A lesson in coexistence

[Celerity]

The 17th-century town Cacheu was a hub of West African and European cultures, languages and beliefs (and run by women)

https://aeon.co/essays/lessons-in-pluralism-from-a-17th-century-african-town


A Prospect of the Portuguese Town of Cacheo, being N off it, in the River of That Name (1732) by John Churchill, London. Courtesy Ruderman Rare Maps



Sometimes, little-known historical characters from long ago can give us a new window both into their times and into our own. In our current era of polycrisis, this may be more important than ever, as shown by the history of a little-known woman from the town of Cacheu in today’s Guinea-Bissau in West Africa. Crispina Peres was the most powerful trader in the town in the 1650s-60s: though readers may know little about her or about this part of the world, either now or in the distant past, it’s often precisely by stepping into a little-known space that we can gain a richer sense of perspective on our own lives.

Peres was a woman of mixed African-European heritage, born some time in the 1610s. In the 1630s, she married a captain-general of the Portuguese colonial port-enclave of Cacheu. By 1665, she was rich, widowed and remarried to a second captain-general. Peres was thus one of the most powerful and dynamic figures of her generation in Cacheu – however, in a sad irony, she’s known instead for the most traumatic and painful phase of her life: her imprisonment. Virtually all we know of Peres comes from her Inquisition trial records: she was arrested in January 1665 after a conspiracy cooked up by her enemies (as was often the case with Inquisition trials).

As usually happened, the inquisitors charged Peres with heresy. Her crime was consorting with healers known as djabakós, whom she had sought to help heal her sick child. And yet, as the papers of her trial show, almost all of her accusers consulted the djabakós. For Portuguese traffickers and officials in Cacheu, Catholicism was not somehow hermetically sealed, as imperial theory demanded: it could be worshipped alongside making offerings at African shrines. Nevertheless, Peres’s integration of African worldviews into Catholic religious practice was enough for the Inquisition. In the slow and bullying manner in which cumbersome bureaucracies tend to grind, it took several years for the papers to be accumulated, the evidence to be weighed, and the (in fact preordained) decision to be taken by the inquisitors to order Peres’s arrest on a charge that most of her accusers could have been found guilty of too.

Already, the details of this case will strike some readers as unusual. The Inquisition is known for its work in late-medieval and early modern Europe, but few people associate it with West Africa. Yet the rise of the Portuguese Empire in the 16th century had gone hand in hand with a rise in the Inquisition’s interest in policing the faith of the distant colonies. Strict adherence to Portugal’s patriarchal religious doctrine was the other side of the coin of its imperial power. In 1560, a tribunal of the Inquisition was established in Goa, which was also responsible for the Portuguese outposts in Mozambique. Thereafter, the Lisbon tribunal was charged with collating evidence of alleged heresies in its other colonies, in Brazil and in its main outposts in Africa: Angola, Cape Verde, and the coast of today’s Guinea-Bissau, where Cacheu is located.


The Procession of the Inquisition at Goa, India. Courtesy the Wellcome Collection

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[jmbar2]

1. Thanks for posting - bookmarked for a leisurely read later.

Thanks for finding and sharing such gems.

[Celerity]

2. yw