People of Faith: Slavery and African Catholics in Eighteenth-Century Rio de Janeiro

1. From Ethiopia to Guinea

1 | from ethiopia to guinea \ As Renaissance Europe probed its southern frontier through trade networks branching across the Mediterranean, its merchants , scholars, royalty, and commoners alike gazed in delighted wonder at the bags, chests, and bundles arriving from distant lands by ship and caravan. Precious metals, ivory, ostrich feathers, strange furs, and hides—these and other exotic stu√s were joined (and often physically conveyed) by dark-skinned slaves, who were themselves both a highly valued import commodity and a provocative object of study for Renaissance elites eager to situate themselves at the apex of a world marketgeography as yet incompletely formulated. In this period, knowledge of faraway realms was mostly obtained through the voyagers’ accounts that had been accumulating in the literature since antiquity. According to Herodotus (fifth century bce), beyond the Saharan Desert sands one could reach a region of great forests and bogs, with a vast river full of crocodiles that swam upstream, in a river flowing from the sunset to the Levant (supposedly the Niger River). The Greek historian had also alluded to entire cities of black people there; and he gave an account of the formidable Garamantes, who spent their days hunting the Troglodytes—a strange people who subsisted on snake meat and communicated with batlike squeals. Four centuries later, another Greek, the geographer Strabo (1 bce–ace 1), provided a harrowing description of the ‘‘numerous deserts’’ that formed a barrier to the exploration of ‘‘the country of the Occidental Ethiopes.’’ By the beginning of the 20 | Chapter One Christian era, Roman explorers and philosophers added their own accounts to the Greek repertoire. With those writings in hand, Pliny the Elder (first century ace) devised his own list of the peoples inhabiting the remote area south of the Sahara.∞ Until the early fifteenth century, Europeans based their understanding of far-o√ lands and peoples on materials such as these. They had traveled only as far as the Mediterranean coast, parts of Egypt, the edge of the Sahara, and the northern stretch of the western coast of Africa (up to the Atlantic archipelagos). The Portuguese, however, were soon to open a new era in Atlantic exploration in general, and African exploration in particular. Their conquest in 1415 of Ceuta (today an enclave in Morocco), a strategic port city in North Africa, eventually came to be a vital Portuguese commercial base with established links to the Muslim world. Portugal thus had new access to the caravan routes that fanned across the north, west, and east of Africa, while it took advantage of Ceuta’s seaside location to launch its own navigational forays up and down the African coast. It would be through a combination of their own actual exploration and the assimilation of Muslim familiarity with the region’s physical and astronomical features that the Portuguese could, in the mid-fifteenth century, start to devise a new African geography.≤ To the south, the Sahara separated Portugal and North Africa from the city of Timbuktu (in modern Mali), already an important center of learning in the early fifteenth century as well as a key trading post where caravans would exchange cargo, haggle for supplies, and water their camels. The city’s location—near the banks of the Niger River, and at the intersection of trade arteries bearing salt, gold, and other goods—was favorable for both cultureandcommerce.Salt,extractedfromtheminesatTaghaza(intoday’s Mali), was conveyed from Timbuktu on to West Africa, south of the Sahara. In exchange for the salt, as well as for other merchandise imported into West Africa, the black kingdoms sent back to Timbuktu gold, slaves,≥ and ivory, along with particular commodities prized by the Mediterranean market (such as black pepper, cola nuts, and amber). The west coast was accessed by three land routes: one leading to Arguin (o√ Mauritania); one to the city of Safi; in Morocco, and one to Cantor, in the Lower Gambia. Renaissance maps suggest that due east of the Guinea Coast, if one could cross or circumnavigate the entire African landmass, lay Oriental Ethiopia, From Ethiopia to Guinea | 21 a place of Christian kingdoms where Santo Elesbão (Ethiopia) and Santa Efigênia (Nubia) originated. According to these cartographies, Guinea denominated a narrow slice of the western coast, situated at around the fifteenth parallel.∂ Little was known of the surrounding territories or the people that inhabited them, particularly south of the Saharan sands. That would begin to change...