986), esp. 1; Scott, “Afro-American Sailors,” 38; Pedro L. V. Welch, Slave Society in the City: Bridgetown, Barbados, 1680–1834 (Kingston, Jamaica: 2003), esp. xiv; Higman, Slave Populations, 174–75, 226; Mary C. Karasch, Slave Life in Rio de Janeiro, 1808–1850 (Madison, 1972); Robert S. Shelton, “Slavery in a Texas Seaport: The Peculiar Institution Galveston,” Slavery and Abolition 28, no. 1 (Aug. 2007): 155–56. 53. Neville A. T. Hall, Slave Society in the Danish West Indies: St. Thomas, St. John, & St. Croix (Mona, 1992), 87; Karasch, Slave Life, 62; Welch, Slave Society in the City, 95; Higman, Slave Populations, 87, 226; Wade, Slavery in the Cities, 16–19, 243–44. 54. Higman, Slave Populations, 175, 226–25, 235–36, 245–46, 258; Wade, Slavery in the Cities, 48–49; Welch, Slave Society in the City, 18; Hall, Slave Society, 87–109; Shelton, “Slavery in a Texas Seaport,” 155–56. 55. Scott, “Afro-American Sailors,” 41–42; Bolster, Black Jacks, 17, 62; Shelton, “Slavery in a Texas Seaport,” 155–56; Great Britain Parliament Papers (Commons), “Report of the Select Committee on the Extension of Slavery Throughout the British

Notes to Pages 180–185

311

Dominions” (no. 721), 1831–32, Evidence of Vice Admiral Sir Charles Fleming, XX, 199–200. 56. Shelton, “Slavery in a Texas Seaport,” 155–68, esp. 159; Ira Berlin, Slaves without Masters: The Free Negro in the Antebellum South (New York, 1974), 265; Linebaugh and Rediker, Many-Headed Hydra, 174–210; Hall, Slave Society, 91, 96–98; Welch, Slave Society in the City, 88–93, 218; Higman, Slave Populations, 231–32, 242; Rediker, Deep Blue Sea, 59–60, 133. 57. Entry, personal diary, October 21, 1830, 1830–36, Moses Ashley Curtis Papers, Southern Historical Collection, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill; Welch, Slave Society in the City, 92; John Augustine Waller, A Voyage to the West Indies: Containing Various Observations Made During A Residence in Barbados (London, 1820), 6, 20–21, 94; Bayley, Four Years’ Residence, 27–28; George Pinckard, Note on the West Indies: Written during the Expedition under the Command of General Sir Ralph Abercromby, 3 vols. (1806; Westport, Conn., 1970), 1:245–46, 393. 58. Higman, Slave Populations, 257–58. 59. Bermuda Gazette, May 23, 1795; “Forbes Letters,” Bermuda Historical Quarterly 11 (Winter 1954): 184. 60. When the Experiment was navigated through Hell Gate, there were at least two black mariners aboard, Quashey (Kwesi) Ferguson and John Edwards Blackamore. An enslaved fruit vendor accompanied the Barbadian pilot that boarded Frederick Bayley’s vessel. “Abstract of Wills on File in the Surrogates Office, City of New York, January 7, 1777–February 7, 1783,” in New-York Historical Society Publication Fund (New York: 1900), 9:143–44; Bayley, Four Years’ Residence, 26. 61. For example, see Hall, Slave Society; Welch, Slave Society in the City, xv–10; David Barry Gaspar, Bondmen and Rebels: A Study of Master-Slave Relations in Antigua (Baltimore, 1985), 107–9; Elsa V. Goveia, Slave Society in the British Leeward Islands and the End of the Eighteenth Century (New Haven, 1965), 141, 230–31; Higman, Slave Populations, 226–302; Karasch, Slave Life; Wade, Slavery in the Cities; Shelton, “Slavery in a Texas Seaport.” 62. Bolster, “Putting the Ocean in Atlantic History.” 63. Some free and enslaved black mariners become boatswain, but most remained sailors and were able to rise only from ordinary seamen to able seamen. Bolster, Black Jacks, 95–96. 64. Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll, esp. 361; Dusinberre, Dark Days, 176–210; Wood, Black Majority, 97; Berlin, Many Thousands Gone, 2, 66. 65. Rediker documented how sailors mutinied when a shipmaster endangered his vessel. Rediker, Deep Blue Sea, 98–99. Chapter 9 1. “Testemunho de Manoel de Salvador,,” July 18, 1771, Arquivo Histórico Ultramarino (AHU), Angola, cx. 55, doc. 43. 2. “Testemunho de Manoel de Salvador,,” July 18, 1771, AHU, Angola, cx. 55, doc. 43.

312

Notes to Pages 185–188

3. “Testemunho de Manoel de Salvador,,” July 18, 1771, AHU, Angola, cx. 55, doc. 43. 4. A law from 1724 prohibited the use of guns in Luanda—including knives. See “Provisão Real,,” Apr. 17, 1724, AHU, Angola, cx. 36, doc. 68. Later, several other antigun laws specifically singled out slaves. In 1747, for example, it was decided that enslaved individuals caught with weapons would be summarily deported to Brazil. See “Carta do Governador de Angola,” Aug. 3, 1747, AHU, Angola, cx. 36, doc. 8. Several decades later, a tougher law added fifty lashes a day for four days to the punishment. See “Extrato de Carta do Governador de Angola,” Aug. 25, 1801, AHU, pápeis de Sá da Bandeira, maço 824. However, there is plenty of evidence that possession of weapons was widespread despite such laws. Slaves, many armed with knives and other weapons, would frequently follow their owners into the city’s streets and taverns at night. See “Carta do Governador de Angola,” Aug. 6, 1752, AHU, Angola, cx. 37, doc. 124. 5. “Testemunho de Manoel de Salvador,,” July 17, 1771, AHU, Angola, cx. 55, doc. 43. 6. “Testemunho de Manoel de Salvador,,” July 17, 1771, AHU, Angola, cx. 55, doc. 43. 7. “Ofício do Governador de Angola,” Aug. 27, 1775, AHU, Angola, cx. 60. 8. “Bando sobre as Tabernas de Luanda,” Oct. 30, 1759, AHU, Angola, cx. 42, doc. 88. 9. “Registro de Requerimento dos Lojistas e Taberneiros,” Jan. 18, 1815, Biblioteca Municipal de Luanda (BML), cód. 28, vol. 2, fols. 183–184v. 10. “Depoimento de Jezne Gauthier,” Aug. 20, 1838, Arquivo Histórico Nacional de Angola (AHNA), cód. 2563, fol. 165v. 11. “Registro de Edital do Senado da Câmara,” Aug. 27, 1801, BML, cód. 26, fols. 101v–102. 12. “Auto de Correição,” Dec. 16, 1784, AHU, Angola, cx. 69, doc. 1. 13. “Registro de Bando,” June 28, 1796, BML, cód. 24, fols. 113v–114v. 14. “Carta para o Juiz pela Ordenação e Oficiais da Câmara de Luanda,” Aug. 26, 1801, AHNA, cód. 152, fols. 62v–64. 15. “Registro de Bando,” Dec. 1, 1740, BML, cód. 18, fols. 64–64v. 16. “Registro de Carta do Governador de Angola,” June 20, 1769, BML, cód. 26, fols. 3v–4. 17. Elias Alexandre da Silva Corrêa, História de Angola, vol. 1 (Lisbon, 1937), 39–42. 18. “Registro de Petição dos Homens de Negócio de Luanda,” Nov. 6, 1826, BML, cód. 44, fols. 161–62. 19. “Registro de Carta do Senado da Câmara,” July 19, 1769, BML, cód. 26, fol. 5. 20. “Portaria do Governo de Luanda,” July 13, 1816, AHNA, cód. 278, fols. 2–2v. 21. “Portaria do Governo de Angola,” Sept. 25, 1818, AHNA, cód. 278, fol. 146v. 22. “Representação da Câmara Municipal de Luanda,” Oct. 3, 1860, AHU, segunda seção de Angola, pasta 26.1. 23. “Carta do Governadro de Angola,” June 23, 1824, AHNA, cód. 157, fols. 26–26v.

Notes to Pages 188–191

313

24. “Ofício do Secretário Geral do Governo de Angola,” Mar. 13, 1853, AHNA, cód. 177. 25. “Participação para a Junta Protetora dos Negros Libertos,” Dec. 27, 1854, AHNA, cód. 2518, fols. 54–54v. 26. “Testemunho de Manoel de Salvador,,” July 17, 1771, AHU, Angola, cx. 55, doc. 43. 27. Corrêa, História de Angola, 80. 28. Michael Angelo and Denis de Carla, “A Curious and Exact Account of a Voyage to Congo in the Years 1666 and 1667,” in A General Collection of the Best and Most Interesting Voyages and Travels in All Parts of the World, ed. John Pinkerton (London, 1804), 157. 29. “Carta do Governador de Angola,” Apr. 30, 1798, AHNA, cx. 2841. 30. “Resposta do Senado da Câmara,” Nov. 12, 1797, Arquivo Nacional da Torre to Tombo (ANTT), Ministério do Reino, maço 606, cx. 708. 31. “Administração de Angola,” 1851, AHU, sala 12, maço 1107. 32. “Mapa das pessoas que residem nesta Cidade de São Paulo de Assumpção de Loanda,” 1773, AHU, Angola, cx. 57, doc. 34. 33. José Curto, “The Population History of Luanda during the Late Atlantic Slave Trade, 1781–1844,” African Economic History 29 (2001): 1–59; José Curto, “As If from a Free Womb: Baptismal Manumissions in the Conceição Parish, Luanda, 1778–1807,” Portuguese Studies Review 10 (2002): 31. 34. Angelo and de Carla, “Curious and Exact Account,” 298. 35. Jeronimo Merola, “A Voyage to Congo, and Several Other Countries, Chiefly in Southern Africk,” in Pinkerton, General Collection, 295. 36. Angelo and de Carla, “Curious and Exact Account,” 167. 37. “Mapa das pessoas que residem nesta Cidade de São Paulo de Assumpção de Loanda,” 1773, AHU, Angola, cx. 57, doc. 34. 38. “Ofício do Desembargador Ouvidor Geral de Angola,” Mar. 20, 1784, AHU, Angola, cx. 68, doc. 46. 39. “Carta fo Governador de Angola,” Dec. 15, 1784, AHU, cód. 1642. 40. “Alistamento do Bairro Nossa Senhora do Rosário, 1823–1832,” BML, cód. 45. 41. Angelo and de Carla, “Curious and Exact Account,” 298. 42. “Ofício do Governador de Angola,” Apr. 27, 1826, IHGB, DL 82,01.14. 43. “Atas da Junta de Fazendas de Angola,” June 5, 1840, AHU, segunda seção de Angola, pasta 3 C. 44. “Carta de Francisco Salles Ferreira,” Nov. 1855, AHU, maço 824, papéis de Sá da Bandeira. 45. Angelo and de Carla, “Curious and Exact Account,” 298. See also Merola, “Voyage to Congo,” 201. 46. Merola, “Voyage to Congo,” 295. 47. “Petição de José Pinheiro de Moraes Fontoura,” 1782, AHU, cx. 65, doc. 48. “Testamento de Caetano Gonçalves da Gama,” Apr. 3, 1785, ANTT, Feitos Findos, Justificações Ultramarinas, Africa (Luanda), maço 7, doc. 9.

314

Notes to Pages 191–194

49. “Primeiro Testamento de José António de Carvalho,” Jan. 8, 1798, ANTT, FF, JU, África, maço 22, doc. 5. 50. “Petição de Feliciano José Colares,” 1831, AHU, Angola, cx. 171, doc. 6. 51. “Requerimento de Francisco de Paula,” Jan. 16, 1776, Biblioteca Nacional do Rio de Janeiro (BNRJ), doc. C 420, 49, n. 12. 52. “Relatório sobre o Estabelecimento de um Novo Seminário Teológico,” Luanda, undated but around 1770, ANTT, Ministério do Reino, maço 660, cx. 708. 53. Corrêa, História de Angola, 82. 54. “Extrato de Carta do Governador de Angola,” Aug. 25, 1801, AHU, pápeis de Sá da Bandeira, maco 824. 55. “Carta do Governador de Angola,” Dec. 15, 1784, AHU, Angola, cód. 1642. 56. “Petição de Francisco Joaquim,” May 22, 1829, AHNA, cód. 7182, fol. 145. 57. “Registro de Bando da Câmara de Luanda,” Nov. 17, 1765, BML, cód. 18, fols. 206–206v; “Registro de Bando do Senado da Câmara de Luanda,” Apr. 10, 1771, BML, cód. 26, fols. 16–17. 58. “Registro de Bando,” Sept. 12, 1772, BML, cód. 26, fols. 22v–23. 59. “Discurso recitado pelo Governador de Angola,” Jan. 1, 1818, AHNA, cód. 278, fols. 103–4. See also Corrêa, História de Angola, 81. 60. “Petição de José Nicolau Ferreira,” May 5, 1825, AHNA, cx. 138, fol. 117v. 61. “Administração de Angola,” 1851, AHU, sala 12, maço 1107. 62. “Oficio do Secretário Geral do Governo de Angola,” Jan. 8, 1853, AHNA, cód. 176, fol. 93v. 63. “Testamento de Manoel Lourenço Ferreira,” 1759, Arquivo Público do Estado da Bahia, Tribunal de Justiça, 04/1610/2079/03. 64. “Ofício do Governador de Angola,” Aug. 28, 1801, AHU, Angola, cx. 101, doc. 41. 65. “Extrato de Carta do Governador de Angola,” Aug. 25, 1801, AHU, pápeis de Sá da Bandeira, maço 824. 66. Corrêa, História de Angola, 77. 67. “Portaria,” Sept. 26, 1796, AHNA, cód. 273, fol. 220. 68. “Residência do Governador de Angola,” July 7, 1804, AHU, Angola, cx. 113, doc. 45. 69. “Ofício do Governador de Angola,” Aug. 21, 1801, AHU, Angola, cx. 101, doc. 38. 70. “Ofício do Secretário de Governo de Angola,” May 5, 1846, AHNA, cód. 104, fol. 268v. 71. “Ofício do Secretário de Governo de Angola,” May 14, 1846, AHNA, cód. 105, fol. 3. 72. “Oficio do Secretário Geral da Província de Angola,” Mar. 1, 1847, AHNA, cód. 167, fols. 15v–16. By then, largely in reaction to a surge of assassinations of owners by slaves, the death penalty was also used. See “Oficio do Governador de Angola,” Dec. 10, 1847, AHU, segunda seção de Angola, pasta 12.

Notes to Pages 194–196

315

73. “Portaria do Governador de Angola,” Oct. 3, 1853, AHNA, cód. 281, fols. 39–39v. 74. “Carta do Ouvidor Geral de Angola,” Sept. 11, 1773, AHU, Angola, cx. 57, doc. 39. 75. “Testemunho do Manoel da Silva Machado Palhares,” July 17, 1771, AHU, Angola, cx. 55, doc. 43. 76. “Testemunho do Coronal Caetano Mathias Leitão,” July 17, 1771, AHU, Angola, cx. 55, doc. 43. 77. “Cópia de Bando,” Jan. 9, 1765, AHU, Angola, cx. 49, doc. 4. 78. “Bando,” Jan. 9, 1765, AHU, Angola, cx. 49, doc. 4. See also Carlos Couto, Os Capitães Mores em Angola no Século XVIII (Luanda: Instituto de Investigação Científica de Angola, 1972), 65–66. 79. “Ofício do Desembargador Ouvidor Geral de Angola,” Mar. 20, 1784, AHU, Angola, cx. 68, doc. 46. See also Jan Vansina, “Portuguese vs kimbundu: Language Use in the Colony of Angola (1575–c. 1845), Bulletin des Seances Mededelingen der Zittingen 47 (2001): 267–81. 80. Corrêa, História de Angola, 83. 81. “Apontamento sobre os Muluas,” undated, AHU, papéis de sá da Bandeira, maço 827. 82. Angelo and de Carla, “Curious and Exact Account,” 157. 83. Antonio de Oliveira Cadornega, História Geral das Guerras Angolanas, vol. 3 (Lisbon: Agência Geral do Ultramar, 1972), 12–14. The Jesuit college was so successful that Lisbon ordered the foundation of another college to “educate and train as clergy” twelve black youth in the late seventeenth century. The initiative failed due to lack of funds. See “Conseulta do Conselho Ultramarino,” Mar. 22, 1686, AHU, Angola, cx. 13, doc. 19. 84. F. Rodrigues, História da Companhia na Assistência de Portugal (Porto, 1937), 567–68. 85. “Registo de Edital do Senado da Câmara de Luanda,” Nov. 12, 1770, BML, cód. 26, fols. 13–13v. For similar efforts in Rio de Janeiro, see Nireu Cavalcanti, O Rio de Janeiro Setecentista: A Vida e a Construção da Cidade da Invasão até chegada da Corte (Rio de Janeiro, 2004), 159–67. 86. “Ofício do Governador de Angola,” Feb. 3, 1773, AHU, Angola, cx. 57, doc. 11. 87. “Apontamento do Barão de Mossamedes,” undated but around 1784, AHU, cx. 68, doc. 29. 88. “Ofício do Desembargador Ouvidor Geral de Angola,” Mar. 20, 1784, AHU, Angola, cx. 68, doc. 46. 89. “Registro de Bando,” Jan. 29, 1785, BML, cód. 28, vol. 1, fols. 92–93; “Carta do Senado da Câmara de Luanda,” Dec. 18, 1797, AHNA, cód. 258, fols. 20v–21. See also Corrêa, História de Angola, 83. 90. “Certidão do Escrivão do Senado da Câmara de Luanda,” Oct. 1, 1797, IHGB, DL 76,02,02. 91. “Registro de Bando,” Jan. 29, 1785, BML, cód. 28, fols. 92–93. 92. “Ofício do Desembargador Ouvidor Geral de Angola,” Mar. 20, 1784, AHU, Angola, cx. 68, doc. 46.

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Notes to Pages 196–200

93. Roquinaldo Ferreira, “Transforming Atlantic Slaving: Trade, Warfare, and Territorial Control in Angola (1650–1800)” (Ph.D. diss., University of California, Los Angeles, 2003). 94. “Relatório sobre o Estabelecimento de um Novo Seminário Teológico,” Luanda, undated but around 1770, ANTT, Ministério do Reino, maço 660, cx. 708. 95. Angelo and de Carla, “Curious and Exact Account,” 157. In the 1780s, Governor Mossamedes requested the construction of a hospital exclusively for military personnel on the grounds that the Misericórdia hospital did not allow accommodation of patients by class and that officers had share it with low-ranking officers. However, the request was rejected by the crown. See “Apontamento do Barão de Mossamedes,” undated but around 1784, AHU, cx. 68, doc. 29. 96. Cadornega, História Geral das Guerras Angolanas, 12–14. 97. Miguel Antonio de Mello, “Proposta do Governador sobre a forma de se distribuirem as importâncias destinadas pelo Erário à sustentação do Culto das Diversas Imagens,” June 1, 1801, Arquivos de Angola Lunda, vol. 2, n. 10, 1936, 262. 98. “Carta do Governador de Angola,” May 22, 1759, AHNA, cód. 12289, fols. 3v–4v. 99. Corrêa, História de Angola, 74. 100. “Carta do Bispo de Angola,” Mar. 3, 1796, AHU, Angola, cx. 83, doc. 32. 101. “Apontamento do Barão de Mossamedes,” undated but around 1784, AHU, cx. 68, doc. 29. 102. “Carta do Bispo de Málaca,” 1788, AHU, Angola, cx. 73, doc. 28. 103. “Dedução dos Fatos do Bispo de Málaca e do Barão de Mossamedes,” 1784, IHGB, lata 214, pasta 5. 104. “Memória dos Usos, Ritos e Costumes dos Sobas e mais Povos desta Jurisdição,” 1820, IHGB, lata 347, pasta 30. 105. “Denúncia de Lourenco Agostinho,” Feb. 14, 1698, ANTT, Inquisição de Lisboa, livro 266, fols. 300–301. 106. “Denúncia de Antonio Soares,” Dec. 20, 1698, ANTT, Inquisição de Lisboa, livro 266, fols. 302–3. 107. Jan Vansina, “Ambaca Society and the Slave Trade, c. 1760–1845,” Journal of African History 46 (2005): 11. 108. “Carta do Governador de Angola,” Mar. 6, 1826, AHNA, cód. 96, fol. 28v. 109. “Denúncia de João Inácio,” Aug. 30, 1698, ANTT, Inquisição de Lisboa, livro 266, fols. 44–45. 110. “Denúncia de Gregório Pascoal,” Sept. 30, 1698, ANTT, Inquisição de Lisboa, livro 266, fols. 35–35v. 111. “Carta do Regente do Calumbo,” Aug. 17, 1798, AHNA, cód. 366, fols. 125v–126v. 112. “Bando sobre a Circulação de Escravos em Luanda,” Apr. 10, 1822, AHNA, cód. D-1–5. 113. “Ofício do Secretário Geral do Governo de Angola,” Oct. 9, 1856, AHNA, cód. 181, fol. 113.

Notes to Pages 200–203

317

114. “Oficio do Chefe do Distrito do Cambambe,” Apr. 17, 1858, AHU, segunda seção de Angola, pasta 24 (2). 115. “Depoimento de Paulo Francisco da Silva,” May 3, 1858, AHU, segunda seção de Angola, pasta 24 (2). 116. “Bando,” Jan. 10, 1769, Biblioteca Nacional de Lisboa (BNL), cód. 8554, fols. 22–24. 117. Corrêa, História de Angola, 82. 118. “Bando,” Jan. 10, 1769, BNL, cód. 8554, fols. 22–24. 119. “Carta de José Lourenço de Souza,” June 3, 1776, Inquisição de Lisboa, livro 279, fols. 39–40. 120. “Testemunho do Alferes Ignácio Paulo da Silva,” Oct. 26, 1722, ANTT, Inquisição de Lisboa, livro 285, fols. 253. 121. “Testemunho de Francisco Lopes Porto,” Oct. 26, 1722, ANTT, Inquisição de Lisboa, livro 285, fols. 257–257v. 122. “Testemunho do Alferes Manoel Rocha Soares,” Oct. 26, 1722, ANTT, Inquisição de Lisboa, livro 285, fols. 254–55. 123. “Testemunho de Manoel Simões,” Nov. 25, 1722, ANTT, Inquisição de Lisboa, livro 285, fols. 254–55. 124. “Testemunho de Manoel Simões,” Nov. 25, 1722, ANTT, Inquisição de Lisboa, livro 285, fols. 254–55. 125. “Dedução dos Fatos do Bispo de Málaca e do Barão de Mossamedes,” 1784, IHGB, lata 214, pasta 5. 126. “Bando,” Oct. 10, 1769, AHU, Angola, cx. 53, doc. 1. 127. “Ofício do Desembargador Ouvidor Geral de Angola,” Mar. 20, 1784, AHU, Angola, cx. 68, doc. 46. 128. “Carta do Bispo de Málaca,” 1788, AHU, Angola, cx. 73, doc. 28. 129. Merola, “Voyage to Congo,” 295. 130. “Testemunho de Sebastião José Martins Ribeiro,” July 19, 1771, AHU, Angola, cx. 55, doc. 43. 131. “Registo de Carta de Liberdade,” Apr. 16, 1856, AHNA, cód. 5613, fols. 5–5v. 132. “Registo de Carta de Liberdade,” Aug. 2, 185, AHNA, cód. 5613, fols. 2–2v. 133. “Registo de Carta de Liberdade,” Oct. 6, 1856, AHNA, cód. 5613, fols. 6v–7. 134. “Testemunho de Henrique Francisco da Matta,” Oct. 15, 1771, AHU, Angola, cx. 55, doc. 43. 135. “Testemunho de João da Silva Franco,” July 19, 1771, AHU, Angola, cx. 55, doc. 43. 136. “Testemunho de Manoel de Salvador,” July 31, 1771, AHU, Angola, cx. 55, doc. 43. For sailors of black descent in the Atlantic, see Alan Cobley, “That Turbulent Soil: Seafarers, the ‘Black Atlantic,’ and Afro-Caribbean Identity,” in Seascapes: Maritime Histories, Littoral Cultures, and Transoceanic Exchanges, ed. Jerry Bentley, Renate Bridenthal, and Kären Wigen (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2007), 154–68; Alan Cobley, “Black West Indian Seamen in the British Merchant Marine in the Mid

318

Notes to Pages 203–205

Eighteenth Century,” History Workshop Journal 28 (2004): 260–74. See also Alison Games, The Web of Empire: English Cosmopolitans in an Age of Expansion, 1560–1660 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 82. 137. “Acareação entre Manoel de Salvador e João Sylva Franco,” July 31, 1771, AHU, Angola, cx. 138. “Testemunho de Manoel de Salvador,,” July 18, 1771, AHU, Angola, cx. 55, doc. 43. 139. For elsewhere in Africa, see Robin Law, Ouidah: The Social History of a West African Slaving “Port,” 1727–1892 (Oxford: James Currey, 2004). 140. “Despacho da Petição de José Nicolau Ferreira,” Nov. 28, 1826, AHNA, cód. 7182, fol. 28, fol. 28v. 141. “Despacho da Petição de Manoel Pires Chaves,” Dec. 12, 1822, AHNA, cx. 138, fol. 22. 142. “Despacho do Requerimento de Manoel Joaquim da Guerra,” Aug. 7, 1828, AHNA, cód. 7182, fol. 100. 143. “Despacho do Requerimento de Henriques Barrento,” Sept. 20, 1828, AHNA, cód. 7182, fol. 107. 144. “Despacho do Requerimento de Francisco Marques de Oliveira,” Dec. 12, 1829, AHNA, cód. 7182, fol. 134. 145. “Despacho do Requerimento de Lázaro Teixeira de Souza,” May 27, 1829, AHNA, cód. 7182, fol. 146. 146. “Despacho do Requerimento de José Pedro Cotta,” Oct. 18, 1826, AHNA, cód. 7182, fol. 28. 147. “Despacho do Requerimento de António José Francisco Gomes,” Sept. 24, 1829 AHNA, cód. 7182, fol. 169. 148. “Testamento de José Joaquim Ferreira,” Apr. 21, 1795, ANTT, Feitos Findos, Justificações Ultramarinas (Luanda), maço 25, doc. 1, fols. 14v–16v. 149. “Despacho da Petição de Manoel Pires Chaves,” Apr. 21, 1824, AHNA, cx. 138, fol. 68v. 150. “Despacho do Requerimento de Francisco de Paulo,” Oct. 25, 1825, AHNA, cx. 138, fol. 146v. 151. “Despacho da Petição de José Nicolau Ferreira,” Nov. 22, 1826, AHNA, cód. 7182, fol. 28. 152. “Despacho do Requerimento de Josefa Angélica,” Nov. 26, 1829, AHNA, cód. 7182, fol. 173v. 153. “Despacho do Requerimento de Caetano José,” Feb. 21, 1829, AHNA, cód. 7182, fol. 134. 154. “Despacho da Petição de Josefa Maria e Ana Maria,” Mar. 16, 1825, AHNA, cx. 138, fol. 109v. 155. “Despacho do Requerimento de Maria Francisca da Conceição,” Aug. 22, 1826, AHNA, cód. 7182, fol. 13. 156. “Termo de Fiança de Manoel António,” Feb. 25, 1831, AHNA, cód. 2563, fol.

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93v; “Termo de Fiança de Joaquim Francisco,” Feb. 25, 1831, AHNA, cód. 2563, fol. 94; “Termo de Fiança de Jacinto João,” Feb. 25, 1831, AHNA, cód. 2563, fol. 94v.; “Termo de Fiança de João Manoel,” Feb. 25, 1831, AHNA, cód. 2563, fol. 94v. 157. “Termo de Fiança de Manoel João,” Mar. 17, 1831, AHNA, cód. 2563, fol. 96; “Termo de Fiança de José Francisco,” Mar. 17, 1831, AHNA, cód. 2563, fol. 96v. 158. “Termo de Fiança de Francisco António,” Mar. 21, 1831, AHNA, cód. 2563, fol. 97v. 159. “Termo de Fiança de Pedro Francisco,” Mar. 21, 1831, AHNA, cód. 2563, fol. 98. 160. “Termo de Fiança de Constantino Totela, Pedro Zombo, Garcia Zombo, e Álvaro Zombo,” June 11, 1831, AHNA, cód. 2563, fol. 103. 161. “Testemunho de Miguel João,” Aug. 8, 1771, AHU, Angola, cx. 55, doc. 43. 162. “Testemunho de João da Silva Franco,” Aug. 2, 1771, AHU, Angola, cx. 55, doc. 43. Chapter 10 An earlier version of this chapter was presented at the AHA Annual Meeting, in Washington, D.C., Jan. 3–6, 2008. I want to thank Joseph Miller and Martin Klein, who encouraged me to give continuity to that introductory paper. The present chapter is part of broader and ongoing research funded by Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Científico e Tecnológico-CNPq. 1. Ira Berlin, “From Creole to African: Atlantic Creoles and the Origins of African American Society in Mainland North America,” William and Mary Quarterly 3rd ser., 53, no. 2 (Apr. 1967): 251–88; Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker, The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic (Boston: Beacon, 2000); Robin Law and Paul E. Lovejoy, eds., The Biography of Mahommah Gardo Baquaqua: His Passage from Slavery to Freedom in Africa and America (Princeton, N.J.: Markus Wiener, 2001). 2. In Portugal, and by extension in Brazil, the Royal Medical College had different names over time: the Cirurgião Mór do Reino, corresponding to the First Surgeon, the Real Junta do Protomedicato, and Fisicatura Mór do Reino. To prevent confusion I refer to this institution throughout this chapter as the Royal Medical College. See Tania Salgado Pimenta, “Artes de Curar—Um estudo a partir dos documentos da Fisicaturamor no Brasil do começo do século XIX” (dissertação de mestrado em história, Campinas, UNICAMP, 1997). 3. On maritime slavery in Brazil and nineteenth-century barbeiros and surgeons, see Jaime Rodrigues, De costa a costa (São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 2005). Robert Harms describes eighteenth-century surgeons’ activities on board slave ships in The Diligent: A Voyage through the World of the Slave Trade (New York: Basic Books, 2002). 4. Regarding Mina-Mahi in Rio de Janeiro, see Mariza de Carvalho Soares, Devotos da cor: Identidade étnica, religiosidade e escravidão no Rio de Janeiro, século XVIII (Rio de Janeiro: Civilização Brasileira, 2000); or the recent American edition of this book:

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Notes to Pages 209–210

Mariza de Carvalho Soares, People of Faith. Slavery and African Catholics in EighteenthCentury Rio de Janeiro (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2011). 5. Mariza de Carvalho Soares, “Histórias cruzadas: Os mahi setecentistas no Brasil e no Daomé,” in Tráfico, cativeiro e liberdade (Rio de Janeiro, séculos XVIII–XIX), ed. Manolo Florentino (Rio de Janeiro: Civilização Brasileira, 2005), 71; regarding black militias in Rio de Janeiro, see Michel Mendes Martha, “As milícias de cor na cidade do Rio de Janeiro, sécs. XVIII e XIX,” in Escravidão Africana no Recôncavo da Guanabara, XVII–XIX, ed. Mariza de Carvalho Soares and Nielson Rosa Bezerra (Niterói: Universidade Federal Fluminense, 2011). 6. For a general view of barbeiros in Brazil, see Licurgo dos Santos Filho in his História da Medicina Brasileira, 2nd ed., vol. 1 (São Paulo: EDUSP/HUCITEC, 199l), 340–42. For recent ongoing research, see Ângela Porto, ed., Doenças e escravidão: Sistemas de saúde e práticas terapêuticas, CD-ROM (Rio de Janeiro: Casa de Oswaldo Cruz/Fiocruz, 2007). Two biographies are the most detailed works on black barbeiros in Brazil, both for the nineteenth century: Zephyr L. Frank, Dutra’s World: Wealth and Family in NineteenthCentury Rio de Janeiro (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2004) and Regina C. L. Xavier, Religiosidade e escravidão, século XIX: Mestre Tito (Porto Alegre: EdUFRGS, 2008). The works focusing on the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries are much more limited. See, e.g., Marcia Moisés Ribeiro, “Nem nobre, nem mecânico: A trajetória social de um cirurgião na América portuguesa do século XVIII,” Almanack Brasiliense 2 (Nov. 2005): 68; and Mariza de Carvalho Soares, “A biografia de Ignácio Monte, o escravo que virou rei,” in Retratos do Império: Trajetórias individuais no mundo português nos séculos XVI a XIX, ed. Ronaldo Vainfas et al. (Niterói: EDUFF, 2006), 47–68. 7. In his important work Vassouras, Stanley Stein argues in favor of a temporal range that considers the fifteen years after the end of the Atlantic slave trade. See Stanley Stein, Vassouras: A Brazilian Coffee County, 1850–1900: The Roles of Planter and Slave in a Plantation Society (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1985), 183–95. 8. Tânia Salgado Pimenta, “Ensino médico e antigas práticas: Sangrar e partejar no Rio de Janeiro da primeira metade do século XIX,” Cadernos de Saúde Coletiva 13, no. 2 (2005): 527–44. 9. The building that housed the City Council of Rio de Janeiro caught fire in 1790. Eighteenth-century documents on barbeiros have not been recovered. For Minas Gerais, see Rita de Cássia Marques, “A saúde na terra dos bons ares, poucos médicos e muita fé,” in História de Minas Gerais—as minas setecentistas, ed. Maria Efigênia Lage de Resende and Luiz Carlos Villalta, vol. 2 (Belo Horizonte: Companhia do Tempo/ Autêntica, 2007), 225–45. For Bahia, see A. J. R. Russell-Wood, The Black Man in Slavery and Freedom in Colonial Brazil (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1982) or the Brazilian edition, Escravos e libertos no Brasil colonial (Rio de Janeiro: Civilização Brasileira, 2005), 64, 93–94. 10. The role of slaves in the city during the nineteenth century is described in considerable detail by Mary Karasch. Her work remains the authoritative treatment of slave life in the city for the nineteenth century. Mary C. Karasch, Slave Life in Rio de Janeiro

Notes to Pages 210–215

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1808–1850 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1987). The information about population comes from her tables 3.2, 3.3, and 4.3, pp. 62–63. 11. Jean-Baptiste Debret, Viagem Pitoresca e Histórica ao Brasil: Notas de Sergio Milliet, vol. 2 (São Paulo: Livraria Martins, 1940), “Street Barbers,” plate 11, p. 149; “Barber Shop,” plate 12, p. 151; and “The Black Surgeon,” plate 46, p. 268. The first edition came out in France between 1834 and 1839. The Brazilian edition, organized by Milliet, is the only modern one that includes all plates and the complete original written texts with descriptions of each plate. Unfortunately the book came out with black-and-white plates. Colored plates came out later. See Jean-Baptiste Debret, O Brasil de Debret (Belo Horizonte: Editora Villa Rica, 1993). Regarding Debret and his attention to barbers, I rely on my previous research on the artist. For an analysis of slavery and visual sources, see Mariza de Carvalho Soares, “Art and the History of African Slaves Folias in Brazil,” in Crossing Memories: Slave and African Diaspora, ed. Ana Lucia Araújo, Mariana P. Candido, and Paul E. Lovejoy (Trenton, N.J.: African World Press, 2011). 12. Arquivo Nacional (AN), Fisicatura Mór do Reino, códice 145. All information about the Fisicatura in this chapter comes from this códice. 13. Arquivo da Cúria Metropolitana do Rio de Janeiro, Livro de Testamentos e Óbitos, 1776–84, 42v. For further information about Luiz Alexandre do Couto and other Mina barbers, see Mariza de Carvalho Soares, “A ‘nação’ que se tem e a ‘terra’ de onde se vem: Categorias de inserção social de africanos no Império português século XVIII,” Estudos Afro-Asiáticos 26, no. 2 (2004): 303–30. 14. Joachim John Monteiro, Angola and the River Congo, 2 vols. (London: Macmillan, 1875). 15. Monteiro, Angola and the River Congo, 2:34–35. Those colors are the same for early barber shops and pharmacies all over the world, which indicates the use of those colors over time. 16. Monteiro, Angola and the River Congo, 2:262–63. 17. Monteiro, Angola and the River Congo, 2:262–63. 18. Monteiro, Angola and the River Congo, 2:286–87. 19. Harms, The Diligent; Marcus Rediker, The Slave Ship: A Human History (New York: Viking Penguin, 2007). 20. For the debate, see Joseph C. Miller, “Mortality in the Atlantic Slave-Trade: Statistical Evidence on Causality,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 11, no. 3 (Winter 1981): 385–423; David Eltis, “Mortality and Voyage Length in the Middle Passage: New Evidence from the Nineteenth Century,” Journal of Economic History 44, no. 2 (1984): 301–8. See the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database, www.slavevoyages.org/tast/index. faces. 21. Alberto da Costa e Silva discusses this point in his preface to Pascoe Grenfell Hill, Cinquenta dias a bordo de um navio negreiro (Rio de Janeiro: José Olympio, 2006). 22. According to Gabriel Debien, French surgeons typically arrived in the West Indies at a very young age, around twenty years. Gabriel Debien, Les Esclaves aux Antilles Françaises (XVIIe–XVIIIe Siècles) (Basseterre: Société d’Histoire de la Guadeloupe,

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Notes to Pages 215–216

1975), 36–37. It is perhaps not necessary to point out that treatment from a youthful French surgeon could be more risky than relying upon a well-trained barbeiro. 23. Historian Joseph Miller points to conflicts between captains (who reported deaths) and chaplains in charge of administering the extreme unction to all dying persons on board. The problem is that the numbers do not always match. Miller also notes that beginning in the late eighteenth century “surgeons supplemented chaplains aboard the slave ships” and all the royal regulations “failed to contain captain’s skills at juggling their records and continuing controversies over branding and fraud.” Miller, Way of Death: Merchant Capitalism and the Angolan Slave Trade, 1730–1830 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1988), 407–8. Among the possible frauds, some of then certainly had the cooperation of slave barbeiros. 24. The medical team of Royal Hospital in Lisbon comprised two physicians, two surgeons, one barber-bleeder (barbeiro-sangrador), one apothecary (boticário), one woman for clyster (cristaleira), and some assistants. For barbers at the Royal Hospital in Portugal, see Francis A. Dutra, “The Practice of Medicine in Early Modern Portugal,” in Libraries, History, Diplomacy and the Performing Arts, ed. Israel J. Katz (Stuyvesant, NY: Pendragon Press, 1991), 39. In 1739, the Portuguese crown sent surgeons overseas to different parts of the empire for the first time. Russell-Wood, Escravos e libertos, 381. 25. Those who worked for the navy were called facultativos da tripulação, and those who worked in the army were called facultativos militares. The word “facultativo,” which means not mandatory, refers to members of the navy crew who did not follow a regular career. Regarding barbeiros in Portugal, see Joaquim Barradas, A Arte de Sangrar de cirurgiões e barbeiros (Lisbon: Livros Horizonte, 1999); Georgina Silva dos Santos, Ofício de Sangue: A Irmandade de São Jorge e a Inquisição na Lisboa Moderna (Lisbon: Edições Colibri, 2005). The main regulation for barbers (Regimento do Barbeiro), dated 1620, can be found in Barradas, A Arte de Sangrar, Apêndice 2–5, 237–47. 26. Joaquim José da Silva Maia, Memórias históricas, políticas, e filosóficas da Revolução do Porto em maio de 1828 e dos emigrados portugueses pela Hespanha, Inglaterra, França e Bélgica (obra póstuma) (Rio de Janeiro: Typographia de Laemmert, 1841). Mariana Cândido found that from the eighteenth century Portuguese ships took surgeons and not barbeiros onboard their slave ships. During her ongoing research on Portuguese slave ships at the Arquivo Nacional da Torre do Tombo, she found only one embarkation with two barbers from Congo; all others had surgeons. 27. For instance, the historical literature on the French Caribbean mentions only surgeons, physicians, and black healers. See Matthew Ramsey, Professional and Popular Medicine in France, 1770–1830: The Social World of Medical Practice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). For French colonies, see Karol K. Weaver, Medical Revolutionaries: The Enslaved Healers of Eighteenth-Century Saint Domingue (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2006), 30–33. In France, prior to the national regulations of 1739, surgeons in training were required to complete a one-year residency at the Colonial Hospital. The medical culture of seventeenth-century England and Scotland also witnessed numerous changes and tensions. The Edinburgh Guild of Barber-Surgeons,

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later associated with the Council of the city of Edinburgh, won its first charter in 1505. Barber-surgeons in Edinburgh began receiving academic instruction alongside physicians, and these academically trained surgeons distanced themselves from barbers. At the beginning of the eighteenth century, some physicians entered the College of Edinburgh to learn surgery, which, in return, gave more prestige to surgeons, and surgery was finally accepted as an academic field of medicine. The combined University of Edinburgh Medical School was created in 1726. See http://www.rcsed.ac.uk/site/345/ default.aspx. According to Richard Sheridan, “[T]he white doctor’s orders and prescriptions were administered to patients by black and colored doctors, doctresses, nurses, cooks, midwives, and nursery attendants. These assistants and attendants played an indispensable role in providing medical services to the slaves.” See Richard B. Sheridan, Doctors and Slaves: A Medical and Demographic History of Slavery in the British West Indies, 1680–1834 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 43–48, 73. There is no mention of barbers, and bleeding appears to have been the responsibility of surgeons. 28. British surgeons worked in the Caribbean throughout the eighteenth century, and here, too, references to barber-surgeons are scarce. For Jamaica, see Sheridan, Doctors and Slaves. During the eighteenth century British surgeons routinely embarked for Africa and other places. The British surgeon Alexander Falconbridge became an important member of the Antislavery Society and published An Account of the Slave Trade (London, 1788). Archibald Dalzel, the governor of the Cape Coast Castle, later author of The History of Dahomey (London, 1793), was a surgeon, defending the Atlantic slave trade. Finally, Mungo Park, the famous British explorer, author of Travels in the Interior of Africa (1799), was a surgeon from Edinburgh. 29. Correspondence of Portuguese Governor Luís César de Meneses in Angola is presently under editing by Dr. Regina Wanderley at the Instituto Histórico e Geográfico Brasileiro, where the documents currently reside. 30. Oliveira Mendes (born in Bahia in 1750, deceased in an unknown place and time after 1814) was a lawyer and a member of the Royal Academy of Science (Academia Real das Ciências) in Lisbon. He attended the Medical School in Coimbra/Portugal but never received his medical diploma. See Antonio de Oliveira Mendes, Memória a respeito dos escravos e tráfico da escravatura entre a Costa d’África e o Brazil, prefácio de José Capela (Porto: Publicações Escorpião, 1977), 52. 31. Miller, Way of Death, 408–9, 435. 32. Russell-Wood, Escravos e libertos, 64, 93–94. 33. Manolo Florentino, Em costas negras: uma história do tráfico atlântico entre a África e o Rio de Janeiro (séculos XVIII e XIX) (Rio de Janeiro: Arquivo Nacional, 1993). 34. For this reason, the collection includes permanent licenses for barbeiros working in the city of Salvador. Archival records of provisões and cartas begin in 1809 and run to 1828, but the run of records is very incomplete until the final year, and most existent licenses are from 1828. Independence came in 1822, but the Fisicatura, along with many other Portuguese institutions, persisted relatively unchanged until 1828. 35. Regarding the Brazilian army in Bahia, see Kraay, who provides some

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information about black militias. Kraay, Race, State, and Armed Forces in IndependenceEra Brazil. Bahia, 1790s–1840s. (Standford: Standford University Press, 2001); and Russell-Wood, Escravos e libertos. 36. See www.museuvirtual.medicina.ufrj.br/. 37. Karasch, Slave Life in Rio de Janeiro, 62–63. 38. Frank is working on this as an expansion of his previous work. Frank, Dutra’s World. 39. The Almanak Laemmert was edited in Rio de Janeiro from 1844 to 1889. It lists the barbeiros working in Rio de Janeiro and the surrounding area in an increasing number during this time. There is no information on how names were collected, but almanacs provide the best way to search for professionals of different expertise at the time. Unfortunately, I could not identify information for the twentieth century. The Almanak is available at http://www.crl.edu/brazil/almanak (09/04/2012). 40. Pimenta, “Ensino médico,” 533. 41. Soares, “A biografia de Ignácio Monte.” 42. Tania Salgado Pimenta, “Barbeiros-sangradores e curandeiros no Brasil (1808– 28),” História, Ciência, Saúde 5, no. 2 (1998): 4. 43. For Dutra, see Zephyr Frank, “Individuals and Neighborhoods in NineteenthCentury Rio de Janeiro: Slavery, Freedom, and Spatial History in the Story of Antonio José Dutra” (paper, American Historical Society meeting, 2008). 44. Regarding the slave market in Rio de Janeiro, see Cláudio de Paula Honorato, “Valongo: O mercado de escravos do Rio de Janeiro, 1758–1831” (dissertação de mestrado em história, Niterói, UFF, 2008). 45. Soares, “A biografia de Ignácio Monte,” 47–68; regarding Martins’s inventory, see nn. 56 and 57. 46. AN, Fisicatura Mór do Reino, códice 145. 47. For a more detailed description of those years, see Pimenta, “Sangradores no Rio de Janeiro na primeira metade do oitocentos,” in Doenças e escravidão: Sistemas de saúde e práticas terapêuticas, ed. Ângela Porto, CD-ROM (Rio de Janeiro: Casa de Oswaldo Cruz/Fiocruz, 2007). 48. Leslie Bethell, A abolição do comércio brasileiro de escravos: A Gra-Bretanha, o Brasil e a questão do comércio de escravos. 1807–1869 (Brasília: Senado Federal, 2002), 90. 49. Cláudio Honorato described barbeiros treating recently arrived African slaves in the market of Valongo. According to him, barbeiros and surgeons bought cheap slaves rejected by other buyers (called refugo) to treat and sell them later, for higher prices. Honorato, “Valongo.” 50. For more details about this cooperation see Honorato, “Valongo.” 51. See the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database, Voyage Identification Number 1013. 52. Ferreira is listed as one of the wealthiest merchants of Rio de Janeiro. See João Luiz Fragoso e Manolo Florentino, O arcaismo como projeto—Mercado Atlântico, sociedade agrária e elite mercantil no Rio de Janeiro: Séculos XVIII e XIX (Rio de Janeiro:

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Diadorim, 1993). For a short biography, see Henrique Sérgio de Araújo Batista, “De imigrante a visconde: A Trajetória de Joaquim Antonio Ferreira” (XII Encontro Regional da ANPUH/RJ: Usos do Passado, 2006). 53. Batista, “De imigrante a visconde,” n. 10. 54. Batista, “De imigrante a visconde,” 3. 55. Batista, “De imigrante a visconde,” 3. 56. In an illegal voyage from Mina Coast in 1830, the apprehended escuna Destemida listed fifty ivory teeth instead of the fifty slaves found almost dead in the ship’s hold. Ana Flavia Cicchelli Pires, “O caso da escuna Destemida: Repressão ao tráfico na rota da Costa da Mina—1830—1831,” in Rotas atlânticas da diáspora africana: Entre a Baía do Benim e o Rio de Janeiro, ed. Mariza de Carvalho Soares (Niterói: EdUFF, 2007), 157–89. 57. Florentino, Em costas negras, 282. 58. See Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database, voyages 47337, 49194, 49195, 49957, and 50757. 59. See Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database, voyages 46412 in 1820 and 228 in 1822. 60. Soares, “Art and the History of African Slaves.” 61. The information about Muslims in Rio de Janeiro is based on previous collaborative research with Juliana Barreto Farias that remains unpublished. Mariza de Carvalho Soares and Juliana Barreto Farias, “Religious Tolerance: Black Muslims among White Christians in 19th and Early 20th Century in Rio de Janeiro” (paper, Slavery, Islam, and Diaspora conference, Toronto, Apr. 24–26, 2003). Regarding the jihad of Shehu Uthman dan Fodio and Muslim slaves in Bahia, see João José Reis, Rebelião Escrava no Brasil: A história do Levante dos Malês em 1835, Edição revista e ampliada (São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 2003). 62. I thank Professor Carmen Bernand for a very helpful conversation about barbers, bleeders, and wig makers in France at the time of the French Revolution. 63. “Le médicin-barbier Nupe se caractérise donc principalement par l’étendu de ses compétences . . . les gens savent bien, de même qu’ils connaissent aussi la spécialité des médicins-barbiers étrangers que viennent souvent pratiquer leur art à la capitale. Ainsi, par exemple, tout le mond sait que les barbiers Hausa sont les seuls à pratiquer l’ablation de la luette chez les jeunes enfants.” S. F. Nadel, Byzance noir: Le royaume des Nupe du Nigeria (Paris: Maspero, 1971), 442. 64. “The doctor and his child-patient then sit under the kapwipu tree from which medicine was obtained and the doctor makes incisions on the patient’s stomach beside the navel and on his back, just as for Chisumi, and applies tusumu cupping horns. When a girdle of horns-scars has been made around the patient’s waist, kapwipy medicine is rubbed into them. When all is over, the doctor (chimbuki) buries (wavumbika or wajika) the postherd containers, together with the blood sucked from the patient and kept in a small calabash, in the hole in the ground left by the long taproot taken for medicine.” In a different treatment described on p. 313, the doctor “grasps both horns at once, pulls them off abruptly and empties the blood into a stream.” Victor Turner, The Forest of

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Symbols: Aspects of Ndembu Ritual (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1967), 313, 316. 65. Information about Hausa barber-surgeons provided here comes from the interesting monograph by the anthropologist L. Lewis Wall, which, despite being an anthropological work from the 1970s, does not appear to present much of a risk of backdating oral sources since historical data verify this as a long-standing practice among Hausa. L. Lewis Wall, Hausa Medicine: Illness and Well-Being in a West African Culture (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1988), esp. chap. 6 on Hausa medical practitioners. 66. Wall, Hausa Medicine. 67. Wall, Hausa Medicine, 212–13. 68. Wall, Hausa Medicine, 223–25. 69. Wall, Hausa Medicine, 225. 70. There is an extensive literature on sickle-cell anemia in Africa and among African descendents that I do not list here. For the slave trade, I do mention Walter A. Schroeder, Edwin S. Munger, and Darleen R. Powars, “Sickle Cell Anaemia, Genetic Variations, and the Slave Trade to the United States,” Journal of African History 31, no. 2 (1990): 163–80; for Africa, an early work was presented by Ronald Singer, “The Sickle Cell Trait in Africa,” American Anthropologist, n.s. 55, no. 5, pt. 1 (Dec. 1953): 634–48. There is no information about sickle-cell anemia among slaves in Brazil, just some recent ongoing research with very few results. 71. Wall, Hausa Medicine, 223–24. 72. Wall, Hausa Medicine, 226. 73. Wall, Hausa Medicine, 212–13. 74. Regarding Yoruba and Hausa in Brazil, see Reis, Rebelião escrava no Brasil. 75. AN, Fisicatura Mór do Reino, códice 145. I have to thank Cristiana Lyrio Ximenes, who identified Francisco Pires Guimarães in the list of Bahian traders she is preparing for her dissertation. 76. The biography of Antonio José Dutra and the extensive work by Zephyr Frank shed some light on the subject. Unfortunately, most information about Dutra’s barber shop comes from his inventory postmortem, from 1849. At the time, the presumed heirs were involved in a dispute and the shop was not regularly functioning. Frank, “Individuals and Neighborhoods in Nineteenth-Century Rio de Janeiro.” 77. Paulo César Azevedo and Maurício Lissovsky, eds., Escravos Brasileiros do Século XIX na Fotografia de Christiano Jr., text by Jacob Gorender, Manuela Carneiro da Cunha, and Muniz Sodré (São Paulo: Editora Ex Libris, 1988). 78. Here I make a reference to Paul E. Lovejoy and Jan S. Hogendorn, Slow Death for Slavery: The Course of Abolition in Northern Nigeria, 1897–1936 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993). 79. Regarding how Mina slaves dealt with their African background in Rio de Janeiro, see Mariza de Carvalho Soares, “From Gbe to Yoruba: Ethnic Changes within the Mina Nation in Rio de Janeiro,” in The Yoruba Diaspora in the Atlantic World, ed. Toyin

Notes to Pages 233–236

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Falola and Matt Childs (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004), 231–47; Soares, “A ‘nação’ que se tem.” Chapter 11 1. Giuseppe Marco Antonio Baretti, A Journey from London to Genoa, through England, Portugal, Spain, and France, 3rd ed., 4 vols. (London, 1770), 1:169. 2. Maria João Neves, Miguel Almeida, and Maria Teresa Ferreira, “Separados na vida e na morte: Retrato do tratamento mortuário dado aos escravos africanos na cidade moderna de Lagos,” Actas do 7o Encontro de Arqueologia do Algarve: XELB 10 (2009): 547–60. 3. Letters to the editor, Anglo-Portuguese News (Lisbon), Aug. 17, 2000. 4. “Cemitério de escravos de Lagos é único no mundo,” Diário de Notícias, Dec. 7, 2011, http://www.dn.pt/inicio/ciencia/interior.aspx?content_id=2169763. 5. For some preliminary exploration of this question, see Bernd Reiter, “Portugal: National Pride and Imperial Neurosis,” Race and Class 47 (2005): 79–91. 6. The following represents what I believe is a nearly exhaustive list of book-length manuscripts on the history of blacks in Portugal during the era of the slave trade. This list includes fewer than a dozen books, none of them focused predominantly on Lisbon: Manuel Heleno, Os escravos em Portugal (Lisbon, 1933); Antonio Brasio, Os pretos em Portugal (Lisbon, 1944); A. C. de C. M. Saunders, A Social History of Black Slaves and Freedmen in Portugal, 1441–1555 (Cambridge, 1982); José Ramos Tinhorão, Os negros em Portugal: Uma presença silenciosa (Lisbon, 1988); Jorge Fonseca, Os escravos em Évora no século XVI (Évora, 1997); Ana Maria Rodrigues, ed., Os negros em Portugal: Sécs. XV–XIX; Mosteiro dos Jerónimos 23 de setembro de 1999 a 24 de janeiro de 2000 (Lisbon, 1999); Didier Lahon, O negro na coração do Império: Uma memória a resgatar—séculos XV–XIX (Lisbon, 1999); Alessandro Stella, Histoires d’esclaves dans la péninsule ibérique (Paris, 2000); Jorge Fonseca, Os escravos no sul de Portugal (Lisbon, 2002); Daniela Buono Calainho, Metrópole das mandingas: Religiosidade negra e Inquisição portuguesa no Antigo Regime (Rio de Janeiro, 2008). 7. Estimates of Lisbon’s population on the eve of the 1755 earthquake vary wildly. In popular renderings such as those found on Wikipedia, figures run as high as 275,000. Historian Teresa Rodrigues places the figure at around 191,000 for Lisbon and its immediate suburbs. She estimates that the central city had around 168,000 residents. Teresa Rodrigues, Cinco Séculos de Quotidiano: A Vida em Lisboa do Século XVI aos Nossos Dias (Lisbon, 1997), 26, 39. 8. Admittedly, this is pure speculation. Fonseca shows that the slave population of southern Portugal declined from a high of around 8 percent in the sixteenth century to 4 percent in the seventeenth century. According to A. C. Saunders, slaves represented roughly 10 percent of Lisbon’s population in the 1550s. Assuming that Lisbon’s slave population declined at a similar rate to that in the south, a figure of 5 percent seems reasonable. Thus, Lisbon likely had around ten thousand slaves in 1750. Fonseca, Os

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Notes to Pages 236–238

escravos no sul de Portugal, 25. For Lisbon’s slave demography in the sixteenth century, see Saunders, Social History, 50–58. 9. Baretti, Journey from London, 1:273–74. Also see Anonymous Frenchman, “Descrição da Cidade de Lisboa, 1730,” in O Portugal de D. João V visto por três forasteiros, ed. Castelo Branco Chaves (Lisbon, 1983), 55. 10. Richard Twiss, Travels through Portugal and Spain in 1772 and 1773 (London, 1775), 2. 11. François de Tours, “Itinerário em Portugal, 1699,” in Portugal nos séculos XVII e XVIII: Quatro testemunhos (Lisbon, 1989), 63. 12. Baretti, Journey from London, 1:274. 13. According to Jorge Fonseca, of 115 runaway slaves from Portugal’s interior who were captured in the seventeenth century, 31 (27 percent) were captured in Lisbon. Fonseca, Os escravos no sul de Portugal, 140. 14. Dom Manuel I, quoted in Victor Ribeiro, A Santa Casa da Misericórdia de Lisboa (Lisbon, 1902), 182–83. 15. A history of the Mocambo neighborhood remains to be written. Today, it retains some immigrant flavor, especially from the Cape Verdians who settled there in the 1960s. Though the neighborhood survives in popular memory as an “African” space, its history, especially prior to the 1755 earthquake, remains practically unknown. 16. João Brandão, Grandeza e Abastança da Cidade de Lisboa (1552), ed. José da Felicidade Alves (Lisbon, 1990), 107. Brandão’s account describes the various economic activities in Lisbon, including those along the riverfront. See esp. 72–84. 17. James H. Sweet, “Mutual Misunderstandings: Gesture, Gender, and Healing in the African Portuguese World,” Past and Present Supplement 203, supp. 4 (2009): 128–43. 18. Arquivo Nacional da Torre do Tombo (hereafter ANTT), Casa da Suplicação, Feitos Findos, Livros dos Juízos dos Degredados, Livro 1 (para as Galés), fol. 17v. 19. Didier Lahon, “Inquisição, pacto com o demônio e ‘magia’ africana em Lisboa no século XVIII,” Topoi 5 (2004): 31–33. 20. ANTT, Inquisição de Lisboa, Processos, no. 11767. 21. Other cases of black slaves being accused of carrying mandingas in Lisbon during this period include the following: ANTT, Inquisição de Lisboa, Processos, no. 4260 (Processo of Joseph, single slave of Antônio Marques Gomes, jailed Sept. 23, 1730); ANTT, Inquisição de Lisboa, Processos, no. 15572 (Denunciation of Francisco, slave of João Ruiz do Valle, May 2, 1735); ANTT, Inquisição de Lisboa, Novos Maços, Maço 27, no. 41 (Denunciation of Antônio de Sousa, slave of João de Freitas, Jan. 6, 1733); ANTT, Inquisição de Lisboa, Processos, no. 16722 (Denunciation of Matheus, slave, Aug. 7, 1731). On the use of bolsas in Portugal, see Calainho, Metrópole das mandingas. Also see Laura de Mello e Souza, The Devil and the Land of the Holy Cross: Witchcraft, Slavery, and Popular Religion in Colonial Brazil (Austin, Tex., 2003), 130–41; José Pedro Paiva, Bruxaria e superstição num país sem “caça às bruxas, 1600–1774 (Lisbon, 1997), 113–14; James H. Sweet, Recreating Africa: Culture, Kinship, and Religion in the AfricanPortuguese World, 1441–1770 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 2003).

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22. ANTT, Inquisição de Lisboa, Processos, no. 11767 (José Francisco Pereira) and Processos, no. 11774 (José Francisco Pedroso) 23. According to the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database, 2,083 slaves (imputed) boarded in Africa and 1,789 (imputed) arrived in Lisbon. Thus, roughly one ship arrived from Africa per year, with an average of 200 slaves on board. See www.slavevoyages.org. 24. Anonymous Frenchman, “Descrição da Cidade de Lisboa, 1730,” 60–61. 25. Ibid., 81. 26. Carl Israel Ruders, Viagem em Portugal, 1798–1802, preface and notes by Castelo Branco Chaves, trans. António Feijo (Lisbon, 2002), 52; Rodrigues, Cinco Séculos de Quotidiano, 67. 27. ANTT, Casa da Suplicação, Feitos Findos, Livros dos Juízos dos Degredados, Livro 1 (para as Galés), fol. 9 (Nov. 22, 1750). Similarly, in the city of Porto, the slave Antônio Preto “beat a white man,” for which he received a six-year sentence in the Galleys. Ibid., fol. 7 (Mar. 16, 1750). 28. Suplemento á Gazeta de Lisboa, no. 51, Dec. 19, 1743, 1020. 29. Suplemento á Gazeta de Lisboa, no. 3, Jan. 17, 1743, 60. 30. Anonymous Frenchman, “Descrição da Cidade de Lisboa, 1730,” 61. 31. For the most explicit articulation of the street as “slaves’ space” in Brazil, especially for women, see Sandra Lauderdale Graham, House and Street: The Domestic World of Servants and Master in Nineteenth-Century Rio de Janeiro (Austin, Tex., 1988). 32. Rodrigues, Cinco Séculos de Quotidiano, 68. 33. Maria Rosalina Delgado, ed., O Jornal Manuscrito de Luiz Montez Mattozo: Anno Noticioso e Historico, 1742: Estudo Crítico, vol. 2, Lisbon: Lisóptima Edições/Biblioteca Nacional, 1996), 227. 34. François de Tours, “Itinerário em Portugal, 1699,” 63. 35. Sermon of Father Rafael Bluteau in the Igreja dos Caetanos in January 1723, as quoted in Manuel Bernardes Branco, Portugal na época de D. João V (Lisbon, 1886), 35–37, cited on 173n17. 36. Of the nineteen black convicts, fifteen were slaves and four were freedmen. The actual numbers break down as follows: fifty-seven Europeans (mostly Spaniards and Galicians), fifty-four Portuguese, fifteen black slaves, four freed blacks, two Moors, and one Brazilian. ANTT, Casa da Suplicação, Feitos Findos, Livros dos Juízos dos Degredados, Livro 1 (para as Galés). 37. For descriptions of the galleys, see Charles Frederic de Merveilleux, “Memórias Instrutivas Sobre Portugal, 1723–1726,” in O Portugal de D. João V visto por três foresteiros, ed. Castelo Branco Chaves (Lisbon: Biblioteca Nacional, 1983), 221. Also see João de Mendonça, “Processo do arquitecto inglês John Couston—Condenado pela Inquisição de Lisboa por ser pedreiro-livre, 1743–1744,” O Occidente, Nov.–Dec. 1886, 283–86. 38. ANTT, Casa da Suplicação, Feitos Findos, Livros dos Juízos dos Degregados, Livro 1 (para as galés), fol. 9v. (Nov. 26, 1750). 39. Ibid., fol. 22v (Nov. 24, 1752).

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Notes to Pages 242–247

40. Baretti, Journey from London, 1:169. 41. Merveilleux, “Memórias Instrutivas Sobre Portugal, 1723–1726,” 209. 42. Baretti, Journey from London, 1:125–26. 43. For other descriptions of Africans playing musical instruments in Lisbon’s streets to celebrate feast days in the latter part of the eighteenth century, see William Beckford, Italy: With Sketches of Spain and Portugal, 2 vols. (Philadelphia: Key & Biddle, 1834), 2:56–57 (Sacred Heart of Jesus, 1787); and Ruders, Viagem em Portugal, 52 (St. Anthony), 59 (St. Peter), and 102 (St. Patrick). 44. Since the Mina king was invited to dance the “Zaramangoe,” one would logically conclude that his must be some corruption of a Mina language term. In fact, it seems closely related to the Ovimbundo, “sarapango,” which describes dancing and singing in a circular motion. See both “saragpango” and “surupango,” in Nei Lopes, Dicionário Bantu no Brasil (Rio de Janeiro: Imprensa da Cidade, 1996), 234, 240. 45. Folheto de Ambas Lisboas, no. 7, Oct. 6, 1730 (Lisbon, 1781). Also see Tinhorão’s treatment in Os negros em Portugal, 208–11. 46. On the importance of St. Anthony for Central Africans in the early eighteenth century, see John K. Thornton, The Kongolese Saint Anthony: Dona Beatriz Kimpa Vita and the Antonian Movement, 1684–1706 (Cambridge, 1998). 47. ANTT, Inquisição de Lisboa, Cadernos do Promotor, no. 100, Livro 293, fols. 13–14v. (Oct. 9, 1727). 48. On the “gross insults” of “uninterrupted sneezing” aimed at blacks walking in religious procession, see Ruders, Viagem em Portugal, 52. 49. Gazeta de Lisboa, no. 17, Apr. 28, 1744, 332. 50. See, for instance, the case of the mandingueiro Manuel de Piedade, who fled his master in Porto, running away to Lisbon. ANTT, Inquisição de Lisboa, Processos, no. 9972 (Manuel de Piedade). 51. ANTT, Inquisição de Coimbra, Processos, no. 1630 (Luís de Lima). For more on this mandinga network, see James H. Sweet, “Slaves, Convicts, and Exiles: African Travellers in the Portuguese World, 1720–1750,” in Bridging the Early Modern Atlantic World: People, Products, and Practices on the Move, ed. Caroline A. Williams (London, 2009), 193–202. 52. ANTT, Inquisição de Coimbra, Cadernos do Promotor, no. 102, Livro 396, fol. 221 (July 3, 1760). 53. The two Africans were Domingos Álvares (Mina) and Luzia Pinta (Angola). The creole was Luzia da Silva Soares. And the Indian was Miguel Pestana. For more on these figures, see Laura de Mello e Souza, O diabo e a terra de Santa Cruz: Feitiçaria e religiosidade popular no Brasil colonial (São Paulo, 1986); Luiz Mott, “O calundu Angola de Luzia Pinta, Sabará 1739,” Revista do Instituto de Artes e Cultura, Universidade Federal de Ouro Preto 1 (1994): 173–82; Luiz Mott, “Um Tupinambá Feiticeiro do Espirito Santo nas Garras da Inquisição,” Revista de História (UFES) 18 (2006): 13–28; and James H. Sweet, Domingos Álvares, African Healing, and the Intellectual History of the Atlantic World (Chapel Hill, N.C., 2011).

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54. See Sweet, Recreating Africa, 96–100. 55. Casa da Suplicação, Feitos Findos, Livros dos Juízos dos Degredados, Livro 1 (para as Gales), fol. 45 (Dec. 19, 1755). Chapter 12 1. Throughout this chapter, I cite colonial race labels such as negro, mulato, pardo, and moreno. I cannot judge from the surviving fragments of brotherhood documentation whether individuals described as such labeled themselves in this manner or if these labels were added by the scribe or cleric present. On rare occasions (which are noted in this chapter), individuals chose to make a special point of their race label, but generally New Spanish documents offer no discussion of who chose the description or why. For this reason I use the term “Afro-Mexican” when referring generally to the population of Africans and their descendants in New Spain. My reasoning is to emphasize that “a diverse range of individuals of African descent contributed individually and collectively to many aspects of life in New Spain. . . . [This term] connotes a fluid group and is meant to highlight the long-term presence of people of African ancestry and suggest that they influenced the development of [modern] Mexican religion and society.” See Nicole von Germeten, Black Blood Brothers: Confraternities and Social Mobility for Afro-Mexicans (Tallahassee, 2006), 5. The term “Afro-Mexican” also avoids an inaccurate emphasis on slavery as a defining condition for Africans and their descendants in New Spain—those individuals labeled Afro-Mexican could be slaves or free people. It also rejects labels such as negro and mulato as rigid or constant since Afro-Mexicans manipulated these and other labels throughout their lives. For further discussion, see Joan Bristol, Christians, Blasphemers and Witches: Afro-Mexican Ritual Practice in the Seventeenth Century (Albuquerque, 2007), 1–2 and 12–13, for a discussion of the fluidity of labels such as “black” and “mulatto.” 2. See von Germeten, Black Blood Brothers, 11–40 for an exploration of this pious expression. 3. Von Germeten, Black Blood Brothers, 84. 4. For example, Herman Bennett, Africans in Colonial Mexico: Absolutism, Christianity, and Afro-Creole Consciousness, 1570–1640 (Indianapolis, 2005). Bristol’s Blasphemers also tends to examples from Mexico City. Patrick Carroll’s Blacks in Colonial Veracruz: Race, Ethnicity, and Regional Development (Austin, 2001) offers a regional perspective. Ben Vinson’s Bearing Arms for His Majesty: The Free-Colored Militia in Colonial Mexico (Stanford, 2003) offers a broader vision of Afro-Mexican regional experiences. See also Frank Proctor, Damned Notions of Liberty: Slavery, Culture, and Power in Colonial Mexico, 1640–1769 (Albuquerque, 2010). 5. Lourdes Mondragón Barrios, in Esclavos africanos en la ciudad de México: El servicio domestico durante el siglo XVI (Mexico City, 1999), 36–39, documents slave sales recorded by Mexico City’s notaries, adding to 340 between 1528 and 1609. However, these data by no means reflect the myriad ways Africans might have arrived in Mexico City—some came as conquistadors with Hernando Cortes, others were bought and sold

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in Veracruz, and others came with masters originating in Spain or other parts of the Americas or New Spain itself. 6. For population numbers, see von Germeten, Black Blood Brothers, 73; Bennett, Africans in Colonial Mexico, 23; Bristol, Blasphemers, 4–5; and Matthew O’Hara, A Flock Divided: Race, Religion, and Politics in Mexico, 1749–1857 (Durham, N.C., 2010), 22–24. 7. Frank Proctor, “Slave Rebellion and Liberty in Colonial Mexico,” in Black Mexico: Race and Society from Colonial to Modern Times, ed. Ben Vinson and Matthew Restall (Albuquerque, 2009), 30. 8. Unlike most other regions, Mexico City’s nonelite residents trended toward the broadest classification of casta, which encompassed a large mass of the working and unemployed poor. This trend was perhaps not as dramatic as asserted by R. Douglas Cope in The Limits of Racial Domination: Plebeian Society in Colonial Mexico City, 1660–1720 (Madison, 1994). 9. On the alleged conspiracy, see Proctor, “Slave Rebellion,” 27–31 and von Germeten, Black Blood Brothers, 77–79. 10. Lisa Silverman, Tortured Subjects: Pain, Truth and the Body in Early Modern France (Chicago, 2001), 126–29; see also Andrew E. Barnes, “Religious Anxiety and Devotional Change in Sixteenth-Century French Penitential Confraternities, Sixteenth Century Journal 19, no. 3 (1998): 389–405. One theory explains that European confraternities were popular among those lacking real political power, an idea that can apply also to colonial brotherhoods among the nonelite, although studies of the cargo system in the Andes often connect nascent Indian political power to Catholic brotherhoods. See Thierry Saignes, “The Colonial Condition in the Quechua-Aymara Heartland (1570–1780),” in Cambridge History of the Native Peoples of America: South America, ed. Frank Salomon and Stuart Schwartz (Cambridge, 1999), 59–137. Christopher Black believes that wearing robes and hoods and both public and private flagellation “could lead to intense fraternity” and helped “cast off their external social status.” Christopher F. Black, Italian Confraternities in the Sixteenth Century (Cambridge, 1989), 102–3. 11. Maureen Flynn, Sacred Charity: Confraternities and Social Welfare in Spain, 1400–1700 (Ithaca, N.Y., 1989), 14–16. 12. Isidro Moreno Navarro and Antonio Burgos, La antigua hermandad de los negros de Sevilla: Etnicidad, poder y sociedad en 600 años de historia (Seville, 1997). 13. The worldwide institution of the Santa Casa de Misericórdia, generally maintained by Portuguese in overseas outposts from Brazil to Japan, was the most successful Catholic brotherhood. See Isabel dos Guimaraes Sa, Quando o rico se faz pobre: Misericórdias, caridade e poder no império portugues, 1500–1800 (Lisbon, 1997) and Fernando da Silva Correia, Origens e formacão das Misericórdias portuguesas: Estudos sobre a história da assistencia (Lisbon, 1944). 14. William Christian, Local Religion in Sixteenth-Century Spain (Princeton, N.J.,

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1981), 185–86 and Flynn, Sacred Charity, 127. Christian argues that these foundations were not necessarily a response to Protestantism, which would not have been understood as a heresy in the early 1520s (199). 15. Susan Verdi Webster cites nineteenth-century Mexican historian and politician Lucás Alamán in stating that a penitential Vera Cruz brotherhood existed in Mexico City by 1527, continuing pre-Hispanic disciplinary practices. See Verdi Webster, “Art, Ritual and Confraternities in Sixteenth-Century New Spain: Penitential Imagery at the Monastery of San Miguel, Huejotzingo,” Anales del Instituto de Investigaciones Estéticas 19, no. 70 (1997): 9–11. Mexicans of indigenous ancestry continued these practices to the present. See Stanley Brandes, Power and Persuasion: Fiestas and Social Control in Rural Mexico (Philadelphia, 1988), 62–69. 16. See Richard Trexler, Reliving Golgotha: The Passion Play of Iztapalapa (Cambridge, Mass., 2003), 2–14 and 20–23 for the history of penitential brotherhoods in Europe. For more information on the justification for penitential practice, see Black, Italian Confraternities, 100; Caroline Walker Bynum, Wonderful Blood: Theology and Practice in Latin Medieval Northern Germany and Beyond (Philadelphia, 2007), 9–11; and Barbara Wisch, “The Passion of Christ in the Art, Theater, and Penitential Rituals of the Roman Confraternity of the Gonfalone,” in Crossing the Boundaries: Christian Piety in Italian Medieval and Renaissance Confraternities, ed. Konrad Eisenbichler (Kalamazoo, Mich., 1991), 242–43. 17. Linda M. Heywood, “Introduction,” in Central Africans and Cultural Transformations in the American Diaspora, ed. Heywood (Cambridge, 2002), 2 and John K. Thornton, “Religious and Ceremonial Life in the Kongo and Mbundu Areas, 1500– 1700,” in Heywood, Central Africans, 83–86. 18. Heywood and Thornton, Central Africans, Atlantic Creoles, and the Foundation of the Americas, 1585–1660 (Cambridge, 2007), 49. 19. Thornton, “Religious and Ceremonial Life,” 83. See also Alonso de Sandoval, Treatise on Slavery, ed. and trans. Nicole von Germeten (Indianapolis, 2008), 40, 147. Sandoval does note that slaves departing from Kongo were not necessarily Christian or baptized with sufficient instruction, implying that he made a distinction between subjects of the king of the Congo and those just passing through the kingdom (163). See also James H. Sweet, Recreating Africa: Culture, Kinship, and Religion in the AfricanPortuguese World, 1441–1770 (Durham, N.C., 2006), 191–95. 20. Christopher Steed, History of the Church in Africa (Port Chester, N.Y., 2000), 56–57. 21. John K. Thornton, The Kongolese Saint Anthony: Dona Beatriz Kimpa Vita and the Antonian Movement, 1684–1706 (Cambridge, 1998), 56–58. 22. Catholic priests in seventeenth-century Kongo were more likely to view Kimpasi practices as devil worship, and went so far as to burn their compounds. See Thornton, Kongolese Saint Anthony, 72–74. 23. Thornton, Kongolese Saint Anthony, 101–2.

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24. Sweet, Recreating Africa, 154, 157–59, 162, 170, 206–8. Sweet notes that AfroBrazilian brotherhoods also had antecedents in Portugal and São Tomé. 25. Aguiar y Seixas also formally approved many confraternities during his tenure as Bishop of Michoacán from 1677 to 1680. 26. Libro de la Cofradía del santuario de la Santa Cruz del Calvario y Jesus Nazareno, Patzcuaro, 1683–1721, Casa de Morelos, Cofradías, Asientos, Caja 3, exp. 9. 27. Joseph Lezamis, Breve relación de la vida, y muerte del illmo. y rmo. señor doctor d. Francisco de Aguiar, y Seyxas, que está en la vida del apostol Santiago el mayor (Mexico City, 1699), in chapter titled “Humilidad y Pobreza” (no pagination). 28. Libro de la cofradía de benditas animas, Itzapaluca, Archivo Histórico del Arzobispado de México, Caja 146CL, exp. 3. 29. Frederick P. Bowser, The African Slave in Colonial Peru, 1524–1650 (Stanford, 1974), 247–50. 30. Isidro Sariñana y Cuenca, Llanto del occidente en el ocaso del mas claro sol de las Españas. Fúnebres demostraciones, que hizo, pira real, que erigió en las exequias del rey N. Señor D. Felipe IIII. el Grande el Exmo. Señor D. Antonio Sebastian de Toledo, marques de Manzera, virrey de la Nueva España (Mexico City, 1666). Sariñana provides no more details on the names or specifics regarding numbers of these confraternities. 31. Memorial de todas las cofradías de españoles, mulatos e indios . . . , México, 1706, Archivo General de la Nación, Mexico (AGN), Bienes Nacionales, vol. 574, exp. 2. 32. Von Germeten, Black Blood Brothers, 71–103. 33. See Proctor, “Slave Rebellion,” 27–31 and von Germeten, Black Blood Brothers, 77–79. 34. Von Germeten, Black Blood Brothers, 78. 35. Contra unos mulatos que han formado cofradía y salido en posesión sin licencia . . . , México, 1601, AGN, Bienes Nacionales, vol. 810, exp. 28. 36. Von Germeten, Black Blood Brothers, 188–211. 37. This hospital is now known as the Hospital de Jesus. 38. Testamento de Juan Roque, negro libre, México, 1623–44, AGN, Bienes Nacionales 1175, exp. 11, fol. 53. In medieval Spain, the authorities also approved appointed leaders who represented specific African communities. See Moreno Navarro and Burgos, Antigua hermandad, 43. 39. Kent Russell Lohse explains the origins of this ethnic designation: “Probably deriving initially from the Fula name for the Tyapi ethnic group, the name Sapi referred in the sixteenth century to a loose-knit confederation of small polities just north of the modern Sierra Leone-Guinea border that included people of the Tyapi, Landuman, Temne, Baga, Limba, Jallonke, and Bullom ethnic groups. Some chroniclers also included the Susu, Kokoli, and Loko among the Sapi. At war with Mani between from the mid-sixteenth to the early eighteenth centuries, Sapi contributed thousands of captives to the Atlantic slave trade, and ‘zapes’ appear in sixteenth-century documents in Mexico, Guatemala, Panama, Peru, and Colombia.” See Lohse, “Africans and Their Descendants

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in Colonial Costa Rica, 1600–1750” (Ph.D. diss., University of Texas, Austin, 2005), 101. See also Rina Cáceres, “Mandingas, congos y zapes: Las primeras estrategias de libertad en la frontera comercial de Cartagena: Panamá, siglo XVI,” in Afrodescendientes en las Américas: Trayectorias sociales e identitarias. 150 anos de la abolición de la esclavitud en Colombia, ed. Claudia Mosquera, Mauricio Pardo, and Odile Hoffmann (Bogota, 2002), 143–68. 40. Baltasar Fra Molinero, La imagen de los negros en el teatro del Siglo de Oro (Madrid, 1995), 93–94. Molinero cites a poem that suggests the label “zape” also seems to have implications in terms of early modern Spanish sexual reputations (26). 41. For details regarding the sales of zapes in Mexico City, see Mondragón Barrios, Esclavos africanos, 31–39. Using Mexico City notarial records, Mondragón Barrios found sales of several zapes in groups Mexico City in the 1560s. The sellers included the Sevillan merchant Rodrigo Bazo. For the period from 1528 to 1609, Mondragón Barrios records twenty-two slaves called zapes transferring ownership in Mexico City, but zapes may have come to live in Mexico City without being recorded by notaries. 42. Possibly Juan Bautista traced his lineage to Muslim Wolof speakers in the Senegambian region. The designation “Jalof ” was very common in describing slaves as far back as late fifteenth-century Spain. While these references to African geographic regions or ethnicities were often used inaccurately, P. E. H. Hair argues that “Jalof ” or “Jolof ” accurately placed a slave as coming from the coast and hinterland of modern Senegal. See Debra Blumenthal’s discussion and reference to Hair in “ ‘La Casa del Negres’: Black African solidarity late medieval Valencia,” in Black Africans in Renaissance Europe, ed. T. F. Earle and K. J. P. Lowe (Cambridge, 2005), 230. This article also gives more background on the Iberian origins of Afro-Spanish American confraternities and community formation in Spain. 43. Testamento de Juan Roque, negro libre, fols. 69–71. Bañol and biojo are labels assigned to slaves originating in the Senegambia/Guinea-Bissau region. I do not know the origins of the term terranova. 44. Testamento de Juan Roque, negro libre, fols. 41–42. 45. Autos hechos entre los morenos de la cofradía de Nuestra Señora . . . , México, 1668, AGN, Cofradías y Archicofradías 6407, exp. 51, fol. 2. 46. Autos hechos entre los morenos, fol. 4. 47. Autos hechos entre los morenos, fols. 5–6. 48. Autos hechos entre los morenos, fol. 10. 49. Expediente sobre las cuentas del Hospital del Señor Marqués del Valle, México, 1681, AGN, Hospitales 3610, exp. 6. 50. Trexler cites a Dominican chronicler writing in 1596 who says three penitential confraternities (with only Spanish membership) existed in this convent by 1582: the Descent and Sepulcher of Christ, the Santo Entierro, and the Soledad. Reliving Golgotha, 35. 51. Moreno Navarro and Burgos, Antigua hermandad shows that official rules

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forbade female flagellation, but ultimately the women did march in procession, 65– 66, 82–84, 107, 132. Silverman cites James Banker’s idea that in Italy, “women were excluded from confraternal membership and its attendant practices because their male contemporaries deemed them incapable of the necessary self-examination and self-discipline.” However, she puts forward the idea that gender exclusion may have to do with the understanding of the voluntariness of penitential suffering. Men made a deliberate choice to imitate Christ, who also suffered voluntarily. Women, in the tradition of Eve, suffered without having any choice in the matter. Only voluntary suffering signified contrition and led to redemption. Laboring beneath one’s status had similar meaning. Silverman’s emphasis on free choice and physical labor is especially intriguing in its application to flagellation among enslaved Africans and their descendants, although in the case of Afro-Mexican confraternities, women played leadership roles and may have even flagellated themselves publicly. Silverman, Tortured Subjects, 127–29. 52. Cuenta y razón de la Cofradía de la expiración de Cristo fundada por morenos y mulatos en el convento de religiosos del Señor Santo Domingo, México, 1671, AGN, Cofradías y Archicofradías 651, exp. 24. 53. See von Germeten, Black Blood Brothers, 48–66 for black women’s leadership and participation in confraternities. 54. Licencia que solicita Mauricio Pacheco, negro diputado de la cofradía de la Expiración de Cristo, México, 1667, AGN, Cofradías y Archicofradías 2503, exp. 39. 55. Cofradía de Expiración de Cristo Señor nuestro . . . , México, 1693, AGN, Cofradías y Archicofradías 1874, exp. 6. In New Spain, pardo or brown seems to be a more polite way to describe mulatos. I sense that pardo was more often used as a self-description, whereas mulato was a more insulting term applied by colonial authorities. This of course suggests the fluidity of these labels. See also note 1. 56. La cofradía de la Preciosísima Sangre de Cristo, fundada por morenos y pardos en la Parroquia de Santa Catharina Mártir, sobre que se prueben las constituciones, México, 1686, AGN, Cofradías y Archicofradías 3231, exp. 2. 57. It is not clear if they wished to pass on the status of founder to their eldest sons or not. 58. Expediente sobre la petición de Luís Montaño, rector; Miguel Real, diputado mayor y Nicolás de la Ygera mayordomo de la cofradía de la Preciosísima Sangre de Cristo fundada por morenos, para que se añadieran constituciones, México, 1693–96, AGN, Cofradías y Archicofradías 2235, exp. 23. 59. As in most cases, it is unclear who chose these descriptors, but as always, a notary or professional scribe did the actual writing. 60. Petición de Domingo de Olmos, negro libre, México, 1694, AGN, Cofradías y Archicofradías 2381, exp. 55. 61. See von Germeten, Black Blood Brothers, 48–66. 62. Petición de Pedro de Porras, rector y Juan de Moral, mayordomo, de la cofradía

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de mestizos, mulatos, y negros de la Santa Veracruz, México, 1645, AGN, Cofradías y Archicofradías 2258, exp. 19. 63. Solicitud de Nicolás Enriquez, rector, y Nicolás de Iliberio, mayordomo, de la cofradía de la Expiración de Cristo, México, 1667, AGN, Cofradías y Archicofradías 2503, exp. 29. 64. See von Germeten, Black Blood Brothers, 58–60 for confraternity rules and decrees involving women’s behavior and dress. 65. Solicitud de Alonso de la Torre, negro rector de la cofradía de San Valentín [sic.] de Palermo . . . , México, 1647, AGN, Clero Regular y Secular 5593, exp. 46. 66. Solicitud de los hermanos de la cofradía del Santo Crucifijo, México, 1647, AGN, Clero Regular y Secular 5593, exp. 47. 67. In 1672, this chino brotherhood was involved in another dispute. See Auto de Juan Rivera en nombre de los oficiales de la cofradía de la exaltación de la Santa Cruz, México, AGN, Cofradías y Archicofradías 2376, exp. 23. The confraternity still existed in 1724. See Oficio de los autos sobre elección de rector y mayordomo de la Cofradía del Santo Cristo y Lavatorio fundada por chinos . . . , México, AGN, Cofradías y Archicofradías 3150, exp. 24. In 1722, a confraternity of the Solitud y Dolores in the San Sebastián parish stated that only mulatos, indios, and chinos filipenses could participate, not Spaniards, castizos, or mestizos. See Solicitud de Juan de Messa, español y Cayetano de Aragon, castizo, para que sean devueltos a la cofradía . . . , México, AGN, Civil 2623, exp. 34. 68. Solicitud de Jhoana de Laya, mulata viuda de Nicolás de Bustamante . . . , México, 1657, AGN, Clero Regular y Secular 4601, exp. 14. 69. Denuncia del bachiller Miguel de Perea, promotor fiscal del Arzobispado, en contra de la Cofradía de San Roque, del Hospital de San Lázaro, conformada por mulatos . . . , México, 1677, AGN, Clero Regular y Secular 5603, exp. 114. 70. Carlos M. N. Eire, From Madrid to Purgatory: The Art and Craft of Dying in Sixteenth-century Spain (Cambridge, 1995), 134. 71. Petición de Victoria de la Cruz, negra  .  .  .  , 1667, AGN, Cofradías y Archicofradías 2503, exp. 25. 72. Solicitud de Joseph de Rojas . . . , 1694, AGN, Cofradías y Archicofradías 2381, exp. 17. 73. Agustín Francisco de Aruña pide por su esposa  .  .  .  , 1684, AGN, Cofradías y Archicofradías 2513, exp. 24. In the Iberian and Spanish American contexts, the label “mulato” always implied full understanding of the Spanish language and at least nominal Catholicism. Those labeled mulato were generally Hispanized individuals in terms of dress and occupation. The addition of the word blanca here suggests that Agustín Francisco de Aruña’s wife had a very light skin color. 74. Pascual Díaz’s testament can be found in the Archivo General de Indias, Seville, Bienes de Difuntos, Contratación 413A, N. 1, R. 5. 75. Archivo General de Indias, Seville, Bienes de Difuntos, Contratación 413A, N. 1, R. 5, fol. 9.

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76. Archivo General de Indias, Seville, Bienes de Difuntos, Contratación 413A, N. 1, R. 5, fol. 13. 77. Indulgencias concedidas por el Santísimo Padre Papa Pio Quinto a los cofrades de la cofradía de los morenos . . . , 1729, AGN, Bulas de la Santa Cruzada 3312, exp. 6. 78. Hojas de ser integrantes de la cofradía de los morenos y morenas de derramamiento de sangre, 1727–39, AGN, Cofradías y Archicofradías 870, exp. 11; Cofradías y Archicofradías 4951, exp. 15; Cofradías y Archicofradías 5144, exp. 62. 79. Much of the documentation relating to brotherhoods with African or Afrodescended membership in New Spain demonstrates that women had leadership roles or participated actively. See von Germeten, Black Blood Brothers, 48–68. 80. Von Germeten, Black Blood Brothers, 89. 81. Von Germeten, Black Blood Brothers, 96–102. 82. La cofradía de San Nicolás Monte Calvario se pone de acuerdo . . . , 1628, México, AGN, Cofradías y Archicofradías 2256, exp. 1; Declaración ante notario y testigos de Francisco Maldonado, mayordomo . . . , 1669, México, AGN, Cofradías y Archicofradías 2532, exp. 5. 83. La cofradía de la Preciosísima Sangre de Cristo, fundada por moreno y pardos en la Parroquia de Santa Catharina Mártir, sobre que se prueben las constituciones, 1686, México, Cofradías y Archicofradías 3231, exp. 2. 84. Patente de la cofradía de la Preciosa Sangre de Cristo, por morenos y pardos . . . , 1714, México, AGN, Cofradías y Archicofradías 5023, exp. 3. 85. Libro de recibo de la cofradía de la preciosa sangre de cristo, 1726–27, México, AGN, Bienes Nacionales 190, exp. 6. 86. Petición de Andrés de la Cruz, negro libre, para que Joseph Limón entregue los libros y cuentas de la cofradía de Nuestra Señora de las Angustias . . . , 1672, México, AGN, Cofradías y Archicofradías 5424, exp. 72. 87. Denuncia de Nicolás de la Trinidad mayordomo de la cofradía de negros y mulatos, la liberación y derramamiento de Sangre de Cristo, 1672, México, AGN, Cofradías y Archicofradías 4948, exp. 24. 88. Cuaderno formado de las listas de las cofradías y de su tesoreros . . . , 1788, México, AGN, Bienes Nacionales 1170, exp. 5. 89. Constituciones de la nueva cofradía . . . , 1713, México, AGN, Bienes Nacionales 444, exp. 3. 90. See Nicole von Germeten, “Colonial Middle Men: Mulatto Identity in New Spain’s Confraternities,” in Vinson and Restall, Black Mexico, 136–50. 91. Von Germeten, Black Blood Brothers, 28. 92. Michael P. Carroll, The Penitente Brotherhood: Patriarchy and Hispano-Catholicism in New Mexico (Baltimore, 2002), 84, 86. 93. Expediente con oficios del Excmo: Señor virrey Revillagigedo para q la procesión de corpus se haga con el mayor decoro . . . , 1790, México, Bienes Nacionales 1443, exp. 29. This statement contrasts with what Vinson observes as “contempt for blacks, [and]

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free-coloreds,” that motivated Viceroy Revillagigedo to drastically weaken the institution of the free-colored militias in New Spain. See Vinson, Bearing Arms, 5, 40. 94. Von Germeten, Black Blood Brothers, 123. 95. Pamela Voekel, Alone Before God: The Religious Origins of Modernity in Mexico (Durham, N.C., 2002), 72; Ann W. Ramsey, “Flagellation and the French CounterReformation: Asceticism, Social Discipline, and the Evolution of a Penitential Culture,” in Asceticism, ed. Vincent L. Wimbush (Oxford, 2002), 576. 96. Elizabeth W. Kiddy, Blacks of the Rosary: Memory and History in Minas Gerais, Brazil (University Park, Pa., 2005).

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Bibliographic Essay

In a 1991 analysis of black life in the eighteenth-century British Empire titled “British Encounters with Africans and African-Americans, circa 1600–1780,” in Strangers within the Realm: Cultural Margins of the First British Empire, ed. Bernard Bailyn and Philip D. Morgan (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1991), 157–219, Philip D. Morgan suggested that the relative openness and liberty of life in towns and cities effectively created an “urban frontier” for victims of Atlantic slavery. Morgan’s formulation can be seen as a crucial move away from previous scholars of North American slavery, who had argued that slavery and urban life were incompatible because slavery as a labor system could not survive amid the cultural and social autonomy created by urban social relations. Morgan, building on a couple of decades of work on Atlantic history, knew that slavery had flourished for extended periods in many large and vibrant cites in Brazil and the Caribbean despite all of the standard forms of urban disorder. He knew from his own work that the symptoms of social disorder that antebellum historians of urban slavery had interpreted as evidence of slavery’s demise were as present in Charleston during the eighteenth century as during the 1850s (“Black Life in Eighteenth-Century Charleston,” Perspectives in American History, n.s. 1 [1984]: 187–232). Scholars needed to rethink urban slavery. North American scholars did so, of course, on the foundation formed by the older literature that had centered on questioning whether slavery could survive in cities. For the classic case that slavery could not, see Richard C. Wade, Slavery in the Cities: The South, 1820–1860 (New York, 1964); Robert Starobin, Industrial Slavery in the Old South (New York, 1970) explored incompatibilities between chattel slavery and industrialization. Barbara Jeanne Fields, Slavery and Freedom on the Middle Ground: Maryland during the Nineteenth Century (New Haven, 1985) offered a rigorously Marxian case for slavery’s incompatibility with urban life. Claudia Gale Goldin, Urban Slavery

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in the American South, 1820–1860: A Quantitative History (Chicago, 1976) used quantitative evidence to demonstrate that slavery and urban life were not inherently incompatible. Philip D. Morgan’s work on Charleston, cited above, helped redirect attention away from questions about whether slavery and urban life were compatible by showing that the kind of disorder that Wade had thought indicative of the dissolution of slavery in antebellum U.S. cities had emerged in Charleston prior to the American Revolution. Historians of Latin America—especially Brazil—and the Caribbean had never been attracted to arguments that slavery could not survive in cities, and the demise of that argument in scholarship on North America coincided with the appearance of a number of English-language works on urban slavery that pushed in new directions. Colin Palmer, Slaves of the White God: Blacks in Mexico, 1570–1650 (Cambridge, Mass., 1976) revealed the important role that African slavery played in the early history of Mexico City, drawing from Inquisition sources, while Patrick Carroll showed the vital role of the free and enslaved population played in both the urban and rural hinterland surrounding the port of Veracruz in New Spain (Blacks in Colonial Veracruz: Race, Ethnicity, and Regional Development [Austin, Tex., 1991]). Herman Bennett, Africans in Colonial Mexico: Absolutism, Christianity, and Afro-Creole Consciousness, 1570–1640 (Bloomington, 2003) and Colonial Blackness: A History of Afro-Mexico (Bloomington, 2009) built on Palmer’s and Carroll’s work by using Inquisition records and other ecclesiastical sources such as baptism and marriage records to explore the culture of free and enslaved Africans in Mexico City. Over the last twenty-five years the scholarship on urban slavery in Brazil has grown markedly, catalyzed by the centennial of abolition in 1988. Mary C. Karasch, Slave Life in Rio de Janeiro, 1808–1850 (Princeton, N.J., 1987) traced patterns of slavery and the slave experience in a Brazilian city across the first half of the nineteenth century until the abolition of the transatlantic slave trade. Sandra Lauderdale Graham examined the gendered dimension of urban slavery and in particular the ability of slave and free people of color to form community and family relations both within and outside their masters’ homes in Rio de Janeiro (House and Street: The Domestic World of Servants and Masters in Nineteenth-Century Rio de Janeiro [Austin, Tex., 1992]). João José Reis, Slave Rebellion in Brazil: The Muslim Uprising of 1835 in Bahia, trans. Arthur Brakel (Baltimore, 1993) reveals much about slave life and culture in Salvador, Bahia, in the course of a careful reconstruction and analysis of the Muslim Uprising of 1835. The book edited by Franklin W. Knight and

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Peggy K. Liss, Atlantic Port Cities: Economy, Culture and Society (Knoxville, Tenn., 1991), does not focus specifically on slaves or slavery, but it includes essays on Caribbean and mainland American ports that serviced plantation regions and provides an indispensable introduction to slavery in American Atlantic ports. During in the 1990s, historians became increasingly interested in the different roles slavery played throughout the Atlantic World, and thus in the variety of slave systems that developed. This led to important work on slavery in colonial North American ports that would abolish slavery by the first decades of the nineteenth century. Gary B. Nash, Forging Freedom: The Formation of Philadelphia’s Black Community, 1720–1840 (Cambridge, Mass., 1988) helped initiate this new work, which also included Graham Russell Hodges, Root and Branch: African Americans in New York and East Jersey, 1613–1863 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1999) and Shane White, Somewhat More Independent: The End of Slavery in New York City, 1770–1810 (Athens, Ga., 1991). Others followed the lead of Philip Morgan’s previously mentioned work on Charleston by examining slavery in North American towns and cities that serviced plantation regions. These include James Sidbury, Ploughshares into Swords: Race, Rebellion and Identity in Gabriel’s Virginia, 1730–1810 (Cambridge, 1997) and Midori Takagi, Raising Wolves to Our Own Destruction (Charlottesville, 1999), for Richmond; Seth Rockman, Scraping By: Wage Labor, Slavery, and Survival in Early Republican Baltimore (Baltimore, 2008) and T. Stephen Whitman, The Price of Freedom: Slavery and Freedom in Baltimore and Early National Maryland (Lexington, Ky., 1997) explore the complicated mix of slavery and wage labor in Baltimore; Thomas N. Ingersoll, Mammon and Manon in Early New Orleans: The First Slave Society in the Deep South, 1718–1819 (Knoxville, Tenn., 1999) and Jennifer M. Spear, Race, Sex, and Social Order in Early New Orleans (Baltimore, 2008) look at the development of New Orleans’s racial order in the eighteenth century. Most recently, Amrita Myers has examined the strategies enslaved women employed in nineteenth-century Charleston to gain and protect their freedom (Forging Freedom: Black Women and the Pursuit of Liberty in Antebellum Charleston [Chapel Hill, N.C., 2011]). It has become increasingly clear that slaves and slavery played an important role in early North American urban history. Scholars of the British Caribbean did not participate in arguments about slavery’s ability to survive urban social relations, but because of the dominance of sugar plantations in Caribbean slave societies, the literature on slavery in British West Indian towns is relatively recent. James Robertson, Gone

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Is the Ancient Glory: Spanish Town, Jamaica, 1534–2000 (Kingston, 2005) and Pedro L. V. Welch, Slave Society in the City: Bridgetown, Barbados, 1680–1834 (Kingston, 2003) trace the growth of two important British Caribbean ports. For quite some time Havana has attracted historians who have examined how slaves and free people of color working in artisan shops and trades utilized the bustling port city’s economy to gain freedom and independence. Over forty years ago the Cuban historian Pedro Deschamps-Chapeaux combed through Cuban archives and notarial records in particular to study what he labeled the “petit bourgeoisie of color” (El negro en la economia habanera del siglo xix [Havana, 1971]). More recently, Philip Howard and Matt Childs have highlighted the role of the Habana cabildos in the nineteenth century; see Changing History: Afro-Cuban Cabildos and Societies of Color in the Nineteenth Century (Baton Rouge, 1998) and The 1812 Aponte Rebellion in Cuba and the Struggle against Atlantic Slavery (Chapel Hill, N.C., 2006), and María del Carmen Barcia Zequeira, La otra Familia: Parientes, redes, y descendencia de los esclavos en Cuba (Havana, 2003), who has traced slave families in the port. After being neglected for far too long, the early history of Havana has finally been analyzed by Alejandro de la Fuente, with the collaboration of César García del Pino and Bernardo Iglesias Delgado, Havana and the Atlantic in the Sixteenth Century (Chapel Hill, N.C., 2008). De la Fuente provides the most detailed account of slavery for any Caribbean port city of the sixteenth century by exhaustive research in archival sources, most notably notarial, cabildo, and ecclesiastical records as they document the enslaved experience. Jeremy D. Popkin’s You Are All Free: The Haitian Revolution and the Abolition of Slavery (Cambridge, 2010) explores the class and racial tensions in Cap Français and their role in the abolition of slavery during the Haitian Revolution. The most sophisticated historiography of urban slavery focuses on Brazilian cities. Salvador, Bahia, has attracted a number of excellent scholars. Richard Graham, Feeding the City: From Street Market to Liberal Reform in Salvador, Brazil, 1780–1860 (Austin, Tex., 2010) examines the role of slaves in the provisioning of the capital of Bahia; Mieko Nishida, Slavery and Identity: Ethnicity, Gender, and Race in Salvador, Brazil, 1808–1888 (Bloomington, 2003) looks at the intersection of race, ethnicity, and gender in the lives of Salvadoran slaves; João José Reis, Slave Rebellion in Brazil: The Muslim Uprising of 1835 in Bahia, trans. Arthur Brakel (Baltimore, 1993) and Death Is a Festival: Funeral Rites and Rebellion in Nineteenth-Century Brazil, trans. H. Sabrina Gledhill (Chapel Hill, N.C., 2003) use slave uprisings to trace the

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worldviews of slaves in Salvador. Rio de Janeiro has also attracted excellent historians. Mary C. Karash’s classic Slave Life in Rio, 1808–1850 (Princeton, N.J., 1987) offers a broad overview. Zephyr Frank, Dutra’s World: Wealth and Family in Nineteenth Century Rio de Janeiro (Albuquerque, 2004); Mariza de Carvalho Soares, Devotos da cor: Identidade etnica, religiosidade e escravidão no Rio de Janeiro, século XVIII (Rio de Janeiro, 2000); Carlos Eugenio Libano Soares, A capoeira escrava e outras tradicoes rebeldes no Rio de Janeiro, 1808– 1850, 2nd ed. (São Paulo, 2004) and A negregada instituicao: Os capoeiras na Corte Imperial, 1850–1890 (São Paulo, 1999) look at specific aspects of slave life in Rio. The work of historian Sidney Chalhoub focused specifically on how urban slaves in Rio not only helped to bring about the end of their own enslavement during the 1870s and 1880s, but also catalyzed the demise of the entire institution of slavery (Visões da liberdade: Uma historia das ultimas décadas da escarvodao na corte [São Paulo, 1990]). James H. Sweet, Recreating Africa: Culture, Kinship, and Religion in the African-Portuguese World, 1441–1770 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 2003) is not an explicitly urban study, but it sheds a great deal of light on slavery in Rio de Janeiro. Urban slavery in the mining state of Minas Gerais is analyzed by Kathleen J. Higgins, “Licentious liberty” in a Brazilian Gold-Mining Region: Slavery, Gender, and Social Control in Eighteenth-Century Sabará, Minas Gerais (University Park, Pa., 1999); Elizabeth W. Kiddy, Blacks of the Rosary: Memory and History in Minas Gerais, Brazil (University Park, Pa., 2005). For a comparison of slavery and race in Brazilian and U.S. cities, see Mariana L. R. Dantas, Black Townsmen: Urban Slavery and Freedom in the Eighteenth-Century Americas (New York, 2008). Brazilian cities maintained a much more routine and rounded relationship with African slaving ports than did North Atlantic ports, and historians of Brazil have long explored those connections. On the interpenetration of the commercial worlds of Angola and Brazil, and the participation of Brazilian freed men and slaves in the Angolan slave traffic as merchants, pilots, soldiers, and even slave hunters (in Africa), see Luiz Felipe de Alencastro, O trato dos viventes: Formação do Brasil no Atlántico Sul (São Paulo, 2000); Charles R. Boxer, Salvador de Sâ and the Struggle for Brazil and Angola (London, 1952). The most detailed study to date linking the Angolan port cities of Luanda and Benguela to Brazil with a focus on how individuals shaped the mercantile and legal systems that connected the two regions is Roquinaldo Ferreira’s Cross-Cultural Exchange in the Atlantic World: Angola and Brazil during the Era of the Slave Trade (Cambridge, 2012). On the intense transatlantic connections of Afro-Brazilians to Africa, see João José Reis, Domingos Sodré um

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Sacerdote Africano: Escravidão, liberdade e candomblé na Bahia do século XIX (São Paulo, 2008); James Sweet, Domingos Alvares: African Healing, and the Intellectual History of the Atlantic World (Chapel Hill, N.C., 2011); Linda M. Heywood, ed., Central Africans and Cultural Transformations in the American Diaspora (Cambridge, 2002); and José C. Curto and Paul E. Lovejoy, eds., Enslaving Connections: Changing Cultures of Africa and Brazil during the Era of Slavery (New York, 2004) . The growing number of studies of slavery in the slaving ports of West and West-Central Africa is fundamentally altering our understanding of the relationships among the cultures of Africa and those of Africans in the Americas. Joseph C. Miller, The Way of Death: Merchant Capitalism and the Angolan Slave Trade, 1730–1830 (Madison, Wis., 1996) is the landmark study in this regard. The two best monographs on individual slaving ports are Robin Law, Ouida: The Social History of a West African Slaving “Port,” 1727–1892 (Athens, Ohio, 2004) and Kristin Mann, Slavery and the Birth of an African city: Lagos, 1760–1900 (Bloomington, 2007). Important studies that touch on aspects of Calabar’s history have greatly enriched our understanding of that important group of slaving towns. Ugo Nwokeji’s recent study details the vast merchant networks that linked the towns of Old Calabar, New Calabar, and Bonny far into the interior of the Bight of Biafra and across the Atlantic to British colonies (The Slave Trade and Culture in the Bight of Biafra: An African Society in the Atlantic World [Cambridge, 2010]). For the relationship between British slave trading factors and Calabar merchants, see Paul Lovejoy and David Richardson, “Trust, Pawnship, and Atlantic History: The Institutional Foundations of the Old Calabar Slave Trade,” American Historical Review 104, no. 2 (Apr. 1999): 333–55. For excellent insights into these types of relations, consult Stephen Behrendt, A. J. H. Latham, and David Northrup, The Diary of Antera Duke, an Eighteenth-Century African Slave Trader (New York, 2010) for the latest and most extensively annotated version of the diary as well as for an important interpretive essay. In a slim but insightful volume, Randy J. Sparks offers a wonderful account of the lives of two young members of a slave trading family from Calabar that analyzes the complicated world of Calabar (The Two Princes of Calabar: An Eighteenth-Century Atlantic Odyssey [Cambridge, Mass., 2004]). Robert Harms, The Diligent: A Voyage through the Worlds of the Slave Trade (New York, 2002) includes important chapterlength discussions of several West African slaving forts in the process of unfolding the story of a single slaving voyage. European Mediterranean cities have also been the focus of new scholarship

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on African slavery that provides critical insights into the origins and evolution of Atlantic slavery in the Americas. Debra Blumenthal, Enemies and Familiars: Slavery and Mastery in Fifteenth-Century Valencia (Ithaca, N.Y., 2009) and David Wheat, “Mediterranean Slavery, New World Transformations: Galley Slaves in the Spanish Caribbean, 1578–1635,” Slavery and Abolition 31 (2010): 327–44 have shown how Portugal and Spain experienced a growth of African slavery as the long-dominant slave market of Muslim captives, even in the Caribbean, slowly faded away. A. C. de C. M. Saunders, A Social History of Black Slaves and Freedman in Portugal, 1441–1555 (Cambridge, 1982) and Jose Luis Cortés López, La esclavitud negra en la España peninsular del siglo XVI (Salamanca, 1989) also shed abundant light on urban slavery in Portugal and Spain. Especially important for understanding slavery in the New World is the study of the small Atlantic islands Sao Tomé and Príncipe, off the coast of West Africa, that served as critical ports for connecting the Luso-Atlantic empire of Portugal: Izequiel Batista de Sousa, Sao Tomé et Príncipe de 1485 à 1755, une société coloniale: Du blanc au noir (Paris, 2008). Portugal and Spain also witnessed the rise of black religious sodalities that provided urban slaves and free colored populations spaces for self organization and ethnogenesis. The literature on these sodalities is growing, and the most recent studies include Ignacio Camacho Martinez, La hermandad de los mulatos de Sevilla: Antecedentes históricos de la Hermandad del Calvario (Seville, 1998) and Isidoro Moreno Navarro, La antigua hermandad de los negros de Sevilla: Etnicidad, poder y sociedad en 600 años de historia (Seville, 1997). It was the “disorder” of urban slavery that prompted Morgan to call the British American urban Atlantic a “frontier.” The literature seems to confirm his historiographical insight. For slaves, Atlantic cities were “borderlands within.” In 1990, for example, Sidney Chalhoub demonstrated in Visões da liberdade that abolition in imperial Brazil was linked to the role of Rio as a space of marronage. Like in the city today, there were black neighborhoods in the former imperial capital that remained outside the reach of the state. Cities acted as “borderlands” in which slaves took advantage of cultural and legal openings not so readily available in plantations. In the Spanish and Portuguese Atlantics, for example, the law contemplated slaves’ ability to purchase their freedom. Slaves for hire enjoyed mobility as well as the ability to accumulate some capital of their own. Some slaves purchased slaves to trade in exchange of their own freedom, a Brazilian practice that has been described by Andrea Lisly Gonçalves, “Alforrias resultants a troca de cativos (Comarca de Ouro Preto, século XIX),” in Termo da Mariana: História

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e documentação, ed. Andrea Lisly Gonçalves and Ronaldo Polito de Oliveira (Mariana, Brazil, 2004), 47–55. In Dutra’s World, Zephyr Frank has shown how slaves and the freed colored populations in Rio accumulated property and capital by purchasing slaves themselves. These strategies of self-purchase and manumission led to the growth of large urban freed colored populations in Brazil and Spanish America. The best synthesis on this phenomenon can be found in Rafael de Bivar Marquese, “A dinâmica da escravidão no Brasil: Resistência, tráfico negreiro e alforrias, séculos XVII a XIX,” Novos Estudos 74 (Mar. 2006): 107–23. Lyman Johnson’s “Manumission in Colonial Buenos Aires, 1776–1810,” Hispanic American Historical Review 59 (1979): 258–79, remains insightful for exploring the process from detailed records housed in notarial archives that many subsequent scholars modeled for other Black Atlantic cities. For a study of the manumission process in nineteenth-century New Orleans in the decades leading up to the Civil War, see Judith Kelleher Schafer, Becoming Free, Remaining Free: Manumission and Enslavement in New Orleans, 1846–1862 (Baton Rouge, 2003). For one of the most detailed studies of Brazilian slavery in an urban environment with specific attention to the process of manumission, see Ian Reed, The Hierarchies of Slavery in Santos Brazil, 1822–1888 (Stanford, 2012). For urban female slaves, the city was also a space for opportunities. Female slaves gained manumission by accumulating capital as market women. They also gained freedom by becoming mistresses of slave masters. There is abundant literature on how urban slave women became the most effective purchasers of freedom. See, for example, L. Virgina Gould, “Urban SlaveryUrban Freedom: The Manumission of Jaqueline Lemelle,” in More than Chattel: Black Women and Slavery in the Americas, ed. David Barry Gaspar and Darlene Clark Hine (Bloomington, 1996), 298–314; Júnia Ferreira Furtado, Chica da Silva e o contratador dos diamantes: O outro lado do mito (São Paulo, 2003); and Kathleen J. Higgins, “Licentious Liberty” in a Brazilian Gold-Mining Region: Slavery, Gender, and Social Control in Eighteenth-Century Sabará, Minas Gerais (University Park, Pa., 1999). Cities offered other opportunities for urban slaves for hire besides greater access to capital for self-manumission. Service in the militias during wars (beginning with the Conquest) was a frequent path to manumission and elite recognition and in some cases even led to the acquisition of nobility titles. Mathew Restall, “Black Conquistadors: Armed Africans in Early Spanish America,” Americas 57 (2000): 171–205 explores the role of black slaves in the conquest of the America. There are several illuminating studies that

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demonstrate the role of black slave militias in manumission and black upward social mobility, including those by Hendrik Kraay, “Arming Slaves in Brazil from the 17th Century to the 19th Century,” in Arming Slaves: From Classical Times to the Modern Age, ed. Christopher Leslie Brown and Philip D. Morgan (New Haven, 2006), 146–79; Hebe Mattos, “ ‘Black Troops’ and Hierarchies of Color in the Portuguese Atlantic World: The Case of Henrique Dias and His Black Regiment,” Luso-Brazilian Review 45 (2008): 6–69; and Francis Dutra, “A Hard-Fought Battle for Recognition: Manuel Gonçalves Doria, First Afro-Brazilian to Become a Knight of Santiago,” Americas 56 (1999): 91–113. The most detailed and insightful analysis of the free-colored militia in Latin America is Ben Vinson, Bearing Arms for His Majesty: The Free-Colored Militia in Colonial Mexico (Stanford, 2001), which emphasizes how free soldiers of color claimed rights, known as the fuero, denied to general free people of color. For the French Caribbean, Stewart King demonstrates how the free people of color militia provided social distinction and opportunities for economic advancement in Blue Coat or Powdered Wig: Free People of Color in Pre-Revolutionary Saint Domingue (Athens, Ga., 2001). Cities also provided slaves with opportunities to manipulate Church canon law and gain access to ecclesiastical courts. The literature on slave judicial strategies at ecclesiastical and lay courts to provoke intervention against abusive masters is growing. Pioneering work that has shaped many of the issues historians continue to investigate includes Jane G. Landers, Black Society in Spanish Florida (Urbana, Ill., 1999). Good examples of this new literature are Javier Villa-Flores, “ ‘To Lose One’s Soul’: Blasphemy and Slavery in New Spain, 1596–1669,” Hispanic American Historical Review 82 (2002): 435–68; Marcela Echeverri, “ ‘Enraged to the Limit of Despair’: Infanticide and Slave Judicial Strategies in Barbacoas, 1788–1798,” Slavery and Abolition 30 (2009): 403–26; Bianca Premo, “An Equity Against the Law: Slave Rights and Creole Jurisprudence in Spanish America,” Slavery and Abolition 32 (2011): 495– 517; and Alejandro de la Fuente, “Slaves and the Creation of Legal Rights in Cuba: Coartación and Papel,” Hispanic American Historical Review 87 (2007): 659–92. Anne Twinam, “Racial Passing: Informal and Official ‘Whiteness’ in Colonial Spanish America,” in New World Orders: Violence, Sanction and Authority in the Colonial Americas, ed. John Smolenski and Thomas J. Humphrey (Philadelphia, 2005), 249–72, shows that some urban free colored purchased in court the status of whiteness. Maria Elena Díaz in The Virgin, the King, and the Royal Slaves of El Cobre: Negotiating Freedom in Colonial Cuba, 1670– 1780 (Stanford, 2000) argues that the figure of “slaves of the king” allowed

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some slaves to avoid being sold as individuals, which in turn allowed them to create and preserve relatively large autonomous communities. These communities would themselves go to court to gain urban rights. Herman Bennett in Africans in Colonial Mexico and Christine Hunefeldt in Paying the Price of Freedom: Family and Labor Among Lima’s Slaves, 1800–1854 (Berkeley, 1995) also argue that urban slaves manipulated canon law and the courts to avoid being separated from their nuclear and extended families. The essays in this volume build on this literature by taking an explicitly Atlantic approach and by foregrounding the experiences of the enslaved.

Contributors

Trevor Burnard is the author of several books on Atlantic history and on white slave owners on the Chesapeake and in Jamaica. He has written a large number of articles on such things as the history of early Jamaica; gender, whiteness, and slavery in plantation societies; and the character of the planter class in the British Atlantic World. He is Head of the School of Historical and Philosophical Studies at the University of Melbourne. Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra is the Alice Drysdale Sheffield Professor of History at the University of Texas–Austin. He is the author of How to Write the History of the New World (Stanford, 2001); Puritan Conquistadors (Stanford, 2006); and Nature, Empire, and Nation (Stanford, 2006). Mariza de Carvalho Soares is Professor Associado of African History and African Diaspora History at Universidade Federal Fluminense, Brazil. Her book People of Faith: Slavery and African Catholics in Eighteenth-Century Rio de Janeiro (Duke University Press, 2011) received the Roberto Reis Prize from the Brazilian Studies Association (BRASA) in 2012. She has published extensively in Brazil and has directed several collaborative research projects. Matt D. Childs is Associate Professor and Director of the History Center at the University of South Carolina. His publications include The 1812 Aponte Rebellion in Cuba and the Struggle against Atlantic Slavery (2006) and, edited with Toyin Falola, The Yoruba Diaspora in the Atlantic World (2005) and The Changing Worlds of Atlantic Africa: Essays in Honor of Robin Law (2009). Kevin Dawson is Assistant Professor of History at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. He received his Ph.D. from the University of South Carolina. His

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Contributors

research considers Atlantic history and the African diaspora, specifically slaves’ maritime culture. Roquinaldo Ferreira is Associate Professor of History and African-American and African Studies at the University of Virginia. He is the author of Cross Cultural Exchange in the Atlantic World: Angola and Brazil during the Era of the Slave Trade (Cambridge University Press, 2012). David Geggus is Professor of History at the University of Florida, Gainesville. He is the author of Slavery, War and Revolution (1982), Haitian Revolutionary Studies (2002), and more than a hundred scholarly articles. Most recently, he edited, with Norman Fiering, The World of the Haitian Revolution (2009). Jane Landers is Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Professor of History. She is the author of numerous books, chapters, and articles on Africans in the Atlantic World, the most recent being Atlantic Creoles in the Age of Revolutions. She directs a project preserving the oldest records for Africans in Cuba, Brazil, and Colombia (http://www.vanderbilt.edu/esss/index.php). Robin Law is Emeritus Professor of African History, University of Stirling, and Visiting Professor in History, University of Liverpool. He is the author of The Oyo Empire c. 1600–c. 1836 (1977), The Horse in West African History (1980), The Slave Coast of West Africa, 1550–1750 (1991), and Ouidah: The Social History of a West African Slaving “Port,” 1727–1892 (2004). David Northrup (Ph.D., UCLA) was a professor of history at Boston College from 1974 to 2012, specializing in African and world history. His many publications have dealt with sub-Saharan Africa, the Atlantic, and global connections. He is a past president of the World History Association. James Sidbury is the Andrew W. Mellon Distinguished Professor of the Humanities in the Department of History at Rice University. He is a historian of race and slavery in the eighteenth-century British Atlantic. João José Reis is Professor of History at the Universidade Federal da Bahia (UFBA) in Brazil. He is the author of Slave Rebellion in Brazil: The Muslim Uprising of 1835 in Bahia (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993) and Death Is a Festival: Funeral Rites and Popular Rebellion in Nineteenth-Century Brazil

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(University of North Carolina Press, 2003), which earned the 1996 Clarence H. Haring Prize from the American Historical Association and the 1992 Jabuti Prize for Nonfiction from the Brazilian Book Council. James H. Sweet is Vilas Distinguished Achievement Professor of History at the University of Wisconsin. He is the author of two prize-winning books, Recreating Africa: Culture, Kinship, and Religion in the African-Portuguese World, 1441–1770 (University of North Carolina Press 2003) and Domingos Álvares, African Healing, and the Intellectual History of the Atlantic World (University of North Carolina Press, 2011). Nicole von Germeten is an Associate Professor of History at Oregon State University. She has published two books and several articles on Afro-Latin American Catholicism, race, and class in the Spanish viceroyalties. Her third book explores race, sexuality, witchcraft, and honor in seventeenth- and eighteenthcentury Cartagena, Colombia.

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Index

Abeokuta (Yorubaland), 38, 40, 61 abolition of slave trade (Atlantic): Brazil, 220–21; British interdiction of slave trade and recaptives in Sierra Leone, 12–13, 23–24; Cuba, 85. See also under slave trade Adderley, Rosanne, 22 Africanization, 14; African religious practices (Luanda), 198–201 (see also alembamento; juramento of Ndua; xinguillamento); concerns of Africanization in São Salvador da Bahia, 76; in conjunction with creolization in Sierra Leone, 22, 24, 27– 34; movement of Ekpe (secret society) from Africa to Cuba, 92; pan-Yoruba nationality, Sierra Leone, 39; white female brotherhood members “acting and dressing black,” Luanda, 201–2. See also Afro-Europeans; Candomblé; cultural hybridization/fusion; secret societies; under individual mutual aid associations for specific African religious practices Africanus, 27–28. See also Horton, James A. B.; Sancho, Ignatius; Vassa, Gustavus Afro-Europeans: Afro Europeans/ Brazilians, Ouidah, 43, 44, 48, 52–53, 55; Cap Français, 103–7, 109. See also Almeida, Antonio de; Medeiro de; Oliveira de; Souza, Francisco Felix de Agbo, Casimir, 52, 53–55, 59, 61 Aguiar y Seixas, Francisco (archbishop),

253–54. See also brotherhoods; Catholic Church Ajayi Crowther, Samuel (African Anglican bishop), Sierra Leone, 25, 26, 28, 38, 39. See also under missionaries Akoo (Aku) in Sierra Leone: languages, 33, 34, 39; nation, 28; Oyo diaspora, 28, 30, 31 Alexander, James J., on Havana population, 95 Allada (kingdom): diaspora, Ouidah, 47, 51, 56; healing practices, Cartagena, 152 (see also Arará, Mateo; barbeiros; healers); place of origin of Jeje, São Salvador da Bahia, 67 Almanak Laemmert (1844–89), on barbeiros, 219. See also barbeiros Almeida, Antonio de, 52, 54, 55. See also Afro-Europeans Almeida, Pedro Felix de, 48. See also AfroEuropeans amnesia (collective national), of African slave past in Portugal, 234–35. See also Pio, Duarte Andrade (Jesuit), on health and disease in Cartagena, 150. See also under Cartagena; health and healing practices; Jesuits Angola, 7–8, 12, 15, 21, 22; barbershops in Angola, 213–15; leech trade between Angola and Brazil, 14, 215; links with Brazil, 21; links with Ouidah, 44, 52; slaves from Luanda in Angola as

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Angola, (cont’d ) pumbeiros, 193. See also under Angolan diaspora; barbeiros; barbers; cultural hybridization/fusion; healers; health and healing practices; slave trade; WestCentral Africa Angolan diaspora: Cartagena, 149–50, 158; Lisbon, 239–40, 243–44; Mexico City, 245, 251; São Salvador da Bahia, 14, 66–68, 71, 73, 76, 80. See also under barbeiros; barbers; cultural hybridization/fusion; healers; health and healing practices; nations; Nkisi Aponte Rebellion (1812), Havana, 18, 89 Arará, Francisco (captain), 155, 157, 159, 160, 161. See also Arará nation; Matudere Arará, Mateo (herbalist/healer), 151–52. See also under Inquisition in Spanish Atlantic Arará nation, in Matudere, 156–61. See also Arará, Francisco; Matudere Ararás of Cartagena, 10, 159. See also Arará nation; mutual aid associations arimos, Luanda, 190–91. See also Recôncavo “Atlantic creole,” 81, 208 Atlantic mobility (Africans): Atlantic travel between Luanda and Rio de Janeiro for business, labor, and education, 205–6, 246; barbeiros as itinerants in the Atlantic, 230; Pascual Diaz’s (mulato) links with confraternites across Iberian Atlantic, 263–64; slave mobility according to skills and gender, 204; slave pilots in British Atlantic, 163–84; slave travel without masters, 205. See also Baquaqua, Mohammah Gardo; barbeiros; Díaz, Pascual; mandinga trade; Salvador, Manoel de; slave pilots Auberteuil, Hillard de, 104 autonomy in Black Atlantic, 11; autonomous parishes in Sierra Leone, 10, 25–34. See also under Atlantic

mobility; barbeiros; canto; ganho; kitandeiras; mutual aid associations; port cities; slave pilots Badagry (Yorubaland), links with: Ouidah, 59, 60, 64; Sierra Leone, 38 Baquaqua, Mohammah Gardo (slave), Atlantic travels, 50, 51, 208 barbeiros (slave healers, blood letters, and hair dressers): in Angola, 213–14; Portuguese Atlantic barbeiro licenses, 216–17; Portuguese Atlantic, African barbeiros owning other barbeiros for “hiring out” (see Martins, José do Santos); Portuguese Atlantic, Hausa healing practices, 227–28; Portuguese Atlantic, on slave ships as healers and translators, 215–16, 220–22; Portuguese Atlantic, Rio de Janeiro masters hiring out barbeiro slaves to ships (see Ferreira, Joaquim Antonio); Rio de Janeiro, 11, 212; Rio de Janeiro, African barbeiros owning other barbeiros for “hiring out” (see Martins, José do Santos); Rio de Janeiro, barbeiros’ ethnicity, 14, 218; Rio de Janeiro, brotherhood, 14, 209, 219, 220; Rio de Janeiro, campaigns against barbeiros, 219–20; Rio de Janeiro, guilds, 14; Rio de Janeiro, surgeons, 210; Rio de Janeiro, urban free barbeiros, 209, 220. See also barbers in Cartagena; health and healing practices; health and healing practices (regulation); Inquistion (Portuguese) barbers (bloodletters), Cartagena, 159–60. See also Francisco; Vera, Francisco de Bariba diaspora (Africans from Borgu): Cap Français, 110; Ouidah, 50, 53, 54; São Salvador da Bahia, 65, 76 Barnes, Sandra, 60 barracoons (slave pens), on African Atlantic Coast, 163. See also slave yards Barry, Boubacar, 165

Index Bartholomew, Joseph (African minister), Sierra Leone, 25. See also missionaries; religion Bay, Edna, 50 Bayley, Frederick, 173–74 Bayly, Zachary (slave trader), Kingston, 139–40 Beckwith, George (governor), ties with slave pilots, 177–78. See also under slave pilots Belley, Jean-Baptiste (colonial deputy in French Revolution), Cap Français, 105 Benguela: Benguela laws on kitandeiras (female slave street vendors), 192–93; Benguela merchants and slave owners, 191, 192; Benguela military forces, 200, 201; Benguela slaves and Atlantic mobility, 202–4; Brazilian slave traders in Benguela, 224 (see Ferreira, Joaquim Antonio); Rio de Janeiro barbeiros’ links with Benguela, 229. See also Benguela (diaspora) Benguela (diaspora): Bahia, 66, 71; barbeiros in Rio de Janeiro, 14, 221, 222, 223; Sierra Leone, 31. See also Benguela Benin, Bight of (diaspora): barbeiros in Brazil, 224; Cap Français, 105, 110; recaptives in Sierra Leone, 31–32; São Salvador da Bahia, 64, 65, 224 Benito de Palermo, San, veneration of: Cuba, 92; Lisbon, 238, 240; Mexico City, 255, 257; São Salvadar da Bahia, 72. See also Bloodshed of Christ; El Santo negro Rosambuco de la ciudad de Palermo; Nossa Senhora de Guadalupe; San Benito Palermo Bercy, Drouin de, 117 Bergson, Henri, on “inversion of roles,” 175. See also slave pilots Berlin, Ira, 110, 130, 182; “Atlantic Creoles,” 208 Bermuda, 163–84. See also slave pilots Biafran, Bight of (diaspora): cultural heritage in Havana, 94, 110; healing practices in Cartagena, 151 (see also

357

Eguiliz, Paula de); recaptives in Sierra Leone, 32, 34; secret societies, 92 Birth of African-American Culture: An Anthropological Perspective, The (Mintz; Price), 87, 88 Black Man in Slavery and Freedom, The (Russell-Wood), 218 Bloodshed of Christ (Mexico City brotherhood), 260; burials, 264–65; provision of health care, 266; veneration of San Benito de Palermo, 265; women, 265. See also Benito de Palermo; brotherhoods; women Bluteau, Rafael (priest), on crime in Lisbon, 241. See also crime Bolster, Jeffrey W., 164, 166, 182 Bori (spiritual possession cult), São Salvador da Bahia, 14, 73, 76–78. See also Candomblé Borno (diaspora): Ouidah, 51, 52, 55; São Salvador da Bahia, 65, 68, 76. See also nations Boston Evening-Post, on rebellion, Kingston, 133 Bowser, Frederick, on Afro-Peruvian brotherhoods, 254 Bremer, Frederika, 96 Bright, Henry (factor), on Kingston slave trade, 127 Bright, Lowbridge (scion of a Bristol family), on Charleston, 125 Brooks, George, 21 brotherhoods: Lisbon, ethnic identities, 243–45; Luanda, complaints of lack of piety, 198; Luanda, ethnic identities, 197; Luanda, health care, 197; Luanda, slave members, 197; Mexico City, burials, 250, 263–65; Mexico City, colonial and religious authorities, 267; Mexico City, ethnic identity, 250; Mexico City, health care, 250, 265–66; Mexico City, penitential blood brotherhoods and flagellation, 8–9, 250–53, 260–61, 267; Mexico City, rebellion, 255–56; Mexico

358

Index

brotherhoods: Lisbon, ethnic identities (cont’d) City, religious processions, 256, 262, 267; Mexico City, slave members, 260; Mexico City, women in leadership positions, 8–9, 260–62; Mexico City and Atlantic networks of brotherhoods, 6, 250–51 (see also Díaz, Pascual); Rio de Janeiro, barbeiro brotherhood, 14, 209, 219–20; São Salvador da Bahia, ethnic identities, 14, 71–72, 81. See also individual brotherhoods Brown, Vincent, 18 burial practices (Africans): burial societies, Cap Français, 117–18; cabildos de nación, Havana, 98, 108; Catholic brotherhoods, Mexico City, 8–9, 248, 250–51, 259, 264–65; Lagos, 235; Lisbon, 234–37; New York, 235. See also brotherhoods; cabildos de nación; Candomblé; mutual aid societies Burnard, Trevor, 17–18, 64, 112, 122–44, 189, 211, 224, 240 cabildos de nación, Havana: aiding with manumission of slave members, 97; burials, 98; ethnic identity, 33, 86–100; festivals, 95–97; finances and cabildo donations, 91; health care, 98; parallel cabildo culture in Africa (secret societies), 92–93; provision of credit, 97; relationship with Catholic Church, 90–91; slave members, 97; Yoruba culture, 88–89. See also under mutual aid societies Cabinda (diaspora): barbeiros, 229; nation, São Salvador da Bahia, 66; slaves for hire in Luanda, 190. See also barbeiros; nations; slaves for hire Cabo Verde (diaspora), slaves in Cartagena, 148–49 Cadornega, Antonio de Oliveira (Luanda historian), 197 Calabar (diaspora): Calabah nation in Sierra Leone, 29, 31, 32; Calabar slaves

and employment licenses for Atlantic travel, 222, 223; identity formation in Sierra Leone, 13, 29, 32, 34; secret societies (Ekpe or Egbo), 60, 92; slaves in Havana, 86. See also under barbeiros; Carabali, Ekpe; nations (African); secret societies Calumbo (near Luanda), festivals organized by slaves, 199–200 Candomblé (associations for spiritual possession cults), São Salvador da Bahia: “acculturation” and “hybridity,” 81–82 (see also Sodré, Domingos Pereira); accusations of witchcraft and deportations, 76, 80; organized by ethnicity, 71; Orisa cult 76, 80; relationship with suburban quilombo, 74–75; temples of cult houses, 14, 72–73; women and priestesses, 72–73. See also cultural hybridization/ fusion; Inquisition in Portuguese Atlantic; Orisa; quilombo; spiritual possession cults Cañizares-Esguerra, Jorge, 1–18 canto (songs and street corners where slaves “hired out” their labor), São Salvador da Bahia, 13, 69; monopolization of specific urban economies, 70; parallel example in Luanda (see kitandeira); women’s roles, 70, 77, 79, 80, 192. See also under ganho; labor; merchants (African); port cities; slaves for hire Cap Français, 4–6, 9–11, 15–16, 18, 22, 32, 64, 126, 151, 162, 189, 199, 224, 241; Afro-Europeans, 103–7, 109; Atlantic slave trade, 111–13; black communal organizations, 9–10; Catholicism, 117–19; ethnic segregation, 106–7; female slaves, 103–5, 108–9, 111, 116; “foreign creoles,” 109; free Africans and accumulation of wealth and skills, 103–7; informal sodalities, 18; Islam, 106, 111; militia, 106–7, 293; mobility

Index of black coachmen, 15; plantations, 102; population demographic, 101–3, 108–11; prostitution, 103–4, 108–9; rebellion (African participation), 118–21; secret societies (Vodou), 117– 19; slaves’ commercial activities in markets (Sunday market and marché des Nègres), 112, 116–20; slave prices, 113–14. See also Atlantic mobility; Islam; labor; merchants (African); secret societies; slave trade; women Carabali/Carabaldi cabildos, Havana, 87–99. See also cabildos de nación; Calabar Cartagena, 5–10, 18, 32, 197, 199, 253, 254, 259; African translators, 150; Cartagena Inquisition, 159; Catholic instruction in Kibundu, 150; Getsemaní (slum), 149, 152, 159, 162; Islam, 151; Jesuits and African population, 150, 152; languages, 150; slave labor, 148–49; slaves, health and hospitals, 149–50, 151–52, 159; slave trade, 148. See also Cevallos, Martin de; Claver, Pedro; Eguiluz, Paula; Francisco; Inquistion in Spanish Atlantic; Matudere; Sandoval, Alonso; Vera, Francisco de Carteau, Félix, 104, 119 Catholic Church: Luanda, 197–98; support of brotherhoods and cofradías, 18. See also under brotherhoods; education; individual cities; Inquisition (Holy Office) in Portuguese Atlantic; Inquistion (Holy Office) in Spanish Atlantic ; Jesuits; missionaries; religion Cecelski, David, 164 Cevallos, Martin de (governor), destruction of Matudere, 158, 160, 161. See also Matudere Chamber of Agriculture (Cap Français), 105, 119 Charles, King (slave), use of clothing to mock white authority, 175. See

359

also under inversion of racial/social concepts; slave pilots Charleston: fear of African maroons, 162; links with Kingston, 122–25, 129, 130, 134; population, 102; slave pilots, 171, 172, 178, 179 “chattel principle” (Johnson, Walter), 18 Childs, Matt D., 1–18, 28–33, 50, 64–67, 85–100, 102, 116, 126, 157, 189, 197–99, 211, 242, 253 Christian, William, 251 Clarke, Colin, 124 Claver, Pedro (friar): provision of sermons in Kimbundu, 150. See also Cartagena; Jesuits; Matudere; missionaries; translators (African) clothing, slaves’ use of clothing to mock white authority, 175. See also under Charles, King; inversion of racial/social concepts; slave pilots companies (mutual aid societies), 13; Cap Français, 106–7; Sierra Leone, 32–34 Congo (diaspora), 22, 31; Bahamian desire to return to Congo from Sierra Leone 23; cabildo de nacion, 86, 97; Cap Français, 110; Congo musical instruments, Lisbon, 243; Mexico City, 257; nation, São Salvador da Bahia, 71; soldiers in Ouidah, 44. See also cabildos de nación; Kongo; nations Cook, Elizabeth, 123 Cooper, Thomas (slave pilot), 177–78. See also slave pilots Cordeiro, Gonçalo, 219. See also barbeiros; black militia; Nossa Senhora dos Remédios Coromantee, identity formation, 13 Corrêa, Elias Alexandre da Silva, on tavern owners, 187, 191, 193, 195, 198, 200 cosmopolitanism, 6; Ouidah, 43–45. See also under creolization; individual city headings Costa, Antônio da (slave), 239–40. See also crime

360

Index

Costa, Joaquim Ferreira da, 64 creole: community in Sierra Leone, 37; identity of Brazilian slaves, 14; splits between African nations and creoles, Mexico City, 258–59 creole (Brazilian term), definition and difference from ladino, 81–82. See also ladino Créole, language in Cap Français, 116 creolization, 3; and Africanization, Sierra Leone, 22, 24–27; or cosmopolitanism, Ouidah, 43–45; creolization/ survivalist dichotomy, 11–12; of demographic in Recôncavo, 64; problematized, São Salvador da Bahia, 80–82; reversal, Yorubaland, 40. See also Mintz, Sidney; Price, Richard; Recôncavo Crèvecoeur, J. Hector St. John de, on slavery in Kingston, 122–24, 130, 141–43 crime: Lisbon, 238, 241, 246–47; Lisbon, slaves and violent crime, 239–40 (see also Costa, Antônio da); Luanda, collaboration between owners and slaves, 202–6; Luanda, slaves, 185–89, 191 (see also Matta, Henrique Francisco da; Salvador, Manoel de) Criollo, Domingo Padilla (ruanaway slave and captain in Matudere), 153–55, 157, 159, 161; execution, 162. See also Matudere Crowley Nicol, George, 24 Cuba, 9; boom in Atlantic slave trade, 94; Cuban African diaspora in Sierra Leone, 13. See also cabildos de nacion; Havana; slave trade Cubbah (female slave), involved in slave rebellion, Kingston, 133 cultural hybridization/fusion: African healing practices in Rio de Janeiro, 208– 30; Angolan and Portuguese cultural fusion in Lisbon, 243–44; hybridization of Kongolese and New Spain Catholic religious practices in Mexico City, 252

(see also kimpasi societies); religious practices in São Salvador da Bahia, 14, 71–80; secret societies in Africa and Cuba, 92. See also under barbeiros; creolization; health and healing practices; secret societies; mutual aid societies Curtin, Philip, 17 Dahomey (kingdom), 12, 13, 42; links with Ouidah, 45–62; slaves in São Salvador da Bahia, 13, 65, 66, 67; warfare, 158 Dankô (Nupe god), worship in São Salvador da Bahia, 73 Dawson, Kevin, 11, 16, 163–84 Debret, Jean-Baptiste (artist): on black surgeons 225–29; on slave life in Rio de Janeiro, 211–13, 224. See also barbeiros degredados, in Luanda, 187, 194; social mobility in Luanda (see Portela, Bernando Nunes) deportations, from São Salvador da Bahia to Africa, 76, 80. See also under Candomblé diaspora studies, Atlantic model, 88 Díaz, Pascual (mulato), 263–64. See also Atlantic mobility domestic slaves, 8; female domestic slaves’ Atlantic travel between Brazil and Luanda, 204; Luanda, 190, 240; São Salvador da Bahia, 63–65. See also Atlantic mobility; labor Eboo, nation in Sierra Leone, 28–29, 30, 31. See also Igbo Ecce Homo (brotherhood, Mexico City), 260; burial duties, 263. See also brotherhoods; mutual aid associations education (as a means for autonomy and mobility): African elites in Brazil for education, 4; Brazilian slave sent to University of Coimbra, Portugal, 246; free Africans and slaves requesting licenses to travel from Luanda to

Index Brazil for education, 204, 205; as a tool for escaping slavery, Lisbon, 240 (see Mina, Antônio). See also under Atlantic mobility; education (provision); labor education (provision), 4; Jesuit education and establishment of governement schools in Luanda, 195–96; lack of Portuguese instruction in Luanda, 195– 96; Sierra Leone, 26, 44; training of free Africans for clergy positions, Luanda, 196. See also education (as a means for autonomy and mobility) Edwards, Brian, 131, 139 Egba (diaspora): São Salvador da Bahia, 67; Sierra Leone, 30, 35, 40 Eguiluz, Paula (healer), 151. See also healers; health and healing practices; Inquisition (Holy Office) in Portuguese Atlantic; Inquisition (Holy Office) in Spanish Atlantic Ekpe (secret society), Calabar, 60; movement from Africa to Cuba, 92. See also Calabar; Carabali/Carabaldi cabildos; secret societies El Santo Negro Rosambuco de la Ciudad de Palermo (Vega), 257 Eltis, David, 88 England, 2, 4, 12, 26, 124, 125, 128, 129, 137, 140, 143, 164, 167, 168, 208, 221, 235; free Africans in Sierra Leone, 23, 27; contemporary engagement with slaving past, 235 Espirito Santo, Gertrudes Maria do (Nagô freed woman), São Salvador da Bahia, member of five brotherhoods, 72 ethnogenesis, 8; ethnonyms and identity, São Salvador da Bahia, 67; Sierra Leone, 12–13, 30–31; Yoruba identity, 39. See also brotherhoods; cabildos de nación; companies; maroon communities; Matudere Expiration of Christ (Mexico City brotherhood), 255; funeral obligations,

361 263; penitential activities, 260; women leaders, 261–62

Ferreira, Joaquim António (merchant), Rio de Janeiro in Luanda, 205 Ferreira, Joaquim Antonio (merchant and ship owner): commercial and military networks, Rio de Janeiro, 223–24; “hiring out” of barbeiros on slave ships, 222–24; illicit slave trade, 224. See also barbeiros; Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database Ferreira, Roquinaldo, 4, 10–11, 14, 16, 42, 185–206, 215 Finger, Simon, 170 Flynn, Maureen, 250–51 Folheto de Ambas Lisboas, 244 Fon (diaspora): Aja-Fon, Cap Français, 105, 110, 111; language, identity, and ethnicity, Ouidah, 45–61; place of origin of Jeje in Salvador, 67; Sierra Leone, 30 Francisco (slave pharmacist), Cartagena, 159. See also barbers; Santa Clara; Vera, Francisco Franco, João Sylva, Luanda, 186–89, 202–6. See also crime; Salvador, Manoel de free black Africans (Atlantic travel): Afro-Jamaican free maroons in Sierra Leone, 23, 25, 37; Brazilian former slaves return to Ouidah, 51–52; travel from Luanda to Brazil for education and business, 205–6. See also Atlantic mobility free black Africans (urban experiences): accumulation of wealth and skills, Cap Français, 103–7; African ordained ministers, Freetown, 25; agricultural roles, São Salvador da Bahia, 74; barbeiros, 209; free black women controlling market stalls, Cap Français, 116; Lisbon, 236, 238, 240–242, 247; Kingston, 126–27; Mexico City, 249; as slave owners, 104, 220; slavery and freedom, Luanda, 202–6. See also under barbeiros; cultural hybridization/fusion;

362

Index

free black Africans (urban experiences) (cont’d ) Espirito Santo, Gertrudes Maria do; manumission; Martins, José do Santos; merchants (African); Vera, Francisco de Freetown, Sierra Leone, 6, 10, 12, 13, 15, 18, 21–41, 59, 257; acculturation through education, 25, 26, 27; acculturation through religion, 38; Africanization, 27–34; African ministers and missionaries, 25; African nations, 27–34; Afro-Brazilians in Sierra Leone, 13; religions, 35–36, 37– 38; class formation, 36–37; creolization, 24–27; emigration, 38–41; immigrants, 36–37; linguistic diversity, 28–34; multiethnic residents, 23–25. See also under Afro-Europeans; missionaries; nations Fuente, Alejandro de la, 90–91 Fuente, Baltasar de la, Cartagena, 153–55. See also Criollo, Domingo Padilla; Matudere Fulani (diaspora): Bahia, 76; Ouidah, 51, 65. See also Fulani-Hausa jihad; Fulbe (diaspora) Fulani-Hausa jihad: effect on slave trade in Bahia, 65, 76; in Ouidah, 51 Fulbe (diaspora): Fulbe Muslim invaders in Oyo Empire, 39–40; Islam, 35, 29; Sierra Leone, 29. See also Fulani (diaspora) Fyfe, Christopher, 25, 26, 36 Galvão, Antônio de Freitas, 200–201. See also Inquisition in Portuguese Atlantic ganga (mbundu healers): Luanda, 199; Rio de Janeiro, 244 ganho, São Salvador da Bahia: slaves for hire, 69; women, 70, 71. See also canto; labor García, Gloria, 95 Geggus, David, 9–10, 15, 18, 101–21, 126, 162, 189, 199, 224, 240 Genovese, Eugene, 182

Getsemaní (slum), Cartagena, 149, 152, 159, 162 Gold Coast (modern Ghana), 12; links with Ouidah, 48–57; links with Sierra Leone, 29–31 Gomez, Michael, 88 Gómez, Pablo, 151 “Greater Senegambia,” in scholarship, 165 Grefe (Griffin?), Bristol (black English pirate), Lisbon, 247 Haitian Revolution (1789–1803), 15, 64, 85, 94, 101, 106, 114, 118, 121, 162 Hancock, David, 143 Harms, Robert, 165, 215 Hastings, Adrian, 40 Hausa (diaspora), 12, 13; Cap Français, Hausa and Islam, 111; city states, 29; Hausa healing practices, 224–29; Hausas and Islam in Sierra Leone, 30–31, 33, 35; identity formation, Sierra Leone and São Salvador da Bahia, 13; Islamic Hausa, Candomblé, and rebellion in São Salvador da Bahia, 76–81; Ouidah, 52, 53, 54; racial label for West Africans in São Salvador da Bahia, 65, 66, 67, 68, 73; worship of Bori in São Salvador da Bahia, 14. See also under Hausa Revolt 1814; Islam Hausaland, 12, 29, 51, 66, 77 Hausa Revolt 1814, São Salvador da Bahia, 77 Havana, 6, 9, 14–18, 22, 28, 32, 50, 70, 102, 126, 134, 151, 157, 189, 211, 241, 253, 259; cabildos de nación, 85–100; demographic changes, 94; legal codes, 89, 91, 95–96, 98; relocation of cabildos, 91, 93–94; Yoruba culture in cabildos, 88–89. See also under cabildos de nación; Cuba; slave trade healers: Cartagena, 151–52; Luanda, 199. See also Arará, Mateo; barbeiros; Eguiluz, Paula; Ferreira, Joaquim Antonio; Francisco; Martins, José do Santos; Vera, Francisco de

Index health and healing practices: African healing practices in Americas, 152, 213, 224–29; Brazilian public health provision, 220; Hausa healing practices in Rio de Janeiro and Angola, 225–28; healing and penitence in brotherhoods, New Spain and Brazil, 252; health and disease, Cartagena, 149–50; health and fugitives, São Salvador da Bahia, 74–75; professionalization of medicine, Portugal, 216; trade in leeches between Angola and Brazil, 14. See also barbeiros; barbers; healing practices under separate mutual aid associations health and healing practices (regulation): campaigns against barbeiros, 219, 221, 229; licenses issued by Portuguese Royal Medical College or city councils, 209. See also Portuguese Royal Medical College; School of Anatomy, Surgery and Medicine Herskovits, Jean, 40 Heywood, Lynda, 251–52 Hibbert, Thomas (slave trader), Kingston, 128, 139–40 Higman, Barry, 124, 181 Histoire de Ouidah (Agbo), 52 History of the Yoruba (Johnson), 39 Horton, James A. B., use of “Africanus,” 27. See also Africanus Howard, Phillip, 91 Hueda (kingdom), 42, 43, 46, 52–57, 60, 61; modern language, 30 Hula (diaspora), in Ouidah, 46–48, 53–56, 61. See also cosmopolitanism; creolization “Humble Petition of the innocent distressed Sons of Christ (commonly called negro slaves),” Kingston, 133 Iannini, Christopher, 123 identity: “African” and ethnic identities, Sierra Leone, 27–34; ethnic identities, Ouidah, 52–59; ethnic identities in

363

cabildos de nación, Havana, 87; ethnic identities in nations and residential patterns, São Salvador da Bahia, 65–66, 68–69, 79; formation of collective identities, 16–18; local conceptions of identity, 4–5; pan-ethnic identities, 13; pan-Yoruban identity, Sierra Leone, 39–40; Yoruba identity, Brazil, 18. See also under identity in individual mutual aid associations and nations Igbo (diaspora) in Sierra Leone, 25, 27, 28, 29, 30; identity formation, 13, 40; nation, 33, 34 Ijebu: dialect in Sierra Leone, 30; ethnonym for “Nagôs” in São Salvador da Bahia, 67; identity vis-à-vis Yoruba, 28 Immaculate Conception (Mexico City brotherhood): burial practices 265; communal identification as African zapes or çapes, 256–57; dispute over ownership, 256–59 Inácio, José (barber), Luanda, 199. See also ganga; health and healing practices; Jesuits Inquisition (Holy Office) in Portuguese Atlantic: centralized in Lisbon, 15; Lisbon, 245, 246; Luanda, 199, 200; slaves denouncing masters’ piety, 245. See also Inquistion (Holy Office) in Spanish Atlantic Inquistion (Holy Office) in Spanish Atlantic: fear of African witchcraft in Cartagena, 151–52; Mexico City, 8, 255; slaves denouncing masters, 8. See also Inquisition (Holy Office) in Portuguese Atlantic inversion of racial/social concepts, 164; “inversion of rôles” (Bergson), 175; slave pilots and temporary authority on ships, 167–68; slave pilots’ uses of clothing for “buffoon image,” 173–76, 183. See also under manumission; slave pilots Islam: Cap Français, 106, 111; Cartagena, 151; medieval Spain 147–48, 150;

364

Index

Islam: Cap Français (cont’d ) Ouidah, 57–58; Rio de Janeiro, 225; Sierra Leone, 13–14, 35–39, 41; Yoruban and Hausa, São Salvador da Bahia, 14, 67, 71, 76–80 (see also juntas de alforria). See also religion James “Jemy” Darrell (slave pilot), 168, 177–78, 181. See also manumission; slave pilots Jarvis, Michael, 164 Jeje: nation in São Salvador da Bahia, 66–73, 76, 80–81; ethnic label in São Salvador da Bahia, 13–14; healing practices and barbeiros, 222–28; worship of Vodun, 14, 73 Jesuits: Cap Français, 118–19; Cartagena, multilingual instruction, 149–52, 156–59 (see also Claver, Pedro; Sandoval, Alonso); Luanda, provision of education, 195–97 Johnson, Samuel, 39 Johnson, Walter, 18 juntas de alforria (savings pools), São Salvador da Bahia, 13–14; manumission, credit, and communal insurance, 70–71; Muslim juntas, 81. See also Sodré, Domingos Pereira juramento of Ndua, Luanda religious tradition of punishment, 198–99 Ketu: ethnonym for Nagôs in São Salvador da Bahia, 67; relationship with Ouidah, 58 Kimbundu: Cartagena, 150; Lisbon, 237, 243–44; Luanda, 195, 200; Sierra Leone, 31 kimpasi societies, Kongo, role of women and penitential activities, 252 King, Stewart, 106 Kingston, Jamaica, 2–6, 15–18, 22, 64, 102, 112, 189, 211, 241; Atlantic slave trading port, 129–30; commodification of slaves, 127–28; concentration of

slave ownership, 134–37, 139–42, 143; household inventories, 135–41; mortality rates, 125–26, 130, 138; networks and gossip in Black Atlantic, 130–31; plantations, 136; population demographics, 126–27; slave markets, wholesale and retail, 131; slave prices and increases, 135–38, 139; slave sales (process), 128; slave yards, 112, 114, 128–35. See also barracoons; slave trade; slave yards kitandeiras (female slave street vendors), Luanda, regulation, 192–93. Knight, Charles (minister), 25 Knight, Franklin, 21 Koelle (missionary), 28–32, 39 Kongo (kingdom of) (diaspora), 13, 31, 149; Cap Français, 105, 113, 118; Cartagena, 149; Catholicism in Kongo, 251–52; nation, Sierra Leone, 32. See also Congo labor (slave labor, slaves for hire, and free Africans), 4; agricultural/plantation, 63, 64, 67, 74, 190 (see also arimos; Recôncavo); barbeiros/healers, 199, 209–30; caixeiros, 193; cantos and ganhos (labor pools), 70; Cartagena, 148–49; coachmen, 15, 114, 120, 239; entertainers, 242; Lisbon, 238–39; Luanda, 190; manufacturing, 150, 238 (see also bolsas de mandinga); merchants, 4, 11, 70, 192–93, 196 (see also kitandeiras); prostitution, 191–92; pumbeiros, 193; sailors, 4, 11, 191; slave pilots, 165–86; soldiers, 12; translators, 44–50, 150, 156. See also merchants (African); slaves for hire; individual occupations ladino: definition, Cartagena, 156, 158; Luandan and Brazilian slaves, 195, 204; nuance, 195 Laffitte, Abbé, (missionary), 55, 57, 58 Landers, Jane, 7, 10, 16, 32, 65, 71, 90, 91, 101, 126, 147–62, 197, 199

Index Law, Robin, 4, 12, 15, 18, 21, 42–62, 64, 88, 131, 158, 187, 205, 207–8 leeches: Atlantic trade, 215; healing practices, Brazil, 14. See also Monteiro, Joachim John Letters from an American Farmer (Crèvecoeur), 122–24 Lewis, Wall, 225, 226, 227, 228 Linebaugh, Peter, 208 Lisbon, 4–8, 14, 17, 32, 69, 74, 191, 216, 217, 218; African burial practices, 234–37; African nations, 243; Angola (diaspora), 239–40, 243–44; Angolan and Portuguese cultural hybridization, 243–44; brotherhoods, 243–45; crime, 238, 241; historiography on African past, 235–36; Mina (diaspora), 239–40, 243; Mocambo and runaway slaves, 8, 74, 237, 238; Mozambique (diaspora), 242; non-African servants, 238–39; Ouidah (diaspora), 238, 246; prostitution, 238; religious rituals, 237, 238; resistance and rebellion (African participation), 239–40; Orço dos Negros, 237; Sao Tomé (diaspora), 240. See also mandinga trade Liss, Peggy, 21 Long, Edward, 132–33 Lopes, Diogo (African barber shop owner), Rio de Janeiro, 212 Lovejoy, Paul, 87, 88, 92, 208 Luanda, 4, 6, 10–16, 22, 42, 67, 71, 213–17, 225, 229; Africanization of Europeans, especially women, 201–2; complaints about lack of religious understanding, 198; crime (owners and slaves), 185–89, 191, 202–6; education, 193; Jesuits, 195–96; justice system, 193–95; languages, 195; missionaries, 197, 202; Portuguese degredados and undesirables, 187–88, 194; slavery and freedom, 202–6; slaves as caixeiros, 193; slaves as pumbeiros, 193; taverns, 189–90; ubiquity of Mbundu religious practices,

365

198–99. See also under alembamento; brotherhoods; crime; Galvão, Antônio de Freitas; ganga; Jesuits; juramento of Ndua; Matta, Henrique Francisco da; Salvador, Manoel de; Simões, Manoel; xinguillamento Lucumi (diaspora), cabildo in Havana, 86, 88–91, 96–97 Luís, São Tomé (runaway slave), 240 Luis Sanin (muslim preacher), São Salvador da Bahia, 71, 79 Mahi (diaspora): language in Sierra Leone, 30; Mina-Mahi, Rio de Janiero, 209, 219; Ouidah, 49, 50, 52–54, 57, 58; place of origin of Jeje in São Salvador da Bahia, 67 Malê Muslim rebellion (1835), São Salvador da Bahia, 67, 73, 76, 78. See also under Islam mandinga trade: mandinga bags (talisman), 6, 8; manufacturing and sale in Lisbon, 238; networks of mandingueiros in Portuguese Atlantic, 246, 247; participation of slaves in mandinga trade (see Pedroso, João Francisco; Pereira, José Francisco) Mandingo (diaspora), 13; African nation, Sierra Leone, 32; Cap Français, 111; Havana, 90 Mann, Kristin, 41 Manuel I (king of Portugal), on African burial ground, Lisbon, 237 manumission, 11; awarded for bravery (pilots in British Atlantic), 164–68, 177– 84; savings pools, São Salvador de Bahia, 13, 70–71 (see also juntas de alforria); self-purchase, 11, 70, 171–72, 202–3, 240–41. See also individual mutual aid societies Many-Headed Hydra, The (Linebaugh; Rediker), 208 maritime geography (Atlantic), influence on cultural and historical processes, 164–84

366

Index

maroon communities: Afro-Jamaican free maroons in Sierra Leone, 23, 25, 37; Cartagena, 152–53. See also Matudere; Mocambo; Quilombo Martins, José do Santos (African barbershop owner), Rio de Janeiro, 220. See also barbeiros; free black Africans (urban experiences) Matta, Henrique Francisco da (slave owner), 202–3. See also Salvador, Manoel de Matudere (Palenque maroon community near Cartagena), 7, 8, 16, 18, 23–26, 37, 115, 147–48; attempt to negotiate autonomy, 153; Cartagena city authorities, 151–62; Christian crusades against maroons, 152; destruction of the maroon, 156; ethnic identity and demographics, 155, 156; ethnogenesis, 157–58; maroons’ networks in Cartagena, 159–60; maroons’ raids and capture of indigenous and Spanish women, 157; nations, 153; rebellion in Cartagena, 160–61; religion, 155–57; trade, banditry, warfare, and diplomacy with Spanish communities, 152. See also Cevallos, Martin de; Criollo, Domingo Padilla; Fuente, Baltasar de la; Padilla, Juana; Zapata, Fernando Mbundu (diaspora), Luanda, 195; healing, 199. See also Kimbundu language Medeiro de (Afro-Madeira family), Ouidah, 44. See also Afro-Europeans Meigs, Josiah, 164, 171 Mello, Antonio de (governor), Luanda, on education, 193 Mende, António de Almeida, 148, 149 Mendes, Luis Antonio de Oliveira, 217 Meneses, Luis César de (governor), on healers, 217 merchants, 12, 13, 15; Cartagena, 149, 151, 158; Jamaica, 125–42; Luanda, 187–94, 204–5; Rio de Janeiro, 222–23, 240, 246–

47; and slave pilots, 163–64, 171–174, 176–77 merchants (African): Cap Français, 106–7; monopolizing commercial networks in São Salvador da Bahia, 70; Ouidah, 43, 47, 49. See also Quénum Mettas, Jean, 111–12 Mexico City, 6, 8, 90, 157, 162, 197, 243; African community (zapes), 257–59; for African religiosity and penitential activities (see brotherhoods); castas, 249; demographic of population, 249; festivals, 242–45; increase in African population, 249; Kongo/Angola diaspora, 251; slave trade, 249; Zape diaspora, 257 Middle Passage, 1, 18, 25, 99, 127, 130, 166, 215 Miller, Ivor L., 92 Miller, Joseph, 21, 88, 92, 217–18 Mina (diaspora): Cap Français, 110; Cartagena, 155; Cuba, 85; Lisbon, 239– 40, 243; Rio de Janeiro, 213, 220–24; São Salvador da Bahia, 13, 64–71, 228 Mina, Antônio (runaway slave), Lisbon, 240. See also education; runaway slaves Mina, Pedro (war captain), Matudere 155– 56, 161–62. See also Matudere Mintz, Sidney W., 87, 88 Misericórdia (Luanda brotherhood), provision of health care, 197 missionaries: African, European, and creole Anglican missionaries in Sierra Leone, 10, 13, 23–26, 35, 38–41; British Methodist Mission, Ouidah, 57; French Catholic missionaries in Ouidah, 54, 55; missionaries in Luanda, 189–90. See also Ajayi Crowther, Samuel; Bartholomew, Joseph; Jesuits; Knight, Charles; Wright, Joseph Mocambo (runaway slaves’ neighborhood), Lisbon, 8, 74, 237; crime, 238; religious rituals, 237, 238. See also under Lisbon Moko, African nation in Sierra Leone, 30, 31, 32

Index Monte, Ignacio (barbeiro), 219–20 Monteiro, Joachim John: on Atlantic trade in leeches, 215; on barbers in Angola, 213–14 Morgan, Philip, 110; on Thomas Jeremiah, 179 Moya, José, 100 Mozambique: African nation, Sierra Leone, 31, 32; diaspora in Lisbon, 242; identity formation, 13; port of destination from São Salvador da Bahia, 65 mutual aid societies. See brotherhoods; cabildos de nación; Candomblé; companies; juntas de alforria; nations Nadel, Siegfried Frederick, 225 Nagô (diaspora): Ouidah, 49–61; São Salvador da Bahia, 65–81; worship of Orisa in São Salvador da Bahia, 14 , 73, 76, 80. See also Yoruba nations (African): Freetown, nations and alliances, 27–34; Freetown, panYoruban nationality, 39–40; Havana, cabildos de nación, 33, 86–100; Lisbon, Angola nation, 243; Lisbon, Mina nation, 243; “nations” in Matudere, Cartagena, 153; São Salvador da Bahia, African Islamic nations, 67, 71, 76–80; São Salvador da Bahia, nations, 65–68; São Salvador da Bahia, nations in brotherhoods, 71–72; São Salvador da Bahia, nations organized in Candomblé, 71–76, 79–82 New York: African Burial Ground, 235; slave pilots, 167, 175; slave trade, 125, 129–30 Nishida, Mieko, 69 Nkisi (Angolan cult), São Salvador da Bahia, 14, 73, 76 Northrup, David, 3, 10, 12–13, 15, 18, 21–41 Nossa Senhora de Guadalupe (Lisbon brotherhood), veneration of San Benito de Palermo, 245. See also Benito de Palermo

367

Nossa Senhora dos Remédios (Rio de Janeiro brotherhood), barbeiros, 14, 209, 219–20 Nova Scotia, black refugees in Sierra Leone, 13, 23, 25, 32, 37 Nupe (diaspora): Cap Français, 110; Ouidah 52, 53, 54; 228; Rio de Janeiro, 224–25; São Salvador da Bahia, 65, 73, 79; Sierra Leone, 31, 33

Oliveira, Nicolas de (merchant), Ouidah, 43. See also Afro-Europeans Orisa, veneration by Nagôs, São Salvador da Bahia, 73; Candomblé, 76, 80 Ouidah, 4, 6, 12, 15, 18, 64, 131, 187, 205, 238, 246; Africans’ participation in transatlantic networks, 44–45; ancestral ethnicity, 52–59; Brazilian community, 44; commerce and travel with Brazil, 43–44; cosmopolitanism, 43–49; ethnic city quarters, 43–50; growth, 42–43; language, 45, 54–55; religious pluralism, diversity, and toleration, 54–58, 60; repatriation of former slaves to Ouidah, 51–52; veneration of deities, 46. See also British Methodist Mission; DossouYovo, Antonio; Vodun Our Lady of Anguish (Mexico City brotherhood), 260; health care, 266 Padilla, Juana (foundress of Matudere), 157. See also Matudere Palmié, Stephan, 92, 288 Pando, Juan de (governor), Cartagena, 153–54. See also Matudere Paupa, identity formation Sierra Leone, 13, 30, 31 Pedroso, João Francisco (Ouidah slave), 238. See also mandinga trade Peel, John, 39, 41 Pereira, José Francisco (slave), 238. See also mandinga trade

368

Index

Petecou, Jean-François (runaway slave), Cap Français, 120 Peter Linebaugh, 166, 208 Peterson, John, 37 Peterson, Mark A., 144 Philadelphia (Pennsylvania), 102, 125, 129, 130, 134, 170 Pimenta, Tania, 220 Pio, Duarte (Duke of Bragança), 235. See also amnesia Pitcarn, Jacob (slave pilot), 177 “plantation complex,” 16–17 plantation slavery: Jamaica, 124–25; St Domingue, 103. See also arimos; Recôncavo Ponte (Count of), on Candomblé, 74, 76. See also Candomblé Portela, Bernando Nunes (Portuguese judge), Luanda, 194–95. See also degredados Portuguese Crown, 64, 217 Portuguese Royal Medical College, 208–10, 216–24. See also barbeiros (regulation) Price, Richard, 87, 88, 157 prostitution: Bermuda, 180; Cap Français, 103–4, 108–9; Lisbon, 238; Luanda, 191–92 Quénum (African merchants’ quarter of Ouidah), 43; ancestry, 53–57, 61–62 Quilombo (runaway slave maroon), São Salvador da Bahia, 74; and Candomblé, 74–75 recaptives, Sierra Leone, 10, 12–13, 21–41 Recôncavo, slave plantations, São Salvador da Bahia, 63, 64, 77. See also arimos Rediker, Marcus, 166, 208, 215 Reis, Isabel, 69 Reis, José João, 13–15, 23, 28–32, 44, 50, 55, 63–82, 102, 116, 126, 131, 157, 159, 189, 192, 195, 197, 211, 225, 240 religion, for individual cities. See brotherhoods; cabildos de nación;

Candomblé; Catholic Church; Islam; Jesuits; missionaries; Orisa; Vodun; individual cities resistance and rebellion (African participation): Cartagena, 159, 160; Havana, 88–89; Kingston, 132–33; Lisbon, 239–40; Mexico City, 255–56; Muslim Hausa, São Salvador da Bahia, 77–80; rebellion, Cap Français, 118–21; slave pilots, 179; Spanish fear of slave rebellions, 147–48. See also under Matudere; runaway slaves; Tacky’s revolt Richardson, David, 92, 279, 284, 285, 289, 301, 346 Rio de Janeiro, 4, 6, 11–16, 22, 63, 64, 67, 90, 126, 134, 151, 185, 189, 191, 235, 241, 259; barbeiros, 210–30; links with Luanda, 203–6; Valongo slave market, 212, 221–23, 235 Rodney, Walter, 165 Rodrigues, Nina, 66, 80 Rogers, Dominique, 102, 204, 107 Roque, Juan (founder of Immaculate Conception), Mexico City, dispute over will, 248, 257–59, 265. See also zapes Rua do Poço dos Negros (Street of the Blacks’ Pit), burial pit in Mocambo, Lisbon, 237 runaway slaves. See Candomblé; maroon; Mocambo; Petite Guinee; Quilombos Russell-Wood, A. J. R., 218 Sahlins, Marshall, 79 Saint-Méry, Moreau de, 104, 109, 111, 115–18 Salvador, Manoel de (slave), Luanda, 185– 89, 191; justice system, 194–95; slave or freeperson, 202–6, 215. See also Matta, Henrique Francisco da San Agustín (convent), Cartagena, 149; owning slaves, 152 San Benito Palermo (Mexico City brotherhood), funerals and health care, 262, 265–66

Index San Francisco (convent), Cartagena, ownership of slaves, 152 San Juan de Dios (Hospital), Cartagena, 149; ownership of slaves, 152 San Nicolás Tolentino (Mexico City brotherhood), health care, 265 Sancho, Ignatius, use of “Africanus,” 28. See also Africanus Sandoval, Alonso de (Jesuit priest), Cartagena, 150, 154 Santa Clara (Convent), Cartagena, 149–52; links with maroons, 159–60. See also Matudere Santa Cruz, Morell de (bishop), 91 Santa Efigenia (Mexico City brotherhood), 255; health care, 266 São Salvador da Bahia (Brazil), 4, 6, 12–18, 22–32, 44, 50, 55, 126, 131, 134, 151, 157, 159, 238, 244, 259; African nations, 65–68; Africans’ monopolization of specific urban economies, 13, 70; Atlantic slave trade, 63–65; brotherhoods, 71–72; Candomblé, 71; freed Africans, 73–74; Islam, 71, 76–80; labor patterns, 69–70; links with Luanda, 189- 97, 210–11, 218, 222–28; religion, 75; spritual possesion cults, 72; urban Candomblé and suburban Quilombo, 74–75. See also Candomblé; canto; Dankô; ganho; Islam; Nkisi; Orisa; Vodun; women São Tomé (diaspora): Cartagena, 149; Lisbon, 240; Ouidah, 44, 52; Scott, Julius, 165, 180 secret societies: Africa, 60, 91–93; Cap Français, 117–19; Yoruba kingdom of Oyo, 92. See also Ekpe; Vodou Senegal, 7–8; emigration from Sierra Leone, 38, 105, 111, 165 sensalas/senzalas (neighborhood for libertos and urban poor), Luanda, 10, 189 Shango (Yoruba God of Thunder): in Sierra Leone, 35; veneration among maroons in Matudere, 155, 160–61. See also under Matudere

369

Sidbury, James, 1–18, 343 Silva, Francisca da (Nagô high priestess), 73 Silva, José da (runaway slave), Lisbon, 242 Silva, Marcelina da (Obatossi high priestess), 73 Simões, Manoel, on African celebrations of the dead, 201 slave caixeiros (accountants), Luanda, 193; Atlantic travel, 204. See also Atlantic mobility slave pilots (British Atlantic), 163–84; contempt for, 168–69; derision of, 170–71; dressing in “buffoon image” to assert status and mock white authority, 173–76; enslaved pilots and free sailors, 166–67; importance of slave pilots, 168; manumission as reward for naval accomplishments, 167–68, 172, 177; mental mapping of hydrospace and waterways, 167; mobility and anonymity in urban spaces, 164; pilots gaining temporary authority on ships, 167–70, 173–74; privileges, 164, 174, 178–79, 183–84; trust of port authorities and protection for, 176–79. See also Beckwith, George; Cooper, Thomas; Darrell, James “Jemy”; King, Charles; Nevens, William; Pitcarn, Jacob slavery: definition of term, 7; differences between rural and urban experiences, 2–7; slavery and gender, Kingston, 138– 39; slave status and protection, 200 slaves for hire: barbeiros, 222; female slaves in Lisbon, 240; hiring out (of pilots), 164, 176–77, 180; Luanda, 189–90; São Salvador da Bahia, canto and ganho system, 69. See also barbeiros; canto; Ferreira, Joaquim Antonio; ganho; labor; slave pilots slave trade: Africa and Brazil, 42, 44, 63–64, 220; barbeiros in Brazilian slave trade, 221; boom in Atlantic slave trade, Cuba, 94; Cap Français,

370

Index

slave trade: Africa and Brazil (cont’d) 111–13; Cartagena, 148–49; Kingston with Spanish Americas, 124, 126–28; Mexico City, 249; New York slave trade, 125, 129–30; slavery in Africa, 49–52; Yoruba captives, Ouidah, 49–50. See also abolition of slave trade (Atlantic); barbeiros; barracoons; merchants; merchants (African); slave yards; Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database; under individual cities slave yards: Cartagena, 149–50; Kingston, 112, 114, 128–35. See also barracoons; slave trade Soares, Mariza de Carvalho, 11, 14, 16, 90, 102, 126, 159, 189, 207–30 Socolow, Susan, 108–10 Sodré, Domingos Pereira (African slave owner), São Salvador da Bahia, 80–82, 195. See also Candomblé; ladino; Our Lady of the Rosary Souza, Francisco Felix de (Afro-Brazilian), Ouidah, 43, 44; interethnic marriages, 48, 58; local influence, 61; ownership of slaves, 49, 50; Souza family, 58; use of local translators, 50. See also AfroEuropeans; translators Spain: brotherhoods, 250–51, 260, 263; reconquest and conquest in Americas, 147 Spitzer, Leo, 37 sugar production, 15; Cap Français, 102, 108–11; Cuba, 85, 94; Kingston, 124, 130, 134, 139; São Salvador da Bahia, 63–64 surgeons, Rio de Janeiro, 209–10, 215–18, 221. See also barbeiros (regulation) Susu (diaspora): African nation, Sierra Leone, 33; Cap Français, 110, 111 Sweet, James, 5, 8, 17, 32, 70, 74, 88, 197, 233–47, 253 Tacky’s revolt, Kingston, 133. See also resistance and rebellion taverns: Anglo Atlantic port cities, 180;

ethnicity of tavern owners in Anglo Atlantic, 187; Luanda, tavern owners, 185–86, 194; slaves and violence in Anglo Atlantic port city taverns, 188–89; ubiquity in Luanda and legal regulations, 186–89 Teixeira, Manoel, on black slaves gathering on streets and defiance to authority, 199–200 Thistlewood, Thomas, on Kingston, 130, 132 Thomas Jeremiah (pilot), 171–72; extent of protection from law, 178–80 Thornton, John, 21, 88, 165, 251–53 Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database, 111. See also Ferreira, Joaquim Antonio translators (African): barbeiros’ roles as translators on ships, 221; Cartagena, 150, 156; Ouidah, 44–45, 48, 50; use of interpreters for Portuguese judges in Luanda, 195 Turner, Victori, 225 Valdés, Geronimo (governor), Havana, 96; urban code on death rituals, 98 Vansina, Jan, 199 Vasconcellos, Antonio de (governor), Luanda, 187 Vassa, Gustavus (Oluidah Equiano), 1–3, 18; on Kingston, 128–29. See also Africanus Vega, Lope de, 257 Vera, Francisco de (free barber/bleeder), Cartagena, 159–60 Vila Vilar, Enriqueta, 149 Vodou, Cap Français, 117–19 Vodun: Jejes veneration, São Salvador da Bahia, 14, 73–76; veneration, Ouidah, 46, 55–57 Von Germeten, Nicole, 8, 17, 23, 32, 71, 90, 102, 157, 197, 243, 248–68 Way of Death (Miller), 21 West-Central Africa (diaspora), 90, 93, 110, 156, 214; barbeiros, 225, 227, 229; European influences, 252; Ouidah, 44; São Salvador da Bahia, 65, 71; Sierra Leone, 31–32

Index Wheat, David, 149, 154 White, Graham, 174–75 White, Shane, 174–75 Whydah, 21, 22, 50, 64 Wilmot Blyden, Edward, on Islam in Sierra Leone, 36–37 women (African): Atlantic mobility of female slaves as domestic servants, 204; in cantos 70; in Cap Français, 103–5, 108–9, 111, 116; education, 196, 205–6; female black slave mortality, Kingston, 138; female slaves as prostitutes, Luanda, 191–92; female slaves’ selfpurchase, 240; as healers, 151 (see also Eguiluz, Paula); kitandeiras, Luanda, 192–93; in leadership roles in kimpasi societies, Kongo, 252; manumission, 131–33, 240; as members and leaders in brotherhoods, 8–9, 72, 252; as owners of taverns in Luanda, 188–89; and resistance/rebellion (see Cubbah); as slave and property owners in Cap Français, 104; as slave owners, Kingston, 141, 142; as slave owners in São Salvador da Bahia, 73 (see also Silva, Francisca da; Silva, Marcelina da); women maroons, 156–57 (see also Padilla, Juana) Wood, Peter, 182 Wright, Joseph (African minister), 25–26 Wurderman, John G. F., 96

371

xinguillamento (invoking devil), 200–201. See also Galvão, Antônio de Freitas; Simões, Manoel Yoruba: Cap Français, 106, 110; Cartagena, 154–55; geneaology of identity, 13, 18; Havana, 88; Ouidah, pan-Yoruba identity, 49–61; Ouidah, Yoruba Brazilian former slaves repatriate, 51– 52; Oyo, Yoruba secret societies, 92; Rio de Janeiro, 224; São Salvador da Bahia, Yoruba Muslims, 14, 65–67, 78, 79 (see also Nagôs); Sierra Leone, pan-Yoruba nationality, 28, 34, 39–40; Yoruba wars (1820s–1840s) and effect on Atlantic slave trade, 65; Yoruba West African mutual aid societies, 93 Yorubaland, 13; Egba Yoruba culture, 40; return migration to Yorubaland, 38–40; reversal of creolization 40; Yoruba-speaking homeland later Nigeria, 23 Zapata, Fernando (Franciscan priest), 155–56, 158, 160–61. See also Matudere zapes, Africans from Sierra Leone in Mexico City, 257–58. See also Immaculate Conception

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Acknowledgments

The funds that made possible the conference that inspired these essays came from the University of Texas at Austin through the Faculty Harrington Fellowship and the Alice Drysdale Sheffield Professorship. Julie Ewald with the Harrington Fellowship facilitated all things. The Institute of Historical Studies of the Department of History promoted our conference and provided a venue for it and logistical support. Julie Hardwick, the Director of IHS, and Courtney Meador, IHS Administrator, and Alan Tully, the chair of the History Department, lent generous hands; so too did Laura Flack and Tony Araguz, History Department Administrators, who purchased air tickets and reserved hotels for all our guests. Several conference participants chose not to publish their essays, but we nevertheless are grateful for their insights: Alex Byrd, Sherwin Bryant, Linda Heywood, and Rosanne Adderley. Colleagues in the University of Texas History Department contributed to the discussions as commentators, chairs, and critical audience members: Toyin Falola, Frank Guridy, Robert Olwell, Tony Hopkins, Jonathan Brown, Virgina Burnett, Neil Kamill, and Seth Garfield. John Garrigus and April Lee Hatfield drove from Dallas and College Station, respectively, to contribute to the discussion. Jim Sweet offered us feedback and critical advice throughout. We thank our graduate students for their enthusiasm and support. Ben Breen helped us with the editing of one of the essays. We were fortunate that the conference came in the wake of the Annual UT African Conference, which resulted in Toyin Falola’s bringing additional attendees and hosting a lively reception with his usual style, pomp, and bottomless glasses. Matt Childs would like to thank his chairs (Lacy Ford and Larry Glickman) for their support. Peter Mancall, Paul Lovejoy, and one anonymous reviewer offered timely and important advice after we submitted the volume for consideration to the University of Pennsylvania Press. Penn Press’s editor Robert Lockhart wisely guided the manuscript through publication.