Capuchins, Missionaries, and Slave Trading in Precolonial Kongo-Angola, West Central Africa (17th Century)

Abstract

In the second half of the seventeenth century, Italian Capuchin missionaries who traveled to West Central Africa both colluded in and critiqued Portuguese slave trading practices. Drawing from their experience on slave galleys in the Mediterranean and their medieval Franciscan heritage, Capuchins brought earlier concepts governing enslavement to bear in Central Africa. Examining Capuchin interventions in exchanges of goods and slaves, their declamations against Portuguese warmongering, their efforts to free unjustly enslaved Africans, and the ways in which they sought to prohibit slave sales to Protestants, this article positions this group of religious agents as important mediators of struggles for empire between the Portuguese, Dutch, British, French, and Spanish in precolonial coastal Africa and as protagonists in their own right. On the basis of the Capuchins’ critique of economic gain and the Kongolese embrace of Catholicism, Capuchins crafted a counter discourse that, if only partially successful, challenged emerging models of Atlantic enslavement.