For centuries, it has been held that the ideas and movement for the abolition of the transatlantic slave trade came from western abolitionists. No input from Africans has been acknowledged.
As a professor of African and Atlantic history, I challenge this notion in a book titled Lourenço da Silva Mendonça and the Black Atlantic Abolitionist Movement in the Seventeenth Century. The book is based on new material found in Portuguese, Spanish and Vatican archives. Its key argument is that the ideas and movement for ending transatlantic slavery began largely among Africans in the Portuguese empire in the 17th century. And not, as most accounts would have it, as a European idea in the 18th century.
The book is based on two decades of research into abolition, universal freedom and justice. In it, I explore the role played by Angolan prince Lourenço da Silva Mendonça. He became a central figure in championing the abolition of slavery after he was exiled in 1671 to Brazil and then Portugal.
By exploring Mendonça’s life, and the detailed records surviving from an important court case in the 1680s, I offer a new perspective on the slave trade, the Black Atlantic, Catholicism, imperialism and abolition. These are all central to global history.
Lourenço da Silva Mendonça
The Atlantic slave trade began in 1415 and ran for four and a half centuries. During that time, more than 16 million Africans were kidnapped and transported to Europe, South and North America and the Caribbean.
Prince Lourenço da Silva Mendonça was born in the kingdom of Pedras of Pungo-AnDongo in 1649, in Angola. (His place of death remains unknown.) His birth coincided with Portugal tightening its grip on the slave trade in west central Africa. This trade’s brutal effects defined his early childhood and adulthood.
In the 16th and 17th centuries, Portugal was in the forefront of European maritime empires and of the Atlantic slave trade. In 1585 Luanda (modern Angola’s capital) was established as a port south of the Kongo kingdom, in the Pungo-AnDongo kingdom, serving this trade.
Angola was named after the title of its king. Portuguese influence gradually spread inland and Lourenço’s grandfather, Hari I, was made a king by Portugal in 1626. During his 38 years of service to Portugal, he was forced to pay 3,800 enslaved people to the crown, a tax known as baculamento.
Hari I had to fight wars alongside Portuguese troops stationed in Angola in which two of his sons, including Mendonça’s father, died. Two of Mendonça’s uncles, however, rebelled against Portugal and refused to pay tax in human persons. Hari II, who took the throne of Pungo-AnDongo, was executed. The Ndongo polity was finally conquered in 1671 and brought fully under Portuguese control. Members of the royal group were exiled.
Mendonça witnessed these processes and was part of this exile network in Brazil, which was colonised by Portugal at the time. By order of the Portuguese crown, Mendonça studied for four years at the Convent of Vilar de Frades in Braga, a city in Portugal. By the 1680s, he was elected as an international lawyer for Black Christians across Africa, Portugal, Brazil and Spain. He was allowed to practise “throughout the whole of Christendom in any kingdom or dominion” and “using the economic and political right which is conferred to him”.
In 1684, Mendonça presented a court case to Pope Innocent XI, petitioning the Vatican, Portugal, Italy and Spain to stop enslaving African people. He demanded abolition not only for Africans, but also for New Christians (Jews converted to Christianity) and Native Americans.
This petition was made more than a century before British abolitionist leaders William Wilberforce and Thomas Buxton fought for the passage of Great Britain’s Act of Abolition.
The Vatican was the leading court in the Catholic world. In the 15th and 16th centuries the Vatican had issued a series of papal bulls permitting the enslavement of Africans, meaning it also had the judicial authority to ban slavery under ecclesiastical law.
In his address to the Vatican, Mendonça exposed the hypocrisy of the institution of Atlantic slavery, using four core principles of law to argue his case: human, natural, divine, and civil laws. He argued for the abolition of slavery and included Black Brotherhoods and interest groups of men, women and young people of African descent in Spain, Portugal, Brazil and Africa. The scale of this international initiative led by Africans in the Atlantic region has not been fully researched.
Mendonça’s thinking developed in part because of his legal role for the Black Christian Brotherhood, a role conferred on him by the king of the Christian Kingdom (Spain), Carlos II, and the archbishop of Toledo, Luis Manuel Fernández de Portocarrero y de Guzman.
His argument for abolition included non-Iberian empires in Africa, the Americas and Europe, and enabled him to take his criminal court case to the Supreme Court of Christendom in an attempt to overturn Pope Nicholas V’s bull, which was the foundation of perpetual Atlantic slavery.
Misunderstood history
Proponents of slavery at the time argued that Africans enslaved their own people and that this practice was embedded in their socio-political, economic, religious and legal systems.
The abolition of Atlantic slavery has subsequently been told mainly as a narrative in which morally superior European Christians rescued Africans both from their own and subsequent imperial systems of slavery. Both the slave trade itself, and colonialism after British abolition, were justified by these linked, usually Christian, narratives.
Mendonça regarded the narratives about African slavery as treacherous tales aimed at justifying the unjustifiable. The records of the case not only reveal the role taken by Africans in the early abolition movement but also their sophisticated development of arguments to connect divine, natural, civil and human law.
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They also show the political nous of Mendonça and his networks in attempting to unite oppressed constituencies within the Atlantic and the broader Catholic world.
Mendonça’s relationship with new Christians, Native Brazilians and other Africans was central to the case he made for universal human rights, liberty, reparation and humanity. It is striking that the Vatican court’s verdict on Mendonça’s case in 1686 was a universal condemnation of the Atlantic slave trade. But the Christian states of Europe failed to honour it. It would take another 200 years before slavery was finally abolished, first in 1834 in the British Empire, and then in 1888 in Brazil.
