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Periodical article | Leiden University catalogue | WorldCat |
Title: | 'Canniball Negroes', Atlantic Creoles, and the identity of New England's Charter generation |
Authors: | Heywood, Linda M. Thornton, John K. |
Year: | 2011 |
Periodical: | African Diaspora: a Journal of Transnational Africa in a Global World (ISSN 1872-5457) |
Volume: | 4 |
Issue: | 1 |
Pages: | 76-94 |
Language: | English |
Geographic terms: | Angola United States |
Subjects: | slave trade slaves identity |
External link: | https://hdl.handle.net/10.1163/187254611x566279 |
Abstract: | In the early seventeenth century, merchants in New England, North America, were heavily involved in privateering raids on Spanish and Portuguese shipping in the Caribbean and in capturing slave ships, almost entirely sent from Angola. Knowing the specific background and historical events in Angola makes it possible to solve a number of mysterious appearances, such as Imbangala ('canniball negroes') raiders, and a queen who was probably a member of the Kongo-Ndongo nobility whose enslaved members also appear in Brazilian records of the same epoch. In the early seventeenth century Angola was plagued by a series of wars fought between the Portuguese settlers and the people of the Kingdom of Ndongo. After 1615, the Portuguese governors enlisted mercenaries they called 'Jagas' and who called themselves Imbangala. They were reputed to be cannibals. They and a host of other Africans, including the 'queen' as well as Atlantic Creoles, had been enslaved during the wars of the 1630s for export by Portuguese merchants to the Spanish Indies, but had been intercepted on the high seas by English privateers and eventually carried to New England. Careful use of contemporary and dense documentation of Angola and shipping allow this greater nuance and opens the way for other research. Bibliogr., notes, ref., sum. in English and French. [Journal abstract] |