The latest edition of Toyin Falola’s interviews was broadcast on Sunday, attracting an impressive line of global historians who examined the intersection of women, slavery and power under the subject, “global Africa, women and slavery.”
The episode with intellectually focused on the new book of the historian Toby Green, The Heretic of Cacheu: fighting about life in a port of Western Africa of the seventeenth century. The discussion, moderated by Professor Ana LucÃa Araujo from the University of Howard, made an international panel of renowned academics that includes Hassoum Ceesay, the Gambian historian and director of the National Center for Arts and Culture; Mariana Candido, Distinguished Research Professor of Winship History at the University of Emory and author of Wealth, Land and Property in Angola: A History of Drugsion, inequality and power; José Lingna Nafafé, associated professor at the University of Bristol; and Dr. Robin Chapdelaine, associate director of the African Studies Center at Stanford University.
From the beginning, the conversation placed gender, commerce and power as key elements in the realization of the Atlantic world, offering acute ideas about the economic and cultural agency that African women exercised during the trade of transatlantic slaves.
Speaking from Gambia, the historian Hassoum Ceesay drew the roles in layers, often women’s paradoxicals in the slave economy. “I’m talking about Gambia,” he began. “This region is well noted for its role in the trade of transatlantic slaves and also in the way women were an integral part of this trade.” He cited the signals, the Euro-African women of wealth and influence) as cultural corridors. “These were women of substance, economic power and social position. They were rich enough to have slaves, maintained slaves and also exchanged slaves. Their role in trade remains deeply disputed.”
Ceesay was based on vivid historical portraits. He remembered Fanda Lawrence, a Gambian widow of a British merchant who continued the slave trade after moving to Georgia in the 18th century, “a story that points to the conflictive role of women in the transatlantic slave trade.” He also invoked Phillis Wheatley, the enslaved poet of the Senegambian region that became a literary voice of resistance: “Wheatley rose above the persecution to become a note poet that received attention even from Thomas Jefferson.”
Based on the roots of Alex Haley, Ceesay emphasized the role of women in the preservation of identity through ritual and memory. “Women like Kunta Kinte’s mother, Binta, who performed name ceremonies, embodied the resistance of culture in the midst of historical trauma.”
For Professor Mariana Candido, the approach changed to Western Central Africa, particularly Angola, the Republic of Congo and Gabon, which, she explained, was “the region most affected by the transatlantic trade of slaves in terms of duration and volume.” According to her, “when talking about women in global slavery, it is inevitable to remember all that Central Africa lost the largest number of people in trade. Approximately 36 percent of the 12.5 million Africans transported to the New World were women.”
Cidido challenged the popular assumptions that women were invisible in history. “I always heard that it was difficult to write about women, but in my research I found women everywhere: travel reports, census data, church records, baptismal records and even in commercial accounts. Women are not invisible in the archives; historians simply have not always looked for them.”
In addition, he noted that “while the men were taken in greater numbers, the women who remained behind crucial social and economic roles. Gender influenced the demand and supply of trade and shape the types of enslaved workers made by men and women.” He revealed his next book, History of Women in Angola (1500-1880), is based on these findings and aligns with Green’s effort to “recognize the centrality of women in economic, social and political life in the ports of the Atlantic, which became spaces of women’s power.”
Anchoring the discussion, Professor Toyin Falola contextualized the historical conversation for the global public. “If you go to the United States, Brazil or Cuba and you find black populations there, it is linked to this history of slavery,” he said. “Millions were taken from central and western Africa, from Cameroon, Nigeria, Angola and beyond.”
Falola praised Toby Green’s work for claiming the African Women Agency. “We are discussing this to emphasize the role of women. In classrooms, we call it agency: how people expresses and find empowerment. Green shows us that African women were not simply victims; they were merchants, political leaders and runners.”
He added that the book “reveals that the Atlantic world was not formed by a single religion. Together with Catholicism, African spiritual systems (damages, rituals and ancestral beliefs, coexisted and formed everyday life.” gender”.
On the basis of that, Professor José Lingna Nafafé expanded the lens to the world of the broader Atlantic, emphasizing that women “carried philosophy, religion and culture of Africa through the Atlantic.” He noted that “the Atlantic was saturated with women and young people who were not part of the wars, but were captured and enslaved.” The women, he said, occupied domestic spaces that became “transmission and resistance sites.”
“They worked in the houses of the slave owners, they cooked, they took care of the children and heard conversations about the systems that oppressed them,” he explained. “These women had the secret knowledge of the slavery operation and sometimes resisted from that space.” Nafafé also discussed the Black Brotherhoods: Christian fraternities where “women were given spaces to trade, and the money they were often used to freely free others. They became liberators within an oppressive system.”
He concluded: “Women had the double pain of being mothers, expelled from their families and at the same time give birth to children who were enslaved. They were the main carriers of trauma and, at the same time, resistance.”
Framing the discussion within a global context, Dr. Robin Chapdelaine of Stanford University said that “the history of African women in slavery is essential to understand the realization of the modern world.” “The term ‘Global Africa’ points out both geography and the process, the ways in which Africa and Africans, especially women, shaped economic, spiritual and intellectual worlds that extend from Senegambia to Bahia,” he said.
Chapdelaine said that “the participation of women in commercial networks linked the African interior economies to the markets of the Atlantic. His work, domicically, reproductive, agricultural and commercial, said the circulation of goods, people and ideas that defined the worlds of the Atlantic and Indian Ocean.” However, he added: “His autonomy was often recast as deviation, his knowledge as witchcraft, his mobility as a moral threat.”
“Studying women in slavery in a global framework,” he said, “is to reimagine freedom not as a European invention but as an African practice disputed.”
For the author Toby Green, the story that inspired the heretic of Cacheu is in the life of Krispina Pérez, “the most powerful merchant in Cacheu’s agreement in the Guinea-Bissau today.” He explained: “This was a 1665 rare Inquisition trial that involved a Women’s Africa woman. Pérez was part of the elite trade class, and his influence was so significant that he caught the attention of the Inquisition, something that almost never happened in Africa.”
Green emphasized that trial documents revealed “the emotional world underlying trade: wrapping, bitterness, love, fear, anxiety and debt) that formed the historical experience.” He added: “The book is unusual because it captures the seventeenth century, a transformative period that prepared the scenario for the industrialization of global slavery.”
Sunday’s discussion reinforced the intellectual mission of Toyin Falola’s interviews, to connect Africa past with its global future through deep academic dialogue. By highlighting the roles overlooked women in the configuration of the history of the Atlantic, the episode stressed the vision of a phallola of an Africa that continues to speak powerfully to the world, recovering their stories, academics and silenced. The event was broadcast through several television, radio and digital platforms.
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