The ‘magical' African heretic who defied the Inquisition

Telegraph

29-06-2025

'Thank God for the Inquisition!' is not a phrase that would have tripped off the lips of many of its victims; but modern historians have the right to say it. From the 16th century to the 18th, the Spanish, Portuguese and Roman Inquisitions generated millions of pages that can be mined for information not only about the mortal sins people committed, but about the ordinary lives they led.
In writing his well-researched study The Heretic of Cacheu, Toby Green, a renowned historian of West Africa, has especial reason to be grateful. Conditions in the small Portuguese trading-posts on the African coast that serviced the Atlantic slave trade are not otherwise well documented, but one Inquisition trial from 1665-8, conducted in Lisbon, sheds extraordinary light upon them. Green has previously co-edited the trial documents; now he uses them, and another cache of papers from the Inquisition in Peru (the business records of a former slave trafficker in West Africa), to weave together a marvellously detailed account of life on the edge of what is now Guinea-Bissau.
The person who was hauled off to Lisbon was Crispina Peres, one of the most prominent people in the town of Cacheu. The daughter of a Portuguese father and an African mother, she was married to the town's former 'captain-general' – a man of similar background, with the added twist that his Portuguese ancestors had originally been Jewish. What made her so prominent, though, was not her marriage but the fact that she was the most successful merchant in town.
Crispina's success was built on a large network of relatives and contacts; it also bred many enemies, who piled on to denounce her when the opportunity arose. The accusations concerned her use of African religious practices: sacrificing animals to ensure a safe and profitable voyage; using amulets and shrines; resorting to traditional healers and diviners; and employing magic to stop her husband from pursuing his sex life outside the home.
Crispina was an independent-minded woman, but that was not unusual. As Green shows, many traders were female, and many households were women-led; a younger man would marry such a woman and move to her house. The men were often away on distant journeys, which were punctuated by binge-drinking; back in Cacheu, it was the women who ran the show, managing the warehouses and negotiating the deals. And in acquiring the products that came from the interior – raw cotton, kola nuts, honey, wax – they dealt with networks of people speaking multiple languages.
Green knocks old myths on the head: that Africans typically had a 'subsistence economy', for example, or lived static lives. He also highlights just how global the material world of these people already was, as they bought and sold Chinese porcelain, silver items from Peru, English and Dutch cloth, wine from Madeira and rum from the Caribbean. And he conjures up with wonderful vividness the sights and sounds of the streets and harbour of this distant world: looms clacking, coopers hammering, and the terrible jangle of chained slaves led to the ships on which many would die.
But what about the Inquisition trial itself, the basis of the book? Here Green's judgement seems more questionable: he treats the whole episode as a case of the punitive use of imperial power for political purposes. Crispina's life and household represented a different world, and the Inquisitors 'felt threatened by it'. Their concern with her use of African amulets and so on had an ulterior purpose: 'If the dominance of African religions could be challenged, then so too could perhaps these 'unchristian' gender norms and the associated economic empowerment of women.'
Her resort to traditional healers, Green argues, implied that 'African political power and knowledge remained primary'. By weakening this, 'the political and ideological independence of Africa itself could be contested.' So the whole trial was political, designed 'to bring Cacheu more firmly into the grip of empire'. The aim was to assert 'Portuguese primacy' and 'Portuguese control' in a 'colonial struggle', both against rival European powers (Holland, England) and against hostile elements in the African hinterland.
These grand claims about the Inquisitors' real motives are not backed up at all clearly by the trial documents. Nor do they square with some basic aspects of the Inquisition's nature. It dealt with a narrow range of sins relating to the Christian religion: heresy, apostasy, abuse of the sacraments, and so on. It was hardly adapted to be a tool of imperial control in a territory where, as, Green says, the 'vast majority' were not Christians, and were therefore completely outside its jurisdiction.
Nor, indeed, was it much used as one, given that Crispina's trial and one other – a dissolute priest tried for soliciting sex in the confessional – were the only two significant trials from this broad area in the 17th century, and there were only five trials of people from the entire Upper Guinea coastline from 1536 to 1800.
This was a Church institution, devoted to preserving the purity of religious life. The judges at its Lisbon tribunal had little concern with gender relations: they could not try adultery or fornication, for example. Green supposes that their concern with African religious practices was just a means towards other ends; yet it was a central part of their job to suppress heresy, idolatry and necromancy.
Catholic priests inside the Ottoman Empire were similarly keen to stop their flocks from using Islamic talismans, without the slightest implication of doing so to reinforce European imperial power, which was non-existent there. The relevant power-struggle in Cacheu was not between empires, but between Crispina and her individual rivals, whose denunciations started the whole process.
Although the Inquisition didn't come up to modern judicial standards, it was in fact unusually impartial and principled, compared with the criminal justice of the time. And lenient too: readers will be glad to know that after finding Crispina guilty, the judges let her off with just a warning and a penance, and sent her home again.