Lourenço da Silva mendonça

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. The book also demonstrates how cattle slavery did not exist before the arrival of the Europeans in sub-Saharan Africa, only a well-defined system of servitude. This was incomparable to modern slavery that dehumanized people and legally framed them as movable property. In a situation of territorial conquest, the conquered kings and sobas (chiefs) were obliged by the law of baculamento to pay tribute in persons from 1611. There were strong protests from these leaders, including Nzinga, Queen first of Pungo-Ndongo and then of Matamba, Mendonça's aunt, and Garcia II, King of the Congo, who was also related to him. This reveals that Mendonça was not the first to resist the colonial-capitalist and pan-European project of modernity, whose economic foundation was enslavement and monoculture in the colonized countries. However, he was the first to articulate the different sides of the Atlantic (Europe, America and Africa) and to present an organized and systematized legal case before the Sacred Court in Rome and before "Your Eminences" in the Roman Curia. In his argumentation, he showed that the theft, by force or fraud, sale, purchase, transportation and captivity of people considered Black or “savage ("nigros aliosques sylvestres") was illegal. Many of the enslaved were already baptized, either before or after captivity, in the latter case by force. In Brazil and Europe, but also in Africa, they organized themselves into Black Brotherhoods in Catholic churches.

The process instituted by Mendonça was accompanied by the delivery of a dossier (a memorial mentioned in a document of 1686) of these confraternities of Black people in Brazil (concerning, in different parts, young people, women and men). The existing confraternities in Europe (Portugal and Spain) and Africa (Cape Verde, São Tomé, Angola, Congo) had already sent their dossiers at previous times, to prove and detail the illegitimacy, violence and brutality of the slave trade, its captivity and exploitation. Mendonça's life led him to understand the colonial project from an African, Brazilian and European point of view. Born and raised in Pungo-Ndongo, he was exiled in his twenties as a political prisoner of war to Brazil in 1671 after the death of his uncle Hari II, the last King of Pungo-Ndongo. The kingdom was destroyed by the Portuguese colonial power, with the strong participation of the Brazilian military, due to Hari II's opposition to the human trafficking of his subjects. Queen Nzinga - the half-sister of Hari I, Lourenço's grandfather, who was appointed King instead of her as a result of his alliance with the Portuguese Crown - fought all her life against this usurpation and the invasion and conquest of her ancestors' kingdom, as well as the enslavement of its people. In this struggle, she cut off the trafficking routes that took her people, or received runaway enslaved. Many of Nzinga's subjects were taken to Brazil, where they also fled and lived in quilombos, with Palmares being one of the most famous and with the largest presence of people kidnapped from colonized territory like Angola. Prince Mendonça grew up like Queen Nzinga in a war environment, but was probably educated at the Jesuit college in Luanda like his grandfather, uncle and father, the latter being an officer of the Portuguese Crown. Colonial education aimed to train them to maintain the alliance with Portugal.

As a prisoner of war in Brazil, where he experienced the effective and lethal side of enslavement in Salvador de Bahia and Rio de Janeiro, Mendonça began to follow in the footsteps of his aunt and uncle. However, he took resistance to a new level, a legal level that questioned the false colonial rhetoric of the "just war" and the existence of African slavery before the arrival of the Europeans, exposing its criminality. In his exile, Mendonça began a transatlantic campaign against the kidnapping of Africans, also learning about the oppression of Native peoples and New Christians. Seen as a dangerous element in the context of the constant struggle against slavery and colonialism in Africa, at least since Afonso I in the Congo, also a relative of Mendonça, and in Brazil, through revolts, escapes and the creation of quilombos, the young Prince Mendonça was eventually taken to Portugal, where he studied at the Monastery in Vilar de Frades.

The monastery was an important training ground for the young elite of the colonies. Young African aristocrats and sons of indigenous leaders from Brazil studied there. After Mendonça’s studies, he became the elected attorney for the Brotherhood of Our Lady of the Black Men in Lisbon, representing the others in the Black Atlantic. In order to take the case as legal representative to the Roman Curia, Lourenço went to Toledo to obtain the authorization of the King of Spain (the King of Portugal being only Regent), and arrived in Rome with a safe-conduct from the nuncio of the Curia in Lisbon. Due to the legal dimension of the case, Propaganda Fide was forced to have the case investigated. 

In the process, Mendonça demonstrated that the capture and captivity, buying or selling of "negroes" and other "savages" - in the sense of both living in the florest and not having been tamed by the Catholic Church, i.e. that they were considered "infidels" - was against divine, civil, natural and human law. A document from 1686, "S.C.S. Officii 20 Martii 1686. - Propositiones: De captivitate nigrorum aliorumque sylvestrium" proves that the Pope gave reason to the 11 legal propositions presented by Mendonça. In other words, Mendonça must have won together with the Brotherhoods. However, the economic interests of maintaining slavery spoke louder and the case was dismissed at second instance. Mendonça's traces were lost, erased and his story forgotten. But his struggle has been continued by quilombolas, Africans and Afro-descendants in the Americas and Africa to this day.