It is important to remember that modern slavery received legal justification in Europe from Roman law, which established the legal fiction that people could be treated as things and, as such, absolute power could be exercised over them.

Mendonça was descended from the Mundongo nobility who, after breaking with the Portuguese, resisted submission and enslavement. By that time, the Portuguese had already conquered almost the entire territory of the Kingdom of Angola. When vassalage was rejected, albeit belatedly, Mpungo-a-Ndongo was attacked, King Ari II, his uncle, was executed, and the kingdom was destroyed in 1671. The two Capuchin missionaries preached against slavery and the corruption of large landowners in Cuba. From 1681 onwards, they produced texts denouncing the illegality of slavery from legal and theological points of view, refuting the arguments used throughout colonization to justify the slave trade and explicitly advocating liberation and reparation. 

Jaca drafted the Resolución sobre la libertad de los negros y sus originarios (Resolution on the Freedom of Blacks and Their Ancestors) (1681), while Moirans wrote Servi liberi seu naturalis mancipiorum libertatis iusta defensio (Just Defense of the Freedom of Slaves and Their Natural Mancipi) (1682).

Between 1682 and 1686, both the missionaries and Mendonça submitted documents—petitions and formal complaints—to Pope Innocent XI, demanding justice and reporting the abuses and brutality of the slave trade and slavery. Thecomplaints included arguments and detailed descriptions of the illegality of the processes of capture and enslavement, addressing topics such as “just war,” “capital crimes,” and “forced conversion to Christianity.” The so-called “titles” of enslavement—that is, the supposed legality of acquiring a human being—were vigorously contested by both Jaca and Moirans.

Moirans developed the most systematic argument about the illegality of trafficking and slavery in light of divine natural law, positive law, the law of nations, canon law, and civil law. Mendonça, in turn, maintained—in his capacity as attorney general of the Brotherhoods of Black Men—that the vast majority of enslaved people had already been baptized.

It is worth remembering that these baptisms took place both coercively, in collective ceremonies, and as a survival strategy, either to escape slavery, to organize, to fight for freedom, or to ensure a dignified burial. This fact alone, according to Mendonça, would be enough to make slavery totally illegal under the canon law of the Catholic Church.

In addition to denouncing the illegality of slavery, Jaca, Moirans, and Mendonça described and condemned the extreme violence, profound cruelty, and brutality that permeated both the slave trade and the slave regime. All of them also demanded compensation for the damage caused to the enslaved.

In this regard, Jaca and Moirans drafted a memorandum with 11 propositions that summarized the illegality of slavery, the need to free the enslaved, and the obligation to repair the damage. The document was initially presented, through the attorney general of the Capuchins, to Propaganda Fide and, later, on March 12, 1685, to the Holy Office and the pope. On March 20, 1686, the Holy Office approved the propositions, confirming the illegality of slavery and recognizing the need for liberation and reparation.

DIRTY GOSSIP – misconceptions of Africa and the slave history: Njinga, Queen of Angola (2013). By Carolin Overhoff Ferreira

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