Portugal and West Africa: The Rise of the Atlantic System
Extreme violence dominated the first twenty years of contact between Portuguese explorers and West African populations. The Portuguese drew from their earlier warfare practices in North Africa by attacking, raiding, and capturing men, women, and children on the Atlantic islands and the Saharan coastal areas.12 Despite recognizing this early context in which raids predominated, several historians have tended to emphasize that African polities controlled the trade in West African ports during the era of the Atlantic slave trade, arguing on this basis that they must have agreed to selling enslaved people to European traders.13 Against this view, a closer examination of the initial incursions by the Portuguese in the West African littoral show that brutal raids marked their first engagement in the Atlantic slave trade.
During this significant period, West Africans repelled Portuguese invasions. They used naval power to fight back, resisted inland, and also opted to escape to the interior. In these early years of the Atlantic slave trade, Portuguese chronicler Gomes Eanes de Zurara authored one of the first detailed narratives of the enslavement of Africans and their arrival on European soil. Zurara explains that in 1444, Lançarote de Freitas, an assistant of Prince Henry (Henrique), also known as Prince Henry the Navigator, launched an expedition of six caravels with soldiers and sailors that departed from the southern Portuguese port of Lagos to the Bay of Arguin, in the coastal area of today’s Mauritania. Once in Arguin, they raided the coastal area, capturing more than two hundred people.14
After the raids were completed, the Portuguese boarded nearly 240 enslaved persons in packed caravels that took almost three months to sail from Cape Blanco to the port of Lagos. After this long sea journey, African captives arrived extremely sick and weak on Portuguese shores, where they had never set foot before.15 Zurara’s chronicle includes observations of the various skin tones of the African captives, confirming that, as early as the fifteenth century, European observers were paying close attention to skin color.
According to Zurara, among the captives, “there were some reasonably white, beautiful and elegant; others were less white like brown; others were as black as Ethiopians, whose faces and bodies were so disfigured.”16 Framing Black Africans according to their physical traits, his observations reveal his perceptions of individuals with lighter skin as beautiful, in contrast to those with darker skin, whom he refers to as ugly.The group of captives disembarking in such horrible conditions provoked reactions of sadness and pity among the inhabitants of Lagos who attended their arrival. Zurara portrays in vivid detail the dramatic conditions of newly arrived African captives who “kept their heads low and their faces washed in tears looking at each other, others were moaning very painfully, looking up at the heavens, shouting loudly as if asking for help from the father of nature. Others wounded their faces with the palms of their hands, hurling themselves to the ground. Others made their lamentations with songs, as was the custom in their homeland, and although the words could not be understood by us, they well corresponded to the degree of their sadness.”17
As the Portuguese consolidated their presence in West Africa, they continued navigating along its Atlantic coastline. In 1445, Portuguese explorer Dinis Fernandes arrived in Cape Verde, an uninhabited archipelago of ten islands and five islets divided into two groups, Barlavento (Santo Antão, São Vicente, Santa Luzia, São Nicolau, Sal, and Boa Vista) and Sotavento (Maio, Santiago, Fogo, and Brava).18 In the years that followed, Portuguese settlers brought enslaved Africans to Cape Verde, and migrants from the Kingdom of Jolof who were escaping enslavement also settled on the islands. Together, these groups gave origin to most of the archipelago’s population.19 Beginning in the middle of the fifteenth century, in all the Atlantic islands of West Africa such as the Azores, Cape Verde, Madeira, and São Tomé in the Bight of Bonny, the Portuguese developed sugarcane plantations. They also established sugarcane plantations on the Canary Islands, but the Kingdom of Castile took over the archipelago in 1479.
As early as the first half of the sixteenth century, the sugar produced in São Tomé was exported to Antwerp and then redistributed to England, France, Flanders, and Germany.In 1455, Pope Nicholas V issued the bull Romanus Pontifex that gave the Portuguese not only the exclusive right to explore the Atlantic coast of West Africa but also to convert its populations to Roman Catholicism. As the trade in enslaved Africans to the Iberian Peninsula and to the islands increased, the raid strategy that predominated in the first years of the Portuguese’s pioneering engagement in the Atlantic slave trade was eventually reconsidered. This wasn’t, however, out of any kind of humanitarian concern. Rather, one historian explains, it was only a result of the Portuguese realizing that risky raids such as those they had previously undertaken would get in the way of satisfying the new growing demand for an enslaved workforce.20
In the 1460s, Portugal started developing diplomatic relations with West African societies, a process that led the kingdom to seal peace treaties and trade agreements with local rulers.21 Gradually, Portuguese agents established trading posts in Senegambia, the zone between the Senegal River in the north and the Gambia River in the south, encompassing today’s Senegal, the Republic of the Gambia, Guinea-Bissau, and parts of Mauritania, Mali, and Guinea. This sustained presence allowed Portugal to develop trade relations in other parts of West Africa as well. In the late fifteenth century, Portuguese traders acquired African captives by way of the existing trading routes that crossed the Sahara. However, African polities also hired Portuguese soldiers as mercenaries, and therefore during the early years of the Atlantic slave trade in West Africa, they captured and enslaved people directly.22
Though the Portuguese were initially alone in their oceanic expansion, other European kingdoms gradually developed interests in the West African trade as well.
Until the second half of the fifteenth century, the Portuguese fought over control of the Atlantic islands along the West African coast with the now unified Kingdoms of Castile and Aragón, whose respective monarchs Isabella and Ferdinand married in 1469. Because the king of Portugal was married to Joanna “la Beltraneja,” who was a candidate to the throne of Castile, the War of the Castilian Succession emerged between Portugal and Castile. This conflict spread through the Atlantic world and was transformed into a battle to dominate trade in Upper Guinea, where the kingdoms of Portugal and Castile competed to control access to trade in gold and enslaved Africans.Eventually, the Portuguese won the maritime war. In 1479, the Treaty of Alcáçovas sealed the peace between the two kingdoms. Portugal gained control of the islands of Madeira, the Azores, and the north of Morocco (Kingdom of Fez), Cape Verde, and the explored or yet-to-be-explored lands of West Africa and West Central Africa, whereas the Kingdom of Castile took possession of the Canary Islands.23 Gradually, the Portuguese expanded and consolidated their influence in Atlantic Africa. Known as lançados, Portuguese sailors and Jewish Portuguese traders, who left Portugal to avoid religious persecution, settled in the region stretching from the Petite Côte in Senegal (between the Cape Verde peninsula and the border of present-day Gambia) to Sierra Leone.24 These settlers did not seek to establish colonies in West Africa; instead, they solidified their presence in the region through trade. By marrying local women, they developed ties that attached them to the local communities, a strategy that Portuguese settlers replicated in other spaces they colonized in Africa and later in Brazil.