The Politics of Freedom among West Central Africans in Colonial Peru

In the 1630s and 1640s, two men identified as Gabriel and Domingo led a fugitive slave settlement on the northern Peruvian coast comprised primarily of men and women from West Central Africa. Scholars have described similar communities throughout the Americas as reconfigurations of West Central African war camps (Landers 2006, Schwartz 1992) and have sought to illuminate their ethnic logic (McKnight 2004). Fugitive settlements in the Americas, however, were not aggressive and temporary military ventures such as the West Central African kilombos or war camps (Miller 1988). Instead, they were often more established, included women, and engaged in trade and other relations with local communities (including indigenous people). Rather than ascribing the fugitive settlement’s actions to a continuity of African practices in the Diaspora (Sweet 2003, Thornton 1992) or a process of creolization in the Americas (Mintz & Price 1992), this paper will explore how inhabitants of Gabriel and Domingo’s fugitive settlement constructed community identifications in relation to their context (Hall 1980) and with the explicit political goals to achieve freedom.

In the first half of the paper, I examine how, in the process of resisting slaveholder demands, enslaved and free West Central Africans expanded the terms of colonial discourse and infused the transatlantic terms of congo and angola with translocal meanings through Catholic confraternities and naming practices. In the second half of the paper, I explore the political goals of the angola leaders as articulated through their military strategies, local alliances, and internal community organization. I argue that the community threatened the regional magistrate’s authority and his lieutenant even while local landholders relied on fugitives as a mobile labor force. Through the identification as angola or congo, fugitives (regardless of their origins) expressed allegiance to each other and defiance of slaveholders in a Diasporic struggle against enslavement.