Paper short abstract:

This paper examines drug use in western Central Africa and its Diaspora. It argues that drug Cannabis, in contrast to other substances, had limited cultural significance because knowledge of its use originated within merchant capitalism, and circulated within exploitative labor institutions.

Paper long abstract:

Laborers have long used drug plants to cope with social, cultural, and environmental marginality. The historical processes through which drug knowledge circulated are often poorly understood, reflecting the subaltern status of users and stigmatizations of drug use. During 1500-1940, laborers in western Central Africa used several plant drugs, particularly Cannabis, the source of marijuana. Scholars have asserted that Cannabis drug use was "African" knowledge that entered the Atlantic World via slavery. Problematically, scant historical data support this assertion, which parallels racial stereotypes of drug use. Instead, this paper argues that Cannabis drug use arrived in western Africa with merchant capitalism, and that drug knowledge circulated within labor, not ethno-linguistic, institutions. First, sailors on Portuguese ships from the Indian Ocean introduced drug Cannabis to coastal Angola and elsewhere (1500s-1600s). Second, commercial slavery increased east-to-west overland migration in Central Africa (1700s-1800s). Some enslaved migrants knew of drug Cannabis from East Africa, and slavers provided the drug to slaves during transport; hard laborers in western Central Africa adopted the drug more generally. Third, after abolition, indentured and forced laborers carried drug knowledge widely, reflecting colonial geographies of labor supply and demand (1830-1940). Finally, Portuguese Angolan planters and merchants developed commercial drug trades to supply former slave populations around the Atlantic (1860s-1910s). Thus, drug Cannabis use is "African" only because Africans demographically dominated underclasses in racially segmented labor regimes. Portraying Cannabis drug use as "African" inappropriately conflates cultural and social knowledge transmission.

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Paper short abstract:

This paper will focus on the attempts (18th and 19th centuries) of turning Angolan pemba clay and encaça bark into commodities, while stressing how scientific epistemology and the Enlightened study of laws contributed to this process by producing ignorance about their place in local orders of knowledge.

Paper long abstract:

As William Pietz made clear in his influential study of the "fetish", from the mercantile age onwards the creation of commodities depends on the stripping of objects from local orders of knowledge (or symbolic meaning systems), effectively promoting the ignorance about their cultural backgrounds in order to turn them into "standard" trade goods. Londa Schiebinger's "Plants and Empire" expands on this theme, by narrating an event which takes place simultaneously with this "commodification": the birth of "modern" scientific botany, based on "binomial nomenclature" and the forgetting of local epistemic contributions and social usages of plants. Finally, one can affirm that when African legal systems and cultures finally came under the scrutinizing gaze of western male scientists and scholars, it immediately became apparent to them that these social constructs needed to be "pruned" in order to be of any administrative use - Africans were deemed incapable of producing abstract concepts and (utopian) laws untainted by politics. Objects situated outside of culture; plant names that were purely arbitrary symbols; abstractions untainted by local idiosyncrasies: these were then the stuff of colonial (appropriation) dreams. Manufacturing them, nevertheless, proved to be a Sisyphus like toil, as old knowledge often uncannily resurfaced. This paper will focus on the history of two examples ("pemba" clay and the "encaça" bark), which provide a nexus between commodity creation, scientific epistemology, and abstract legal conceptualizing, while demonstrating how the production of ignorance (or "agnotology" following Londa's lead) about them was instrumental in fixating their value in a colonial context.

Paper short abstract:

Histories of science and empire portray the colonial adoption of indigenous medicine as a process of appropriation and extirpation. My account differs. I follow a single item of materia medica as it was swept into imperial communication systems, crossed empires, and traversed medical regimes.

Paper long abstract:

Histories of science and empire tend to portray the colonial adoption of indigenous materia medica as the appropriation of curative materials and the extirpation of social and cultural meaning.

My work complicates that familiar story. This paper follows a single item of materia medica over time, as it was swept up into imperial communication systems, crossed empires, and moved into and out of medical regimes. I show how medical meanings—ways of reasoning about medicine and the body—were stickier than we tend to think. The plant currently labeled Crossopteryx febrifuga first found its way into the European medical imagination at a market in Takrur near the Upper Guinea Coast in the 1480s. Already a staple of materia medica among free and enslaved Africans in the region, it became important as well to Portuguese and Spanish colonial medical practice in the Gulf of Guinea from the sixteenth to the late eighteenth centuries. British interest brought it to the UK's Royal Botanical Gardens at Kew in the middle of the nineteenth century, where dried specimens of it remain today. What did this curative item mean in the context of fifteenth century encounters? In what ways did that meaning change among slaves and settlers on São Tomé (under the Portuguese) or Fernando Pó (under the Spanish)? And what meaning was it invested with when British imperial agents brought it to Kew? No single medical community, and no single empire, ever managed to monopolize the medical meaning of this common tropical plant.

Paper short abstract:

This paper examines how calumba root, a healing construct of Africans in Mozambique, was adopted by other medical practices, while in the process of circulating and producing knowledge about the plant its African origins were erased by Western science.

Paper long abstract:

Scholars have highlighted how Enlightened bioprospectors usually appreciated African botanical knowledge and skills, even when European scientists and colonial administrators conceived that Africans were unable to produce universal knowledge. Indeed, they recognized that African peoples knew how to employ plants species, and other environmental means, to healing and adopted their knowledge.

Calumba root was among multiple plants used by Africans in Mozambique to cure, which were adopted by Portuguese settlers. During the 18th century this root was traded around the Indian Ocean rim and was exported to Europe from India, enriching private entrepreneurs and colonial states. Nevertheless, calumba root was known as a commodity from India or Ceylon. In the beginning of the 19th century, scientific exchanges between networks of naturalists in diverse centers of the Indian Ocean expanded the global knowledge about calumba root and traced its origins in Mozambique.

This study examines the circulation and production of knowledge about calumba root, from its origin as a Mozambican healing construct to its incorporation into other medical practices, in India, Europe and America. As will be demonstrated, the increasing information about the plant produced by the laboratories of European modern science during the 19th century gradually erased the role of Africans from Mozambique in producing healing knowledge or underlined a negative representation of African agency.

Paper short abstract:

The paper presents a study on the Ma kpo, a kind of bat used by the kings of Dahomey which today is one of the most valuable objects from the collections of ethnographic museums around the world.

Paper long abstract:

Among the Fon the Ma kpo is called "anger bat". In the Portuguese documentation it appears as "bat" (bastão). They were sent along with the kings' emissaries on diplomatic and commercial missions, or advertising war. The contexts in which such bats appear in the Portuguese documentation over the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries indicate the relations between the kings of Portugal and Dahomey. Changes in the uses of those bats also demonstrate changes in their meaning and shape. From the nineteenth century, between the French, those bats were known as "récade". Therefore, the chronology of bats, their names and changes are an important clue to think the change in the conception of power and use of regalia in Dahomey due to its position within the Atlantic world.

Paper short abstract:

This communication analyses the guides for missionary action produced by capucins, from late XVII and early XVIII centuries, in Kongo, in order to understand the ethnographic knowledge about the africans, and how that speech simultaneously structures and legitimizes the evangelization method.

Paper long abstract:

The baptism of the sovereign of Mbanza Kongo, which took place in 1491, sets the beginning of a long and complex relationship that left impressive marks on the historical dynamic of those african societies. Since that moment, but mostly, from the second half of the sixteenth century, hundreds of european missionaries, from several religious orders, crossed the region and produced vast literature regarding their activity on african soil. Built through defined rules, this textual Corpus exhibits rich content of information on those places' societies and cultures, from aspects of material culture, to those most directly connected to the belief systems, forms of organization of power or conviviality modes. Far from a mere deposit of curiosities, the knowledge collected through the observation and direct experience of the religious but, also, in a large scale, via african informers, is structured in an ethnographic speech on the African, which presents him as an other culturally different, in his habits and feelings. Therefore, the ethnographic knowledge is an asserted authority that makes the methodological orientations, particularly produced by the Capucins, as pertinent as effective to the work of missionaries, building a sort of African pastoral, mindful of the specificity of the context in which they acted.

This communication analyses the guides for missionary action produced by capucins, from late XVII and early XVIII centuries, in Kongo, in order to understand the ethnographic knowledge about the africans, and how that speech simultaneously structures and legitimizes the evangelization method.

Paper short abstract:

This study explores the role of African agents in the construction of colonial knowledge in the interior of Benguela.

Paper long abstract:

African rulers and local agents shaped much of the colonial knowledge produced about territories and peoples. In the case of the interior of Benguela at the turn of the 19th century, African intermediaries informed Portuguese colonial officers about distances, political and religious systems, ethnic labels, languages, as well as trade and judicial practices despite the silence of the colonial sources on the African input.

The project of territorializing the Portuguese colony of Benguela was based on the appropriation of Central African knowledge of geography, fauna and flora, as well as political, economic, and social organization. Colonial officers drew maps, collected population demographic data, and produced reports with the intent to strengthening colonial control. In this study will explore how the ethnographical information was collected in the end of the eighteenth century - and how the territorial space was imagined. Precise boundaries were established despite the migratory nature of the population that inhabited the interior of Benguela, recreating new ways to think about the interior and the people who occupied it. For this purpose, I will analyze a series of "Notícias" produced about Benguela and its interior at the turn of the nineteenth century containing description of rivers and mountains, as well as of chiefdoms and larger states, and their religious and political systems. This study demonstrates how colonial reports were based on the knowledge and know-how of African intermediaries. Due to the weak Portuguese presence in Benguela and its interior, colonial officers relied on the African intermediaries and their information.

Paper short abstract:

This paper discusses the interaction between the abolition of slave trade and African slavery in Portugal and in European trading settlements in perceptions and practises of labour in Portugal and in Portuguese colonial Africa.

Paper long abstract:

The end of the slave trade to Europe and the progressive abolition of african slavery in Portugal and in Portugal's colonial possessions during the XVIII-XIX centuries occurred at the same moment when new labour contracts, first form of welfare states and new forms of racialization emerged in Europe. This paper discusses the interaction between these processes in perceptions and practises. A particular accent will be put on the evolution of the condition of free people of color and on the connections between Portugal, Gorée and the Portuguese settlements on the Petite Côte (Senegal).

Paper short abstract:

The rationalization of statistical data was a key element in the Crown’s control of overseas territories. This process, however, faced preconceived notions of local agents. This paper aims to identify error patterns in local statistical production, relating with agent’s mobility and qualifications.

Paper long abstract:

According to Political Arithmetic's thought the Portuguese Crown established the normative framework that would allow a more reliable knowledge over its overseas territories and a more efficient colonial administration. Thus, the statistical data collection about population, military and economic status in the colonial empire was conceived under a methodology devised by central power, using uniformed models, which would guaranty comparability. However, this process was dependent on local agents that interpreted and applied the norms in diverse ways. This diversity reflects the solutions found by these agents when problems arose while collecting, compiling and processing the data into statistical maps. One can verify that several types of errors were made in the production of these maps: calculus errors; different mathematical formulation; and transcription mistakes.

This paper results from an empirical study that addresses the divergences between what is required by the Crown and what is actually produced by local agents, in order to identify patterns. Consequently, a correlation can be drawn between the identified patterns and local authorities' mobility and qualifications.

We will base this analysis in a vast documental corpus, present in Historical Overseas Archive (Arquivo Histórico Ultramarino), which sums up over 200 maps with significant consistent data, concerning Angola's territory between 1797 and 1830.

With this recent study, we aim to actively contribute for the discussion around new methods and analytical framework on demography.

Paper short abstract:

The main goal of this paper is to analyze life and work conditions of the people who lived in the village of Nova Oeiras, especially those who worked with the iron transformation in the Royal Iron Factory of Nova Oeiras.

Paper long abstract:

The main goal of this paper is to analyze life and work conditions of the people who lived in the village of Nova Oeiras, especially those who worked with the iron transformation in the Royal Iron Factory of Nova Oeiras. On one hand, the factory installation was part of the portuguese colonization project in Africa, and it was related to mineralogical and scientific studies that were growing in the second half of the eighteenth century, in the context of Pombal's policies to develop the manufactories. On the other hand, it involved workers from a diverse cultural, social and legal matrix: europeans, africans, deportees, prisoners. This research aims to discuss how this mosaic of individuals, which was united by the knowledge about the iron smelting and forging, was related to the most important interests of the colonial and metropolitan authorities. The study of African techniques that were employed in the iron smelting and forging will be used as thread of analysis, since it allows to understand the disputes, conflicts, customs and traditions involving both the portuguese colonization strategies of domination, and also the forms of resistance articulated by africans.

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Paper short abstract:

This paper seeks to discuss the presence of Africans from Gold Coast and the introduction of techniques of mining in the eighteenth-century Brazil. It will be considered the slave trade between Brazil and Gold Coast and the cultural exchange of African knowledge in both sides of the Atlantic world.

Paper long abstract:

African labor was critical in the development of the Atlantic World. Whether in villages, cities plantations or mining regions, enslaved Africans played an essential role in the economy of Portuguese America. With the discovery of gold mining in the late seventeenth century, the need for African work labor became more and more increasing. Brazilian miners demanded West Africans - introduced via the transatlantic slave trade by Bahian traders - who were supposed to be skilled workers for mines. In 1728, Luiz Vahia Monteiro, Governor of Rio de Janeiro, wrote: "the Black Minas have more reputation for that work [mining], for the miners say they are stronger and vigorous, but I believe they obtained such reputation because they are known as sorcerers […] and they are the only who discover gold".

Nonetheless, the connections between Brazilian slave traders and Gold Coast merchants have not been studied in depth. The proposal of this paper is to discuss the presence of Africans from Gold Coast and the introduction of techniques of mining in the eighteenth-century Brazil. It will be considered the slave trade between Brazil and Gold Coast and the cultural exchange in both sides of the Atlantic world. In doing so, this paper intends to contribute with the debate on the importance of the African background in the Americas, as described by the "Black Rice" thesis, supported by Judith Carney, Walter Hawthorne and Gwendolyn Midlo Hall, and questioned by David Eltis, David Richardson and Philip Morgan.

Paper short abstract:

Luso-African merchants, mariners, servants, and slaves were regularly present in Spanish Caribbean ports from the mid-1500s to 1640. In addition to captives, the early slave trade brought Iberians with experience of Africa and Africans (and vice-versa), and prior models for cross-cultural exchange.

Paper long abstract:

Nearly two thousand transatlantic slaving voyages to Spanish America are presently known to have been organized or completed during the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. A variety of under-utilized source materials generated in Spain and Spanish American port cities provides information on many such voyages, occasionally describing shipmasters and passengers as 'vecinos of Cabo Verde,' 'vecinos of Angola,' and even as 'tangomãos' or 'tangomangos.' Meanwhile, members of slave ships' crews—some of whom were enslaved—included grumetes and sailors of sub-Saharan African or Luso-African origin. In other words, the same vessels that brought enslaved Africans also carried Iberian and Luso-African crew members and passengers who had extensive experience in Africa, and African mariners who were already familiar with the Iberian world. Drawing attention to those who arrived in Santo Domingo, Cartagena de Indias, and Veracruz between the 1560s and 1630s, this paper argues that such individuals provide a unique opportunity to analyze relationships between regions of Atlantic Africa and colonial Spanish America that were closely connected historically, but which have been treated in separate historiographies. Countering narratives that portray Iberian and African interaction in the colonial Americas as an initial 'encounter' between free and coerced migrants with little prior knowledge of one another, this paper argues that some aspects of early colonial Caribbean history may be best understood not as 'creolization,' but as 'Africanization': a migration of concepts, socio-economic roles, and human beings from Atlantic Africa directly to the Caribbean, facilitated and reinforced by the transatlantic slave trade.

Paper short abstract:

This presentation's purpose is to analyse the information produced and conveyed among survivors of Portuguese shipwrecks who literally walked the African East coast in the 16th and 17th centuries, upon accounts of shipwrecks both present in and absent from the História Trágico-Marítima.

Paper long abstract:

Africa's East coast, today's Mozambique and South Africa, was the main set of Portuguese shipwreck accounts, written in the 16th and 17th centuries. Besides the sea voyages and the shipwrecks also the ordeals of the survivors are rigorously described, especially of those who made ashore and walked all the way to the known places where they could find their countrymen for help, mainly towards Lourenço Marques. There are accounts that were written on purpose to inform on how to prevent accidents at sea or to instruct survivors on how to make the right decisions when walking along the coast. For instance, which were the locally sought metals to trade with the Africans, and which were the most secure ways to follow, as it is shown in the statement of first lieutenant of São Tomé carrack, Gaspar Ferreira Reimão, and the account of the Santo Alberto carrack from João Baptista Lavanha. However, a few narratives weren't known back then as they weren't published in the fascicles or, later, in the compilation known as the História Trágico-Marítima (The Tragic History of the Sea) published in two tomes in 1735 and 1736 by bibliophile Bernardo Gomes de Brito. In this presentation and working on printed or manuscript descriptions, we analyse the information that shipwreck survivors already knew when travelling by sea, as well as other information that was brought in through former survivors who stayed in Africa and even from Africans themselves who knew the stories of other Portuguese survivors for decades-long.

Paper short abstract:

The present paper aims to study the Mozambican slave traders regarding their social and familial histories with the purpose of understanding how they acquired and used commercial knowledge in the early 19th century.

Paper long abstract:

In recent years, important contributions have been made to improve our knowledge on slave-traffic in the East African coast between the 18th and 19th centuries. Slave traders that settled in Mozambique Island have been studied regarding especially their commercial activities. It is known, for instance, that at that period slave-traders arrived to the island coming from different parts of the globe, and that there were also Africans amongst them. However, little is known, about their lives in Mozambique Island, being it either about their family and social histories or how they applied their know-how on African societies, and African trade in their own commercial activities.

This paper seeks to broaden our knowledge on the slave traders of Mozambique Island, which included Portuguese, Indians and Swahili. In order to do so, I will draw on José Capela's work, namely on his Slave Trade Dictionary, and cross it with a set of diversified primary sources, such as population censuses and memoirs, which will allow me to identify and characterize the Mozambican slave traders, their families and their links to the local society. In the end, it will be possible to understand how these slave traders acquired and used their commercial knowledge in the early 19th century.

Paper short abstract:

This paper compares the processes by which two natural resources, coffee and rubber, became marketable goods in Angola during the 1800s, showing how European demand and African initiative transformed the Angolan export economy after the end of the slave trade.

Paper long abstract:

As the export slave trade was slowly winding down in Angola after 1830, produce traders began to develop new forms of commerce in west-central Africa. Two commodities came to dominate the new export economy in nineteenth-century Angola: first coffee and then rubber. This paper examines how European traders in northern Angola obtained knowledge of local economic resources and production systems - in this case robusta coffee and wild rubber - and how they established connections with African producers and suppliers of these commodities. The robusta coffee plant was native to this part of Africa, but little is known about the initial stages of its commercialization in the Dembos and Kongo regions of northern Angola from about 1830 onward. From about 1870, rubber was exported from Angola in ever larger quantities, eventually overtaking coffee as the colony's most valuable commodity. Unlike coffee, however, most of the rubber sold in northern Angola was tapped from creepers and shrubs several hundred miles inland from the coast, that is, in regions beyond colonial control. This often left European traders guessing about the exact origins of the product they purchased and the untapped riches existing beyond colonial horizons. This paper compares the processes - in particular cross-cultural exchanges of information - by which two natural resources, coffee and rubber, became marketable goods in Angola during the 1800s, showing how European demand and African initiative transformed the Angolan export economy after the end of the slave trade.

Paper short abstract:

How the epistemic inequities in the global division of knowledge labour that marginalise African knowledge and expertise contributes directly to the high rates of premature mortality and chronic morbidity on the continent.

Paper long abstract:

Recent reforms proposed (e.g. by Thomas Pogge 2005, 2012 inter alia) to augment those WTO* agreements (e.g. TRIPS)* which cripple access to 'essential' prescription drugs in Africa appear unlikely to fulfil the aims of integrating public health issues worldwide in the post-2015 Millennium Development Goals.

Today's global approaches to African epidemics bear some remarkable continuities with policies since political Independence and with treatment responses initiated by British colonial administrators of the Gold Coast since the 1880s—policies such as volunteerism, behaviour modification, residential segregation, and now increasingly militarized incarceration. My first hand evidence is restricted to contemporary data derived chiefly but not exclusively from Ghana; my presentation of Gold Coast colonial policy relies upon the medical historiography of Stephen Addae (1996).

Influential elites in academia and industry, comprising the global advocacy of international health rights, promote ethical arguments and development schemes that betray an uneasiness and unfamiliarity with the experiences, the expertise, i.e. the first hand knowledge of human physical conditions and acculturated interests, that these global responsibility advocates purport to serve (MarthaNussbaum 1997). I will apply Miranda Fricker's (1999, 2014) and Elizabeth Anderson's (2012) analyses of transactional and institutional epistemic injustices to global discourse about health. I hope to demonstrate that marginalisation of Africans' subjective agency, hermeneutic authority, and complex systems of modern and traditional expertise contributes directly to the disproportionate burden of premature mortality and chronic morbidity on the African continent.

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