Everyday life in a slave trading town

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The arrest of Crispina Perez

1:52In 1665, the Portuguese Inquisition arrested Crispina Perez, a powerful slave trader in the West African port of Cushu. The records of her case provide a remarkable window into everyday life in 17th century West Africa, and form the basis of Toby Green's latest book, The Heretic of Cushu. In today's episode of the History Extra podcast, he's joined by Rob Attar to explore the story of Crispina and the lost world she inhabited.

2:28So in 1665, Crispina Perez, a slave trader from the West African port town of Cushu, was arrested by the Inquisition. Why did this happen? Well, it happened for a lot of reasons, but fundamentally it happened because Crispina Perez was the most powerful trader in the town of Cushu, and she represented a real challenge to the Portuguese Empire in a number of ways. She represented a challenge because she had better connections, family connections, personal connections, trading connections, with the peoples of that part of West Africa, what today is Guinea-Bissau, and the surrounding countries, Guinea and Senegal.

3:04So because of that, she had much better relationships and much better trading connections, and she was therefore a challenge to the ambitions of the Portuguese Empire to establish itself as the major European Empire trading in West Africa at a time when it was under threat from other European empires, the Dutch, the English, the French. And so it was kind of like a show trial from the imperial side of things. And then from the point of view, of course, of Cushu, and this is where I think the book is interesting to a wide range of readings, of course there were lots of things going on in the town, lots of relationships, lots of tensions, enmities, rivalries,

3:41and these all played out in the desires of one or two groups of traders to vie with one another and take over as the leading group of merchants in the town. And so all this kind of came together to lead to an Inquisition trial of Crispina Perez as a heretic, as a baptised Christian who yet went and regularly sought access to healers who practised both local forms of healing but also through the lens of West African spirituality, and this was deemed enough to be tried for heresy. Okay, and there's plenty of things that I'd like to explore in more depth as we go through this conversation,

Rise of women traders

4:13but just to stick with Crispina for now, how did she get to the position of being such a prominent slave trader in Cushu? Well, this is a large question which we could probably talk about for about the next 30 or 40 minutes, Rob. I mean, first of all, there was a long history already by 1665, it seems a very long time ago, it is a very long time ago, but already by that time for nearly two centuries, there have been Portuguese settlements and presence in this part of West Africa. So there was a long history of mixed heritage people acting as go-betweens between the imperial worlds of the Atlantic and West African societies.

4:47So these were people who would generally have Portuguese fathers, West African mothers, but the fathers were itinerant merchant traders who spent very little time in the area and were effectively absentee. So they would be brought up by mothers speaking West African languages. So Crispina's native language was Bainunk, it seems. Her mother was Bainunk, she was brought up by her mother and her grandmother. Living in West African urban environments, household environments, extended compounds. So this kind of mixed heritage was fundamental part, and not only in this part of West Africa,

5:20but actually in other parts such as what's today, Ghana, parts of Angola, and so on. So that was a given. And also because the children of these mixed heritage families were brought up by West African families and the maternal line, women had a lot of power in these societies, a lot of power. So one of the fascinating things about the sources we have for Kasho is that they show us how women actually ran the town, women ran the commercial life, they ran the social life, they ran the religious life, and this itself was an enormous threat to Portuguese patriarchal norms in the era of the Counter-Reformation, which had happened

5:52in the 16th century, a resistance to the rise of Protestantism, which had seen an increasing renewed conservatism in the Catholic faith. So this kind of more matriarchal framework was very much a challenge to that. But it was actually the norm. This was the norm in these communities. So there are kind of social, historical, political contexts which explain why the most powerful trader in Kasho in the middle of the 17th century was a woman, was Krishpina Perez. And actually, interestingly enough, after she was tried for heresy and her network was kind

6:23of overcome by a rival network, within 15 years, the most powerful trader in Kasho was another woman, her rival, Bibiana Vaz, who's also present in the trial. So this was actually the norm. And these people were often called in West Africa, Signales. So there are cultural, historical, social reasons why a woman like Krishpina would be in this powerful position at this time.

Daily life in Cushu

6:42So coming on to Kasho itself, what kind of a place was it in the mid-17th century? If, let's say, we had a time machine that allowed us to walk around the town at this time, what would we see? I mean, that's the sort of thing, actually, that the book tries to explore. It's very interested in the details of daily life and what daily life is actually like. And so what you would see is the nitty gritty, which helps the town to reproduce itself socially and culturally. So there was a small colonial settlement, very small, which had the fort, the church, a few

7:13large houses up by the port side, which would have stores underneath where various kinds of the goods which came in from the Atlantic trade and from trade along the rivers, networks of West Africa would be stored. So this might be textiles, they would be all kinds of metalware, they might be swords, guns, but they might also be stores of different kinds of jewellery, different kinds of luxury textiles, which might be bought from Mexico and China, all kinds of things would be stored in these warehouses. And also alongside, among the larger households, which were also slave trading households, which

7:48wasn't everybody, of course, was a small number of the wealthiest households, would be effectively dungeons where captives were also kept, waiting for the ships which would arrive around about 10 or a dozen a year to transport those captives to the Americas. So that's the colonial town, which is a very small town, but the much bigger town, which actually in many ways kept the fabric of the town going, was beyond the walls of that town. And that was known at the time as Villa Kenci, or the hot town. This was where the households were run by women. They were extended compounds. They would often run small shops from their households.

8:21And there were bakers. There were all kinds of stores which were run there. And these women would also work the laundry system, so they might be washing clothes by the riverside. And there were also a lot of craftspeople who lived in this town. So there were lots of people involved in the shipping industry. There would be carpenters. There would be caulkers repairing leaks on the ships. So there'd be lots of people working on the ships alongside coopers making barrels, tailors as well, making clothes. So there were all kinds of craftspeople living in these small towns. And then you'd have people coming in canoes, known as armadillas, from across the San Domingos

8:54River, which the Casho sits on, which is a wide river. From the other side of the river, people would come bringing boatloads of grains and other supplies, which would be sold in the town. And then, as I say, about 10 or 12 times a year, ships would depart with captives for the Americas. And so periodically, you would also find captives being marched through the streets, either on arrival or to depart. But it's important to bear in mind that, you know, this is actually a part of the town's life. So what the book tries to do is situate the importance and significance of this transatlantic

9:25traffic and its enormously transformative role in African history within the framework of the way in which African societies were reproducing themselves, were engaging in the matter of daily life. And that's an important relationship in the book as well.

The transatlantic slave trade context

9:42How much then of a shadow did the transatlantic slave trade cast over other aspects of life in Cashew? I mean, were any of the enslaved people being taken across the Atlantic? Were they from Cashew? Had they been brought from the interior? That's a very good question. Yes. So in fact, there are many, many, many misconceptions around the history of transatlantic slavery. And it's hard in, you know, a podcast, let alone a book, to try and address those all. But, you know, one of them is, of course, the idea that Africans were involved in the traffic of other Africans. Whereas, of course, that's not how people saw themselves at the time.

10:13People in Cashew did not see themselves as Africans. As the Congolese philosopher Valentin Moudimbe, who passed away recently, wrote, the idea of Africa itself was invented largely through the history of the transatlantic slave trade in the 18th century, effectively. And so in this period, you know, did somebody in Cashew have more in common culturally, or let's say Senegal, did they have more in common culturally with Portugal or, let's say, Congo or South Africa? Well, in many ways, you could argue Portugal because there was a shared history of Islam. There had actually been interconnections with the Iberian Peninsula for a long time.

10:45So all that's to say is that the idea of an African's engaging in this trade is itself a misconception. Just as, you know, convicts were dispatched to Australia from Britain in the early 19th century. So various kinds of criminals within societies were taken as captives for the transatlantic traffic, as long as war prisoners, which is often the case in many societies around the world. So all that is to say that most of the people coming through Cashew, the vast majority, were not from Cashew. They were from other parts of the region. They were prisoners of war.

11:16They were criminals of some kind within the norms of West African societies. And that's why, for somebody who lived in Cashew, they weren't necessarily scared of being themselves captured and put on a ship, because they lived within a different framework of social relationships in Guinea-Bissau at the time. At the same time, one of the fascinating things about the sources which I draw on to write this book is their Inquisition records. And they have actually verbatim testimony from enslaved people in Cashew, so members of the household of Trishpina Perez, for instance.

11:46And they reveal a lot about the fears and the anguish that people in that condition suffered at the time, in a very rare way. It's very rare. There were testimonies of enslaved people, particularly from the 19th century, a very few from the 18th century. From the 17th century, it's extremely rare. And so there are some documents, letters from one of these captives, Sebastião Rodrigo Shparraza, in the text. And that shows, first of all, that the desire for freedom was all-consuming, that Sebastião, this individual, was prepared to do almost anything to achieve that in Cashew.

12:17And also, there was one case of a member of Trishpina's household who, the document says, later went to the Americas. So once people were enslaved, members of the household, there was nothing to necessarily prevent them themselves being captured and being enslaved. For various reasons, it might be some kind of bankruptcy in the household. It might be some kind of personal rift. It might be all kinds of reasons. So that fear was certainly present and consuming very much, particularly among the enslaved population who actually lived in Cashew and did much of the work there.

12:49But for members of the town who were living in Vila Quente, in the other neighbourhood, who were involved in the, let's say, daily life of the town, it probably wasn't that much of a concern. How much of a Portuguese presence would there have been in Cashew? Would there have been many Portuguese people walking around the town? Well, the Portuguese presence was cultural and in the built environment. So yes, there was the fort and yes, there were churches and there were a few sobrados, buildings with two stories, where the merchants lived.

13:19But the, let's say, ethnic Portuguese presence was extremely small. So Trishpina Perez's husband, who was also of mixed heritage and became the captain general of the town. So he was the most senior colonial official. This was before Trishpina was arrested. But so he was somebody of mixed heritage. So if you're talking in ethnic or racial terms, people who were Portuguese, it was a very small number, a very, very small number. I mean, Trishpina's husband, George, said in the trial that he estimated that there were only four people in the whole town who practiced Catholicism without practicing any African

13:51religious rights, which suggests that, yes, it was an extremely small number. The presence was much more administrative, the administrative framework of the empire, which was present, the legal aspects which had to be adhered to for those who wanted to participate in the transatlantic traffic, for instance, those merchants who wanted to do that, for priests, for members of the colonial administration. So there was a strong administrative presence. And then, yes, a cultural presence, yes, in terms of the practice of Catholicism.

14:21So, again, Trishpina Perry is a woman of mixed heritage, is a heretic because she is a baptised Catholic. So that is a significant aspect. But the bottom line is that Cascio is an African town. And that's one of the important things. It's an African town. One of the things I discuss in the book is how Trishpina and George, although they were, you know, Trishpina was the most powerful merchant, the richest merchant in the town. And they were very much a couple as part of the colonial world. As I say, George had been the captain general. But theirs was an African household, an extended household in many different ways. And I discuss this in the book. So, according to the theory of the Portuguese empire, and much later historians, we should

14:55add, this was a Portuguese town. But in practice, it was a West African town.

15:05Everyone's got a hard question about AI. Your job, your kids, where it's going. Anthropic was built to surface those questions and share what it finds along the way. Because there's hope in hard questions. Ask yours at Claude.ai slash Spotify and keep thinking. That's Claude.ai slash Spotify. When you're building a company, you learn that trust is what closes deals. You may have the best product, but buyers won't sign without proof that your product is secure,

15:36especially if it has AI. Vanta gets you compliant fast with SOC 2, ISO 27001, and more, and keeps you secure with continuous monitoring. Hyperbound, a YC-backed startup, used Vanta to unlock the Fortune 100 in under a year. Snowfire got audit-ready in a month and closed a multi-million dollar deal. Trust matters. Get started at Vanta.com. This fall, discover why there are two sides to every pancake story at Cracker Barrel. The edgy side, created by the golden, crispy edges. And the softer side, made up of those warm, fluffy centers.

16:08So slow down. Make time to bring in the family, day or night, and try the new Sweet Cream Caramel Apple Pancakes. Three of the world's best buttermilk pancakes, topped with fried cinnamon apples, caramel drizzle, and sweet vanilla cream. Then dig in and write your own breakfast story. Welcome home to Cracker Barrel.

Multi-faith life and entertainment

16:27In quite a few of the answers you've given so far, you've touched on religious belief in cashew. I wonder if you could tell us a little bit more about that. What was the mix of different faiths at the time? That's a really, really good question. Because I think one of the things about cashew, which is really interesting, is that it was a multi-faith setting in which people participated in each other's religious lives. There was Catholicism, as I've mentioned, and there are various moments in the life of the, you know, the life of the religious calendar where major Catholic processions would take place, candles and the wax.

17:02So wax was one of the products which was traded. And beekeeping was an important aspect, actually, of economic life in the rivers near to cashew. But a lot of this wax was exported, actually, to the New World for the candles of the Americas. But some of it was kept and used in the candles in these religious processions. So they were important. But we also know from the Inquisition trial of Crispina Perez that African religious life was extremely important, that funerals, tocaturas, as they're called in Creole in Bissau, were an extremely important part of religious life, but actually also of social life.

17:34They would go on for long periods of time. People would bring large and expensive gifts to them, as they still do to this day. And this was very much a part of African religious practice and faith. And then Islam was also an important part of life in cashew. So some of the healers who Crispina Perez consulted were Muslims. They were from the Jahanke ethnic group, who largely came from the town of Sutoko on the Gambia River, around 150 miles to the north. Both Islamic preachers were also passing through, evangelising, and that was an important part.

18:05And some of the traders in cashew also had Jewish heritage. So it was a whole mix. And people actually, as I've said, also shared in one another's practices. So Crispina Perez was a baptised Catholic, but she consulted Islamic healers. Some of the Jabbakos were Islamic. And then also went to African religious festivals of one kind or another. And all this is to say that I suppose, you know, what made this multi-faith environment somehow also cohesive, in spite of the great suffering which was also present,

18:38was the ability to share in one another's lives and not to live in segregated, ghettoised communities. So that kind of interchange was an important part of daily life in cashew. What did the people of cashew do in their time off then? We've talked about their work. We've talked about their religion. What did they do for fun? Yeah, so there's a chapter in the book, I think it's called Gossip and Entertainment. And so, yes, gossip was part of it. You know, as in many communities, people like talking about one another. And that was certainly a lot of it. And there's a lot of evidence on this. And there's a phrase which Crispina Perez's husband uses,

19:10is that in this town, people can make a fly into an elephant, which basically means that you'll start with a small piece of information and it will very quickly be magnified out of all proportion. This was an oral culture and that had an important aspect to play in what people enjoyed doing. There's also a lot of evidence that, you know, there were long parties, music of various kinds, drumming, but also other kinds of music, stringed instruments, which some listeners will know from contemporary West African music. So the Kora, for example, actually seems to have originated further east

19:41in what is today Guinea-Bissau, maybe a little bit later. But stringed instruments were certainly being played. Guitars were coming down the Atlantic coast as well. There was a long history of interaction between West African musical styles and Iberian musical styles as well. So there were parties and then there was a lot of drink, a lot of drink, both European wines coming from Madeira, but also palm wine brewed locally in West African spirits. So there were plenty of ways in which people found to pass the time. And you talked about drink there,

20:12but do we know much about what people were eating as well? Well, rice was the staple actually in Guinea-Bissau and still is to this day. It had long been a rice-growing region prior to the arrival of the Portuguese. Some think almost for 2,000 years now, there was actually a different variant of rice, the Asian variant of rice, Orisa sativa, and then the West African variant, Orisa glaberima. So this was a sort of red rice. And so this was the staple. But rice production expanded dramatically actually in the 16th and 17th centuries. One of the things that Atlantic trade did was increase access to iron,

20:45which increased ability to clear land and therefore to cultivate rice, which is a very labour-intensive form of production. So that was one of the staples. And for the evidence we have, there were among the colonial-oriented community, luxuries imported from the Atlantic world, cheeses from the Alentejo, marmalade, sardines, so products which were being imported. But at the same time, lots of West African staples as well, yams, and actually increasingly groundnuts and peanuts,

21:15which were originally a Native American food actually from Mexico, but which began to be cultivated in this part of West Africa from the middle of the 16th century onwards. So in many ways, the dish of food was in many ways symbolic of Kashiwa's fundamentally West African setting, but with increasingly global and cosmopolitan influences coming alongside the globalisation, which went in various ways with the rise of the Atlantic world. So from what we've heard, Kashiwa seems like a really fascinating place, a real melting pot of religions, of cultures. Was this typical for the region,

21:46or was it unique in this part of West Africa? So it was very much typical. So this idea of plural identities was very much part of West African societies pre the 15th century. And a marker of that is actually multilingualism. So some languages in the region had words for people who spoke many languages, and it was common for people to speak four, five, six languages, and has remained so in fact. And so that multilingualism is really a marker for the fact that these were plural societies and communities, and they were used to integrating people from different backgrounds.

22:20In fact, there was a tradition of that, which some anthropologists have called the landlord and the stranger, that strangers could be welcomed on certain terms into communities, doing certain tasks while they became integrated within the society. All that's to say that the Portuguese framework, the Atlantic framework, what I think made this a community where that outwardness would work, was precisely that there was an existing framework of pluralism. So when the Portuguese began to arrive in the late 15th century, early 16th century, they were trying to integrate into a society which already was used to welcoming outsiders, actually used to welcoming outsiders

22:51from powerful imperial players. So in fact, prior to the Portuguese, there'd been the Empire of Mali, which was based on the Niger River, further to the east. So some of these kingdoms were tributaries of the Empire of Mali. So they were used to powerful outsiders, integrating them into a larger commercial imperial world. And so that was one of the reasons why the Portuguese were able to settle, actually, and were able to form these communities. So yes, that's an important part, actually, of the story of Cachaud, that it helps us to understand how this was not something which the Portuguese did. It was something that the existing social and political

23:21and historical context meant was quite easy for them to integrate into.

Trial and historical legacy

23:26And coming back now to Cushpina Perez herself, what was her eventual fate when she went in front of the Inquisition? You know, there are many aspects of the story which are very sad. I mean, Cushpina Perez, she herself said she was a cruel woman. She said to the Inquisitors that the evidence of enslaved members of her household shouldn't be trusted because of the cruelty with which she treated them. She was not a pleasant individual. I mean, powerful people usually aren't. And she was deported to Lisbon. So anybody who was being tried by the Portuguese Inquisition, the investigations would happen on site, but eventually they would have to go

23:57and stand trial in Lisbon. She spent three years in Lisbon. In fact, for one of those years, there was no hearing at all. She seems to have literally languished in the jail with no communication with the outside world at all. The injustice which she then faced herself, I think, is expressed by the fact that her interpreter in this trial was the same person who had brought her in chains as a prisoner from West Africa. She eventually admitted her guilt as best as she was able to because she didn't really understand what she was being accused of. You know, because as I've said,

24:28mixed religious practice was the norm. That was what she was doing. As her husband said, almost everybody in the town did this. So she didn't really understand what she was guilty of, but she confessed her guilt as best she could. She was tried. She was processed in an auto da fé, along with other prisoners in Lisbon. And then she was sent back to Cachoe, and that's the last we hear of her. After that, she probably died shortly afterwards. And as I mentioned before, the people who were their rivals became the dominant force in the town. I think, you know, we've talked quite a bit, Rob,

24:58about the town, the context, Cachoe, but I want to stress that this kind of detailed portrait of a West African town is very unusual for this era. We really don't have many sources which allow the kind of detail of daily life to be reconstructed in this way. And I think that's one of the things which makes these sources really valuable and helps to really place all of this very painful, tragic, but vital part of world history in a richer context. Absolutely, yes. So this is a story that happened 350 years ago.

25:31If one were to go to Guinea-Bissau now, visit Cachoe today, how much of the town that you're writing about in your book would still be there? What would be the similarities and differences? Well, so, I mean, I have been to Cachoe several times, and the fort is there. There have been attempts to restore parts of it. Of course, there were two histories of colonialism here in Cachoe. There was the one that I write about in the book, and then there was another one in the modern colonial Africa when the Portuguese formed a formal colony in the late 19th century and remained in Guinea-Bissau until 1974.

26:01And basically that colonial town, the modern colonial town, was kind of imposed and imprinted on the old one. So the old buildings didn't survive that. But some of the old jetties and riverways and the fort are there. And then the town where most people actually live is set back from the river in extended households as in the past. And what is interesting to think about is that actually, I think, Cachoe in the 17th century was probably a much livelier, busier place than it is today. It was at the heart of a vital economic activity

26:32in world history at the time. That's not the case today. It's actually a much quieter place now than it would have been then. And is there much memory among the people who live there today of the stories that you're telling in your book? That's a very good question, and I have been asked that before. And one of the fascinating things is not very much. There certainly is oral memory of these mixed heritage families, and those families themselves guard many aspects of that carefully. In fact, I have been told that there are various things they don't share with other members, even of Guinea-Bissau, let alone outside.

27:02So those aspects may be present, but they're not widely shared. Then, of course, broader histories around these relationships are very present, and in oral histories in different ways. I wrote about this a bit in my previous book, A Fistful of Shells, that they're there in ways which take quite a long time to unpick. They're not something that you would find specifically mentioned. A number of historians have written about this, about the memory of slavery and the way in which public memory, like the public memory you might have of a figure like Krishbina,

27:33is quite different to private memory. And obviously, in many ways, the private memory is more important and more significant in terms of what people experience and how they make sense of that today. But of course, that's itself a lot harder and in a way more problematic to represent. Just finally, Toby, your book, as you say, offers a really unusual snapshot into a town in West Africa at this point in time. How do you think this microhistory might change people's understanding of West Africa at this time? Well, hopefully what it does, and I think that it humanises, I think, a very painful

28:04and difficult history, which, you know, people find it very hard to know how to address. It doesn't reduce this to statistics, process. We're talking about people's emotions, how people lived, loved, hated, desired, behaved badly, were drunkards, and how they had parties, how they experienced time, and how all of that, actually, all that kind of part of history, which historians generally are not very good at writing about, actually helps to understand this as a human framework

28:35and not something which is somehow either rendered in terms of statistics and facts which somehow strip away those emotions, or public memorials, which, as I've just said, also in some ways also can only reflect a part of people's experiences. Hopefully we'll open people's understanding to human aspects of this, which are quite painful and difficult to approach in other ways, actually. That was Toby Green in conversation with Rob Attar.

29:05Toby is Professor of Precolonial and Lusophone African History and Culture at King's College London, and his latest book, The Heretic of Cushu, Struggles Over Life at a 17th Century West African Port, is out now, published by Penguin.

29:29Everyone's got a hard question about AI. Your job, your kids, where it's going. Anthropic was built to surface those questions and share what it finds along the way, because there's hope in hard questions. Ask yours at claude.ai slash Spotify and keep thinking. That's claude.ai slash Spotify.

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30:27This fall, discover why there are two sides to every pancake story at Cracker Barrel. The edgy side, created by the golden, crispy edges, and the softer side, made up of those warm, fluffy centers. So slow down. Make time to bring in the family, day or night, and try the new Sweet Cream Caramel Apple Pancakes. Three of the world's best buttermilk pancakes, topped with fried cinnamon apples, caramel drizzle, and sweet vanilla cream. Then dig in and write your own breakfast story. Welcome home to Cracker Barrel.