Conveners: Rebekah Lee and Doris Okenwa
Speaker: José Lingna Nafafé (University of Bristol)
Discussant: Michael Odijie (ASC, Oxford)
This book talk introduces a groundbreaking study which tells the story of the highly organised, international legal court case for the abolition of slavery spearheaded by Prince Lourenço da Silva Mendonça in the seventeenth century. The case, presented before the Vatican, called for the freedom of all enslaved people and other oppressed groups. This included New Christians (Jews converted to Christianity) and Indigenous Americans in the Atlantic World, and Black Christians from confraternities in Angola, Brazil, Portugal and Spain. Abolition debate is generally believed to have been dominated by white Europeans in the eighteenth century. By centring African agency, José’s book offers a new perspective on the abolition movement, showing for the first time how the legal debate was begun not by Europeans but by Africans. This study underscores the exceptionally complex nature of the African liberation struggle, and demystifies common knowledge and accepted wisdom surrounding African slavery.
Winner of the African Studies Association of the UK’s Best Book Award 2024: ‘This is a work of deep scholarship, demonstrating that the movement for the abolition of the Atlantic slave trade began as an African-based idea in the seventeenth century. Lourenço da Silva Mendonça, born into a royal family in Angola, and a multilingual Christian, developed a sustained critique of slavery and took a case to the papal courts in an attempt to have it declared illegal by the Catholic church. Nafafé’s book, monumental in its approach and footnoting, will help to change the important fields that it addresses – the histories of the slave trade; the Black Atlantic; African Catholicism; imperialism; and abolition. These are central issues in global history.’
José Lingna Nafafé is Associate Professor of African and Atlantic History, Department of Hispanic, Portuguese and Latin American Studies, University of Bristol, and was the first Director of the MA in Black Humanities. His academic interests embrace inter-related areas linked by the overarching themes of: the Black Atlantic abolitionist movement in the 17th Century; the Lusophone Atlantic African diaspora; wage-labour, 1792-1850; race, religion and ethnicity; Luso-African migrants; ‘Europe in Africa’ and ‘Africa in Europe’; and postcolonial theory. His recent publications include the best Award-Winning book, Lourenço da Silva Mendonça, and the Black Atlantic Abolitionist Movement in the 17th Century (Cambridge University Press, 2022). He is currently writing a third monograph entitled, Beyond Wilberforce’s Experiment in Abolitionism: Yellow Fever Epidemic, Unfree Labour and the Market, 1792-1870.
