1 - The Municipal Council of Luanda and the Politics of the Portuguese Governors in Angola

Summary

Chapter 1 deals with the Municipal Council of Luanda and the politics of Portuguese governors in Angola in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, detailing how the Municipal Council of Luanda was involved in illegal wars , treachery and robbery in capturing and enslaving Angolans and shipping them to Brazil on behalf of Portugal. It demonstrates how the Municipal Council of Luanda became the site of political intrigue, jealousy, deceit and mutiny in a political landscape in which the main drive was for economic gain; the enslavement of Angolans was the key part of that package. The methods deployed to capture them – wars, pillage, treachery – formed the basis for Mendonça’s Vatican court case.

On 6 March 1684, when Mendonça presented his evidence-based court case in the Vatican, he began with statements on how Africans were captured and enslaved.¹ As a member of the Royal Court of Pungo-Andongo, he would doubtless have recalled historical cases of ordinary people having been rounded up from their homes, fields and daily lives and having been enslaved in Angola; he would have experienced war; and he would have heard stories of people being seized in raids, kidnapped and taken to the Americas as enslaved people.² He would have heard from his grandfather, father, uncles, aunts and brothers – all allies of the Portuguese – about illegal wars conducted, treachery used and robbery carried out on Angolans captured, enslaved and shipped to Brazil on behalf of Portugal.³ His report in the Vatican confirms cases of ‘those who have been “abducted”, “kidnapped”, “hunted”, “snatched”, “taken from the fields with fraud” and “sold” to “merchants”’⁴ who would in turn ‘sell them in Europe like animals’⁵ or in the Americas for that matter.

So to begin to understand Mendonça’s criminal court case about the predicament of enslaved Africans in the Atlantic, it would be useful to start in West Central Africa, where he first experienced his people being seized and carried off into slavery in the Americas.⁶ It is essential that we locate his work in the political, legal and economic landscape of Kongo and Angola.⁷ It is also fundamental that we understand from the beginning that enslaving Africans was an integral part of the Portuguese conquest of West Central Africa.⁸ This is evident from the 1512 brief to the kings of Kongo, and later Angola, by Dom Manuel, King of Portugal.⁹ It is, therefore, impossible to draw a distinction between what we might perceive as a ‘slavery period’ in Africa at the beginning of the Portuguese encounter with West Africa or West Central Africa in general and the conquest.¹⁰ That is not to suggest that some Africans conquered by the Portuguese – whether kings or sobas in West Central Africa – did not unwittingly become involved in or were coerced into the trade we now call the ‘slave trade’, in which ordinary African men, women, young people and children were captured and made slaves.¹¹ However, for our understanding of Mendonça’s criminal court case and his presentation in the Vatican, we need to be fully aware of his experiences in Angola. That means that it is also imperative that we understand the role played by the Muncipal City Council of Luanda, which regulated all shipments of enslaved Angolans to Brazil.¹²

It was in the city councils, such as that of Luanda, that decisions were made about how Africans were to be captured and enslaved.¹³ The councils were the places in which decisions were made about conquest – the so-called ‘just war’ – and the wages of the soldiers fighting in those wars were paid.¹⁴ Those who disagreed with the politics of the council and its decisions were exiled to Brazil or São Tomé.¹⁵ Such was the fate of the Portuguese governor of Luanda, Correia de Sousa,¹⁶ as well as of Mendonça’s family, which was considered a threat to the ‘common good’ of the council.¹⁷

Early historiography of West Central Africa tended to emphasise that the capture and enslavement of Angolans were a means of financing the Portuguese conquest of the region. Both Heintze and Candido have put considerable effort into demonstrating that raiding and taxation were important mechanisms of the Portuguese administration in maintaining their economic strength.¹⁸ Whilst Ferreira explores the idea that markets/feiras in eighteenth-century Angola were used as a means of obtaining enslaved Angolans, he indicates that their regulations were carried out by sobas. However, he concedes that the Portuguese authorities in Angola created these markets in an attempt to bridge local trading regulations.¹⁹ Vansina has taken this debate further and examines a different perspective on the markets, arguing that the Portuguese intervened to introduce a new ‘distance’ market in the region in enslaved Angolans, using caravans. For Vansina that market was based on the slave trade.²⁰ Curto argues that African rulers in West Central Africa were involved in the Atlantic slave trade, including enslaving their creole élites.²¹

Thornton, Heywood and Curto have argued that the very foundation of Kongo was based on slave labour and that Afonso I [1509–1543] was complicit in the slave trade during his reign.²² According to Thornton and Heywood, Afonso I’s co-operation with Portugal in the slave trade is attested by his letters to Manuel I, king of Portugal (1495–1521).²³ Thornton states that the ‘warfare in this time was nevertheless important, for Nimi aLukeni’s (1380–1420) father was said to be a raider who had sought his fortune by reducing one or another local stronghold and demanding tribute’.²⁴ However, Thornton appears to have been reliant on the oral sources of Father Giovanni Antonio Cavazzi da Montecuccolo (1621–1678), an Italian Jesuit priest, sent to Angola by the Vatican, in his assessment of pre-colonial Kongo, particularly with regard to Afonso I; a point he acknowledged in his work.²⁵ The difficulty with Cavazzi’s oral sources lies in the fact that they were collected in the seventeenth century and translated from Kikongo (one of the Kongo languages) into Italian, his Native language; he would have been inclined to use terms such as ‘slave’ or servus (Latin for slave) in describing situations in which conquered Africans in Europe were obliged to offer slave labour to their conquerors.²⁶ This practice was found in the Luso-Iberian political project of reconquest of the Iberian peninsula (formerly known as the Reconquista) from the eighth to the fifteenth centuries that was based on encomienda system.²⁷ Robin Blackburn declares that ‘the Spanish and Portuguese use of African slaves was heavily influenced by medieval, Mediterranean and Roman legacies’.²⁸ As we saw in the Introduction, servitude had no direct correlation with slavery in the Western understanding of the term.²⁹ Missionary sources such as those collected by Cavazzi cannot be viewed as reliable, given his Christian ideology, the fact that he was ignorant of local cultural practices and the language he used in rendering terms from Kikongo in Italian. Based on the evidence of what he said about Jaga being cannibals, his understanding of the local practices needs to be taken with some degree of caution.³⁰ The very ‘Society of Jesus’ that he was serving as a priest owned enslaved Africans in Kongo and Angola, and he never condemned the practice of Atlantic slavery: on the contrary, he endorsed it.³¹ It cannot be taken for granted that he had lived in Kongo and Angola because his collection of oral materials appears to be genuine and to have been collected at the time of political tension in Kongo.³² Cavazzi’s sources remain questionable as they may not reflect the political reality of the time. In other words, there are no other comparative sources available to us to confirm his claims.³³

Heywood has developed Thornton’s argument further and argued that ‘slavery as an institution existed from the time that Kongo emerged as the dominant power in West Central Africa in the fourteenth century’.³⁴ Heywood was also reliant on Cavazzi’s oral sources. She states that ‘Cavazzi collected the earliest oral traditions on slavery from Kongo informants in the mid-seventeenth century, noted that the traditions claimed that the first slaves in the kingdom appeared at its founding by Kongo’s first conqueror king, Lukeni lua Nimi.’³⁵ According to Heywood, the existence of slavery as an institution in Kongo is attested in 1502 by the Cantino Atlas.³⁶ For Heywood, Afonso I was directly involved in the slave trade and it was in his rule as a king that we gain an understanding of slavery in Kongo. She remarks: ‘the several letters from King Afonso I (1509–43) to the Portuguese kings form the bedrock of any understanding of the social categories that existed in the kingdom and the place of slavery in it’.³⁷ Heywood went further to reconstruct the social structures of Kongo from Afonso I’s letters, using terms such as gente, naturaes, naturaes forros, espcriuos/esprauos and peça (freeborn Kongolese, citizens, free citizens, captives/slaves and piece of merchandise).³⁸ She states: ‘at this time Afonso operated an open slave market in the capital, for he notified King Manuel that the enslaved people who had been captured were ‘in our compound (terreyro)’.³⁹ Terms used by Heywood need further analysis in the light of the Regimento (brief or set of instructions) of 1512 sent by Dom Manuel, king of Portugal, to Afonso I two years earlier.⁴⁰ This brief gives the reasons behind Afonso I’s response to Manuel and João III. The brief has not been cited by both Thornton and Heywood. Manuel’s Regimento of 1512 formed the background to Afonso I’s letters; one cannot understand the rationale of the letters without analysing them in tandem with the Regimento.⁴¹ Terms such gente, naturaes, naturaes forros, espcriuos/esprauos and peça used in Afonso I’s letters were there to explain his Christian commitment and to inform Manuel of it; Manuel had been keen to see Kongo model its governance on Christian European states. Manuel also expected Afonso I to pay back the expenses incurred for the education of his children whom he had sent to Portugal previously. He stated:

and remind him [Afonso] of the great expense that we make with the sending of these ships, friars and clerics and things that we have sent him and those that have gone before you, and so the expense that is made here [in Lisbon] for the maintenance and teaching of his children, for that he must load said ships as fully as he can.⁴²

These ‘expenses’ included personnel, Portuguese soldiers’ wages and items stated in Manuel’s 1512 Regimento that were shipped to Kongo for Afonso I, such as: armas (firearms)⁴³ and escudos darmas (coats of arms),⁴⁴ o seello das armas (cell weapons),⁴⁵ bamdeira das armas (flags bearing coats of arms),⁴⁶ gemtes e armadas (soldiers),⁴⁷ oficiaes macanicos (mechanical officers or armed engineers),⁴⁸ hū letrado (a judge),⁴⁹ frades e clerigos (priests: friars and clerics)⁵⁰ and other material goods. In summary, Manuel declared: ‘and aside from all the things that you took, there were freights, provisions, and a lot of payment that we made, for that reason it would not be good for the ships to return empty’.⁵¹ These items were to help Afonso I set up his court along the lines of those kept by Christian monarchs in Europe, ‘as from the beginning of your Christendom, we hope that in those parts there a lot will follow in the service of Our Lord and the addition to his holy Catholic Faith’.⁵² Manuel remarked:

there is an acknowledgment of his [Afonso I’s] conversion and the news of his Christian faith which we have passed on to the Holy Father as he is a great and powerful King. And it is in keeping with what Christian Kings and Princes do, so we must do. He must send his obedience to his Holiness, as all Catholic princes do, as the Vicar of Jesus Christ to his Church of Saint Peter in Rome, who is the head of all the Christian Faith.⁵³

What was said during the embassy of Pedro, Afonso I of Kongo’s cousin, who was sent to Portugal as an ambassador between him and Manuel, we may never know. However, what is clear from that diplomatic correspondence is that the Crown wanted enslaved people, minerals and a trade monopoly between Kongo and Portugal. From Manuel’s brief there were many issues that were not included in the Regimento. They were left for the Crown’s envoy to communicate to Afonso I directly ‘for the King, you will tell him as we spoke here with Dom Pedro his cousin’⁵⁴ as soon as they arrive in Kongo, such as the intention that he be given firearms and their use ‘for him to be well informed of the foundation [reason] we have and for giving him the firearms’.⁵⁵ It is clear from the Regimento that he was expected to use these gifts to establish his kingdom in the likeness of Portugal: the army and arsenal were to be used in accordance with Portuguese institutions and customs, including Christianity, the Church, defence, justice and governance.⁵⁶

Manuel made it clear that slave-capture and metals were the main purpose of his alliance with Kongo.⁵⁷ In other words, the goal of the Crown was to gather slaves: ‘mainly, the ships [sent to Kongo] should return full of slaves and other merchandises’.⁵⁸ Manuel went further in his plea to Afonso I: ‘tell him [Afonso I] if slaves are traded in his country then merchandise will be taken [from Portugal] to trade them’.⁵⁹ The Crown also promised further aid, if Afonso I cooperated; Portugal would help him when he needed it. Manuel remarked ‘with great pleasure, you will always find help and favour from us’.⁶⁰ The aid he received from Portugal came about because of his commitment to Christianity ‘just as we usually give and send them to the Christian Kings and Princes’.⁶¹ African kings who did not profess Christianity would not meet the criteria for aid ‘as for the heathens and non-Christian kings and princes we do not send them gifts or greetings’.⁶² Afonso’s war captives from part of his own kingdom (Ndongo) were to help him fulfil his obligation to Manuel. The description makes clear that the social division he made among the inhabitants of his kingdom was an attempt to protect his people from the vicious Portuguese slave trade. Afonso did not have enslaved people in his compound. He had to go and wage war against Matamba and Ndongo to get them for the Portuguese Crown. He was armed by the Crown, which expected him to act as Christian monarchs acted. It took Afonso two years to organise the trade in enslaved people for the Portuguese Crown.⁶³

The word terreyro that Heywood interprets as a market is ambiguous. It can mean a ‘square’ but this does not necessarily imply ‘market’ as Heywood suggests. Curto argues that Afonso I opened a market in São Tome, when in fact it was a Portuguese market.⁶⁴ In fact, he sent his people there to ensure that people being stolen from his kingdom were not enslaved or made into war captives. Moirans points out that a just war did not take place in Africa.⁶⁵ Miller has argued that there were slaves’ markets in the interior of Angola into which the Portuguese tapped.⁶⁶ For him, Queen Njinga of Matamba was involved in the slave trade, selling many Angolans into slavery in the Americas.⁶⁷ C. R. Boxer has endorsed the view that slavery was natural in Africa and that it cannot be compared to China where enslaved people were state property. Boxer compared the taking of Chinese muitsai or kidnapped children for use as enslaved people to that of Africans. The former, he said, were state property and not for sale, whereas there were no legal precedents for what was done to the Africans. Once again, historians of the Atlantic such as Boxer simply advance a problematic version of African culture that lacks critical engagement with the available writings. He identifies Atlantic slavery as an African problem rather than a European one, declaring:

prisoners of war were, in fact, State slaves. There is, however, no need to dispute the accuracy of Caspar da Cruz’s main contention viz. that Chinese domestic slaves were in a very different category from the Negro and other slaves who were bought and sold like cattle in the Portuguese colonies – and that consequently the Portuguese had no legal or moral right to purchase either muitsai or kidnapped children for use as slaves.⁶⁸

In a similar vein, Augustin Holl, President of the Scientific Committee of UNESCO’s General History of Africa, stated in an interview for the BBC with journalist Zeinab Badawi aired on 27 October 2020, that African coastal peoples were directly involved in the Atlantic slave trade as they were given guns to hunt people from the interior. He declared: ‘One cannot expect the Europeans to mount expeditions in the hinterland of Africa to catch slaves or enslave people. It is coastal political groups that organise the expedition. Coastal people were armed with the latest technology – guns – and were able to capture their neighbours.’⁶⁹ However, Holl was not able to explain why this was when asked by Badawi. He said: ‘it is really hard to say but we have to remove morality from this kind of issue. What is the common expression for that? It is called realpolitik, meaning there are no sentiments there. Coastal people used their power to seize people and sell them for profit.’⁷⁰ However, Holl is taking a leap here in his analysis. There is ample evidence in this book from European accounts that the coastal people were conquered by Europeans and had to pay them tax in enslaved people, otherwise they would have been taken into slavery themselves.⁷¹ Walter Rodney argues that: ‘in the Congo, the slave trade did not get under way without grave doubts and opposition from the king of the state of Kongo at the beginning of the sixteenth century’. There is clear evidence that Portugal intended to trade in slaves in Kongo.⁷² In Rodney’s analysis, ‘the King of the Kongo had conceived of possibilities of mutually beneficial interchange between his people and the European state, but the latter forced him to specialize in export of human cargo’.⁷³ According to Rodney, Afonso I’s expectation was not met. ‘He asked for masons, priests, clerks, physicians; but instead, he was overwhelmed by slave ships sent from Portugal, and a vicious trade was opened up by playing off one part of the Kongo kingdom against another.’⁷⁴ None of these historians who have argued for the existence of slavery in West Central Africa were aware of Sousa’s edict of 1626, which transformed the landscape of trade and currency in West Central Africa.⁷⁵

In my view, the changes in taxation introduced by governor Fernão de Sousa gave birth to slave-raiding. Unaware of it, neither Heintze and Candido viewed the 1626 changes as a legal intervention that arose as a natural result of the Portuguese conquest.⁷⁶ Soba allies were obliged to pay the tax in the form of human bodies – that is, enslaved people. Since this tax system was not a viable method, they resorted to raiding people to pay the tax imposed on them. Heintze and Candido were unable to unlock the distinction between taxation in produce and its substitute as a monolithic tax based on human beings. What is new in my interpretation is the understanding that the new tax system in enslaved people was deliberately imposed by the Portuguese and became part of the constitution of the Muncipal City Council of Luanda.⁷⁷ Based on new primary sources, I uncovered this law and realised that the taxation system based on it was designed to be permanent in West Central Africa. Fernão de Sousa was successful in naturalising this abhorrent law and it became an unquestioned norm in the region in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

We must also bear in mind that the acquisition of enslaved Africans was not so straightforward a transaction as we have been led to believe. There were no markets in which natural-born or captured Africans could be bought as enslaved people in Angola in the seventeenth century; such markets were only found in Portugal, Brazil and the Americas.⁷⁸ Those who have argued for the existence of markets in Angola – such as Heintze, Miller, Ferreira and Boxer – have missed the point since they were ignorant of the 1626 changes.⁷⁹ Documentary sources available to us do not support their speculations.⁸⁰ From the accounts of both Antonio Bezerra Fajardo and Frei Melchior da Conceicam, there is no reason to equate kitanda (feiras or markets) with a market at which enslaved people were to be found for sale. Angolan institutions and practices cannot be held responsible for the ruthless methods (including kidnapping) used by the Portuguese to capture people in the region. Furthermore, Mendonça’s claim in the Vatican refutes this interpretation.⁸¹ Angolans saw kitanda as places for the exchange of goods but nevers as marketplaces for the sale of human beings. People in West Central Africa never conducted the sale of human beings as a business in an open space. People in Angola who had been unjustly ‘convicted’ of a crime they did not commit, ‘snatched’, ‘kidnapped’ or ‘stolen’ from their families could not be stocked and sold in a public space. The testimonies of former enslaved Africans such as Equiano, Guguano, Baquaqua and so on tell us a different story;⁸² Mendonça’s court case gives us a different, more accurate understanding of what the enslavement of Africans in the region was like.⁸³ Angolan markets such as those of ‘S. José do Ecncoje, Dondo, Lembo, Lucamba and Ambaka’s presídio, were created by the Portuguese’.⁸⁴ They were attached to local presidios (Portuguese outposts) and regulated by the authority in Luanda as well as their respective captains and captains-major. Early exchange of enslaved Africans was taking place in presidios. These forced negotiations between the Portuguese and their conquered allies’ sobas were carried out in the outposts. Even the sobas did not consent to them.⁸⁵

From the sixteenth century onwards, court cases in West Central Africa were being run under the Portuguese legal system in conquered areas.⁸⁶ From the sixteenth century, in the conquered zones in Angola, court cases were run by the Portuguese from their presidios.⁸⁷ People employed by captains-major in theses outposts were overriding court cases in favour of the captains who in turn were doing a service for the governor.⁸⁸ After the Dutch occupation of Angola (1641–1648), there was a major shift in terms of the Portuguese military organisation in Angola. From 1666, each presidio – such as Mbaka, Cambambe, Massangano or Muxima – was composed of: one captain, one captain-major and twenty-five soldiers.⁸⁹ They were manned with pumbeiros and Quimbar (a pejorative term used to describe ‘a half-civilised Black person’ that comes back to his village after living for sometimes in towns where the Portuguese were).⁹⁰

The most significant element of the outposts was the incorporation of mocano⁹¹ in them. For each mocano to carry out their deliberation in these outposts, the following members had to be present: governor, captain, tribunal priest, secretary, scribe and eyewitnesses.⁹² The court’s officials employed in these outposts were charged with the task of obtaining enslaved people from local sobas under the control of Portuguese outposts by false verdicts. These controlled sobas were obliged to accept ‘forced gifts’ or ‘buttering-up gifts’ such as ocombas (okombas) and ynfucas (infucas) from the captain and captain-major of the outposts.⁹³ Ocombas and ynfucas are Kimbundu words. How these terms were used in a ‘disciplinary power’⁹⁴ on conquered sobas in Angola are described by Sousa himself, as stated by Brásio:

according to Fernão de Sousa, ocombas [okombas] consists of a pearl of wine, cloth, or another good that the captain of the presidio [Portuguese outpost] send to sobas of his district, or any other White person similarly send to the soba, with the intention that the soba pay him back. They do it with the pretence of friendship and of a good relationship. According to the same Fernão de Sousa, another gift, Ynfutas [infutas] consists of selling the ‘forced gift’ or ‘buttering up gift’ to the sobas, with kind words and ways in which it does not appear to them that they will either pay or that they will not pay it later. They give them these goods either on request or by force, and then the time passes by, they then return to demand that these gifts be paid back, under the penalty of arresting their women, children, and vassals (children of Morinda) who are free, and to sell them as slaves⁹⁵.

Another Kimbundu term used in the period was encombros or emcombos, meaning a muted goat, which I will discuss later in this chapter. Emcombos, also known as emponda or mponda, was a traditional gift given to appease a person high in the hierarchy or establish a friendship with him/her. It was a form of a contract or testament that made an agreement binding and committed both parties to peaceful interaction. To make it legal and binding required the presence of high dignitaries such as ambassadors who were witnesses of the agreement and were responsible for taking the gift with them back to the king. In Cadornega we have a case in which an agreement was made between the Portuguese living in Luanda, who feared an imminent attack from the powerful army of soba Mani Mulaza, ‘Mani Sundi’ of Loango or Zaire in the seventeenth century. The Portuguese in Luanda did not have a powerful army to repel him; they decided that the best thing for them was to appease him before he sent his army against them. For this agreement to be made, Mani Mulaza sent his macunges or ‘ambassadors’ to seal the agreement. It was made binding by emcombos, accompanied by motetes de Luco, which were baskets made of palm trees (they might give four baskets of maize flour or fuba). This was not a payment in enslaved people as the Portuguese made it to be when they came to dominate politics and the economy of the time for the people they conquered in Angola⁹⁶.

Customary practices such as ocombas and ynfucas used for building communities in West Central Africa were used by the Portuguese for their own ends. They appropriated these terms, which sounded natural to the Mbundu people, but the way they applied them changed the Angolans’ understanding of them. To the outside world these terms would appear to be used in accordance with Mbundu practices. However, they were taken out of context and used to serve a purpose for which they were not intended – to obtain slaves. The buying and selling of enslaved people was not an established practice; the Portuguese aligned their criminal acts with the Angolans’ cultural practices.⁹⁷

The approach to studying African history and the history of Africans’ involvement in the Atlantic slave trade has been centred on two not entirely exclusive axes. On the one hand are those who sought an understanding of the African past from broad African institutional practices and argued for a mutual relationship based on give and take, i.e. that Africans were active players in Atlantic history. Thornton argues that Africans contributed to world history in the same way as their European counterparts.⁹⁸ On the other are those who argued that Africans’ relations with Europeans were based on an unequal footing. For Lovejoy, as far as the Atlantic slave trade was concerned, Africans participated by using European systems to advance their economic and political ambition.⁹⁹ It is my position that the argument that Africans were positively involved in world history needs to be carefully made so as not to make Africans participants in a crime they did not commit or align them to a European system that wanted to annihilate them and which they were actually fighting against.¹⁰⁰ We also need to guard against the position that tends to see African encounters with Europeans as asymmetrical.¹⁰¹ Documentary sources from the period do not support this claim fully.¹⁰² The Atlantic exchange between Africa and the Americas took place in the initial phase in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries on an equal footing. However, even in these early centuries of contact, relations were still influenced by other elements based on coercion and persuasion. In its first contact with the region of West Central Africa, Portugal sought a contractual agreement: this led to the vassalship of conquered African rulers under legal, economic and political systems already in existence in Europe.¹⁰³ Dom Manuel’s brief to his counterpart Afonso I stated that: ‘we will send him our judge that administer legal proceedings in his Kingdoms in accordance with our system and in the same way this applies to things relating to war that they be carrying out in our manner from here’.¹⁰⁴ The legal system in West Central Africa was thus transformed. In this brief Manuel made it clear to Afonso I that the ‘slaves, likewise copper and ivory’¹⁰⁵ were the main trade objectives that Portugal wanted to consolidate in Kongo. This document undermines Curto’s argument on the legality of slavery in West Central Africa.¹⁰⁶ Because of the violence to which West Central African people were subjected, the Portuguese Overseas Council in 1698 introduced a new measure under which the creation of courts (mocanos) were to be brought to centres of the Portuguese control to ‘avoid such sensitive violence … to the miserable Africans’.¹⁰⁷ However, the violence used to secure enslaved Africans was never halted. Mocanos in the City of Luanda and outposts were used simply to disguise the aim of the project, which was to enslave Angolans.¹⁰⁸

Having set out the context and historiographical debates arising from it, the rest of this chapter moves on to look at a specific case involving Correia de Sousa, governor of Luanda City Council (Senado da Camara da Cidade de Luanda) because it demonstrates how economic interests were at play in Angola. Furthermore, it shows the questioning of the slave trade by Jesuit priests and the involvement in it by the Church and the Luso-Hispanic Crown, as well as the factual illegality of the slave trade even within Portuguese jurisdiction, given its alliances with the Angolan and Kongolese Christian kings. All this is vital for our understanding of Mendonça’s argument that the slave trade was preposterous and that it was imperative that African enslavement in the Atlantic be abolished.

The first step is to look at the structure of the Municipal Council of Luanda, and to examine how treachery was used to capture and enslave the Kazanze and Bumbi people who lived in the region and who were vassals of Kongo. We will then explore the intervention made by the crown judge, Antonio Bezerra Fajrado, who was sent to Angola to look into injustices against Angolans and Kongolese. Correia de Sousa’s abuses during his period of rule included causing unrest in Luanda, which we will also examine. We then engage with Correia de Sousa’s dispute with Gaspar Álvares, a Portuguese Christian merchant who lived in Luanda and was one the wealthiest traders in Angola. His story clearly shows the double standards of the Church’s involvement in the slave trade. Finally, we take a critical look at the appeal by King Pedro II of Kongo (1622–1624) to return the Kazanze and Bumbi people from Brazil, where they had been taken illegally.

The chapter is based on rich and newly discovered archival sources about the cases, mainly the correspondence of Correia de Sousa, letters from Jesuit and Italian priests reporting to the Crown and the Vatican, correspondence from the administration of the Crown in Madrid and Fajardo’s appeals. This data has not been used by Africanists, Atlanticists or historians of West Central Africa, most of whom have focused on the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.¹⁰⁹

1.1 The Structure of the Luanda City Council

The Municipal City Council of Luanda was composed of governors, a senior crown judge, scribes, judges and other functionaries employed by the council and the Vatican, such as ordinary judges, officers, councillors, an attorney, prison officers, a porter and apostolic notaries. The governors of Luanda, like those in Salvador and Rio de Janeiro, were mainly members of the aristocracy,¹¹⁰ whose interests were quite different to those of the city residents and the Kongo and Angolan kings. There were two ordinary judges, three councillors and one procurator (attorney) or councillor attorney of the city. Ordinary judges were adjudicators, likely to support the Crown’s interests over those of city dwellers and plantation owners. Councillors were administrators who functioned as tax officers, fixed the price of goods and deliberated over the public interest with regard to the needs of local business. The attorneys were executive legal representatives, who represented the interests of the city council before the Royal Court of Lisbon. Municipal council officers were generally elected from the pool of city dwellers deemed reputable people, or ‘good-men’.¹¹¹ They could be of any nationality – Luanda was significantly multinational, with Flemish, German, Spanish and New Christian inhabitants – and could also be members of the city council.¹¹² Aside from the council officers, there was a scribe or secretary who was a council functionary whose role included fixing the price of goods and maintaining control of the currency and trade regulations. The scribe was also charged with writing official documents. There was also a porter, who acted as a messenger and publicly announced the decisions of the Municipal City Council. A minister of prisons was responsible for the imprisonment of criminals and war captives.

In the City of Luanda, there were also several other roles in the Municipal Council. Among them was the apostolic notary. At first sight, the apostolic notary would appear to be an ecclesiastical position, but the notaries’ political role in feeding back information to the Roman Curia cannot be ignored. There were apostolic notaries in most European countries and in other countries where Christianity was established, including Kongo.¹¹³ In Angola, there were also Jesuit religious leaders who played an influential role in the politics of the Municipal Council of Luanda and who, on several occasions, acted as interim governors.¹¹⁴ There was also a senior crown judge, whose role was to defend the interests of the Crown and the Crown’s subjects in Luanda. By 1665, there were 326 European residents in Angola, 132 of whom were in the city and 124 of whom were in the conquest zone.¹¹⁵ More than 1,000 Portuguese residents were living in Kongo in 1623.¹¹⁶ The economic interests of these Portuguese residents often clashed with those of the Crown, particularly around the subject of taxes, which were often negotiated in the Crown’s favour.

In 1665 the Municipal Council of Luanda, together with the Portuguese residents, put forward a motion responding to the Crown’s intention to increase the annual tax. The Crown needed to pay a ‘dowry’ of 4 million cruzados to the English, for losses accrued when they supported the Portuguese in the Dutch war in Brazil. Portuguese municipal councils in Angola and Brazil were ordered to contribute to this sum. The Municipal Council of Luanda rejected the Crown’s demand for 22,500 cruzados per year in taxes. In response, the Crown instead proposed 360,000 cruzados divided into twenty-four instalments over sixteen years. Eventually, the council agreed to pay 15,000 cruzados annually over 24 years.¹¹⁷ Meanwhile, residents of Pernambuco, Brazil, paid 400,000 cruzados at the rate of 25,000 per year for a period of sixteen years,¹¹⁸ and Bahia residents paid 1,280,000 cruzados at the rate of 80,000 per year for a period of sixteen years.¹¹⁹

Outside the Angolan context, the Crown appears to have been the victim of its own decrees, which were often discarded by ruthless governors or municipal councils pursuing their own interests. Gilberto Freyre, the famous Brazilian sociologist, has reviewed the power and economic relations between the municipal councils and the Crown in the Atlantic. He argues that ‘the king of Portugal was a ruler without government. The Municipal Council members, the words of these political families, soon limited the power of the Kings and later on imperialism itself.’¹²⁰ The political environment in Angola is telling. Issues between the Crown, governors and other members of the Municipal Council of Luanda (see Figure 5) dated back to the inception of the Council of Luanda in the sixteenth century, when the Portuguese Royal House of Aviz (1385–1580) was slow to grant the Portuguese general Paulo Dias de Novais a charter to become the first captain and governor of Luanda in 1571. When the charter was finally passed, Novais began to lay the foundations for what would become the Municipal Council of Luanda in 1575. This process took place against the backdrop of uneasy relationships with the kings of Kongo and Angola. It has been claimed that Novais was granted a stake in Luanda’s settlement by the king of Kongo, although there is no evidence of this in archives in either Portugal or Angola.¹²¹ Reference is, however, made to the good will of Kongo’s authorities in allowing the Portuguese settlement even after the restoration of the House of Braganza (1640–1910) to the thrones of Brazil and Portugal. In the interim, between the ruling periods of the Aviz and the Braganza, the House of Habsburg (1581–1640) and the Hispanic-Portuguese Crown were distracted by the opposing lures of trade in Angola and in Brazil.¹²²

Figure 5 Intersection of power between the Crown, the Portuguese Overseas Council and the Municipal Council of Luanda.

By the author.

To maintain trade and to continue the exploration of Angola, especially with regard to the exploitation of the region’s metal deposits (with silver being of particular importance), the Portuguese Crown needed to nurture a local labour force. However, the lucrative plantations of Brazil also required African labour. Angola and Brazil both held great potential for economic gain, and the Crown sought to maintain a fine balance between the two. In both regions, however, the governors’ interests lay primarily in creating personal wealth, which was done most quickly through the Atlantic slave trade. The governors of Luanda often had businesses in Brazil because many of them came from there; they exploited Angola, enslaving its people and sending them to work on their sugar plantations in Brazil. These conflicting interests created great and unceasing tension between the governors, the Muncipal City Council of Luanda, the Crown and the sobas and African kings in the region. The business of slavery was central to everything that was done in Angola. Faria, a Portuguese economist of the seventeenth century, stated that the wealth accrued from Africa made it possible for the Crown in Portugal to conquer the Far East and Brazil. He declared:

it is of note to those who have news of business of this Kingdom [Portugal] that the concentration and rights of the Coast of Guinea have been for many years the principal Revenue of the Crown of Portugal, and with it has become wealthy. And it gave it leverage to conquer the Orient and the New World. With it came the right of the import from Cape Verde, and Rivers of Guinea, Mina, São Tomé and Angola nearing 200,000 per annum.¹²³

Let us now take a closer look at Governor Correia de Sousa’s struggle with wealthy businessman Gaspar Álvares for control of the slave trade. Álvares had made his fortune from the slave trade in the region. The case in question deals with Correia de Sousa’s interaction with the City Council and Álvares, and the breakdown of relations over their conflicting opinions on the methods to be used to secure enslaved Angolans in the region. Part of the problem with Álvares’s business was that the Church and the Jesuit College of Luanda were not willing to challenge him for his involvement in the slave trade and the brutality that went with it; rather, they wanted to appropriate his wealth for the Church. It is thus through the prism of this marriage of convenience between the Church and the economic sphere that Mendonça’s court case is to be comprehended. Indeed, the official silence from the Church and the Vatican was one of the major concerns of Mendonça and the confraternities of Black Brotherhoods in Africa, Brazil, Portugal and Spain. I will also look at the challenge by the Kongolese authorities about the injustice of their subjects being taken into slavery, and the involvement of the Spanish Crown in Madrid (the Philippine administration that united the crowns of Spain and Portugal), which took a different view on enslaved Kongolese. They were interested in the slave trade rather than administrating justice for the Angolans and Kongolese taken to Brazil as enslaved people illegally. This lack of justice for the millions who had been enslaved in the Americas constituted the basis of Mendonça’s cry for freedom.¹²⁴

1.2 Correia de Sousa, the Treachery and Seizing of Kazanze People, a vassal of Kongo

Correia de Sousa’s account of slave-trading injustice related to the Kazanze people, Luanda’s neighbours and vassals of the kingdom of Kongo, and the case of Bumbi (a trading town in Kongo). These are among many stories from the region characterised by what Mendonça described in his presentation in the Vatican as ‘kidnapping’ and ‘treacherous’ methods of capturing Africans. Correia de Sousa’s account is supported by reports made by other governors of the period, including André Vidal de Negreiros (1661–1666) and Manuel Cerveira Pereira (1603–1607 and 1615–1617) who also deployed these methods during their tenures in Angola. The demand for African labour in Brazil’s sugar plantations and for use in general agriculture and mining increased the incentive for war in Angola to supply Angolans for the slave market.¹²⁵ Carl Wadström, in his Essay on Colonization, Particularly Applied to the Western Coast of Africa (1794), stated that the Atlantic slave trade began with the Italians, who wanted to open a market in the New World. Once their attempt to recruit Indigenous Americans had failed, they turned their attention to supplying enslaved Africans as labourers on the sugar plantations:

… without undervaluing the West Indian sugar colonies, we may venture to observe, that their importance, nay, according to the planters themselves, their very existence, depends on Africa. That continent supplies them with slaves, whom they call by the soft name of, ‘Negro labourers,’ and who alone confer a value on their property. Some affirm, with much probability, that they also owe to Africa the very object of their labours.¹²⁶

Wadström’s remarks show how slavery permeated Atlantic society, and why enslavement of Africans persisted for so long. They also suggest the reason for the silence in connection to liberation and demonstrates the flaw in current historiography on Atlantic slavery about Africans’ willingness to participate in the slave trade.

Returning to the issue at hand, Correia de Sousa’s case is significant in terms of our understanding of the mechanisms of slave capture and its legality, which is often neglected when debating issues relating to Atlantic slavery. It is also significant in delineating the guiding principle that steered the municipal councils and their governors, and their relationships with the African ruling classes in West Central Africa.

Prior to his arrival in Angola on 4 October 1621,¹²⁷ Correia de Sousa received a letter from the former governor of Angola, Manuel Cerveira Pereira (1603–1607 and 1615–1617). Pereira had also founded the city of São Philipe in Benguela, Angola, in 1617,¹²⁸ and he wrote the letter in question from there, urging Correia de Sousa to provide him with military personnel. Pereira stated that he had fifty-five people,¹²⁹ old and young, and that he himself was not in good health: he had an ulcerated arm and was also blind in his left eye. Nonetheless, he was ready to make battle with the enemy, who in his view recognised their miserable state. This letter became a turning point for Correia de Sousa’s mission in Angola because it indicated what he needed to do.

On the day he received the letter, Correia de Sousa was aboard a ship to Luanda. He wrote a letter to the king of Spain regarding the news from Pereira, stating: ‘ … all is in turmoil and in a confused state. If I could but deal with the issues of the soldiers, where there is a lot to be done in so little time, and they are of very low morale. I will offer Angola to God, in all that is in me, I will serve Your Majesty with good will.’¹³⁰ However marginal it may sound, this statement led to the invasion of Kazanze; Correia de Sousa later betrayed the Kazanze people and waged war on them to appease the soldiers fighting in Angola and give them land, since their wages had not been paid.

While in Angola, Correia de Sousa met with Njinga, who was not queen at the time but was a macunze or ambassador of her brother King Mbandi.¹³¹ Mbandi had sent Njinga to Luanda to negotiate a peace agreement between the Portuguese and the kingdom of Ndongo. Njinga made it clear to Correia de Sousa that his trade terms, which included a proposal to obtain enslaved people from Ndongo, were not acceptable.¹³² She explained that while Correia de Sousa’s predecessor, Luís Mendes de Vasconcelos (1617–1621), had had temporary success in Ndongo, forcing Mbandi out to the Kindonga islands on the River Coanza, it would be a mistake for Correia de Sousa to take this as a sign of vassalship and attempt to make Mbandi pay tax in enslaved people. Mbandi was not a conquered king and the Ndongo kingdom was still in Mbandi’s hands. If Correia de Sousa wanted to enter into trade with Mbandi and Ndongo, it had to be on the basis of different merchandise, not enslaved Africans. The outcome of that meeting forced Correia de Sousa to rethink his approach to trading and obtaining enslaved people from the Ndongo and Matamba regions. He dispatched his own embassy to Ndongo to negotiate with Mbandi in the Kindonga islands. That delegation included ‘Father Dionizio de Faria Barreto, a son of the land [Native of Angola], who spoke the language well, and with him, Manoel Dias, and after they arrived on the islands, they offered him peace and friendship on the part of the governor; from there they left via inland.’¹³³ The message that came back from that mission was a firm demand from Mbandi regarding the sovereignty of Ndongo. The terms of the agreement between Mbandi and Correia de Sousa were unprecedented, and I agree with Joseph Miller that there was more to Njinga’s diplomatic mission to Luanda than we are led to believe.¹³⁴ Though we do not have the documents in which the terms of their agreement were stipulated, it is clear that Mbandi’s demands had to be met before any trade negotiation with Luanda could take place:

[Mbandi] had accepted the proposal on the condition that to have a secure passage [for trade], first Jaguar Kazanze must be expelled, who is currently waging war on him, and that the [governor] must restore to [him] the sobas and Quisicos [subjects] that the governor Luis Mendes had taken away from him, for he could not be a king without sobas, nor a lord without subjects to serve him.¹³⁵

Mbandi’s position throws further light on our perception of slaves in the region: he put up resistance to trade with the Portuguese, to slavery and to foreign domination. In Mbandi’s view, a monarch required chiefs to run his kingdom, with subjects to labour for the kingdom – and not to be used for slavery. Without king, chiefs and subjects, there could be no realm. Mendes may have driven Mbandi out of his palace at Kabasa to the islands, but Mbandi’s flight was not a sign that he was ready to give up his role as king, forget his people or deny them their liberty. Mbandi’s declaration was to show Correia de Sousa that, as king of the Mbundu people, his role was to defend and protect them. It demonstrated that his customs and manners ran counter to Correia de Sousa’s and the Council of Luanda’s understanding of the power relations between them.

Correia de Sousa submitted Mbandi’s proposal to the Municipal Council of Luanda. The council decided unanimously in favour of Mbandi’s demands: ‘the governor has presented the proposal to the Council, Captains, and more people (as it is customary in that Kingdom). All have agreed that it will be good for the Kingdom to do what the King has asked for.’¹³⁶ The decision was based on what Anselmo termed the ‘common good’ of the residents represented by the council members.¹³⁷ Following the council ruling, Correia de Sousa came to the realisation that he was not going to succeed in exerting his will over Angola if he continued to seek approval for all his motions from the council, which prioritised its own interests. Instead, he turned to the army to be the enabler of his political will. Soldiers wielded great power in Angola thanks to their role in the region’s conquest. Significantly, their salary had often presented a stumbling block for many governors in Angola, as they were paid from the booty that came from war, conquered lands and captured people, often in local currencies such as patacas and libongos.¹³⁸ Governors had generally been extremely accommodating of army demands, recognising the need to lubricate and continue the mechanism of conquest. The City Council simply did not have the economic resources to sustain the conquest without waging illegal wars on ordinary people, including those already considered allies of Portugal.

Given the resistance of King Mbandi and in order to fulfil his ambition and reward the soldiers, Correia de Sousa invaded Kazanze’s territory on the pretext that there were enslaved Africans belonging to the Portuguese who had escaped and hidden there.

Correia de Sousa’s invasion of Kazanze was, by all European and Christian precedents, illegal – a fact that later came back to haunt him. He made it clear that he was taking over from where his predecessor, Luís Mendes de Vasconcelos – whom Correia de Sousa claimed had stationed a contingent of twenty-five Portuguese soldiers and some Angolan guerra preta, the Angolan contingent forces who fought alongside the Portuguese, in Quilunda near Kazanze ‘ … to oblige the enemies to surrender’ – had left off.¹³⁹ Correia de Sousa explained his seizure of Kazanze land on the grounds that the Kazanze were murderers, for they stood accused of killing Portuguese men during the time of Governor Novais, almost fifty years earlier. He also claimed that they were harbouring runaway enslaved people from Luanda, and stealing Portuguese goods and livestock. He claimed, too, that the Kazanze had aided the release of two important enslaved political figures: ‘Manigonge’¹⁴⁰ and ‘Manicorinha’, who from their titles we can deduce were allies of the kings of Kongo.¹⁴¹ Correia de Sousa himself acknowledged in a letter on 3 June 1622 that Kazanze was a vassal of Kongo: ‘Kazanze is a Lord who has under his jurisdiction 16 sobas each with his many people; all pay allegiance to this Kazanze, who is the Lord of all of them and they also said that these Kazanzes were always obedient to the Kings of Kongo and were subjects to the governance of the Dukes of Bamba.’¹⁴²

Let us now look at how the siege of Kazanze led to treachery being employed in capturing Angolans and turning them into slaves. The attack was what Heywood and Thornton describe as a ‘violent and duplicitous war against Kazanze’.¹⁴³ The war strategy was described in Correia de Sousa’s letter to the Crown in Madrid, sent on 3 June 1622. It was intended that a detailed map or lenço of the landscape extending across Angola and into Kongo’s territory would accompany the letter. The map was not included, but a copy of it later arrived in Lisbon, where it is now housed in the Palacio of Ajuda and has been cited only minimally by historians of Angola. In his letter to Madrid, Correia de Sousa stated:

I wished to send with this letter a scarf [map] that I have had made, that contains only this island and the city of Luanda, lands and the war with Kazanze, of which Your Majesty is Lord, from the River of Dande to Coanza, be in truth as it is all placed. And for the hastiness this map cannot go, it is being left, a consideration of which I say, when I go and I will deal with what I have been through in this so risky and unplanned war from the day I arrived until 11 May 1622, in which God be served giving the end full of his mercy as I will say, saying the truth I am used to.¹⁴⁴

The problem Correia de Sousa had on arrival in Angola was the extremely low morale of the soldiers, which was made worse by their not having been paid. This was perhaps because – as the records show –the amount of tax collected in the period was low. Correia de Sousa knew of the problems facing the army, and knew also that to survive and fulfil his economic ambitions, he required their support. His discontented soldiers needed reimbursement in the form of land, and the territory of neighbouring Kazanze presented the perfect solution. However, while Correia de Sousa ingratiated himself with his soldiers, he did not curry favour with the Crown in Madrid, which was well apprised of the chaos he was creating in Angola. Correia de Sousa’s claim to ‘give Angola to God’ translated as an ambition to loot the lands, raid, kidnap and then send the people into slavery in Brazil, São Tomé and the Spanish West Indies.¹⁴⁵

Correia de Sousa’s war was unjust, and based on an economic rationale, and not on the Kazanze people’s rejection of Christianity, which was the main condition for waging a ‘just war’ on them. One of his main reasons for invading Kazanze (see Figure 6) was that their lands were good,¹⁴⁶ consisting of a great deal of fertile soil¹⁴⁷ famed for its superior maize production:

… it produces grain, like a muted apple, and a thick apple, as they call it in the idiom of the Kimbundu language of these kingdoms, and our muted maize and coarse corn; the muted is another caste than ours from Portugal, because he gives humps cobs or coats very big and large in tall canes, and he has the most substantial sustenance that are produced in these parts.¹⁴⁸

The considerable value of the Kazanze’s lands, rather than the pretext he claimed – that the people of Kazanze were rebellious and a threat to Portuguese existence in the region – provided the driving motive for Correia de Sousa’s war. Soon after the war, Correia de Sousa divided Kazanze land among his Portuguese soldiers: ‘… twelve leagues around Luanda were cleared and divided among veteran soldiers, so that they might till it, which will be of great benefit to the state’.¹⁴⁹ The Kazanze case, in which 1,211 people were rounded up and kidnapped, including children and women, is used here as an optic through which to comprehend the call for justice and application of law in the Atlantic, particularly with regard to the capture of enslaved people.

Figure 6 Map dated 1623 of the seige of Kazanze. Biblioteca da Ajuda, Lisbon, Portugal, [BAL], cartografia, MS. [Topografia (…) Provincia da Quissama, Angola, CA 1622, ARM, met. X 51-IX-20, fl. 2.].

Photograph by the author.

Correia de Sousa’s justification for invading Kazanze was riddled with contradictions. Moreover, it demonstrated the power of the governors in Luanda and their lack of respect for the will of the Crown in Madrid. Correia de Sousa stated that the region he had invaded belonged to the Crown: it stretched from ‘… the city of Luanda and the enclave of Kazanze and of all that Your Majesty is Lord, from the River Dande to the River Coanza’.¹⁵⁰ If this claim is to be taken at face value, he had therefore invaded the lands of the king he was charged with serving, and hence breached the law that governed his tenure in Luanda. By declaring Kazanze a land belonging to the king of Spain, he also rendered it a Christian land, which should never have been subjected to war by the Portuguese. This makes sense of Mendonça’s claim in the Vatican that enslaved Africans in Brazil and the Americas, such as those from Kazanze, were already Christians. We will return to this issue shortly. Suffice it to say here that most of the Africans shipped to Brazil as slaves were not slaves at all, but were likewise ‘Christian’ people captured under the same circumstances as the Kazanze.

By his own account of the attack on Kazanze, Correia de Sousa appears to have used African war tactics and Angolan mercenaries to starve the enemy and force them to surrender.¹⁵¹ According to his report and as documented in a map from 1623,¹⁵² he encircled Kazanze with five ditches, in which he stationed five captains and sergeants.¹⁵³ He ordered all the captains and their soldiers to cut down the trees with axes, sickles and cleavers to allow their ‘arrows to reach the enemies’. According to the battle report, the Kazanze defended themselves, wounding between twenty-five and thirty Portuguese soldiers and Angolan mercenaries. Many Kazanze soldiers surrendered, and the Kazanze [chief] fled with five of his sobas; he was later captured and brought to Luanda. Correia de Sousa interrogated them there and, having extracted important information, ordered the beheading of the ‘Kazanze’ [chief] and two sobas for their role in ‘robbing properties in Tombo’. ‘They were brought to Luanda, where they were decapitated publicly for justice, with two other soba allies. And finally, they arrested Grunhe, brother of Kazanze, to whom justice was administered in the same way.’¹⁵⁴

Following the execution of their leaders, the Kazanze were called on by Correia de Sousa to carry out an election, which was customary practice in Angola following the death of a soba. The ceremony by which a new soba was elected was called undar. Correia de Sousa’s successor, Fernão de Sousa, gave a dense description of undar:

Undar is a ceremony in which they anoint sobas when they succeed in the lands after the death of the Lord of the Land, or when by means of justice, according to their laws and customs, a Lord has been thrown out of the land, and macotas who are Councillors then elect another Lord, who is usually the nephew of the dead, son of his Sister, who they regard as a legitimate Lord, and not the son, who they say could be a bastard. Even though elected by them, and even before they have chosen him, they inform the Governor of him, asking him to show good will, stating that they would like to elect him, which is the same thing as to be confirmed in the land. And in undar the new soba, lies on his chest on the ground before the Governor as a sign of vassalisation to his Majesty. A little flour is thrown over him, and he takes it with his hands, and rubs it on his breast and arms, and now he is declared the Lord of the land. Then he is sent to dress after being endowed with the power of the soba, according to the law.¹⁵⁵

Correia de Sousa’s demand for an election was in fact a deception. He called the macotas (elders or councillors) of Kazanze to Luanda to perform the ceremony there. They went in good faith, but on arrival found there was to be no election. Correia de Sousa declared: ‘I have sent captain major Pero Coelho de Sousa that he brings me all sobas, macotas that are their advisors including tendalas and maculuntos, that are their ministers of war, because I wanted them to have an election that is accepted in their lands.’¹⁵⁶ He knew that they, including ‘the four gingos that are the heirs and pretenders for the Kazanze’s throne’ would come to be elected as their lord of the land, ‘and they all came willingly, and I did not inform the captain of my intention’.¹⁵⁷ He used treachery to detain them. When they arrived, he had them rounded up and put on a ship to Brazil to become the subjects of Governor Diogo de Mendonça of Salvador, Bahia. The murinda (ordinary subjects) were then called to Luanda under the pretext of the election. All the murinda (a total of 1,211) were forced to board five ships hired by Correia de Sousa and sent to Brazil. Many of them were children and elderly men and women. Almost half of them – a total of 583 – died onboard due to the appalling and inhumane conditions¹⁵⁸ and poor physical health. The ship was not fit for long-distance travel. In contrast, those between fifteen and twenty-five years of age and who were of able body had a much higher survival rate. Their death was beyond doubt caused by Correia de Sousa’s treachery. At least their deaths were documented, but thousands upon thousands of such deaths have not been recorded.¹⁵⁹

The case of the war in Kazanze and the exile of its inhabitants to Brazil as enslaved people by Correia de Sousa in 1622 is key in enabling us to understand the socio-political environment in which Portuguese slave-trading developed in Angola, and the wider practice of slave-trading unfurled in the Atlantic. It also highlighted the raiding, kidnap and treachery used to capture ordinary people. It was within this context that Mendonça contextualised and refined his anti-slavery statement. The idea of so-called African slavery – that is, the idea that Africans were complicit in slavery – has overshadowed cases such as Kazanze’s, which is just one example among many. What has come to dominate Lusophone historiography is the element of transaction between Africans and the Europeans, but the siege of Kazanze and the enslavement of its people shows another side of the story that has often been overlooked.

Aside from Correia de Sousa’s own account, the most valuable insight into the war waged on Kazanze comes from Catholic priests working in Angola and Kongo at the time. After the enslavement of the Kazanze, they launched an appeal at the High Court of Appeal, describing what Correia de Sousa had done. This appeal was recorded in several documents: Mateus Cardoso’s case in the High Court of Appeal;¹⁶⁰ a collector’s relação or High Court of Appeal case;¹⁶¹ Mateus Cardoso’s letter to Father Nuno Mascarenhas, 20 October 1623;¹⁶² Antonio Bezerra Fajardo’s High Court of Appeal case, 24 February 1624;¹⁶³ and Collector Albergati’s report to the pope, 23 September 1623.¹⁶⁴ These priests’ descriptions of the Kazanze invasion and its motives contradict Correia de Sousa’s account of events, and to a large extent reflected the Portuguese governors’ attitudes, which were motivated by economic gain. All the High Court appeals argued strongly against the invasion as an unjust act and claimed that there was no justification for the exile of the Kazanze people and their sobas to Salvador, Bahia. The exception was the account of Albergati, which focused mainly on the brutality of the invasion on Kongo that followed the Kazanze attack. All the High Court Appeal writers claimed that Correia de Sousa had constructed the invasion to suit his own interests.

It appears from the sources available to us that, contrary to Correia de Sousa’s claim, there was no war in Kazanze. De Sousa’s account also included some doubtful assertions that the only people who had died in battle were Angolan guerra preta and other African contingent forces. It also suggested that only Portuguese soldiers were wounded.¹⁶⁵ The Portuguese and guerra preta may have encircled Kazanze as the map showed, but the details of the actual battle that took place were unclear, according to the priests’ reports of the case in the High Court of Appeal held on 20 October 1623. Their reports were, as aforementioned, highly critical of Correia de Sousa’s campaign in Kazanze. According to them, during the siege, the sobas went to the chief priest of the Jesuit College of Luanda, Father Jerónimo Vogado, wanting to reach a settlement with the Portuguese and repledge their allegiance to the Portuguese Crown. They went unarmed, seeking a peaceful resolution to the crisis and used Father Vogado as a mediator. The sobas confided in Vogado, whom they deemed a trustworthy mediator, and Correia de Sousa appeared to offer them safe passage to a meeting with him. So, according to these alternative accounts of events in Kazanze, the Kazanze sobas went willingly to Correia de Sousa and were not, as claimed by him, captured while trying to escape and then brought to him. Instead, Correira de Sousa clearly betrayed his agreement with Vogado, and slaughtered the sobas. As Cardoso reported:

… for them to stop the war, vassals of Kazanze decided to leave its protection, and to return to the old alliance with the king of Portugal. In order to obtain a treaty and to surrender, they went to Father, the Councillor of the Society of Jesus, to be their godfather before the Governor. As a result, three sobas came at night to the [Jesuit] College, saying that they would like to pledge their allegiance with all their vassals and with more sobas, and that other parts of Kazanze would pledge allegiance too, and they had come for the Governor that he would receive them. Immediately, the Councillor took this news to the Governor, who received it well. He gave order that they go to our settlement, which they did immediately, and with this example more sobas came out of the forest to our settlement, unprotected by their Head Kazanze, and they entered in the same way to our settlement on the goodwill of the Governor. Seeing that the enemy came without people [soldiers], immediately they were taken away, and brought to Luanda, where he had them decapitated.¹⁶⁶

From the evidence of this text, there is a clear indication that the enslavement of the Kazanze was illegal, the war against them was neither ‘just’ nor legal and the killing of their leaders was motivated by economic interest. What becomes evident is that Correia de Sousa was interested only in enslaving the Kazanze people and securing their land for the unpaid soldiers. The individuals captured in Kazanze and taken to the Americas as enslaved people were ordinary civilians, not given the protection that would have been offered to soldiers, who would come under the category of kijiko.

1.3 Protests against Correia de Sousa’s Actions and the Illegal Sending of Kazanze People to Brazil

Correia de Sousa took the Kazanze people from the Jesuit compound and not, as he claimed in his own reports, from the undar ceremony. Correia de Sousa account was not supported by the evidence supplied in the High Court of Appeal on 20 October 1623, nor in Cardoso’s High Court of Appeal hearing in the same year entitled, ‘Father Nuno Mascarenhas’ High Court of Appeal of what befell in Angola in the year 1623 about the imprisonment of the King Crown Judge, and Municipal Councillors, and the Priests of the Society of Jesus’.¹⁶⁷ The Jesuit High Court of Appeal hearing states that:

… the vassals of Kazanze were in our allegiance, in our settlement, then the Governor brought in a resolution of his own, which he took by himself. And he hired five ships and filled them with those miserable people, who came to show their allegiance; he sent them to Brazil and, paying the cost of shipment and food packages to the ships’ masters, left their land depopulated, without a sign of people.¹⁶⁸

These were people who had come from their land of their own free will to the priests’ settlement in Luanda. Among those sent to Brazil were distinguished sobas who had long served Portuguese interests in Luanda, and whose contribution to the Portuguese project in Angola was acknowledged by its priests and residents. For example, they had helped in the building of the fort in Luanda. They had served in the Portuguese army and fought for the Portuguese in Angola. One had been a fisherman for the Portuguese in Luanda alongside his role in the army.¹⁶⁹ In summary, they had dedicated their lives to and believed in the Portuguese project of the conquest of Angola.¹⁷⁰ In 1623, prior to the case in the High Court of Appeal written by Mateus Cardoso, Vogado’s advice to Correia de Sousa was that he should not harm the Kazanze sobas. However, Correia de Sousa ignored this advice. Father Mateus Cardoso stated:

… it seems to all people that the resolution was unjust, bearing in mind these sobas came of their free will to pledge their allegiance; some of them came to speak to the Councillor and other Priests who tried to dissuade the Governor from his decisions, for it appears that it was just that the poor sobas’ words were kept. In particular, it was not fair to ship them and make landless soba Quisso and the other two or three who had pledged their love for us, them having served in our army, helped to build our fort, and one them having fished for our soldiers.¹⁷¹

In Correia de Sousa’s case, we face the fundamental issue of the legality of the Atlantic slave trade in Angola. The rights afforded to Angolans and Kongolese at the time were based on their identity as Christians. The priests’ case in the High Court of Appeal stated that they were Christians and vassals of Portugal. Christian identity was used as an ontological point of departure from which to defend their human rights. Conceptually, being Christians, they were members of the universal Roman Catholic Church, had the same personal rights as all followers of God¹⁷² and were entitled to the rights and protection of natural law.¹⁷³ A key pillar of natural law was the assumption that Christians were creatures of divine origin, enlightened and deserving of protection against violations and threats to their rights.¹⁷⁴ Despite this, the governors of Luanda implemented their own rules in Angola in order to capture people and enslave them, ignoring what the Portuguese Overseas Council called neglect of Africans’ rights under natural law.¹⁷⁵

Vogado’s argument sought to disabuse Correia de Sousa of any notion that he was entitled to the Kazanze, and to make a distinction between the governor and the Kazanze, whom he was treating as enslaved. He based his argument precisely on the Kazanze people’s Christian identity, which made them universal subjects of the wider Christian community – ‘those sobas were not guilty, nor warranting of degradation, and were worthy of rewards’.¹⁷⁶ Vogado took his defence of the Kazanze, together with complaints from the residents of Luanda who opposed Correia de Sousa’s actions, to the governor’s residence. Their concerns were dismissed. Correia de Sousa’s position was market-driven and, in the name of economic gain, the status and rights of the Kazanze were ignored. He responded to Vogado, saying that in ‘sending all of these people away, he would be giving His Majesty more rewards for conquering Kazanze himself, and he did not want any vassal of Kazanze in Angola’.¹⁷⁷

Crucially, the war against the Kazanze demonstrates the injustices of slavery, and how the wars used in the period to justify the enslavement of Africans were based on a fraudulent claim.¹⁷⁸ Correia de Sousa alleged he was fighting a ‘just war’, but evidence suggests that this was not the case, and his actions in Kazanze were driven purely by economic motives. Moreover, there is very little evidence of the already preposterous argument of a ‘just war’ being fought by Kongo and Angola, to justify the capture of people who were then enslaved. The decision to enter into war with Angolans was made unilaterally by the governor and the Municipal Council of Luanda, without consultation with the Crown in Madrid, and the grounds necessary to declare a ‘just war’, as prescribed by the Crown, were starkly absent. Moirans, indeed, argues that there was never a ‘just war’ waged against Africans during the Atlantic slave trade. For a ‘just war’ to occur, according to him, there needed to be a ‘just prince’ capable of taking a decision as to whether there should be a war; however, in the case of Africa, wars were waged in regions that had no such prince.¹⁷⁹ Moreover, the substance of Madrid’s orders to the governors of Angola was that war could only be declared if Angolans were preventing the preaching of the Gospel. There is no evidence from primary sources that this was the case; on the contrary, the governors of Angola gave reasons such as that the Angolans were making a trade blockade or were not opening the market for trade that the Philippine administration (the Madrid Crown) had sanctioned.¹⁸⁰ Vogado’s advice to Correia de Sousa was rooted in theology, but Correia de Sousa responded that he did not need theology, that natural and divine laws were both a lived experience – that is, part of culture – and that there was no need for a priest to interpret his decision in terms of theology:¹⁸¹

For the conscience, do not give me advice unless I have asked you; before you were born, Father, I had been governing. I know my conscience more than you do; there is no need for theology for a man to know what is required by his conscience, for an old person could be saved without knowing theology … do not advise me, do not advise me, I know what I am doing.¹⁸²

Here once again is the old conflict between faith and politics, between religion and economics. Vogado brought into the discussion a third person, a Native Angolan graduate theologian originally from Matamba, Father Dionizio de Faria Barreto, who was an ecclesiastical magistrate and vicar general of Luanda at the time. Father Barreto was extremely experienced in matters of Angolan diplomacy; he often acted as a bridge between the governors and the Angolan ruling class and was an expert in conflict resolution.¹⁸³ In spite of the expertise and counsel offered to him, Correia de Sousa maintained his position¹⁸⁴ and followed through with his decision to send the Kazanze people to Brazil. From then on, the relationship between the governor and the Society of Jesus soured, and Correia de Sousa began to persecute the Society.

From these reports, we learn what perhaps has not been made explicit in many debates about the wars waged on Angola and Kongo and about slavery in the region. There was a theological rationale for how Christian kingdoms and regions like Kongo, in which Christianity was established, were to be protected. As part of Christendom, Kongo was afforded protection against attacks by other Christian kingdoms, for there was mutual respect between all Christian monarchs. This interpretation was documented by priests in Luanda at the time and posed a challenge to the treatment of Christian Angolan slaves, which Mendonça later raised in the Vatican. The priests’ report stated:

The Governor João Correia de Sousa, before the Judge of the High Court left Angola,¹⁸⁵ marched into a war, not only against heathens, but also against Christians who are vassals of the King of Kongo, Brothers in Arms to Your Majesty, that has a Seat and a Court of Bishops. And in that Kingdom come and go Portuguese who trade as in this land of our King and Lord; there, there are more than one thousand Portuguese, trading their goods, from which trade comes thousands of cruzados to the Royal Treasury. These were not good enough reasons for João de Sousa to wage war on a Christian Kingdom in the month of May 1622.¹⁸⁶

In their report to the Crown, the Jesuits summed up the problems that befell the captives of Kazanze before they reached Brazil: ‘so these poor people were shipped to Brazil, where they gave much to talk about. And there were no more to be found in all the five ships except old men and women and children; and they were asked what had happened to the people of war who had embarked from near Luanda.’¹⁸⁷ Correia de Sousa instructed the governor of Salvador, Diogo de Mendonça, to give the captives ‘land where they are to be, together or separated, until His Majesty decrees what is to be done to them’.¹⁸⁸ De Mendonça was also warned to watch them closely as there was a chance that they would stage a rebellion or form a dissident group in Brazil. Let me state again that all of the Kazanze were subjects of the Crown and all were Christians. By their own laws and beliefs, the Portuguese should never have sent them to Brazil as captives. According to the priests’ representations to the High Court of Appeal, Correia de Sousa had, in effect, violated the law set by the pope and the kings of Portugal and Spain.¹⁸⁹ In Salvador, Bahia, judges were brought to give their view on the legality of the situation. Their view was clear: the exile and enslavement of the Kazanze was illegal, the captives were to be returned to Angola, and His Majesty must order Correia de Sousa to pay for their return with his own money:

The Governor and the Judge of the State of Brazil, seeing how these poor people came on board the ship, questioned their conscience, at which point they sought the advice of the Attorneys (Judges), who felt that Your Majesty ought to order that these poor people be sent back to settle again in their lands. Such a view has already been approved by Your Majesty, and a decree that the cost be paid out of João Correia de Sousa’s property, so that he return these sobas and the poor to their lands, though this cannot be the case, for almost all of them have died from illness and lack of necessities.¹⁹⁰

Correia de Sousa had taken a unilateral decision without consulting his governing authority, the City Council in Luanda, leaving some council members outraged by his actions and methods. Questions were asked in Brazil, too, about the morality of the slaves’ capture. The case of Kazanze was seen as grossly inhumane, and generated concern about the process of enslavement and the mechanisms of slave-trading.

Correia de Sousa’s claim that the Kazanze were harbouring runaway slaves – that is, those who had been captured and enslaved in the territory – echoed an accusation constantly made by previous governors of Angola. The problem of runaway slaves in Kongo and Angola was not new. A report written at the time of the governorships of Bento Banha Cardoso (1611–1615) and Luís Mendes de Vasconcelos (1617–1621), the direct predecessors of Correia de Sousa, stated that the problem of runaway slaves was dealt with through peaceful negotiation with the authorities of the lands in which runaways had sought sanctuary. War was not used as a resolution. The report declared that:

… there were years in which complaints were made by the Governors of Angola to a soba, lord of large lands, and vassals of the King of Kongo, saying that there were many common Portuguese slaves who were running away and hiding in the lands of that soba, and that he was receiving them and protecting them. Many times governors sent him requests that he return the runaway slaves, which he did indeed do in the time of the Governor Bento Banha Cardoso and during the time of Luis Mendez de Vasconcellos, who sent Captain Pero de Gouveia Leite there to the soba, who many times and on numerous occasions gave to the Portuguese more than 500 slaves he had found who had run away to his lands.¹⁹¹

Correia de Sousa claimed that the Kazanze were legally the spoils of war – that is to say, war captives. In other words, they were all runaway slaves: ‘for all of these persons [Kazanze], for reason of war and justice, they are slaves, if they did not come, they [soldiers] would have been obliged to enter to their forest and for not being killed, they have chosen the remedy by giving themselves up without any party’.¹⁹² However, the Crown in Madrid had not intended that people be removed from their lands to Brazil; on the contrary, its policy in West Central Africa encouraged increasing the population in the region to support trade and the production of goods. Despite this, Correia de Sousa continued his military offensive in Angola.

1.4 Correia de Sousa’s Unjust War against Bumbi, Another Vassal of Kongo

In 1622 Correia de Sousa invaded Bumbi, another vassal of Kongo, having accused its soba leader, Duke Paulo Affonso Nabangogo, of hiding runaway slaves.¹⁹³ On 3 June that year, Correia de Sousa sent his soldiers to the land of Nabangogo and demanded that he return the runaways, using the pretext that the enslaved people in question had been stolen from their Portuguese owners in Luanda. Nabangogo’s response was that there were no enslaved people there; if there had been, he would have returned them. This was a similar response to that given by Queen Njinga a few years later, when the same pretext was used against her kingdom. Nabangogo claimed that there were no enslaved people in Bumbi because they had returned to their original lands, and in so doing had regained their freedom and ceased to be enslaved.

Correia de Sousa’s intervention in Bumbi ignited a fierce political confrontation that resulted in war with Kongo. His actions demonstrated another form of injustice in the region: war was used to capture Kongolese men, who were then labelled as enslaved. The governing authorities in Kongo questioned the legality of Correia de Sousa’s war in Bumbi. Whilst the pressure of war was mounting, Father Barreto led efforts to find a peaceful solution to the crisis. He drew on his long experience as a mediator between governors and Angolan kings and sobas, and on his knowledge of Angolan customs and socio-political dynamics, and dispatched his own servants (helpers) from Luanda to Nabangogo to enquire about the alleged fugitive slaves.¹⁹⁴ Nabangogo told them to give him time to find the enslaved people, holding that the geography of the region made it difficult to determine their whereabouts. Correia de Sousa secretly sent his military chief of staff, or captain, Pero Coelho de Sousa, to Bumbi, where the duke of Bumbi, Paulo Affonso Nabangogo, and another soba leader, Marques de Pemba, Dom Cosme, could be found. The duke had two European priests as confessors, indicating that he was an ally of the Madrid Crown. Nevertheless, Sousa sent Jagas soldiers (one of the people groups of Angola) and guerra preta to fight Duke Nabangogo.¹⁹⁵

Correia de Sousa demanded that Nabangogo return 2,030 alleged runaway enslaved and send him 50–100 further enslaved people as compensation.¹⁹⁶ Without giving Nabangogo adequate time to comply with his wishes, Correia de Sousa sent troops to Bumbi and many prisoners of war were taken, including Nabangogo, Cosme and other sobas. They were brought to Luanda, sold as enslaved people and then shipped to the Spanish Indies, Brazil and São Tome.¹⁹⁷ The enslavement and sale of Nabangogo and his people caused outrage amongst the religious authorities in Luanda, who began to question Correia de Sousa’s motives.¹⁹⁸ Correia de Sousa’s following campaign into Kongo territory sparked another outcry among priests, members of Kongo’s élite and residents of Luanda.

Four major economic and political imperatives had prompted Correia de Sousa to wage war on the Bumbi. Firstly, he would stop at nothing to gain control of the region’s natural resources, demanding that Pedro II, king of Kongo, hand over copper mines in Kongo and Pemba to the Portuguese. Secondly, he demanded Portuguese ownership of the island of Luanda, where zimbu (shells used as currency in Angola and Kongo) were found in abundance. Thirdly, he sought to open a passage between the rivers Dande and Bengo. Lastly, he demanded that Pedro II must accept his authority, and threatened to remove him from his throne if he did not comply. He said he would have Pedro II and his confessor, Brás Correia, arrested and brought to Luanda in chains,¹⁹⁹ claiming that ‘in the name of the king of Portugal, he was given the authority to elect and confirm Kings of Kongo’.²⁰⁰ Pedro II’s response was pragmatic: he claimed that because of the unjust war waged on his kingdom, it was impossible to open the markets, because the law in Kongo and Angola held that in times of war no trade was to be conducted and all markets were to be closed.²⁰¹ This was a problem for the more than 1,000 Portuguese merchants who lived and traded in Kongo. Their safety was paramount for the Municipal Council in Luanda, which was highly concerned that, following the war in Bumbi, Kongo would retaliate by targeting those Portuguese merchants.²⁰² Gaspar Álvares, a wealthy businessman, wrote to the governor protesting that he had 150,000 cruzados-worth of enslaved people in Kongo, and that the war should not have gone ahead as it paralysed his business there.²⁰³ Thus, there was an important economic argument against Correia de Sousa’s war on Kongo.

During the war, several dukes of Bumbi were killed along with other noblemen, and many people were taken captive.²⁰⁴ Back in Luanda, Correia de Sousa ordered the arrest of Gaspar Álvares, the senior crown judge and city councillors. He then sacked the other council members and replaced them with people loyal to himself. He ordered the house arrest of all priests, warning that if they left the Jesuit College of Luanda they would be arrested and sent out of Angola.²⁰⁵ Correia de Sousa acted in this way in order to implement his method for capturing Angolans and Kongolese.

Fifty-five Portuguese residents in Kongo signed a petition demanding Correia de Sousa return the war captives. Indeed, the evidence of this petition reinforces my argument that Mendonça’s presentation in the Vatican was not a petition, but a court case.²⁰⁶ At the same time, the people of Kongo wanted to take matters into their own hands and accused Pedro II of giving Portuguese residents protection at the expense of the safety and well-being of his own people. The people of Kongo branded Pedro II a ‘puppet Portuguese king’²⁰⁷ for not allowing them to take their revenge on Correia de Sousa. Pedro II, however, was aware that Correia de Sousa’s aggression was not merely directed towards Kongo, but also at people within the Portuguese administration, including members of the Municipal Council of Luanda, Portuguese residents and merchants, as well as the Jesuit priests.²⁰⁸ To ensure the safety of the Portuguese residents in Kongo, Pedro II had them brought into his own compound. Only then did he launch a diplomatic attack on Correia de Sousa, sending formal letters to Madrid and the Vatican complaining that Correia de Sousa had illegally invaded Kongo, and stating that he must return the captives that he had stolen from Kongo and sold as enslaved people, and who were already bound for Brazil and São Tomé.

Officials, including some of those sacked from the Municipal Council of Luanda, wrote to Correia de Sousa. One letter was written by Payo d’Araújo, senior municipal judge,²⁰⁹ and was sent on behalf of the king of Portugal and Spain, Philipe III (1621–1640). It highlighted that Luanda was dependent on Kongo for trade and that war against Kongo would strain trade relations because, as noted above, according to the law in Kongo and Angola no trade was to be conducted and all markets were to be closed in times of war.²¹⁰ This alone would have severe economic implications in the region. However, D’Araújo’s letter went further, emphasising that enslaved peoples were the backbone of Luanda’s economy and its conquest. If trade were prevented due to war, Luanda would suffer greatly.²¹¹ While D’Araújo represented the dominant argument against the war shared by members of the Municipal Council, it is important to highlight that he was the captain of the presidio and the Fort of Our Lady of the Rosary of Kambambe from 1603–1604, and owned several senzalas (houses) of enslaved people in Luanda,²¹² so war would also have adversely affected his own interests.

The relationship between the governor and the Municipal Council of Luanda had come to a standstill during the administration of governors before de Sousa. Furthermore, the relationships of governors Manuel Pereira Forjaz (1607–1611), Bento Banha Cardoso (1611–1615), Manuel Cerveira Pereira (1603–1607, 1615–1617) and Luís Mendes de Vasconcelos (1617–1621) with the African rulers of the region had often come to a point of crisis that required the intervention of the Crown. The Crown had been informed of the abuses of power and the crimes committed against Angolans and Kongolese, and these reports had been the catalyst for sending Antonio Bezerra Fajardo to Angola in 1623 to conduct an official devassa (enquiry) into the political and military conflicts in the region. Let us examine Fajardo’s judicial investigation of the crimes committed in the region and the unlawful capture of the Angolans and Kongolese who were then enslaved, as it resonates with the themes of Mendonça’s court case in the Vatican.

1.5 Antonio Bezerra Fajardo’s Investigation into Portuguese Crime in Angola and Kongo

Antonio Bezerra Fajardo was a fiscal crown court judge from Madrid who was sent, in 1623, to investigate the behaviour of Angola’s governors – in particular, Luís Mendes de Vasconcelos (1617–1621), Correia de Sousa’s predecessor as governor of Luanda. Fajardo was tasked with regulating the governors’ power in Luanda, as well as their involvement in raiding, kidnapping and treachery in the region.²¹³ He was also vested with power to investigate how the governors, as representatives of the Crown, conducted their relationship with Kongolese and Angolan kings and sobas.²¹⁴ It is in this context that Fajardo’s role, which sheds light on Mendonça’s later court case in the Vatican, needs to be understood. In his case in the High Court of Appeal, Fajardo attempted to regulate the governors’ abuse of power and promote a peaceful resolution between them and the Kongolese and Angolan authorities. Surprisingly, his investigation into the crimes committed against Angolans and Kongolese and the illegality of the slave trade in the region has not yet been explored by the historians of Kongo and Angola. Scholars such as Heywood and Thornton have mentioned Fajardo in passing while addressing issues relating to the sale of firearms to the ‘heathens’ in Kongo.²¹⁵ Yet Fajardo’s investigation is significant for our understanding of the illegality of the Portuguese operation in Kongo and Angola – in particular, the trade in enslaved people practised by the city council, the governors and captains of the presidio, as well as their relationship with the sobas, who were coerced into trading in enslaved people through the use of force. In some instances, sobas were armed and obliged by the Portuguese authority to help secure captives in Angola. There were, as mentioned before, no ‘just wars’. As Fajardo explained, the bulk of war captives in West Central Africa did not in fact fit the category: ‘not even these slaves that are taken from these wars can be war captives, because they are taken from unjust wars, which they [the governors] wage on them against the decrees and brief from His Majesty’.²¹⁶

In 1623, the Crown instructed that the white pombeiros, the Portuguese slave-traders who visited different regions to buy Angolans and Kongolese who had been caught in raids, kidnapped and enslaved, must stop attending Angolan markets because they were causing conflict between Angolan and Portuguese residents. In Angola, Birmingham claims that ‘the earliest pombeiros were Europeans’, but that ‘the high mortality among them soon led the Portuguese to use mestiços and trusted enslaved Africans as pombeiros’.²¹⁷ The Crown further issued a decree to the Portuguese residents in Angola that all trading in enslaved people should be carried out by Black pombeiros, rather than white. Judicial proceedings demanded that the pombeiros should not live with the Angolans in their fields. Their presence among the Angolans was a cause for constant revolt against the Angolan sobas, who were often forced to flee their lands. The Crown wanted the macotas and the sobas to find a local solution to these conflicts, so it instructed that their advice be sought. Captains of the presidio were told not to ask the sobas to come to the presidio too often. Sobas who went to the presidio were forced by the captains to accept the demand to bring them enslaved people. Those sobas who were reluctant to comply were severely beaten and those who did not meet their agreed target were punished.²¹⁸ Judicial proceedings from Madrid declared that those sobas who had been left without land because of internal conflict must be given land to settle. Sobas were told not to trade with white pombeiros who came to live on their lands. The kings of Angola were to be allowed to live in peace and harmony. Captains were not to invoke Philip III’s name to acquire any benefits from the sobas.²¹⁹ All of this suggests that sobas were often being asked in the name of the Crown in Madrid to carry out the task of securing people as enslaved people for the Portuguese. In other words, sobas were the point of contact for captains of presidios seeking to obtain enslaved people through illegal means. This is a crucial point, not often taken into account when discussing the mechanisms of the slave trade in Angola.²²⁰

Fajardo’s investigation into the crimes committed in the region is a major piece of work that deserves deeper analysis. It also highlights the conflicting interests of the Crown in Madrid and the Muncipal City Council of Luanda. If we are to understand Mendonça’s claim in the Vatican of the illegality of the slave trade, Fajardo’s enquiry into the Portuguese relationship with local authorities in Angola and Kongo is of great significance. Fajardo was instructed to investigate which sobas were allies of Portugal, and those whose allegiance was currently being solicited. He needed to ensure that they were treated in a dignified fashion and that the will of the macotas responsible for electing the kings of Angola and Kongo was respected according to their cultural practices. The primary task was to ‘detect from the sobas the reason for their revolt … who was behind it … and whether any captains of the presidios (captaincies) had incited revolt by making promises to them so that they would act against the law and against the macotas who had elected them according to their laws’.²²¹ Portuguese interference in local politics is telling because their interest in slavery was harmful to the political status quo supported by the elders, the macotas. The local kings’ power and authority was by proxy. The king was accountable to his council of elders, who could challenge his power but not veto it. These macotas not only exercised a strong social and religious role, they also played an influential political role in decision-making.

Through carrying out his enquiry in Luanda, Fajardo obtained first-hand information on the tense relations that were causing problems between the Native and European people living in Angola, on the infighting within the Municipal Council of Luanda and on how the sobas were being ill-treated by the Portuguese for failing to raid and kidnap their neighbours for sale as enslaved people. Fajardo advised that the Crown take action to prevent Portuguese injustice and cruelty in Angola and Kongo. In his High Court of Appeal report, Fajardo shed light on the complexity of the issues he had investigated. He summarised the issues in eighteen clauses, which became statutes and were written into the Constitution of the Muncipal City Council of Luanda: ‘and a chapter of brief from His Majesty has been written in the City Council of Luanda Constitution by the Judge Antonio Bezerra Fajardo, that His Majesty had sent as a Judge to these kingdoms. He ordered it to be copied in the said Constitution, in which the chapter from His Majesty had decreed that nor offensive war be waged on them.’²²² The following is précis of each clause:²²³

1. 1. Some governors were instigators of wars in Angola and there was a danger of ‘losing Angola because of these wars’

2. 2. There was ‘a need for military experts in Luanda who make decisions regarding wars’

3. 3. ‘There was unjust treatment of Angolans and the enslavement of captives’.

4. 4. The issues of ‘just war’ and the ‘royal fifth’

5. 5. The situation of ‘sobas fleeing, thus voting with their feet’

6. 6. The ‘Portuguese captains being relieved of their duties by governors’

7. 7. The business of ‘regulating the Council of Luanda so that it reflected the administrative structure found in Lisbon’

8. 8. The ‘need for regulated trade’, which was interconnected with the regulation of the council

9. 9. The need to ensure ‘no killings of sobas by governors’

10. 10. The issue of ‘providing respectable priests to aid captains of presidios in their dealings with Angolans akin to the systems found in Goa and India’²²⁴

11. 11. ‘No firearms were to be given to any sobas either for defensive or offensive purposes’

12. 12. ‘Sending annual certificates to the council treasury documenting all ships leaving Luanda for Brazil and India’

13. 13. That ‘no ships should trade in Lugano’

14. 14. ‘No interference with the appointment of scribes and municipal councillors’

15. 15. ‘200 reis duty was to be paid for each slave leaving for Brazil’

16. 16. ‘Governors were not to take deposits in their subscriptions’

17. 17. That ‘no private property owned by residents was to be confiscated by governors’

18. 18. That ‘fiscal officers of His Majesty should give no special treatment to any individual, including governors’

What follows is my interpretation of what the most relevant of the clauses reveal:

1. [1] The accepted view was that the inter-group wars between Angolans and their distant neighbours for territorial control were the cause of many conflicts in Angola. However, further consideration of the evidence from Fajardo’s own findings suggests that those wars were related to known political and economic struggles between the City Council and the governors. In this context, the internal politics of the Muncipal City Council of Luanda and the council’s desire for enslaved people facilitated the constant waves of invasion and war experienced by the Kongolese and Angolan people.

2. [2] According to Fajardo, many of the wars that were judged to have derived from intra-Angolan and Kongolese conflict were myths, and the Portuguese interventions were most often unwarranted. The idea of a ‘just war’ was used as a pretext for the acquisition of Africans for slavery in Brazil. The so-called wars in the region were fomented by warlords, motivated by gain. Scrutiny of the justness of those ‘wars’ would uncover hardly any real war in Angola and Kongo at all. In Moirans’s argument, there was no ‘just war’ waged on Africans because their kings were not involved in decision-making about the wars that aided the capture of the Africans.²²⁵

3. [3] Fajardo was in agreement with Mendonça’s court case about the ill-treatment of the Africans, including Angolans, and maintained that their enslavement was based on fraud.

4. [4] The use of ‘just war’ as a defence for the enslavement of Angolans is implausible, and there are several reasons to doubt the explanation. One of the reasons that Fajardo was sent to Angola and Kongo was that the revenue that should have flowed to Madrid from the booty of a ‘just war’ was simply not there. The Crown in Madrid was entitled to a royal fifth of the booty of any ‘just war’ in the region. However, since these wars were not just, there was no royal fifth, as we shall see in the case about the return of the Kazanze people from Brazil to Angola. The explanations for ‘just war’ were regularly used by Portuguese apologists to brush aside the brutality and the injustices of Atlantic slavery.²²⁶

5. [5–6] Fajardo moves on to deal with encombros, a tax that was replaced with baculamento, the complicity between the governors and their captains in capturing Angolans, and the situation of ‘sobas fleeing, thus voting with their feet’ and the ‘Portuguese captains being relieved of their duties by governors’. Sobas were forced to pay tax in enslaved people and, as a result, many fled their lands. Some, who had joined the Portuguese project of conquest and been involved in capturing their fellow countrymen could not return to their lands because they had created internal enemies. Captains of the presidios worked in tandem with their governors carrying out raids and treacherous attacks. Those captains who failed to meet the expectations of their governors were sacked from their posts. These two clauses show that there was not a ready-made market for enslaved people, and that enslaved people were secured by illegal means.

6. [7–8] The Crown in Madrid wanted to maintain vassalage and tribute payments from the sobas as part of a long-lasting business plan for the region. Conversely, the city council was interested in making a quick profit, and the slave trade – based on illegal wars fought against Angolans –was their priority.

7. [9–10] The need to ensure ‘no killings of sobas by governors’ and the issue of ‘providing respectable priests to aid captains of presidios in their dealings with Angolans akin to the systems found in Goa and India’ is significant in giving us a better understanding of Mendonça’s court case. The killing of sobas by governors went in tandem with the enslavement of the Angolans. Sobas were coerced into raiding and kidnapping their own people as part of their vassalage. Those who did not comply with the rules were severely punished, often by death.²²⁷ The call from Fajardo to bring a respectable priest into the presidio was clearly an attempt to control the brutality of the governors and their captains. The presence of a priest would at least guarantee some humanity in the treatment of sobas. It is important to note that the harsh treatment inflicted on sobas by the Portuguese officials was to ensure that sobas carried out their duties – that is, the providing of Angolans for slavery. To obtain the number of captives that were required each year, sobas had to resort to using different methods. They used raiding, kidnapping and treachery to acquire enslaved people, as the sporadic wars waged against Angolans and Kongolese were not sufficient to meet Portuguese demand, and because the use of firearms by sobas was prohibited at some point in the first quarter of the seventeenth century.

8. [11–12] The capture of Africans for slavery caused social issues in Central Africa and created a cycle of violence and unnecessary war that was used to feed the market in the Americas. Waging war became the norm for settling the scores of those who lost their family members through raiding and kidnapping. Sobas who were on the side of the Portuguese used warfare to maintain their safety and that of their family. Mendonça’s court case in the Vatican was not delivered in a vacuum. He took on board the regional cases that arose where he and his family lived. Fajardo’s recommendation was that trade in Angola and Kongo be carried out in a manner similar to other Portuguese contact zones, such as Brazil and India, where trade was regulated by ‘sending annual certificates to the Council Treasury documenting all ships leaving Luanda for Brazil and India’.

9. [14] For Fajardo the role of the scribes and municipal councillors was to be protected. There was to be ‘no interference with the appointment of scribes and municipal councillors’. They were the regulators of the economy in the region, they fixed the price of the goods and stabilised the currency. Politically, they were under pressure from the city council to represent its interests and suppress any negative reports. To control the scribes and municipal councillors was to control information in the region and to be able to misinform the Crown. Suffice it to say that the suppression of information from these regions was one of the fundamental reasons why Mendonça went to the Vatican, where he could reveal the truth about the crimes committed against Angolans and Kongolese, including members of his family.²²⁸

In reading Fajardo’s findings, one may reasonably state that many so-called ‘slaves’ were not in truth ‘slaves’, because they had been captured illegally. According to his findings, there were hardly any enslaved people in Angola who had been caught legally, that is, captured in a ‘just war’ as defined by the Crown in Madrid. If there had been, and they had been captured in what was judged to be a ‘just war’, then, he posited, the Crown in Madrid was entitled to one-fifth of all the enslaved people captured. As it stood, cases where people had been captured legally were extremely rare. In 1452 Pope Nicholas V passed a decree, Dum diversas, to King Alfonso V, allowing the Crown of Portugal to conquer Saracens and pagans and to reduce them to perpetual slavery if they refused to accept the teachings of the Christian message. However, the Portuguese Crown did not interpret the fifteenth-century papal bulls that urged Christians to wage wars on infidels as an unfettered mandate to turn Africans into enslaved people. As explained, only if the Africans rejected the preaching of the Gospel could a so-called ‘just war’ be waged against them. Indeed, the concept of lawful slave capture emerged following the Portuguese Restoration. In the time of Tristão da Cunha’s governorship of Angola and that of his successor, Francisco de Távora ‘Cajanda’, the royal fifth raised from the destruction of Pungo-Andongo was valued at one-fifth of 710,000 reis’ worth of presa (war captives); another fifth went to the governor, another to the generals in the army and the other two-fifths went to the soldiers, making a grand total of 3,551,000 reis.²²⁹ In other words, of the enslaved people extracted from Angola, the majority were taken illegally, because they were not war captives captured in a ‘just war’. The royal fifth shows the emergence of the idea of ‘lawful’ slave capture in Angola, or at least shows that justifying slave capture as lawful was in the interests of the Crown, because they gained economically from it, while illegally captured enslaved people went unrecorded, with no benefit to the Crown. This fact was an important reason for Mendonça’s outcry at the Vatican, where he called on Pope Innocent XI (1676–1689) to take action.

According to my understanding of Fajardo’s appeal, any war conducted by the Portuguese against their African allies in the region must be minutely examined in terms of its justification and legality. Fajardo wanted new processes to be instigated whereby decisions regarding war would be made by a wider body of representatives from Luanda’s various constituencies that should exclude Luanda’s own governors, captains and residents.²³⁰ He claimed that the latter’s personal interests had always been served by waging war for the procurement of enslaved people, and that captains were often acting on the orders of governors, as was clear in the case of Correia de Sousa. Fajardo stated that:

His Majesty should decree with grave consequences that there should never be wars against sobas, except defensive wars, and that when war is waged, let that decision be made with the council of the Bishop or his representative, and with the Director of the Society [of Jesus], Senior Crown Judge, Fiscal Officer of His Majesty, and the City Council of São Paulo [Luanda]; and let it be that captains and the representative of the people should not be part of such votes, for the captains and the city residents want nothing except that there are wars so that they can take slaves and benefit from them. Many people are dying in wars, as well as from hunger, and many others are eaten by Jagas who keep the people they kill. And if possible, first give to all a warning against such wars to stop; it is very necessary.²³¹

Persistent warring and abuse of sobas were undoubtedly a valued means of control for the Portuguese governors and their captains in Angola and underlay the role of the Muncipal City Council of Luanda in the region. Indeed, the very existence of the City Council was based on securing the Angolans as enslaved people. Wars were primarily conducted with a single aim: to gather enslaved people. Most decisions taken by the war cabinet in Luanda had no legal basis for their implementation. In the light of this evidence, who were the enslaved that populated the Americas? The answer to this question is that they were ordinary people who had been raided, captured and stolen. They did not fit any of the categories of people whom the Portuguese would define as slaves. They were not fighters, called kijikos, who had been captured in war. Nor were they debtors, those who had not paid their dues or owed someone money or had been caught stealing someone’s property.

The notion of capturing people did have a place in the political, economic and legal environment of Angola and elsewhere in Africa at the time.²³² It was not without legal precedent, but was a practice bound by clearly understood reciprocal duties and responsibilities. The kijikos and debtors were under the legal protection of those who had taken them. Those who had kijikos and debtors in their service had a duty of care towards them. The captors were monitored by the watchful eye of Mbundu (the whole of society) to ensure that they fulfilled their responsibilities until such time as the kijikos and debtors had completed their term of service and were released.²³³ It seems that the African concept of ‘slaves’ – that is, of debtors and kijikos – views the condition as temporary and bound by respect and responsibility, not a matter of ownership and servitude as in the Western version. Kijikos and debtors were never owned as such by their captors; indeed, Thornton states that the term kijiko is a description of a free person.²³⁴ Those who argue for the existence of slavery in African society in seventeenth-century Angola have based their argument on anti-abolitionist literature of the nineteenth century rather than on sound evidence-based historical analysis.²³⁵ From this evidence, therefore, we may conclude that so-called ‘slaves’ in Angola in this period were not in fact slaves and that the category ‘slave’ needs to be revisited. I will now turn to Correia de Sousa’s role in the Muncipal City Council of Luanda and how he attempted to influence members of the war cabinet to support his method of capturing Angolans and how, in the absence of support, he resorted to sacking them.

1.6 Correia de Sousa’s Unrest in the City of Luanda

A major accusation made by the religious authorities in Luanda was that Correia de Sousa used his newly appointed scribe to pen his own version of events in letters to Madrid. He also censored all letters addressed to the Crown in Madrid, rewording them to suit his own interests.²³⁶ Using his power as governor, Correia de Sousa refused to allow priests to leave Angola and sent soldiers to the port in Luanda to ensure that no priests or previous members of the Municipal Council left for Portugal without his consent.²³⁷ He promised high office to many of his new council members in exchange for their loyalty.²³⁸ He arrested wealthy residents, including one of the wealthiest merchants of the time, Gaspar Álvares, whom he saw as a threat to his mission. He suspected that Álvares would use his wealth to curry favour with the senior judge in Luanda and turn the judge against him.²³⁹ Cardoso declared that:

… there was also an order that our brother Gaspar Álvares should be arrested. The soldiers surrounded his house, but he took shelter by an escape door and hid himself. And the next day at night he sneaked into our school, half dead and out of breath, saying, ‘Priests, I have been wishing to enter the Society, for I see that God calls me because I am an old man and never had a shotgun in my house and there is no-one who complains about me with anger. And yet John Correa says that I am a traitor and a mutineer; this is from heaven, God calls me, I want to enter the Society soon.’ And so he trimmed his beard and wore a cassock.²⁴⁰

Personal financial gain was always the motive for Correia de Sousa’s actions. Eliminating his major rival Álvares, who was blocking Correia de Sousa from capturing Angolans and Kongolese, made it easy for Correia de Sousa to implement his method of capturing the Angolans and controlling the slave trade. Father Cardoso wrote, ‘and so all this is the Governor’s wickedness, for he has planned to get rich by diabolical manners’.²⁴¹ Correia de Sousa had a notice pinned to the pillory declaring that traitors should give themselves up, among them Gaspar Álvares. I will in due course return to Álvares’s case.

Correia de Sousa indeed claimed that he was changing the political and economic landscape of the Municipal Council of Luanda. To achieve this, he used his power to buy the support of many of the priests, although senior priests remained averse to his economic strategy. The two priests who were the leading supporters of his cause were Marçal de Figueiredo and Bento Ferrás, whom Cardoso branded ‘unworthy clerics of that office’ in his submission to the High Court of Appeals. He singled out Ferrás, in particular, as ‘an idiot cleric, a cheat and a liar’. Ferrás was the confidant of another priest, Gasper Preto, whom Cardoso described as ‘a messenger cleric who, with the collectors, is capable of anything, does what he wants in all matters and demands and cheats’.²⁴²

Farrás’s allegiance was undoubtedly bought by Correia de Sousa on the basis of ‘cash for sermons and trade’.²⁴³ Farrás used the pulpit to voice his support for Correia de Sousa publicly. In his sermon entitled ‘I had a dream’, in which he declared that there was a plot to have Correia de Sousa arrested, it was clear that he was alluding to the former members of the Municipal Council of Luanda as well as influential Jesuit figures. Cardoso in his submission to the Court of Appeal states, ‘[Farrás] said in a sermon that he had a dream that they wanted to arrest the Governor; after this, he left for his business in the Spanish Indies without waiting for the Lord Bishop.’²⁴⁴ Correia de Sousa had forbidden any priests and members of the Municipal Council to leave Angola, and had positioned soldiers in the port in Luanda to monitor those leaving. That Farrás was allowed to travel freely from Luanda to the Spanish Indies demonstrates his complicity with Correia de Sousa. Correia de Sousa also had the support of three other priests, Marçal de Figueiredo, Gaspar Preto (who was Angolan) and Diogo Nabo Paçanha. It was undoubtedly this kind of formal support for Correia de Sousa that led Mendonça to accuse the Church of participation in slavery in his court case.

In 1622, Correia de Sousa was arrested, after having fled to Cartagena, for not returning the enslaved Kazanze and Bumbi people to Angola, and for causing unrest in Angola, Kongo and the Municipal Council of Luanda. He returned to Portugal for imprisonment by the Madrid Crown: ‘João Correia de Sousa, who left this government last year, and went to Cartagena in the New World, was there arrested by the order of His Majesty; and in Lisbon he escaped from the blame put on his government.’²⁴⁵

The Municipal Council of Luanda (see Figure 7)²⁴⁶ was left in the hands of a military junta led by Captain Pero Coelho de Sousa, who in 1622 was ‘one of those who sentenced the King’s Senior Crown Judge to death, and was the one who came from the war with the soldiers to arrest him, and that he [Correia de Sousa] begged everyone to recognise him as his own person until the governor made it back, that at latest would be eight months.’²⁴⁷

Figure 7 Map of Luanda, Angola, in the seventeenth century. Biblioteca da Ajuda, Lisbon, Portugal. [BAL], cartografia, MS. A descrição da barra do reino de Angola, 51-IX-21 (fl. 2.), Armário Met.X.

Photograph by the author.

1.7 The Feud between Correia de Sousa and Álvares

I will now further develop the theme of the slave trade in Angola and Kongo and detail the intersection between the Church and slavery. The Church in Angola, and the Jesuits’ Society, were silent with regard to criticising the slave trade. Their lack of criticism indicates that they were complicit with the merchants who were members both of the Muncipal City Council of Luanda and of the Church, and suggests that the Church benefited from the slave trade. In his writings, Cadornega describes the feud between Gaspar Álvares and Governor Correia de Sousa, outlining – as discussed above – that Álvares complained about Correia de Sousa before going to the Jesuits in Luanda to train as a novice. Cadornega was in agreement with Cardoso about the events that befell Álvares in Luanda:

Gaspar Álvares [Devil Boy] was born in Lisbon and was an extremely wealthy merchant in Angola. Due to some issues with the Governor João Correia de Sousa, he went to the Jesuit College of Luanda and became a novice. He made a will on 13 February 1623 and granted this to the Jesuits for the founding of seminaries in the Kongo and in Luanda. Gaspar Álvares died in November 1623.²⁴⁸

Álvares had accumulated his wealth through slave-trading between Angola and Brazil and Argentina, and the sum he set aside in his will for the founding of seminaries was 20,000 cruzados, the worth of 400 enslaved people (see Table 2). Álvares wrote his will almost three months before he was to be executed on 2 May 1623 in the city of Luanda by order of Correia de Sousa. The execution did not take place, but Alvares nonetheless died that year, on 23 October 1623. The following year, on 20 April 1624, an attorney general from the Society of Jesus in the Court of Madrid, Antonio Colaço, ‘sent a petition to the Crown asking for the Mission in Kongo to waive a customs tax of 400 slaves, equivalent to the 20,000 cruzados that Gaspar Álvares had outlined in his will, which the Society of Jesus had not received’.²⁴⁹ Three governors were appointed to preside over the petition before it reached any tribunal; two of them, Dom D. da Silva and Dom D. de Castro, approved the petition, and the third, D. Simão Soares, declined to sign it.²⁵⁰

Table 2 Wealth of Gaspar Álvares, Portuguese trader and resident of Angola in the seventeenth century, based on his correspondence and will. By the author

Items	People	Value description	Value
Build colleges: Luanda and Kongo		10,000 cruzados 10,000 cruzados (2 cural of sheep and cattle) 20,000 cruzados (estimated value of slaves held)	10,000 10,000 20,000
Seminary in Luanda	For 10 or more pupils, to include: clothing, food, maintenance and teaching. For children of the poor men of the kingdom	20,000 cruzados (worth 10,000 of Kongo cloths and another 10,000 of slaves’ worth)	20,000 10,000 10,000
		500 cruzados from interest on slaves leaving for Bahia, Pernambuco for the seminary in rights plus 10,000 cruzados in Kongo cloths	500 10,000
His own lands near the Santa Casa da Misericordia de Lisbon; there, two houses to be built for rent for the Luanda Hospital		20,000 cruzados (estimated price of the two houses)	20,000
	To Paschoal Antunes 60 sheep, plus 20,000 cruzados, plus a slave named Antonio, and one named Lucrecia, and other people		20,000 10,000?
	To children of João Álvares, who is a neighbour in Abrantes 600,000 reis in credits	600,000 reis	600,000
To Santa Casa da Misericordia House de Lisbon		600,000 reis	600,000
To what he owed to Santa Casa da Misericordia de Lisbon as the President of the Board		360,000 reis	360,000
Debt collected and given to Captain Henrique Dias da Estrada of the Santa Casa da Misericordia House de Lisbon		200,000 reis	200,000
More debt to be collected from Cartagena as witnessed in the books kept in the drawers, and more money sent via Brazil, Rio de Prata, assigned documents, accounts in the book in which many properties owed to me are written		Value not known
Francisco Charamela lent to the Governors a debt which should be collected	To be given to the priests of The Society of Jesus	1,000 cruzados	1,000
Other properties not mentioned		Values go to the Society of Jesus for the building of college in Kongo or in another kingdom or seminary. If nothing is done towards that, then 40,000 goes to the Orphanage House	40,000
To Confraria de Nossa Senhora da Conceição in Lisbon		For retable, 100,000 reis	100,000
To Casa Professa de Santo Antonio		4 slaves to send from Lisbon beautiful retable	??
To Manuel da Silva		For retable 80,000	80,000
Has built a chapel and there built 3 houses: a factory with a floor and 3 houses that follow for everyday prayer	Used by the São José’s priests Used by Paschoal Antunes and his children	130,000 reis Rent value more than 200,00 reis More 150,000	130,000 200,000 150,000
	To Luís Gonçalves Bravo	4 slaves	??
To the priests of São José to build a church		4,000 cruzados of city cloths To be also given more money from his houses rent from now to July 1624 (March 1623–July 1624	4,000 ????
	To the poor both men and women	2,000 cruzados	2,000
	For the sister of João Baptista to enter the monastery of Abadeça	4,000 cruzados	4,000
Any property found after this will, it should go to orphan houses, and the poor people, and a quarter of what is left should go to orphan houses	Poor people and orphans	?	?
To build a hospital in Alcantra If the plan fell through, the money must go to wed orphans, and with poor	To Capucho Freiry, Francisco Antonio de santo Estevão	20,000 cruzados	20,000
	Any known relatives of his in Lisbon	To them 100,000 reis each	100,000
	For those orphans that I have asked to be wedded from my property are daughters of Gaspar Carneiro	200,000 reis of cloth each (200,000 x ???)	200,000??
20000 masses to be carried in Lisbon	For people, he may have done wrong to	Value not known. In Bahia, it varies from priest to priest	???
Money that comes from Rio de Prata for brotherhoods	To Father Duarte Vaz	200 patacas	200
Houses of stone that he has made from their senzala	A young woman of dual heritage that is in the house of Paschoal Antunes, he is setting free, called Catherina; he should marry her whom he has left with a young black girl	200,000 reis of cloths, a slave that she brought up by the name of Maria Ambuela with her sons	200,000

Sum total = 3,321,393 Cruzados

Gaspar Álvares’ worth was 3,321,393 Cruzados in Angola, which equated to 664, 279 persons of enslaved Angolans and Kongolese taken to the Americas.

The events that led to Correia de Sousa ordering Álvares’s execution, and the subsequent wrangle over Álvares’s inheritance, began in 1623 when Kongo noblemen wrote a letter of petition to the senior crown judge, André de Moráes Sarmiento, considered ‘a man of justice and virtue’, demanding that Correia de Sousa be stopped in his actions against Kongo.²⁵¹ The senior crown judge called a meeting with the municipal councillors and sergeants Antonio Bruto, Martim Correa and Lourenço de Figueiredo,²⁵² who accepted a brief containing the eighteen clauses written by Fajardo and approved by the Council of Luanda and the Crown.²⁵³ As forementioned, the brief sought radical political and commercial reform in Angola. In particular, the council sought to stop the governor having the final say over whether war would be waged or not. They asked that the judge, Captain Major Payo de Araujo, be present when they negotiated with Correia de Sousa.²⁵⁴ In the first meeting, Correia de Sousa rejected the council’s proposal not to wage wars against Angolans and the Kongolese. At a second meeting with Correia de Sousa, Dionizio de Faria Barreto, an African priest and judge, read out the brief to Correia de Sousa. This infuriated Correia de Sousa, who turned against the senior crown judge and the municipal councillors. He summoned the army, led by Pero Coelho de Sousa,²⁵⁵ to Luanda under the pretext that he was to be imminently arrested by the city’s Municipal Council.²⁵⁶ When the army arrived, he divided the men into two groups and sent them to arrest members of the Municipal Council: the first group arrested the senior crown judge; the second group went to the house of Antonio Bruto, who escaped into the night on horseback.²⁵⁷ Luanda was put under curfew that night, while soldiers opened fire and the residents were left in disarray.²⁵⁸ Cardoso recounted that the city was in shock: ‘all were in fear and confusion knowing the cause; it was that the soldiers surrounded the senior crown judge’s house, who arrested him, and took him before the Governor, who received him with harsh words, called him a traitor, and declared that his head be removed; he ordered him to be chained and put in prison’.²⁵⁹

Correia de Sousa ordered d’Araujo’s execution for 2 May 1623, just a day before he himself was to be extradited to Portugal for imprisonment: ‘and before he left on board the ship, on 2 May, he ordered the Judge Payo d’Araujo to be beheaded, the municipal councillors, Antonio Bruto, Martim Correa and Lourenço de Figueiredo and our Brother Gaspar Álvares novice, all placed in the pillory’.²⁶⁰ The Crown in Madrid, having received unceasing complaints from Pedro II, the king of Kongo, about Correia de Sousa’s invasion tactics in Kongo and Kazanze, had finally ordered his arrest and extradition to Portugal. The Luandan officials seized by Correia de Sousa were not executed and, if the Vogado report is accurate, Gaspar Álvares died in Luanda four months later, on 24 October 1623. There is, however, disagreement between Vogado and Cadornega surrounding Álvares’s death: Cadornega stated that ‘Gaspar Álvares died in November 1623’ in the prison of Limoeiro.²⁶¹ It had been Álvares’s desire to invest some of his wealth in the education of Native Angolans and Kongolese. Following his death in 1623, new teachers of Latin, philosophy, humanities, arts and rhetoric arrived in Luanda. Funded by Álvares’s will, they taught the children of the sobas and noblemen of Angola and Kongo (see Table 2).²⁶² The will was strongly contested in court by his living relatives in Lisbon, especially by Antonio de Bairros Pereira and other heirs, for four years after his death. The case was heard by the Tribunal of Consciousness and Orders on 17 November 1627.²⁶³

However, the biggest legal challenge to Álvares’s will came from the Crown itself on 16 October 1624, during the Luanda governorship of Correia de Sousa’s successor, Fernão de Sousa (1624–1630). The Crown contested the will on two fronts: political and legal. Politically, the Crown claimed that it had to respond to the needs of its subjects ‘with the desire that justice is done to all, as it is my obligation, and to avoid the outcry from the heirs of the deceased’.²⁶⁴ The Crown had been informed about mismanagement by some of the officials in Angola and Kongo, the Church’s complaints about Correia de Sousa in particular and Fajardo’s complaints in general. It could be argued that Fajardo’s claim to the High Court of Appeals had probably reached Madrid. The Crown pointed a finger at the Treasurers of the Deceased and Absent,²⁶⁵ which was the office in Luanda charged with dealing with the property of the deceased, claiming that money was not being passed on to the relatives. The Treasurers had allegedly been appropriating the money, ‘using it as if their own, to which great loss has been incurred from the heirs of the deceased, who have been in the city requesting their payments’.²⁶⁶ The Treasurers of the Deceased and Absent should have passed any money to the Bureau of Consciousness and Orders; instead, they failed to declare it.

The Crown appointed Judge Diogo Nabo Peçanha to carry out an enquiry into the case and to ensure that all the money was returned to Álvares’ family. In the absence of Peçanha, Correia de Sousa was then to appoint a bailiff of trust, who would keep hold of the money and who be responsible for sending it to Portugal and Spain. Meanwhile, the Crown in Madrid accused King Pedro II of Kongo’s two confessors, André Cordeiro and Brás Correia, of corruption, after having been informed of their abuse of power in appointing ‘treasurers, scribes and presidents of the Board of the Deceased’.²⁶⁷ The Crown threatened to repatriate these priests if they failed to cooperate with the enquiry commissioned by the Crown.

The complication with Álvares’s will was not only that he had become a novice and left his wealth to the Society of Jesus in Luanda but also that his will had not been properly witnessed. There had been no witnesses present at its signing, aside from the priests from the Church who were implicated in its signing by Vogado, the director of the Jesuit College in Luanda. Álvares left a colossal sum of money to the Society of Jesus, in the region of 400,000 cruzados, equal to the value of 8,000 enslaved people and more than the cost of twenty colleges on the scale of the Jesuit College in Salvador, Bahia (see Table 2). It was clearly an amount that was envied by the Crown itself.

The Crown accused Jesuit leaders of corruption and embezzlement, claiming that the Treasurers of the Deceased and Absent were given backhanded pay-outs to ensure that the will was authenticated. It was asserted that ‘the Religious [priests] corrupted the officers with bungs: each was paid 3,000 Cruzados and another 1,000 cruzados went to a person who appeared for the absentees. The officers had forgotten what they owed to my service and the obligation of their office; they have abandoned the treasury for their own interests.’²⁶⁸ Madrid urged the Jesuits in Luanda not to obstruct justice through religious censorship or to omit any information regarding the case; rather they should comply with the rules of the enquiry and return the money to the appointed judge. ‘If they attempt to obstruct justice with any censure, that person or persons, be they religious [priests] or otherwise, will have disobeyed my decrees and will immediately be sent back to this kingdom [Portugal–Spain].’²⁶⁹

Four months later, on 10 February 1625, governor Fernão de Sousa was able to defuse the conflict between the Crown and the Society of Jesus in Luanda by proposing that it was in the interest of both the Crown and the Álvares family that the money be kept in the possession of the Jesuits, rather than in the hands of the Treasurers, until a solution was found. He assured the Crown that ‘the inventory of Gaspar Álvares’s wealth will be implemented, and it will not get lost for being in the hands of the priests of the Society of Jesus, it being much safer in their hands than in the hands of the Treasurers’.²⁷⁰ He went further, suggesting that the Treasurers of the Deceased and Absent must be overseen by the newly appointed senior crown judge, who should have the role of Chief Commissioner of the Deceased. Whilst in post, he should appoint the Treasurers of the Deceased, who must trust him, and who ought to be moneyed people who would give him ‘residência’ or an ‘official judicial review’ after he completed his term in office. For Fernão de Sousa, this would prevent the mismanagement of the Treasury and hold the officers charged with the job to account. Giving him an ‘Official Judicial Review’ – that is, auditing him – would also prevent him from running away to Brazil or to other regions such as the Spanish Indies, because ‘he must return to the kingdom, and he would not dare to do wrong, and if he does it, he will be punished, and his Majesty will not make use of his services again’.²⁷¹ Sousa did not want a repeat of the Gaspar Ferras’s case, in which Ferras – the president of the Treasurers of the Deceased in Luanda – having been accused of corruption in the handling of Gaspar Álvares’s will, had fled to Pernambuco after learning that the Crown had issued a warrant for his arrest. As Fernão de Sousa recorded:

… with this will comes the inventory [will] and more papers that belong to the Treasury of which Gaspar Alu[a]rez made in the Jesuits College in this City; with them I sent Simaõ de Niza to prison, who was the Treasurer of the Deceased and Manoel Paez who served as a Scribe. Not Gaspar Ferras, who was the President of the Deceased, for when a letter was issued, and an order given by His Majesty to arrest and send him there, he had already gone to Brazil. In that it was precarious to arrest him in Pernambuco, I have written to Governor Mathias de Albuquerque that when arrested it would be favourable that he is sent to the Bureau of Consciousness.²⁷²

The imprisonment of Simão de Niza brought the Gaspar Álvares scandal to its lowest point, demonstrating the lingering political and religious problems within Luanda and Kongo during the period and a political landscape that was mired in greed, jealousy, treachery and power struggles. The case of Niza only superficially highlights hidden issues about slavery in Angola, which so far has been brushed aside when researching the Atlantic slave trade. The case changes our ideas of what slavery was in relation to Central West Africa. Before leaving for his imprisonment in Portugal, Niza wanted to make clear that the corruption regarding Álvares’s testament ran deep in the Society of Jesus in Luanda. During his hearing, he ‘pulled out an instrument from the Judge of the Deceased’,²⁷³ with which he was intending to frame the Jesuits and shed light on their involvement in the scandal. ‘Priests of the Society of Jesus knew of it, and that it was intended to discredit their religion, and they asked their lawyer to press charges against him, and obliged him with censures to show it, and by not obeying them he aggravated them, and declared it to priests.’²⁷⁴ Niza confided in Fernão de Sousa as he sought protection from him against the priests who wielded great power in Luanda.²⁷⁵ In order to aid him, Fernão de Sousa demanded that he show him the instrument in question. However, Niza refused, and ‘persisted in his stubbornness and was sent [to Portugal] for excommunication’.²⁷⁶

On Christmas Eve, 1625, Fernão de Sousa concluded his enquiry into Álvares’s scandal and sent a letter to the Crown in Madrid, stating: ‘I have given an account to His Majesty on how I have proceeded in the case of the Deceased and Absents’ wealth, and am sending in two ways the inventory of items that has been left by Gaspar Álvares, along with other things that belong to His Majesty.’²⁷⁷

1.8 Kongolese Captives Return from Brazil (1623–1627)

Pressure to return the Kazanze and Bumbi captives to Angola and Kongo came predominantly from authorities within Kongo. The Kongolese king, Pedro II, demanded that justice be done and that Correia de Sousa return those he had sent to Brazil, São Tomé and the Spanish Indies. The Crown in Madrid sent a letter on 7 December 1622 ordering the governor of Brazil, Salvador and Bahia, Diogo Mendonça Furtado, to uncover the whereabouts of the captives:

… the Governor Diogo de Mendonça Furtado has been ordered to know the whereabouts of the sobas whom Joaõ Correia declares are free … and if it is the case that from Brazil, there has been something written on this issue about the slaves, it will be considered soon. And I will be informed of what happens.²⁷⁸

On 9 December 1622, the Crown issued a letter to the governors of Portugal stating that a fact-finding meeting about what happened in Angola would be called, and subsequently the matter would ‘be discussed in the state council’ and the ‘justification of the war and the truth behind the Blacks who were sent to Brazil’ would be ascertained.²⁷⁹ After obtaining the truth about the war, the Crown responded by ordering Correia de Sousa to return the Kazanze people and those from Bumbi as free agents. In addition, the cost of their return would be met by Correia de Sousa himself.

The authorities in Madrid were eager to find a solution to the issue of the captives and their illegal enslavement in Brazil. Pressure from Kongolese authorities would not dissipate until the captives were returned to their homelands in Kongo and Angola. On 17 December 1622, the Crown issued another letter to Diogo Mendonça Furtado, addressing him this time as ‘friend’ and asking him to enquire diligently about the captives and the important Kazanze and Mbumbi political figures among them. The letter was signed by the Crown’s secretary of state and tribunal justice, Christovão Soarez, who was among those summoned by Madrid to investigate the circumstances around the captives. The letter said:

… from Joao Correa de Sousa’s, Governor of Angola’s, letters I understood that among the number of Black captives whom he had sent in different vessels to this state came sobas and other persons who are declared on a paper, which you will be given, signed by Christovão Soarez, from my Council and my Secretary of State, Tribunal Justice [meaning unclear here]. And for the service of God and myself it is necessary that they are treated as free; it seems to me that on this occasion there should be ordered, as I do, that as soon as you receive them, find out from them whether they want to return to Angola.²⁸⁰

The Crown demanded that Correia de Sousa cover the cost of the captives’ return, declaring: ‘if they wish to return to Angola, he must send them as soon as possible, giving them their fares and subsistence, and whatever else they might need … and giving them all good treatment’.²⁸¹

Madrid was also informed of the political danger that the free Kazanze people in Brazil might pose to the governing authority there. In a letter to the governors of Portugal, the Crown declared that the captives were not to be allowed to come together in case they created an uprising. Their continuous separation from one another was vital; they were sent to different captaincies in Brazil including Maranhão: ‘considering that they continue to separate Blacks [Angolans] that are present in Brazil, Maranhão or other parts, to ensure that being together does not inspire revolt’.²⁸² The captives were given the choice of returning to Angola or staying in Brazil.

Some were returned during the time of Bishop Frier Simão de Mascarenhas, who was interim governor of Luanda after Correia de Sousa’s departure.²⁸³ However, not all of them could be returned: as mentioned, the death toll had been enormous.²⁸⁴ At the same time, the Dutch occupation of Pernambuco and Bahia may have made it difficult to determine the whereabouts of all the captives. Yet Madrid made demands for the return of the captives during the time of Correia de Sousa’s government in Luanda and after.²⁸⁵

Pedro II wrote a letter to the Dutch authorities on 27 October 1623 requesting military aid and manpower. This could be interpreted as part of an African military effort to oust the Portuguese from Kongo, as Thornton and Heywood have argued.²⁸⁶ However, the tone of Pedro II’s letter of 7 December 1622 to the Hispanic Crown shows merely a desire to secure the liberation of the captives.²⁸⁷ He demanded their return on the grounds that they had been unjustly captured and had not been for sale in the first place. This was an official plea to set free those who had never in fact been ‘slaves’. What the letter indicates was that Kongo’s authorities were ready to challenge the Portuguese on the issue of the illegal enslavement of Kongo’s people, similar to the challenge made by Angola’s Mbandi.²⁸⁸ This was also not the first time that Kongo’s authorities had fought for their people’s liberty; indeed, they had fought for centuries for the liberation of their people. Afonso I of Kongo already had contested Portuguese trade and slave trade in his kingdom, demanding that it be stopped.

The Crown in Madrid sent three letters in December 1622: two letters to Diogo Mendonça Furtado, one on 7 December and another on 17 December; and one on 9 December to the Portuguese governors in Brazil. All the letters commanded the return of captives sent to Brazil and ordered that Correia de Sousa see to ‘their fares, food, and any general needs they might have, to do everything for them and treat them well’.²⁸⁹

On 18 March 1624,²⁹⁰ the Crown sent another letter to Furtado telling him that the captives had been declared free and should be sent back to Angola and Kongo. Having not received any news about their return from this first letter, the Crown issued a warning and demanded a further enquiry into the captives’ whereabouts: ‘until now I have not known how the decree has been fulfilled; it seems to me necessary to issue it again.’²⁹¹ In Angola, Governor Fryer Simão de Mascarenhas was tasked with finding the captives, negotiating their release from captivity in Brazil and ensuring their safe return to Angola. However, Mascarenhas was dealing with an internal problem in Luanda, where the military junta faithful to Correia de Sousa was clinging to power. The junta disregarded Mascarenhas’s instructions, and the Crown was forced to write instructing Pero Coelho de Sousa – the junta’s leader – to turn the power of the military over to civilian authority so that the council could be run without interference. However, Pero Coelho de Sousa withheld any correspondence from Madrid from Mascarenhas, who remained ignorant of the Crown’s instructions for six months after his arrival in Luanda on 9 August 1623. It was only on 13 January 1624 – by which time the junta’s leader, Pero Coelho de Sousa, was dead²⁹² – that Mascaranhas received a letter from the king decreeing that de Sousa give up the government: ‘On 13 January I received a letter that Your Majesty [was to] give new awards of royal offices to this government … and consequently Your Majesty’s decree to write to Pero Sousa Coelho that he give up the government. He has done it and the letter came into my hands […] two days after confirming Pero Coelho de Sousa died.’²⁹³

On 3 February 1624, Mascarenhas informed the Crown of the outcome of his own enquiries in Brazil. He had managed to negotiate the release from Brazil of fifty-three people, including the duke of Bamba’s cousin. Mascarenhas declared:

… with a satisfaction on the affairs of the Kingdom of Kongo and the war of Bumbi that was fought in the time of Governor João Correia de Sousa, I have written to you, Your Majesty, and to the King of Kongo of what has been done. For the people captured in that war […] that have been scattered in that land, I made great effort and ordered that they were returned to the Duke of Bamba […] Of the fifty-three people who came, one was the cousin [female] of the Duke.²⁹⁴

However, Kongo continued to write letters, putting pressure on Madrid, because the number of captives who had returned from Brazil was far fewer than the number sent there. Madrid demanded that the governor of Brazil redouble his efforts to return them to Kongo, because ‘being large, the number of Blacks whom João Correia de Sousa sent to Brazil, only very few of them have been sent back to Angola. And the governor wrote to say that he did not grant all of them freedom for he understood that some of them had come from the previous war.’²⁹⁵

Whilst diplomatic pressure exerted by Madrid on the Municipal Council of Luanda continued following the return of some of the captives, Pedro II was also conscious that Mascarenhas initially had limited power in Luanda, owing to the influence of the military junta who were still in control even after Pero Coelho de Sousa’s death. He threatened to send his own ambassador to Madrid with complaints about Portuguese activities in the region if nothing was done to ensure the return of the remaining captives. Mascarenhas was aware of the political implications of not returning the captives, and sent two letters to Madrid explaining Kongo’s stance and his attempts to dissuade Pedro II from sending his ambassador to Madrid:

… together with a letter that I have written to Your Majesty sent via São Tomé, there was also another [letter] from the king of Kongo that he sent me. He wanted to send an ambassador [to Madrid] with complaints. I have dissuaded him and I have been left calm. And I advised too that there is good treatment of the Portuguese there, including the restitution of [their] captured properties […] that in the past was retained in his kingdoms […], and that it is necessary that trade roots stay open [much freer] and that commerce continues with the king of Kongo.²⁹⁶

The political implications are evident in this letter. We cannot take for granted the importance of free-trade routes in giving access to the local markets in Angola and Kongo, which the Portuguese knew were important to their existence in Kongo and Angola. The free-trade routes could easily obscure the economic exploitation that took place in the region. Mascarenhas knew that the mission of Kongo’s ambassador to Madrid would have made manifest the weakness of his authority in Luanda, as well as providing dangerous clarity on the heavy-handedness of Portuguese activity in Angola and Kongo and the illegality of the slave trade in the region.

Meanwhile in Salvador, Brazil, a new wave of political discourse was emerging to counter Madrid’s decree to return the captured Angolans. This new argument presented an economic case for not returning the captives to Kongo, stating that not all captives sent to Brazil had been captured in an unjust war. As a result, not all of them should be returned to Angola and Kongo. After considering this argument, Madrid rebutted their claims opportunistically, asserting that if their presupposition of a ‘just war’ was correct and the captives had been captured legally, then Furtado needed to pay Brazil’s royal fifth on the 1,211 enslaved people exported from Kazanze to Brazil. In this vein, Madrid sent a letter to Furtado on 15 February 1624:

… and considering that they came from a ‘just war’ and that until now there is nothing to indicate the contrary, it is important that my treasury does not lose the profit on these slaves. It seems to me necessary to give you the charge and decree that you confirm what you have heard and understood of what the governor of Brazil has done with them. Give him the order that it is necessary that he keeps what is for me, and that he sends the proceeds to this kingdom. It is important and there is a lot for you to answer for; take care to execute it without delay.²⁹⁷

According to my estimations, the royal fifth on 1,211 enslaved people worth roughly 60,550 cruzados would have been 12,110 cruzados. The documentary evidence shows that debate in Brazil about the return of captives from Kazanze was dropped altogether following the Crown’s demands, and instead the argument centred mainly on the captives from Bumbi. This was a political manoeuvre aimed at casting doubt on Madrid’s claim that the captives sent to Brazil were illegal. The claim that the war waged on Kazanze had been just was designed to free the Bahian authorities from the burden of having to return the Kazanze captives, of whom there were many, to Angola; a much smaller number of captives were taken from Bumbi, and they were also of high status.

1.9 Concluding Remarks

Slavery did not exist in Angola and Kongo before the arrival of the Portuguese. Both the Angolan and the Kongolese authorities demanded the return of the people who had been taken to live in slavery in Brazil. They used their rights to exert pressure and demand freedom for these people, posing arguments based in Christianity, natural law, citizenship and humanity. This is why I am asking whether those taken to the Americas actually fitted into the category of ‘enslaved people’ or whether they were labelled ‘slaves’ in order to fit into the European merchants’ commercial category. If enslaved people were being readily bought and sold, then it seems probable that the kings of Angola and Kongo, Mbandi and Pedro II, would have asked for the market price for these people rather than fighting for their return. In other words, we could extrapolate the argument and say that there were no enslaved people whatsoever in Angola in the light of this case. In commercial terms, these individuals would have had considerable market and labour value.²⁹⁸ The difference between the authorities in Madrid, Angola and Kongo was their valuation of those taken to Brazil. For Madrid, if the return of the captives was not possible, on the assumption that they were caught from a ‘just war’, they demanded that reparations be paid to recoup their economic value, that is, one-fifth of the money accrued from the sale of the Kazanze sent to Brazil. Meanwhile, Kongo and Angola demanded a return of their subjects, regarding them as humans and not as objects of economic value or enslaved people.

The problem of runaway slaves in Angola, which was the reason given to wage war on the Kazanze and the Bumbi, also demonstrates that the model for modern slavery in Brazil could not work in Angola. It was possible to enforce slavery in a foreign country, when people are removed from their own communities. However, the Angolans knew their own soil and laws and knew that they could not be enslaved for as long as the Africans who were taken to Brazil or elsewhere in the African continent, such as the island of São Tomé.²⁹⁹ In Angola, of those captives who escaped or ran away from Portuguese captivity, some joined Queen Njinga to fight against the Portuguese. Brazil was new terrain, however, and it took time for the slave captives to familiarise themselves with the region before they could plan an escape. In Brazil, Native enslaved people were able to run away, because they knew their terrain well. In Ngugi wa Thiongo’s terms, African slavery was possible because it was based on the removal of people from their own continent to be exploited in another.³⁰⁰

The governors in West Africa were not interested in adhering to Crown policy. This is very much reflected in their behaviour in Angola. They paid lip service to the Crown but largely ignored the rules it set. Nevertheless, the Council of Luanda came into conflict with the governors for seeking to benefit their own interests in how they enslaved Angolans. Often, council members used the Crown as leverage to gain the upper hand. The council depended on the good will of the African kings to maintain its interests in the region. Soldiers were very much a law unto themselves and were often manipulated by governors to work against the council. Diplomatic and trade policy set by the Crown was predominantly ignored by Portuguese soldiers, merchants and residents.

Demand for labour for Brazil’s plantations or engenhos (sugar mills) created great incentives to wage war on the Angolans and Kongolese. The Angolan governors could go down two paths. They could ensure that such wars waged were ‘just wars’ and that the Crown received a fifth of all the booty derived from them, and that they, too, received their fifth. Alternatively, they could choose to wage wars unjustly and face the prospect of royal fines and having assets confiscated. To wage an illegal war, the governors needed the Municipal Council to support them so that no reports of war would be sent to the Crown in Madrid. The argument that any transactions between Africans and Europeans meant that there were sales taking place, and by extension that Africans were selling other Africans to the Europeans in markets is not sustainable. The existence of exchange or transaction of goods does not necessarily imply the buying and selling of people as slaves, i.e. an existing slave trade, and I would argue that the transactions that took place among Angolans were mainly for goods and produce, and rarely for human beings. The Kazanze case shows that there was no sale involved, just treachery.

Gaspar Alvarés’s case demonstrates the Church’s involvement in slavery, albeit with some protest against Correia de Sousa’s unjustified war and kidnapping and stealing of the Kazanze and Bumbi people. The Church had used the slave trade to advance the Christian mission, while its own principles set the contradicting demand for universal freedom for humanity. Gaspar Alvarés’s business was based on the slave trade and thousands of people from Angola who did not fit the category of slaves were shipped to Brazil by him. Yet, in contrast to Correia de Sousa, he was never criticised for his actions by the religious authorities in Luanda. This might be explained by the fact that Correia de Sousa was more aggressive and ruthless in obtaining enslaved people, and only interested in his own profit, without Alvarés’s ties to the Church. Indeed, even after his death, the Church sought to continue Alvarés’s business. Mendonça’s revelations in the Vatican rested on the types of activities outlined in this chapter. Mendonça stated in the Vatican that Christian merchants were conducting their business illegally in Africa, and Africans were being raided, kidnapped and stolen through the mechanisms of treachery and war. The Municipal Council, Portuguese residents in Angola, governors and soldiers were all economically dependent on the slave trade for their survival. To achieve their ambition, they entered into the trade illegally by enslaving Africans and acquiring their land. In Chapter 2, I look at Dongo and its relations with Kongo in terms of political and social structures. I discuss Aidi Kiluanje, also known as Philipe I de Sousa or Dom Henrique Rei do Dongo, and as Samba a Ndumba in Angola, and his election to the throne of Pungo-Andongo. I will look at both his rivalry with Queen Njinga and his family ties with her, and how the Portuguese used his election to foster their trade relationships in Angola by transforming baculamento into a tax payment in enslaved people. It was this mechanism of enslavement that was at the heart of Mendonça’s legal challenge in the Vatican in 1684.