Contested Freedoms on Two Coasts: African Claims of Illegal Slavery in Atlantic Africa and Brazil

This paper explores how some West and West Central Africans trafficked to Brazil in the eighteenth century constructed legal claims to being free in Africa. Across Atlantic Africa, local legal courts like the tribunal de mucanos existed alongside Portuguese concepts of just war and original freedom to broadly define the circumstances in which a person could be enslaved. Across the Atlantic, in Brazil, no such court existed to evaluate claims to freedom in Africa, obliging illegitimately enslaved Africans to translate pluralistic legal frameworks from their places of origin to new American contexts. This paper examines their arguments and strategies for doing so, revealing the diverse ways that some Africans used their Christian faith, kinship, trans-Atlantic reputational networks, and in at least one case, their own body, to escape slavery. It joins recent scholarship on the formation of discourses of just war and illegitimate slavery in the Spanish Empire and West Central Africa to consider the uneven ways that claims to freedom in Africa were evaluated in Brazil. This paper also reflects on the archives of illegal slavery by foregrounding the initiative of Africans in exposing the limits of laws and discourses regulating who could be enslaved, when, and from where. From these fragmentary archives surface bonds of kinship, community, and reputation unbroken by the Middle Passage. They also reveal the contours of an intellectual history of freedom and law expressed in civil and royal courts throughout the Luso-Atlantic.