by Hugh Thomas
As befitted an imperial people, the Songhai used gold for money, though without any inscriptions; elsewhere, cloth (in Timbuktu, the turquidi cloth of the Hausa city of Kano), bars of salt, cattle, dates, and millet were employed as substitutes. Horses had been bred for hundreds of years; they were to be seen in West Africa as early as the tenth century A.D. Cities on the Niger, such as Segu, Kankan, Timbuktu, and Djenné, as well as Gao, numbered over ten thousand in 1440, some being perhaps as large as thirty thousand. The Hausa cities of Katsina and Kano, on its high rock, had perhaps a hundred thousand each. Other settlements had been established along the edge of the forest in the south, such as Bono-Mansu and Kong. All had substantial markets, even if the houses and mosques were mud-built.
The smelting of iron and steel in West Africa was similar to that in Europe in the thirteenth century, before the advent of power driven by the waterwheel. SenegambiaII had iron and copper industries, and the quality of African steel approached that of Toledo before the fifteenth century. These metals equipped most African households with knives, spears, axes, and hoes. Goldsmithery was of a high quality: “The thread and texture of their hatbands and chainings is so fine that . . . our ablest European artists would find it difficult to imitate them,” a Dutch captain wrote in 1700.16 It is true that the West Africans did not have wheeled vehicles, but those were still rare in Europe. Nor did they use horses for carrying goods long distances, since they were vulnerable to the tsetse fly in the forests near the coast. But it would be false to depict West Africa, at the moment of its contact with Portugal, and Europe, as lived in by primitive peoples. In many respects, they were at a higher level than those whom the Spaniards and Portuguese would soon meet in the New World.
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A new character to Portuguese exploration was given by the early settling in West Africa of traders from Lisbon, including some exiled criminals, who set themselves up on the estuaries of rivers, sometimes making homes for themselves in the interior. A few settled in villages where they took black girls as wives, and they and their mulatto descendants often joined African society fully, taking part in the appropriate celebrations, abandoning Western clothes, tattooing their bodies, and becoming every year less European. These so-called lançados (lançados em tierra, men who had thrown themselves onshore), or tango-mãos (a European trader who had had his body tattooed), were resented by the Portuguese authorities, principally since they were able to escape all the regulations which the Crown imposed on overseas trade, including taxes. But the lançados were in general well received by the Africans, who went out of their way to make them happy: in return they were naturally expected to conform to their hosts’ customs.
Casual sexual relations seem to have begun early between the Portuguese and the Africans: Valentim Fernandes wrote, in 1510, “If one of our white people arrives at the house of a black, even if it is the king, and asks for a woman or a girl to sleep with, the man there gives him several to choose from, and the whole thing is done in friendship and not by force.”17
The slaves imported from Guinea were received, with all other goods from Africa, by the Casa da Guiné in Lagos. An elaborate ritual for reception was formulated, including inspections and paying of duty before sale. It was at that time supposed that the country suffered from a shortage of laborers. So African slaves were soon being bought by bishops and noblemen, artisans and court officials, and sometimes even by workingmen. By 1460, the holding of black slaves had become a mark of distinction for Portuguese households, as it had been in the past for Muslim ones; and Africans were from the beginning preferred to the “good for nothing, rebellious and fugitive” white slaves (Muslims)18—unless they were black Muslims, as were many Wolofs. Africans, after all, were usually potential Christians. Had not one of the three kings, Balthasar, been black?
African slaves began to perform many functions in Portugal: they became ferrymen in Lisbon and other cities, or were hired out for heavy physical labor, as stevedores or as builders, in hospitals or in monasteries. Some slaves were to be found in sugar plantations, though these were not very successful in Portugal: the cane took too much richness from the soil, and plantings could not be repeated. Slaves were sometimes also employed as interpreters in Lisbon and on ships going to Africa; in theory at least, when one of these slaves secured four slaves for his owner, he would be given his freedom.
When it was realized that the Africans liked music, African bands of drummers and flute-players were encouraged in Lisbon. These slaves brought to Portugal a little of their music and some of their dances, and many maintained their own language, adapting it to create a pidgin Portuguese, fala da Guiné or fala dos negros. Some soon adapted to a purer Portuguese—especially, of course, those born in Portugal. Slaves were from now on to be seen at Portuguese ceremonies. In 1451, black dancers performed at the wedding by proxy of the Infanta Leonora, Prince Henry’s niece, to the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick III. A slave posing as a black monarch from Senegambia sang in African-Portuguese at the wedding of the Infanta Joana in 1455 to King Enrique IV of Spain (an ill-fated wedding, as it turned out). Some Portuguese masters freed their slaves at their death. Others seduced them (though that was illegal) and freed any subsequent children, sometimes obtaining legitimization for them. Every variety of sexual relationship was practiced with black slaves; and a few white women took them as lovers.
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Portugal secured approval from successive popes for most of these activities. First, in 1442, the Venetian Pope Eugenius IV approved Prince Henry’s expeditions to Africa (in the bull Illius Qui). Since other European monarchs had shown themselves unenthusiastic about joining in such an adventure, and since the Portuguese were incurring many expenses, as Prince Henry’s representatives in Rome insisted, Pope Eugenius did not hesitate to grant to Portugal exclusive rights over her African discoveries. Then, in the 1450s, Popes Nicholas V and Calixtus III gave an even warmer approval for the undertakings in three further bulls.
No two popes were more different in manners than these. The first was a great humanist, the second was austere; the first was a patron of the arts, the second was concerned to assist his relations. One was a Genoese, the other a Valencian. But their policy towards Portugal in Africa was much the same—possibly since neither gave much time to the question.
Nicholas V—Tommaso Parentucelli, a native of Sarzana, on the riviera in the Genoese republic—was the son of an impoverished doctor. He had been librarian to the bishop of Bologna, Niccolò Albergati, whom he had succeeded. No pope since the Carolingian era built as much as Nicholas. He conceived the idea of building a new basilica of Saint Peter, inspired the translation of innumerable Greek texts into Latin, and founded the Vatican library: an institution that lasted even longer than the Portuguese slave trade.
Calixtus III was a septuagenarian Spaniard, born Alfonso de Borgia, from Játiva near Valencia, a professor of canon law, a royal counselor, and for many years archbishop of Valencia, a city which then had an important market for slaves. Borgia had been a severe bishop but, though in no way a humanist, he was also known as generous and kind, especially, admittedly, to his nephew, the future Pope Alexander VI, to whom he gave the purple at the age of twenty-five.
Nicholas tried to enlist Christendom to unite against the threat of Islam. When this attempt failed, he issued the bull Dum Diversas in 1452, which allowed the king of Portugal to subdue Saracens, pagans, and other unbelievers—even to reduce them to perpetual slavery. This clause was obviously intended to include the natives of West Africa. Nicholas followed that bull with Romanus Pontifex, of January 8, 1454, which approved what Prince Henry and the Portuguese had done up till then, hoped that native populations might soon be converted to Christianity, and gave formal support for a Portuguese monopoly of trading with Africa—not just the region of Ceuta but all the territory south of Cape Bojador. The conquests in the latter lands were to be perpetually Portuguese, as well as “all the coast of Guinea and including the Indies
”—the last word then indicating, more or less, everywhere supposed to be on the way to China. The bull approved of the conversion of the men from Guinea. It also supported Henry’s desire to circumnavigate Africa and find a new way to India, and spoke of the benign consequences to be expected from enslaving pagans.19
This bull was solemnly proclaimed in the Cathedral of Lisbon, in Portuguese as well as in Latin.
Between the emission of the first and second of the bulls, Constantinople had fallen to the Turks, leaving the pope the uncontested first prince of Christendom (a Russian cardinal, Isidore, had been captured and sold as a slave after that catastrophe, though he had reached Rome after six months). The fall of Constantinople had one unexpected consequence: it stimulated the Genoese, whose trade in the Black and Aegean seas was seriously interrupted if not destroyed, to intensify their interest in the West and the Atlantic (Venetian business was less affected, since it had concentrated on Egypt). So the Genoese now financed the development of alum deposits at Tolfa, near Rome, to make up for the loss of those at Phocaea, near Smyrna; they invested in new plantations of sugar cane in the Algarve, in Andalusia, and then in Madeira. Nothing suggests a direct connection between the merchants of Genoa and the Genoese pope. All the same, the family of that prince of the Church was in commerce, and Nicholas must have been aware of the interests of his fellow citizens.
His successor, Calixtus III, issued the bull Inter Caetera in March 1456. That agreed that the administration of the new Portuguese dominions and interests should be directed by the Order of Christ, the knightly association of which Prince Henry the Navigator was the leader.
These bulls represented a triumph for Portuguese diplomacy: Prince Henry had been alarmed at Spanish interference in what he looked on as his, or Portuguese, waters. The king of Castile had in 1449 given a license to the duke of Medina Sidonia, the lord of the port of Sanlúcar de Barrameda, where the river Guadalquivir reaches the Atlantic, to exploit the land facing the Canary Islands, as far south as Cape Bojador. In 1454, a Castilian ship bound for Guinea was seized by the Portuguese. The Castilian King Juan II protested. The Portuguese replied that Pope Eugenius had agreed that Guinea was theirs. Prince Henry’s diplomats in Rome prevailed on the pope to say that he knew that Portugal had conquered Africa as far as Guinea: a wildly imaginative concept. They also spread the rumor that it was impossible for any ordinary boat to beat its way out of the Gulf of Guinea and return to Europe. They sought too to reserve all the charts for their own use, and seized ships without a license, and hanged the crews. A Spanish captain named de Prado whom the Portuguese found selling arms to the Africans was burned alive in order to discourage others. Such actions did not entirely prevent Genoese and Spanish interlopers; and Diogo Gomes, sent to West Africa by Prince Henry to establish good relations with the rulers, reported in 1460 that these foreign merchants were damaging Portuguese trade: “For the natives used to give twelve Negroes for one horse, now they gave only six.”20
All these famous bulls underwriting the Portuguese endeavors were decided upon because of the need to act forcefully against Islam, seen, after the fall of Constantinople, as now menacing Italy itself, as well as Central Europe. Calixtus III bound himself by a solemn vow to recover Constantinople and restore the Christian position in the eastern Mediterranean. He did his best to organize a last crusade to achieve that aim. The schemes of Prince Henry fitted into that plan. All the same, it will always seem surprising that it should have been a pope from Spain, Calixtus III, who confirmed the grand destiny of that country’s despised neighbor, in Africa and beyond.
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IThe Azanaghi had remained in touch with Europe through trade with the Muslim kingdom of Granada; thence, thanks to Genoese merchants in Málaga, they imported so many white china cups made in Venice that these became almost a currency.
IIThe region between the two rivers Sénégal and Zambia.
5
I Herded Them As If They Had Been Cattle
“Twenty-two people . . . were sleeping, I herded them as if they had been cattle towards the boats.”
Diogo Gomes, c. 1460, on the river Gambia
THE PORTUGUESE search for new lands, and the discovery of new peoples and crops, continued during the 1450s, even though Prince Henry’s practical mind was increasingly on his business interests in Madeira and in the Azores. Thus an uninhabited volcanic archipelago some three hundred miles to the west off Cape Verde was glimpsed in 1456 by the Venetian Alvise Ca’da Mosto on his second voyage, sailing under Portuguese protection.
These Cape Verde Islands became, after 1462, an essential part of the Portuguese enterprise in Africa. The largest of the islands, given the name of Santiago, was soon colonized and cultivated. The beneficiaries of the discovery were an experienced captain, Diogo Afonso, a squire of the household of Prince Henry’s brother Fernão, who discovered most of the islands; and a Genoese, Antonio di Noli, governor of the islands until his death in 1496.
Within a generation, cotton was planted. But the main value of these settlements was to hold slaves from the African coast facing them, and the islands established a protectorate over the region for that purpose. They were soon inhabited by mulatto lançados.
In 1458, meantime, Prince Henry had dispatched Diogo Gomes, with three caravels, to negotiate treaties with the Africans. His mission was to assure the rulers that the Portuguese would henceforth not steal slaves nor anything else on a regular basis, but would barter for them, like honest men. He was also to arrange for visits from Africans to Portugal. Gomes made his way even farther up the Gambia than his predecessors had done, as far as the then legendary market city of Cantor, two hundred miles from the sea, completely under Songhai rule. When the news came that “the Christians” had arrived, many neighboring peoples sent curious observers, and Gomes was given a vivid indication of the quality of the gold which might become available there. He also received a great many presents, including ivory. He had some curious religious conversations, in the course of which one king, Nomimansa, who ruled the headland by the mouth of the river, boldly declared himself a Christian, without more ado. Gomes, of course, also took back some black slaves. He seems to have gone beyond his own self-denying ordinance not to kidnap: he recalled that he took “twenty-two people who were sleeping, I herded them as if they had been cattle towards the boats. And we all did the same, and we captured on that day . . . nearly 650 people, and we went back to Portugal, to Lagos in the Algarve, where the prince was, and he rejoiced with us.”1
A new expedition of discovery in 1460, the last mounted during the lifetime of Prince Henry, and led by Pedro de Sintra, discovered a point five hundred miles beyond the Gambia, which was named Sierra Leone, apparently because of the shape of the mountain there. Henry was dead before he could hear of this.
As well as slaves, the Portuguese were still interested in gold, ivory, and the peppery “Guinea grains” which came from the stretch of territory to be known in consequence as the Grain Coast, covering modern Liberia. Portuguese captains negotiated for these on the river Gambia, and Genoese merchants of Lisbon marketed them as a substitute in Europe for the peppers obtained through Venice from the East Indies. As for gold, it could be bartered for easily enough at Cantor, on the Gambia.
The goods exchanged with African leaders were European and Mediterranean, not only Portuguese. Cloth taken to Africa by the Portuguese came from Flanders, France, even England. Damask delighted the Africans. Some wheat was carried from Northern Europe. Brass goods came from Germany—especially “armilles,” bracelets, which began to be made in Bavaria specially for this trade, and there was also a demand for monstrous ornaments of solid brass, and brass pots and basins, often later melted down and recast according to indigenous tastes. Glass came from Venice in the form of beads. Spiced wine from the Canaries or Jerez in Spain, was also popular, as were knives, hatchets, Spanish swords, iron bars, conch shells from the Canaries and, especially, copper rods, for which the appetite of some Africa
n communities was insatiable. Candles were as interesting to Africans as they later were to the Mexicans, and many African monarchs became fond of trumpets. Finally, one of the great favorites in many harbors of West Africa in the early days of the slave trade were “lambens,” striped woolen shawls made in Tunis or Oran, which had been known to the West Africans before, thanks to the Sahara caravans. All these goods were easily obtained in Lisbon or, if not, in Antwerp, and carried from there by the ubiquitous Genoese.
After the journey of Pedro de Sintra to Sierra Leone, and the death of Prince Henry in 1460 (he left only eleven slaves), exploration was discontinued for ten years. The Portuguese settled down to the commercial exploitation of the territories which they had already discovered. King Afonso V seemed more interested in regulating the trade which Prince Henry had made possible than in expanding it. He was also concerned with the conquest of Morocco. At the same time, some of the slaves in Portugal seemed for a time to be giving some modest trouble. In 1461, for instance, the representatives to the Cortes (the Portuguese parliament) of the city of Santarém, forty miles up the Tagus from Lisbon, complained that, to serve the feasts which the slaves of the town organized to celebrate Sunday and other religious festivals, some chickens, ducks, and even lambs had been stolen, and plans for escape had been hatched. So the Cortes forbade the slaves to hold such parties. Preventing black Africans from assembling in groups would be an obsession in Portugal for generations.