Jacobus Capitein: Dutch Calvinist and Black Cosmopolitan

Jacobus Capitein has long been a source of interest as one of the few Africans educated in Europe in the eighteenth century, but critics have not been able to shake off the image he created with a lecture he delivered at the University of Leiden in 1742, in which he argued that Christianity is compatible with slavery. This article argues that Capitein is a much more complex figure than the thumbnail sketch might imply. Capitein ended up spending five years in Elmina, on the West Coast of Africa, and the letters he sent to Holland during that time can help, if not dispel, at least modify his image as a mouthpiece for Western colonialism. They tell the story of a man unprepared by his scholarly upbringing to deal with the hardships of life on a colonial outpost, but they also reveal a determination to understand his new social and cultural context, as well as, ultimately, a cosmopolitan flexibility completely at odds with the intellectual stiffness evinced in the Leiden lecture. Capitein was as much an African as a European and, in the end, this multiple, diasporic identity allowed him, if only fleetingly, to rise above the strictures of his upbringing and to acquire his own, unique, cosmopolitan voice. By trying to build on the enlightened form of Calvinism with which he had grown up, he evinces a desire to try to really understand the perspective of others and an ability to think in terms of multicultural, multiracial communities. Capitein was a black Atlantic cosmopolitan who used both his European and his African diasporic experiences to, in his own way, expand the meanings of cosmopolitanism.