Building Creole Identity in the African Atlantic: Boundaries of Race and Religion in Seventeenth-Century Cabo Verde

I

The Atlantic may be a vast ocean for the most part devoid of human life, but that is not how historians see it. As the historian of the British Atlantic world David Armitage put it, "we are all Atlanticists now."¹ Not a little of the excitement of the historical profession has turned on the need to construct broad and transnational perspectives for the exchanges of peoples and goods which have constructed modern worlds.

This is, as every reader of this journal knows, a process in which Africa played a fundamental part. Conceptualizing an Atlantic space in the early modern era requires the inclusion of African contributions to revolutions in ideas, agriculture, and global capital brought about by the forced African diaspora produced by Atlantic slavery.² And yet historians of African societies have not joined their colleagues working on the Americas, the Caribbean and Europe in the leap to embrace "Atlantic" history. While there have been some attempts to construct an African sphere of the Atlantic world, a general attempt to achieve this on a systematic basis remains lacking.³

Part of the reason for this is the current general decline in research in early modern African history. While the late 1960s, 1970s, and early 1980s saw many highly distinguished monographs, such research is no longer so easy to come by.⁴ Shunning the externalized, European perspectives on which many traditional histories of Africa were based, post-colonial students of Africa have rightly interpreted African history from the viewpoint of African societies.⁵ As this has required primarily a cultural engagement with material, practitioners have moved towards contemporary histories, which may explain the present dearth of studies reaching farther back.

But the result of this situation is that the integration of an African perspective into the now vast field of Atlantic history is partial at best. Thus where Africa is brought into these wider histories it is all too often misrepresented, if represented at all.⁶ Africa's place in broader Atlantic histories is often from the perspective of the economic requirements of the Atlantic rather than through an understanding of the agency of African societies and an analysis of the effects of Atlantic forces on African societies.⁷ As Africanists have directed their attention towards the cultural contexts of the societies of the African Atlantic and Atlanticists to economic patterns of the wider Atlantic world, the opportunity to draw the broader outlines of the role and influence of an "African Atlantic" has been passed over.⁸

Such a vast subject cannot be comprehensively addressed in a single paper. Rather, my aim here is to illustrate the type of ideas and work which could result from a consistent engagement with an "African Atlantic." How were new identities constructed in this space? What was the role of African exchanges in the wider Atlantic? Did the idea of "the Atlantic" itself mean anything to those who participated in it? These are the sorts of questions which may find an answer when we begin to examine the early modern African Atlantic and the issue of the emergence of Creole identity in Cabo Verde.⁹

The geographical focus of the paper is therefore on the Caboverdean archipelago. Situated some 500 kilometers from the northern coast of Senegal, and today composed of nine inhabited islands, this archipelago has been poorly served by historiography in general, particularly in English.¹⁰ And yet it holds a pivotal place in Atlantic history, having served as something of a paradigm for subsequent trends: this was, after all, the first locale in the Atlantic where slaves were all drawn from sub-Saharan Africa, the site of the first European city in the tropics, and the capital of the trans-Atlantic slave trade to Spanish America for the first century of its existence.¹¹

Quite apart from these historiographical concerns, there are sound methodological reasons for beginning an approach to the idea of the African Atlantic through the prism of Cabo Verde. There are sufficient published and unpublished sources to construct...