His-story is not My-story
The translated manuscripts present a revisionist view of early Atlantic slave trading, by showing that the human trafficking was a Portuguese creation. This challenges the accepted HIS-STORY that since the European slavers only moved the slaves from the African coast to their destination in the Americas, the supply side of the trade was entirely in African hands.
INTRODUCTION
A review of scholarly books on West African history shows a near-universal conclusion that, “since the European slavers only moved the slaves from the African coast to their destination in the Americas, the supply side of the trade was entirely in African hands.” (Eric R. Wolf, ‘Europe and the People Without History’ [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982"> 4). Most scholars of African History agree with Professor Wolf, and tell their graduate students and the public that ships sailed to West Africa from the Americas and Europe and simply purchased slaves from Africans. The dominant HIS-STORY claims that from 1502, when the Middle Passage began, until 1888, when slavery ended in Brazil, Africans sold over twelve million slaves to Europeans. This simplistic view of the Middle Passage is repeated so often that HIS-STORY has become historic fact. However, scholars rarely footnote historical manuscripts documenting the first century of the Atlantic slave trade from West Africa. Most scholars quote documents written after century one of the Atlantic slave trade and apply those later findings to the beginning of the forced migration. ‘Before Middle Passage’ presents a revisionist view of the early Atlantic slave trade.
‘Before Middle Passage’ translates two Portuguese manuscripts written between 1513 and 1526 that reconstruct how Portuguese colonists in the Cape Verde Islands sailed to nearby West Africa and secured captive Africans, whom they transported as slaves to the Cape Verde colony, and then on to Portugal, Spain, and the Spanish Canary Islands. The translations reconstruct early human trafficking from the vast Senegal to Sierra Leone region, channeled through the Cape Verde Islands, to Iberia and its Atlantic colonies. Translated customs data show Cape Verde colonists sailed a dozen ships annually to West Africa and transported ca.1500 enslaved Africans a year to the tiny Portuguese islands. That human trafficking created a surplus of enslaved people in the Cape Verde colony. Although the islands’ colonists kept slaves to work sugar and cotton plantations, many Africans were transshipped to Europe and its colonies on both sides of the Atlantic. While the Cape Verde colony had a surplus of African slaves, West Africa had no such surplus.
The first Portuguese went to the Cape Verde Islands in 1460 when mariners employed by Prince Henry the Navigator of Portugal discovered the uninhabited archipelago, just five hundred kilometers off the coast of Senegal. Two years later, Italian and Portuguese men and a very few European women colonized Santiago, the largest of the ten-island archipelago. By virtue of discovery, Portugal owned the Cape Verde Islands, and thereby exercised a monopoly over European trade with West Africa. Because Portugal dominated the first century of European contacts with West Africans (1441-1541), most surviving manuscripts about the early Atlantic slave trade were written in difficult-to-decipher Portuguese. In order to read fifteenth-and sixteenth-century Portuguese manuscripts, one must be versed in Portuguese paleography—the reading and interpretation of ancient written manuscripts. One reason many scholars skip over the early Atlantic slave trade, and focus instead on the latter centuries, is because the early Portuguese documents are very hard to read, and most universities do not support graduate students for the many years required to learn Portuguese paleography and conduct archival research in Portugal.
In 1466 Portugal linked its Cape Verde Islands to nearby West Africa, when King Afonso V issued a Founding Charter granting his colonists the monopoly to outfit ships and trade with the Senegal to Sierra Leone region facing the insular colony. However, Portugal did not conquer that region of Africa. Thus, the first Portuguese men who went to West Africa were traders, not conquerors. Unlike the first Spaniards in the Americas, the first Portuguese in West Africa wrote little about themselves, and even less about enslaved Africans and human trafficking—but there are a few hard-to-read Portuguese manuscripts on these subjects.
One manuscript translated in ‘Before Middle Passage’ is an onboard log of the ship Santiago, which in 1526 sailed from Lisbon to the Cape Verde colony and then on to nearby West Africa, where its captain purchased captive Africans before returning to the Cape Verde Islands and Portugal. The Santiago’s scribe, Antonio Pires, recorded seeing Captain Andre Afonso purchase captive Africans in Sierra Leone and Guinea Bissau. The scribe reported that homens broncos (white men) sold all the captive Africans to the Portuguese vessel. The scribe even named the Portuguese men living in Africa who sold the African to the Santiago. The same onboard log noted that the Santiago’s captain gave textiles and iron bars to the African kings in the Sierra Leone and Guinea Bissau harbors where he purchased the captive Africans. According to the onboard log, no African king or African merchant sold anything to the Portuguese vessel.
By the early sixteenth century, thousands of Portuguese men were living in the region of West Africa facing the Cape Verde Islands. These men who lived in Africa worked with family members and business associates in the Cape Verde Islands to monopolize the Atlantic slave trade from the Senegal to Sierra Leone region. A number of Portuguese edicts issued by King Manuel I (1495-1521) confirmed that a large number of Portuguese men lived in West Africa facing the Cape Verde Islands. The king ordered all these men who lived in Africa to return to Christian territories; however, they ignored the king, and remained in Africa. Since the Portuguese did not conquer West Africa, Portuguese kings exercised no control over Europeans who lived there. Most of the Europeans men who lived in West Africa had migrated from Portugal and its insular colonies in the Cape Verde Islands and São Tomé. Others jumped ship when Portuguese fleets bound for India anchored in Senegal. After just two weeks at sea, many landlubbers realized they could not handle the two-year-long ocean voyage to India. So many young male Portuguese mariners, adventurers, deserters, criminals, and political and religious exiles lived in West Africa facing the Cape Verde Islands, that sixteenth-century Portuguese coined a new word, lancado, to describe them.
Africans welcomed lancados because they were traders not conquerors, and their presence attracted merchant ships from the Cape Verde Islands and Portugal. Lancados also traded with European pirates and interlopers. It is important to remember that the first Portuguese went to Africa as friendly traders, and posed no perceived threat to Africans. It is likely African kings, governing councils of elders, bureaucrats, army officers, and ordinary citizens received the Portuguese with open arms, because they brought textiles, glass, salt, sugar, iron, copper, liquor, horses, armaments, gun powder, gunsmiths, and mercenaries who empowered kings and the ruling class. Since the Portuguese did not conquer West Africa, Catholic priests did not go to the African continent to convert Africans. Instead, priests remained in the Cape Verde Islands where they administered to European colonists and Africans who had converted to Catholicism.
The bulk of ‘Before Middle Passage’ consists of a translation into English of the Portuguese receipt book from the customs houses of the Cape Verde Islands from 1513 to 1516. In it Portuguese customs agents reported import duties on 3,166 enslaved Africans transported from nearby Africa in three dozen ships, all outfitted in the Cape Verde Islands. The customs officers named nearly a thousand Portuguese human traffickers, their ships, officers, crew, and outfitters, as well as the price of each living slave. Most importantly, the scribes recorded the 25 percent import duty collected on enslaved Africans by the Portuguese government and the 5 percent tax collected by the Catholic Church. The customs duties may provide data for organizations seeking reparations for the enslavement and bondage of Africans in the Americas.
A section of the translated Cape Verde customs receipt book provides details of export taxes paid on ca.600 enslaved Africans by merchants from Portugal, Spain, and the Canary Islands, when they made customs declarations before departing the Portuguese colony. Cape Verde customs agents collected 10 percent import and export duties from merchants from Europe and its insular Atlantic colonies. All export taxes collected on slaves went to the government of Portugal, and none to the Catholic Church.
Portuguese and Spanish manuscripts written at the time (1513-1526) point to smugglers transporting enslaved Africans from the Portuguese Cape Verde Islands to the Spanish Caribbean. The Middle Passage began with a small number of Africans shipped from Spain and others smuggled from the Portuguese Cape Verde Islands to the Spanish Caribbean. These translated Portuguese documents open a rare window into the workings and scope of the early Atlantic slave trade to Europe and the birth of the Middle Passage.
ANALYSIS OF THE HUMAN TRAFFICKING
A most interesting finding is that the Portuguese men who lived in West Africa monopolized early slave trading into the Iberian Atlantic. These two translations and other extant Iberian manuscripts present a revisionist view of early Atlantic slave trading, by showing that the human trafficking was a Portuguese creation. This challenges the accepted HIS-STORY that “since the European slavers only moved the slaves from the African coast to their destination in the Americas, the supply side of the trade was entirely in African hands.”
The translations reveal that in 1526, Portuguese officials who outfitted the Santiago in Lisbon informed its captain and scribe that when the vessel reached West Africa, Africans would sell their slaves to the Portuguese ship. However, the onboard log of the Santiago documented that Portuguese men who lived in West Africa sold all African slaves to the Portuguese ship. Spanish documents from the same time (1513-1526) identified the Caribbean-based Spanish priest Bartholomeu de Las Casas as stating that he first believed that the Portuguese had enslaved Africans in Just Wars. However, later in life, the priest declared that he learned the Portuguese had captured free Africans whom they then sold to Spaniards as legitimate slaves.
The translated customs receipt book showed that each and every captive African entering Cape Verde custom houses was classified as a legitimate slave by Portuguese traders, the Portuguese customs officers, and the Catholic Church. The customs records also showed that Portuguese priests in the Cape Verde colony participated in human trafficking. The two translated manuscripts provide a revisionist view of the Atlantic slave trade to Europe and the birth of the Middle Passage, and show that the Portuguese started and initially monopolized the maritime human trafficking from West Africa to Europe and the Americas.
* Trevor P. Hall is a Professor of African History. He completed his Ph.D. at The Johns Hopkins University with a dissertation on early-modern Cape Verde Islands.
* THE VIEWS OF THE ABOVE ARTICLE ARE THOSE OF THE AUTHOR AND DO NOT NECESSARILY REFLECT THE VIEWS OF THE PAMBAZUKA NEWS EDITORIAL TEAM
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