Contested Freedoms on Three Coasts: African Claims of Illegal Slavery and Belonging in the Luso-Atlantic World

This paper explores how some West and West Central Africans trafficked to Brazil and Portugal in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries constructed legal claims to being free in Africa. Across Atlantic Africa, judicial institutions 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 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, vassalage, royal kinship, trans-Atlantic reputational networks, and in at least one case, their own body, to escape enslavement. By engaging with Africanist and Americanist scholarship on belonging, this paper asks how overlapping bonds of belonging to families, communities, and imperial political communities could be invoked to delineate legal practices of enslavement, even in the diaspora. 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.