5 - Mendonça’s Discourse in the Vatican: Liberation as a Wider Atlantic Question

Summary

In Chapter 5, I explore Mendonça’s court case in the Vatican and argue that liberation of the enslaved Africans in Brazil, Portugal and Spain was part of a wider Atlantic question. By allying himself with these different constituencies in the Atlantic, Mendonça emphasised that his call for freedom was universal – abolition should go beyond the African frontier to include New Christians and Indigenous Americans. Mendonça’s evidence-based court case challenged the established assertion that Africa was a slaving society that already practised and willingly aided the European Atlantic slave trade. His evidence demonstrated how the mechanics of the Atlantic slave trade operated in Africa, and how violence was used as a strategy for maintaining the institution of slavery. The accused were the Vatican and the Italian, Portuguese, and the Spanish political governing authorities, and Mendonça brought together African accusers from different organisations, confraternities and interest groups. This is a significant reinterpretation of slavery and abolition, revealing a new understandings of Mendonça’s criminal court case in the Vatican as a Black Atlantic abolition movement.