Location
University of Bonn
Organizer: Bonn Center for Dependency and Slavery Studies
Wednesday, 28.05.25 – 04:00 PM – 06:30 PM
Festsaal at the University Main Building, Universitat Bonn, Bonn, Germany
Join us for the guest lecture “Crispina Peres: An African Woman’s Microhistory and the Study of the African Past” by Prof. Dr. Toby Green, FBA (King’s College London, UK) in which he explores the history of Crispina Peres, the most powerful trader in the West African slave trafficking port of Cacheu, who was arrested by the Inquisition in 1665. Her enemies had conspired to denounce her for taking treatments prescribed by Senegambian healers: the djabakós. But who was Peres? And why was the Portuguese Inquisition so concerned with policing the faith of a West African woman in today’s Guinea-Bissau? Drawing on his groundbreaking new book The Heretic of Cacheu (Penguin/Allen Lane and University of Chicago Press, 2025), in this lecture Professor Green takes us to the heart of this conundrum, but also into the atmosphere of a very distant time and place. We learn how people in seventeenth-century Cacheu built their houses, what they wore, how they worshipped – and also the work they did, how they had fun, and how they healed themselves from illness. Through this story, the haunting realities of the growing slave trade and the rise of European empires emerge in shocking detail. By the 1650s, the relationship between Europe, West Africa, and the Americas was already an old one, with slaving entrepots, colonies, and military bases interweaving over many generations. But Cacheu also challenged the dynamic. It was globally connected to places ranging from China and India to Brazil and Colombia, and women like Crispina Peres ran the town and challenged the patriarchy of empire. For the first time, through the surviving documents recording Peres’s case, we can see what this world was really like. Cacheu is an extraordinary act of historical recovery. It is the story of a seventeenth-century West African woman, but also of the shifting, sophisticated world in which she lived – its beliefs, values and people.
Toby Green has worked widely with colleagues across Africa, organising events in collaboration with institutions in Angola, Ghana, Guinea-Bissau, Mozambique Sierra Leone and the Gambia. His books have been translated into 12 languages and include the award-winning A Fistful of Shells. He writes extensively for the media, including in recent years London Review of Books, New Statesman, Prospect, and UnHerd. He has worked on curriculum change in the teaching of African history both in the UK and in West Africa, and has been a member of the UK government’s Model History Curriculum Advisory Group. He is a Fellow of the British Academy, and Professor of Precolonial and Lusophone African History and Culture at King’s College, London. His new book, The Heretic of Cacheu: Struggles over Life in a 17th-Century West African Port will be published by Allen Lane and University of Chicago Press in 2025.
IN PERSON EVENT: REGISTRATION (FREE) REQUIRED VIA THIS LINK: https://doodle.com/sign-up-sheet/participate/7bbaf721-496d-48b9-b63c-f2598f5f3498/select
Convener:
Ana Lucia Araujo, Professor of History, Howard University, Heinz Heinen Fellow (May-June 2025), Bonn Center for Dependency and Slavery Studies.
Co-hosted by the Research group “The Concept of Slavery in African History,” Bonn Center for Dependency and Slavery Studies.