Boxer - Race Relations in The Portuguese Colonial Empire

Race Relations in the
,I
.li
DOS FlLHOS DA JNDIA O.RIEN';r'Al.,
Portuguese Colonial Empire
1415-1825
E DAPJlVlN<;lA-OOAPOSTOLO S .THOME
~"""'~ DOJ F.R.APES _MF.NOR,_~ nAREG'Vl.All
DJlSERVANpA DA .MES.MA1NDIA.
BY
M1gud da l-'1.m.li:c,~a',_ ru[:

tadlo. c f:ro[J.Jr<Dlor gend da. lnefrna..
Prouw~ia, Hll1o ddlJ,eno.ru-r.U ~e
Tara.Por rlilmefma l11rli<L. __ '"'
D~.rigida tlo Fi,/'C Fr,Pau_/~ d. 'I'ri:ruUufc, ,'
I ~CE<W lubi"La-J.a. ~tadc J.n Sa;'fi.E.tD
PoroP'Frei
C. R. BOXER
CAMOENS PROFESSOR OF PORTUGUESE
KING'S COLLEGE
UNIVERSITY OF LONDON
'!ffi:,."l.o Jn.J,~a. rJrumt:u',~P!J!Lmiffn~
P>:a-ui>ui",
. I
The frontispiece of Fr. Miguel da Punficac;:ao, O.F.M, Relar5o Difensiva

(Barcelona 164-o), pleading the cause of Creole friars m India.
,,I
CLARENDON PRESS OXFORD

1963
PREFACE
Ox;ord University Press, Amen House, London E.C.4

GLASGOW NEW YORK TORONTO MELBOURNE WELUNGTON
BOMBAY CALCUTTA MADRAS KARACIU LAHORE DACCA
CAPE TOWN SALISBURY NAIROBI lliADAN ACCRA
KUALA LUMPUR
HONG KONG
Oxford University Press, 1963
I am grateful to the Richard Lectures Committee for

inviting me to give these lectures at the University of
Virginia in November, 1962; I would also like to express
my thanks to the members of that University for making
my stay in Charlottesville so pleasant.
The lectures are published exactly as they were delivered, but footnotes have been added to document the
assertions in the text.
C. R. B.
London
May, 1963
U4'/
Printed ln Great Britain at the Pitma11 Press, Bath
CONTENTS
Frontispiece: The frontispiece of Fr. Miguel da Purificac;:ao,
O.F.M., Relafiio Defensiva {Barcelona 1640), pleading the
came of Creole friars in India.
I. MOROCCO AND WEST AFRICA
II. MO<;:AMBIQUE AND INDIA

III. BRAZIL AND THE MARANHAO
INDEX
41
86
IJI
VII
I: MOROCCO AND WEST AFRICA

most of you probably know, it is an article of
faith with many Portuguese that their country has
never tolerated a colour-bar in its overseas possessions and that their compatriots have always had a natural
affinity for contacts with coloured peoples. In a recent
interview with Life Magazine, Dr. Salazar affirmed:
'These contacts have never involved the slightest idea of
superiority or racial discrimination . . . I think I can say
that the distinguishing feature of Portuguese Africanotwithstanding the congregated efforts made in many
quarters to attack it by word as well as by action-is the
primacy which we have always attached and will continue to attach to the enhancement of the value and the
dignity of man without distinction of colour or creed, in
the light of the principles of the civilization we carried
to the populations who were in every way distant from
ourselves.' 1
Similarly, the preamble of a recent governmental

decree abolishing the former 'Statute of Portuguese
Natives of the Provinces of Guine, Angola, and Mo,ambique', claims that 'The heterogeneous composition of the
Portuguese People, their traditional community and
patriarchal structure, and the Christian ideal of brother. hood which was always at the base of our overseas
1
Secretariado Nacional da Informa~ao, Salazar Says. Portuguese
problems in Africa. Complete version of the interview granted by the
Portuguese prime minister to 'Life': The only version approved for publication (Lisbon, 1962), p. 6.
MOROCCO AND WEST AFRICA
expansion early defined our reaction to other societies and

cultnres, and stamped it, from the beginning, with a
marked respect for the manners and customs of the
peoples we encountered.'' These beliefs are very
sincerely and very deeply held, but it does not follow that
they are always well grounded on historical fact. It is the
object of these lectures to show that the truth was more
complex, and that race relations in the old Portuguese
colonial empire did not invariably present such a picture
of harmonious integration as the foregoing quotations
would imply.
The old Portuguese colonial empire was essentially a
thalassocracy, a maritime and commercial empire,
whether mainly concerned with the spices of the East,
the slaves of West Africa, or the sugar, tobacco and gold
of Brazil. It was, however, a seaborne empire cast in a
military and ecclesiastical mould. For centuries the most
common official term for the Portuguese overseas
possessions was AsConquistos, 'The Conquests', irrespective of whether they had been acqtured by warlike or by
peaceful mea1is. When in rsor King Manne! assumed the
style and title of 'Lord of the conquest, navigation and
commerce of Ethiopia,. India, Arabia and Persia,' the
Portuguese had conquered none 6f these countries,; but
their right to do so, in whole or in part,. was held to be
implicit in a series of Papal bulls, briefs, and donations
which had been granted to successive Kings of Portugal
during the preceding eighty-three years. The sixteenthcentury Portuguese chronicler, Joao de Barros, in justifYing King Manuel's assumption of his grandiloquent
title, explains that the Popes 'are universal lords, empowered to distribute among the faithful of the Catholic
Church, the lands which are in the power of those who
are not subjected to the yoke thereof'. Whatever the
theological validity of this assertion, it certainly reflects
the Portuguese conviction that they were primarily
crusading conquistadores who were entitled to conquer or
to dominate the lands of the Muslim and the Heathen
from Morocco to Mindanao. The successor of Joao .de
Barros, the soldier-chronicler Diogo do Couto, who spent
most ofhis long life in the East, emphasized from personal
experience the close connection between the Cross and
the Crown when he wrote: 'The kings of Portugal
always aimed in their conquest of the East, at so uniting
the two powers spiritual and temporal, that the one
should never be exercised without the other.' 3
Since Portuguese expansion overseas began with the
capture of the Moorish stronghold at Ceuta in I4I5, and
since its further development was powerfully influenced
by the ensuing struggle with the Moors, we can begin
our survey with a brief consideration of Portuguese
activities in Morocco. Whatever the motives which
induced the Portuguese to undertake the conquest of
Ceuta in I4I 5, and subsequent! y to occupy a chain of
2 Decreta-Lei No. 43893, dated 6 September 196r, in Boletim de

Mofambique (Louren~o Marques, J96r). I se:rie num. ]6, pp. ragS-~.
The decree was signed by Dr. Salazar and all the members of his
government.
2
'
' '
3 Joao de Barros, Decada Prime ira da Asia, Livro VI, cap. i.,' first
published in 1552: Diogo do Couto, Decada VI, Livro IV, cap. 7, first
published in r6u. For the relevant fifteenth-century Papal documents
see Ch.-Martel de Witte, Les Bulles Pontfficales et 1' expansion portllgaise
au XVe sihle (Louvain, !958).
fortresses down the Moroccan Atlantic Coast, their

liuman and economic ~~souices-;,~r-efartoc; ll;:cite;Hor
t!~~II1 t~ ~oillsll~~th.~t in.astfaiiati~loL};!lisli~. i.n~s.
']:heir last offe.nsiYLe_~ total disaster on the

ftt,Jd of Alcacer~Kc;\>ir JtAggt}st. 1.5is.Ly;:JieJi..tiJlr}tJi;lg
Seh~_tian was slain and virtuallyallofhis army who were
not
kill;;(fwere
faken.prl.soners.
By the end of the six~..__,__
? ~-"-- --- -- --------teenth century only Ceuta, Tangier, and Mazagao
remained in Portuguese hands. Of these, Ceuta stayed
loyal to Spain in 1640, Tangier was surrendered to the
English in 1662, and Mazagao was evacuated in 1769.
The fighting in Morocco, which lasted with few intermissions from 1415 to 1769, partook of the character of a
holy war-a jihad on the one side and a crusade on the
other. For most of the time it was a war of petty raids
and skirmishes, with cavalry detachments from the
Portuguese garrisons making frequent forays into the
surrounding countryside, and t!Je Moors trying to lure
them into ambushes. Mutual religious intolerance
exacerbated the bitterness on both sides. Muslims who
became converts to Christianity, whether freely or under
duress, and who were subsequently recaptured by their
former correligionists, were martyred under the most
excruciating circumstances by the Moors. The Portuguese
on the other hand, often made no distinction between
combatants and non-combatants when they got the upper
hand. For instance, the captain of Safim, reporting to
t!Je Crown on the result of a surprise attack made by t!Je
garrison on two Moorish encampments in July 1541,
wrote: 'We took them completely by surprise and killed
about 400 persons, most of them women and children.
4
'
The common soldiers gave quarter to nobody, and only

after they were tired of killing, did we capture some
eighty souls.'
The lot of the 'Mouros de pazes', or Moors who submitted to the Portuguese, was usually a hard one. Their
mosques and holy places were desecrated, their prayers
were interrupted by cat-calls, jeering, and the throwing
of stones, and sometimes t!Jeir women were violated as
well. Some of their complaints were no doubt exaggerated, but there is ample evidence to prove that, wit!J
very few exceptions, the Portugnese made no serious
efforts to understand or to conciliate their Moorish
subjects and regarded them as Camiies regarded t!Je torpe
Ismaelita. When the Portuguese strongholds in Morocco
were reduced to Ceuta, Tangier, and Mazagao, Moors
were no longer allowed to live in these places, which were
populated exclusively by Christians.
The intermittent warfare of raids, sieges, and reprisals
in Morocco was punctuated by occasional truces, during
which a barter-trade was carried out with Moorish and
Jewish merchants. On such occasions, large caravans from
up-country would enter the Portuguese strongholds
under safe-conduct, or camp in the vicinity of the walls,
while Christian, Muslim and Jews traded in relative amity.
There were also instances when the leaders on bot!J sides
exchanged courtesies and hospitality in the best traditions
of mediaeval chivalry, but such instances were the
' D. Rodrigo de Castro to King Jolm III, Safim, 8 July 1541,
apud Gulbenktana, As Gavetas da Torre do Tombo, I (Lisboa, r96o),
p. 771. For the martyrdom of a Muslim Renegade turned Christian
and Almocadem of Arzila in 1516, see D. Lopes, Hist6ria de Arzila
durante o domfnio portugu8s (Coimbra, 1924), pp. 197-204.
exception rather than the rule. Moorish influence was

discernible in the Arabic titles of Adail, Almocadem,
Anadel, etc., which the Portuguese used for their cavalry
commanders, and the tactics in the way of tip-and-run
raids were very similar on both sides. But if there was a
sort of love-hate relationship between Portuguese and
Moors, the hate certainly predominated. Three hundred
and fifty-four years of virtually continuous frontier warfare on the Moroccan Atlantic seaboard kept alive the
traditional Portuguese .hatred of the Muslim. 5 It also
predisposed them to regard all the followers of the
Prophet as mortal enemies, whether they were Moors,
Arabs, Swahili, Persians, Indians, or Malays.
As has invariably been the case wherever Christianity
and Islam have confronted each other in Africa and Asia,
Portuguese efforts at proselytism among the Moors met
with virtually no success in Morocco. Converts were
confmed to individuals who had been captured or
enslaved as children, or to adults who sought refuge in the
Portnguese fortresses for personal reasons and who had
no hope of returning to their kith and kin. When the
Portuguese voyages of discovery and trade brought them
into contact with the Negro peoples of Senegambia and
Guinea their missionary efforts had more success with
those who had not yet been influenced by Islam, though

the long-term results did not come up to the original
optimistic expectations. Manuel Severim de Faria, the
scholarly canon of Evora Cathedral, who was a zealous
supporter of the overseas missions, wrote of the situation
as it was in 1655 as follows: 'The first place .that the Portuguese colonized on the coast of Guinea was the Mine
[Sao Jorge da Mina, Elmina] in the year 1482 and the
first preaching was made then, as Joao de Barros implies
in his Decada I, Book 3, chapter ii. And although more
than a hundred and fifty years passed until that stronghold
was lost [in r637] there were never more native Christians
than those in three or four villages adjoining the forts of
St. George and Axim, although its jurisdiction was so
large that it extended for over 200 leagues.''
Portuguese proselytism in the Congo and Angola had
also lost its impetus by this time, despite a very promising
start in the old kingdom of Congo in the early sixteenth
century. This failure in West Africa, whether relative or
complete was ascribed by Severim de Faria to three
principal causes. First there was the lack or tmsuitability
of missionary personnel. Bishops were usually reluctant
to go to such unhealthy dioceses as Cape Verde, Sao
Tome, and Congo, and when they did go they usually
died of some tropical fever before they could do much
good. The white clergy who could be induced to serve
in West Africa were mostly of poor quality, and those
few who survived the deadly tropical diseases were more
Cf. D. Fernando de Menezes, Hist6ria de Tangere (Lisboa, 1732);

15021769 (Paris, 1917); Cenival, Ricard, et al. [eds.J, Sources inidites de
I'histoire du Maroc. Portugal (5 vols., Paris, 1934-53); D. Lopes,
Hist6ria de Arzila (Coirilbra, 1924); ibidem in Hist6ria de Portugal.
Ediriio Monumental, vol. iii, pp. 429-544, and vol. iv, pp. 78-129
(Barcelos, 193 1-2); R. Ricard; Et11des sur l' histoire des Portugais au
Maroc (Coimbra, 1955).
6 Manuel Severim de Faria, Notidas de Portugal (Lisboa, r6ss),

pp. 224-40, 'Sobre a propagayam do Evangelho nas Provincias de
Gu..ine'.
J. -Goulven, La place de Mazagan sous ln. dominatiotl portugaise,
MOROCCO AND WEST. AFRICA
active in 'the slave-trade, than in saying mass or doing

any priesHy office. Second, although there were a few
exepiplary Christians am.o!1g the Portugueseand.Mulatto
laymen the majority wde exiled convicts or qnscrupu~
lous adventurers. The sole obj~c.t .ofthe latter was to get
rich as quickly as possible,. and their unedifying lives and
slave-trading activities were a great hindrance to the
work of conversion. Third, the malignity of the climate
and the heavy mortality among white men on the West
coast formed an insuperable obstacle to any continuous
and expanding missionary work.
The essential accuracy of Severim de Faria's observations is borne out by the history of the Portuguese
missions on the Guinea coast. Only in the Itsekeri kingdom ofWarri did they succeed in establishing a Christian
tradition that was to continue into the nineteenth century.
Even there Christianity was only superficially accepted
as a court religion in the capital, and it did not achieve
this limited success in the rest of the country.' Commercial and missionary interests were seldom reconciled,
and where they conflicted, as they did in the case of the
slave-trade, it was usually the former which prevailed. 'I
personally feel,' wrote a Portuguese Jesuit in r604, 'that
the troubles which afflict Portugal are on account of the
slaves we secure unjustly from our conquests and the lands
and mostofhis contemporaries saw nothingincongruous

or immoral in the fact that the ecclesiastical establishments
in Sao .Tome, Congo, and Angola were maintained
almost entirely from the profits of the slave-trade.
From the time of the first Portuguese voyages of discovery and trade along the Guinea coast, slaves, gold, and
ivory were the principal commodities. sought by the
white men. In Upper Guinea, which may be roughly
defmed as the region between the River Senegal and Cape
Palmas, Portuguese traders and exiled criminals frequented many of the rivers and creeks, often penetrating
a considerable distance into the interior. Many of them
settled in the Negro villages, where they and their
Mulatto descendants functioned as principals or intermediaries in the barter-trade between Africans and
Europeans. Those of them who went completely native,
stripping off their clothes, tattoing their bodies, and speaking the local languages, and even joining in fetishistic
rites and celebrations, were termed tangos-maos, or
lanados. The kings of Portugal did not object to this
miscegenation so much as they objected to these lan,ados
evading the taxes which the Crown imposed on all
overseas trade. For this reason the death penalty was
enacted against them in rsrS, but although' this law
remained on the statute book for many years, it was
seldom if ever applied, since the Portuguese Crown
exercised no effective jurisdiction in that region. Through
the medimn of these lanados and tangos-maos, Portuguese
became and for centuries remained the lingua:franca of
the coastal region of Upper Guinea.
Portuguese relations with the different peoples of this
where we, trade'. 8 This, however, was a minority view,

7 A. F. C. Ryder, 'Missionary activity in the kingdom ofWarri
to the early nineteenth century' (journal of the Historical Society of
Nigeria, vol. ii, pp. 1-26).
8 Letter of Joao Alvarez S. ]. d. 24. vii. 1604, apud Francisco
Rodrigues S.J., Hist6da da Companhia de Jesus na assistfncia de Portugal.
vol. iii, (2) (Porto, 1944), p. 458.
'
part of West Africa naturally varied as between one tribe

or area and another, but armed conflicts were relatively
few and contacts on the whole remained friendly. Perhaps a Jesuit missionary's description of Portuguese
relations with the Joloffs of Senegambia in r6r6 may be
taken as fairly typical. 'To see a Joloff man,' he wrote,
'is to see a true portrait of idleness. As for the Joloff
women, they are very good-natured and extremely fond
of the Portuguese nation, which is not the case with the
men.' He adds that the women often revealed secretly to
the Portuguese plots which were being hatched by their
menfolk, thns enabling the white men to escape nnharmed. 9 The lanfados and tangos-maos came in for much
severe criticism, whether from Portuguese Crown
officials, Jesuit missionaries, or the Dutch, French, and
English traders who strove to supplant the Portuguese
commercial hegemony in West Africa. But though their
sins may have been scarlet, they acquired a special
standing in the eyes of many of the Negro rulers and their
peoples. Some of them were able to marry into the ruling
families, while others made advant;ogeous agreements
with local chiefs, either on their OWn acconnt, or on
behalf of the European principals for whom they might
be working. Their iullnence was for long a source of envy

and astonishment to other European traders who frequented Upper Guiuea.
On the Gold Coast of Lower Guiuea the Portuguese
relied not only on peaceful contacts but on a display of
power and force, as exemplified by the erection of the
castles at Sao Jorge da Mina (r48~) and Axim (r503). Here
there were no tangos-maos or lanfados who penetrated
into the interior, but the Portuguese remained in their
coastal forts, trading brass bowls, bracelets, beads, textiles, and other goods for gold, ivory, and slaves brought
by African traders from the interior. Commnnication
between the forts was by sea and not by land. There was,
of course, a good deal of miscegenation with Negro
women in the immediate neighbourhood of the forts;
but the Mina Negresses pregnant by white men seem to
have indulged iu abortion or infanticide, and Mulattoes
were much less numerous than in Upper Guiuea.10
Nevertheless, the superficially Christianized Negroes of
Mina town remained loyal to the Portuguese, as English
and French intruders tmmd in the sixteenth century, and
the Dutch in r625 and 1637. Even in the immediate
11
Manuel Alvarez S.J., Etiopia Menor e descric;:io geografica da

Provincia de Serra Leoa', unpublished ms. of r6r6, quoted by Luis
de MatOs in Boletiin Internacional de Bibliogrtifia Luso-Brasileira, Torno
I (Lisboa, rg6o), pp. 537-8. For other contemporary descriptions of
tangos-maos and lanrados see Fernie Gue~reiro S.J., Relar5o Anual

das cousas que fizeram os Padres;da Companhia de-jesu.s nas partes da
India Oriental, e .no Brasil, Angola, Cabo-Verde e .Guini nos anos de
1602-3 (Lisboa, r6o5), fol. 130; OrdenacOes Manuelinas, Livro V,
titulo II2, fol. xcv of the i565 edition;]. W. Blake, Europeans in
West Africa, 145o-156o (z vols., London, 1942), vol. i, pp. 28-39
IO
l
\
I
I
1o ' porque entao amancebadOs muitos [brancosl com negras

gentias, as quaes se tern par averiguado que esper~is:ao os partos, ou
matandoos depois de nacidos ou fazendoos abortivoS, o qual se
prova, porque estando amancebados, e crecendo bs ventres, nao hi
nenhnm s6 mulato em toda a aldeia, havendo tantos, donde as
negras parem a seu salvo' Cinform~ao da Mina') dated 29 Sept.
1572, apud AntOnio Bdsio C.S. Sp., Monumenta MissiotMria Ajricana.
Africa Ocidental val. iii, 1570-1599, Lisboa, 1953, p. 90). For a discussion of Portuguese penetration and influence in lower Guinea at
tills period see J. W. Blake, Europea11s in West Africa,: 1450-1560,
vol. i, pp. 40-57.

II
vicinity of the Castle of Sao Jorge da Mina only about

half of the 8oo Negro inhabitauts were Christiaus,
according to official reports of I6JI-2. This is certainly
not a very impressive total after rso years of Portuguese
occupation and missionary activity (or inactivity).
Portuguese influence on the mainland of Lower
Guinea from the Rio Volta to Cape St. Catherine was for
long exercised mainly through traders from the islaud
of Sao Tome after its colonization at the end of the
sixteenth century. At one time aud auother the Portuguese had high hopes of converting the Oba of Benin
and his subjects, but the efforts of their sixteenth-century
missionaries were no more successful in the long run than
were those of the Spanish and Italiau Capuchins who
attempted the same task at intervals between r648 aud
I7IJ. But if efforts to evangelize Benin more often
aroused deep suspicion of Christianity thau auy interest
in its beliefs, the missionaries aud the slave-traders from
Sao Tome spread the use of the Portuguese language
widely in this kingdom, where a knowledge of spoken
aud written Portuguese lasted for centuries. If William
Bosmau, writing at the turn of the seventeenth century
is to be trusted, Portuguese relations with the people of
Benin afforded a curious contrast to those they had with
the Joloffs at the other end of Guinea. 'The women
of Benin,' wrote the Dutchmau, 'behave themselves
very obligingly to all; but more especially to the
Europeaus, except the Portuguese which they don't like
very well; but our nation is very much in their favour.' 11
Uninhibited sexual intercourse between Black and

White did result in the creation of a thoroughly Portuguese Mulatto population, on the Cape Verde Islands aud
on those of Sao Tome and Principe in the Gulf of Guinea.
Whereas on the mainland it was more a matter of the
Portuguese traders and adventurers becoming Africanized
thau of the Negroes becoming Europeanized, the racial
fusion in the islands resulted in the dominauce ofEuropean
cultural traits. Both these islands were uninhabited when
they were first discovered, and they were both mainly
colonized by a mixture of whites sent from Portugal,
Spain and Italy, and of slaves imported from a wide
variety of tribes on the mainland, mauy of whom
subsequently secured their freedom. First the Cape Verde
Island of Santiago and then Sao Tome became slaving
depots, where slaves from Upper and Lower Guinea,
respectively, were collected and housed pending their
dispatch to the plantations and mines of Spanish America
and Brazil. Conversely, from the Cape Verdes and Sao
Tome, white Portuguese and Mulattoes sailed to Upper
and Lower Guinea, respectively, to trade for slaves,
11
{ed.
W. Bosman, A New and Accurate description of the coast of Guinea

1721), pp. 430-1. Cf. Pt. n, p. 252 of the original Dutch edition,
I2
1704. For a well documented survey of R.C. missions in Benin, see

A. F. C. Ryder, jThe Benin Missions' in Journal of the Histor~cal
Society .of Nigeria, vol. 2 (December, 1961), pp. 231-59, to whtch
may be added Mateo Aguiano O.F.M. Cap., Misiones Capuchinas en
Africa, II, Misiones al reino de Zinga, Benin, Arda, Guinea y Sierra
Leone (Madrid, 1957), and Fr. FrancisCo Leite de Faria, O.F.M.,
Cap.'s lengthy review of this work in StuJia. Revista Semestral, III
(Lisboa, 1959}, pp. 289-308, and his own numerpus articles on
Capuchin missions in West Africa published in the review Portugal
em Africa, 1950-1960. The figure for the number of native Christians
at Mina in 1631, is taken from an M.S. report dated Lisbon 17 January
1632 by the ex-governor, Manuel da Cunha, in the writer's collection.
IJ
gold, and ivory. Over succeeding centuries the racial

amalgam in the islands was complete, the Negro element
predominating in the physical make-up and the Portuguese in the cultural faqade.
The prosperity of the Cape Verde Islands was shortlived, and their slave-trade shifted to other centres during
the seventeenth century. In r627 the governor described
Santiago as the 'charnel-house and dungheap' of the
Portuguese empire, and its Mulatto inhabitants were
characterized as being the most vicious and immoral on
the face of the earth. The numerous foreign seafarers who
called briefly at the islands were usually most uncomplimentary about their inhabitants, and it is therefore
refreshing to find a warm defence of them by the
celebrated Jesuit Padre Antonio Vieira. 'They are all
black,' he wrote from Santiago on Christmas Day 1652,
'but it is only in this respect that they differ from
Europeans. They have great intelligence and ability, and
all the polity of people without religion and without
great wealth, which amounts to the light ofNature. There
are here clergy and canons as black as jet, but so well-bred,
last decade of the fifteenth century by levies of white

families sent out from Portugal, by forcibly baptized
Jewish children of both sexes, and, above all, by banished
criminals and convicts. Those of the deported Jewish
children who survived were married off as they grew
up, but an observer in rso6 claimed that 'few of the
women bore children of the white men; very many more
bore children of the Negroes, while the Negresses bore
children of the white men.' 13 All the unmarried men
were provided by the Crown with a Negress, avowedly
for breeding purposes, and a marriage ceremony seems
to have been optional. A Portuguese pilot who knew the
island well in the second quarter of the sixteenth century
tells us that in his day people of any European nationality
were welcome to settle there. 'They all have wives and
children, and some of the children who are born there
are as white as ours. It sometimes happens that, when
the wife of a merchant dies, he takes a Negress, and this is
an accepted practice, as the Negro population is both
intelligent and rich, bringing up their daughters in our
way of life, both as regards custom and dress. Children
born of these unions are of a dark complexion and called
Mulattoes, and they are mischievous and difficult to
authoritative,
SO
SO
learned, such great
lllUSicians, SO
discreet and so accomplished that they may be envied by

those in our own cathedrals at home.' Evidently Vieira's
exuberant pen was running away with him, but his
eulogy of the Cape Verde Islanders was probably not more
exaggerated than the bitter denunciation of their failings
penned by his predecessors twenty-five years earlier."
The island of Sao Tome was originally colonized in the
n1anage.' 14
apud Francisco Rodrigues S.J., Hist6ria da Companhia de Jesus na
assistncia de Portugal, Torno III. vol. 2, (Porto, 1944), pp. 448-70;

Letter of AntOnio Vieira S.J., d. Cape Verde, 25 Dec. 1652, apud]. L.
d'Azevedo (ed.) Cartas do Padre Ant6nio Vieira S.J., val. i, p. 295.
13
Apud, A. F. C. Ryder, 'An Early Portuguese trading voyage
to the Forcados River' (journal of the Historical Society of Nigeria),
vol. i; p. 298 n.
14
S. F. de- Mendo Trigoso (ed.), Viagem de Lisboa {; ilha de Siio
Tom! escrita por hum piloto Portugues (Lisboa, n.d.), pp. 51-52.
I4
I5
12
Jesuit reports on the Cape Verde Islands and mission, 1627-9,
The seamen who manned the ships trading from Sao

Tome to Lower Guinea, the Congo and Angola for
'black ivory' were almost all Mulattoes, and thus related
by blood to the slaves they exported. As in Cape Verde,
the bulk of the clergy in Sao Tome soon came to be
constituted of Mulattoes and free Negros, since their
mixed blood gave them a better resistance to tropical
diseases, and white clergy were loath to leave Portugal
for such a notoriously unhealthy place. The local authorities, as distinct from the colonists, sometimes gave eyjdence of colour-prejudice. A royal decree of 1528
reprimanded the governor for opposing the election of
Mulattoes to the town council, declaring they were
perfectly eligible so long as they were married men of
substance. Two years earlier, the Crown had granted a
petition of the local Negro freemen to found a branch of
the lay brotherhood of Our Lady of the Rosary. They
received privileges which were in some respects superior
to those enjoyed by the same confraternity at Lisbon. 15
For some fifty years after the Dutch took Axim in
1642, Portuguese contacts with Lower Guinea were few,
fleeting, and tenuous. The slave trade was concentrated
in Angola, Benguela, and, to a much smaller extent, the
area in Upper Guinea around Cacheu and Bissau. With
the discovery of gold in Minas Gerais in the last decade
of the seventeenth century it became urgently necessary
to fmd Negro slaves who were stronger and more fitted
for work in the mines than the Bantu from Angola and
the Congo. This led to the reopening of the slave-trade
between the Brazilian ports-Rio de Janeiro, Bahia, and
Recife-and the 'Costa da Mina' as the Portuguese called
Lower Guinea. Despite the intense opposition of the
Dutch at Elmina, who claimed the right to force all
Luso-Brazilian ships trading on the coast to call there and
pay a tax of 10 per cent on their tobacco cargoes, the
Portuguese succeeded in establishing themselves at
Whydah in 172r. After the conquest of this place by
Dahomey seven years later, an average of about 6,ooo
slaves was exported to Brazil from this port annually. The
Brazilian demand for slaves of Sudanese origin was
counterbalanced by the Dahomians' preference for Brazilian tobacco, rum, and sugar above all other. Hence, despite
periodic disputes between the two parties which involved
occasional interruptions in the trade, it continued to
flourish tmtil well into the nineteenth century. The LusoBrazilian slavers at times enjoyed a more favourable
position in Dahomey than any of their European rivals. 1 '
In surveying the relations of the Portuguese with the
Africans of the Guinea coast in the widest sense of the
term, it can be said that, apart from the immediate
vicinity of the forts at Mina and Axim, these relations
were characterized by peaceful commercial penetration
and by mutual interest in the slave-trade. Missionary
activities took a very secondary place, and nowhere did
they meet with any lasting or impressive success on the
15 A. Er:isio, S.C.Sp., Monumenta Missionaria Africana. Africa

Ocidental, val. i (Lisboa, 1952), pp. 331, 376, 391,472-4, SOD-I. Cf.
also A. F. C. Ryder's article cited in Note (n), and A. Teixeira da
Mota, 'Notas sabre a hist6ria dos Portugueses na Africa Negra', in

Baletim Ja Sociedade de Geografia JeLisboa,Jan.-March, 1959, pp. 27-55.
18
A. F. C. Ryder, 'The re-establishment of Portuguese factories
on the Costa da Mina to the mid-eighteenth century', in Journal of
the Historical Society of Nigeria, vol. i (Dec. 1958), pp. 157-83.
r6
17
mainland. While the prestige of the Portuguese traders

was greater than that of their European rivals in some
regions and at certain times, the reverse was the case on
other occasions. A Frenchman who attended the coronation of the King ofWhydah in 1725 reported that while
the French, English, and Dutch Directors and their
respective suites were allowed to remain seated with their
hats on, the Portuguese Director and his subordinates were
forced to stand bareheaded behind the other Europeans.
He also alleged that no Portuguese would dare to strike
a Negro who insulted him, 'for fear he might promptly
receive twice as many blows, and perhaps something
worse', whereas a Frenchman might even kill a Negro in
such circumstances without incurring the wrath of the
King." At a later date the rulers of Dahomey did not
hesitate to remove, imprison, or deport to Brazil those
of the Portuguese Directors at Sao Joao Baptista de
Ajuda (Whydah) who displeased them. Nor were the
authorities at Lisbon and Bahia able to take reprisals for
such despotic treatment, as this wo~d have involved the
cessation of the profitable slave-trade. 18 But whether the
Portuguese were treated by the Africans better or worse
than the other Europeans who traded for slaves, gold, and
ivory along the coast, it was the Portuguese language

which was most widely spoken and which formed the basis
of several creole dialects, some ofwhich survive to this day.
The Portuguese discovered the old kingdom of Congo
in the same year that they built Sao Jorge da Mina on the
Gold Coast (1482). The core of this Bantu kingdom lay
in what is now Northern Angola, between the river
Dande and the river Zaire (Congo). King John II of
Portugal (in whose reign the great river was discovered)
and his successors of the House of Aviz did not attempt
to secure political control of this kingdom, nor did they
try to conquer it by force of arms. They were content to
recognize the kings of Congo as their brothers-in-arms;
to treat them as allies and not as vassals; and to convert
them and their subjects to Christianity by the dispatch of
missionaries to the Congo and by educating selected
Congolese youths at the monastery of St. Eloi and elsewhere at Lisbon. Nor were their efforts limited to
propagating Christianity. The early Portuguese embassies
and missions included not only priests and friars, but
skilled workers and artisans, such as bricklayers, blacksmiths, masons, and agricultural labourers. Even two
German printers emigrated voluntarily with their press
to the island of Sao Tome in 1492, presumably with a
view to working in or for the Congo kingdom; and
several white women were sent out to teach the local
ladies the arts of domestic economy as practised in Portugal. One of the Congolese princes sent to Europe for
his education was later consecrated titular Bishop of
Utica by a rather reluctant Pope, at the King ofPortugal' s
1 7 Voyage du chevalier Des Marchais en Guine (1730) quoted by

Clado Ribeiro de Lessa, Viagem de Africa em o reino de Dahome
escrito pelo Padre Vicente Ferreira Pires no anode 1800 (Sao Paulo, 1957),
pp. 189--90. For an instillce of where the Portuguese were better
treated than other Europeans in Guinea, see Villante de Bellefond apud

A. Teixeira da Mota, Notas sabre a historia dos Portugueses na Africa
Negra (Lisboa, 1959), p. JJ.

u Clado Ribeiro Lessa, op. cit., pp.
re-establishment,' op. et loc. cit.
!8
200-2;
A. F. C. Ryder, 'The
insistence in rsr8.
19
The most ardent advocate of Western religion and

civilization in the sixteenth-century Congo was King
Dom Affonso I, who ruled from 1506 to 1543. This
monarch was a gennine, fervent, and intelligent convert
to Christianity who did his utmost to implant the new
religion by precept and example. Portuguese traders,
workers, and missionaries were warmly welcomed, and,
for a time at least, the Congolese showed an enthusiastic
willingness to adopt the ways of Western life which
anticipated that of the Japanese three htmdred and fifty
years later. The kings of Congo modelled their court at
Mbanza Congo-now renamed Sao Salvador-on that
of Lisbon; the principal chiefs were given the European
titles of Duke, Marqnis, and Count; and schools were
opened for the teaching of the Portuguese language and
the Christian religion. Unfortuuately, this promising experiment broke down after Dom Affonso I' s death, partly
because of Portugal's rapidly growing commitments in
Asia and South America, but mainly owing to the
spread and intensification of the slave-trade.19
Clerical morality was at a low ebb all over early

sixteenth century Europe, and several of the pioneer
missionaries to the Congo led anything but edifying
lives, if they were lucky enough to survive the malaria
and other tropical diseases which qttickly killed their
colleagues. Although the majority of the Portuguese
commuuity, whether clerical or lay, for some decades
mixed amicably with the Congolese in general and mated
freely with the women in particular, a bad impression
was made by the race-prejudice displayed by certain
individuals. On one occasion, the resident Portuguese
judge in the Congolese capital, when invited by Dom
Affonso I to reside in his place, rudely replied that he
wonld not live with the Congolese monarch nor with any
other Negro for all the wealth in Portugal. Fernao
de Mello, who was governor of Sao Tome for much of
Dom Alfonso's reign, also systematically sabotaged all
the efforts of the Portuguese and Congolese kings to
achieve the results which they both desired. He did not
hesitate to incite the Portuguese missionaries and merchants in the Congo to neglect their work of conversion
and education in favour of intensifying the slave-trade,
and it must be admitted that many of them did not need
much urging. A considerable Mulatto commuuity grew
up at Sao Salvador, and it was from this element that the
local clergy were mainly recruited. In due course, they
became bitterly anti-Portuguese, as visiting Jesnit and
Capuchin missionaries fouud in their turn. In 164r-48,
the Cathedral Chapter of Sao Salvador and the King of
Congo, while remaining loyal Catholics in communion
with Rome, warmly supported the Calvinist Dutch
19
The history of Portuguese relations with the kingdom of
Congo in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries is relatively well

documented. In addition to Father A. Bdsio C.S.Sp., ro-volume
Monumenta Missionaria Africana. Africa Ocidental, which has now

reached the year 1646 and is still in progress, see Visconde de Paiva
Manso, Hist6ria do Congo. Documentos (Lisboa, 1877); J. Cuvelier,
L'Ancien royaume de Congo (Brussels, 1946); J. Cuvelier and L. Jadin,
L'Ancien Congo d'apres les archives Romaines, 1518-1640 {Brussels,
1954); L. Jadin, Le Congo et Ia secte des Antoniens. Restauration du
royaume sous Pedro IV et la 'saint Antoine' Congolaise, 1694-1718
(Brussels, 1961). For succinct surveys in English cf. Basil Davidson,
Black Mother. Africa: The years of trial (London, I96I), pp. II5-50;
James Duffy, Portuguese Africa (Cambridge, Mass., 1959), pp. 5-23;

ibid., Portugal in Africa (London, I962), pp. 37-46.
20
2I
invaders of Angola, and even placed images of heretic

Dutchmen on their altars.
By the end of the sixteenth century the principal West
African slave-markets, which had originally been in
Guinea and then in Congo, were located in Angola and
Benguela. The attitude of the Portuguese towards the
peoples south of the river Bengo forms a curious contrast
with the efforts so persistently made to convert and
Europeanize the Congoleoe by peaceful means. The
inhabitants of the country south of this river were
admittedly rather less advanced than those of the old
kingdom of Congo when the Portuguese first made
enduring contacts with the former; but this does not
entirely explain the summary way in which for the most
part they were treated. Disillusionment at the meagre
results obtained in the Congo after such a promising
start, evidently had a good deal to do with it. As early
as 1563, a pioneer Jesuit missionary in Angola advocated
what one of his colleagues in Brazil termed 'preaching
with the sword and the rod of iron'. 20 Padre Francisco
de Gouveia S.J., who was detained for many years at the
kraal of the N gola, or chief from whom Angola derives

its name, and who then owed a shadowy allegiance to
the Congo king, explained that these Bantu were barbarous savages who could not be converted by the
methods of peaceful persuasion that were employed with
such cultured Asian nations as the Japanese and Chinese.
Christianity in Angola, he wrote, must be imposed by
force, although, once the Bantu were converted, they
would make excellent Christi"<'s. This was, and for long
remained, the general view among Portuguese laymen
and missionaries alike.
The advocacy of the Church militant fitted in well
enough with the proposals of Paulo Dias de Novais, a
grandson of the discoverer of the Cape of Good Hope,
who was then pressing his scheme for the conquest and
colonization of Angola upon a somewhat hesitant court.
The charter that was finally given him by the Crown in
1571 envisaged the colonization of atleasta part of Angola
by peasant families from Portugal, who were to be provided with 'all the seeds and plants which they can take
from this kingdom and from the island of Sao Tome'.
But when Paulo Dias' expedition arrived off Luanda in
February r 575, the slave-trade was already in full swing;
malaria and other tropical diseases proved an insuperable
obstacle to white colonization for the next three centuries;
and the high ideals of the royal charter were soon abandoned for the unrestrained procurement ofpefas, 'pieces',
as Negro slaves were termed.
This demand for slaves intensified and perpetuated the
inter-tribal wars which raged in the interior, and in which
the cannibal Jagas-ancestors of the modern Bayaka-
20 ' para este g6nero de gente nao ha me1hor pregac;ao do

que espada e vara de ferro' (letter of Fr. Jose de Anchieta S.J. d. r6
April 1563). Padre Garcia SimOes S.J., wrote from Luanda to the
Jesuit Provincial, 20 October 1575, that nearly everyone with
experience of the Congo and Angola agreed that the subjugation of
theN egroes must precede their conversion: 'quasi todos tem por averiguado que a conversio destes Barbaros nao se alcanyad. por amor,
senao depois que por armas for em sogeitos e vassallos del Rei N ossa
Senhor'. For this and similar advocacy of forcible conversions cf. A.
Bdsio, S.S.Sp., Mommwnta lv!issionaria Africana. Africa Ocidental, vol.
ii, pp. 566-9; ibid., op. cit. vol. iii, pp. 142,205, 348, 375, 477, and for
a solitary opinion in the contrary sense, pp. 279-80.
22
23
played such a prominent part. In earlier years, the Portuguese had aided successive kings of Congo against these
barbarous invaders, who, at one time, had sacked the
capital itself and who had only been driven off by timely
assistance from Sao Tome. In Angola and Benguela,
however, the Jagas were mostly on good terms with the
white men. They formed the backbone of the guerra
preta ('Black War') or native auxiliaries (also known as
empacasseiros from a word meaning buffalo-hunters),
with whose aid the Portuguese dominated the other tribes.
'Their chiefs pride themselves on being very loyal to
us,' wrote a Portuguese chronicler at Luanda in r68r,
'for which reason they are hated by the other heathen
of these kingdoms, and this warlike band terrorizes all
this part ofEthiopia.' 21
At tllis period many of the Jagas were still caffilibals,
eating human flesh not merely as a ritual sacrifice, but as
a matter of habit, convenience, and conviction. They
originally killed all their own offspring, and kept the
choicest of the youtlls and maidens whom tlley captured
in war, bringing tllem up in the 'law of the Jagas'.
Unlike the other Bantu tribes, they kept no flocks and
indulged in no agricnltural pursuits. They were primarily
nomadic robbers, and were, therefore, rather a collection

of wandering hordes than an ethnic tribe. During the
second half of the seventeenth century, they gradually
became used to a more settled existence, and their women
were allowed to give birth outside the quilombo, or warcamp, and could bring up their children instead of
killing them. On the death of a Jaga chief, there was an
interregnum during which all tile bush-paths were
closed, the goods of itinerant traders were forfeited, and
also the lives of any persons who might try to travel.
A similar custom prevailed in tile so-called empire of the
Monomotapa, or Ma-Karanga (Wa-Karanga) tribal
confederacy in what is now called Southern Rhodesia
and Mo<;ambique; and it was likewise carried on by
the Ovimbundu of Benguela into tile present century.
hlter-tribal warfare undoubtedly existed in this part of
Africa before the arrival of the Portuguese and of tile
Jagas; but there is also no doubt tllat the slave-raiding wars
and expeditions were subsequently intensified with a view
to procuring slaves for tile Brazilian and Spanish-American plantations and mines. This dreary round of fighting,
slave-raiding, and slave-trading continued in the hinterland of Angola with few intermissions for over two
centuries. As Manuel Severim de Faria noted in r625:
'There has been no tiling but ftghting in Angola from the
beginning of the conquest till now, and very little has
been done for the conversion of the inhabitants of that
great province, the majority of whom are in the same state
as when we first entered therein, and more scandalized by
our weapons than edified by our religion.' On another
occasion, after receiving news of the devastation wrought
21 '. se prczao de muito leaes, cauza porque se fia delles as

couzas de mayor importancia, pella que sao odiados do gentio deste'
reinos, e faz este corpo de guerra atemorizar a toda esta Ethiopia,
(AntOnio de Oliviera Cadornega),Hist6riaGeral das GtlerrasAngolanass

(ed. J vols., Lisboa, 1940-2), val. iii, p. 165. For the Jagas cf. M.
Plancquaert, Les Jag a et les Bayaka du Kwango. Contribution HistoricoEtlmographiqHe (Brussels, 1932); Gladwyn Murray Childs, 'The
peoples of Angola in
the seventeenth century according to Cador-
nega', injoHrnal of African History, vol. i (1960), pp. 271-9.
24
25
by a Portuguese punitive column in the interior, he

commented sadly: "one cannot see any good effect
resulting from so much butchery; for this is not the way
in which commerce can flourish and the preaching of the
gospel progress, which is what is needed in that State.'
The Crown of Portugal sometimes tried to curb the bellic~se propensities of the governors and settlers, as instanced
by King John IV in 1649, when he drastically modified
the terms of the onerous treaty imposed by the governor
of Angola on the King of Congo. He observed that the
Portugnese had given the Bantn monarch needless provocation by their own misbehaviour, adding that in future
the governor should 'treat those heathen and the King
of Congo with greater clemency.'"
These views were not shared by most white men on the
spot, whose opinion of the African is reflected in the pages
of the Hist6ria Geral das Guerras Angolanas ('General
History of the Angolan Wars'), compiled by Antonio
de Oliveira Cadornega in 1681-3, after a residence of
over forty years in Angola. Cadornega never tired of
stressing that 'all these heathen people are not ruled nor
do they obey through love, but only through brute
force'. Drastic measures were needed to keep the Bantu
in their p!.ce, he averred. 'For these heathen, more than
those of any other nation, act on the principle of "long
live the winner", and as Negroes they fear nothing save

only corporal pnnishment and the whip; as was the case
with the Romans and the Libertines, when the former
could not subdue the latter by force of arms but only by
the lash with which they punished and whipped them.
It is only in this way that former governors and conquerors have kept them in subjection, and only in this
way can we keep what we have won by force of arms in
these kingdoms.' After reconnting the mass execution of
numerons chiefs who were suspected of plotting against
Portngnese rule in 1624, he adds that this example
'remained unforgettable for fnture generations, and left
all the heathen of these kingdoms frightened and terrorized, since it is only by force and fear that we can maintain our position over these indomitable heathen'. This
viewpoint is likewise reflected in mnch of the official
correspondence emanating from Lnanda for over two
centuries. For instance, Joao Fernandes Vieira, Mulatto
paladin of the Pernambnco campaigns against the Dutch
in 1645-54, and governor of Angola in 1658-61, reminded
the Crown that it was an 'old and approved usage' never
to allow a Negro to lift his hand against a white man,
'because the preservation of the kingdom depends upon
this obedience and fear.' 23
:a:a Manuel Severim de Faria, Notidas de Portugal (Evora, 1655),

pp. 225-7, 235-6; Cf. Ralph Delgado, Historia de Angola (4 vols.,
Benguela and Lobito, 1948-55), val. ii, pp. 58-59; Cadornega,
Hist6ria Geral (ed. 1940), val. i, p. 90 n; For the treaty of 164-9 v.rith
the King of Congo and King John IV's comments thereon, C. R.
Boxer, Salvador de S& and the struggle for Brazil m1d Angola, 16oz-1686
(London, 1952), pp. 275-8.
26
I
I
23 ' do gentio da terra a quem por costume antigo e aprovado

se lhe nega authoridade para poder ofender (ne111 ainda levemente) a
homens brancos, porque nesta obediencia e temor consiste -a conservayio do Reina' (Joio Fernandes Vieira to the Crown, Luanda
15. ix. 1659, in Arquivo Historico Ultramarine, Lisboa, 'Angola,
Papeis Avulsos de 1659''). For Cadornega's advocacy of wlut wmtld
nowadays be termed 'Nigger bashing', cf. Hist6ria Gcral das Guerra.~
Angolanas, val. i, pp. 91-92,260-1; vol. ii, pp. 142-3; vol. iii, pp. 4.0,
165.
27
For over 250 years Angola was regarded as the principal

slave market for Portugal's empire in the south Atlantic,
apart from furnishing many slaves to Spanish America
as well for most of that time. An enthusiastic official,
writing of what seemed to be the limitless possibilities of
this market for 'black ivory' in 1591, assured the Crown
that the hinterland of Luanda was so thickly populated
that it would furnish a copious supply of slaves 'until
the end of the world'. Bento Banha Cardozo, one of
the conquistadores of Angola, concluded his account of the
natural resources of that kingdom in r622 with the
words: 'very little attention is paid to these things there,
because most people being employed in the slave-trade
they neglect everything else.' By the end of the seventeenth-century various authorities were deploring the
serious decline in the population of Angola, owing to the
internecine wars, excessive forced labour and the ravages
of smallpox. A report by Prince Pedro's Jesuit confessor
stated that whereas formerly Angola 'did not have a span
of land that was not inhabited', nowadays the slavetraders had to travel for three months into the interior
before reaching the markets (pumbos) where slaves were
sold. 24
Most of the traders who went on these long journeys
were Mulattoes or Negroes, and individual whites who

ventured beyond the furthermost Portuguese outposts
naturally had to show respect and deference to the
independent African chiefs through whose lands they
passed. But this did not prevent the slave-traders in
general from oppressing the sovas (chiefs) who owed
allegiance to the Portuguese Crown, by demanding
(unpaid) porters and carriers from them, despite frequent
legislation against such abuses. The opinion of the average
white Portuguese iu Angola of the Negroes whom they
enslaved was reflected in a memorial of c. 1694 drawn up
by all those engaged in this commerce at Luanda, and
which described the slaves as being 'brutes without
intelligent understanding', and 'almost, if one may say
so, irrational beings' 25 This was an attitude which
peristed for centuries, and which was based on the firm
conviction that the Negro was f1tted only to be a slave or
an indentured labourer. An Englishman with long
experience of Portuguese Africa noted with warm approval that the Portuguese had never viewed the Negro
'in anything but a proper and practical light; for them he
is first and last the mi'io d' obra ~abouring hand), and any
proposition tending to lessen his value in that capacity
would never, and will never be entertained by them'. 26
24
Domingos de Abreu e Brito apud A. Albuquerque Feiner, Um
inquCrito 4 vida administrativa e economica de Angola e do Brasil em fins

do siculo XVI (Coimbra, 1931), p. 35; Bento Banha Cardozo apud
Luciano Cordeiro, Viagens, explorafoCs e conquistas dos Portugueses,
162o-162g. Producfoes, comercio e govemo do Congo e Angola (Lisboa,
r88r), p. rS. Manuel Fernandes, S.J., 'Voto sabre as vexac;:oins que
se fazem aos negroes de Angola', Ms. of c. 1670 in BAL, Cod. so-V39, Torno V, doc. 24, fls. 4o-4r.
28
25 '. . . os ditos escravos como brutes e sem juizo discursive . . .

para quem he brute e quasi (se assim se pode dizer) irracional . ..
('Copia de huma petiyam que o povo e mais moradores e forasteiros
fizeriio ao Senado da Camara', s.d. but c. 1694-, in the archives of the
Municipal Council of Luanda).

2 6 R. C. F. Maugham, Portuguese East Africa. The history, scenery and
great game of Manica and Sofa/a (London, 1906), pp. JOI-J. Though
written of Moc;:ambique, this observation is equally applicable to
Angola.
29
The need for affirming white superiority by means of

display as well as through force was adumbrated as follows
by Cadornega in r68r: 'Every kind of display and power
is necessary when dealing with this heathen, for this is
what they respect. In the land and district of any one of
these Savas, a noble Portuguese who does not take with
him many Negroes and Negresses for the service of his
household who are called Mocamas, and other outdoor
servants, such as cooks, washerwomen, and others who
get water and firewood from the bush, with many
musical instruments such as marimbas, chucalhos, bagpipes,
native viols, etc.,~if he does not have this train, even
though he may be a great ftdalgo as we said, they do not
respect him in the least, saying that he is a poor man, and
poverty among them is a shame; whereas if any low-class
white man appears with such a train and well dressed,
that is the one they respect and admire as a lord.'"
Although Cadornega, like most of his com1trymen,
was a convinced advocate of keeping the Negro in his
place at the bottom of the social scale, he had a good
word for the Mulatto, Mesti~o, or half-breed community,
whose origin and development he described as follows:
'The soldiers of the garrison and other European
individuals father many children on the black ladies, for
want of white ladies, with the result that there are many
Mulattoes and Coloureds (pardos). The sons of these
unions make great soldiers, chiefly in the wars in the
backlands against the heathen inhabitants. They can
endure severe hardships and very short commons, and go
without shoes. Many of them become great men. When

this conquest began, all the most important conquerors,
with the exception of a few who brought their families,
accommodated themselves with Mulatas, daughters of
respectable settlers and conquerors by their female
slaves or free concubines.' Cadornega claimed that many
of the descendants of these inter-racial unions became
people of importance and could be compared with those
resulting from racially mixed marriages in Portuguese
India and Brazil. 28
Cadornega does not state whether Mulattoes or
Octoroons were allowed to become members of the
town councils in Luanda and other Angolan muuicipalities, as they were in Cape Verde and Sao Tome, but
which was not allowed in eighteenth-century Brazil. In
view of the extreme shortage of white women in Angola
and Benguela and the large number of Mulattoes, it
would seem that they must have been admitted in practice
if not in theory. This is the more likely, as in r684 the
Crown of Portugal had speciftcally ruled that no attention should be paid to a man's colour when military
promotions and appointments were made in the Angola
garrison and militia units. A petition of the Luanda
mmncipal council to the Crown in I7IJ stated that the
Luanda militia regiment was then organized on a basis
of complete racial equality, though the petitioners
requested that one of the companies should henceforth
be recruited only from those citizens who were entitled
to hold municipal offices and from their descendants-
27
Cadornega, Hist6ria Geral das Guerras Angolanas (ed. 194.0),
vol. i, p.
118
Cadomega, Hist6ria Geral das Guerras Angolanas (ed. 1942),
vol. iii, p. 30.
210.
30
3I
in other words presumably from whites and nearwhites.29

I have not been able to ascertain the result of this
petition, but in any case a prejudice against Mulattoes and
Mestiyos certainly existed in Angola at this time and for
long afterwards. A resident Italian Capuchin friar, Fr.
Girolamo Merolla, wrote of these mixed breeds in r69r:
'They hate the Negroes mortally, even their own
mothers that bore them, and do all they can to equal
themselves with whites, which is not allowed them, they
not being permitted to sit in their presence.' 30 This statement would seem to be exaggerated, especially when we
recall Cadornega' s contemporary testimony that many
of the Mulattoes distinguished themselves in the wars in
the backlands and became 'great men.' Perhaps Cadornega was thinking more particularly of the Angolanborn Luis Lopes de Sequeira, whose mother was evidently
a coloured woman, and who commanded the Portuguese
force which defeated and killed King Dom Antonio I of
Congo at the battle of Ambnila (29 October r66s). h1

any event, by the last quarter of the eighteenth century the
Mulatto militia officers were allowed to frequent the
governor-general's official reception on the same footing
as whites-a practice which a Luso-Brazilian officer contrasted with that obtaining in Rio de Janeiro, where the
viceroy would ouly allow coloured militia officers to
make their bows to him from the doorway, after their
white colleagues had kissed his hand."
The ambivalent attitude of the white Portuguese
towards their Mulatto kith and kin, comes out very clearly
in the discussions which lasted intermittently for the best
part of three centuries on the formation of a native clergy.
We have seen that the Pope, at Portuguese prompting,
consecrated a Congolese as titular Bishop of Utica in
rsr8. This particular precedent was not followed for
several centuries, but a Papal brief of the same year
authorized Portuguese bishops to ordain 'Ethiopians,
Indians, and Africans', who might reach the educational
and moral standards required for the priesthood. 32 I
have said that this was done from the early sixteenth century in the Cape Verde Islands and Sao Tome, and it was
likewise practised in Angola, but the Negro, Mulatto and
Mestis:o clergy were subjected to a continual flow of
criticism. The Italian Capuchin missionaries who worked
29 'Senhor, o terc;:o da ordenanp desta Cidade corista de 4 companhias s6mente par nao haver gente de que se possio formar mais:
nellas nao ha distin~ao de pessoas, porque todas servem difuzamente
Nobres e Plebeos, de que se seguem bastantes inconvenientes que se
poderao atalhar ordenando Vossa Magestade que se observa neste
Reina o mesmo que no Estado do Brazil que he servirem em huma
dellas os homens cidadoins que costumao servir na Republica e seas
ftlhos somente' (Luanda Municipal Council to the Crown, 2 August '
I7IJ, in Archives of the Municipal Council, Luanda, Codex 483,
fl. 100). For the carta-dgia of 24 March 1684, abolishing the colourbar in military promotions and postings, see Ralph Delgado, His-
t6ria de Angola, vol. iv (1955), p. 58.
31
E. A. da Silva Correa, Hist6ria de Angola, 1792 (ed. 2 vols.,
Lisboa, 1937), vol. i, p. 84. For the career of Luis Lopes de Sequeira,
the victor of Ambuila (1665) and Ptmgo-Andongo (167r), killed in

action in r68r, see Ralph Delgado, Hist6ria de Angola, vols. iii, iv
the first English edition of his Vioggio in Chmchill, Collection of

Voyages, vol. i (1704), p. 739
passim.
az Brief of Leo X dated 12 June 1518 apud A. Bd.sio, C.S.Sp.,
Monumenta Missionaria Africana, vol. i, pp. 421-2.
32
33
30
The author died at Luanda in 1697,
and the
quotation is from
in the Congo and Angola for most of the seventeenth and

eighteenth centuries were particularly scathing in their
denunciations of the coloured secular clergy ordained
by successive bishops of Luanda, stigmatizing them as
concupiscent, simoniacal, aud actively engaged in the
slave-trade. Their scandalous way of life largely nullified
the Capuchins' work of conversion in the interior and led
to widespread relaxation of ecclesiastical discipline. 33
On the other hand, the Bishop of Luanda stated in
r689, that it was virtually impossible to train pureblooded Negroes for the priesthood, although Cadomega
tells us that the Jesuits did train some at d1eir college.
The Bishop further alleged that there were not nearly
enough white clergy. to staff the missions in the interior,
and that the annual death-rate among the few white
clergy available was exceedingly high. This meant that
recourse had to be had to the Mulattoes and Mestiqos,
who enjoyed the additional advantages of being better
acclimatized and fmding it easier to learn the indigenous
languages. 34 From time to time, suggestions were made
an For some typical examples of the continuous and scathing
criticism of the white, Negro and Mestir;o secular clergy cf. A. Bd.sio.
C.S.Sp., Monurnenta Missionaria Africana, val. iii, 297, 4-93 ; ibid, op,
cit., val. v, pp. 51-52, 56, 285, 288, 312-13, 590, 613; val. vi, pp.
283-5, 366-74, 342,' 415; val. vii, pp. 64-65, 255, 274-5, 360, 522,
562, 564; val. viii, pp. 95, 175-6,242-3, 343, 464--5; vol. ix, pp. 14,
106,146; Ralph Delgado, Hist6ria de Angola, val. iv, pp. 54-55, r667I, 237-8,-299-301, 365-78; Gastio de Sousa Dias, Os Portugueses em
Angola (Lisboa, 1959), pp. 173-6; L. Jadin. Le Congo et Ia secte des
Antoniens. Restauration du royaume sous Pedro IV et la 'saint Antoine'
congolaise, 1694-1718, pp. 430-r, 467, 487, 578, 592, 6oo-r.
,
34 L. Jadin, op. cit., p. 430, summarizing the Bishop's letter to the
Congregation of the Propaganda, d. Luanda, 25 February r689.
34
both at Lisbon and Luanda, that it would be better to

educate Negroes and Mulattoes for the priesthood m
Europe rather than in the demoralizing environments of
Cape Verde, Sao Tome, and Angola. None of these
schemes came to anything concrete, unless we except
the preliminary experiment with the Congolese youths
at the convent of St. Eloi in the early sixteenth century.
The situation continued to deteriorate throughout the
eighteenth century, and Dom Francisco Inocencio de
Sousa Coutinho, by common consent one of the best
governors that Angola ever had, spoke for many besides
himself when he denigrated the coloured clergy on the
grotmds that 'whiteness of skin and purity of soul' were
usually interdependent. 35 It may be added that the
Mulatto and Mestiqo secular clergy of Angola, though,
ofteh criticized by their white contemporaries, never
became anti-Portuguese as did the coloured clergy of the
old kingdom of Congo.
In strong contrast to the criticisms continually voiced
of the coloured secular clergy, and fairly frequently of
the Jesuits and Carmelites who worked in Angola, was
the high praise bestowed by successive governors and
bishops, as well as by Portuguese and African laymen,
on the self-sacrificing labours of the Italian Capuchin
missionaries. From the time of their establishment ar
Luanda in 1649, they were by far the most exemplary
of all the religious orders, and the only missionaries who
worked for many years on end in the fever-stricken
interior. Cadornega testifies to the high esteem in which
35
AntOnio da Silva Rego, Curso de Missionologia (Lisboa, 1956)
p. 297-
35
they were held, and the Municipal CoUllcillors of Luanda

informed the Cardinals of the Sacred College of the
Propaganda Fide in r678 that they rendered 'innumerable services' to Black and White alike. Nor was this an
exaggeration. Long after they had disappeared from the
scene, an English traveller of the r86os commented on
the fruits, vegetables, and plants which they had introduced, on the arts and crafts they had taught, and on the
veneration in which the Bantu held their memory
'everywhere in Angola'. 36
One region which was more than superficially affected
by Portuguese cultural influences was the area between
the rivers Bengo and Loge, inhabited by the Dembos.
Most of their chiefs were baptized Christians and used
the title of Dom, while some of them had their own
household chaplains. In Cadornega' s day they had many
Portuguese traders living more or less under their
jurisdiction, and other Portuguese who were employed
by them in various capacities. These white men would
accompany the Dembo chief in whose lands they lived
when he went to hear Mass or left his banza (kraal) on
special occasions. Use of the Portuguese language was
widespread and many of the leading men could read and
write it. At one time firm allies of the Portuguese, they

subsequently fell out with them and became virtually
mdependent. 37 The Dembos region was in a state of
revolt for most of the nineteenth century, and was the
scene of many of the sanguinary events enacted on
Angolan soil in I96I. It is rather curious that the two
regions where the Portuguese cultural influence was most
enduring-the old kingdom of Congo and the Dembosshould be the two which subsequently became the most
bitterly opposed to Portuguese rule and which formed
the centres of revolt in our own day.
The Overseas Collllcillors at Lisbon, when discussing
the advisibility of introducing a copper coinage into
Angola in r688, reminded King Pedro II that the preservation of Brazil depended on the continuous supply
of slaves from Angola, which was then rllllning at the
rate of about six or seven thousand a year. They added
that the Negroes 'loathed our rule and fervently desired
to throw us out of that conquest; and only out of fear
aud respect for our arms did they allow the preaching
of the gospel and the admission of our trade'. 38 By and
large, this state of affairs remained the same for the rest
37
Cadomega, Hist6ria Geral das Guerras Angolanas, vol. iii (ed.
1942)? pp. 20o-:!. The standard mo~ern work on the Dembos is

36
Letter of the Municipal Council of Luanda to the Cardinals of

the Propaganda Fide, d. I I November 1676, in the Archives of the
Municipal Council at Luanda, Codex 482, fls. 18-ig; Arquivos de
Angola, 2a. serie, vol. vii {Jan.-June 1950), dedicated to the missionary
action of the Capuchins in the Congo. and Angola, especially pp.
59-64; Cadornega, Hist6ria Cera[ das Guerras Angolanas, vol. ii (ed.
1940), pp. 49-52, 485-93; Paiva Manso, Hist6ria do Congo. Documentos (Lisboa, 1877), pp. zro--64, 289-369; J. Monteiro, Angola and
the River Congo (2 vols., London, 1875), val. ii, pp. 96-98.
by
Hennque _Galvao, De':"bos (2 vols, L1sboa, n.d.). The Dembos region

was eff<:!Ctlvely occup1ed by Joio de Almeida in 1907
38
'porque os Negros aborreciam o nosso dornmio e desejavam
com excesso lanc;ar-nos ~aquela conquista e s6 pelo temor e respeito
das nossas ~a; permet1am a pregas=ao do evangelho e admitiam o
nosso comhcm (Consulta of the Conselho Ultramarine, d. 3r March
r688, apud Cadornega, Hist6ria Geral das Guerras Angolanas, val. ii,
PP 536-7). C Cadornega, Hist6ria Geral das Guerras Angolanas
val. iii, pp. 381-2.
'
37
of the period with which we arc concerned; and it helps

to explain why Angola never became a second Braziland, perhaps, why it is hardly likely to become one
now.
There were, of course, other reasons for the failure of
the Portuguese to develop in the Congo and Angola a
multi-racial but white-dominated type of society such as
ultimately emerged in Brazil. The African tribal societies
which they encountered, primitive in some respects as
they 1nay have been, were n1uch stronger, more numerous
and better able to resist European penetration than were
the thinly scattered Stone-Age Amerindians of Brazil.
The South American geographical environment, with all
its tropical hazards, was less of an obstacle than were the
fever-ridden valleys of the Zaire, Cuanza, and Bengo
rivers. The annual mortality among the whites in Angola
and Benguela was always far higher than among those in
Brazil. Very few white women ever went to Angola, and
none at all to Benguela for the best part of two hundred
years. White women were admittedly in short supply in
colonial Brazil, but far more went there than ever went
to West Africa-or, for that matter, than to East Africa
or to India. Miscegenation was, of course, the general
rule on both sides of the South Atlantic; but given the
fact that West Africa was then literally as well as figuratively the 'white man's grave', far fewer Mulattoes were
born and bred in Angola than in Brazil. A Capuchin
friar who visited both Luanda and Bahia at the turn of the
seventeenth century estin1ated that the population of the
former city comprised 40,000 Blacks, 4,ooo Whites, and
6,ooo Mulattoes, and that of the latter city 20,000
Whites, 50,000 Blacks, and 8,ooo or ro,ooo Mulattoes.

These figures were only rough calculations, but they
probably reflect fairly accurately the relative proportion
between white and coloured at one to three in Bahia and
one to ten in Luanda. For the rest, even in Cadornega' s
day Luanda was becoming an Africanized city, and this
was still more so a century later, as can be seen from the
classic account of Elias da Silva Correia."
The result of concentrating virtually all efforts on the
slave-trade in Angola for over two centuries, was the
formation of a powerful slave-owning and slave-trading
white class, the growth of a detribalized class of Negroes
who co-operated in this trade with the Portuguese, and
the appearance of a Mulatto and Mesti<;o class, some of
whom attained important positions in the militia, in the
slave-trade, and in the Church ... These three classes were
virtually limited to the coastal towns, of which Luanda
was the only one of any size, and to the vicinity of a few
strong-points (presidios) in the interior, none of which
were more than two hundred miles from the coast. In
the rest of the country, the tribal organization and way of
life remained basically unaffected by Portuguese cultural
38
39
89
Antonio Zucchelli, O.F.M.Cap., Relazioni del viaggio e
missione di Congo nelt.F:thi~p.ia ItifCrio~e Occidentale (Venice, I7I2), pp.
70-7I, 102. Zucchelh vmted ~ahu and Luanda in r698-I703;

Cadorneg~, HistOria Geral das. Guerras Angolanas, vo1. iii, pp. z8-JI,
38r-6; Ehas Alexandre da Silva Correia, Hi.st6ria de Angola (ed. 2
vols., Lisboa, I9J7), vol. i, pp. 77-84.
40
III Co!Oquio Internacional de E.studos Luso-Brasileiros 1957,
Aetas, vol.i (Lisboo, I959), p. rSS. Cf. ibid, pp. Iji-J, I92-8, for
diffe~ent VIews on why Angola did not develop in the same way as
Braz1l. C also Jose Hon6rio Rodrigues, Brazil e Africa: ol/fro
horizonte (Rio de Janeiro, I96r).
influence, with the partial exception of the Dembos,

and the Ambaquistas or itinerant traders of Ambaca.
Another result of Portuguese concentration on the
slave-trade was the rooted conviction that the Negro
could legitimately be enslaved and hence was indisputably an inferior being to the white man. The Portuguese
male might and did mate freely with the Negress,
whether bond or free; and, given the extreme scarcity of
white women in Angola, he was almost bound to marry,
if he married at all, with a Mulata or (more rarely) with
a Negress. But it did not follow from this readiness to
mate with coloured women, that the Portuguese male
had no racial prejudice, as is often asserted by modern
apologists. There were, of course, some exceptions, but
the prevailing social pattern was (and is) one of conscious
white superiority. Captain Antonio de Oliveira Cadornega, who lived for over forty years in Angola, is a safer
guide in this respect than Dr. Antonio de Oliveira
Salazar who has never set foot in Africa.
II: MOCAMBIQUE AND INDIA
'THE
'
State of India', 0 Estado da India, was the

name given by the Portuguese to all their possessions and trading-posts between Sofala and Macao,
or, in a looser sense, to the whole of maritime East Mrica
and Asia from the Cape of Good Hope to Japan. Portuguese relations with the many and varied peoples bordering on the Indian Ocean and the shores of Monsoon
Asia naturally differed a good deal, but I shall have to
confme myself to surveying some apects of those relations
in Moyambique and India proper.
Vasco da Gama and his successors found the east coast
of Africa from Sofala to Somalia occupied by a chain of
Arab-Swahili settlements, strongly Africanized by centuries of contact and concubinage with the Bantu, but
proudly conscious of their Islamic heritage. The Swahili
traded with the Negroes of the hinterland for gold, ivory,
and to a lesser degree, slaves, giving them in exchange
chiefly beads and cotton textiles, both of Indian origin.
The Portuguese almost at once identified Sofala with the
Biblical Ophir, and they endeavoured to monopolize the
gold trade of that place by building a fort there in rsos.
King Manuel's instructions for D. Francisco de Almeida,
the first viceroy of Portuguese India, enjoined him to
seize and enslave all Muslim merchants at Sofala, but not
to do any harm to the local Negroes. He was to tell the
latter that: 'We have ordered the said Moors to be
enslaved and all their property confiscated, because they
4I
40
4
MOyAMBIQUE AND INDIA
MO<;AMBIQUE AND INDIA
are enemies of our holy catholic faith and we have

continual war with them.' 1 In other words, the Portuguese crusade against the Muslims of Morocco was to be
continued against their co-religionists in the Indian
Ocean, and this was the keynote of Portuguese policy in
that region for the next hundred years.
By fair means and by foul, the Portuguese first tried
to displace the Swahili traders along the coast and to deal
with the Negroes who brought the gold from the
interior, but their efforts met with only partial success.
The Swahili had been established along the East African
coast for several hundred years, they had intermarried
to a great extent with the Bantu, and consequently they
were far better integrated than the new arrivals from
Europe. The itinerant Swahili traders were familiar with
the bush paths and river routes for hundreds of miles into
the interior; and, apart from anything else, they were far
too numerous to be driven away by such scanty forces
as the Portuguese could muster. The Swahili merchants
on the offshore islands maintained their centuries-old
connections with Arabia, the Persian Gulf and India,
despite the efforts of the Portuguese to supplant them. A
Portnguese official writing to the King from Mo~ambique
island in 1508 advised his master to kill or expel all

the 'respectable Moors' from the coast below that place,
since they were dangerous commercial competitors.
The low-class Swahili of Mo~ambique could be allowed
to remain 'since they are like animals, and satisfied with
gaining a handful of maize, nor can they harm us, and
they can be used for any kind of work and treated like
slaves'.'
Whether by forceful for by friendly means, the Portuguese had established their control over the East African
coast south of Somalia within a decade of their first
appearance in the Indian Ocean. Their success was greatly
facilitated by the peremlial rivalry between the various
Swahili city-states north of Cape Delgado, which could
never combine for any length of time against them, and
Malindi remained their faithful vassal state or satellite for
over a hundred years. Wherever the Portuguese encotmtered opposition to their pretensions to dominate the
seaborne trade of the coast, they dealt with it in a manner
which was deliberately calculated to inspire terror. Fr.
Joao dos Santos O.P., who was for some years a parish
priest in the Querimba Islands towards the end of the
sixteenth century, tells us in his classic Ethiopia Oriental:
'In the time that I lived here, there were still some Moors
who remembered the first Portuguese who had passed
along this coast, and of the cruelty with which they used
1 '. e os ditos mouros catyvares e aos naturaes da terra nam

fares dano asy em suas pesoas como em suas fazendas, porque todo
queremos que seja gardado, dezendolhe que os ditos mouros que

mandamos catyuar e tamar todo ho seu o mandamos asy fazer par
serem imiguos da nasa samta fee catholica e com eles teermos
contynuadamente guerra' (Regimento for D. Francisco de Almeida,
2 ' porque os daqt~ da terra de Mo~ambique sam bystiaes, e

comtemtamse com guanharem hum alquere de milho, e nam podem
d. 5 March 1505 apud Cartas de Affonso de Albuquerque, 7 vols., Lisboa,

r884-1935, val. ii, p. 282. C also Alexandre Lobato, A Expa11siio
Portuguesa em Mofambique de 1488 a 1530, 3- vols., Lisboa, 1954-60,
val. i, pp. 75, Sr.
danar em maijs, e servem nestas obras e em tudo, como escpravos'

(Duarte de Lemos to the Crown, Moyambique, 30 September 1508,
apud Arquivo Portugus Oriental. Nova Ediflio, I I vols., Basted-Goa,
1936-40, Torno IV, vol. i, Parte Ia, p. 287.)
42
43
the natives of the region who did not want peace and
friendship with them, and whom they punished so
severely that they spared the lives of none, not even
women and children.''
Despite the cruelty with which they acted towards
the Muslims on many occasions, and despite the fact that
they systematically deprived the Swahili of the best part
of their trade in gold, ivory, and slaves, the Portuguese
eventually reached a more or less amicable relationship
with those who remained south of Cape Delgado. North
of this point, the Portuguese position was never very
secure, and they were driven from this region by d1e
Omani Arabs at the end of the seventeenth century. In
Zambesia and the offshore islands of Mo~ambique they
allowed the Swahili to remain on sufference, more or less
in the manner envisaged by Duarte de Lemos in 1508.
Their sheikhs, headmen, and merchants were kept in
strictly subordinate positions and prevented from amassing great wealth, but were employed as intermediaries
in the trade with the Bantu. The humbler Muslims served
as sailors, casual labourers, and in various menial capacities.
Social relations between Christians and Muslims became
quite friendly in some of the remoter regions, though the
more zealous Roman Catholic clergy prevented any
genuine rapprochement between the two groups, in so

far as they could. Fr. Joao dos Santos O.P., relates with
pride how he forcibly prevented a Swahili headman in
Querimba from circnmcising his own Muslim sons,
although the friar owed his life to the headman's sister,
who had nursed him through a dangerous illness, and
although the wretched man offered to give one hundred
cruzados in alms to the Christian church if he was allowed
to celebrate this rite. The Dominican friar also put a stop
to the existing practice of Muslim women visiting their
Christian female friends on Sundays and Saints' days,
'when they all sang, danced, and feasted together as
friendly as if they were all Muslims'. He adds that he
abolished this 'pernicious practice' despite much local
resentment and opposition on the part of both Muslims
and Christians.
Fr. Joao dos Santos O.P., was convinced that he had
put an end to this amicable mixture of Christian, Muslim,
and Pagan practices among the population of the
Querimba islands, but in point of fact the mixture
continued much as before, both there and in Zambesia.
Apart from anything else, there were relatively few
missionaries and priests available for work in East Africa,
and the majority of those who did work in that missionfield were of very inferior calibre. An edict promulgated
by the Inquisition at Goa in r 771, denounced many
s Fr. Joao dos Santos, O.P., Ethiopia Oriental e varia historia de

cousas notaveis do Oriente (Evora, r6o9), Pt. I, Livro 3, ch. 5 An almost
identical observation was made by the Spanish ambassador to Persia,
D. Garcia de Silva y Figueroa, in 1621. Cf. C. R. Boxer and Carlos
de Azevedo, Fort Jesus and the Portuguese in Mombasa, 1593-1729
(London, 1959), p. 33. The Portuguese punitive expedition against
the Querimba Islands took place in 1522. Cf. E. Axelson, South-East
Africa, 1488-1530 (London, 1940), pp. 151-4.
44
'rites, ceremonies, and superstitious abuses', which were
widely prevalent among the Christians of Mo~ambique.

They included the Islamic custom of publicly exhibiting
4
Fr. Joao dos Santos, O.P., Ethiopia Oriental (Evora, r6o9), Pt.
II, Livro 2, ch. IJ.
45
MO<;:AMBIQUE AND INDIA
to friends, relations, and neighbours, the piece of cloth

or linen stained with the evidence of the ftrSt coitus
between a newly married pair. Other abuses denounced
by the Inquisition included the festive celebration of a
girl's first menstruation by invoking the 'Most Holy
Name of Jesus'; superstitious rites connected with the,
baptism of newly-born babes, and the health of expectant
mothers; funeral customs which involved a female
slave sleeping in the bed of a recently deceased master
with a male slave of the same household; and the widespread use of the muave, the indigenous method of summary justice, by which an accused person who took the
infusion of the bark of a certain tree without ill effects
was adjudged innocent and thereby entitled to dispose of
the life and property of his (or her) accuser. These and
other similar rites were not limited to newly converted
Negroes and Indians, but were practised by Whites and
Mulattoes as well. 5
Although the general standard of the clergy in Moyambique was never very high, and that of the Dominican
missionary friars during the eighteenth century was
generally admitted to be deplorably low, the priests
nevertheless exercised great influence through their
sacerdotal-status.~exander Hamilton, writing about the

Bantu of Zimbesia and the Mos:ambique littoral in I700,
observed: 'They have large strong bodies and limbs, and
are very bold in war. They'll have commerce with none
but the Portuguese, who keep a few priests along the
sea-coasts, that overawe the silly Natives and get their
teeth [i.e. elephant tusks] and gold for trifles, and
send what they get to Moyambique.' 6 Some seventy
years later, a Portuguese who knew Zambesia well,
noted: 'In general, all the Kaflirs of Sena, who are either
slaves of the settlers or else tributary vassals of the State
[of India], are docile aud friendly to the Portuguese,
whom they call Muzungos. They dislike anyone who is
not a Portuguese, calling all foreigners mafutos. This
dislike derives from a superstitious fear that the Portuguese have spread among them, telling them that all the
mafutos eat the Negroes, and other absurd tales which they
implicitly believe, and this is one of the chief reasons why
they are so friendly to us, for they say that only the
Muzungos are good, and that all others are bad. It is to be
hoped that this conviction will endure in the minds of
the said Kaflirs, for in this way we will always be able to
dominate them and to live undisturbed. They are most
obedient and submissive to their masters and to all the
Muzungos in general.' After giving an instance of the
loyalty of the Negroes in foiling an attempt of the Dutch
to establish themselves at Quelimane, Joao Baptista de
Montaury sounded a warning note: 'On this occasion,
the loyalty of the Kaflirs saved that State, because the port
5 'Edital da Inquisir;ao de Goa contra certos costumes e ritos da

Africa Oriental', 21 January 1771, in J. H. Cunha Rivara, 0 Chronista
de Tiss11ary(4 vols., Nova Goa, r866-9), vol. ii, pp. 273-5. C Concgo
Aldntara Guerreiro, Q11adro,s da hist6ria de Motambique (z vok,
Lourenyo Marques, 1954), vol. ii, pp. 301-12, JZS-33. 342-5;
Alexandre Lobato, Evolufii'O admiuistrativa e econ6mica de Motambique,

1752-1763 (Lisboa, 1957), pp. 129-54; Antonio Alberto Banha de
Andrade, RelarOes de Motambique Setecentista (Lisboa, 1955), pp.
67-105, for the decadence of the missionaries and clergy of
Mo'fambiq11e.
6
A. Hamilton, A New Accou11t of the East Indies, 1727 (ed. W.
Foster, 2 vols., London, 1930), vol. i, pp. r6-r7.
47
of Quelimane did not have then (nor has it got now) any
fortification whatsoever. Still, who can be certain that
this friendship will last for ever, and that it will never
change; the more so, since these same Kaffrrs are treated
with excessive harshness by their masters? May not this
affection be changed into hatred, owing to the ill treatment they receive? May they not do in future to the
Muzungos what they formerly did to the Majutos? This
is worth thinking about, and it is not very sound that
we should continue to rely solely on the good faith of
these Kaffrrs.' 7
Two outstanding Dominican friars who exercised
great and in some respects lasting influence over the
regions they controlled for about forty years, were Fr.
Joao de Menezes in the Querimba islands, and Fr. Pedro
da Trindade in the Zumbo district beyond Tete. The former, who died in 1749, was the virtual ruler of the
northerly Querimba islands, and he ignored all the
orders of his ecclesiastical and secular superiors to leave
his ftef and return to Goa. He carried on an active contraband trade with the French and English, and died
surrounded by a numerous progeny of sons and grandsons. His colleague of Zumbo, who died in 1751, apparently led a celibate life, but he was the owner of vast
landed estates, and he traded for gold, ivory, and slaves
with native chiefs in what is now Matabele- and Mashonaland. His memory was for long revered among the Bantu,
to whom he taught various arts and crafts, including
the use of some European agricultural implements. Both

these friars maintained their own private armies of
enslaved and free Negroes who iulrabited their lands,
this being a characteristic of the celebrated prazo-holders
of Zambesia, to whom I must now devote a few words.
The prazos were entailed estates which had their
origin in the Portuguese penetration up the Zambesi
valley in the period 1575-1640, when isolated individuals
may have reached as far as the Kariba gorge. Portuguese
-and later Goan-:-adventurers took advantage of the
crumbling power of the Monomotapa, or paramount
chief of the Makalanga (Wakarnaga, vaKaranga) tribal
confederacy, to occupy by force or by agreement, the
lands of various sub-chiefs, whose powers and jurisdiction
they assumed. The Jesuit Padre Manuel Barreto, writing
in 1667, described the position as follows: 'The [Portuguese ]lords of the lands have in their lands that same
power and jurisdiction as had the Kaffir chiefs [Fumos J
from whom they were conquered, because the terms of
the quit-rent were made on that condition. For this
reason they are like German potentates since they can
lay down the law in everything, put to death, declare
war, impose taxes. Perhaps they sometimes commit great
barbarities in all this; but they would not be respected
as they should be by their vassals if they did not enjoy
the same powers as the chiefs whom they succeeded.'
Padre Barreto added that these adventurers did not limit
themselves to inspiring fear and terror, but were likewise
famous for their prodigal hospitality and princely
generosity. He instanced as an example Manuel Pais de
Pinho, whose 'conduct of his household and person was
' Jolo Baptista de Montaury apud A. A. de Andrade, ~elafOes de

Mofamhique Setecentista, pp: 365-7. Montaury's report lS dated c.
1778.
49
MOC:,:AMBIQUE AND INDIA
MOC:,:AMBIQUE AND INDIA
that of a prince'. He maintained his prestige and reputation, by being 'very lavish in giving, and very fierce, even
cruel, in chastising, which are two qualities that will make
any man adored by the Kaffirs'. 8
Originally, as described by Barreto, the prazos were
virtually private principalities, founded by White,
Mulatto, or Goan adventurers, who became completely
integrated in the Bantu tribal system and took over the
rights and duties of the indigenous chiefs they displaced.
They often intrigued, and occasionally fought one
another with their private armies of free and enslaved
Negroes, some of which were ten, twenty, or thirty
thousand strong. These feuds and the involvement of the
prazo-holders in frequent warfare with unsubdued and
hostile tribes, led to these estates changing hands and in
extent with great rapidity, and the owners tended to
become completely Africanized. With the object of
averting this, and in order to bring lands under the control of the Crown, the prazos were transformed into
entailed estates which were granted by the Crown for
three snccessive lines on payment of an annual quit-rent
in gold dust. They were granted to white women born
of Portuguese parents, on condition that these women
married with white Portuguese men. Male children of
these unions were excluded from the succession, the
prazos descending only in the female line, with the same
proviso that the heess must marry a white man. A
prazo was granted to a family on these conditions for

three lives only, after which it was supposed to revert
to the Crown. Failure to cultivate the land properly,
the marriage of the lady owner with a coloured man,
or her failure to reside upon the property, likewise
carried the penalty of the prazo reverting to the Crown.
Endeavours were also made to limit the size of the prazos.
In course of time, all of these conditions were increasingly disregarded. Prazos swelled to enormous proportions, rivalling those of the largest jazendas in colonial
Brazil. The obligation to cultivate the land properly
was generally ignored, as there was no market for a large
exportable surplus and the prazo-holders therefore
contented themselves with growing enough crops for
their households and slaves. White men were so few in
the Zambesi river valley, and their expectation of life so
short, that the prazo-heircsscs usually married with the
better acclimatized Mulattoes or with Indo-Portuguese
from Goa. Nevertheless, many of the prazos flourished
for a time, and many tales are told of the wealth and
generosity of their owners in the eighteenth century, and
of the vast fortunes in gold, ivory, and slaves that some
of them accumulated. The system also helped to maintain
Portuguese influence in Zambesia, in however tenuous a
form. It was on the private armies of the prazo-holders
that the Crown depended to fight its native wars, since
the regular garrisons of Sena, Tete, Sofala and Quelimane
seldom amounted to more than fifty or sixty fever-stricken
convict-soldiers deported from Portugal and India.'
8 Manuel Barreto, S.J., 'Informa'rao do Estado e Conquista dos

Rios da Cuama', d. Goa, I I Dec. r667; text with English translation
in G. McCall Theal, Records of So 11th East Africa, vol. iii, pp. 406-soS.
The wording of my translation differs slightly from that of Theal
in a few places.
11
The best discussion of the evolution and development of the
pra.:zo system is by A. Lobato, Evolufii'O administrativa e ecou6mica de
so
SI
MOt;:AMBIQUE AND INDIA
The prazo-system, as developed in the eighteenth

century, failed to increase substantially the white population of Zambesia, or to fix European newcomers to the
soil. Deadly tropical diseases, and the self-indulgent way
oflife which derived from the possession of hundreds of
slaves, combined to make Zambesia, like West Africa, a
white man's grave. In the first two or three decades of the
sixteenth century there were apparently several hundred
white adventurers who spent their lives in the hinterland
of Sofala and Manica, trading for gold and ivory with the
Bantu, in much the same way as did the lan,ados and
tangomaos in Guinea and Senegambia. But tropical fevers
and the competition of the Swahili itinerant traders
eventually proved too much for most of them, although
one of their number, Antonio Fernandes, penetrated
deep into what is now Southern Rhodesia, and was
regarded by the warring Bantu tribes as being semidivine. At the tum of the seventeenth century, when the
power of the prazo-holders was still great and the Monomotapa was a Portuguese puppet, individual Portuguese
traders also frequented the periodic trading fairs in the
hinterland of Zambesia and Manica, where they bartered
for gold, ivory, and slaves with the Bantu. Most of these
feiras were destroyed in the incessant wars attending the
rise of Changamira and the Rozvi (Wa-Rozvi, vaRozvi) clan about that time, and the white traders
were replaced by Mulattoes, Banians, and IndoPortuguese.10

Before taking leave of Mo;:ambique, a few words may
be said about the Banian or Indian-trader problem, which
already existed there in the late seventeenth century.
Then, as now, Europeans were deeply divided in their
views over these people, who rurned out to be far more
ubiquitous and pertinacious competitors than the Swahili.
Most of the Porruguese denounced the Banians as unscrupulous monopolists and engrossers, or as parasitic middlemen who waxed fat by exploiting both the European
settler and the African peasant. Some of the Jesuits,
however, took a very different viewpoint, and claimed
that the frugal and hard-working Indians made much
better colonists and traders than the Portuguese. The
Indian trading community from Diu at Moyambique
island was under the protection of the local Jesuit College.
Some of the governors were severely critical of the
Banians, but others stated that they formed the economic
10
H. Tracey, AntOnio Fernandes, descobridor do Monomotapa,
1514-1515 (ed. and trans. Caetano Montez, Lourenyo Marques,
1940); W. A. Godlonton, 'The journeys of Antonio Fernandes, the
_...Mofambique, 1752-1763, pp. 209-33. Cf. also Sebastiiio Xavier Botelho, Memoria Estatistica sobre os dominios Portugueses na Africa Oriental
(Lisboa, 1835), pp. 262-71. For a succinct survey in English cf.
]. Duffy, Portuguese Africa (1959), pp. 82-89; ibid., Portugal in Africa
1962), pp. 92-95
first known European to find the Monomotapa and to enter Southern

Rhodesia', in Transactions of the Rhodesia Scientific Association, vol.
xl (April, 1945), pp. 71-103. For the declioe of the Monomotapa
and the rise of the Changamire, cf. the previous works of Alexandre
Lobato and A. A. Banha de Andrade, passim, and two excellent
articles by D. P. Abraham which make use of regional Bantu oral
traditions as well as the Portuguese written sources, 'The Monomotapa Dynasty' in Nada. The Southern Rhodesian Native AjJairs
Department Annual No. 36 (Salisbury, 1959), pp. 59-84, and 'Maramuca: an exercise in the combined use of Portuguese records and
oral tradition', in the oumal ofAfrican History, vol. ii (Lonqon, 1961 ),
pp. 2II-2j.
52
53
"'
mainstay of the colony and were a hard-working and
German and English colonists in Pennsylvania, or the

Dutch and the French Huguenots at the Cape of Good
Hope. Nothing came of this interesting suggestion, and
the Indians stayed in Portuguese East Africa, where they
remained as indispensable-and as unpopular wiili some
sections of the community-as were the Chinese in the
Philippines and in the (then) Dutch East Indies. 12
In contrast to what was happening oft the west coast
of Africa, the Portugnese were not primarily interested
in the slave-trade on the east coast until the eighteenth
centnry, when this branch of commerce became more
important than the gold and ivory trades. They always
did trade in slaves, of course, as ilie Arabs and Swahili
had done before them, but these East African Negro
slaves were required only as domestic servants and bodyguards. The numbers involved in the export trade were
therefore nothing like so large as those e:iported from
Guinea and Angola to satisfy the voracious demands of,
the plantations and mines of America. Alexander
Hamilton wrote in 1727= 'Jhe inhabitants of Moqam~
bique, as well as those on the continent, are all Negroes,
inoffensive con1mtmity .11
Among those officials who were most critical of the

Indians was a visiting Portuguese judge, Dr. Duarte
Salter de Mendon1:a, who travelled widely in Moqambique during the years 1723-26. He considered that
neither the Portuguese nor the Indians made good
. colonists. The former he described as being proud and
work-shy, 'for as soon as they have rounded the Cape of
Good Hope, they all want to become captains and
commanders'. As for the latter, they were all secretly
hostile to the Portuguese, stirring up the Negroes against
them and indulging in contraband trade with the Swahili
of Angoche and Mombasa, His suggested solution of the
problem was to encourage tl1e large-scale immigration
of Roman Catlwlic Irish families, so as to colonize the
healthy upland country between Moqambique -:tnd
Angola (the actual Southern Rhodesia). He pointed out
that their loyalty could be relied on, and their daughters
, could marry white Portuguese who would occupy the
_,military and government posts and no longer be obliged
to mate with Negresses in default of white women. The
two white nations would thus become fused into one,
in ilie same way as the Sabines and the Romans, or the
n The Banians were Hindu traders from Gujerat, but the term
was sometimes extended to include Muslim merchants from the
same region, and I have so used it here. For ~ypical criticisms of the
12
Cf. the stm1ffiary of Dr. Duarte Salter de Mendon'ra;'s project
apud A. LobatoEvolu_r5o administrativa e ecoti6mica de Mo.rambique, pp.
297-307. It was probably Salter de Mendon<;a who inspired the Lisbon
journalist, Jose Freire Monterroio Mascarenhas, to make an identical
suggestion to his friend the viceroy of India, D. Pedro de Almeida

Marquis of Castella-Novo, in 1744 (apud Arquivo das Colonias, val. i,
Lisboa 1917, pp. 152-7). Curiously enough, a similar plan for
colonising the district of Louren<;o Marques by ro,ooo Irish was
suggested by Admiral Augusto de Castilho in r883, but this was
Indian and Indo-Portuguese traders from Gujcrat and Goa cf. A. A.

Banha de Andrade, RelafOes de Morambique setecentista, pp. 93-105,
and A. Lobato, Eyohtfii'O Administrativa e econ6mica de lv!ofambique,
pp. 255-6,299, and for a defence of them by the Jesuit Padre AntOnio
Gomes in 1648, Studia, val. iii, pp. 240-2.
evidently made without knowledge of the prior_projects of Salter de

Mendonc;:a and Monterioio Mascarenhas (J. Andrada Corvo,.Estudos
sobre as pro1Jincias ultramarinas, 4 vols., Lisboa, r883-7, vol. ii, p. 267).
54
55
of a large size, handsome, and very well limbed, and make

good slaves. The King's ships, as well as private traders,
bring good store of them to India, both sexes being in
high esteem with the Indian Portuguese, both having
services, proper to their sex, allotted them.' 13 The slave
export-trade greatly increased in the second half of the
eighteenth and in the early nineteenth century, and by
r8r2 the common term throughout the East for an
African slave was a 'Mosambiquer'. Modern Portuguese
writers who claim that their compatriots never had any
feeling of colour prejudice or of discrimination against the
African Negro, unaccountably ignore the obvious fact
that one race cannot systematicaiiy enslave members of
another on a large scale for over three centuries without
acquiring a conscious or unconscious feeling of racial
superiority. This was just as true in East Afi:ica as in West,
and if the words Negro and Cafre did not invariably have
a pejorative implication they certainly very often did so,
'ust as 'Nigger' and 'Kaffir' did (and do) in English.
The relative frequency with which Negroes and Mulattoes were ordained as priests in Portuguese West Africa
from early times constrasts curiously with the extreme
reluctance which the ecclesiastical authorities displayed
to act in the same way on the east coast. We have seen
that seminaries for the education of the indigenous clergy
were established during the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries in the Cape Verde Islands, Sao Tome, and
Angola; but not until 1761 did the Lisbon government
order the establishment of a seminary at Mo('ambique
island. The terms of this decree expressly envisaged the

ordination of Mulattoes and free Negroes as well as
whites, quoting the precedent of the 'kingdom of Angola
and the islands of Sao Tome and Principe, where the
parish priests, canons, and other dignitaries are usuaiiy
the black clergy who are natives of that region'. Although
tins measure was originated by the dreaded dictator of
Portugal, who is best known to us by his later title of
Marquis of Pombal, it was never implemented in East
Africa. Canon Alcantara Guerreiro, the historian of
Mo,ambique, observed sadly in 1954 that 'although
nearly two centuries have passed since this edict was
promulgated, the first native priest has yet to be ordained
in Mo('ambique' .14 It is true that some Negroes of East
African origin were ordained at Goa during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, including a son of the
Monomotapa, who died as vicar of the Dominican
monastery of Santa Barbara in r67?, but these priests
remained in Portuguese India and did not return to the
land of their birth. Whether this was done as a matter of
deliberate policy, I cannot say; but the fact remains that
the coloured clergy and friars of Mo,ambique, who
were the target of so much criticism by governors and
Crown officials, were exclusively Goans or IndoPortuguese.
I mentioned previously that the Estado da India was a
commercial and maritime empire cast in a military and
13
A. Hamilton, A Netv Account of the East Indies,
vol. i, p. 17.
1727
(ed. 1930),
14
Conego Alcantara Guerreiro, Quadros Ja hist6ria de Morambique,

vol. ii, pp. 331-2. The text of the abortive decree for the establishment
of a seminary for the training of secular clergy in Mo~?mbique
Island, dated Lisbon, 29 May 1761, is printed by A. A. de Andrade,
RelafOes de Mofambique Setccentista, pp. 599-601.
57
'
MOC::AMBIQUE AND INDIA
MOC::AMBIQUE AND INDIA
ecclesiastical mould. Every male Portuguese who went

out to the East did so in the service of the Crown or of the
Church. Laymen who married after reaching India were
allowed to leave the royal service aud settle down as
citizens or traders, being then termed casados or married
men. The remainder were classified as soldiers (soldados)
and were liable for military service until they died,
married, deserted, or were incapacitated by wounds or
disease. 'This is a frontier laud of conquest', (pais he terra
de conquista eJronteira) wrote a Franciscan missionary friar
at. Goa in 1587, and this is a theme which repeatedly
recurred for the next two hundred years. 'Tell me Sirs;
is there today in this world another laud which is more of
a frontier, aud in which it is more necessary to go about
with arms in the hand than in India? Most certainly
not!' wrote Diogo do Couto in his So/dado Pratico. Over
a century later, the Viceroy D. Pedro de Almeida reminded King John V: 'This state is a military republic,
aud its preservation depends entirely on. our arms by land
and sea.' Partly because of this frontier milieu of continuous warfare, which lasted with few intermissions
until the end of the eighteenth century, very few white
women went out to India in comparison with men.
There wonld seldom be more thau a dozen or so women
in a ship which might carry six or eight hundred males.
Moreover, if the evidence of several contemporary
chroniclers is to be trusted, few of those white women
who reached India alive proved fecund in ~hildbearing."
Under the circumstances, miscegenation aud more of

it was the general rnle with the Portuguese male in India,
as in Africa aud in Brazil, with the results described by a
scandalized Jesuit missionary in the year 1550 as follows:
'Your Reverence must know that it is f1fty years since
the Portuguese begau to inhabit these regions of India.
Whereas all those who came out here were soldiers, who
went about conquering lands and enslaving people, these
same soldiers began to baptize the said people whom they
enslaved, without auy respect and reverence for the
sacrament, aud without any catechizing or indoctrination.
And since the inhabitants of these countries are very
miserable, poor, aud cowardly, some were baptized
through fear, others through worldy gain, and others for
filthy and disgusting reasons which I need not mention.
And not only was this (in my opinion) great abnse done
in the begi1llling, but it continued even when India
became full of Christian ecclesiastics, audit is still in vogue
15 A. C. Germano da Silva Correia, Hist6ria da colonizafa'O

portuguesa na India (6 vols., Liboa, 1943-58), shows that more white
women left Portugal for Goa than is generally realized, but he
misreads many of his own sources and hence makes unwarranted

deductions. For example, in narrating the capture of the carrack
Sa11ta Catarina by the Dutch in February 1603, he assumes that she
was a ndo da carreira da India which had just left Lisbon vvith over 100
Portuguese women on board (op. cit., val. iii, p. so). In fact, she was
bound from Macao to Malacca, and the women were all Eurasians
and coloured girls, the majority being slaves. Yet on the basis of hiS
erroneous assumption that the women were white, Dr.-GermanO da
Silva Correia calculates that the total number-ofPortuguese women
who emigrated to India in the period 1500--1700 may well have. been
not far short of So,ooo( !) Actually, S,ooo worild be a very generous
estimate, and Sao would prObably be much nearer the real :figure.
For the frontier spirit quotations, see the text of Studia, val. ix, p.
106; Diogo do Couto, Soldado Prdtico (ed. Rodrigues Lapa, Lisboa,
1937), p. 144; dispatch of the viceroy D. Pedro de.Almeida, d. Goa,
is January 1746, in Arquivo das Colo1lias, val. v, p. 109 ).
58
59
at the present day. I have frequently protested about this

to persons whom I am bound to respect and obey in
doctrinal matters. Some of them reprimanded me,
asking who incited me to interfere in this business. Others
. replied that if Saint Thomas [Aquinas] and other saints
who wrote treatises on the Sacraments and on Christian
Doctrine had been in these regions and knew these peoples
they would have done the same as we do, and perhaps
they would have written in another way.... I confess
that I originally baptized some people in this manner;
but for a long time I have not baptized anyone except
children, or adults whom I have catechized for three or
four months. Many people come in order to be baptized,
and I ask them why they want to become Christians?
Some reply because the lord of the land tyrannizes and
oppresses them, and others reply that they must become
Christians because they have nothing to eat. I then make
them a little speech, explaining briefly what it means to
be a Christian and why they should become one, for
which purpose they must come for fifteen or twenty days
to the church for instruction in the Christian faith, after
which I will baptize them. They usually answer that they
will become Christians ifl baprize them there and then,
otherwise they will go away and not return, and this in
fact is what they do.'
Padre Lancilotto likewise deplored the tmbridled
sexual licence which was such a characteristic feature of
Portuguese colonization according to him and to many
other contemporary observers. 'Your Reverence must
know that the sin of licentiousness is so widespread in
these regions that no check is imposed on it, which leads
to great inconveniences, and to great disrespect of the

sacraments. I say this of the Portuguese, who have
adopted the vices and customs of the land without reserve,
including this evil custom of buying droves of slaves,
male and female, just as if they were sheep, large and
small. There are irmumerable Portuguese who buy droves
of girls and sleep witlt all of them, and subsequently sell
them. There are innumerable married settlers who have
four, eight, or ten female slaves and sleep with all of them,
and this is known publicly. This is carried to such excess
that there was one man in Malacca who had twenty-four
women of various races, all of whom were his slaves,
and all of whom he enjoyed. I quote this city because it is
a thing that everyone knows. Most other men, as soon as
they can afford to buy a female slave ahnost always use
her as a girl-friend (amiga) besides many other dishonesties
in my poor understanding.'"
There may have been some exaggeration in Padre
Lancilotto' s scandalized 'description of the excesses of the
Lusitanianlibido in sixteenth-century Asia, but there was
not much. The number of respectable Indo-Portuguese
married families was undoubtedly greater than could be
inferred from his account; but it is obvious that the system
of household and domestic slavery which obtained in
Golden Goa was not conducive to a wholesome fanllly
life. We may guess, or at any rate hope, that Cam5es
treated the slave-girl, Barbara, who held him enthralled,
6o
16 Nicolas Lancilotto, S.J., to St. Ignatius Loyola, d. Coulao

(Quilon), 5 December 1550, apud A. da Silva Rego [ed.J,. DocwnentafiiO para a hist6ria das missifes do padroado port~1gues do Onente. Indw
(12 vols., Lisboa, 1947-58, in progress), vol. vii, pp. J2-J8.
6r
more as an amiga than as a cativa; but the cruel treatment
Jesus. The European-born Portuguese were mostly

illiterate pages or soldiers who would have to be taught
to read and write during their novitiate. Those born in
India were vicious, weak, and idle, being brought up by
slave women in every kind of vice. As for the Indians
themselves, none of them should ever be admitted into
the Society: 'both because all these dusky races are very
stupid and vicious, and of the basest spirits, and likewise
because the Portuguese treat them with the greatest
contempt, and even among the inhabitants of the country
they are little esteemed in comparison with the Portuguese. As for the mestiros and castiros, we should receive
either very few or none at all; especially with regard to
the mestiros, since the more native blood they have, the
more they resemble the Indians and the less they are
esteemed by the Portuguese.' 18
A few years after Valignano had penned \his scathing
denunciation of half-castes and of coloured peoples
(though he was careful to exempt the Japanese and
Cllinese from his strictures) a Portuguese Franciscan
friar at Goa gave a much kinder appreciation of the racial
situation i,n a report to his superiors in Europe. 'Wherefore I inform Your Paternity', he wrote in December
which slaves of both sexes often received in Portuguese

'Asia is well attested by numerous witnesses, 17 It is
also obvious that the children of tllis pronliscuity with
slave mothers seldom had the chance of an adequate
upbringing or education, and were apt to be despised
by new arrivals from Europe, whether these were learned
Jesuits or teen-age soldiers from the slums of Lisbon and
Oporto,
Such in fact was usually though not invariably the case.
Tllirty years after Padre Lancilotto penned his above
quoted report, another Italian Jesuit, Padre Alexandre
Valignano, celebrated reorgarlii!er of the Jesuit missions in
Asia, classified the population of Portuguese India (in the
narrower sense of the term) as divisible into the following categories. Firstly, the European-born Portuguese,
or Reinol. Secondly, Portuguese born in India of pure
European parentage, who were very few and far between.
Thirdly, those born of a European father and a Eurasian
Fourthly, the
halfmother, who were termed tastiros.
---I
breeds, or Mestiros. Fifth and last, the indigenous purebred Indians 'and those with hardly a drop of Enropean
blood in their veins. He regarded all these elements as
unsuitable candidates for adnlission into the Society of
17 Luis de CamOes, Redondilha 'Endcchas a Barbara escrava',
beginning 'Aqnela cativa que me tem cativo', which has been the
theme of voluminous discussions by Carri5es' commentators. For
the cruel treatment of slaves in Portuguese Asia cf. J. H. Cunha
Rivara (ed.), ArchiPo Portuguez Oriental (8 vols., Nova-Goa, I 857-75),
vol. lv (r862), pp. 51-54, 186-7,267-70, and the accounts ofLinschoten (1596), Mocquet (r6r6), Pyrard de Laval (r6rg), and many
other travellers in Portuguese India.
62
(lBl Alexandre Valignano, 'Sumario de las casas gue pertenenyen

a la provincia de Ia India Oriental y al govierno della', d. August
1580 (apud A. da Silva Rego, Dowmwta~Efo.India, vol. xii, pp. 5778r. Cf. also C. R. Boxer, The Christian Century in Japan, 1549-1650
(University of California Press, 1951), pp. So-Sr. In the seventeenth
century, the term castifO came to be applied to Portuguese bom in
India without any infusion of Asian blood, and the term 1\1esti~o to
anyone who had a European ancestor, however remote or diluted.
Cf. R. Dalgado, Glossclrio Luso-Asirftico (z vols., Coimbra, 1919-21),
in voce castiro and mestifo.
MOc;;AMBIQUE AND INDIA
MOc;;AMBIQUE AND INDIA
1585, 'that in East India there are many generations of
'N egresses' by the Portuguese. 20 Many of his men did

not share his racial prejudice in this respect, but many
others certainly did. His policy, of creating a mixed but
legitimate and Christian race through intermarriage with
selected Indian women was widely criticized both then
and for long afterwards. But the criti.cs of inter-racial
marriages, who were more numerous ~nd more vocal
than is generally acknowledged today, could never get
over the awkward fact that not nearly enough white
women came out to India to make white colonization
possible. Inevitably, the average white Portuguese male,
if he married at all, had to marry with a Eurasian, an
Asian, or an African woman; though concubinage with
slave-girls was usually more popular among the young
and virile bachelors than was holy wedlock with a
woman of any colour, tmless she happened to be an
heiress .
That the majority of European-born Portuguese were
convinced upholders of white superiority is shown by
the history of the. Religious Orders and of the armed
forces of the Crown in India. After some preliminary
hesitation, and the admission of a few Indians or halfcastes to their ranks with disappointing results, all the
Religious Orders refused to admit these categories by the
end of the sixteenth century. They maintained their
refusal for over a century, and even when they began to
admit a few Japanese and Chinese, they still retained their
Gentiles [=Hindus] who in the course of time adopted

the sect of the Moors [=Islam], from which generations
descend on the maternal side many sons of India born here
whose fathers, even though honourable Portuguese,
married in these parts with Christian women of the land
whose grandparents and great-parents were of those
generations, that is, were originally Gentiles who had
become Moors. And this is so common here in these
parts, that it is no reproach whatever to those sons' of
India, nor to their Portuguese fathers however honourable
they may be, nor is it regarded as a bar to any human
honour and dignity, nor up to now has it been the cause
of any danger to the faith.' 19
The Franciscan friar was obviously thinking of the
mixed marriage policy inaugurated by Alfonso de
. Albuquerque, who encouraged his men to marry the
'white and beautiful' widows and daughters of the
Muslim defenders of Goa whom they had killed in battle
or subsequently burnt alive (algiias Mouras, mulheres alvas
e de hom parecer). Albuquerque himself made it clear that
he wished these marriages to be limited to women of
Aryan origin who had been converted to Christianity,
and he stressed that he did not want his men to marry the
'black women' of Malabar-in other words dark-skinned
women of Dravidian origin, who were often termed
Ht Fr. Gaspar de Lisboa, O.F.M., letter d. I4 December 1585 in
Studia, vol. ix, p. 83. Fr. Gaspar is quite wrong in alleging that con-
verts from Hinduism and Islam were never suspect in their new faith.
The published records of the Jesuits and of the Goa Inquisition contain ample proof to the contrary.
20
In 1524 the married white men of Goa were 'todos ou a mor
parte, Casados com Negras que levam aigreja em cabello muy humtado' (letter of D. Henrique de Menezes, d. Goa, 27 October 1524,
ap11d A. de Silva Carvalho, Garcia d'Ortn, Coimbra, 1934, p. 52 11).
ban on Indians and mesti~os. In this attitude they consciously or unconsciously followed the precedent of the
same Religious Orders working in Spanish America and
the Philippines, who took a similar line which they
upheld for even longer. Like the Spaniards in the Philippines, the Portuguese in India were prepared to train
Ihdian and mesti~o candidates for the secnlar priesthood,
but they Kept them in strictly subordinate positions as a
matter of ecclesiastical and colonial policy, and they
flatly refused to let them become fully-fledged Jesnits,
Portugal,' he wrote in r654, 'they are the scum of that

kingdom, and the most unruly in it, and who carmot
stay there. If some of them are jidalgos, CJ4:n they are
mostly illegitimate. I do not deny that there may be an
exceptional one who is well-behaved and of good
parentage, but these are so few that they cannot be
numbered on the fmgers of even one hand. If we speak
of those who are born in India ofPortuguese parents, they
are reckoned to be even worse. Those of the country, the
blacks, are regarded as inadmissible or unsuitable for
officiating in holy orders.'"
The first breach in the theory and practice of white
superiority in the ecclesiastical hierarchy of Portuguese
India was made when the Christian Brahmin, Mattheus
de Castro, was consecrated Bishop of Chtysopolis, in
partibus injidelium, at Rome in r635, and sent to India as
Vicar-Apostolic of Bijapur three years later. He was not
Dominicans, Franciscans, or Angustinians. A Portuguese
Franciscan friar born (so he said) of white parents in

India, complained in 1640 that even he and his like were
called 'Niggers' by their Enropean born colleagues.
These latter argued that although some of the Creole
fri'lrs might be of pnrc European descent, yet the fact
that in their infancy they had been suckled by Indian
ayahs was sufficient to contaminate their blood and their
character for the remainder of their lives. An Italian
Theatine priest who lived at Goa from r64o to r6so,
while recommending the local Brahmin Christian
priests to the good graces of the Cardinals of the Propaganda Fide, added significantly: 'None of the Religious
Orders here will allow these kind of people to take their
holy habit. At first I thought this very blameworthy;
but experience has made me realize that their refusal is
fully justified.'
It may be added that Fr. Avitabile was as critical of the
local Portuguese, Mesti~os and Indians, as Lancilotto and
Valignano had been in the previous century. 'And to
give a true account of the people who come here from
66
21
Letter of Fr. Pietro Avitabile, d. Goa, 31 December 1645, apud
Carlos Merces de Melo, S.J., The recruitment and formation ~f the
uatiue cle~'!Y in India, 16th-1gth cent11ry. An historico-canonical Jtudy
(Lisboa, 1955), pp. 247-8. Miguel da Purificacao, O.F.M., RelacJo
Defensiva dos filhos da lt1dia Oriental e da Provincia do -Apostolo S.
Thome dos frades menores da regular observanfia da Jncsma India (Barcelona, 1640), a book whose exceeding rarity is probably due to its
publication in a limited edition at Barcelona in the year of the Catalan
and Portuguese revolutions. For the adamant refusal of the Spanish
regular clergy in the Philippines to admit Indios and 1Vfestizos to their
ranks and their determination to keep the native secular clergy in a
strictly subordinate position c J. L. Phelan, The Hispanizatio11 of the
Philippines. Spanish aims and Filipino responses (Madison, 1959), pp.
85-89; Domingo Abella, The See of Nueva Cdceres (Manila, 1954),
pp. 56-58, 69, 78-79, 87-93, 104, 122 ff., 168, 269-70; ibid.,
'Eighteenth century documents on Bishop Miguel Lino de Espeleta
of Cebu', 8-page reprint from The Philippine Historical B111letin, vol.
iv, Nr. J (Manila, 1960).
allowed to function in Portuguese territory, and he

revenged himself by inciting both the Muslim Sultan of
Bijapur and the Calvinist Dutch East India Company to
attack Goa. The Portuguese repaid his dislike with
interest, the venerable Jesuit Patriarch of Ethiopia, Dom
Affonso Mendes, terming the Brahmin bishop 'a barebottomed nigger'. More effective than the intrigues of
this stormy petrel in breaking down the doctrine of
white superiority in church and state, was the apostolic
action of a group of Goan Oratorians headed by Fr.
Joseph Vaz, whose devoted labours in Ceylon saved
Roman Catholicism from extinction in this island at the
end of the seventeenth century. 22
Despite the success achieved by these Indian-born
friars, it was a long time before the other Orders
followed the example of the Congregation of the Oratory
in admitting Indians to their ranks. In 1736, the Viceroy
Count of Sando mil informed his royal master: 'The
difference that there is between the natives of this country
and the vassals of Your Majesty who come from Portugal
and are natives thereof, is obvious; and it has always been
acknowledged to such an extent that when a post in the
Inquisition of this ciry was bestowed on a secular Indian
priest named Lucas de Lima, a man of great reputation
in learning and behaviour, the ministers of the said
Inquisition would not admit him; and it seems that
owing to the representations which they made to the

General Council, this appointment was suspended in such
wise that it was never implemented'. 23 Several Archbishops of Goa showed themselves strongly opposed to
giving anything but very subordinate posts to the
indigenous Indian clergy, particularly D. Fr. Christovao
de Sa e Lisboa (1620-2) and D. Fr. Inacio de Santa
Teresa (1721-40), both of whom were convinced upholders of white racial superiority. It was only in the
second half of the eighteenth century that the Religious
Orders relaxed their opposition to admitting Indians to
their own ranks. This was partly the result of pressure
from Rome exercised through the Propaganda Fide;
partly the result ofthe grmving sc~rciry ()[vocations from
Eurofe; but mainly. owing to the insistence of th~
Portuguese dictator, Sebastiao Joseph de Carvalho,
Count of Oeiras and Marquis of Pombal, who, in this
respect at any rate, showed that he was an enlightened
despot. By the time that the Religious Orders were
suppressed in Portugal and its overseas dominions in
1835, there were about three hundred Regulars in Goa,
only sixteen of whom were Europeans, all the remainder
being sons of the soil.
The policy of the Portuguese Crown towards the
colour-bar in the Estado da India was not always clear and
consistent, but on the whole the Portuguese kings took
the line that religion and not colour should be the criterion
22
For Dom Mattheus de Castro, see Dom Theodore Ghes-
quiere, Matthieu de Castro, premier vicaire apostolique aux Indes (Louvain, 1937); Carlo Cavallera, Matteo de Castro, 1594-1677, Primo
Vicario Apostollico dell' India (Rome, 1936). For Fr. Joseph Vaz and
the labours of the Goan Oratorians in Ceylon see R. Boudens, The
Catholic Church in Ceylon tmder Dutch mle (Rome, 1957), pp. 89-II5.
68
23
Viceroy Count of Sandomil to the Crown, Goa, 24- January

1736, apud J. H. Cunha Rivara, Archivo Portuguez Oriental, Torno
VI, pp. 440-2. C also ibid., op.cit., pp. 455, 474.
24
Cf. Carlos Merces de Melo, S.J., The recruitment and formation
of the native clergy in India, pp. 172-7.
MOc;:AMBIQUE AND INDIA
for Portuguese citizenship, and that all Asian converts to

Christianity should be treated as the equals of their
Portuguese co-religionists. Laws to this effect were passed
in 1562 and 1572 but, as we have just seen, they were
never fully implemented. The more enlightened viceroys
realized that the servile character of the natives was largely
due to the contemptuous way in which they were treated
by the Portuguese. Antonio de Mello de Castro wrote in
r664: 'our decay in these parts is entirely due to our
treating the natives thereof as if they were slaves and worse
than if we were Moors'. Nearly a century later the Viceroy Cotmt of Ega deplored the way in which the Indians
were treated by the European Portuguese, 'who often
insult them with iniquitous words and chastise them with
cruelty'. On the other hand, early in the seventeenth
century, the members of the Council of India at Lisbon
:Jdvised the Crown that: 'India and the other overseas
territories whose government is the concern of this
council, are not distinct nor separate from this kingdom,
nor even are they joined to it in a sort of union, but they
are actual members of this same kingdom, just like the
kingdom of the Algarve and any of the provinces of
Alemtejo, Minho e Douro, etc., . . . and thus anybody
who is born and lives in Goa, or in Brasil, or in Angola,
is just as Portuguese as is anyone who is born and lives
in Lisbon' .25
It is not clear whether the Crown accepted this argnment, or whether the Councillors who advanced it were
thinking only of white Portuguese born in the overseas

territories, or of Asian, African, and Amerindian Christian
converts as well. What is certain, is d1at racial discrimination in favour of the European-born Portuguese, if not
always accepted in theory, was widely and continuously
exercised in practice by the great majority of overseas
viceroys and governors. The correspondence of successive
viceroys of Goa is full of complaints against the real or
alleged physical and moral inferiority of mestifDS as compared with European-hom and bred Portuguese. Whenever possible, white Portuguese were placed in the chief
military and government posts, jnst as they were in high
ecclesiastical office, and mestifDS and mixed-bloods had to
play second ftddle. There were some exceptions, of
course, such as Gaspar Figueira da Serpa in Ceylon. This
fidalgo was the son of a Portuguese father and a Sinhalese
mother, and his outstanding military prowess led to his
eventually being given the chief command in the field
against the Dutch and Siultalese in 1655-8. But such
instances remained exceptions. Even those European-born
fidalgos who had married Eurasian women and made their
homes in the East, complained that they were passed over
for promotion after years of arduous service in favour of
beardless striplings who had just arrived from Portugal
and who had every intention of returning thither. Most
viceroys and governors.were even more uncomplimentary
about the indigenous iul1abitants of Portuguese India,
frequently stigmatizing them, as Lancilotto had done
in 1550, as base, cowardly, and tmreliable. 26
da
25 ConsHlta of the Conselho

India, which functioned at Lisbon
as an advisory cmmcil on colonial affairs to the Crown from 1604 to
r6q, apud Francisco Paulo Mendes da Luz, 0 CoiiScllw da India

(Lisboa, 1952), pp. 173-4.
26 For the career of Gaspar Figueira da Serpa, who died at Goa

'amidst poverty and ingratitude', according to the Jesuit chronicler
71
The gap between theory and practice in the matter of

racial equality narrowed in the fmt half of the eighteenth
century, when the Crown accepted the viceroys' view
that the principle of white supremacy mnst be maintained
both in church and state. The theory that Indian Christians
were treated on a footil1g of perfect equality with
the Portuguese moradores of Goa, was admitted by a
commission which reported on this problem at Goa in

1715, never to have been fully implemented in practice. In
the same year, the Crown informed the viceroy Count of
Ericeira that in filling military and government posts he
must take especial care that the Indians 'should on no
account be preferred to nor equalled in any way with the
Portuguese, because such is convenient for my service,
ond the authority and prestige of our nation' .2 7 Moreover, Kanarese were to serve for at least twelve years
before they could become qualified to hold office,
whereas a Portuguese need only serve for eight. The
Cotmt of Ericeira needed no promptmg on this point, as
he always acted on the principle of giving European-born
Portuguese preference and promotion over all others.
The first serious attempt (since 1572} to abolish the
colour-bar in Portuguese Asia and East Africa was made
by Pombal through the medium of the celebrated decree
of 2 April 1761. This edict informed the viceroy of India
and the governor-general of Mo~ambique that henceforth the Asian subjects of the Portuguese Crown who
were baptized Christians must be given the same legal
and social status as white persons who were born in
Fern:io de Queiroz, see the latter's Temporal and Spiritual Conquest oJ

Ceylon (3 vols., ed. and trailS. S. G. Pereira, S.J., Colombo, 1930),
index, pp. I229-30, in voce 'Figncyra de Serpe'. For a typical complaint by a Portuguese-born fidalgo married in India at the way he
and his like were passed over in favour of those who returned to
Portugal with the money they had amassed in the East, see AntOnio
de Sousa Coutinho's comments to the Council of State at Goa in
r663, apud P. Pissurlencar (ed.) Assentos do Conselho do Estado da
India, 1618-1750 (5 vols., Goa-Bastori, 1953-7), vol. iii, p. 134-
For a typical assessment of a MestifO by a Reinol. c the Viceroy D.
Pedro de Almeida's violent denunciation of the character of D. Luis
Caetano de Almeida Pimentel (the :first mestito to fill the post of
governor-general ofPortuguese India) in 1746, inArquivo das Colonias,
vol. v (Lis boa, 1930), pp. IIO, II 8-19. The same viceroy was even
more tmcomplimentary about the Hindu subjects of the Portuguese
Crown, whom he described as follows in 1750: 'EXperience has shown
that anyone who with a sincere and open heart has dealings with
Gentiles of any caste, especially Brahmins, can give himself up for
lost. He -will fmd himself inevitably deceived if he does not resist
the softness, submission, and the outwardly good manners which they
use. There is not one who has any faith or loyalty in his dealings with
anybody else, and they are by nature lying and fraudulent' (Instruc-
t5o do Exmo Vice-Rei Marquez de Aloma ao seu s11ccessor o Exmo ViceRei Marquez de Tavora, ed. Filippe Nery Xavier, Nova Goa, 1856,
pp. ror, roS--9). Nothing would be easier than to multiply ~uch
derogatory quotations from the correspondence of viceroys and
governors over the centuries. Cf. J. H. Cunha Rivara, Archi(}O
Oriental Portugts~z. Fasc. VI (r878), pp. 477-8, and A India Portuguesa
(2 vols., Nova Goa, 1923), vol. ii, p. 433, for the quotations from
AntOnio de Mello de Castro and the Cmmt of Ega.
27
'attendendo muito a que os Canarins nao sejio antepostos, nem

igua1ados por algum modo aos Portuguezes, porque assim convem
a men serviyo, e authoridade e respeito da Nayao, e do contrario me
darei por muito mal servido; e que estes tks Canar.ins n[o possao
habilitarem-se para os officios, que couberem nelles, menos que com
doze annes, porque he resao haja differenp dos Portuguezes a elles,
que s6 necessitao de oito annos para serem despachados' {Crown to
Viceroy, 19 February 1718, in Archivo Portuguez Oriental, VI (r876),
p. !02. For admissions that Indian Christians had seldom or never
been treated on a footing of equality with white Portuguese see
ibid, pp. 8j, 193. 445-9.
73
6
. Portugal, since 'His Majesty does not distinguish between

his vassals by their colour but by their merits'. Moreover,
it was made a penal offence for white Portuguese to call
their Indian fellow-subjects 'Niggers, half-castes, and
other insulting and opprobrious terms', as they were in
the habit of doing. This decree was repeated in even
more categorical terms two years later, but it was not
promulgated by the authorities at Goa Ulltil 1774. The
dreaded dictator of Portugal was not a man to be trifled .
with, as his savage treatment of the Jesuits and of the.
Tavoras proved; and the fact that this decree was not
implemented for thirteen years, shows clearly how deeply
the feeling of racial superiority was implanted in the
Portuguese colonial authorities. The slavish obedience
with which Pombal's most iniquitous enactments were
carried out on all other occasions contrasts most strongly
with the conspiracy of silence by which the alvara of
2 April 1761 was .quietly shelved by those responsible for
its implementation, just as was the complementary
decree (29 May 1761) ordering the establishment of a
seminary for the training of coloured clergy at Mo~am
bique. 28 This attitude is especially. significant, as the
Viceroy CoUllt of Ega (1756-65) had already promulgated an edict at Goa in July 1759, denoUllcing 'the contempt with which the natives of this State are treated by
the Europeans who call them Niggers, curs and other
!!a. For the alvards of 14 July 1759 and 2 April 1761, the carlaregia of 10 April I76J, and their being pigeon-holed till '774. see
insulting names, for no other reason than the difference

of colour'.
The Portuguese at first tried to abolish caste distinctions
among their Indian converts, but they soon foUlld that
this was impossible and they were forced, however
reluctantly, to compromise with this immensely powerful
and deep-rooted social and religious system. There is no
need for me to go into the details of the castes and subcastes of Hindu India, but I would remind you that they
are traditionally grouped in four main divisions: the
Brahmins or the priestly caste, who could .and often did
engage in other occupations; the Kshatriyas or the warrior
caste; the Vaysias (Vanis) composed of merchants and
peasants; and the Sudras or the menial class. In Hindu
society the priesthood was reserved for the Brahmins,
and the Portuguese had to follow this practice with their
converts, only those of Brahmin stock being admitted
to the Christian priesthood-with a few rare exceptionsprior to the nineteenth century. Those of the other castes
who became converts were divided into the following
four groups. The Chardos (Charodos), who claimed to be
of Kshatriya or warrior origin, and a few of whom
succeeded in getting ordained, though some authorities
ranked them with the Vaysias. The Sudras, who not only
performed menial offices in Portuguese territory, but
were also peasants and artisans. The Corumbins (CurUlllbins) who were chiefly landless workers and peasants.
The Farazes, who did the most menial jobs (sweepers,
grooms, grave-diggers, etc.) and who more or less
corresponded to the Hindu pariahs or Ulltouchables.
These five Christian castes did not intermarry with each
Archivo Portuguez Oriental, Vl {1876), pp. 498-9. For the nonfulfilment of the-alvari.of 29 May 1761 enjoining the establishment
of a seminary for coloured clergy at Mos:ambique, seep. 57 above
and note (14).
74
75
MO<;;AMBIQUE AND INDIA
other, and the Brahmins (Brahmane, Bragmane, etc., in IndoPortuguese), enjoyed much oftheir former prestige, though
some of the Chardos tried to claim equality with them. 29
It is often thought that the Portuguese married on a
large scale with high-caste women who had been
converted to Christianity from Hinduism, ever since
Albuquerque initiated a policy of inter-racial marriage
with light-skinned women of Aryan origin in rsro. Such
marriages did indeed take place, but they were the
exception rather than the rule, since the Brahmins and
Chardos converted to Christianity kept their pride of
caste and race, and they did not wish their daughters
to marry with European or with Mesti(o men. The
Portuguese authorities on their side did not encourage
the marriage of Portuguese men with the low-caste

Sudra and Curumbin women; and their sporadic efforts to
foster the remarriage of Christian Brahmin widows with
white soldiers drafted from Portugal for service in Indiathe majority of whom were convicts. and exiles in the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries-met with very
little response from the caste-conscious Brahmins. In any
event, as we have seen, many Portuguese males preferred
to consort with their slave-girls rather than enter the
bonds of holy matrimony. In the course of the eighteenth
century the lasting connections which numerous Portuguese fidalgos and soldiers formed with Hindu Bailadeiras,
or Nautch-girls, caused the viceroys and archbishops
constant concern. Mnch futile legislation was enacted with
a view to curbing the passion of the fidalgos for the
bailadeiras; but in any case these illicit unions were often
childless, as the women usually practised some form of
birth-control or abortion in order to avoid having
children by their European admirers. 30
We have seen that both the European-born Portuguese
(the Reinols) and the Christian Brahmins tended to
despise the Mesti(OS, or the true Indo-Portuguese of
mixed blood, although this was precisely the class that
Affonso de Albuquerque and those who thought like him
regarded as the main support of the Portuguese power in
29
For a curious work by a Christian Brahmin secular priest
affirming the superiority of his caste over all other Asian races, and
its inherent right to be treated on an equal footing by the Portuguese,
see AntOnio Joao de Frias, Aureola dos Indios e Nobiliarchia Bracmana

(Lisboa, 1702). A contemporary Chardo author, Leonardo Paes, one
of the relatively few secular priests of chardo origin, in his Promptuario

das di}finitoens Indicas deduziJas de varios chronistas da India, gra~Jes
authores, e das historias gentilicas (Lisboa, 1713), claims this privilege
for his caste, which he equates with the Rajputs, but most modern
writers place the chardos lower than the Khsatriyas and with the
Sudras. P. Pissurlencar argues that they were of Vani or Maratha
origin in his 'Contribui~ao ao estudo etnologico da casta indoportuguesa denominada chardo,
luz de documentos ineditos
encontrados no Arquivo Hist6rico da India', 7-page reprint from the
Aetas do l Congresso Nadonal de Antropologia Colonial (Porto, 1934).
For the Christian castes of Portuguese India cf. the entries under their
respective categories in S. R. Dalgado, Glossdrio Luso-AsiJtico,- and
Antonio Emilio d' Almeida Azevedo, As communidades de GoaHistoria das instituifOes antigas (Lisboa, r89o); A. B. de Branganp
Pereira, Etnografia da India Portuguesa (2 vols., Goa-Bastora, 1940),
val. ii, pp. 25-58.
ao Cf. C. R. Boxer, 'Fidalgos Portugueses e Bailadeiras Indianas.

Seculos XVII e XVIII', in the Revista de Historia, No. 56 (Sao Paulo,
1961), pp. 83-105. For the largely unsuccessful efforts made in 1644,
r684, and 1745 to foster the marriage of white Portuguese soldiers
with Christian Brahmin and Charod6 women, see P. Pissurlencar,
Assentos do Conselho do Estado do India, 1618-1750, vol. v (r957), pp.
29]-j.
77
MOCAMBIQUE AND INDIA
MO<;:AMB!QUE AND INDIA
Asia. In rs6r the Crown actually went so far as to prohibit the enrolment of meslifOS in the royal service, but
this measure was certainly not enforced for long. 31 Even
at the best of times there were seldom more than two or
three thousand able-bodied men who emigrated from
Portugal to India in a year, and the wastage among those
who survived the voyage, from tropical diseases, battle,
and desertion was exceedingly high. The MeslifOS had
necessarily to be employed on an increasing scale,
particularly when Brazil attracted the majority of emigrants from Portugal in the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries. As early as r6ro the soldier-chronicler, Diogo
do Couto, complained that most of the Portuguese in
India 'had more relatives in Gujerat than in Tras-os
Montes'. But although the MestifOS, with a greater or
lesser mixture of Eurasian blood, were more numerous
than the Reinols from Portugal, they likewise tended to
become something of a caste, having no more wish to
intermarry with the Christian Brahmins and other
Indians than the latter had to marry with them. The
main ambition of most MeslifO parents was to marry their
daughters witl1 European-born Portuguese, failing which
they would wed with men of their own kind-and the
lighter the colour the better."
Just as the Reinols were apt to despise the MeslifOS, so

the latter were apt to despise the local Indians of whatever
caste, whom they termed 'Canarins'. The MeslifOS
remained intensely prond of their Portuguese ancestry
and they even affected to regard themselves as superior to
European-born jidalgos, boasting that their own aristocracy
put that of Portugal in the shade. 33 The loss of Bac;aim
and ilie fertile 'Province of the Nortl1' to the Marathas in
the disastrous wars of 1737-40 was a blow from which
iliey never recovered, as their wealthiest families depended
on the income derived from the landed estates which
they owned there. The emancipation of the local Hindus
in the early nineteenth century, and the disbandment of
the Indo-Portuguese standing army, which was largely
oflicered by MeslifOS, or Descendentes as they are called
nowadays, completed their ruin, and actually they form
a very modest part of the population of Goa. There were
still 2,500 of iliem in 1871, but in 1956 they numbered
only a little over a thousand in a population totalling
about half a million. Their decline in numbers was
paralleled by their decline in social inlportance. Ont of
226 senior official posts in Portuguese India six years ago,
134 were occupied by Christian Indians (Goans), 49 by
Portuguese born in Portugal or elsewhere than in India,
and only nine by Descendentes. 34
31
'0 capitulo 31, em que Vossa Al~eza manda que senao assentem
os mistiyos, asi o guardo, mas parece que devia Vossa Alteza despemsar com alguns que o merecem' (Viceroy Count of Redondo to the
Crown, Goa, 20 December, rs6r, apud Studia, val. ii, p. 59).
32
Diogo do Couto, Didlogo do soldado pratico portuguez {Lisboa,

1790), pp. 36, 109. For the desire of wealthy parents to marry their
daughters to white Portuguese, however poor and lowly, cf. C. R.
Boxer and Carlos de Azevedo, FortJesus and the PortugHese in Motitbasa,
1593-1729 (London, I96o), pp. 39-40, and the sources there quoted.
78
all C The Archbishop D. Fr. Inolcio de Santa Teresa's complaint

'dos fidalgos da India que dizem boca cheya, que Fidalguia s6 ada
India ... a que a do Reina he sombra a vista della' ('Estado do prezente
Estado da India', MS. of I725 in the writer's collectlon, fl. 48 1Jerso).
34 Orlando Ribeiro, 'Originalidade de Goa', in Aetas do 111
Col6qt~io Intemacional de Estudos Luso-Brasileiros, Lisboa, 1957, vol. i
(Lis boa, 1959), pp. 170-9, especially pp. 176-7.
79
The rivalry between MestiOS and Canarins, which was

always latent, became embittered with the increasing
impoverishment of the former class and the growth of
the latter in bureaucratic power and influence during the
nineteenth century. This feeling was recently expressed
by a distinguished Descendente, Dr. Germano da Silva
. Correia, the historian and champion of his class, who
quoted with approval the following observations of
Marshal Gomes da Costa, the founder of the military
dictatorship which led to the inauguration of Dr.
Salazar's regime. 'The disbandment of the Indian Army
in 1871 marks a glorious gain for the Cauarim, because
the army had been the refuge of the Descendentes of the
Europeans, who occupied all the senior ranks, and who
systematically excluded therefrom their rivals for predominance. So long as the army existed, the Descendentes
had a source of strength, and the Canarim could not get
the upper hand. The great barrier which stood in
the way of their achieving their ends now fell to
the ground. And the Canarim triumphed, bursting with
pride, seeing himself master of the destinies of India.
One of them, Bernardo da Costa, in his newspaper
0 Ultramar, prophesied to the descendants of the
heroes of the conquest that their daughters would
be the wet-nurses of his own grandchildren-he, a
Canarim !' 35
If the racial and social tension between the MeslifO and
the Canarim (whether Christian or Hindu) has lasted down

to the present day, it may easily be imagined that a similar
feeling existed between the Portuguese ruling class and
the original inhabitants of the soil, even after these had
become converted to Christianity. Albuquerque had
captured Goa from the Muslim Sultan of Bijapur, but
the overwhelming mass of the population were Hindus,
and for several decades the Portuguese made no serious
efforts to interfere with their religious belief and way of
life. The Joral or charter for the village community headmen, elaborated at Goa by the Comptroller of the
Revenue, Alfonso Mexia, in 1526, is a striking example
of this early toleration with due respect for existing
Hindu social institutions. But in the second half of the
sixteenth century, with the establishment of the Jesuits
and the Inquisition, and as a reflex of the increase of
religious bigotry in Europe, the heat was turned on the
Hindus and Buddhists in Portuguese Asia, as it had previously been on the Muslims. With the notable exception
of Diu, wherever else the Portuguese exercised effective
power in India and Ceylon, they destroyed the Hindu
and Buddhist temples, suppressed the public exercise of
all religions other than the Roman Catholic form of
Christianity as defined at the Council of Trent, banished
or expelled the Asian priests, monks, yogis, fakirs and
holy-men, destroyed their sacred books, and drastically
pnmed, where they did not altogether forbid, the
'heathen' ritual observances connected with birth,
marriage and death. From the year r684 onwards, the
Portuguese secular and ecclesiastical authorities made
sporadic attempts to suppress tlre use of the Konkani
35
Marechal Gomes da Costa, A Revolta de Goa e a Campanha
de 1895-6 (Lisboa, I9J9), pp. IJ-!4; Germano da Silva Correia.

Hist6ria da colonizafii'O portuguesa na India, vol. vi (r95-8), pp. 98-99,
6)0-47-
So
8r
form of the Maratha language and to replace it by

Portuguese."
.
In conjunction with these repressive measures, which
sometimes involved the use of force, they also tried to
secure converts for Christianity by a mixture of threats
and blandishments in the spiritual void which they had
created by banning the public exercise of the indigenous
religions. In places where their power was strongest,
such as in the immediate vicinity of Goa and Ba~aim,
they met with a considerable degree of success over the
years. The district of Bardez which adjoins the island
of Goa on the north, and that of Salcete which adjoins it
on the south, were two regions where the action of the
Church Militant was most successful, the former being
entrusted to the Franciscans and the latter to the Jesuits.
Even so, the whole-hearted acceptance by these Indian
converts of their new religion sometimes took longer
than is realized nowadays. A Franciscan chronicler at
Goa in 1722 recalled how during the Sultan ofBijapur's
attack on Bardez in 1654, some of the local Christians
had plotted to kill their Franciscan parish priests, and how,
on other occasions, they had helped Hindu families by
hiding orphan children whom the Padres wished to bring
up as Christians. The chronicler commented: 'All these
trials were inflicted on the friars of St. Francis in those
times, out of hatred for our religion and even for our
King; for as the Portuguese were the conquerors and they
were the conquered, they could not help hating them in
general and our friars in particular, since they were the
ones who had begun these holy evangelical deeds. I dare
say that this feeling endures to this day, not out of hatred
to our religion, for by the mercy of God they have
become very good Christians, but withal they still have a
certain antipathy for us, as is frequently seen. And when
we try to ascertain tl1e reason for this, we cannot find any
other canse but that it originated in the begitming of our
missions.' 37
During the Maratl1a invasions of Bardez and Sa Ieete in
1739-40, similar allegations were made that the native
Christians secretly sympathized with the itwaders; bnt in
actual fact they remained loyal to the Portuguese, and the
bulk of the ransom money which was paid to prevent the
victorious Marathas from occupying Goa itself was contributed by the Indian Christian and Hindu vassals of
the Portuguese Crown. 38 The dictatorship of Pombal,
a6 Cf. C. R. Boxer, 'A note on Portuguese missionary methods

in the East, r6th-r8th centuries', in The Ceylon Hi$/Orical
the local Christians they had nothing to fear from a Muslim conquest,
Journal, and the sources there quoted, most of which are taken from
the two series of the Archivo Portug~1ez Oriental, the Asseutos do

Conselho do Estado da India, and the DocumeH!afa'O para a hist6ria das
missOes do padroado portuguEs dO Oriente. Cf. also ]. H. da Cunha
Rivara, Ensaio Historico da Lingua Concani (Nova Goa, r858).
82
37
Anon, 'Noticia do que obravao OS frades de sao Francisco . . .
no servi~o de Deos e de Sua Magestade', Goa, 1722, apud A. da Silva
Rego (ed.) Documentaf50 para a hist6ria das missi"fes do padroado

portllgues do Orie11te. India, vol. v (1951), pp. 44-0'-I. As noted above
(pp. 67-8) theBijapurinvasion ofBardezin 1654 was instigated by the
Brahmin Bishop of Chrysop'olis, Dam Mattheus de Castro, who told
since Christians were tolerated in such fanatically Muslim lands as
Turkey and Persia (P. Pissurlencar, Assentos do Conselho do Estado,
vol. iii, pp. 296, 374).
38
Most of the money was raised by forced loans from the Hindu
section of the community, but this does not seem to have affected their
loyalty to the Portuguese Crown. Cf. P. Pissunlencar, Assentos do
which was by no means an unmixed blessing for either

Portugal or her overseas possessions, at least brought a far
greater degree of toleration for the Hindus of Goa. The
inhabitants of the 'New Conquests', which were acquired
between 1763 and 1788, and which formed the larger
part of the Estado da India extinguished by Krishna Menon
in December I96I, were explicitly guaranteed complete
freedom of worship and respect for their religion. Full
toleration had to wait till the advent of Constitutionalism
in Portugal in the eighteen-twenties and thirties, or even,
in some minor matters, until the implantation of the
Republic in 1910.39 But for practical purposes, it can be
said that the racial toleration and (relative) absence of a
colour-bar of which the present-day Portuguese so
proudly boast, dates from the time of that Jekyll-andHyde character, Sebastiao Joseph de Carvalho, Marquis
of Pombal. This in itself is no mean achievement; but it
does not square in historical fact with the claim so often
made by and. on behalf of the Portuguese that they never
had the slightest idea of racial superiority or of discrimination against their subjec.t peoples.
of Canara, the old Carnatic region of the Deccan. But the Portuguese
from their pioneer days mistakenly applied the term to the people
of Goa, who, geographically are Konkani-Marathi ethnically are
Tnrln-A rv<>n "-11..1 nln~nlnn;r,ll-u ,,.,.. r,.,rln-11'11rf"'MP'>n
'T'hP t"Pr't'YI
r"'"''"';"'~
ERRATA
p. 85 line 3
read Konkani-Marathi, ethnically
p. 98 last line for 1775-8 read 1757-8

p.
II5
line
p.
r21
note
12
read E a mulata
for Catons read Carma
APPENDIX
A Note on the term 'Canarim'
As Yule and D.algado have pointed out in their respective glossaries,

the term Canaritn should apply, strictly speaking, to the inhabitants
Conselho do Estado da India, V, 1696-1750, pp. 530-2; ibid., 'Portugueses eMaratas', inBoletim do Instituto Vasco de Gama, nr. XI, Nova
Goa, 1932, pp. 69-86.
39 AntOnio de Noronha, 'Os indUs de Goa e a RepUblica Portuguesa', in A I11dia Portuguesa (z vols., Nova Goa, 1923), vol. ii, pp.
2II-J68.
85
which was by no means an unmixed blessing for either

Portugal or her overseas possessions, at least brought a far
greater degree of toleration for the Hindus of Goa. The

of Canara, the old Camatic region of the Deccan. But the Portuguese
from their pioneer days mistakenly applied the term to the people
of Goa, who, geographically are Konkani-Marathi etlmically are
Indo-Aryan, and glotologicallyare Indo-European. The term Canarins
was sometimes used to designate those who became Christians,
sometimes those who remained Hindus, and sometimes for both
categories indiscriminately. During the eighteenth century, and
perhaps earlier, the word Canarim acquired an offensive connotation,
presumably because the Portuguese were apt to be so contemptuous
of the native inhabitants of Goa. When discussing how to raise
troops for the Anglo-Portuguese expedition against Kanhoji Angrja
in 1721-22, D. Christov[o de Mello observed: 'No trust whatever
can be placed in the Canarins as they are absolutely useless (unluckily
or luckily for us, as the case may be) and they cannot even defend their
own homes, still less attack and conquer fortresses' (c P. Pissurlencar,
Assentos do Conselho do Estado da India, v, 1696-1750, pp. 340, 482).
This is typical of many such snide remarks.
does not square in historical fact with the claim so often

made by and on behalf of the Portuguese that they never
had the slightest idea of racial superiority or of discrimination against their subject peoples.
APPENDIX
A Note on the term 'Camrrim'
As Yule and Dalgado have pointed out in their respective glossaries,
the term Canarim should apply, strictly speaking, to the inhabitants
Conselho do Estado da India, V, 16g6-1750, pp. 530-2; ibid., 'Portugueses e Maratas', in Boletim do Instituto Vasco de Gama, nr. XI, NOva
Goa, 1932, pp. 69-86.
39 AntOnio de Noronha, 'Os indUs de Goa e a RepUblica Portuguesa', in A India Portuguesa (2 vols., Nova Goa, 1923), vol. ii, pp.
2II-J68.
ss
BRAZIL AND THE MARANHAO
III: BRAZIL AND THE MARANHAO

described Spani;h America
m h1s day and generation as bemg: The refuge
and haven of all the poor devils of Spain, the
sanctuary of the bankrupt, the safeguard of murderers,
the way out for gamblers, the promised land for ladies of
easy virtue, and a lure and disillusionment for the many,
and a personal remedy for the few.' Much the same could
be said of Portuguese America in the same period and for
long afterwards, as a Portuguese Jew, Gaspar Dias Ferreira, noted in very similar terms some thirty years after
Cervantes' death: 'The Portuguese who has lost his money
or who has come down in the world-it is to Brazil that
he goes for refuge or to recoup his fortlme.' 1 I propose
briefly to consider some aspects of the reaction of the
Portuguese who settled in Brazil and the Maranhao to the
peoples whom they found there and to whom they had to
adjust themselves as best they might. These peoples can
be divided into three main groups: the aboriginal
Amerindian inhabitants of the soil; the Negro slaves of
West African origin, whom the Portuguese introdnced
as a labour-force when they found they could not get
satisfactory results from Amerindian labour, whether
bond or free; and the mixed bloods, Mamelucos,
IGUEL DE CERVANTES
Miguel de Cervantes, in the opening lines of the 'Celoso

extremeiio' (r6r3), one of the Nove/as eJemplares. Cf. HAHR, val.
xxxv (1955), p. 514. Gaspar Dias Ferreira to the Crown, Amsterdam,
20July 1645, Revista do InstitutoArqJ.Ieol~~ico e GeogrJfico Pernambucmw,
vol. xxxii (Recite, 1887), p. 78.
1
86
Mulattoes, Mestifos and Caboclos, who stemmed from

the mixing of those three races in varying degrees. 2
The characterization of America which I have quoted
from Cervantes omitted one important aspect ofEuropean
interest in the New World. America was not only a
promised land for ladies of easy virtue, but also for
missionary priests and friars, among whom the Jesuits
must take first place in so far as Portuguese America was
concerned. 'This land is onr enterprise,' wrote Manuel
de N6brega, leader of the pioneer Jesuits who landed at
Bahia in Angnst 1549. This was no idle boast, any more
than the proudly prophetic words which he wrote three
years later: 'We are working to lay the foundations of
houses which will last as long as the world endures.' There
is no certainty abont the might-have-beens of history,
but it is very likely that but for the work of the Jesuits in
colonial days there would be no Brazilian nation as we
know it today. N6brega and his pioneer companions. of
r 549 began the triple task which their successors continued
down to the suppression of the Portuguese branch of the
Society of Jesus by Pombal in 1759. Domestication and
conversion of the Amerindians; education of the male
children, both white and coloured; reformation of the
Portuguese colonists' morals and manners, which, like
those of most European pioneers in the tropics were
apt to be based on the theory that there were no Ten
2 Mameluco, cross-breed between Amerindian mother and white
facl1er; MestifO (a) male offspring of a black and white sexual union,
(b) sometimes used for male offspring of an Amerindian and white
sexual union; Caboclo, used variously for (a) cross-breed of white
and Amerindian stock, (b) domesticated Amerindian, (c) any lowclass person, usually of colour.
Commandments south of the equator. With the passage

of time and the growth of cities in Brazil, the last two
functions came to occupy an increasingly important part
of the Jesuits' work; but they never forgot that their
original and principal reason for being in Brazil was the
conversion and care of the Amerindians. 3
It need hardly be said that this was an exceedingly
difficult and often thankless task. The missionaries' ideal
them in the straight and narrow path is quite otherwise,

and can only be done with many missionaries; for they
believe in nothing, and are therefore like a sheet of paper
on which we can write what we like, provided that they
are sustained with continual example and precept.' Time
and again we fmd the early missionaries giving glowing
and optimistic reports on the encouraging progress being
made by their neophytes, only to have their hopes dashed
in the upshot by the reversion of so many of their charges
to primitive savagery. fu Brazil, as in Africa and India,
one of the major obstacles in the way of the Jesuits was the
indigenous practice of polygamy. Their efforts to uproot
this practice were not made any easier by the fact that the
pioneer moradores, in the absence of enough women of
their own race, tended to adopt this native custom in
practice ifnot in theory. TheJesuits complained that many
of the secular clergy were singularly complacent about
such irregular unions and indeed often indulged in concubinage themselves.
Nevertheless, the Jesuits persevered. They tried to
domesticate and christianize the wandering Amerindians
by gathering them in village mission-settlements (aldeias),
as their Spanish colleagues did with conspicuous success
in the better-known Reductions of Paraguay. They also
took the line that their Amerindian converts to Christianity must be treated as adolescents and not as adults.
Through force of circumstances they were reluctantly
was to make 'savages into men, and men into Christians,
and Christians persevering in the faith'. It was this last

stage which inevitably proved the most difficult to attain
with the nomadic food-gathering forest tribes whose
cultural level was that of the Stone Age. Tl1e Jesuits soon
realized that their best-some people would say their
only-hope lay with the children, 'catching them
young', and educating them in the way they should go;
but time and again the missionaries saw their most
devoted efforts turned to naught. They had to contend
with the atavistic pull of thousands of years of savage life
on the one hand, and with the bad example set by many
of the moradores, or colonists, on the other. Indeed, the
latter often deliberately tried to sabotage the work being
done by the Jesuits among the Amerindiaru, whom they
regarded primarily as an exploitable and expendable
labour-force.
Nobrega wrote to King John Ill in September 1551:
'Converting these heathen is very easy, but maintaining
3
For the above and what follows cf. the standard history of the
Jesuits in Brazil by Serafim Leite, S.J., Hist6ria da Companhia de Jesus

no Brasil (ro vols., Lisboa and Rio de Janeiro, 193 8-50), and the works
of the same author on NObrega reviewed in Archivwn Historicwn
Societatis Jesu, vol. xxvi (Rome, 1957), pp. 3r6-2r.
4
Pablo Hernandez, S.J., Organizaci6n social de las doctrinas guaraniticas de Ia Comp5n{a de Jesus (z vols., Barcelona, 1913); Magnus
MOrner, The political and economic activities of the Jesuits ill the La Plata
regio11 (Stockholm, 1953), a:re two of the best books out of many on
the Jesuit Reductions of Paraguay.
88
7
compelled to allow the inmates of the aldeias to perform

manual labour for the Portuguese colonists, under certain
conditions and safeguards. But they strove to limit their
concession as far as possible, and to shield their neophytes
from demoralizing contacts with whites and half-castes.
For this reason they forbore, in some areas, to teach their
converts the Portuguese language, and they themselves
used only Tupi, the so-called lingua geral, in their missionvillages.
Although the Jesuits by and large were advocates of
peaceful persuasion rather than of forceful methods in
civilizing and converting the Amerindians, it must not be
thought that they were invariably so. They sometimes
began to despair of success in their uphill task, and then
they were apt to champion the Church Militant with a
vengeance. Nobrega, for instance, writing immediately
after the murder of the first Bishop of Bahia, Dom Pedro
Fernandes Sardinha, who was killed and eaten with most
of his companions by the cannibal Caete Indians when
shipwrecked on his voyage home, took a very different
view to that which he usually held. Whereas previously
he had ascribed the slow progress of conversion to the
misbehaviour and immorality of the white and halfbreed colonists, on this occasion he placed the chief blame
squarely on the ineradicably savage nature ofthe Amerindians. While not denying that the moradores had been
guilty of blameworthy excesses at various times and
places, he stated that even where the colonists had given
no provocation whatsoever, the Amerindians had shown
themselves to be utterly bestial and untrustworthy
savages. He urged that the use of force was the only
satisfactory way to compel them to settle in villages and

to make them live 'as rational creatures'. Force was
the only argument which they understood, and the
Portuguese moradores were far too gentle and accommodating with them. They should follow the example of
the Spanish conquistadores, penetrate deeply into the
interior, and distribute the conquered Amerindians as
serfs among those who opened up and exploited the
land. 'I do not understand', he wrote, 'how the Portuguese race, which is the most feared and obeyed in all the
world, is patiently enduring and almost subjecting itself
along this coastal region to the most vile and miserable
heathen in all mankind'. 5
As I said, this outburst was written in a moment of
understandable anger at the news of the tragic loss of so
many lives. It must be compared with Nobrega's more
balanced and considered views as expressed in his famous
'Dialogue on the conversion of the heathen' which he
wrote in r 556. It is true that in this Dialogo he like;vise
envisages the use of force, but only in a moderate degree.
While stressing that more promising and permanent
results are likely to be obtained from the children and
grandchildren of the original converts than from these
latter themselves, he instances some model adult converts
among the Amerindians of Sao Paulo. Moreover, he
reverted to his original view that the indiscriminately
hostile attitude of the moradores to the Amerindians was
the main reason for the missionaries' difficulties with the
latter; and he argued against the introduction of the
90
ii Serafim Leite, S.J., Monumenta Brasiliae, II, 1553-1558 (Rome,

1957), pp. 448-g.
9I
BRAZIL AND THEj_MARANHAO
Spanish system of the encomienda and the repartimiento

which he had advocated after the murder of the Bishop
of Bahia. Nobrega's advocacy of the use of force under
certain circumstances was carried still further by his contemporary and successor, the saintly Anchieta. Writing
of the results of a local war with the Amerindians of
Piratininga in 1561-2, Anchieta observed: 'It seems to us
that now the gates of this captaincy are opened for the
conversion of the heathen, if God our Lord will give us
some means of subjugating them and bringing them tmder
our yoke; because for this kind of people there is no better
way of preaching than with the sword and the rod of iron,
and for them more than for any others it is necessary to
"compel them to come in" (compelle eos intrare).' 6
Despite this and a number of other similar passages
which could be quoted to prove that the Jesuit missionaries in Brazil-as elsewhere for that matter-were not
opposed to the use of forceful methods on occasion, I
must reiterate that by and large they ouly envisaged the
use of force as a last resort in their dealings with the
Amerindians. They believed that the Amerindians had
certain natural virtues, which they endeavoured to foster;
and they were frrmly opposed to the enslavement of the
Amerindians by the moradores, or to the unrestricted use
of the former as indentured servants by the latter. The
most famous champion of the freedom of the Amerindians was the celebrated Padre Antonio Vieira, S.J.,
who spent much of his long life battling and intriguing

on their behalf, whether as a missionary in Brazil and the
Maranhao, or as an advocate of their cause at Lisbon and
Rome. 7
The colonists looked at the Amerindians with very
different eyes, being resolved to use the men for servile
labour and the women as wives, concubines, or handmaidens. Even after experience had shown that theN egro
was vastly superior both as a household servant and a fieldhand, enslavement of the Amerindians continued in
regions .where the colonists could not afford to import
Negro slaves, or where their way oflife was more suitable
for the Red Man. Both these conditions applied in the
southern region of Sao Paulo de Piratininga and in the
northern State of Maranhao-Pari.' On the highland
plateau of Piratininga, the colonists mated with Amerindian women to a greater extent than they did elsewhere,
and they adopted much of the savages' jungle craft and
forest lore. The Paulista, or Bandeirante as the Brazilian
historian Taunay christened him, was the South American
equivalent of the French-Canadian metis or coureur-dubois. More at home in the forest paths md bush trails of
the remote backlands than in their own houses, the
& Letter of Anchieta, r6 April 1563, apud S. Leite, Hist6ria da

Companhia de Jesus no Brasil, vol. i, p. 291. For the advocacy of the
same methods in Angola by some of And1ieta' s colleagues on the
other side of the Atlantic, see p. 22 above and note (zo). 'Compel
them to come in', is from Luke, xiv, 23.
92
7 AntOnio Sergio and Hemini Cidade ( eds.), Padre A11t6nio Vieira.

Ohras Escolhidas (12 vols., Lisboa, 1951-4), vol. v, Em defeza dos
Indios (Lisboa, 1951); Mathias Kiemen, O.FM., The Indian Policy
of Portugal in the Amazon region, 1614-1693 (Washington, D.C.,
1954); C. R. Boxer, A great Luso-Brazilian figure: Padre AntOnio
Vieira, S.j., 1608-1697 (London, I957)
8 The State of Maranhao, comprising Cead, Maranhao, and
Gdo-Pad., was separated from the State of Brazil in r621-6. Ceara
was rejoined to Brazil in 1656, but the Maranhao and Gdo-Pad
remained a separately administered State until 1774.
93
Paulistas penetrated hnndreds of miles inland in the

course of their expeditions in search of Amerindian slaves
and precious metals, eventually reaching the Andes to
the West and the Amazon to the North'
The fact that the Paulistas had such a strong strain of
Amerindian blood, and that for many generations they
usually spoke Tupi among themselves in preference to
Portuguese, did not prevent them from taking a much
lower view of the Amerindians' capacities than did the
Jesuit missionaries. They claimed, indeed, that their
long-term objective was the same as that of tl1e Padres,
namely to domesticate, convert, and eventually civilize
the savages whom they captured. One of their leaders
and foremost Indian-fighters, Domingos Jorge V elho,
explained their standpoint to the Crown in r694 in the
following terms:
'Firstly, our troops with whom we go to conquer the
savage heathen of the remotest backlands are not soldiers
enrolled in Your Majesty's muster-books nor do they
receive pay or rations from the Crown. They are bands
formed independently by some of us, each one providing
his own armed servants, and together we penetrate the
backlands of this continent, not in order to enslave (as
some hypochondriacs would have Your Majesty believe)
but to acquire the savage heathen Tapuias, eaters of
human flesh, in order to reduce them to the knowledge
of urbane humanity and human society and rational
dealings, so that by dris means they may come to have

that knowledge of the light of God and of the mysteries
of the Catholic faith which will suffice for their salvation
-for he labours in vain who tries to make them angels
before making them men. Having captured and tamed
these savages, we reinforce our bands with them and make
war upon the others who are still obstinate nntil they
yield. And if we subsequently make use of them for our
tillage and husbandry, we do them no injustice; for this is
done as much to support them and their children as to
support us and ours. This is so different from enslaving
them that it is rather doing them a priceless service, since
we teach them to till, to sow, to reap, and to work for
their keep-something which they did not know how
to do before the whites taught them.' Domingos Jorge
further explained that the bulk of the Paulista bands
(dignified by the title of terros, or regiments in his time)
consisted of Amerindians, 'the whites who are added to
them being only to lead and direct the said soldiers' .10
I-Ie instanced his own 'reginlent', which was composed
at this date of over Sao Amerindians and rso whitesand the great majority of the so-called 'whites' probably
had a strong strain of Amerindian blood.
Thirty years after Domingos Jorge V elho had explained
the Paulista viewpoint to the Crown, Paulo da Silva
Nunes, a European-born Portuguese, who had lived for
sixteen years in the Maranhao-Pari, and who represented
' C. R. Boxer, The Goldm Age of Brazil, 1685-1750 (California

University Press, 1962), p. 21. The standard work on the Paulistas is
by A. de E. Taunay, Hist6ria Gcr_al das Bandeiras Paulista:s (w vols.,
Sao Paulo, 1942-8), of which an abridged edition in two volumes
was published at Sao Paulo in 1951.
10
~omingos Jorge Velho to the Crown, 15 July 1694, apud
Ant6mo Ennes, As guerrqs nos Palmares. Subsfdios para a sua historia.
Domingos jorge Vellw e a 'Troia Negra', 1687-1700 (Sao Paulo, 1938),
pp. 205-17.
94
95
the colonists of that State at Lisbon, submitted to the

Crown an even more trenchant denunciation of the
Amerindians and a justification for their enslavement.
He claimed, as had his Paulista predecessor, that the white
settlers of the Maranhao-Para region did not want to
enslave the Amerindians in the strict sense of the term,
but merely to employ them as household and f1eld
labourers, paying them, feeding them, clothing them,
and teaching them the Christian religion and sound
morals. To achieve this end, he stated, it was necessary
to force them to work; and he cited many Biblical and
Classical authorities in support of his opinion, including
the Church Fathers, Plato, Virgil, Pliny, and the great
Spanish Jurist, Juan de Solorzano y Pereira (1575-1654),
author of the Politica Indiana.and De Indiarum Jure. Paulo
da Silva Ntmes likewise discussed contemporary theories
concerning the origin of the Amerindians, whether they
were descended from the Jews captured and deported by
the Assyrians in the time of King Hosea, or whether
they were descended from Cain and involved in the curse
laid on him.
Without deciding between these rival theories, the
representative of the moradores of the Maranhao-Para
declared that in any event he agreed with those authorities
who considered the Amerindians to be 'not true hnman
beings, but beasts of the forest incapable of understanding
the Catholic faith'. He further stigmatized them as
'squalid savages, ferocious and most base, resembling
wild animals in everything save human shape'. He then
asked rhetorically: 'If African Negroes can be enslaved,
why not the Indians of the Maranhao?' Discussing the
different systems of slavery and servitude which prevailed

in the world, he argued that the forced labour to which
the Amerindians were subjected was nothing like as
cruel as the fate suffered by Europeans who were condel1111ed to work in the mines and in the galleys. Finally,
he asserted that the State of Maranhao-Para could not
subsist without the servile labour of the Amerindians,
even though many of these wretches 'killed themselves
out of spite like barbarians !'11
I have summarized the views of Domingos Jorge
Vellta and Paulo da Silva Nunes at some length, because
they were typical of those held by many people in their
respective day and generation, whether these were
Brazilian-born and bred like the former, or Europeanborn and educated like the latter. They also show the
difficulties with which the Jesuits had to contend in
champiouing the freedom of the Amerindians, and the
force of the public opinion against them on this matter,
which led to their expulsion at varions times from Sao
Paulo (r64o--53), Santos (r64o--2), and the MaranhaoPara (r66r-63), despite the fact that they could usually
cotmt on the support of the Crown. It is significant that
after nearly two centuries of royal edicts and Jesuit efforts
on behalf of the Amerindians, that many-perhaps most
-of the moradores could still regard them as little better
than beasts in human form, tmworthy of serious consideration save as an expendable labour-force.
96
11 'Proposta da Camara do Pad. a S.M. appresentada pelo Procnrador do Estado, Paulo da Silva Nunes, em 1724', and supporting
documents (Biblioteca Publica de Evora, Codex CXV), swnmarized
by Joio Lucio de Azevedo, Os Je.suitas no Griio-Pard. Suas missiies e a
colonizatiio (Coimbra, 1930), pp. 204-8.
97
By the middle of the eighteenth century, the majority

of the Amerindians who were in close contact with the
white men of Brazil and the Maranhao-Pad., had either
been gathered in the missionary aldeias, or else were
being absorbed through concubinage rather than intermarriage with the moradores. Their definite emancipation
was largely due to the dictatorial interference of Pombal,
who in this respect carried on the Jesuits' work, while
suppressing the Society in the Portuguese dominions and
accusing the Padres of deliberately retarding their assimilation by Luso-Brazilian society. Pombal had never been
in Brazil, but he was evidently influenced by contemporary French theories of Le bon sauvage, which he had,
perhaps, absorbed during his stay as envoy at London.
At any rate, he instigated the promulgation of a royal
decree in April 1755, which stated that Portuguese
colonists of either sex who intermarried with Brazilian
Indians would not only lose nothing in the way of social
status, but would improve their chances of official
preferment and promotion. 'Moreover,' continues the
wording of this decree, 'I forbid that my vassals who
marry with Indian women, or their descendants, should
be called Caboucolos, or any other name which might
sound insulting'; persons who were guilty of this namecalling were threatened with deportation from their place
of residence."
By a series of royal decrees promulgated in 1775-8,
Pombal decreed the secularization of all the nussronvillages, and ordered that they should be handed over to
the Amerindians who inhabited them. At the same time,
the white soldiers of the various garrisons in Brazil
and the Maranhao-Pad. were urged to marry Amerindian
women, but the response must have disappointed the
imperious dictator who was so anxious for the fusion of
the two races. Deprived of their Jesuit and other missionary mentors, the Amerindians of the aldeias, now pompously renamed as towns, quickly reverted to savagery
in many instances. Gomes Freire de Andrada, who was
governor-general of most of southern Brazil at this time,
reported in February 1761, that the emancipated Amerindians were selling their livestock, neglecting their
husbandry, and letting everything on field and farm go
to rack and ruin. All they seemed to be interested in was
holding dnmken orgies; 'for which reason', he concluded
gloomily, 'there is nobody as yet who wants to marry
any of them'. In fact, many of the Amerindians who had
been given their freedom were unable to adjust themselves
to the new responsibilities for which they were totally
unprepared, nor did their white neighbours and cocitizens cease at once to try and exploit them. Nevertheless, if many commrmities declined and disappeared from
the face of the earth, others successfully survived their
changed circumstances and eventually became absorbed
in the mass of the Luso-Brazilian population."
12
The alvarJ de ley of 4 April 1755, together with an English
translation, is reproduced in full
by Ant6nio Alberto de Andrade,
Jviany Races--:-On.e _Nation. The traditional anti-racialism of Portllgal' s

civilizing methods (Lisboa, 1954), pp. 23~29.
13
Joao Ltkio de Azevedo, Novas Epanrlforas. Estudos de hist6ria c
literat11ra (Lisboa, 1932), pp. 50-62, for -Gomes Freire de Andrada's
dispatch of9 February 1761, and the re1evant laws and decrees relating
to the formal emancipation of the Amerindians, which were printed
integrally in the Collecfiio Jos Breves Pontificios e leys regias que foriio
99
Pombal's dictatorial abolition of the colour-bar against

Brazilian Amerindians and Christian Asian vassals of the
Portuguese CroW!l, and the grant of full civil rights which
was simultaneously bestowed on them, were not extended in anything like the same measure to persons of
Negro blood. It is true that, as we have seen, a royal
decree of the 29 May 1761, envisaged the foundation of a
seminary for native clergy in Mo,ambique island,
where full-blooded Negroes, provided they were
'freedmen, and instructed in the arts and sciences, and of
good report and character', could be educated for the
priesthood, as they were in Sao Tome and Angola. But
we have also seen that this seminary was never founded;
and Pombal certainly had no intention of abolishing
Negro slavery in the overseas possessions of the Portuguese CroW!l. He did indeed abolish Negro slavery in
Portugal in the year 1761, but on economic rather than
on humanitarian or egalitarian grounds, as the wording
of the decree makes clear." In short, just as the founding
fathers of the United States were not thinking of their
Negro slaves when they enunciated the inalienable right
of every man to 'life, liberty, and the pursuit of

happiness', nor was Pombal thinking of the Negro
slaves in Brazil when he condemned in such forthright
terms any form of discrimination against the Amerindians.
The position of the Negro slave in Brazil, as elsewhere,
hardly needs stressing here. Suffice it to say that his (or
her) existence was usually 'nasty, brutish, and short', the
average life of a slave on the plantations or in the mines
being estimated at from seven to ten years. The household slaves were usually, though not invariably, a good
deal better off than the field-hands and the miners.
Those of the Negresses who were favoured with their
masters' attentions might aspire to lead an enviable lifeunless there was a white misttess to wreak a jealous and
sadistic revenge on them. Freed slaves and their descendants, of whom there were large and steadily increasing
numbers, were better off than slaves in most ways, but
they were still discriminated against in law. They enjoyed
fewer rights than their white fellow-citizens, and the
pnnishment infucted on them was usually more severe
for an identical offence.
One of the curiosities-and tragedies-of colonial
history is the illogical distinction which was drawn for
centuries between the enslavement of the Black Man and
the Red. The enslavement of the Amerindian was forbidden by Church and State at a relatively early date in
both Spanish and Portuguese America; but Fr. Bartolome de las Casas, O.P., who, after first condoning
Negro slavery later emphatically condemned it, had few
followers in this respect among his own compatriots, and
expedidos e publicadas desde o mmo de 1741 sabre a liberdade das Pessoas,

Bens, e Commercia dos Indios do Brasil published together with a Supplementa at Lisbon in 1760.
u. '. . . fazendo nos meus Dominies Ultramarinos huma
sensiuel falta para a cultura das terras e das minas, s6 vern a este
continente occupar os lugares dos moe;: as de servir, que ficando sem
commode se entregam a ociosidade', etc., preamble to the alvar& of
19 September 1761, abolishing Negro slavery in Portugal, for all
Negroes and Negresses landed in Portuguese ports after the space of
six months from the publication date in Brazil and Africa, and a year
in Asia.
roo
IOI
still fewer among the Portuguese. The attitude of Padre

Antonio Vieira, S.J., may be regarded as typical of the
more humane among his countrymen; and Vieira, while
ftghting tooth and nail for the freedom of the Amerindians, limited himself to denouncing the sadistic illtreatment of Negro slaves without suggesting that their
enslavement was equally wrong. In one of his earliest
sermons, Vieira compared the sufferings of the Negroes
in the sugar-mills at harvest time to those of Christ upon
the cross; but he adjured the slaves if not exactly 'to grin
and bear it' at any rate to pray and bear it, assuring them
that such Christian resignation would be suitably recompensed in Paradise.
Vieira's attitude is all the more paradoxical since, unlike
many of his contemporaries, he did not believe in the
innate superiority of the white man over the black. 'Can
there be', he asked in his celebrated Epiphany sermon of
r662, 'a greater want of understanding, or a greater error
of judgement between men and men, than for me to think
that I must be your master because I was bom further
away from the sun, and that you must be my slave
because you were born nearer to it?' And again: 'An
Ethiope if he be cleansed in the waters of the Zaire
[Congo] is clean, but he is not white; but if cleansed
in the water of baptism, he is both.' This insistence that
religion and not race was the hallmark of a civilized man
did not prevent Vieira from arguing to the end of his
days that the freedom of the Amerindians could best be
secured by increasing the importation of Negro slaves
from West Africa. Only thus could the Amerindians be
liberated from the servile labour of the household and the
102
plantation without damaging the colonists' economic

interests. 15
Colonial Brazil was sometimes characterized as being

'a hell for Blacks, a purgatory for Whites, and a paradise
for Mulattoes'; and the treatment of African slaves in
Brazil, ifnot worse than that which was meted out to their
brethren in the Spanish, French, English and Dutch
colonies in the Western hemisphere, was at any rate
nothing to be proud of. Towards the end of the seventeenth century the Portuguese Crown began to take a
belated interest in mitigating the harshness with which
slaves were often treated, but the legislation which was
enacted for this purpose does not seem to have achieved
any lasting result. The pleas of Antoni!, Benci, and other
Jesuits for a better treatment of the slaves in Brazil also
seem to have gone unheeded, partly, perhaps, because
their works had .such an extremely limited circulation."
In the second half of the eighteenth century a slowly
iucreasing number of people in Portugal and. Brazil
began to have scruples about the moral validity of the
15
C. R. Boxer, A great Luso-Brazilian figure: Padre AntOnio
Vieira, S.J., pp. 22-23, and the sources there quoted.
16
Andre Joao Antonil [pseudonym of Giovanni Antonio
Andreoni, S.J.J, Cultura e opulenda do Brasil por suas drogas e minas
(Lisboa, I7II ), was suppressed by the Portuguese government a few
weeks after its publication, and less than ten existing copies of this
eighteenth-century edition are recorded by bibliographers; Jorge
Benci, S.J., Economia Christii dos Senhores no govemo de escravos (Roma,
1705), is even rarer. The only recorded copy seems to be that in the
National Library at Rome, utilized by Seraftm Leite, S.J., for the
second edition published at Oporto in 1954. Crown edicts against
the mistreatment of Negro slaves were promulgated in 1688, 1698,
and 1714, but they had no lasting effect.
103
Negro slave-trade, and were concerned about the cruelty

with which slaves were commonly treated. This growth
in humanitarian feeling was presumably a reflection of
the ideas fostered by the movement known as the
Enlightenment. But these critics were still a small
minority, and the deep-rooted prejudices with which
they had to contend are strikingly revealed in an anonymous pamphlet published at Lisbon three years after
Pombal's abolition of Negro slavery in Portugal itsel 17
This pamphlet is cast in the form of a dialogue between
a Lisbon lawyer and a slave-owning gold-miner from
Brazil who has come to seek his advice about a refractory
slave. The lawyer opens the discussion by saying that
whoever deals with youths or with Negroes needs
patience, to which the miner retorts: 'Slowly, Sir! I
agree that patience is necessary in dealing with youths;
because after all they are somebody' s children, and they
are white like ourselves. But I cannot endure to hear it
said that patience is necessary in dealing with slaves;
for after all they are Negroes, and as their owner has
bought them for money, he can do whatever he likes
with them'. The miner goes on to say that he knows of
nothing whatever that can be said in favour of Negroes
or of slaves, and that if patience must be used in dealing
with other white men's sons this does not apply to
Negroes. 'For we whites are descended from Adam, and
the Negroes are descended from Cain, who was black,
17 Nova e curiosa relafilO de hum abuzo emandado, ou evide!lcias da
raziio; expostas a Javor dos homens pretos em hum dialogo entre hum
letrado e hum mineiro (Lisboa, 1764). This very rare little work is not
listed in any of the standard bibliographies, and I have never seen
another copy than that in my own library.
and who died cursed by God himself, as the Scripture

relates.' To this the lawyer replies that even if the Negroes
were descended from Cain, Cain himself was the son of
Adam, so the Negroes have the same origin as white men.
He further points out that there is no scriptural proof
that Cain was a black man, and that even if he was, the
whole of mankind perished in the Flood with the exception of Noah and his family, none of whom were black
according to the Bible.
The miner returns to the attack by asking how the
Negroes came by their colour, to which the lawyer
answers that there is no satisfactory explanation of this,
although many learned men have investigated the problem. He dismisses the miner's suggestion that it is because
they are born nearer the stm, pointing out that many
white people are born of white parents in the tropics,
while Negro parents in temperate countries always give
birth to black children. Unabashed by these arguments,
the miner says that whatever the origin of their colour,
the fact remains that Negroes are black and 'therefore not
people like ourselves'. The lawyer retorts: 'Sir, the blackest man in all Africa, because he is a man, is just as much
a man as is the whitest German in all Germany.' He goes
on to instance many famous Ethiopes in biblical history,
including the Queen of Sheba and one of the three Wise
Kings who worshipped the infant Christ in the manger
at Bethlehem. He concludes this line of argument by
exclaiming with greater feeling than accuracy: 'What
does ilot Portugal owe to the blacks in its conquests in
Brazil! They were the ones who threw the Dutch out of
Pernambuco and Rio de Janeiro; and our Lord the King
I04
!05
D. Pedro II granted a habit of the Order of Christ to a

black, who on that occasion successfully led the others;
for that great king did not wish that the accident of colour
should deprive him of the honour to which his merits
entitled him.' 18
The miner remains tmconvinced by this argument, and
asks the lawyer why, 'if the blacks are jnst as good as us,
what is the reason that they are our slaves, and we whites
are not their slaves'? The lawyer says that slavery is
not a question of colour, since Muslims, Indians, Chinese
and other peoples have also been enslaved at various times
and places, while the Muslims of Barbary still enslave
their white Christian captives. He points out that at one
time the Romans enslaved all their prisoners of war, and
that this custom was formerly practised among some
European nations, though it is now extinct; implying
that slavery itself is an anachronistic institntion which is
bound to disappear eventually. The miner replies
emphatically: 'I am amazed at what your worship tells
me about this matter; but I have always observed that in
Brazil the Negroes are treated worse than animals, being
punished very severely, and called by very insulting
names, yet withal the blacks endure this.' When the lawyer reminds him that punishment for a crime must not
e Mulatos do Estado do Brasil (Recife, I954); C. R. Boxer, The Dutch

in Brazil, 1624-1654 (Oxford, I957).
overstep the limits of necessary severity, the miner says:

'Your Worship is joking! On a certain plantation in
Bahia, I saw two slaves killed in one day, their master
standing by and ordering them to be flogged to deatl1
by other slaves; and on a farm in Rio de Janeiro I saw a
master kill a slave with his own hands. Moreover, none
of these men were punished for killing their slaves, nor
did anybody take the slightest notice of it. For after all,
if they killed the Negroes, they were the ones who lost
their money thereby, and a man can do what he likes
with his own.'
This cynical attitude is deplored by the lawyer, who
says that the slave-owners who committed these atrocities
were guilty of mortal sin. If they had not been punished
for these crimes, he adds, it must have been because the
local justices did not know about them. 'Ah Sir!' he says
to the miner, 'how badly do they treat the poor slaves
in the Brazils! But who acts in this way? Avaricious
people! Godless people! People with the hearts of wild
beasts!' The unrepentant miner retorts: 'How I would
like, Sir, to see you trying to cope with a hundred, or two
hundred, disobedient, treacherous, lazy and thieving
slaves, and to see how you would treat them then!'
The lawyer has the honesty to acknowledge: 'I would
probably treat them worse than does anybody there.
But,' he adds, pointedly, 'what everyone ought to do is
to treat his servants with charity, with zeal, and for love
of God. Whoever does not have the patience to take
trouble with slaves should seek some other way of life.
For it is more important not to offend God than to gain
profit from any worldly concern whatsoever.' The miner
ro6
!07
1s The Dutch never occupied Rio de Janeiro, and this is a garbled

reference to the Negro leader, Henrique Dias, who took a prominent
part in the war of 1645-54, which resulted in the expulsion of the
Dutch from Northeast Brazil. Dias was granted the Order of Christ
by King John N, the father of King Peter II. Cf. Jose .Antonio
Gonsalves de Mello, Henrique Dias. Governador dos Pretos Crioulos
observes that the lawyer has become 'a missionary in

favour of the Negroes', but that is because he has no
experience of what they are really like. Somewhat
illogically, the miner asks: 'What would you do, Sir, if
you saw the Negroes in the Brazils working almost
continually day and night, and this while going naked?
As a rule, they are only given a little bit of manioc flour
to eat; and they have Sundays and some Saints' days off, so
that they can earn something to keep them from starving.'
The lawyer remarks that though he has never been in
Brazil, he has heard much about the harsh way in which
slaves are treated there, and he asks the miner to come to
the point and explain the reason for his visit. The latter
states that he has a Negro slave, whom he bought about
ten or eleven years ago. At first the Negro served him so
faithfully and well that the miner, in order to encourage
him, promised to free him in another ten years; but seeing
that the Negro thenceforward worked harder than ever,
he resolved secretly that he would not keep his word.
Eventually, the slave began to suspect his master's real
intentions, and his zeal cooled to such an extent that the
miner decided to sell him as a slave in Brazil, 'with the
sole object of getting him killed by the harsh prmishments in vogue there'. The slave, in order to forestall
this plan and advised by other Negroes, became a member
of the Lisbon Confraternity of Our Lady of the Rosary
for Black Men, one of whose privileges was that none of
the brethren could be sold as a slave for the overseas
market. 19 The miner punished him severely for this
move, and determined to ship him secretly to Brazil,

but on going to church and making his confession last
Sunday, his confessor had told him that he could not, in
conscience, do such a thing. He has now come to the
lawyer to take legal advice on this point.
It need hardly be said that the lawyer strongly supports
the confessor's stand as being both morally and legally
correct. He continues: 'What you ought to do, is to
fulfil your promise; or, at the very least, inflict no further
affiiction on your slave, who is sufficiently unfortunate,
in being one. It is a very common error to believe that
the blacks are born solely in order to serve as slaves, but
Nature itself loves men of all races without distinction.
The way in which many masters treat their slaves is
unjust. The latter ought to be punished when they do
wrong, but the punishment should be in proportion to
the fault. Children are likewise punished by their parents,
but in moderation. I do not argue from this that slaves
who disobey their masters should not be punished at all,
but I only affirm that the punishment should not degenerate into cruelty. A conditional promise has the force of
law. You promised to free your slave if he continued to
serve you well: he not only continued to serve you well,
but better still. You are, therefore, obviously bound to
free him. You are likewise bound to respect the privilege
which he enjoys as a member ofhis Brotherhood. Hence,
u Cf. also for the spiritual privileges granted to this brotherhood

on the same conditions as to white members of a confraternity,
Patente das indulgencias, grafas, privilegios, e prerogativas, com que os

Swnmos Pontffices, Legados Apostolicos, Bispos e Arcebispos _adomdriio,
enriquedrJo, e dotJriio a confraria, e irmandade do santissimo Rosario de
Nossa Senhora dos Homens Pretos de Siio SaiJJador da Matta de Lisboa
(Lisboa, 1757).
108
109
my opinion is that either yon should give your slave a

certificate of manumission, or else you should treat him
kindly, so that he does not lead a dog's life. In this way
you will avoid sinning before God, and do what you
ought to do.'
The miner replies by suggesting that it will be sufficient
if he gives the slave his freedom in another fifteen or
twenty years. 'Better late than never,' responds the
lawyer, 'but how old is he now?' The miner then confesses that he bought the slave some fourteen or f1fteen
years ago, when the Negro was already about twentyeight years old. The lawyer rebukes him for his callousness in planning to get rid of his slave just when the latter
reaches an age when he can no longer do any heavy work,
and will become a more or less useless month to feed.
The miner remains quite unrepentant in face of this
admonition and twits the lawyer with being an Ncgrophile Intellectual, who for some unaccountable reason
prefers a black man to a white. Having failed to convince
each other of their respective viewpoints, the miner takes
his leave of the lawyer by placing on the table the legal
fee of eight testoons, 'which may serve to buy a watermelon as a dessert for your dinner'.
I,have summarized the Nova e Curiosa Rela,ao at some
length, because, like the previously quoted correspondence of Domingos Jorge V elho and Paulo de Silva Nunes,
it accurately reflects the climate of opinion at the time it
was written. It shows that there were a number of people
who were sharply critical of the evils inherent in any
system of slavery; but it also shows that these enlightened
v1ews were not shared by the great majority of their
contemporaries, with whom it was an article of faith that

the black man was born to serve the white, and that the
latter could do what he liked with his own. The allegations made by the anonymous author concerning the illtreatment of slaves in colonial Brazil are amply borne out
by the testimony of contemporary observers. I have only
space to quote two of these here, but they will suffice.
In 1755, the Town Council of Mariana in Minas Gerais
suggested that nmaway slaves who were recaptured
should have d1e Achilles' tendon of one foot severed,
thus preventing them from running away again, but not
from hobbling about to work. Dam Marcos de Noronha,
Cmmt of Arcos and Viceroy at Bahia, roundly condemned this infamous suggestion when he heard of it.
He informed the Crown that 'the greater part of these
slaves run away because their owners do not feed nor
clothe them, nor treat them with compassion and charity
as they ought to do, both in health and sickness. And
besides ill-treating them as regards food and clothing,
they lilrewise inflict a thousand cruelties and unheard-of
punishments on them'. The testinlony of Dam Marcos
de Noronha is of the more weight since he had previously
been governor of Pernambuco (1746-9) and of Goyaz
(1749-55), so that he wrote this criticism with ten years'
experience of Brazilian slave-owners behind him. 2
In 1758 a curious book was published at Lisbon
entitled (in translation) The Ethiopian ransomed, indentured,
IIO
III
20 Petition 9 the Senate of Mariana, May 1755, and the Cmmt

of Arcos' dispatch, Bahia, ro Attgust, 1756, apud Accioli-Amaral,
Memonas historicas e politicas da provinda da Bahia (6 vols., Salvador,
1919-40), vol. ii. pp. 427-9.
sustained, corrected, educated, and liberated. The author,

Manuel Ribeiro Rocha, was a Lisbon-born secular
priest, who had long been domiciled at Bahia. His book
amounts to a plea for the substitution of Negro slavery
in Brazil by a system of indentured labour, under which
the slaves bought from Africa would automatically
become free after working for their master during an
agreed period. He devoted a whole section (the ftfth) to
discussing the punishment of refractory slaves, and the
extent to which this right was abused by many slaveowners in Brazil. He tells us, among other things, that
although flogging with the chicote (rawhide knout or
whip) was limited to a maximum of forty lashes under
Portuguese law, yet Brazilian slave-owners thought
nothing of inflicting two-, three-, or even four-hundred
lashes. He also states that there were some slave-owners
who, whenever they bought a new slave, had him
soundly flogged straightway, simply out of a sadistic
determination to show that they would stand no nonsense. He advocates the abolition of such barbarous
punishments as flogging with the chicote, pricking the
victim's buttocks with a pointed knife, cauterizing the
wounds with drops of hot wax, etc., and urges that
corporal punishments should be limited to the use of the
scourge, the cane, the palmatoria, and imprisonment. He
also denotmces the slave-owner's common habit of
abusing their victims with the most frightful oaths,
curses, and insulting names. This, he says, was something
which the Negroes particularly resented: 'and they claim
that they also have souls like the whites. And that Christ
our Lord likewise suffered and died for them; and that
in the churches, masters and slaves all receive communion at the same table.' 21
That the treatment of slaves in Brazil did not improve
appreciably during the eighteenth centnry, despite the
gradual spread of humanitarian ideas in what was evidently a restricted circle, is proved by a comparison of
tl1e accounts given by Antoni! and Benci at the end of
the seventeenth century with that of Vilhena a htmdred
years later. Many of the abuses and atrocities denounced
by the two Jesuits are also condemned in the pages of the
Noticias Soteropolitanas e Brasilicas, which the Portuguese
professor of Greek compiled during a residence of twelve
years (r787-99) at Bahia. 22 Like his predecessors, Vilhena
thought that something ought to be done to check 'the
barbarous, cruel and unheard-ofway in which the majority
of owners treat ilieir tmfortunate slave labonrers'. He
also denounced the sadistic floggings to which they were
frequently subjected; the totally inadequate rations and
clothing which they received-when they received any at
all-and their being allowed only one day a week (apart
II2
21 Manuel Ribeiro Rocha, Ethiope Resgatado, emp~nhado, sustentado, corregido, instmido, e libertado (Lisboa, 1758), especially pp.
r88-223, for the mistreatment of slaves in colonial Brazil. The
chicote was thus described
by Captain W. F. Owen, R.N., in
1825:
'The knout was formed of several thongs of hard dried hull's hide,
covered with knots, and attached to a stick about three feet long, as a
handle' (Narrative of Voyages, London, 1833, vol. i, p. 124). The
pnlmatoria was a wooden hand-shaped ferrule, pitted with holes,
which was used to strike the offender's open hand, often inflicting
weals and swellings which made it tmusable for a time.
22 Luis dos Santos Vill1ena, RecopilafiiO de Noticias Soteropolitanas
e Brasilicas, contidas em XX cartas que da Cidade do Salvador Bahia de

Todos os Santos escreve hum a ontro amigo emLisboa (ed. Braz do Amaral,
2 vols., Salvador, 1922), vol. i, pp. 187-9, 191, 215.
II3
from an occasional saint's day) in which to cultivate their

own allotments. Their mortality was inevitably high from
'overwork, starvation, and flogging', but their inefficient
and unfeeling owners seemed to be oblivious to the
financial loss which they themselves suffered from having
to replace the slaves so often. The treatment of the slaves
employed in agriculture and in mining was admittedly
worse, as a rule, than that of the household slaves, who
were often comparatively well off. But when due allowance is made for this fact, it remains true that by and
large colonial Brazil was indeed a 'hell for blacks'. 23
The corollary that Brazil was a 'paradise for Mulattoes'
requires considerable modification. It is true that the
sexual attraction of the Mulata for the average LusoBrazilian male is overwhehningly evidenced by the
accounts of foreign visitors, by the complaints of colonial
governors and bishops, and by popular song and story.
The French circunniavigator, Le Gentil de 1a Barbinais,
who stayed for some months at Bahia in 1718-19, was
scandalized by the local citizens' preference for a coloured
woman even if a white one was available. 'I have often
asked them,' he wrote, 'the reason for such an extraordinary taste, but they never could tell me. For my own
part, I believe that being suckled and reared by slave girls

they derive this inclination from their milk.' 24 The
colonial authorities legislated frequently but vainly
against the money, dresses, and jewellery lavished upon
coloured ladies of easy virtue by their admirers, often to
the impoverishment of their lawful white wives. Antoni!
at the beginning of the eighteenth century and Vilhena
at the end of it, deplored the liberty and licence which
were frequently granted to Mulattoes of both sexes,
whether bond or free, by their owners or by their
fathers-a relationship which was often combined in the
same individuals. E. a mulata que e Mulher ('It is the
Mulata who is the real woman') as the Brazilian saying
goes, and the same idea is echoed in the last two lines of
an old carnival song from Belem do Para:
El-Rei, El-Rei, El-Rei Embaixador,

Ora viva a mulata que tem o seu amor ! 25
de sua mae hauer uma imensidade de cscravas para o seu servi~o,

eram as filhas obrigadas par semanas a regerem esse mesmo serviifo,
e a tartaruga velha o fazia executar sem a menor falha, ao sam do
chicote e palmatoria que sempre lhe servirio ao seu lado de Camaristas' (apud Pedro Calmon, Historia Social do Brasil. Aspectos da Sociedade Colonial, Jrd ed., Sao Paulo, 1941), p. 286.
2 ,~_ Le Gentil de Ia Barbinais, Nouveau Voyage autotlr du monde (3

vols., Paris, 1728), vol. iii, p. 204. The Count of Assumar, Governor
of Minas Gerais in 1717-21, voiced the same opinion when he wrote
of the white Mineiros, 'even the so-called greatones have been bred
in the milk of servitude'. A sinrilar argument was advanced in Portuguese Asia a century earlier, when the European-born friars argued
that their colleagues who were born of white parents in India were
nevertheless suckled and brought up by Indian ayahs. Cf. p. 66
above for the citation from Fr. Miguel da PurifiCa~ao, O.F.M.,
RelafCiO Dcjensiva dos jilhos da India Orientale da ProJJiJuia do Apostolo
S. Thome dos frades menores da regular observanda da mesma India
(Barcelona, 1640). On the question of white child and coloured wetnurse see Gilberto Freyre, The Masters and the SlaJJes (New York,
1946), pp. 278-9.
26 For other popular verses on mulatas and the jealollSy with which
white women regarded them see Pedro Ca.lmon, Historia Social do
Brasil. Espirito da Sociedade Colonial, pp. 164--9.
II4
Il5
23
Even the household service was often done 'to the sound of the
chicote and palmatoria', as may be seen from Santos Marrocos' account

of the home of his Carioca fiancee in r8r4: 'pais apesar de em casa
This toleration, or rather favouritism, which was

extended to many Mulattoes in many ways was, however,
paralleled by much social and legal discrimination against
the pardos as they were also called. Colonial legislation
discriminated against persons with an infusion of Negro
blood much more than it did against Mamelucos, Caboclos,
and other examples of cross-breeding between Whites
and Amerindians. Free Mulattoes were often coupled
with enslaved Negroes in the wording of laws which
either forbade them to carry weapons and to wear costly
clothes, or else severely restricted their use of these marks
of gentility which might tend to place them on a level
with the Whites. For most of the colonial period they
were not allowed to hold high positions in Church and
State, although this was more of a theoretical than a
practical bar at various times and places. Apart from anything else, the relative scarcity-or total absence-of white
women in many regions of Brazil resulted in this official
colour-bar being largely ignored in practice.
In 1725, for example, the white gentry of Minas Gerais
protested against anyone of other than pure white
descent being considered as eligible for municipal and
judicial posts. These representations were sympathetically
received at Lisbon, where the Overseas Councillors
advised the Crown that the passage of legislation in this
sense would encourage white men to marty women of
their own colour, instead of living in sin with Negresses
and Mulatas, as most of them did. Accordingly, in January 1726, the Crown promulgated a decree that all
candidates for municipal office in Minas Gerais must be
(a) of pure white descent, and (b) either the husband or else
the widower of a white woman. This probably had some

temporary effect; but twenty-seven years later the
governor of Minas Gerais observed that provided the
aspirant was not of too dusky a hne, it was wealth rather
than colour which remained the chief criterion for municipal office in that captaincy. The governor also supported
a request made by the better educated Mulattoes of Minas
Gerais that they should be allowed to wear swords like
white gentry, a privilege which had hitherto been denied
them, but which the Crown granted at Gomes Freire de
Andrada's suggestion in 1759.26
It was not only the Mulattoes of Minas Gerais who
fmmd legal obstacles in the way of their social advancement. In the 168o's the pardos of Bahia protested to the
Crown at Lisbon and to the Jesuit General at Rome
against their recent exclusion from the schools run by the
Jesuits. When the matter was referred back to the authorities at Bahia, Padre Antonio Vieira, who was then VisitorGeneral of the Society in Brazil and who had himself a
little Negro blood in his veins, explained that the pardos
had been banned because the upper-class white citizens
would not tolerate their own sons sitting alongside those
half-castes, 'most of whom are of vile and obscure
origin'. He added: 'They are nearly always badly
brought up, as the regular and secular clergy and the local
gentry have all learnt by experience. For that reason, on
this coast of Brazil, they are already prohibited from
II6
" C. R. Boxer, The Golden Age of Brazil, 1695-1750, pp. 165-6,

402,
and sources there quoted, to which should be added the order of
by which Mulatto gentlemen were allowed to wear swords

PANRJ, val. viii, p. 214).
I759
II7
entering the priesthood and the Religious Orders, or from

holding any government post.' He stated that the Jesuits
themselves had never been in favour of discriminating
against any 'honest and well-mannered youth', irrespective of his colour, and that they would readmit coloured
students if ordered to do so by the Crown and by their
General, as did indeed happen. It was also the Crown
which intervened sixteen years later to compel the
Rectorate of the University of Coirnbra to admit a
Brazilian pardo whom they had previously rejected on
account of his colour. It was likewise King John V who
ordered the Governor of Pernambuco in 1731 to admit
a qualified Mulatto advocate to practice as Pro.curator of
the Crown, after the Governor had rejected him for thiS
post solely on account of his colour."
What is said above of the Jesuits applies mutatis mutandis
to the other Religious Orders working in Brazil. Sometimes they admitted coloured novices and sometimes
they did not, the most exacting and consistent of those
who maintained a rigorous colour-bar being the Teresian
bare-footed Carmelites, established at Olinda in 1686.
This branch of the Order not only steadfastly refused to
adruit coloured individuals of any kind and shade, but
rejected any aspirant of Brazilian birth, even if he was of
pure white origin. Though accepting the money and the
charity of the inhabitants of Pernambuco, these fnars
recruited their numbers exclusively from European-born
27
Vieira's letter of 27 July r688 and further documentation in
Seraftm Leite, S.J., Historia da Companhia de jesus no Brasil, vol. : pp.

75-80, ibid, vol. iv, pp. 260-7; vol. iii, pp._ 201-4; F. A. Pereira da
Costa, Anais Pernamb11canas (7 vols., Renfe, 1951-8), vol. v, PP
and bred Portuguese during the hundred and forty-five

years that their monastery existed. 28 It was a similar tale
with the armed forces of the Crown. Perhaps because
European recruits were always in short supply and
desertion was rife, soldiers of the regular garrisons in
Brazil served alongside each other without distinction of
colour-though the European-born were apt to be favoured when it came to a question of promotion or one of
compassionate discharge. The ruilitia regiments, on the
other hand, were sometimes organized on a class and
colour basis; and I have already alluded to the distinction
made by the Viceroy Marquis of Lavradio between the
white and coloured officers of the militia at Rio de Janeiro
m the last quarter of the eighteenth century;'9
Finally, a word on the Irmandades or lay-brotherhoods
of colonial Brazil, and their attitude to race relations.
This was anything but uniform, some of them being
based on rigid class and race distinctions, while others
were open to all and sundry. As an example of the former
category I may cite the Tertiary Order of .st. Francis,
which refused to admit coloured individuals of any kind,
and even barred white men who were married with
Mulatas. As an example of the latter category I may cite
the Black Brotherhood of Our Lady of the Rosary
founded at Ouro Preto in 1715. Though primarily
mtended for Negroes, whether bond or free, this partlcular confraternity adruitted people of all colours and
28
Francisco Augusto Pereira da Costa, Anais Pernambucauos (7
vols., Recife, 1951-8), vol. iv, pp. 282-4.
'" C. R. Boxer, The Golden Age of Brazil, 1685-1750, pp. I42-J,
398, and sources there quoted, to which should be added Vilhena
Noticias Soteropolitanas e Brasilicas, val. i, pp. 250-70.
'
59-6!.
II8
Il9
of both sexes in accordance with the terms of its compromisso or statutes. Early in the eighteenth century, Bahia
had no less than thirty-one approved brotherhoods
dedicated to the Virgin Mary alone. These were divided
on a racial basis, six being reserved for Negroes and five
for Mulattoes (pardos), the remainder being exclusively
white confraternities constituted according to social
position or to age. As indicated above, some of the Brazilian white brotherhoods were so exclusive that their
statutes contained a clause that any brother who married
beneath him in class or colour should automatically
forfeit his membership. 30
From the foregoing it is, I hope, sufliciently clear that
racial prejudice and racial tension existed in colonial
Brazil to a much greater extent than some modern
authorities-'no names, no pack-drill', as we used to say
in the army-are willing to allow. In Brazil, as in Portuguese Asia and Portuguese Africa, Negro, Preto, and
Cafre, were all pejorative terms, often synonymous wit!1
Escravo. 'Have pity on a man living among Kaflirs,' wrote
the Count of Assumar from Minas Gerais to an aristocratic
friend at Lisbon in 1718, and the next year he advised his
correspondent to reject the viceroyalty of Brazil if it were
offered to him by the Crown, 'since America is no country
for white men.' Despite these sour observations, the free
Negro and the dark-hued Mulatto had little or no hope
of ascending in the social scale, whatever their aptitudes
30
M. S. Cardozo, 'The lay brotherhoods of colonial Bahia', in The
and qualifications. One or two exceptions merely confirm

this general rule. Whatever social heights light-skinned
Mulattoes and Mulatas might achieve by passing themselves off and being accepted as white, the prejudice
agamst Afncan blood was so strong that in 1771 the
viceroy ordered the degradation of an Amerindian chief,
who, 'disregarding the signal honours which he had
received from the Crown, had sw1k so low as to marry a
Negress, staining his blood with this alliance'. If colonial
Brazil was in some respects a Mulattoes' Paradise, it was
a rather uneven one. 31
Catholic Historical Review, val. xxxiii (Washington, D.C., 1947), pp.

12-30; Francisco Antonio Lopes, Os Palacios de Vila Rica. Ouro Pre to
no circlo de ouro (Bela Horizonte, 1955), pp. 194-7; Caio Prado Junior,
FormafiTo do Brasil contemporaneo, I, Colonia (Sao Paulo, 1953), p. 252 11.
We do not need psychiatrists or psychologists to tell

us that every hwnan being is a bw1dle of contradictions,
nor do we need historians to tell us that this was just as
true m the past as it is in the present. We have only to
recall the author of the 137th psalm and the millions
who have sung it down the ages with no feeling of
embarrassment or incongruity. Nor, I presume, do we
need reminding that Christians and Buddhists, both
adllerents of essentially pacifist Creeds which abhor the
shedding of blood, have vied with-or against-each
other in waging sanguinary wars, with battle-cries like
that of the Calvinist Scots' army at Dunbar in 1650
'Jesus and no quarter!' The Portuguese were, and are, no'
exception to this rule; and if I have dwelt in these lectures
31
Letters of D. Pedro de ,Almeida_, d. Ribeirao do Catons, April

I7I_8 ~1d June _1719 (authors collection). For an analysis of colour
pre~udtce an~ Its connection with Negro slavery see Caio Prado
Juruor, op. c1t., pp. 267-76, Cf. also Pedro Calmon Historia Social
do Brasil, passim.
'
I2I
I20
9
on the dark rather than on the bright side of Portuguese

colonization in past centuries, it has not been with the
object of suggesting that they behaved worse than other
European nations would have done in the prevailing
circumstances. I only wish to show that sweeping generalizations like the following recent pronouucement by Dr.
Armando Cortesao must be taken with a pinch of salt:
'The Portuguese never had any preconception of race or
of colour. They always dealt with and still deal with
christian fraternity towards all, whether they are white,
black, swarthy or yellow !' 32 This statement, though
made in perfect good faith, is not the truth, the whole
truth, and nothing but the truth.
The truth was and is more complex, as I stated at the
beginning of these lectures. The Portuguese were neither
angels nor devils; they were human beings and they
acted as such; their conduct varying greatly according
to time, place, and circumstances. The Brazilian planters
who flogged their slaves to death for trivial offences were
almost invariably generous and kindly hosts; and they
may have been capable of sincere affection for individual
Negroes and Mulattoes. If some slave-owners only
manumitted their slaves when these latter were too old
and ill to fend for themselves, others freed them in the
prime of life-though few can have acted with the
bizarria of the Visconde de Ponte de Lima, who appeared

in the bull-ring on the 2! November 1708, with a retinue
of twenty husky Negroes, whom he had bought a few
days previously, all of them richly dressed and with the
certificates of freedom which he had just given them tied
to their arms. 33
Moreover, if slaves in Brazil were treated just as harshly

a they were in the English, French, and Dutch WestIndian colonies, it remains true that their chances of
manumission were greater; and the Black Brotherhoods
of Our Lady of the Rosary provided them with a source
of aid and comfort which was lacking in the sugarcolonies of the Northern European powers. If the Portuguese in Brazil often acted on the Anglo-Saxon principle
that the only good Amerindian was a dead one, there were
other occasions when they shared the Red Man's joys and
sorrows. A French Capuchin missionary who was very
critical of the way in which the Portuguese mistreated
some tribes in the backlands of Bahia towards the end of
the seventeenth century, also admitted that the church
weddings ofconverted Amerindians were well attended by
the local Portuguese, who added a gay note to the solemnity
of the occasion by playing lively airs on their guitars and
firing salvoes of musketry in honour of the happy pair.'
33
Realidades e desvarios Afticanos. Discurso proferido na Sodadade de

Geografia de Lisboa em 9 dejunho de 1962, Lis boa, 1962, pp. 30--JI).
On p. 23 of the same we read, 'sempre tratimos os indigenas humanamente e, quando civilizados, de igual para igual'.
'. trouxe mais vinte negros vcstidos a mourisca, com

asseyo, e custo, e todos com as suas cartas de alforria atadas nos
brac;:os, p~rque o dito despois de os comprar par muy hom dinheiro,
lhes deu hberdade a todos, e os vestidos, como tambem a todos os
mais criados' (Jose Soares da Silva, Ga.zeta em forma de carta, 17011716, ed., Lisboa, I9JJ, p. I79)34 Fr. Martin de Nantes, O.F.M. Cap., Relarion succinte (c. 1707),
apud C. R. Boxer, The--Golden Age of Brazil, 1698-1750, p. 233.
122
!23
a2. 'Os Portugueses nunca tiveratn preconceitos de rac;:as ou de

cores. A todos trataram e tratam com fratcrnidade, crista, quer
sejam brancos, pretos, bac;os ou amarclos' (Armando Cmtesao,
BRAZiL AND THE MARANHAO
It was a similar story elsewhere in the Portuguese

conquistas. Although a viceregal decree published at Goa
in 1567 at the prompting of the first Ecclesiastical
Council celebrated in Portuguese India, ostensibly put an
end to all social intercourse between Portuguese families
and their Hindu and Muslim neighbours, we know that
tins order for enforcing what is nowadays termed
apartheid was not strictly obeyed. Successive Ecclesiastical
COLmcils at Goa . denounced not only the contmued
toleration of 'heathen' religious processions but the practice of Christians lending their jewellery, fmery, and
slaves to the participants therein. We also gather from
these ecclesiastical fulminations that the Portuguese on
occasion supplied guns to ftre salutes during the Muslin1
Fast of Ramadhan! Far from enforcing monogamy on
all and sundry as the puritanical prelates of the 1567 and
later Councils decreed, many of the Portuguese themselves maintained seraglios whenever they could, and I
have previously quoted some of the missionaries' complaints about Lnsitanian concupiscence on a staggering
scale. 35
From about 1540 onwards, the Portuguese authorities

at Goa certainly enacted a large number of harsh and
oppressive laws with the object of preventing the open
practice ofHinduism, Buddhism, and Islam in Portuguesecontrolled territory-with the partial exceptions of
Ormuz, Diu, and Macao-but the application of these
laws varied from the exceedingly rigorous to the purely
formal. Similarly, the laws which were enacted for the
purpose of favouring converts to Christiatuty at the expense of those who declined to be converted, and with
the declared object of taking the orphan children of
Hindus to be catechized and brought up as Christians,
were sometimes applied to the letter, but more often not.
If some viceroys, such as Francisco Barreto (1555-8)
and Dom Constantino de Bragan<;a (1558-61), were
priest-ridden bigots who strove to enforce them as
far as possible, other viceroys, such as Dom Luis de
Ataide (rs68-71, 1578-81) and the Count of Lavradio
(1671-7), were relatively tolerant and applied them halfheartedly or not at all. It was a common complaint of the
ecclesiastical authorities at Goa in the eighteenth century
that the secular arm did not give the Church adequate
snpport at all times, and that Hindu and Muslim merchants and officials were usually favoured much more
than native Christians. 36 In short, it is unsafe to generalize
35 For the enactm_ent of the 1567 and subsequent Ecclesiastical

Councils periodically held at Goa see J. H. da Cunha Rivara, ~rch_ivo
Portugucz Orieutal,. Fasc. _IV _(r~62),- For a_ survey of the ~C?1s1atton
favourino- converts and discmnrnatmg agamst aU non-Chnstlans (or,
rather, :an-Roman Catholics), in the period I562-1843, see P.
Pissurlencar, Roteiro dos Arquivos da India Portuguesa (Goa-Bastod,
1955), pp. 62--95. The documents published by Cuuha. Riva~a in
Fasc. VI (r876) of the above-quotedArcl11vo Portuguez f?~tental ~1ve a

good idea of the way in whic~ the P_ortugue~e authonues oscillated
between repression and toleratiOn durmg the eighteenth century over
such matters as Hindu marriage ceremonies, compulsory conversion
a"f orphan children, reservation_ of official pOsts for cOnverts,
etc., etc.
124
36 'Where is the household of Goa, even the most respectable, in

which Hindus do not make bold to enter without hesitation? A poor
Canarim may be waiting outside the door for hours on end without
anyone taking any notice of him, if he is a Christian. Along comes a
Hindu, and up the stairs he goes with every confidence .. .' (Fr.
Manuel de Natividade, O.P., writing at Goa, 9 December 1715). 'A
125
on this topic of religious bigotry and toleration in Portuguese India; though it can be said as a rough guide that
bigotry was more in evidence than tolerance for most of
the two centuries between 1561 and I76I.
As with religious bigotry, so with racial prejudice, and
for obvious reasons the two often went lund in hand.
The Muslim, the Hindu, and the Negro who was
legally and socially discriminated against on account of
his religion, was apt to fmd himself despised on account
of his colour. Indeed, colour-prejudice survived the
draconic edicts of the Marquis of Pombal in 1763-74,
and the egalitarian legislation of the Constitutional
government in Portugal in the early nineteenth century.
But here again it is unsafe to generalize. In May 1825,
Captain W. F. Owen, R.N., attended a ball at Government House on Mo~ambique island, 'at which was present
every soul that could claim European origin, however
distant or tinged by the mixture of black blood. Such an
extraordinary collection as this was scarcely ever witnessed. It included nearly every grade, from highly
polished civilization to the just fledged savage, whose
limbs had never before been confmcd within the limits
of broadcloth; from the well-fitted and neat costun1c of
Europe, to the loose butterfly-looking suit of vanity and
ignorance; while the complexions varied from the most

brilliant black to the pleasing red and white of our more
favoured race'. This seems to imply that racial equality
m Portuguese East Africa existed in its most tmrestricted
form. Yet over fifty years later an ex-governor of Sofala
could protest in print against the unwritten but 'inexorable' social law by which a native of Portuguese India
could not hope to be promoted above the rank of captain (retired) in the Portuguese military medical service,
whatever his merits and length of service. 37 One other
instance will show the difficulty of generalization in this
f1cld. For a long time, slaves in Angola were treated as
badly, or worse, than those in Brazil; but by the end
of the eighteenth century slavery on many Angolan rural
estates had become little better than a farce. A widow who
owned such an estate (arimo) could only re-marry if her
slaves approved of her choice !38
Hindu living in these our lands, as long as he wears a cabaya and

professes Hinduism, has free leave to enter anywhere in any house,
even the most private room; but as soon as such a man, from whom
nothing was kept secret, is converted to Christianity, he does not find
a door open to him, nor is he held in the same regard as formerly'
(Viceroy Caetano de Mello de Castro to the Crown, Goa, ro January
1707). Cf. J. H. da Cunha Rivara, Archivo Portuguez Oriental, val. vi
(r876), pp. 6s, 93, 193, 445-7.
126
97 'No districto de Sofalla ha hum facultative de 2a. dassc

chamado Gon~alvcs. E natural da India', e por consequencia condem~
nado a lei inexoravel que lhe nao di acesso alem de capitao, a esse
posto s6 lhe e concedido pela. refonna . . . e reahnente barbara nao
os dcixarem subir na cscala hierarchica at aos postos que attingem os
outros seus collegas' (Alfredo Brandao Cr6 de Castro Ferreri,
Apontam~ntos _de um ex-governador de Sofala, Lisboa, r886, p. 65). For
the multJ-ractal ball at Government House, Moyambique, on the 13
May 1825, see W. F. W. Owen, R.N., Narrative of voyages to explore
~~1e shores ofAfrica, Arabia, and Madagascar (2 Vols., London, 1833), vol.
11,
PP
I9I-2.
'" 's e
cazao, a esco111a do m_ando 11e, sua; com_ tanto que Seja

aprovado por esta occioza escravatura; do contrario a dczerr;ao he
o scu recurs:o ordinaria, par nao experimentar a severidade do novo
scnhor, que a sua voluntaria opinllo detesta' (Elias Alexandre da
Silva Correa, Historia de Angola, 1792, 2 vols., cd. Lisboa, 1937, vol.
ii, pp. ITZ-14.
127
I should like to make one further point by way of

conclusion. The Portuguese have often been the severest
critics of their own colonial misrule, but even the fiercest
of these critics seldom suggested that the conquests,
colonies, or provinces-as they were variously termedshould be abandoned on that account. Three typical
examples will suffice to show their attitude. Dom Joao
de Castro, 'Knight of the Renaissance', as his latest
English biographer calls him, who governed Portuguese
Asia with conspicuous success from 1545 to 1548, wrote
of the Hindu inhabitants of Portuguese territory, 'They
could more properly be called our slaves than our subjects', and again, 'I can assure Your Highness that more
souls are lost among the Portuguese who come out to
India than are saved among the heathen who are converted by the preachers and Religious to our holy faith'.
On another occasion, writing of the way in which the
Portuguese mistreated their h1dian allies, he commented:
'Truly it is a weighty thing that we should persecute the
mdians to such an extent that we hardly leave them an
clement in which to live. We have already taken the sea
from them, and we are slowly usurping the land from
them piecemeal through litigation in claiming title-deeds
and donations. It only remains for us to deprive them of
the air, since they have no use for f1re, as their food is
limited to herbs and fruits, wherein', he concludes
ironically, 'Nature has shown her great foresight'. Yet
Dom Joao de Castro was in some ways a conquistador of
the old school. He forbade his men to give quarter to
their Muslim enemies in the relief of Diu-a command
which they disobeyed, to his great annoyance-and he
proudly thanked God for making him a born Portu-
128
gucsc.39
Diogo do Couto, the soldier-chronicler to whom I

have already alluded several times, spent most of his long
life in Golden Goa, which he saw decline :&om its noonday splendour into its sunset glow, after the arrival of
the Dutch and the English in Eastern seas. Among several
tmpublished works which he left on his death in 1616,
was one entitled Dialogo do soldado pratico (Dialogue of the
teteran soldier). This is, perhaps, the most vitriolic attack
on Portuguese colonial maladministration ever pe1med,
and the following passage may be taken as typical of its
mordant criticism. 'mdia has the most pure and excellent
airs in the world, the finest and most salutiferous fruits,
and spring and river waters on the face of the earth,
bread, barley, every variety of pulse and vegetables,
enough large and small cattle to sustain the world, and
everything else about it is marvellous. 111e worst that
there is there, is us, who came and ruined such a wonderful country with our lies, our deceits, our frauds, our
chicaneries, our injustices, and other vices which I forbear to mention.' Yet Couto was nothing if not a patriotic Portuguese and an ardent imperialist. He devoted his
old age to glorifying his countrymen's martial achievements in the East in the Decadas that he compiled so
laboriously in the face of considerable handicaps. ' 0
~~ Elaine Sanceau (cd.), Cartas de D;jo5o de Castro (Lisboa, 1954),
pp. 28, 39. 45. 2]0, 298.
40 Diogo do Couto, DiJlogo do so !dado prJtico (ed. Caetano do
Amaral, Lisboa, 1790); 0 so !dado prtftico (ed. M. Rodrigues Lapa,

Lisboa, 1937), pp. 244-5 for the above quotation. Only four of
I29
If there is a modern Portuguese work which vies with

Couto's Soldado Pratico in its bitter denunciation of
Portuguese real or alleged colonial incompetence and
misrule, it is Joao de Andrade Corvo's Estudos sabre as
provincias ultramarinas, a 4-volume work commissioned
by the Lisbon Academy of Sciences and published be-tween r883 and r887. The reader of these volumes is left
with the impression that if Portuguese colonization was
only half as retrograde and inefficient as it is represented
as having been in these pages, then the sooner the Portuguese left their overseas possessions, the better for all
concerned. Yet this is not at all what Andrade Corvo
intended, nor what he himself thought. He served more
than once as Minister of Marine and Overseas, and he
was an enthusiastic colonialist who encouraged Serpa
Pinto and other Portuguese explorers of Africa in the
years r87o-90. As it was in the days ofD. Joao de Castro,
of Diogo do Couto, of Andrade Corvo, so it is today.
Life-long opponents ofDr. Salazar, such as Dr. Armando
Cortesao, line up behind him when it comes to Portngal
standing fast in Africa. Whatever the Portugnese workers
and peasants may feel about Portugal's past, present, and
future as a colonial power, the great majority of the
edncated classes arc proud of her past history and present
achievements overseas and arc resolved not to abdicate
voluntarily in the foreseeable future.
Couto's twelve Daadas (IV-VII) were published in his lifetime, the
remainder appearing posthumously at various dates between 1645
and 1788.
INDEX
41-42.
Almeida, Dom Pedro de,
59 n, 72 n, IIS n, rzo-r.
sS,
Alvarez, Joao, S.J., 8 n.

Alvarez, Manuel, S.J., 10 11.
Ambaquistas, 40.
Ambuila, battle of, 33.
Anchieta, Jose de, S.J., 22, 92.
Andrade, AntOnio Alberto de,
98 n.
Andrade Corvo,Joiio de, 129-JO.
Angola, origin of nam_e, 23;
race relations in, 22, 30-40,
127; slave-trade in, 23, 25,
28-29, 39-4.0, 127; advocates
of 'Nigger-bashing' in, 26-27;
pomp and ceremony in, 30;
indigenons clergy of, 33-3 5;
decline of population in, 28
Antoni] ( = Andreom), S.J,
IOJ, II5.
Arcos, Cmmt of, J r r.
J30
Arzila, 5 n.
A vitabile, Fr. Pietro, his defence
of the colour-bar, 66--67.
Axelson, Eric, 44 n.
Axim, 7, II, r6, 17.
Azevedo, Joiio Lucio de, 97 n~
99 n.
Abella, Domingo, 67 ll.

Abraham, D.P., 53 n.
Abreu e Brito, Domingos, 28.
Affonso I, KiugofCongo,2o--2T.
Ajuda see Whydah.
Albuquerque, Affonso de, his
policy of mixed marriages in
India, 64-<J5, 76-77Alcantara Guerreiro, Canon,
46 n, 57.
Aldeias, Jesuit mission villages,
89, 9S.
Almeida, Dam Francisco de,
Bailadeiras, 77.
Bandcirantes, 93-95
Banha Cardozo, Bento, 28.
Banians, in Moyambique, 53-54Barreto, Manuel, S.J., 49-50.
Barros,Joao de, 3. 7
Benci,Jorge, S.J., 103, II3.
Benguela, 22, 24, 25, 38.
Benin, 12.
Blake, J. W., ro H, II 11.
Bosman, Willem, 12.
Braganya Pereira, A. B., 76 11.
Brahmins, Christian, 75-77
Brisio, AntOnio, C. S. Sp.,
n.
Religious,
II H, I6 1'1, 20 11, 22
Brotherhoods,
r6,
roS-9, II9-20.
Caboclo, 87, n6.
Cadomega, AntOnio de Oliveira,
on the loyalty of the Jagas,
24; his attitude to the Bantu
of Angola, 26-27, 30; to
Mulattoes and mixed bloods,
30-32; his praise of Capuchin
missionaries, 35-36; on the
Dem_bos, 36-37; on Luanda,
39; and Salazar, 40.
13 I
INDEX
Cafre (Kaifu), pejorative term,
120.
Cain, Negroes aUegedly descended from, 96, J04-5Caio Prado Junior, 120 11,
Couto, Diogo do, 3, 58, 78,

129-JO.
CLmha, Manuel da, 13 n.

Cunha Rivara, ]. H. da, 62 n,
73 11, 74 II, !34 11.
I2I 11.
Calmon, Pedro, II4
11,
II5
11,
I2I _11.
Dahomey, 17-18.
Dalgado, S. R., 76.
Davidson, Dasil, 20 n.
Delgado, Ralph, 34 n.
Dembos, 36-37.
Descendentes, 79-80.
Dias, Henrique, 106.
Dias Ferreira, Gaspar, 86.
Dias de Novais, Paulo, 23.
Dominican friars, in Mo<;:am-
CamOes, Lu{s de, 5, 6r-62.

Canarins, 79-8 r, 84-8 5.
Cape Verde islands, miscegenation in, 13-14.
Capuchin missionaries in Congo,
21-22; in Angola, 32-36; in
Brazil, 123.
Caste distinctions in Portuguese
India, 7 5-76.
bique, 46-49.
Castis:os, 62, 63 n.
Duffy, James, 20 11.
Castro, DomJoao de, 128-9
Castro, Dom Mattheus de,
Bishop of Chrysopolis, 67-68. Ehnina (Mina), 7, n-n, 13 n, 17
Castro, Dom Rodrigo de, Ennes, AntOnio, 9 5 n.
Ericeira, Dam Luis de Menezes,
captain of Safim, 5.
sth Cmmt of, 73.
Cervantes, Miguel de, 86.
Ceuta, 3, 4, 5
Fcmandes, AntOnio, 52.
Charados (Chardos), 75-76.
Chicote, II2-13.
Fernandes Sardinha, Dam Pedro,
Bishop of Bahia, go.
Clergy, indigenous, in Cape
Verde, 14, r6, 33; in Sao Fernandes Vieira, Jo:io, 27.
Tome, 16, 31, 33; in Congo Fidalgos, in India, 79and Angola, 19,21-22, 33-35; Figueira d.:t Serpa, Gaspar, 71.
in Mo~ambiquc, 56-57, 74; Freire de Andrada, Gomes, 99,
II7.
in India, 65-69, 75Confraternities, religious, 16, Freyre, Gilberta, liS 11.
108---9, II9-20.
Congo, Portuguese in the old Gomes da Costa, Marshal, So.
kingdom of, 19-22, :::6, 33, Gomes Freire de Andrada, 99,
34. 35. 37. 38
II7.
Cortesao, Armando, 122, 130. Gonsalves de Mello, Jose
Costa, Bernardo da, 8o.
AntOnio, 106 n.
132
INDEX
Gouveia, Francisco de, S.J.,
22-23.
Guerreiro, Fernao, S.J., ro ll.
Hamilton, Alexander, 47, 55-56.
Hindus, legal discrimination
against, 8r-8z, 124-6; sometrines favoured at the expense
of Christian converts, 125-6;
political emancipation of, 79,
83-84; denotmced by the
Viceroy Dam Pedro de
Almeida, 72 n; loyalty during
the Maratha invasions, 83.
Irish, schemes for emigration
into Mo<;:ainbiquc, 54-55
Innandades, 108-9, r r9-20.
Jadin, Louis, 20 u, 34 n.
Jagas (Bayaka), 23-25.
Jews and Jewesses, intermarriage
with Negresses and Negroes in
Sio Tome, rs.
Joloffs, ro.
Kaffir, pejorative term, 120.
Kiemen, Mathias, O.F.M., 93 11.
Konk::ull language, Portuguese
efforts to suppress, 8r -82.
Lanqados, 9-II, 52.
Lancilotto,
Nicholas,
S.J.,
denounces Portuguese concupiscence in India, 59-61.
Las Casas, Fr. Bartolome de,
O.P., 101-2.
Le Gentil de la Barbinais, II4-
rs.
Leite, Serafim, S.J., 88 n, 9I 11,

92 n, 103 11.
Leite de Faria, Francisco, O.F.M.,
Cap., I3 11.
Lemos, Duarte de, 43-44
Lima, Lucas de, 68-69.
Lisboa, Gaspar de, O.F.M.,
defends racial mixture in
India, 63-64.
Lobato, Alexandre, 42 n, 46 n,
51 n, 5411, 55 11.
Lopes, David, 5 11, 6 n.
Lopes de Siqueira, Luis, 32-33.
Luanda, slave-trade in, 23-29;
miscegenation in, 30-31, 3839; municipal council of, 31,
36; militia of, 31-32; population of, 38-39.
Mameluco, 86-87, rr6.
Manuel, I (King of Portugal,

1495-152I), 2-J.
Maranhao, .definition of, 93 n.
Marathas, their war with the
Portuguese, 83.
Mangham, R. C. F., .29.
Mazagio, 4, 5Mello, Fernao de, 2!
Mello de Castro, AntOnio de, 70.
Mendes, Dam Affonso, S.J.,
Patriarch of Ethiopia, 68.
Menezes, Joio de, O.P., 48-49.
Merees de Mello, Carlos, S.J.,
67 ll.
Merolla, Girolamo, O.F .M.,
Cap., J2.
Mestis:os, in West Africa, 30--35,
39; in India, 62, 76-Bo; in
Brazil, 87. See also Miscegenation, Mulattoes, Pardos.
133
INDEX
INDEX
Mirra, Sao Jorge da (Elmina),
Portuguese fortress on the
Gold Cost, r48z-r6J7, 7,
II-IZ, IJ
n,
Nantes, Martm dC, O.F.M.,

Cap., 123.
NObrega, Manuel de, S.J., 87-92.
Nova c Curiosa Relarrio (1764),
summary of, 104-10.
17.
Miscegenation, in Upper Guinea,

9-ro; in Lower Guinea, I I I]; in Congo, 21; in Angola,
30-35, 38-40~ inMoc;:ambiquc,
45-46, 48, 50-jl, 54. !26-7;
in India, 59-65; 71-72, 76-So; in Brazil, 86-87, 89, 93,
95,98, II4-Ij, 117-20; ll1thc
Maranhao, 98, 99, IIS; m
Minas Gerais, u6-r7; m
Cape Verde, I]-q, r6; m
Sao Tome, 14-16.
Moc;:ambique, island, 42-43.
Moc;ambique, miscegenation in,
45-46, 48, 50-5I, 54, 126-7;
slave-trade in, ss-s6; lack of
indigenous clergy in, 56-57;

schemes for white emigration
to, 54-55. See also Banians,
Dominicans, Monomotapa,
Swahili, Zambesia.
Monomotapa, 25, 49, 52, 57
Montaury, Joao Baptista, 4748.
Mulata (female of Mulatto), JI,
40, rq-r6, 121.
Mulattoes, ln Guinea, r-r6; in
Sao TomC, 14-15; in Congo,
21-22; in Angola, 30-35,
38-40; in Moc;:ambique, 4546, 50-52; in Brazil, 87, 103,
114-20, 121.
Muslims, Portuguese enmity
towards, 4-6, 41-45, 64, 81,
126; friendly rdations with,
44-45. 124.
Orlando Ribeiro, 79 n.
Owen, Captain W. F., Royal
Navy, II3 11, 126-7.
Paiva Manso, Visconde de, 20 n,
36 11.
Palmatoria, rr2-13.
Pardos, criticism of, II7-18.
Paulistas, and the Amerindians,
93-95
Pissurlencar, Panduronga, 76 1t,
77 n, 83 11, ss.
Pombal, Sebastiao Jose de
Carval110 e Mello, Count of
Oeiras and Marquis of, and
the colour-bar in Moc;:ambiq uc,
57, 73-74; and the colourbar in India, 83-84, 126; his
suppression of the Jesuits, 87,
98; his emancipation of the
Brazilian Amerindians, 98roo; his abolition of N cgro
slavery in Portugal, 1oo-r,
I04
Prazo system, 49-53
Pumbos and Pumbciros (Pombeiros), 28-29.
Purificac;:ao, Miguel da, O.F.M.,
his defence of the Creole
friars in India, 66, 67 11, II5 n.
Querimba islands, race relations
in, 43-46.
Quilombo, 2 5.
I34
Reinol(s), 77-79.
Religious intolerance, in Portuguese fudia, Sr-84, 125-26;
Religious tolerance in the
same, 125-6; in the Querim_ba
islauds, 43-46.
Religious Orders, upholders of
'White supremacy in Portuguese India, 65-69; in Brazil,
IIS-19.
Ribeiro, Orlando, 79 11.
Ribeiro Rocha, Manuel, 1!2-IJ.
Rodrigues, Francisco, S.J., 8 n,
I4 n.
Rodrigues, Jose Hon6rio, 39 11.
Ryder, A. F. C., 8 n, 13 11, 15 n,
16 11, 17 11, 18 n.
Sa.fim, 4, 5.
Salazar, Dr. AntOnio de Oliveira,
I, 2 11, 40, 1JO.
Salter de Mcnonc;a, Dr. Duarte,
54-55
Sanceau, Elaine, I29 11.
Sandomil, Count of, 68.
Santa Teresa, Ignacio de (Archbishop of Goa, 1721-40), 69.
Santos,Joao dos, O.P., 43-45.
Santos Marrocos, I 14 11.
Sao Salvador (Mbanza Congo),
2G-2I.
Sao Tome, 12-16, 31, 33.

Senegambia, 6, ro.
Seuegal, 9.
Severim de Faria, Manuel de, 7,
8, 25-26.
Silva Correia, Gem1ano, 58 n,

59 n, So.
Silva Nunes, Paulo da, 95-97,
no.
Silva Rego, AntOnio da, 35 rt.

Slavery and the Slave-trade, in
Guinea, 8-10, 16-17; in Cape
Verde, 13-14; in Sao Tome,
13-16; in Congo, 20-21; in
Angola, 22-23; 28-29, 34, 39,
40; in Moc;:ambiquc, 55-56;
in India, 59-62; in Brazil,
10o-14, 122-3; ill-treatment
of Negro slaves, 62, rr2-14,
127; good treatment ofNegro
slaves, 127.
Sofala, 41-42.
Solorzano y Pereira, Juan de,
96.
Sousa Coutinho, Dom Francisco
Inocencio de, criticises coloured
clergy, 35
Sousa Dias, Gastao de, 34 n.
Sova, 29, JO.
Swahili, relations with the Portuguese, 41-45.
Tangier, 4, 5.
Tangos-maos, 9-II, 52.
Taunay, Affonso de Escragnolle,
93. 94 11.
Teixeira da Mota, Aveline, 16 11,
r8 n.
Trindade, Pedro da, O.P., 48-49.
Valignano, Alexaudre,
S.J.,
denotmccs mixed bloods m
India, 62-63.
Vaz, Jose, Goan Oratorian friar,
68.
Velho, Domingos Jorge, his
opinion of the Amerindians,
94-97, IIO.
I35
INDEX
Vieira, AntOnio, S.J., praises
Cape Verde clergy, 14; and
the freedom of the Amerindians, 92---93, roz-3; and
Negro slavery, 102-3; and
the pardos of Bahia, II7.
Vieira, Joio Fernandes, 27.
Vilhena, Luis dos Santos, II]I4, II5.
Warri, 8
Whydah, J7-I8.
Witte,
Charles-Martel
O.S.B., 3 n.
Zaire, 19, 38, roz.

Zambesia, 45, 47, 49,
Zucchelli, Antonio,
Cap., 39 11.
Zmnbo, 48.
sr.
de,
52.
O.F.M.,
OXFORD BOOKt
HE IA
97061
'
PORTUGAL AND BRAZIL:

AN INTRODUCTI~
Essays in memory of E. Prestase and A. F. 0. . .
Edited by
H. V. LIVERMORE with the

W. J. ENTWISTLE
'it
1,,-
f.
assi- fill
ANGOLA: A SYMPOSIUM
Views of a Revolt
(Institute of Race
ReiGt~)
LA TIN AMERICA
The Balance of Race redreued
By
I. HALCRO FEitGUSON, wit/1

PHILIP MAKtN
a for-t/ by
(Institute of lWce Re/Gtiolu)

.
PROSPERO'S MAGIC
Some thouJhts on clU!i and raGe
.~'
f ~.
By PHILIP MASON
(Institute of R.ce ReiGtioas)
THE PORTUGUESE OFF Til

SOUTH ARABIAN COJUT
By
R. B. SEIUEANT
OXFORD UNIVERSITY PaEII

[8214-17/9/63]
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325.

Boxer - Race Relations in The Portuguese Colonial Empire

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Portuguese Colonial Empire

M1gud da l-'1.m.li:c,~a',_ ru[:

'!ffi:,."l.o Jn.J,~a. rJrumt:u',~P!J!Lmiffn~

The frontispiece of Fr. Miguel da Punficac;:ao, O.F.M, Relar5o Difensiva

CLARENDON PRESS OXFORD

Ox;ord University Press, Amen House, London E.C.4

Oxford University Press, 1963

I am grateful to the Richard Lectures Committee for

Printed ln Great Britain at the Pitma11 Press, Bath

II. MO<;:AMBIQUE AND INDIA

I: MOROCCO AND WEST AFRICA

Similarly, the preamble of a recent governmental

MOROCCO AND WEST AFRICA

MOROCCO AND WEST AFRICA

expansion early defined our reaction to other societies and

2 Decreta-Lei No. 43893, dated 6 September 196r, in Boletim de

MOROCCO AND WEST AFRICA

fortresses down the Moroccan Atlantic Coast, their

t!~~II1 t~ ~oillsll~~th.~t in.astfaiiati~loL};!lisli~. i.n~s.

']:heir last offe.nsiYLe_~ total disaster on the

MOROCCO AND WEST AFRICA

The common soldiers gave quarter to nobody, and only

MOROCCO AND WEST AFRICA

MOROCCO AND WEST AFRICA

exception rather than the rule. Moorish influence was

those who had not yet been influenced by Islam, though

Cf. D. Fernando de Menezes, Hist6ria de Tangere (Lisboa, 1732);

6 Manuel Severim de Faria, Notidas de Portugal (Lisboa, r6ss),

J. -Goulven, La place de Mazagan sous ln. dominatiotl portugaise,

MOROCCO AND WEST AFRICA

MOROCCO AND WEST. AFRICA

active in 'the slave-trade, than in saying mass or doing

and mostofhis contemporaries saw nothingincongruous

where we, trade'. 8 This, however, was a minority view,

MOROCCO AND WEST AFRICA

MOROCCO AND WEST AFRICA

part of West Africa naturally varied as between one tribe

be working. Their iullnence was for long a source of envy

Manuel Alvarez S.J., Etiopia Menor e descric;:io geografica da

tangos-maos and lanrados see Fernie Gue~reiro S.J., Relar5o Anual

1o ' porque entao amancebadOs muitos [brancosl com negras

vol. i, pp. 40-57.

MOROCCO AND WEST AFRICA

MOROCCO AND WEST AFRICA

vicinity of the Castle of Sao Jorge da Mina only about

Uninhibited sexual intercourse between Black and

W. Bosman, A New and Accurate description of the coast of Guinea

1704. For a well documented survey of R.C. missions in Benin, see

MOROCCO AND WEST AFRICA

MOROCCO AND WEST AFRICA

gold, and ivory. Over succeeding centuries the racial

last decade of the fifteenth century by levies of white

learned, such great

discreet and so accomplished that they may be envied by

apud Francisco Rodrigues S.J., Hist6ria da Companhia de Jesus na

assistncia de Portugal, Torno III. vol. 2, (Porto, 1944), pp. 448-70;

Jesuit reports on the Cape Verde Islands and mission, 1627-9,

MOROCCO AND WEST AFRICA

MOROCCO AND WEST AFRICA

The seamen who manned the ships trading from Sao

15 A. Er:isio, S.C.Sp., Monumenta Missionaria Africana. Africa

Mota, 'Notas sabre a hist6ria dos Portugueses na Africa Negra', in