"Portuguese" Style and Luso-African Identity: Precolonial Senegambia, Sixteenth - Nineteenth Centuries

ONE. The Evolution of “Portuguese” Identity: Luso-Africanson the Upper Guinea Coast from the Sixteenth Century to the Early Nineteenth Century

O N E The Evolution of “Portuguese” Identity: Luso-Africans on the Upper Guinea Coast from the Sixteenth Century to the Early Nineteenth Century THE ESTABLISHMENT OF EARLY PORTUGUESE COMMUNITIES During the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, Portugal established a trading presence along the Upper Guinea Coast, that part of the Atlantic coast extending from Senegal to Sierra Leone. Portuguese ascendancy in the African trade began with fifteenth-century seaborne explorations . By the early 1600s, however, the joint Spanish-Portuguese monarchy ’s financial difficulties, combined with the rise of Dutch commerce, had begun to undermine Portuguese supremacy. This process was abetted by the Dutch conquest of northeastern Brazil beginning in 1630 and by the establishment of a Dutch trading post on Gorée Island off the Senegalese coast in 1621. A generation later, the French establishment of St. Louis at the mouth of the Senegal River in 1659, followed by the capture of Gorée in 1678 marked a growing French commercial presence. Britain became an important player at about the same time. The establishment of an English garrison at James Fort in the lower Gambia River, shortly after mid-century, marked the beginning of a military and commercial rivalry in the region between the French and the British that would continue until the end of the Napoleonic Wars in 1815. Emigrants from Portugal (some of whom were Jews seeking to escape religious persecution),1 who were known as lançados,2 settled along the coast, where many of them married women from local communities. By the early sixteenth century, the offspring of these unions, Luso-Africans, or “Portuguese,” as they called themselves, were established at trading centers from the Petite Côte in Senegal to Sierra Leone in the south (Figure 1, Figure 2).3 Descendants of Portuguese emigrants, of Cape Verde Is- landers, and of West Africans, the Luso-Africans developed a culture that was itself a synthesis of African and European elements. Rich historical documentation allows a case study of the changing ways Luso-Africans identified themselves over the course of three centuries. Several “Portuguese ” Cape Verdean merchants, including André Alvares de Almada (fl. 1590) and André Donelha (fl. 1570–1625), wrote accounts of the coastal trade; their descriptions present Luso-Africans from the perspective of the Cape Verdean elite. The earliest lançados established themselves along the coast as commercial middlemen between African and European traders4 and as coastal traders between Sierra Leone and Senegambia. In 1623, Dierck Ruiters, a Dutch merchant who had traveled to Guinea in the first decade of the century , described Luso-African trade at Cacheu:“The trade of the Portuguese in Cacheu is of two kinds, first, trade from Portugal, second coastal trade . . . mostly undertaken in small ships, pinnacles, and launches, by Portuguese who live on Santiago Island.”5 The lançados’ commercial activity was formally discouraged by the Portuguese Crown until the second decade of the seventeenth century. They nevertheless played an important role in trade between Portugal and the Cape Verde Islands. Lançado communities were permanently settled on the Petite Côte, while in Sierra Leone and the Rio Nunez of Guinea much early commerce was in the hands of the lançados who sailed there regularly from S. Domingos, in presentday Guinea-Bissau, north of the city of Bissau.6 The offspring of these lançados and African women were called filhos de terra [sons of the land] and were generally considered “Portuguese.”7 Throughout the sixteenth century, the descendents of the lançados maintained close commercial ties with the Cape Verde Islands. Many Cape Verdeans were themselves the offspring of mixed Portuguese and West African marriages. By the late sixteenth century, the island of Santiago , whose population was overwhelmingly of African origin, constituted a Creole society.8 Sharing elements of a common culture and united by marriage and economic ties, the mainland Luso-Africans and the Cape Verdeans represented a socially complex and geographically dispersed community. Cape Verdeans, like mainland Luso-Africans, resolutely maintained that they were “Portuguese.” Both populations used the same criteria, which were essentially cultural, to identify themselves as subgroups . THE CHARACTERISTICS OF LUSO-AFRICAN IDENTITY Throughout the sixteenth century, membership in the Luso-African community was not associated with physical features. Rather, the “Portuguese ” were defined, broadly speaking, by cultural and socioeconomic characteristics.9 The first defining characteristic of “Portuguese” identity 14 “portuguese” style and luso-african identity was...