Post/Colonialism and the Pursuit of Freedom in the Black Atlantic

Jerome C Branche

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9780367593322
• eBook ISBN: 9781351667807
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Slavery
• Index: Social Sciences

Post/Colonialism and the Pursuit of Freedom in the Black Atlantic is an interdisciplinary collection of essays of wide historical and geographic scope which engages the legacy of diaspora, colonialism and slavery.

The contributors explore the confrontation between Africa's forced migrants and their unwelcoming new environments, in order to highlight the unique individual experiences of survival and assimilation that characterized Atlantic slavery. As they focus on the African or Afro-diasporan populations under study, the chapters gauge the degree to which formal independence, coming out of a variety of practices of opposition and resistance, lasting centuries in some cases, has translated into freedom, security, and a "good life."

By foregrounding Hispanophone, Lusophone, and Francophone African and Afro-descendant concerns, over and against an often Anglo-centric focus in the field, the book brings a more representative approach to the area of diaspora or Black Atlantic studies, offering a more complete appreciation of Black Atlantic cultural production across history and across linguistic barriers.

Part I
Iberian colonialism

Some principles, people and praxis

1 Black Atlantic identity and the Spanish Inquisition

Baltasar Fra-Molinero

The Black Atlantic is a composite of voicings that have been uttered, and muffled, for more than five hundred years. Following Paul Gilroy’s theoretical construct of the Black Atlantic, this chapter tries to understand the way Black men and women who lived in the Canary Islands from the sixteenth through the eighteenth century constructed a transnational world and made “Black commentaries on the modern which have been so far overlooked by western intellectual history” (Gilroy 1993: 45). Blacks in the Spanish-speaking Atlantic were the first to experience modernity, and they contributed to its creation as they experienced their lives in almost perpetual movement, in a series of exchanges that were tied to the Atlantic slave trade and produced a hybrid culture. If we look at the Canary Islands, we can appreciate how Spanish becomes a language of the African Diaspora. Black men, women, and children transported the Spanish language across the Atlantic into the American continent. Blacks, whether they were born on the African continent, in the cities of mainland Spain, or in the Canary Islands, were part of institutions and cultural practices – religious confraternities, linguistic traits – that crossed the Atlantic Ocean, a phenomenon that scholars have been pointing out for decades (Nodal 1981: 86–87). In fact, the legal arguments created around the conquest of America, their debates and doubts, also applied to the justification of the conquest of the Canary Islands (Merediz 2004: 36–37). And in all these cases, the involuntary (and at times voluntary) presence of Blacks in these Atlantic spaces is too often ignored.

A linguistic term – bozal – was the first word that defined the enslaved African that crossed the waters of this sea westwards and northwards. Bozal is an enslaved individual whose voice has been rendered unintelligible by the enslaver. A bozal does not speak the language of empire – Spanish, Portuguese – and this fact alone is a marker of her inferiority, both legal and moral.¹ One has to look in unusual places to hear the voice of those rendered silent. To have a voice is to have the power to answer, or the power to question, which is an act that unsettles authority. However, the existence of the very word bozal indicates the need to distinguish between those enslaved Blacks who could and did speak Spanish fluently and in fact were native speakers, called ladinos, and those who did not, due to their recent capture. This binary opposition between bozal and ladino, a non-white who speaks the language of the Whites (Spanish), became the source of an ideological distinction that had connotations regarding phenotype and place of origin.²

The Canary Islands were part of one of those cultural routes Paul Gilroy defines as the channels of Black identity throughout the Atlantic Ocean. Blacks from the Canary Islands forged communities across the Ocean and between the different islands of the Canarian archipelago, as well as with other points in the Atlantic, such as London, the Netherlands, the Iberian Peninsula, the other Atlantic islands off the coast of Africa, and of course, with the African continent itself (Sampedro Vizcaya 909–910). This chapter addresses the formation of a Black Atlantic identity in the Canary Islands through the testimonies written down in the Archives of the Inquisition in the Canary Islands.³

It is now accepted, following C.L.R. James, and later Sidney Mintz, Fernando Ortiz, and Robin Blackburn, that the Caribbean industrial form of labor in the sugar plantation became the economic engine of the modern state (Schmidt-Nowara 2001: 151). Insofar as these origins can be traced back to the sixteenth century, one must acknowledge the centrality of the Canary Islands in this development.⁴ The Canary Islands in many respects initiate what Achille Mbembe calls the historical identifier of Africa in history, one marked by displacement and dislocation in time (Mbembe 2001: 15). The Atlantic became the first modern global space, one defined by movement and diaspora. The Canary Islands occupied an early position in what David Nemser calls the spatiality of colonial relations of islands in the utopian imaginary of the Renaissance (Nemser 2010: 2). Insularity was synonymous with the concept of coloniality, understood as a political condition predicated on the presence of a Black population.

The Canary Islands, together with the other Atlantic islands belonging to the Portuguese crown, were a primary space where this Black Atlantic identity started to take form. These Atlantic islands soon transformed themselves into plantation economies that were only possible by their being increasingly populated with enslaved Blacks from the nearby African continent (Fernández-Armesto 1987: 200–202). The new Atlantic communities that developed in these insular locations show several common characteristics in terms of social formation. These islands were multi-ethnic, multi-racial, slave societies that owed their existence to a distant political center that provided them with military might and that was the recipient of an export economy. Blacks in the territories of the Spanish Monarchy – negros, mulatos, pardos, personas de color – were the first people to create a Black Atlantic identity. I wish to define Black Atlantic identity as the awareness and recognition of place of origin of one’s ancestors, place of birth far away from that ancestral origin, and the meaning of a slave past in oneself or in one’s parents or ancestors.⁵

For this reason, the archives of the Spanish Inquisition of the Canary Islands offer us a unique window to the words and the self-fashioning of Black identity in the early modern world.⁶ The astonishing number of Black men and women processed by the Spanish Inquisition of the Canary Islands covers almost the entire history of this religious institution, the first in a European empire that had a global reach, from Spain to the American continent and further to the Philippines (Cunningham 1918: 417). Through the written records of hundreds of cases, the bureaucratically mediated voices of Black men and women, free and enslaved, speak about their travels, religious beliefs, medical practices, family ties, and relationship with the institution of slavery as the evil they were trying to escape from. These men and women came from western Africa, but also from Boston or Barbados.

Following Marcus Redicker’s theoretical construct of finding voices in the interstices of the official account of what happened to the African protagonists of the Black Atlantic, this chapter tries to do an archeology of voices from the bottom up (Rediker 2010: 36). My attempt here is to discuss a few cases of Black men and women who shaped their lives in the early modern period and lived in the Canary Islands. The lives of these men and women were dramatically changed by their encounter with the Spanish Inquisition, the first global institution in having a central role in the formation of modernity (Silverblatt 2004: 6). The Spanish Inquisition operated in an ideological world that defined new categories of knowledge. Among these new categories was racial identity, a category that was directly related to religion, to things sacred, and to magic.

Michel Foucault defined power relations as a reality related to the circulation of knowledge, even if it is in asymmetrical fashion. Foucault links power to knowledge. Starting with the development of the State, power in the modern world is tied to the regime of knowledge (régime du savoir) and the production of truth. The subject of the State in western Christianity is linked to the community through the idea of salvation. The State inherits from the Church what Foucault calls pastoral power, the power to lead the individual to salvation (Foucault 1982: 781). The Spanish Inquisition was a perfected and unique modern institution of the State that controlled the power of salvation and saw itself as a safeguard against attempts to challenge the monopoly of salvation that justified the State. Modern slavery was justified by Spain and Portugal as an institution that rescued the enslaved from a life of paganism in their homeland. In the early years of the modern slave trade, rescate or resgate was the term used for a slaving expedition off the west coast of Africa. It was a word with the dual, contradictory meaning of “rescue” and “ransom.”

The Black men and women who found themselves persecuted by the Spanish Inquisition faced this discourse of pastoral power and narrative of Christian salvation. They had to use a language that implicitly accepted the principle of salvation and pastoral care to answer the accusations they were facing. Central to their presence before the Inquisition was their blackness. In their responses during the interrogation, Black men and women of the Canary Islands reflect their understanding of race as a social category within the religious discourse of salvation, and their awareness of the institution of slavery as a historical process. Their words show an awareness of the Black Atlantic they were shaping in the context of modern slavery.

Barbary/Guinea/Africa as place of origin

This awareness is shown in the case of some Black women born in the African continent and brought to the Canary Islands as slaves. This Black Atlantic identity – the awareness of living in an Atlantic space – also appears when some Black men and women were accused of heresy and witchcraft, which was one of its variants. Indeed, witchcraft constitutes the bulk of the cases against Black people examined by the Inquisition.⁷

The Inquisition was an institution that regulated religious spaces – mental, physical, and metaphysical. Religious spaces have been a mainstay in the Black Atlantic. The Diasporic nature of African-based religious systems – their circulation in all directions through history – is only the most salient aspect of a larger complex that constitutes African identities acreoss the Atlantic Ocean in history. Throughout most of the history of the Black Atlantic, the Spanish and Portuguese Inquisitions were the foremost institutions that tried to suppress and confront African-based forms of religiosity.⁸ Some of the earliest cases of this confrontation happened in the Canary Islands.

The Spanish Inquisition of the Canary Islands was particularly busy in the persecution and suppression of Islamic practices, or what it interpreted as Islamic. The proximity to the continental coast of northern Africa allowed many enslaved and free people to travel to Berbería (Barbary Coast) without permission looking for freedom and a return to the Islamic faith (Acosta González 1989: 50). This was one of the crimes that the Holy Office persecuted with greatest zeal, as social alarm at the possible invasion by Muslims was a practical reality.⁹ Many Black and Mulatto men were punished for this reason, for they could sail by sea in both directions in one or two nights. Flight and Islam were mostly a masculine activity, and also an act of rebellion against slavery, and it involved Blacks (Anaya Hernádez 2008: 3). Most of the slaves that appeared in front of the Inquisition for trying to flee were also born in the African continent (Fajardo Spínola 2005: 100–102).

In the case of some enslaved Black women who had been born on the African continent, the issue became exactly to what degree they participated in the circulation of power, that is, how Christian they could demonstrate themselves to be at the time they were facing a particular accusation. These women were aware of the consequences of being found guilty of religious heterodoxy. In response, they resorted to the power of silence, equivocation, or even of claiming ignorance. They used the discourse of Catholic orthodoxy to the extent that it would benefit them. They fashioned the narratives in line with what would be exemplary lives or what would be expected of the lives of Black people within the racial hierarchy established by society and authority.

Black Atlantic identity appears in two cases of African-born women who were accused of saying heretical things that the witnesses interpreted as Islamic propositions. In both cases, their African origin and their lives before their conversion to Christianity play a salient role. The first case is that of Francisca de Jalofe. The second one corresponds to a Black woman called María de Candelaria, who was accused of practicing her Islamic faith in spite of having been baptized.¹⁰ Both women were born in Africa and were enslaved in the Canary Islands. Both lived in the western-most islands of the Archipelago, far away from communities of Muslim descent that were more abundant in the eastern islands such as Lanzarote and Fuerteventura, where many of the inhabitants were considered Moriscos, who could have offered them more solidarity and protection.¹¹

The process against Francisca de Jelofe links place of origin and ethnicity with her former religious faith.¹² Francisca, a Wolof woman as her surname indicates, was accused of saying and doing certain things that appeared strange to her accusers, who immediately attributed them to the Islamic faith of her place of origin. Her process lasted for a whole year, between June 1568 and November 1569. It started with a letter by Francisca Jelofe addressed to the local commissar of the Inquisition, a self-accusatory text that lists a series of religious misdeeds:

3r. Francisca, a Black woman from the Wolof country, who appeared in front of Your Paternity yesterday Wednesday 28 July [1569] asking for mercy because in her ignorance sometimes she had eaten with her back against the fireplace, something that is against the custom among the Christians and I protested that I would not do the same again in all the days of my life. I appear in front of Your Paternity and say that last night I was thinking whether I had done or said any other thing against the customs of the Christians. And I remembered that three years ago more or less, as I was worshipping God in front of the moon, I said the following words: that it was better to look at the moon than at a wooden god. I know that what I said was bad, and seeing that the Christians worship God’s image and I also worship it and have worshipped it in church and in my master’s home, kneeling down, [I know] I was mistaken then, because I was not instructed in things pertaining a Christian as I should have been, and because I was not realizing it, I said it. [emphasis added]¹³

Although in the process the Islamic faith is never mentioned, the self-accusation implies that this woman’s race – her slave condition and her ethnic origin – are meaningful in the context of her Islamic past. Her physical act of eating with her back to the fireplace, and praying while looking at the moon outside the home, are part of a series of unorthodox practices that acquire more meaning given her rejection of wooden images, possibly related to the Islamic prohibition against idolat...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of illustrations
• List of contributors
• Introduction
• Part I Iberian colonialism: some principles, people and praxis
• Part II Postcolonial conundrums: dystopia, relocation, and the “postcolony”
• Part III Identitarian reflections
• Index