Excerpts from Balanta B’urassa, My Sons: Those Who Resist Remain Volume 3
West Africa: Quest For Gold and God 1475-1578 by John W. Blake recalls,
“Until 1553, the part played by Englishmen in West Africa was negligible. The major threat to Portuguese supremacy came from the French. These twenty-three years may be regarded, then, as a period when the Portuguese monopoly was subjected to a French challenge. Unlike the earlier challenge from Castile, the second did not end in a Portuguese victory. On the contrary, the volume of French interloping trade began to multiply after 1553, while English traders henceforth made regular voyages to Guinea. Again, the new challenge was not a territorial struggle between relative equals, in which each submitted similar claims. The Castilo-Portuguese conflict had resolved itself, in a sense, into a race for possessions and trade, starting from scratch. But there was no race about the rivalry after 1530. The later struggles were the outcome of acts of pure aggression, perpetrated by groups of enterprising merchants and sailors in England and in France, against imperial Portugal. Dynamic interlopers assailed a static empire. . . .
The Englishman, William Hawkins, seems to have sent three expeditions between 1530 and 1532. . . . Hawkins purchased ivory at the Rio dos Sestos on his second voyage . . . . but this promising traffic did not survive the ensuing decade. For a time, English commercial and maritime energies were diverted to other, and more fruitful channels. But Englishmen ventured to Guinea once more after 1553, and the international struggle in West Africa assumed hitherto unrivaled proportions. It was magnified because French interlopers did not abandon their operations in Guinea. . . . Taken as a whole, a sordid fight for trade resulted in which little mercy was given and none expected, while the interests of the negroes were entirely subordinated to those of the whites. Thus, the reappearance of the English in 1553 inaugurated an era of triple rivalry in West Africa.
The West African monopoly of Portugal was further undermined after 1559 by certain important changes in Europe . . . . The situation in England, where Protestantism was finally accepted and guaranteed by the state, inspired more vigorous efforts to break down the monopoly. London merchants and Plymouth sailors now advanced religious arguments, as well as the argument of force, to support their clandestine operations in Guinea. Indeed, their operations ceased to be clandestine when Queen Elizabeth took the crown which Mary had worn so uneasily. They openly attacked the papal division of the world and declared a holy war for the liberation of the seas. . . . The catholic states in Europe were drawn together and their imperial policies coordinated.
England, as was perhaps natural for the paramount protestant state, took the lead in Guinea enterprises from 1559 to 1571; while Huguenots played the role of chief Guinea interloper from 1571 to the end of our period. . . . It is obvious that after 1559 a close connection existed between religious strife in Europe and white enterprise in West Africa. One of the salient features of this interaction was the association of those in high places with many of the illegal voyages to Guinea. . . . An examination of the personnel of those associated with the English voyages to Guinea reveals many highly-placed officials, and demonstrates that the English government was, more than the French, definitely and openly sympathetic towards these enterprises. . . . Even the queen and the cautious Sir William Cecil, the chief secretary of state, were favorably inclined towards the adventures to Guinea. Whatever she might pretend, Queen Elizabeth cared little for nice legal points. Her primary criterion was the welfare of her country, and from the beginning, therefore, she questioned the monopolistic claims of Portugal and Spain. . . . During the ten years after 1561 our evidence suggests a greater volume of English than of French traffic to Guinea. . . . The scope of English enterprise was threefold: first, there was direct traffic between England and Guinea; secondly, John Hawkins inaugurated the transatlantic slave trade; and thirdly, several attempts were made to establish a permanent station as a base for trade and military operations in West Africa. . . .
English participation in the slave trade was spoiling peaceful commerce. . . . We do not know the identity of the English interloper, who thus roused a hornet’s nest for the unlucky captain Fenner, but it has been suggested that captain Lovell was responsible. With the backing of John Hawkins, a fleet of four ships under Lovell’s command set out from Plymouth in November 1566 to trade to Guinea, and three of the four ships subsequently made their way to the West Indies. Lovell was later accused of piracy by the Portuguese, and the case was tried before the High Court of Admiralty in 1568. The captain was charged with having seized a number of Portuguese ships with their cargoes. Near Santiago he captured two large ships, loaded with negroes, and two other ships were taken at the islands of Fogo and Maio. His object, then, was evidently to load as many blacks as possible before sailing to the West Indies. But he did not merely plunder Portuguese vessels, for, as we saw, he organized at least one raid for slaves upon the mainland.
Hawkins association with the enterprise of John Lovell helps to explain its character. It was John Hawkins who first put into operation the idea of English participation in the Africo-Caribbean slave trade, when he made the celebrated voyages of 1562-3 and 1564-5. His inspiration was behind the slaving voyage of captain Lovell, and he probably inspired other voyages about which today we know nothing. We hear of at least one other English ship which loaded 125 negroes at Cape Verde in the winter of 1564-5 and, what would appear more significant, its commander was Bartholomew Bayao, a Portuguese renegade. Bayao was well known to the Portuguese, who invoked the help of the tribe of the Sapes in Sierra Leone to expel him from the coast. Was this man one of the Portuguese who regularly aided the English in their interloping activities? And did he suggest the slaving voyage to John Hawkins? Unfortunately, the voyage of 1564-5 is the earliest notice of him, so that these questions cannot be answered. Yet Bayao was a clever cosmographer, well acquainted with the African navigation, and he was engaged in more than one enterprise for England. It would seem that his voyage to Cape Verde and the Spanish Indies ended disastrously, for in 1570 he was a prisoner at Seville. In this year he escaped and fled back to England, where he was welcomed by the merchants and some of the councilors, because ‘no one could have come more apt for their designs’. A scheme was immediately set on foot for a plantation in South America from which the traffic of Guinea, the Spanish Indies and the Pacific might be controlled. Bayao was to lead the necessary expedition. It so alarmed the Spanish authorities that the ambassador, Gueraa de Spes, tried to bribe Bartholomew Bayao to enter the service of King Philip II. But Bartholomew was a difficult man with whom to deal and perhaps set his price too high, for he remained in England. Nothing came of the colonization, but Bayao returned to the slave trade. In the spring of 1571 he equipped three ships and a pinnace for the Senegal, from whence he intended to carry slaves to Hispaniola. . . .
The character of English enterprise in Guinea thus began to change. During the early years of English traffic to West Africa, gold, pepper and ivory were the primary attractions for the syndicate of merchants who adventured in it. However, as trading beyond Cape Palmas grew more dangerous, so did the gold trade tend to decline. John Hawkins then projected a new type of commerce, wherein the Guinea voyage itself ceased to form a complete cycle. This new trade did not necessitate facing the guns or the galleys of Portugal on the Mina coast, for plenty of negro slaves were procurable between the Senegal and Sierra Leone. Nor did it involve the greater risk of fever, which attached to the farther voyage. It did not even mean that the other commodities of Guinea, apart from slaves, need be ignored. Hawkins found it convenient in 1563, when about to leave Sierra Leone for the West Indies, to send one of his ships straight back to England with the pepper and ivory, which he had purchased. His plan was copied by those who came after him. Captain Lovell seems to have sent one of his ships back from Guinea in the spring of 1567, and we have reliable evidence that one of a fleet of three ships, owned by William Winter and sent to Guinea to participate in the transatlantic slave trade, returned to England without visiting the Caribbean (1570). The slave trade was thus gradually preferred, particularly after the failure of the expedition of captain Fenner. Nearly all the ships sent to Guinea during the Anglo-Portuguese crisis of 1569-71 were potential slavers.
The men who were interested in Guinea clearly saw that trade, whatever its character, could be greatly facilitated by a permanent station in West Africa. We have noted in the preceding chapter that this idea had already been considered between 1554 and 1558. A keener interest in trade now led to correspondingly more thorough efforts to plant settlements, but no greater success was achieved than before 1559. The preeminence of Englishmen among the interlopers in the period from 1559 to 1571 is indicated by the fact that nearly all the contemporary projects of colonization in Guinea were of English origin.”
Concerning John Hawkins, Nick Hazlewood, in The Queen’s Slave Trader: John Hawkyns, writes,
“John Hawkyns had tasted blood at a very early age. His killing of a barber in his hometown is recorded in the Calendar of Patent Rolls for July 1552. . . . At the time of the royal pardon Hawkyns was barely twenty years old. . . . Whether Hawkyns’s innocence is really established by the pardon is neither here nor there – such pieces of paper could by purchased by rich and powerful families. What it does illustrate, however, is that even as a young man from a wealthy background, John Hawkyns was very much a product of the brutal time, place, and family that he was born into. . . .
John Hawkins was born into one of the two or three wealthiest merchant families in the important seaport of Plymouth, a family that boasted a rich West Country pedigree and that would imbue him with a craving for luxury and intrigue, and quite possible the lust for power that was to characterize all aspects of his life. . . . . His mother, Joan Trelawney, was a daughter of William Trelawney of Cornwall. His father, William, was the offspring of a powerful Tavistock merchant and the heiress of King Edwards IV’s sergeant -in-law, William Amadas of Launceston. . . .
[The family] lived together in a smart town house in a narrow lane at the end of Kinterbury Street, in the southwest quarter of Plymouth’s old town. . . . from their small back garden they could look down at the indisputable evidence of their familial power, the wharves and warehouses of Plymouth’s inner harbor, Sutton Pool, where they ruled the roost over the bustle and business of the docks. . . .
Shipping and mercantile activities were the cornerstones of William Hawkyns’s life. As an energetic and successful businessman, he was a part of a thrusting, ambitious class that was pushing its way to the surface as England finally emerged from the dark ages of the Hundred Years War and the internecine conflict and regicide of the Wars of the Roses. This aspiring new middle class consisted of men who were to benefit from the centralization of government, the broken stranglehold of Roman Catholicism, the spread of Protestantism, and a growing sense of national unity.”
And returning to West Africa: Quest For Gold and God 1475-1578 by John W. Blake,
“John Hawkins, whose men in January 1568 actually burned down the Portuguese trading house on the river Cacheu. This disaster calls for comment. Hawkins had on his two previous voyages seized Portuguese ships in the waters of Sierra Leone. On this occasion, however, he took armed vessels up the Rio de S. Domingo (Cacheu river) and attacked the whites in their trading house on its (north?) bank. Witnesses in a Portuguese court of law alleged that Hawkins and his men, armed to the teeth, landed at Cacheu, slew many Portuguese residents, seized 30,000 ducats, and burned down the factory there. We know, from other evidence, that the white traders had a ‘factory of Sao Domingos’ on the Cacheu river in 1535 and another further south in Biafada country at Guinala on the Ria Grande de Buba in 1558 (Rodney, P. 76). It would seem that in 1568 Hawkins destroyed the ‘factory of Sao Domingos’. Witnesses are specific: this trading house was the place where ‘the royal dues and taxes are levied and collected by the servants and factors of Antonio Goncalves de Guzman and Duarte Leo, [the farmers or contractors of the trade of Cape Verde and the Rivers of Guinea]’. But one witness also insisted that on the Rio de S. Domingo ‘there are two settlements of Portuguese: one is in Cacheu port and the other is in Buguendo. Did Hawkins burn Cacheu? Or did he burn Buguendo?”
HISTORY OF GUINEA, LAND OF THE BALANTA FROM THE TIME OF JOHN HAWKINS
1560’s Expansion of English slaving on the West Coast of Africa
1562 John Hawkins loots six Portuguese ships and deepens the English challenge to the Portuguese claims to the Guinea coast.
1563-1564 John Hawkins and Francis Drake ship African slaves.
1565 Drake loots eleven ships in Portuguese waters.
1566 John Lovell, Francis Drake, and John Hawkins sailing for England loot fourteen Portuguese ships in Guinean and Cape Verdean waters. French pirates attack Portuguese in Madeiras.
1567 John Lovell loots Portuguese slavers at sea. John Hawkins raids Cacheu River and makes overland attack on Papels of Cacanda.
1570’s - 1600 An annual average of 3,000 African captives are shipped largely from Guinala in Guinea-Bissau by the lancados and Tangomaos; about half of the slaves are sent to Brazil.
1580’s Cacheu is reported to have 700-800 Christians “between white and black”
1580-1640 King Henrique is toppled. Portugal comes under the rule of the Spanish Hapsburg Kings, but Cape Verde continues as a major slave entrepot, under Portuguese and lancado control, threatened by the Dutch, French, and English.
1581 Andre Donelha visits Guinala noting eight slave ships from Sao Tiago and at least ten others owned by Tangomaos.
1582 The population of Fogo and Sao Tiago includes 13,700 slaves and 600 whites.
1588 the feitor of Cacheu, Lopes Cardoso (A Portuguese born in Cape Verde) convinces Cacanda Papels to accept the construction of a casa forte, which allows lancado independence from Papels and the start of a capitania system subordinate to Cape Verde.
1590 Papels attack the Cacheu fort but are repelled by the lancados, who celebrate their victory by renaming the casa forte, “Nossa Senhoa do Vencimento”.
1590’s Dutch intensify trade efforts along Guinea coast.
1591 The Songhai army is defeated by the Moroccans at Tondibi.
1594 Earliest account of the Balantas (by name) in written records, Andre Alvares Almada, Trato breve dos rios de Guine, trans. P.E.H. Hair - “The Creek of the Balantas penetrates inland at the furthest point of the land of the Buramos [Brame]. The Balantas are fairly savage blacks.”
1600-1650 About 4,000 slaves from Upper Guinea coast were exported annually to Brazil and elsewhere (about 200,000 for this period).
1601 The Crown gives Portuguese Jews the right to settle and trade on the Guinea coast.
1611 19 November King Felipe writes to Father Barreira noting that Guineans “need” to be conquered.
1614 Joao Tavares de Sousa appointed as first feitor at Cacheu and Sao Domingos River in Guinea.
1615, Manuel Alvares commented, ‘They [Balantas] have no principle king. Whoever has more power is king, and every quarter of a league there are many of this kind.’
1617 More than 2,000 African captives shipped from Cacheu.
1618 English Company of Adventurers is chartered for trade in gold and slaves. The company builds a fort on James Island in the River Gambia to rival the Portuguese in Casamance and Guinea.
1619 Slave traders allowed to pay crown tax directly at Cacheu and bypass the slave tax paid in the Cape Verde Islands.
1620 Royal order sends Portuguese women degredados to Cape Verde to “extinguish the mulattoe race.”
1627, Alonso de Sandoval wrote that Balanta were ‘a cruel people, [a] race without a king.’
1628-42 Jesuit mission moves its mission to the Guinea coast.
1636 First African slaves exported to Rhode Island by Portuguese and especially English slave traders.
1637 Dutch West India Company seizes Al-Mina from Portuguese, ending their control of 155 years.
1638 Portuguese lose trade center at Arguim to Dutch. French become established on the Senegal River.
1640’s New World sugar production demands more slaves.
1650 Joao Carreiro Fidalgo appointed as capitao-mor of Cacheu. He arrives with two caravelas of fifty men each as well as canons and arms with the intention to intimidate the local population and build a fort, but this is not successful.
1650 Tarikh as-Sudan written in Timbuktu, by Mahmoud Kati, the Chronicler for Askia the Great.
1650-70’s About 7,500 slaves exported to Brazil each year or about 150,000 for this period. Sugar production and the slave economy of Madeira decline. The Wolof and Bambara are in cycles of regional warfare to produce slaves or defend themselves from attacks by slavers.
1669-92 Economic depression in Portugal
1672 Formation of the English Royal African Company
1676 Formation of Companhia de Cacheu, Rios e Comercio da Guine to provide taxes and slaves for the Portuguese Crown, and approve the capitao-mor, who is Antonio de Barros Bezerra and the main shareholder of the company, which failed in 1682.
1677 French take Goree from Dutch.
1679 Regulos near Cacheu revolt against lancado trader.
1680 Formation of Companhia Africano do Cabe Verde e Cacheu.
1684 Revolt at Cacheu led by mestica trader Bibiana Vaz and her “seditious group” which holds capitao-mor de Oliveira as a captive in Farim for fourteen months until he escapes.
1684 Francisco de Lemos Coelho says that much of the territory of the Balanta ‘has not been navigated, nor does it have kings of consideration.’ . . .
1689-93 French slave traders active in Cacheu and Casamance under De La Courbe
1690 Formation of Companhia do Cacheu e Cabo Verde to control regional trade in slaves and ivory. This company failed in 1696. Bishop Portuense of Ribeira Grande stages raids on his priests who are sleeping with their slave concubines, a widespread practice which added to the Crioulo population.
1694-95 Bishop Portuense visits Cacheu, Bissau, Farim, and Geba. While in Bissau he baptizes the King, Bacompol Co, as “Dom Pedro,” whose eldest son, Batonto is sent to Lisbon to be baptized with the King of Portugal as his godfather.
1697 Widespread Papel revolt is organized by Incinha Te against the Portuguese. Mandinkas of Farim also revolt.
1698 Capitao-mor Jose Pinheiro is arrested by Incinha Te, King of Bissau. Pinheiro dies in custody.
1698-99 French slave traders seek protected commerce in Bissau.
1698-1708 Rhode Islanders build 103 ships largely for the Triangle Trade. The New England colonies are importers of Caribbean molasses to produce rum for barter for slaves from Guinea.
1701 The capitania fort at Bissau is abandoned because of African resistance.
1707-1708 King Joao V orders the fort at Bissau to be destroyed and its artillery sent to Cacheu.
1725 Fula Islamic revival begins in Futa Toro and Futa Jallon and brings the Denianke dynasty to an end. The Fula spirit of regional jihad encourages the Fula of Guinea-Bissau to resist the authority of the Mandinka kingdom of Kaabu.
1747 The Portuguese baptize the King of Bissau to regain control.
1750’s Merchants of Grao Para and Maranhao (Brazil) call for an increase in its slave imports from Guinea for sugar, cotton, rice and cacao production and are authorized by the Crown to form a slave trading and commercial company.
1776 The American Revolutionary War begins, and Americans increase imports of rice and cotton from Maranhao, which requires more slaves from Guinea. Slaves are generated as the revivalist Fula Muslims complete the formation of the Imamate of Futa Toro and bring an end to the Denianke lineage in Futa Toro.
During this period from the 1570’s to 1776, Walter Rodney writes in A History of The Upper Guinea Coast 1545 to 1800,
“These were slaving by piracy, by warlike alliances, and by more or less peaceful partnership. In the first of his stages, he [Basil Davidson] recognizes the very brief phase of direct attaks by the Portuguese on the Africans in the mid fifteenth century; while the activities of John Hawkins are cited as typical of the second stage. But what Hawkins represents is an aberration and an anachronism. Ever since Cadamosta sailed in 1456, organized trading had already taken the place of the earlier manhunts, and it was because of the possibilities of peaceful commerce that Fernao Gomes was given his grant in 1469. Hawkins’ methods were typical of the first phase which the Portuguese had long left behind. He made direct attacks on unsuspecting villagers, and he seized slaves whom the Portuguese had purchased. Only on his second trip, when he found that the Africans were prepared and that violence on his own initiative was not paying dividends, did he enter into an alliance with the local kings (Manes), who were waging war. The Mane warfare was coincidental, and otherwise Hawkins, like other European captains, would have had to do business with the African ruling class through the intermediary of the Lancados . . . . Apart from Sierra Leone, only Cacheu and Guinala were made use of in the sixteenth century. Consequently, commerce on the Upper Guinea Coast settled down into a pattern dominated by the lancados. . . .
The lancado was almost invariably a Portuguese, but he is best regarded as a phenomenon – the private European trader living among African tribesmen – and as such he could be of any nationality. Allied to the lancado was the grumete, another Portuguese term best left untranslated, being loosely applied to a large category of African helpers of European traders. Some were purchased as slaves, some were paid what amounted to a wage, and others were virtually affined relatives of the white merchants. The grumete were at all times a significant part of the resident trading community led by the lancados. The main business of the lancados and grumetes was slaving. . . .
The lancados were not evenly dispersed, because the idea of commerce with the Europeans and the acceptance of the European presence did not find a universal and simultaneous welcome. Indeed, some tribes displayed chronic hostility towards the Europeans; The Djolas were in this latter category. . . . Another group, the Balantas, were so hostile that the belief was widespread among the Europeans on the coast that the Balantas killed all white men that they caught. This reputation of ferocity was shared by the Bijagos Islanders. . . .
Other tribes fitted in between the two extremes, and certain common patterns of behavior were to be found throughout the regions where the lancados were welcomed by the Africans. . . .
The Europeans always dealt with the kings, chiefs, and nobles of the Upper Guinea Coast. . . . Each resident trader placed himself under the protection of an African ruler; and there was an understanding on mutual rights and obligations. . . .
The strongest personage in the vicinity of the Portuguese settlement of Cacheu was the king of Mata, with the chief of Mompata falling under his jurisdiction. Apparently the most powerful Papel leader was to be found at Bassarel in the vicinity of the river Calequisse, south of the Cacheu. . . .”
According to John Horhn’s They Had No King: Ella Baker and the Politics of Decentralized Organization Among African Descended Populations,
“Intermarriage did occur between the Balanta and these foreign groups, especially with the intention of fostering trade relationships. However, at no time was the concentration of wealth in the hands of members of the b’alante b’ndang (or any other group) ever so pronounced that it led to the crystallization of an elite class. Furthermore, the Balanta were extremely mistrusting of outsiders not from their own lineage or tabancas. This was true even when applied to members of their own ethnic group and resulted in a culture that held loyalty to the tabancas above all else. Therefore, it was impossible for outside forces to gain influence over Balanta culture without direct conquest and the commitment of military resources. The fact that the Balanta possessed very little material culture and existed in dispersed settlement pattern would have discourage the notion of any such conquest.”
in Planting Rice and Harvesting Slaves: Transformations along the Guinea-Bissau Coast, 1400-1900, Walter Hawthorne writes,
“As late as 1732, European sailors were loath to venture up the Rio Geba for fear of coming in contact with Balanta age-grade warriors. . . . Spanish Capuchins specifically mentioned that Balanta ‘play a certain instrument that they call in their language bombolon’ to ‘announce the attack.’
Having assembled in what the Capuchins called ‘a great number,’ Balanta warriors struck their stranded victims quickly and with overwhelming force. ‘Upon approaching a boat,’ the Capuchins said, ‘they attack with fury, they kill, rob, capture and make off with everything.’ Such attacks happened with a great deal of regularity and struck fear in the hearts of merchants and missionaries alike. Others also commented on the frequency of Balanta raids on river vessels. On March 24, 1694, Bispo Portuense feared that he would fall victim to the Balanta when his boat, guided by grumetes, ran aground on a sandbar, probably on the Canal do Impernal, ‘very close to the territory of those barbarians.’ . . . .
Faced with an impediment to the flow of trade to their ports, the Portuguese tried to bring an end to Balanta raids. But they were outclassed militarily by skilled Balanta age-grade fighters.
Portuguese adjutant Amaro Rodrigues and his crew certainly discovered this. In 1696, he and a group of fourteen soldiers from a Portuguese post on Bissau anchored their craft somewhere near a Balanta village close to where Bissau’s Captain Jose Pinheiro had ordered the men to stage an attack. However, the Portuguese strategy was ill conceived. A sizable group of Balanta struck a blow against the crew before they had even left their boat. The Balanta killed Rodrigues and two Portuguese soldiers and took twelve people captive.
Returning to Hawthorne’s Strategies of the Decentralized,
“In 1777, Portuguese commander Ignacio Bayao reported from Bissau that he was furious that Balanta had been adversely affecting the regional flow of slaves and other goods carried by boats along Guinea-Bissau’s rivers. It was ‘not possible,’ he wrote, ‘to navigate boats for those [Balanta] parts without some fear of the continuous robbing that they have done, making captive those who navigate in the aforementioned boats.’ In response, Bayao sent infantrymen in two vessels ‘armed for war’ into Balanta territories. After these men had anchored, disembarked, and ventured some distance inland, they ‘destroyed some men, burning nine villages’ and then made a hasty retreat back to the river. Finding their vessels rendered ‘disorderly,’ the infantrymen were quickly surrounded by well-armed Balanta. Bayao lamented that ‘twenty men from two infantry companies’ were taken captive or killed. Having sent out more patrols to subdue the ‘savage Balanta’ and having attempted a ‘war’ against this decentralized people, the Portuguese found that conditions on Guinea- Bissau’s rivers did not improve.’”
Historic Pictoric Map, 1732 Negroland and Guinea : with the European settlements explaining what belongs to England, Holland, Denmark
Thus, the English entered Guinea, the land of the Balantas, as violent (“Protestant”) interlopers conducting acts of pure aggression that violated the natural law of the Balanta and the ecclesiastical/canon law of the Catholic Church which conceded dominion to the Balanta, recognizing their sovereign African existence as extra ecclesiam that preceded the human calculus transforming subjects into captives and slaves and acknowledging the theoretical and practical recognition that Guinea did not represent terra nullius (land that is legally deemed to be unoccupied or uninhabited). The Pope claimed that his jurisdiction extended de jure over infidels, and thus he alone could call for a Christian invasion of an infidel’s domain. Even then, however, Pope Innocent maintained that only a violation of natural law could precipitate such an attack. Neither the Portuguese nor the English or any European used any supposed violation of natural law as a justification to invade the Balanta.
The English also violated the ius gentium which formed the basis of the law of nations. The ius gentium was not a legal code, and any force it had depended on "reasoned compliance with standards of international conduct.” Thus, the law of nations was neither natural law, which existed in nature and governed animals as well as humans, nor civil law, which was the body of laws specific to a people. Under the law of nations, slavery was held to be a practice common to all nations, who might then have specific civil laws pertaining to slaves. This was derived from ancient warfare, where the victor had the right under the ius gentium to enslave a defeated population; however, if a settlement had been reached through diplomatic negotiations or formal surrender, the people were by custom to be spared violence and enslavement. However, as has already been well documented, slavery was not a practice of the Balanta. From their earliest documented conflict with the Mesintu in 3200 BC, throughout the ENTIRE written record, the Balanta have been identified as a people that NEVER practiced slavery and ALWAYS SUCCESSFULLY RESISTED IT. As such the ius gentium or law of nations could not be applied as a legal justification for the English conduct in Guinea against the Balanta since such justification must necessarily rest on reasoned compliance with standards of international conduct which can not be achieved between Balanta and English competing legal codes. Further, the English would have been required to conclude treaties with each head of household since the Balantas had no king, chief or leader and sovereign judicial and political authority rested with the head of the household. Additionally, the English behavior WAS DEEMED ILLEGAL by the community of European nations at the time which could use the ius gentium or law of nations amongst each other since they had been engaged in the practice of slavery for centuries. Specifically, the English violated the Treaty of Tordesillas and were deemed “pirates” and “interlopers” by European sovereigns. At the start of the sixteenth century the Portuguese declared that to trade in Guinea without a license is a capital offense. This is the reason why London merchants and Plymouth sailors had to advance religious arguments, as well as the argument of force, to support their clandestine operations in Guinea. Ultimately, the English openly attacked the papal division of the world and declared a holy war for the liberation of the seas. In substance, the law of nations is a mechanism for “might makes right” and the “rule of force”.
Thus, in order to justify it’s illegal activities and imperial ambitions, the English, like the Portuguese began distinguishing between sovereign ‘Moorish’ subjects and those ‘Moors,’ ‘Negros,’ and ‘black’ that they could legitimately enslave. Based on phenotype and and other natural and political characteristics, the English used the terms such as ‘Black Moors’ ‘blacks,’ “Ethiops,’ ‘Guineas,’ and ‘Negroes,’ or the descriptive terms to which a religious signifier was appended such as ‘Moors. . . [who] were Gentiles’ and ‘pagans’, which gradually constituted the rootless and “sovereignless.” This became the basis to delineate who could be ‘legitimately’ enslaved and establish juridical status. The English then used such juridical status to identify territory that could be invaded and raided for slaves. That territory became known as “Negroland” and appeared on English maps.
The Europeans made partnerships with the Mandinka, the Casanga, the Papel and the Bijago. The Mandinka, the Kaabu Empire and the Cassanga Kings demanded tribute from the Banhuns, Buramos, , Jabundos, Falupos, Arriatas and Balantas . When the Balantas refused to pay taxes they would be attacked. The main purpose of the raids was to obtain captives for sale to Europeans. Mandinka rulers regarded this as a means of disciplining recalcitrant subjects who refused to pay tribute or to recognize Mandinka supremacy. The Cassanga king also produced slaves through judicial proceedings. The slave trade provided the Cas Mansa’s rulers with a way to eliminate rivals and unwanted or unruly commoners by condemning them to captivity and sale for whatever ‘crimes’ they may have committed.According to the fiscal arrangement, the Iberian monarch had a one-third interest in the sale price of these slaves. Various taxes were created at each level of transaction.
The sale of slaves brought wealth directly in the form of revenue streams or indirectly as taxes or gits to the rulers of the kingdom. Much of the wealth derived from the slave trade was used to equip the armies that took captives from decentralized groups on the frontier of Casa Mansa; some may have been redistributed to regional leaders or others in return for their support; and some was appropriated by the king, who ‘enjoyed royal state, and was served with pomp – [he possessed] a table, silk carpets, chairs, a gilded bed, curtains and canopies of silk, and a whole inner service in silver.’ The wealth that the king derived from the slave trade certainly elevated him well above the masses, giving him untold power over many institutions – judicial, military, and economic.
Hawthorne notes that
“by 1755 the unregulated trade in slaves from Bissau was booming. That year, Portuguese officials in Cacheu reported that Portuguese and French ships were leaving the island with ‘substantial cargoes of captives.’ The Company of Grao Para e Maranhao, which was accorded monopoly trading privileges for the Guinea -Bissau region beginning in 1755. The company had been created to supply the Brazilian states of Par and Maranhao with slave laborers. By 1775 the company had completed a fort, the Praca de Jose de Bissau. The fort had strong 40-foot-high stone walls that formed a square, at the corners of which were four bulwarks. Trenches surrounded all of this. And the company had an enormous holding pen for slaves. Like the Portuguese government had on many occasions before, the Company of Grao Para e Maranhao sought to undercut the power of Luso African traders who lived in the region. The company was especially keen on defending its monopoly trading rights, and it feared Luso Africans would not recognize these. With British vessels regularly purchasing slaves in Bissau and Geba from ‘Portuguese’ in the 1760’s, the company’s fears were well grounded.”
Thus, when the English began to establish new colonies in the Americas, they used the corporation, a new form of personhood with its own rights and obligations, established by English civil law called “common law” to govern civil and criminal matters. Balanta people were redefined as “Negro” and given the juridical status as “slave” and property of the corporation, in violation of natural law, canon law, and the law of nations. As corporate-less beings that lacked the protective shield of a culturally sanctioned corporate status, much like the Jews and Moors in 15th century Portugal, the history of the Balantas taken to the English colonies in the America’s would, for the next 400 years, simply be the accounting records of the various English corporations.