Lourenço da Silva Mendonça Chair:
critique of colonial formation, reparation and anti-racism
Introduction
The creation of the Lourenço da Silva Mendonça Chair: critique of colonial formation, reparation and anti-racism aims to carry out teaching, research and extensionist activities to promote a multifaceted and contemporary understanding of slavery and colonialism as modern-capitalist projects whose dehumanization and implementation of monocultures still profoundly affect humanity, the world population and planet earth today. In order to better understand and value the cosmologies and knowledges that have been lost or subalternized throughout the implementation of this hierarchical and oppressive global system, the Chair will work in a transnational, multi-epistemological and multidisciplinary way, as well as in close dialogue with civil society, associations, institutions and entities with adjacent agendas, to promote greater articulation between academic theory and artistic, socio-political and community practices. Participating in the reflection on colonial formation and actively seeking ethical, economic, educational, socio-political, cultural and legal reparation for the damage and trauma colonialism caused will be the main objective of this Chair. For all these reasons, the Chair is anti-racist.
Who was Lourenço da Silva Mendonça?
John Nost the Elder, ‘Bust of an African Man,’ 1701. ROYAL COLLECTION TRUST
The Chair remembers and pays homage to the forgotten Lourenço da Silva Mendonça, a Mbundu (Kimbundu) prince of the Pungo-Ndongo Kingdom, today Angola, and his transatlantic and intersectional abolitionist struggle against the dehumanization and subjugation of Africans, Native peoples of the Americas, and New Christians in the context of colonization in the 17th century. In 1684, Mendonça, as procurator of the Brotherhoods of Our Lady of the Black Men in Lisbon, Castile, Brazil and the world of Christianity, filed a lawsuit against enslavement with Pope Innocent XI, Bishop of the Roman Curia (now the Vatican) and Pontiff of the Catholic Church. Recalling this process leads to the rewriting of African protagonism and resistance in the history of colonialism and abolitionism, and also offers a new understanding of slavery in sub-Saharan Africa. This is what José Lingna Nafafé (2022) argues in his book Lourenço da Silva Mendonça and the Black Atlantic Abolitionist Movement in the Seventeenth Century (Cambridge University Press). Mendonça's exposition of the legal process against slavery was based on his in-depth knowledge of the colonial legislation of the time and his ethical thinking rooted in his upbringing in Bantu cosmology
"Mendonça carried a message of death to the Vatican: death for the enslaved Africans was not a question of if, but when. The death that Mendonça was talking about was not what one could view as a necessary component of being a mortal creature, that is, this was not death by natural causes, but rather death that was imposed on enslaved Africans for being marked as slaves, as someone’s property. In his court case in the Vatican, Mendonça made it clear that the enslaved Africans in Brazil and elsewhere were living between the threat of violence and the loss of hope of a proper human existence. Their lives were swept away by violence and by suicide, which they often took upon themselves as a way to end their suffering. He encapsulated their suffering in the Latin dictum mors certa est, translated into Spanish as Morir Es Lo Mas Cierto (Death is certain)" (José Lingna Nafafé, Lourenço da Silva Mendonça and the Black Atlantic Abolitionist Movement in the Seventeenth Century, p. 374)
Propaganda Fide signature and coat of arms with the text Morir Es Lo Mas Cierto on Gaspar da Costa de Mesquita's letter of recommendation. Photograph by José Lingna Nafafé.
Events
Seminar: "The proof that demands a verdict: The case of the African abolitionist Lourenço da Silva Mendonça in the Atlantic and the Vatican's response in the 17th century”. Read more...
News
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