On February 22, 1688, an African local ruler who signed himself “Dom João Manoel Grilho, who treads on the lion in his mother’s belly” wrote a letter in Portuguese from the town of Lemba on the lower reaches of the Congo River to an Italian Capuchin priest who was somewhere in the vicinity: “Praised be the Most Holy Sacrament. . . . Christ preserve you. I received with great pleasure your loving letter. . . . For my part as your spiritual son I remain most ready to receive your commands, and the same is true of your [spiritual] daughter, my mother Dona Potenciana. . . . I do not know when by God’s mercy I will see the benign face of Your Paternity, or when you will come to save the souls of my sons.” This letter, he explains, is being carried by a trusted slave who has orders to find the father, give him gifts, and discuss other important matters with him.
This phenomenon of a Kongo prince writing a letter in Portuguese (even if it was written for him by, say, a literate Portuguese in his employ) was the product of two hundred years of Kongolese adaptation to the Portuguese and to Christianity. In the decades after the arrival of the first Portuguese ships at the mouth of the Congo River in 1485, the Portuguese had been amazed to find a Kongolese king and much of his court converting to Christianity, learning Portuguese, writing letters to the pope and the king of Portugal, and sending embassies to Europe. Formal adherence to Christianity and kings with Portuguese names had continued in the kingdom of the Kongo down to a disastrous battle with the Portuguese in 1665 and the nearly complete collapse of the old kingdom.
Reading the records of this long connection in the light of modern knowledge of the cultures and religions of this region, we can understand a bit more of the complexity of the relation. For the Kongo people, the worlds of life and death were separated by an expanse and depth of water. The soul of the dead person went off into the water and there took on another body, colored white, and stayed in the tranquil realm of death. Those left behind paid homage to and sought to communicate with the dead at regular intervals. It is probable that the white-skinned Portuguese coming from across the water were greeted as if they had come from the kingdom of the dead. When Kongolese envoys took ship to Europe with them and came back telling of the wonders they had seen, it was clear that the newcomers had some compelling kinds of spiritual power. A Kongolese prince who converted and then had to fight to win the throne, becoming the first Christian king of the Kongo, tapped those sources of power. Much of the Kongo elite converted, and a dense web of Portuguese trade and influence developed. But the Kongolese soon discovered that they could pay for European goods only by exporting slaves, and the slave trade became the overwhelming reality of the relation. The kings did manage to keep the delivery of slaves within their kingdom orderly, passing through slaves taken in wars beyond their borders, condemning criminals to slavery, and extorting gifts of slaves from the rich and noble.
For the Kongolese elite in the big towns, Christianity and the Portuguese connection provided new forms of display through access to foreign goods and new ways to harness supernatural power, but they changed little of fundamental importance in Kongolese culture and politics. Out in the villages the occasional visiting missionary priest with his prayers, his ceremonies, his crosses to set up or give away usually was seen as a holy man of a somewhat novel type in contest with the indigenous ones but not radically different. Threats and intrigues from a new Portuguese center at Luanda, farther south on the coast, menaced the Kongo kingdom, but the most basic source of its instability in the seventeenth century was the arrival of dozens of Capuchin missionaries, sent by the Vatican Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith and not under Portuguese control. The Capuchins were much more intrusive and less willing to compromise with Kongolese custom than earlier Portuguese priests had been. Carrying their attacks on the traditional culture into many areas of the kingdom, the Capuchins united the Kongolese against the Europeans. In the resulting war with the Portuguese in 1665, the Kongolese king was killed, his capital was devastated, and the kingdom of the Kongo disintegrated.
In the mid-seventeenth century the Portuguese commanders at Luanda used ferocious African auxiliaries to spread violent slave raiding far inland. In 1656 one queen of a slave-raiding people made a treaty with the Portuguese admitting their traders and missionaries to her realm and obtaining a reliable outlet through Luanda for the slaves her armies captured. The raiding spread into the southern edge of the Kongo kingdom, accelerating its disintegration. The Portuguese had been convinced without much evidence that the raider queen’s armies were cannibals; now the captives staggering out to the beach at Luanda looked at the great food cauldrons on the ships and were convinced that the white men were going to eat them.
Farther north, at the mouth of the Congo River, a major center of African-Portuguese interaction became nearly independent of Kongo, with its own set of connections to the north and inland, where Lemba, seat of power of “Dom João Manoel Grilho, who treads on the lion in his mother’s belly,” was a major riverside crossroads and trade center.
But what are we to make of this opaque little text? Can we hear the voice of Dom João Manoel Grilho? Not much can be made of the body of this little letter. His reference to his mother, Dona Potenciana, is important in a society where descent and rank were matrilineal. Perhaps he hoped the Father would come to “save the souls of his sons” because they had not yet been baptized. It is not likely, however, that he thought of baptism as completely different from other forms of divine cleansing and protection provided by the ancestors and local gods or as requiring the baptized to shun the local powers in the future. We come closer to a real African voice, though still with great difficulty, if we look again at the way the author of the message refers to himself: “Dom João Manoel Grilho, who treads on the lion in his mother’s belly.” In Kongo culture, down to our own times, praise names are sources of power, conferred after long and exacting ceremonies. We cannot find in these names, or in this culture in general, anything like our apparently sharp distinctions among wealth, political power, and supernatural efficacy. A man who had accumulated wealth, as our Dom João Manoel probably had through trade, could use some of it to pay for ceremonies that legitimated his local political dominance and gave him supernatural powers. In a way he became a charm, a powerful bundle of objects, what Europeans called a fetish. From modern times we have a record of one such ceremony that made a great man a new embodiment of powers that had originated when a woman gave birth to four things: a human being, a leopard, a snake, and a lump of chalk. These powers then also could be embodied in a charm object of leopard skin, snake skin, and chalk. The “lion” of the Portuguese text must be a mistake or broad usage for “leopard,” as feared and revered in the forests as lions were on the savannas. The man who wears or sits on a leopard skin taps its power. Treading on, in these ceremonies and Kongolese explanations of them, implies violation, desecration, appropriation of powers. Is Dom João Manoel then claiming the power of one who already annihilated the leopard and stole his powers when they both were in the mother’s womb? It is hard to imagine a knot of symbols more expressive of the Oedipal roots of will to power or more at odds with European Christian convention.
Were the sons ever baptized? Did Dom João Manoel Grilho live on, sitting on his leopard skin, in ambivalent communion with the Church of Rome, watching the boats, the long lines of porters? And what of the great river, already in his time sometimes called Congo and sometimes Zaire? Crossings of it, like the one at Lemba, were obvious centers of transshipment and extortion from trade. And not much farther up the river one could hear the roar of miles and miles of impassable rapids.
African storytellers performed prodigies of memory and transmission of ruling lineages and important events, but their accounts cannot be linked precisely enough to our dating system to focus on events in 1688. Where Islam already was influential, Arabic sources provide some dates. But still we are disproportionately dependent on Europeans feeling their way along the coast of Africa. We are interested in their experiences, their bafflements, frustrations, and very occasional successes. We also need to read against the grain of their records, to try with the help of modern historians, quite a few of them African, to understand a bit more of the African realities than the seventeenth-century Europeans did. The long connection with the Portuguese and the many writings of the Capuchins make the Kongo story one of the better-documented and richer cases for such reading. It is of great importance not only for the history of that area of Africa but also for Brazil, the destination of most of the slaves exported from Luanda. Europeans had many trading posts along the Gold Coast, roughly modern Ghana, but its history is much less clearly known; the Europeans rarely ventured far from their coastal forts and had only the most patchy understanding of what was going on inland.
For the Europeans in the 1680s a stretch of coast running east from the Gold Coast, roughly matching the coasts of the modern republics of Benin and Togo, between Ghana and Nigeria, was a zone of fresh promise and more than usual bafflement. In 1688 Jean-Baptiste Ducasse, an important agent of the French Company of Guinea, which held a very insecure royal monopoly of French trade on this coast, was visiting the coastal kingdom of Whydah in this region, attempting to establish good relations with the African rulers so that the French could regularly export slaves. The principal deity to whom the kings of Whydah paid homage was the python god Dangbe, resident in a shrine under a magnificent high tree about two miles from the capital town. Sometime in 1688, when the time came for King Agbangla of Whydah to make his annual ceremonial visit to the shrine of Dangbe, other European residents professed themselves scandalized to see Ducasse marching along in the procession, dressed in leopard skins “and other sorts of trifles.”
The indignation was disingenuous. All Europeans were in Whydah on the sufferance of the king, participating in a trade controlled by his officials. Every European nation or company had a shrine to local gods somewhere in its compound. Europeans in this period had some interest in making sense of the African society and culture around them but little imaginative or emotional sympathy for it; even a mention of the “Very beautiful lofty tree” under which the shrine of Dangbe was built stands out as a rare betrayal of feeling.
The scattered trees of this coastal region stood out impressively in the open landscape, so unlike the forests that came down to the shore farther east and west. This was the Dahomey gap in the forest belt, which made movement of goods and people much easier than in the dense forests, so that the gap became a natural focus of trade from inland. The python deities represented not only the power and danger of big snakes but also phallic power; one European observer tells us that during the crop-growing season people feared that pythons out at night would seize young women and drive them mad, so they kept the young women shut up in a special sanctuary in that season. Nor were female power and fertility neglected; kings and great men accumulated and displayed their wealth largely in the form of households full of dozens or even hundreds of wives and female dependents and slaves. Only a few served the king or shared his bed; most of them worked on his farms. Occasionally it was said that a jealous senior wife would force the king to sell a favored female slave to the Europeans. That was not the only way in which the power of female sexuality was present in the trade of the Europeans. Their most important import was cowrie shells, most of them from the Indian Ocean, especially from the seas around the Maldive Islands off southern India. Cowries had been used as money for thousands of years in places as far apart as China and West Africa. They were valued for their uniformity, durability, and the resemblance of their oval shape with a long cleft down the center to female external genitals.
The Europeans were glad to be able to sell cowries, metals, cloth, liquor, and increasing amounts of guns and gunpowder. They bought some ivory for the European market and other goods to be sold in other African ports. But by far the most important reason why they continued to swelter in the coastal heat, die of mosquito-borne diseases, make their baffled ways through volatile local politics, and occasionally even dress up in leopard skins was the ever-growing demand for slaves in the towns, mines, and plantations of the Americas.
There were very few places on the African coast, and Whydah was not one of them, where Europeans ventured more than a few miles from the coast. If they considered doing their own capturing and enslaving of Africans, cutting out the cost markups of the African middlemen, they simply didn’t have many chances to take slaves in this way. At Whydah about one slave in twenty was of local origin, enslaved by actions of powerful Africans: judicial sentence, sale as surplus (or object of a senior wife’s jealousy) out of some great man’s household, or bondage through bad debts. Nineteen of twenty were brought down from the interior by merchants who had bought them in the towns of other kings and chiefs. Most of these slaves had been taken by violence—wars, raids on neighboring towns, ambushes as they went to their fields or to market. The growing European-American demand for slaves was increasing the incentives for the violence that fed the dreadful trade.
Few African participants in the trade had a full understanding of the horrors to which they were condemning the slaves they brought to the coast and sold: the fetid, crowded, pitching ships, the exhausting labor and brutal discipline of sugar plantations, the system of law and government that made the slave property a “chattel,” not a person. In Africa—to make some very broad generalizations about hundreds of diverse societies and cultures—everyone fitted somewhere in a hierarchy of superiors and inferiors, which often was expressed in terms of a big family of senior and junior relatives. The positions we would call slave were inferior ones, but never void of human identity and connection, and often with chances to improve one’s position by hard work, by sharing the senior man’s bed and producing a child or by marrying another dependent of slightly higher status. Male slaves of warrior age, more dangerous and more likely to make common cause with the people from whose midst they had been captured, were more likely to be sold to traders who would resell them in some distant place. This fitted nicely with the coastal trade, where strong young men sold at a premium. But they still were human beings, while in a household or on their way to be sold.
That is not to say that King Agbangla of Whydah and his merchants and officials were not aware that selling slaves to the Europeans was different from selling them to other Africans. There was nothing in Africa like the ships rocking out in the surf. Many believed that the Europeans were buying the slaves and taking them away in order to eat them. But an insidious shift in the long-followed practices of slavery and the slave trade within Africa was under way. Kings and chiefs were increasingly eager to buy the goods brought by the Europeans, and now it was increasingly hard for them to defend themselves against their enemies without imported guns and gunpowder.
All slaves brought to Whydah were delivered to stoutly built stockades, where they were kept under the supervision of officials appointed by the king. The Europeans worked through African middlemen, also appointed by the king. Payment to the king for permission to trade was negotiated in advance. The king had the right to sell some of his slaves before the trade was open to others; often they were high in price, weak, and sickly. As trading then began with other sellers, the body of each slave was examined carefully without any respect for the modesty of men or women, and defective individuals were refused. Once slaves were selected, and their prices agreed on, they were branded with the mark of the European purchaser so that they could not be switched thereafter for less desirable slaves. All possible care was taken, our informant tells us, not to burn them too hard, especially the women, “who are more tender than the men.” They were kept in the stockades, not at the offices of the buyers, until they were taken out to the ships.
Whydah and nearby ports probably exported six to seven thousand slaves in 1688. Early in the year shipments were very large; if they had continued at that level for the whole year, the total might have been more than twelve thousand. But then supplies from inland dropped off sharply, some traders paid higher prices for their slaves, and others accepted a higher proportion of women in their cargoes. Ducasse recorded that the interruption was the result of “some differences with the King of Fon in the interior, who prevents their passage.”
This is characteristic of the vagueness of most European information about African politics, especially about areas which Europeans rarely saw. Fon was an early name for the kingdom later called Dahomey. It had begun its rise as an independent kingdom sometime earlier in the 1600s. By the 1680s it was a major supplier of slaves to the coast and was becoming more and more warlike, alternating slave-taking raids with mercenary service of its soldiers under other rulers. In the 1720s it broke out to the coast, conquering Whydah and nearby ports. Europeans who had to visit its capital brought back fearsome stories of its well-drilled soldiers adept in the use of firearms and its palace festooned with the skulls of enemies killed in its battles. A few such skulls could be seen even at the palace of the kings of Whydah in the 1680s, but the complete reshaping of Dahomean society by constant war, already beginning in 1688, was a result of the ever-growing need for war captives to be taken to the coast, branded, and put on the waiting ships.
At the farthest western bulge of Africa was one of the few regions where Europeans were managing by 1688 to gain any direct knowledge of the interior. There two great rivers flow down to the ocean, the Senegal and the Gambia. By 1688 Europeans had been trading in the region defined by the lower courses of the two rivers, which modern scholars call Senegambia, for more than two hundred years and had speculated about the possibility of access to the riches of the interior that the rivers might provide. But they had not managed to do more than maintain a fort or two at the mouth of each river, the French on the Senegal and the English on the Gambia, and occasionally send a small expedition upriver for some trading. They were entirely marginal to the complex political and economic life of the region.
The African peoples of Senegambia shared broad characteristics of language and society. Crops were at the mercy of highly variable rainfall. Heavy rains higher up the rivers produced unpredictable floods, which might wipe out a crop and at the same time leave a layer of fertile silt for the next year’s planting. North of the Senegal there rarely was enough rain for a crop, but one of the area’s important commercial resources was the gum, like gum arabic, that was collected from wild trees. The edge of the desert near the Senegal also was a cultural frontier; the people who came in out of the desert on their horses and camels had lighter skins, spoke Arabic or Berber, and were culturally and socially oriented to the world of Islam.
The Senegal frontier experienced episodes of militant Muslim intrusion; a new series of Moroccan raids south of the Sahara was already under way in the 1680s and was to become more threatening in the early 1700s. But the really effective carrier of the message of Muhammad here, as in many parts of the world, was peaceful trade. Arab and Berber merchants might affect the beliefs of Senegambian merchants, or they might settle down, marry local women, and raise their children as Muslims. Local rulers might employ Muslims for their literacy and be influenced by their beliefs. Thus, although traditional worship of ancestors and many other gods and spirits remained strong in the countryside everywhere, there were many in the towns who were more or less good Muslims. A teacher or a local resident who had acquired a stronger conception of orthodox Islam at school or on a pilgrimage to Mecca might lead a movement for Islamic purification of a whole court or city; by 1688 a first wave of such movements had reached its peak and subsided. More peaceful adjustments were possible; a Muslim teacher and his followers might be allowed a good deal of autonomy in a ward of a town or a separate town. In the 1680s a group of people of varied origin had followed their teacher into a sparsely populated area between the upper courses of the Senegal and the Gambia and were setting up their own state, which would be an important factor in the politics of the region and would be ruled by several dynasties of imams, or Muslim prayer leaders. Elsewhere networks of long-distance traders called juula were more observant of Islam than the rest of the population and frequently lived in their own quarters of towns.
In these societies everyone had a place, but that place might change. Rules of kinship determined who was eligible to become a local ruler or one of his officials. Blacksmiths, dealing in the dangers of molten metal and the making of weapons and therefore thought to have special spiritual powers, kept somewhat apart from society and married only among themselves. There also was a considerable population of slaves. Only those who had been bought from elsewhere could be sold. Many had secure status as subordinate members of their masters’ households. Some were royal slaves, who might become very powerful if employed as soldiers or administrators.
Both the Arab and Berber traders from the desert and the Europeans on the coast bought slaves in Senegambia, but the supply was highly variable; only in a period of major internal warfare late in the 1500s did the region supply a large percentage of the slaves crossing the Atlantic. In the 1680s slaves counted for slightly over half of the value of European exports from the region. Other trade goods, for the Europeans and the North African Muslims, were the products of a varied and commercialized regional economy. Iron was widely smelted and worked, and the best products were of very good quality. Cotton was grown, and cotton textiles were woven for local use and trade within the region. Other goods that moved in interregional trade and also appealed to outsiders were the gum arabic mentioned above, cattle hides, beeswax, ivory, and gold. Gold was produced in small quantities by methods that involved digging and sorting large quantities of soil and gravel. This work was done by peasants during the season when no farm work was done and was a modest source of supplementary income, probably not enough to pay for the workers’ food while they were engaged in it.
But any appearance of gold in trade was enough to drive Europeans mad. Sweltering in their forts at the mouths of the two great rivers, watching six out of every ten new arrivals die during the first year, they hatched project after project to explore up the great rivers, open direct trade there for slaves and other exports, and find the sources of those trickles of gold. In July 1688 one sieur de Chambonneau was in Paris, reporting to the authorities of the Royal Company of Senegal, one of a succession of French companies that sought without much success to expand and monopolize French trade on the African coast, on his remarkable explorations up the Senegal River in 1686 and 1687. In 1687 his men, on two small barks, had made it all the way to the Felu Falls, the head of navigation on the Senegal, more than five hundred miles from the mouth of the river. The local ruler had received them hospitably and had told them they were not far from the great inland trading city of Timbuktu or from one of the upper branches of the Gambia. The French explorers also thought the Senegal would be navigable above the Felu Falls; it was not. The local ruler promised them a quantity of gold within eight days, but they could stay there only one day, “everyone on the barks being ill, because they had been eating only millet, and because of the great heat of June, July, and August and the continual rains.”
Chambonneau’s proposed solution to these difficulties, in his 1688 report, was radical. France should send an expedition of twelve hundred men and women, including four hundred soldiers, to take possession of some of the rich lands along the lower Senegal and establish a real European settler colony. The natives would resist for a few months but then would acquiesce, since there was no private property in land in their societies and there was plenty of uncultivated land in any case. The French, farming their own land and having few or no slaves, could grow wheat, so that all Frenchmen in the area could eat bread instead of millet, which they thought unhealthy; tobacco, of which excellent quality already was being grown; sugar; indigo; cotton; and even silk. The settlers would not compete with the Royal Company of Senegal for slaves and other exports but rather would provide it with fresh food for its trading posts and new exports, in the tobacco and other cash crops of their farms. Drawing much on failed ideas for European settler colonies in the West Indies, ignoring the real obstacles of climate, disease, and local people quite able to defend their own lands, this was an amazingly unrealistic proposal, and we have no evidence that it ever was given serious consideration.
From their bases on the Gambia River the English were well aware of the French advances along the Senegal and were doing what they could to explore the potentialities of trade up their river, though as far as we can tell without any fevered dreams of European housewives spinning cotton and tending silkworms on the banks of an African river. The report of one Cornelius Hodges on his explorations up the Gambia in 1689 and 1690 adds much to our understanding of the obstacles the Europeans faced and the uncertainties of the commercial rewards upriver. The river was hard to navigate at low water; but once the rains started, it ran “like a sluice,” and sometimes there was nothing the English could do except head back downstream with the flood. At various points along the river people seemed to have good stocks of ivory that they were eager to sell. In one area there had been a gold boom, begun in 1683, when an old woman noticed flecks of gold on the roots of a tuber, but recent years of drought and famine had brought production to a halt. Advancing across the Senegal and out into the desert fringe, Hodges also noted reports of the menacing Moroccan raids not far off
In the eighteenth century the trade of the Europeans on the Senegal and the Gambia expanded, primarily in slaves (but still only a small percentage of the massive eighteenth-century stream across the Atlantic). The Moroccan raids and the trans-Sahara connections also continued to shape Senegambia. The closing down after 1800 of the slave trade across the Atlantic was followed by a remarkable growth in the gum arabic trade and by the intrusion of French imperial power, but never by anything like the sieur de Chambonneau’s colony of cash-cropping French farmers.
In the centuries before 1688 the major routes of trade in West Africa led out from the northern edges of the forest belt and across the savannas to the jumping-off points for caravans across the Sahara. The centers of empire building were at or near those jumping-off points. By about 1800 the dynamics of trade had shifted decisively toward the coast, and the most important centers of state building were those, like Dahomey, that were not on the coast but largely oriented toward dominating it. Dependent on European sources and better informed about coastal ports and maritime trade than about anything else in African history, we are likely to see the growth of maritime trade as the main cause of the shift. It was important, but there were other changes inland.
Not until the late eighteenth century did Europeans explore above the Felu Falls. But many Africans knew the routes to the east, farther up the branches of the Senegal and then overland to the upper reaches of the great river Europeans were to call the Niger. A long run down the Niger, almost as far as from the mouth of the Senegal to the Felu Falls, would take the traveler to Timbuktu, which became an English metaphor for impossible remoteness but in African perspective was an important and well-known crossroads and center of culture. Another two hundred miles down the river was another great crossroads, Gao. From there it still was more than twelve hundred miles to the forests and mangrove swamps where the Niger met the Atlantic.
In 1688 Timbuktu and Gao were shadows of their flourishing days. For centuries the focuses of power and trade in West Africa had been along the Niger, where the trade routes took off across the Sahara to the Mediterranean coast. Islam had come along those trade routes and put down deep roots; Timbuktu had many mosques and schools, with scholars who wrote in Arabic about African history and Islamic topics. The disruption of trans-Sahara connections and prosperity after 1500 had many sources. The Ottoman Empire advanced along the southern shore of the Mediterranean, disrupting trans-Sahara trade temporarily. The Portuguese mounted a long, nasty, disruptive, and pointless invasion of Morocco. Partly as a result of that disruption, Moroccan forces crossed the desert in 1591, devastated Timbuktu, and maintained a loose presence along the Niger for decades. Nomads invaded from the desert; in 1688 they held Gao and threatened Timbuktu. One people had built a wide structure of power upriver from Timbuktu, but it was falling apart after the death of their most capable leader about 1680. Moreover, on the Senegambia frontier, as we have seen, Moroccan raids were again becoming more frequent. The really massive changes in trade and state building in the forest belt were just beginning in 1688, but on the Niger, far from European eyes, Timbuktu and the other splendid old crossroads cities were in long declines, which the rise of the coast would simply accelerate and make irreversible.