The Heretic of Cacheu
The Heretic of Cacheu
Struggles Over Life in a Seventeenth-Century West African Port
Toby Green
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This book is dedicated to the friends from Guinea-Bissau, Senegal and The Gambia whom I have been privileged to make over the years.
It is especially for Buba, Mama, Yahya, Mohammed and Fátima; for Baba and Hassoum; for Abdoulie, Assan, Bala and Daniel; for Alaji, Djenaba, Marém, Ndaye, Alfa and Boubacar; and for Carlos, Carmen and José.
The critique of Western humanism is not a mere historical account of what happened – the book of atrocities. It is also the mourning of what was lost, in a way that does not dwell in the trauma, in a way that allows the survivor to escape the curse of repetition, to put the debris together again
Achille Mbembe, Necropolitics
List of Illustrations
Picture credits are given in parentheses.
p. 16 The fortress of Cacheu. (Nammarci, published under a creative commons licence: https://commons.wikimedia. org/wiki/File:Cacheu_statues_in_fortress.jpg)
p. 19 Our Lady of the Rosary, Cidade Velha. (Toby Green)
p. 38 Map of Cartagena, seventeenth century. (Available from Bridgeman: https://www.bridgemanimages.com/en/ blaeu/cartagena-in-colombia-from-the-atlas-of-w-blaeuseventeenth-century/engraving/asset/4730348)
p. 43 A bolon in northern Guinea-Bissau. (Toby Green)
p. 53 Signare from St Louis, Senegal. (From Jacques Grasset de Saint Sauveur, Costumes civils actuels de tous les peuples connus (1788); public domain)
p. 72 Postcard of the river at Farim, 1910. (Smithsonian: https:// edan.si.edu/slideshow/viewer/?eadrefid=EEPA. 1985-014_ref7044)
p. 74 Pepel cloth from the early twentieth century. (Lisbon, Museu de Etnologia: http://matriznet.dgpc.pt/MatrizNet/ Objectos/ObjectosConsultar.aspx?IdReg=82845)
p. 76 Rice bushels, Guinea-Bissau. (Toby Green)
p. 89 A fence bordering a vegetable garden, Bijagós islands. (Toby Green)
p. 98 Olifant. Ivory, carved. Sierra Leone, c.1500–1550. (Lisbon, Museu Nacional de Arte Antiga (inv. no. 988 Div))
List of Illustrations
p. 99 Ivory pyx from Sierra Leone. (Walters Art Museum, licensed under a Creative Commons-Attribution ShareAlike 3.0 unported license: https://commons. wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Sierra_Leonian_-_Ivory_Pyx_ with_Scenes_from_the_Passion_of_Christ_-_Walters_ 71108_-_View_F.jpg)
pp. 106–7 French map of the Casamance river and Bijagós islands, 1767. (Archives Nationales d’Outre Mer, Aix-en-Provence, France. Public domain: https://recherche-anom.culture. gouv.fr/ark:/61561/1169640.1169641/daogrp/0/2)
p. 111 Kola nuts as a wedding gift. (Azekhoria Benjamin, under creative commons licence: https://commons.wikimedia. org/wiki/File:Kolanuts.jpeg)
p. 113 Lumo, Bula, Guinea-Bissau. (Toby Green)
p. 115 Canoe on Orangozinho island, Bijagós. (Toby Green)
p. 116 French map of Bolama island, Bissau, 1718. (Archives Nationales d’Outre Mer, Aix-en-Provence, France. Public domain: https://recherche-anom.culture.gouv.fr/ark:/ 61561/78781.1169637/daogrp/0/1)
pp. 124–5 Ribeira Grande, Cabo Verde, 1655. Detail from the Atlas of Leonardo de Ferrari. (Public domain: https:// commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Pormenor_da_ Planta_de_la_Ciudade_Cape_Verde_(1).jpg)
p. 136 Manjako religious shrine,Jeta island, Bijagós. (Toby Green)
p. 139 James Island Fort, The Gambia. (From Francis Moore’s Travels into the inlands of Africa, 1738. Public domain: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Sketch_ of_James_Island,_Gambia.png)
p. 144 A kapok or silk-cotton tree, Bijagós islands. (Toby Green)
p. 150 The restored Franciscan monastery in Cidade Velha (Ribeira Grande). (Toby Green)
p. 158 Termite mound, Bijagós islands. (Toby Green)
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List of Illustrations
p. 177 Silver ‘daalder’. (Public domain: https://commons. wikimedia.org/wiki/File:1601_Amsterdam_daalder_8_ reales_British_Museum.jpg)
p. 183 Map of the Bijagó islands, 1767. ( Archives Nationales d’Outre-Mer, Aix-en-Provence, France, 17 DFC C 55, XIV, carton 76, ark:/61561/78634.2071219. Public domain)
p. 198 Vertical loom, from today’s Nigeria. 1910. (Public domain: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Studies_ in_primitive_looms_(1918)_(14597768459).jpg)
p. 222 Playing cards from c.1650. (Public domain: https:// commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Pierre_Barbey_-_ Playing_cards.TIF)
p. 224 Warri board. (The Horniman: https://www.horniman. ac.uk/object/14.3.66/1)
Acknowledgements
All books are collaborative endeavours. I have learnt so much from so many people over the years, without which this one could never exist. It’s hard to thank everyone who I would like to, and I apologize to everyone who the imprints of the passing years on my memory mean that I may have omitted.
I am more than usually indebted to my many friends and colleagues in Guinea-Bissau, Casamance and The Gambia, who have helped me to conduct research and taken me to key locations. In Guinea-Bissau Alaji Mamadou Ndiaye first took me to Cacheu, in 1995, and four years later introduced me to his friend Ibrahima Mansaly, teacher at Goudomp-3 school in the Casamance, who taught me a great deal about the history of Kaabu. Carmen Neto introduced me to the Guinean community in London and taught me much about her country throughout the 2000s. Later, it was a great (and fun!) privilege to work with Manecas Costa, who gave me different perspectives on Cacheu and its cultural heritage when we met in 2015 and again a couple of years later. Over the years, Carlos Cardoso has been a wonderful friend and colleague, who has materially transformed the ways in which I understand GuineaBissau and its peoples. And the same is even more true of José Lingna Nafafé, whose enduring friendship and faith in me has been one of the blessings of my life and career.
In The Gambia, Hassoum Ceesay has been more than a colleague: debater-king, fellow wordsmith and friend, he ensured that I was able to visit Bintang and Kaur and gain a sense of what those historic settlements may have been like several centuries ago. Baba Ceesay and Bala Saho first helped me to initiate my working relationships in The Gambia and have always been committed to the work that we shared in. I owe more than I can say to Buba
Acknowledgements
and Mama Saho, and to many other dear friends: Sainey Baldeh, Abdoulie Jabang, Oussainou Sanneh and Assan Sarr. I Nimbara.
The journey towards writing this book began first with all these Senegambian friends, but was then kickstarted with the intervention of two generous colleagues in Britain. In 2010, Malyn Newitt suggested to Filipa Ribeiro da Silva and me that we should consider working on an edition of Crispina Peres’s Inquisition trial for the British Academy’s sources on African history series (www.fonteshistoriaeafricanae.co.uk). We began work with our colleague in Lisbon Philip Havik, and many years later were able to publish our collective edition of her trial, which forms the groundwork and basis for so much of the discussion that follows. The companionable years during which we worked together on this project informed me immensely about the many contexts of Crispina Peres’s trial – I owe a great deal to Filipa and Philip: thank you both, camaradas.
A few years after this, Linda Newson very generously passed over to me her own photostats and accompanying CD -Roms of the account books of Manoel Bautista Pérez, impounded by the Inquisition in Lima in the late 1630s. Though I later made my own archival visits to Lima, where I was able to consult some of this material directly, this vast bundle of paper became absolutely essential when I combed through it again as I tried to conceive how a book like this might be written. It was typical of Linda’s generosity to consider that the material might be helpful in some way.
Whatever perspectives I am able to bring to all this material emerged as well through the influence of the careful and transformative scholarship of many people. Great thanks and debts are owed to Boubacar Barry (especially for the concept of ‘Greater Senegambia’ without which this book would not have been conceived in its present form); Philip Havik for his immense archival research and pioneering studies of the history of gender, and then providing a detailed and invaluable critique of inconsistencies and mis-steps in the text as I prepared the proofs, for which I am immensely grateful; Walter Hawthorne for work on the Balanta and the history of Guinea-Bissau; José Lingna Nafafé for his pathfinding work on
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Acknowledgements
African–European relations in today’s Guinea-Bissau (and so very much else besides); Carlos Lopes for the early historicization of Kaabu; Thiago Mota for his transformative recent work on the history of Islam in Senegambia; Peter Mark and José da Silva Horta for their work on the New Christian diaspora and art history; and Vanicléia da Silva Santos for her work on the Crispina Peres trial and on the bolsas de Mandinga
For many years I have worked with the British Academy on their committee for publishing sources for African history. I am thankful to Geetha Nair, James Rivington and Portia Taylor in the Publications team for shepherding the edition of Crispina Peres’ trial to publication in 2021, and to Ken Emond and Emma Deakins for their support over the years. I also thank the Academy for kindly giving permission for material from the trial edition to be reproduced in this book: © The British Academy 2021. Material reproduced by permission from African Voices from the Inquisition, Vol. 1: The Trial of Crispina Peres of Cacheu, Guinea-Bissau (1646–1668), ed. Toby Green, Philip J. Havik and F. Ribeiro da Silva (2021), London: Oxford University Press.
Once I had developed over the years the relevant materials and perspectives, James Pullen helped me to work out the original idea. Meanwhile, I have been very lucky to work with the same editorial team of Simon Winder at Allen Lane and the University of Chicago Press on this book as on my earlier book A Fistful of Shells. When he first saw the idea Simon was immediately supportive and has been an immense editor, always understanding both the book’s potential and how to bring out its ideas; at Chicago, Dylan Montanari has also been hugely helpful in putting the book through its final paces. I know how lucky I am to have worked with them both on developing this to fruition, and I am also very grateful to David Watson for a very thorough and clean copyedit of the draft text.
I also owe much to those at King’s College, London, who have supported unstintingly my research into this important but neglected topic over the years. The book was written during research leave granted by the College, and couldn’t have been done without it.
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Acknowledgements
Successive heads of department have always supported the work I have done in both West Africa and the UK . I want also especially to thank my colleagues in professional services who have made all manner of complex arrangements feasible: Faida Begum, Juliette Boyd, Amy Hart, Dot Pearce and Ania Stawarska have all helped me to arrange aspects of my work without which this book could not exist. My deep and sincere thanks to them all.
The sustained research and thought which made me able to write this work came first of all during the time when I had been awarded a Philip Leverhulme Prize in History. However, then the book itself was delayed in a number of ways by the Covid-19 pandemic. Putting it finally together then came at a difficult point in my own life. I am so grateful to those who shared their own strength with me and thereby gave me the capacity to complete it, in particular: Olutayo Adesina, Samuel Adu-Gyamfi, Nat Barstow, David Bell, Muriel Blaive, Aleida Mendes Borges, Pedrito Cambrão, Oliver Davis, Érika Melek Delgado, Richard Drayton, Thomas Fazi, Bob Fowke, Sunetra Gupta, Daniel Hadas, Mike Jackson, Sinan JohnRichards, Laurent Mucchielli, Reginald Oduor, Wellington Oyibo, Juliette Rouchier, Daniel Spiller, Sundararaman Thiagarajan, Ellen Townsend, Fernandes Wanda, Anjuli Webster and Reva Yunus.
I owe a particular debt to two dear friends and colleagues, Ana Lúcia Araujo and José Lingna Nafafé. They each read a complete draft of this book before anyone else and helped to shape the final version. Ana Lúcia provided all kinds of support in the writing of this book, making wonderful suggestions for illustrations and translation issues: her humane and brilliant knowledge of this period in history has been vital in helping me to reshape it into its current form, and her friendship has been essential in helping me to work on it at all. José and I meanwhile talked over many aspects of the manuscript and the hidden traces it revealed of the distant past of his country of birth – and also the sadness of writing such a book at a time when Guinea-Bissau has been suffering an enormous socioeconomic and political crisis driven by global forces, as in the past: José helped me to see traces of the religious
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Acknowledgements and cultural worlds of Guinea-Bissau’s past in the text in a materially different light, and also gave me confidence that I was on the right track.
Above and beyond all of these deeply heartfelt debts of gratitude, I am nothing without my much-beloved family: Emily, Lily and Flora. It was a joy to be able to travel with them in 2023 to these places which mean so much to me, and for them also to meet so many of the people from whom I have learnt so much. Above all else, their love and laughter ensured that I could finish this book.
Characters
crispina peres : the richest and most powerful trader in Cacheu in the 1660s, married to two former captain-generals of the town. Of mixed African-European heritage.
jorge gonçalves frances : son of Álvaro, a New Christian trader who had been penanced by the Inquisition of Évora in 1594; himself a former captain-general of Cacheu and majordomo of the church of St Anthony; married to Crispina. Of mixed AfricanEuropean heritage.
ambrosio gomes : major commercial rival of Crispina and Jorge; one of the plotters in the Inquisition trial of Crispina.
andré de faro : Capuchin missionary and author of a memorial about evangelization in Senegambia from the late 1660s; scribe in the trial of Crispina.
antónio da fonseca de ornelas : new captain-general of Cacheu at the time of Crispina’s trial, and a major enemy of Crispina and Jorge.
antonio vaz de pontes : priest of Cacheu despatched by the Caboverdean governor to trade for him in Senegambia; a major slave trafficker in his own right, and a wealthy businessman as well as priest, often found in the house of his lover in Vila Quente.
bibiana vaz : rose to become the most powerful trader in Cacheu by the 1680s and imprisoned the captain-general of Cacheu in her home in Farim for eighteen months; married to Ambrósio Gomes and also one of the chief plotters in Crispina’s trial.
bonifacia : enslaved household servant of Crispina; deeply involved with her offerings to the chinas in an attempt to preserve the health of her child; raised with the close involvement of Sebastião Rodrigues Barraza, who then fell in love with her; died before Crispina’s trial.
Characters
diogo furtado de mendonça : Archdeacon of Cabo Verde who instigated the Inquisitorial trial of the priest Luis Rodrigues.
domingos de aredas : godson and apprentice of Jorge; ransomed by Jorge from enslavement by the king of Sará; became an enemy of Crispina over a row involving chinas and then moved to live with Ambrosio Gomes and Bibiana Vaz; one of the main accusers in Crispina’s trial.
francisco lemos coelho : trader and enemy of Jorge over a street-fight with one of his relatives; author of one of the most detailed accounts to survive of life in Senegambia in the 1660s.
gaspar vogado : official religious visitor of Cacheu; major administrator of the town, responsible for defences and rebuilding the church in the 1650s; one of the key instigators of Crispina’s trial.
joão bautista pérez : New Christian trader from Montemoro-Novo in Alentejo; spent several years living in Cacheu in the 1610s and had four children there; account books provide some of the most detailed evidence on life in Cacheu; brother of Manoel; died in 1617.
joão nunes castanho : Jorge’s brother-in-law; envious of the wealth of his relative, one of the main conspirators in Crispina’s trial.
leonor ferreira : cotton-spinner and trader from Ribeira Grande in Cabo Verde; merchant who came to trade in Farim and Cacheu in 1655, where she knew Luis Rodrigues.
luis rodrigues : priest and drunkard; canon of the Cathedral of Ribeira Grande and priest of Farim c.1655; arrested by the Inquisition for soliciting women in the confession and deported to Lisbon; acquitted and returned to Cabo Verde, where he began the process of fomenting Crispina’s trial.
manoel de almeida : sergeant-major of Cabo Verde, who accompanied Crispina to Lisbon and handed her over to the Inquisitors there; acted as Crispina’s interpreter in the trial; eventually became captain-general of Cacheu.
manoel bautista perez : New Christian trader in Cacheu in the 1610s, who moved to Lima and became the richest trader there;
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arrested by the Inquisition suspected of heresy in 1636; executed in the auto-da-fé of Lima in 1639; the legal dealings over his credit and debts produced some of the most detailed evidence we have on seventeenth-century Cacheu.
maria mendes : cotton-spinner in Cacheu; born in Ribeira Grande, probably in the 1590s; aunt of the public scribe in Cacheu; known as having some of the best contacts with the djabakós
natalia mendes : herbalist living in Vila Quente, often called upon to provide cures by people in Cacheu; married to the barbersurgeon known as Frique-Fraque.
paulo de lordello : president of the Franciscan monastery of Ribeira Grande at the time of Luis Rodrigues’s trial; agitator for Inquisitorial investigations; official charged with leading the investigations leading to Crispina’s arrest.
sebastião rodrigues barraza : household slave of Crispina and Jorge, often despatched outside the town on household errands; claimed to be related to the nobility of Casamance; apparently a Muslim, though also an inveterate drunkard.
Peoples of the Cacheu Region in the Seventeenth Century
bainunk : most oral histories agree that they were among the oldest inhabitants of today’s Casamance and Guinea-Bissau; Bugendo and Guinguim were Bainunk settlements. Under demographic and political pressure in the seventeenth century, their numbers and significance declined precipitously, and there are very few Bainunk left today.
balanta : in the seventeenth century found especially in the region of northern Guinea-Bissau, between Cacheu and Farim, and also south of here. Famous warriors who resisted trading and dealing with Europeans. In the nineteenth century many Balanta also migrated to the south of today’s Guinea-Bissau, to become then the largest ethnic group in the country until recent years.
bijagós : people who live in the archipelago of small islands off the west coast of the mainland; said to have moved there to escape the invading armies of the Mali empire in the thirteenth century; famed warriors.
caboverdeans : generally mixed-heritage people often found in Senegambia; born in the Cabo Verde archipelago of islands some 300 miles off the African coast north of Dakar in today’s Senegal. Some Caboverdeans came as imperial emissaries in Church, trade and administration; others as captives of some of these people; and others as independent traders wanting to re-establish themselves in the West African homelands whence they or their ancestors had come enslaved to Cabo Verde in the sixteenth century.
jolof : large polity and people found north of the Gambia river; little involved in Cacheu in the seventeenth century, although some Cacheu traders did do business in Jolof lands.
Peoples of the Cacheu Region in the Seventeenth Century
floup : people who lived in the lands between Cacheu and the Atlantic Ocean, growing in importance in the seventeenth century; famous for frequency of attacks on Atlantic slave trading ships; known today as the Jola.
fulani : cattle-herders and scholars of Islam found across West Africa from Kano to Senegambia; migrated in a large group in the late fifteenth century to the Fuuta Jaalò mountains of today’s Guinea-Conakry under Koli Tenguela; involved in raiding captives for the transatlantic slave trade.
jakhanké : Sufi Islamic scholars and teachers whose centre in the seventeenth century was at Sutucó on the Gambia river; frequent traders across Senegambia and purveyors of amulets. Said to have originated from Dia, in the Middle Niger valley, perhaps the oldest urban settlement in that region (c.500 bce ).
mandinga : ethnic group found in Kaabu and across Casamance and Gambia; linked to the Malinké of today’s Guinea-Conakry and to the Mande of the Mali empire.
nalú : rice-growers living in small-scale communities in the south of today’s Guinea-Bissau and north of today’s Guinea-Conakry.
pepel : major ethnic group living around Cacheu in the seventeenth century and in the bolons round and about, as well as in the nearby kingdom of Mata de Putame. Later subdivided into closely related groups today known as the Manjako (most focused around Cacheu and the coast), Mancaigne (around Bula) and Pepel.
sapi : name given by the Portuguese to peoples living around Sierra Leone, some way south of Cacheu, and famous as ivory carvers; following invasions from Mane peoples in the 1560s, some moved to live in and around Cacheu.
Glossary
aguardente : rum brought from the Americas.
alcaide : mayor or chief official of town in Senegambia, deriving from the Portuguese; in Mandinga the word is today Alkalú.
alúas : wooden tablets on which children practise writing Arabic verses from the Qu’ran. Still often used today.
arroba : a standard measure equivalent to 32 lbs or 15 kilograms.
auto-da-fé : public Inquisitorial procession in an urban centre, in which penitents carried candles before them before receiving their punishment; in the seventeenth century, cases of burning or garrotting were comparatively rare.
barafulas : white-and-blue cloth woven in the Cabo Verde islands and highly prized in Senegambia.
bolon : creek.
boticário : apothecary/pharmacist.
cantareiras : fixed benches for sitting in the kitchen.
Carreira da Índia : sea route of the Portuguese empire from Lisbon to Goa; a fleet undertook this annually once in each direction, a journey of eight months.
chinas : shrines of Senegambian religions; a name given by outsiders both to the religious setting in which offerings were made and to the apparel involved in these offerings, such as the pots which could be kept in the home with various special liquids.
combete : storehouse.
compadre : godfather; co-godparents were known as compadres.
criado/a : servant.
djabakós : healer or seer drawing on Senegambian religious practice to prescribe cures or offerings to be made.
farim : ruler of one of the Mandinga kingdoms of southern Senegambia. fazenda/fazendeiro : plantation(-owner).
Glossary
gan : extended family network.
godenho : measure of kola nuts.
griot : praise-singer.
gris-gris : amulet.
grumetes : apprentices of major traffickers, often involved in regional trade in Senegambia, where they would undertake tasks for their mentor/master’s household.
iran : spirit-snakes with special magical properties in Senegambian belief-systems.
kapok : silk-cotton trees.
Kristón : mixed-heritage Catholics living in the port towns of today’s Senegambia, acting as intermediaries for Atlantic traders.
lumo : rotational weekly market.
mato : bush; also used in colonial documents to indicate areas outside imperial control (i.e. most places).
New Christians : descendants of Jews who had been forcibly converted to Christianity in Portugal in 1497, or whose ancestors had chosen to convert rather than to leave Spain in 1492. New Christians held a wide range of beliefs: some were devout Catholics, others were crypto-Jews, others were more or less atheists.
nyantio : aristocratic warriors of the kingdom of Kaabu.
parda : of mixed heritage.
praça : fortified imperial redoubt (such as Cacheu).
regateiras : women trading at markets.
signares : mixed-heritage women who became powerful traders in the port-towns of West Africa between Senegal and Sierra Leone.
sobrado : house with two storeys.
tabanka : names for fortified villages in Senegambia, still the word for village in Guinea-Bissau today.
tchon : land belonging to a people or to a gan (extended kinship network).
Introduction
Towards the middle of 1652, Jorge Mesquita de Castelbranco arrived as the new governor of Santiago, largest among the islands of the Cabo Verde archipelago and around 300 miles west of the African coastline. Castelbranco was an ‘impoverished nobleman’ who had been offered this position, which the officials of the Portuguese Colonial Overseas Council probably saw as something of a sinecure. The focus of empire had long moved on from Cabo Verde to Angola and Brazil, where the Portuguese were immersed in a decades-long conflict with the Dutch for control of the South Atlantic. However, Castelbranco saw things differently: being a colonial governor was still an opportunity to rebuild the family fortune, given that Santiago island had long been at the centre of the region’s traffic in enslaved Africans, linking the port of Cacheu in today’s Guinea-Bissau with the Atlantic world.1
As soon as he arrived, Castelbranco made his mark. When a wine-trader arrived from the island of Madeira, further north in the Atlantic Ocean, he imprisoned him for causing him ‘offence’. Vicente Gomes, the Madeira wine-trader, had accused Castelbranco of lying and acting dishonestly when he had tried to stop him from doing business with the sweet wines still famous today, and then essential in Cabo Verde for the Catholic Communion ritual as well as for other, more dissolute, purposes. By the time of the petition, in late June, Gomes had been fuming in prison for a month: Santiago’s community was small, everyone knew everyone, and he couldn’t be released without the governor’s approval.2
But meanwhile, Gomes’s business partner was busy. Manoel Henriques, the scribe of the royal estate, had a side-hustle as an intermediary in the wine business. He had been selling Gomes’s wine to the traders of Ribeira Grande, the capital city of the island.
The Heretic of Cacheu
Several witnesses came forward to describe how he had placed wine in their houses for them to sell. All of them were women: Beatriz Jorge, who was thirty years old, Maria Manuel (thirty-four), Maria de Socorro (forty-seven) and Francisca Peres (thirty). In other words, and as the historian Nwando Achebe puts it, while the men paraded around harbouring enmities, sowing political chaos and proclaiming their own self-righteousness in lengthy and tedious epistles, ‘women owned the marketplace’ in this West African island town.3
Political factionalism was already rife in Santiago when Castelbranco appeared in 1652. A deposition from 1655 described how he had arrived to find that the previous governor, Pedro Semedo Cardoso, had imprisoned the judge and purveyor of the Royal Estate Manoel Paez de Aragão ‘because of the great hatred and enmity that there was between them’. Cardoso had replaced Aragão with Francisco Alvares Liste as judge. The deposition went on that he had done this since both of them supported the faction led by the African inhabitants of the island, descendants of enslaved captives who had escaped to live in the high mountains of the interior in Santa Catarina, the region around what is today the town of Assomada. In fact, at that time, ‘the inhabitants of the island who had been born there were mutinying, saying that they were going to come down to the city and kill all the whites there, and saying publicly that the Black man should be governor.’4
Thus, while women owned Ribeira Grande’s marketplace, African women and men ran the island beyond it. Into this complex political world blundered Jorge Mesquita de Castelbranco, this minor Portuguese nobleman who had fallen on hard times, someone who held stereotyped and outdated views of what this world was like. As colonial governor, shouldn’t he be able to do as he pleased and treat the place as his own plaything to profit from as he wished? Wasn’t he automatically in charge?
But, like history itself, things weren’t anything like as simple as he had imagined: by early November 1653, less than eighteen months after he had arrived, Castelbranco had been thrown into jail in the fortress of St Philip, whose restored walls and cannon still
command the cliff overlooking Ribeira Grande in today’s country of Cabo Verde.5
This book offers an account of daily life in the seventeenth-century West African port town of Cacheu. It does so through the lens of the life story of the richest trader in the town by the early 1660s, a woman called Crispina Peres. Peres was arrested for trial by the Portuguese Inquisition in 1665 and deported to Lisbon to the Inquisitorial jail. She is the ‘heretic’ of this book’s title. And yet, while Peres was arrested for the crime of heresy, many readers may conclude by the end of the book that her real crime was that her power challenged that of the growing Portuguese empire – that her real ‘heresy’ was a different sort of power, and a different way of understanding the world.
Through the lives of Peres and her family, friends and enemies, this book takes us into the worlds of the women and men who lived between around 1615 and 1670 in Cacheu, in today’s Guinea-Bissau,* then the major West African slave-trading port linked to the colonial world of Santiago island in Cabo Verde. We find out who the people of the town were; how they interacted with the regional and global networks that they were part of; what it was that moved them, angered them or made them afraid; how they made money; and how they enjoyed themselves, and loved, lived and died. Crispina Peres’s life is the continuity which shapes the book as a whole, though at times it is set aside to engage with a broader and more holistic portrait of this seventeenth-century West African port town. In tracing these emotional, economic and social histories, I have tried to allow the lives of the people involved to emerge as in a tapestry. At times the ten chapters cover similar topics, but they always do so from a range of different perspectives. Through the slow layering-up of these different perspectives, a picture takes
* Hereafter, for the sake of convenience, I will refer to the general region of today’s country as ‘Guinea-Bissau’ – although, of course, the nation state did not exist until 1974.
The Heretic of Cacheu
shape which aims to offer an overall understanding of daily life there. This structure also allows the book to embody one of its central arguments, which is that people in seventeenth-century West Africa did not operate through our current linear approach to time. Instead, they experienced the world and the passing of time in a way that was more cyclical: indeed, the rise of a linear view of time was connected to the rise of the empires of the Atlantic world.
A number of other histories of West African port cities have been written for this period, yet all the same this narrative has an unusual level of emotional detail about daily life almost 400 years ago. We are able to reconstruct these feelings because of a type of historical source that had not been drawn on by historians of West Africa until the last twenty years: the records of the Portuguese and Spanish Inquisitions. These institutions were responsible for imposing and overseeing the ‘purity of the faith’ not only in Spain and Portugal, but also in their colonies. While the enforcement of this policy was very sporadic in places such as today’s Angola and Guinea-Bissau, in the middle of the seventeenth century two lengthy Inquisition trials were held involving West Africans. The first began in 1657, and was brought against the philandering, drunkard canon Luis Rodrigues, of the cathedral of the island of Santiago. Rodrigues was arrested in Cabo Verde for soliciting women in the act of confession and deported to the Inquisitorial jail in Lisbon in March 1658. But there, in spite of a strong range of evidence, he was pardoned.6
A vengeful man, Rodrigues returned to Cabo Verde in 1661 determined to get his own back on his enemies. In 1655, two years before being arrested, Rodrigues had been sent from Cabo Verde to be the parish priest of the town of Farim in Guinea-Bissau, some distance up the São Domingos river from Cacheu. There he had caused many scandals. In one sermon he had claimed that he had been given powers by the Pope to exculpate any incestual relations. He was widely accused of sleeping with any woman he found attractive, making them go to his house for confession, where he received them in breeches and a shirt lying on his bed in a special building he had assigned for this purpose. He had then embarked on an affair
Introduction
with a married woman whose husband had wanted to kill him, forcing him to flee Farim for Cacheu by night in the boat of someone who felt sorry for him.7
In spite of all this – and of the numerous accusations against him in the Cabo Verde islands as well – Rodrigues preferred to blame his enemies for his arrest and trial by the Inquisition, rather than to consider his own faults. He was a human being, warts and all. And so, on his return to West Africa from Lisbon, he set about getting his own back. Rodrigues soon drew on his political contacts to fulminate the papers leading to the second trial, which came to a head in the early months of 1665. This was the trial that was brought against Crispina Peres. Peres was married to the former captain-general of Cacheu, Jorge Gonçalves Frances, someone who in his own trial Rodrigues had declared to be his sworn enemy. After Rodrigues began the proceedings, Peres’s other enemies in the town took charge, and she was eventually arrested on the charge of witchcraft. Following three years of interrogations in Lisbon, Crispina Peres was processed in an auto-da-fé there, where she was given a mild penance – as was often the case with Inquisitorial judgements by this time – returning to Cacheu in June 1668.8
These two trials offer remarkable social histories of a small town and its hinterlands in seventeenth-century West Africa, with the type of detail which was long assumed by historians to apply only to the worlds of Europe. While biographical histories exist for Angola in the seventeenth century, this is the first such book to be written in this era for West Africa. Those interested in this history are extremely fortunate to have these records today, since they are the only cases of their kind which have survived. They were produced at a particular point of Senegambia’s history, as part of the imperial competition then growing across the world. But for the rest of its long active history, the Portuguese Inquisition did next to nothing in West Africa: by and large, its main interests in the empire were in Brazil and in Goa (where they had formed a tribunal in 1560).9
What is more, alongside these 1,000 folios of documents, there is a further bundle of 1,000 or so more pages of Inquisition sources.
The Heretic of Cacheu
These documents predate these trials by forty years and are housed in the National Archive of Peru in Lima. There, in the 1630s, the Portuguese slave trafficker Manoel Bautista Pérez was arrested by the Inquisition of Lima. Bautista Pérez was the richest man in the city, and his account books dating back almost twenty years were soon impounded by the Inquisition as his creditors petitioned for the debts which they claimed he owed them. Some of these account books relate to the time that he and his brother João spent as slave traffickers in Cacheu in the 1610s. João had died in Cacheu in 1617, and Manoel had come to the Americas shortly afterwards, where he grew rich. Two decades later, the account books of profit, loss and despair linked to their actions in West Africa and then South America were impounded, as the Inquisition sought to assess the size of Manoel’s property.10
Taken all together, what has endured from that traumatic period of world history is a remarkable collection of documents of over 2,000 folios that offer the chance to reconstruct many aspects of daily life that were long assumed lost. The use of Inquisition documents to provide hitherto unparalleled social histories of medieval and early modern Europe was a feature of history-writing of the 1970s. Books such as Montaillou by the French historian Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie and The Cheese and the Worms by Italian historian Carlo Ginzburg became widely read; and more recently the historian James Sweet used an Inquisition trial to explore the life history of Domingos Álvares, an enslaved African from today’s Benin living in Brazil in the 1730s. These books collectively transformed the ability to understand the fine-grained detail, the textures and the feelings which made up human lives so long ago. In so doing, they challenged the view of history as one performed and enacted by male elites: the kings, noblemen and merchants who so often line the pages of history books.11
One thing which these documents also offered these historians was the opportunity to undercut stereotypes about static, unchanging communities in the past. In Montaillou, Ladurie takes us into the social worlds of this remote Pyrenean redoubt. In doing so, he