Captivity’s Cosmopolitanism: João de Oliveira and the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade from the Bight of Benin

In 1770, customs officials apprehended and imprisoned João de Oliveira for carrying contraband as he entered the Bay of All Saints in Salvador, Brazil. It was not the first time the cabeceira or ‘headman’ and slave trader had been held in captivity. Originally from Gold Coast of West Africa, Oliveira had been kidnapped as an adolescent and trafficked to Pernambuco, Brazil during one of the peaks of the trans-Atlantic slave trade. His status evolved from enslaved man to slaving merchant in the intervening decades, demonstrating his recurring ability to navigate a deeply hierarchical slave society through an instrumental usage of his cultural and linguistic flexibility. Initially a trading auxiliary to a slaving ship captain, his waterborne mobility enabled him to secure legal manumission. In the second half of his life, Oliveira became a diplomatic interlocutor to the King of Onim (Lagos) in Yoruba-speaking West Africa, and a trusted ally of the Brazilian merchant community in the Bight of Benin. As one of many of the trans-Atlantic slave trade’s cosmopolitans, his surprising trajectory reveals the centrality of cultural mediation in the making of slaving commerce. Drawing on Lorelle Smelly’s theorization of cosmopolitanism as being simultaneous ensconced the local and the global, this paper analyzes the cultural politics of the mid-eighteenth-century transatlantic slave trade from the perspective of one of its key functionaries—connecting the cosmopolitan material, political and cultural worlds of Lagos to the brutal commerce of slaving.