Christian Burial Denied
As death pursued enslaved Africans beyond their Atlantic crossing, on several occasions slave merchants and slave owners continued to deny bondspeople a proper funeral and a peaceful place to lay their bodies to rest.
Africans transported to both the Iberian Peninsula and Latin America, where Catholicism predominated, were baptized either before their departure from the continent or upon their arrival at their destination. Hence, at least in theory, when enslaved Africans died, they had the right to funerals and the Catholic rites that usually included the final anointing (Extreme Unction), a mass, a procession, and a proper burial site.In the Portuguese colonies of Angola and Brazil, until the early nineteenth century, before the existence of modern cemeteries, baptized Africans were supposed to be buried within the walls of church buildings. For example, in 1665 the Portuguese won the battle of Mbwila (or AmbuĂla) against AntĂłnio I (Nvita a Nkanga), the Catholic ruler of the Kingdom of Kongo, who had challenged their domination. During the battle, Portuguese-led troops shot and decapitated Nvita a Nkanga. Still, the Portuguese organized his funeral “with all the pomp and ostentation.” The Catholic brotherhood of Our Lady of Mercy led the funeral ceremonies, including a procession by its members. This brotherhood was one of the many fraternal organizations that existed in Portugal and Spain and their overseas colonies during the era of the Atlantic slave trade. Following the model established by brotherhoods gathering white individuals, these mutual aid assistance associations congregated free, freed, and enslaved Africans and their descendants to honor a patron saint, and they provided their members with welfare assistance, including proper burial services and the opportunity for participation in religious festivals. Nvita a Nkanga’s head was then buried in the main chapel of Luanda’s Church of Our Lady of Nazareth (Nossa Senhora de NazarĂ©), a temple devoted to the saint venerated by AndrĂ© Vidal de Negreiros, the governor of Luanda, and to whom he attributed the Portuguese victory.15
Other Africans were buried in Catholic churches in Portugal as well.
More than one century after the funeral of AntĂłnio I, a West African emissary from Dahomey was buried in a Catholic church in Lisbon. Two ambassadors representing King Agonglo of Dahomey went to Salvador in Bahia, and then to Lisbon in Portugal, to negotiate with the Portuguese rulers the terms of the Atlantic slave trade. Once in Lisbon the two Dahomean representatives were baptized as João Carlos de Bragança and Manoel Constantino Carlos Luiz. But as explained in a letter from Queen Maria to King Agonglo, Manoel became sick and died on February 19, 1796. Therefore, as a Christian who had been baptized, he was buried in the Convent of Francesinhas in Lisbon, with all expenses related to his funeral covered by the Portuguese crown.16 Unfortunately, unlike the Church of Our Lady of Nazareth that is still standing in Luanda, the convent was deactivated in 1890 and then demolished, leaving unknown what happened to the remains of the ambassador and other possible African notables interred there.Unlike African officials who were buried in the buildings of Catholic churches in their homelands or while they were sojourning in the Iberian Peninsula, many enslaved Africans who died in slave-trading ports in Europe, Africa, and the Americas were laid to rest without any funeral ceremonies. In Catholic societies of Latin America, including Brazil, until the nineteenth century, in urban areas, the bodies of enslaved men, women, and children could be discarded in waste dumps, as there was obviously not enough available space to accommodate the large number of remains of bondspeople inside the walls of church buildings, especially in contexts where the enslaved population was huge, even outnumbering the free Black and white populations. Ultimately, although forced to convert to Christianity, enslaved Africans in Lisbon or in the port cities colonized by the Portuguese, such as Rio de Janeiro in Brazil or Luanda and Benguela in West Central Africa, especially those who died before being sold, never fully received the Christian privileges of proper funeral ceremonies and burial services.17
As discussed in chapter 1, enslaved Africans disembarked in the Portuguese port of Lagos as early as 1444.
Situated nearly 190 miles south of Lisbon, Lagos received some international attention in 2009, when during the construction of the Anel Verde Parking Lot in the Gafaria Valley, archaeologists uncovered the remains of 155 enslaved Africans in an urban waste dump that functioned as a “Blacks’ pit” dating back to the period between the fifteenth and the seventeenth centuries.18 The site is among the oldest and rarest burial grounds of enslaved Africans uncovered in the Iberian Peninsula. The common grave confirms existing archival documents showing that between the 1570s and the 1580s, nearly 10 percent of the deceased individuals in Lagos were enslaved.19 Most of the recovered remains belonged to adult men and women, but there were also remains of children. The lateral, dorsal, and ventral positions of the skeletons, sometimes even with the arms and legs attached, indicate that most corpses were not inhumed but rather thrown in the urban waste dump without following any Christian burial rites. But 7 percent of the skeletons were interred with belongings such as rings, necklaces, and coins, suggesting they were treated with some care. The presence of this small number of skeletons that appeared to have been sensibly interred suggests that those who performed these burials may have had emotional ties with the deceased.20 Such an explanation is plausible, and this practice certainly persisted in the Americas, where enslaved people were buried by their own relatives and other fellow bondspeople.
Figure 5.1. Rua do Poço dos Negros (Street of the Blacks’ Pit), Lisbon, Portugal. Photograph by Ana Lucia Araujo, 2022.
In a decree of November 13, 1515, King Dom Manuel I ordered Lisbon’s municipal chamber to construct a whitewashed stone pit to serve as a common grave to inter the city’s enslaved population, with the goal of preventing slave owners from discharging their remains in the city’s outskirts where the corpses were eaten by animals.21 Some scholars debate about whether or not the pit to discard the remains of enslaved persons was ever constructed.22 Other scholars insist that the pit effectively existed and was located outside the walls of the city, in the vicinity of the Street of the Blacks’ Pit (Rua do Poço dos Negros), even though this street name (figure 5.1) only appeared in existing sources for the first time in 1681, more than a century later.23 Despite these disagreements, similar pits were constructed in Lisbon and other Portuguese cities such as Elvas in the following years.
Regardless of the existence of these common graves, records dating back to the early sixteenth century show that most baptized enslaved Black people in the Iberian Peninsula received full Christian burials. Still, most who were interred in churchyards or inside church buildings were members of Catholic lay Black brotherhoods, comprised of enslaved people owned by affluent families. Challenging the dehumanization imposed on bondspeople, these organizations provided a variety of services to support their members, including access to a dignified interment.24 As these brotherhoods made their way to the Catholic colonies of the Americas, they could offer their enslaved members spiritual and material comfort in a context in which their human dignity was denied.