Africans, Afro-Brazilians and Afro-Portuguese in the Iberian Inquisition in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries

Abstract

The object of this article is to analyze aspects of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century African culture in the Lusophone Atlantic through new methodological approaches to Portuguese inquisitorial sources. The records of the Inquisition are beginning to serve the needs of historians beyond their original functions as religious documentation. The text examines the confessions of Africans prosecuted or denounced for practices of sorceries provide new insights about the evolution of Afro-Atlantic culture. In this paper, I demonstrate that Africans incorporated elements of the popular Catholicism to reinforce specific aspects of their native or non-Catholic cosmogonies.

Keywords:

• Africa
• Afro-Atlantic religion
• Bolsa da Madinga
• Brazil
• charms
• Inquisition
• Portuguese empire

Acknowledgements

The text was presented in the workshop ‘Africa, Europe, and the Americas, 1500–1700’, Ghana, 12–26 July 2009, Omohundro Institute of Early American History and International Institute for the Advanced Study of Cultures, Institutions, and Economic Enterprise, Accra, Ghana.

Notes

1. Arquivo Nacional da Torre do Tombo (ANTT). Inquisição de Lisboa. Processo n. 502 – Escravo João da Silva, Native of Angola. João da Silva also shows up in the records under the other names he was known by: João Curto, João Congo (Congo João), and João Preto (Black João). When he was imprisoned in 1754 he declared that he was around 30 years old.

2. Carreira (1961) explains the basic meaning of the term: ‘In a generic way, all of the individuals that exercise any function, wide or reduced, that it involves the accomplishment of magic rites, they take the Creole designation of Jambacosse or Djambacós [the men]’ (Grifos do autor).

3. Andreza Fernandes, free, native and resident in the Island of the Prince, denounced in 1771. Her crime went to put a cross in the ground of the church during mass and to jump on the same three times. Bento Rodrigues or of Jesus, black man, native of Santiago and resident of the same island, sentenced in 1647, because he ‘faked’ having had a revelation of the Virgin Mary. Instituto dos Arquivos Nacionais/Torre do Tombo. Inquisição de Lisboa, proceeding n. 8867.

4. I am now beginning on a historical research project on the theme ‘Africans in the Luso-Atlantic Inquisition: The Inquisition in Angola’, supported by the Seminar on the History Atlantic World, Harvard University.