Jeroen Dewulf, a Belgian-Flemish historian who did Erasmus in Porto 30 years ago and now speaks Portuguese fluently, began researching the Dutch presence in Manhattan, at the time when New York was called New Amsterdam, when he read documentation in Dutch, Portugal suddenly returns to his life, as he tells: “in documents from the 17th century, the names of the first African slaves who arrived in Manhattan appear and they were all Portuguese names: João, Maria, Conceição, and with geographical nicknames such as Angola or the Congo, people from different parts of Africa and even Portugal, such as António Fernando de Cascais or Pedro Português. The latter are a very curious case. They must have been free blacks, sailors perhaps, captured by the Dutch. the ships, but since human trafficking was prohibited in their country, António Fernando de Cascais and others were sold in North America”.
The book that Dewulf will present today at the Luso-American Foundation for Development (FLAD), in Lisbon, is called Afro-Atlantic Catholics – America’s first black Christians and tells how the first generation of slaves in Manhattan, arriving in the first half of the seventeenth century, were Catholic and referred to them as Afro-Atlantic Catholics. In fact, the Belgian academic explains, “they were Africans with a strong Portuguese cultural influence, not only the name they were baptized with, but also the language, a creole, perhaps similar to what is spoken today in Cape Verde or to Papiamento , the Portuguese-African Creole of the Netherlands Antilles (Curaçao, Aruba, Bonaire). There are Dutch documents from that time that prove that the first Portuguese speakers in North America were Africans”.
Dewulf, who is director of the Center for Portuguese Studies at the University of California at Berkeley, says African Americans, the vast majority of whom are Protestant, are unaware of the influence of this New York creolized Catholicism on community building. And there are also Afro-Atlantic Catholics present in other parts of the present-day United States, such as Virginia or South Carolina, at that time. “The language was quickly lost, but the memory of Africa was not. We have documents that show a family who came from Africa, who became free, and when they managed to buy land, they called it Angola,” says the historian in a conversation in a café in Lisbon. Some time before, thanks to a Portuguese friend, Professor Luís Faria of Instituto Superior Técnico, he had already sent me a copy of the book published in 2022, a fascinating book.
“Today, if an American is asked if he considers himself Christian, the community in which most people answer yes is the black community. In a way it should be strange, Christianity in its traditional version is, after all, the religion of the oppressors. The traditional explanation is that when Africans arrived in the Americas they brought their native religions with them and it was only later, in the late 17th century, that white missionaries converted them.But my research shows that the first generation of slaves already brought their own version of it. Catholicism from Africa and that this awareness has not been completely lost. There are known cases of Protestant missionaries who later try to approach the black community to explain Christianity from its beginnings, to explain who Jesus Christ was, and who are surprised be when they find out that some know the religion,” emphasizes Dewulf.
One of the explanations advanced in the book for this Catholicism among the first slaves to arrive in North America is based on the kind of religion the Portuguese themselves practiced when they arrived in Black Africa in the 15th century, that is say before the rigidity of the Contra. -Reform. “It was a Catholicism with music, with dance, easier to integrate into African culture, mixed with legends, for example, Jesus who is African. Because there was a great lack of priests, the Portuguese priests trained the brightest African children to become teachers, a kind of catechists, in which they memorized the prayers, because no one wrote them down.In Cape Verde, São Tomé, Congo, Angola, this African Catholicism originated. And one of its characteristics was the brotherhoods, the brotherhoods, which were taken to America says the historian. Dewulf adds that these brotherhoods, the only mutual aid organizations in slave communities, persisted in the African community for a long time, with Protestant missionaries, later even talking about the existence of secret societies”.
With this book, Dewulf hopes that the African-American community, though mainly Baptist today, will become aware of this historical role of Catholics, not least because – and he clarifies that it is only a hypothesis – “there is won’t have a relationship between black Americans who treat themselves to these days”brother” or “brothers“, Brethren, and the Influence of the Old Brotherhoods?”.
Born in 1972 in Flanders, near Bruges, Dewulf studied German literature and history. When he wanted to learn a Romance language, in addition to the French he already spoke, he thought of Italian and Spanish, “but they could be studied in Belgium”, and as Erasmus was really a goal, he chose Portuguese in Portugal. “I prepared myself a bit, but the first month was very difficult. The lessons were in Portuguese, not as there is now a lot in English. But then everything went better,” recalls the Belgian. He returned home after a year, but his love for the country and the Portuguese language led him to apply for a scholarship from the Instituto Camões to study Portuguese and become a teacher. And again he ended up at the University of Porto, he says, where he later completed his master’s degree. The connection with Portugal was guaranteed. This was followed by a doctorate in Bern, on Hugo Loetscher, a Swiss writer. Loetscher, who met Dewulf and whose editorial legacy he curates, also had a relationship with Portugal and the Lusophone world. “There is a curious story: he made a film for television about Portugal, which was very critical of the dictatorship. The film was not shown in Switzerland until after April 25, under pressure from the Portuguese embassy,” says the director. from the Centro de Estudos Berkeley Portuguese. Loetscher is also the author of a poetic lament critical of Salazar and in the 1970s, Dewulf told me, he published several articles in DN, one of them suggestively titled “Da Goa de Albuquerque à Goa dos hippies“.
We say goodbye, but not without arranging an interview later about the rivalry between the Portuguese and Dutch in the late 16th century and most of the 17th century, a war in Brazil, Angola and various parts of Asia. Dewulf draws my attention to a remarkable fact, which will be elaborated on later: “the Luso-Brazilian expedition that recaptured Luanda from the Dutch was the largest military operation launched from America to the other side of the Atlantic until the world wars of the 20th century.”.
Conference at FLAD is free, but requires prior reservation via [email protected]
Source: DN
