my essay 2

Coreen Harris

Essay Two

HST 300

In Afro Latino Voices, Kathryn McKnight and Leo Garofalo, build upon John Thornton’s work, expanding his analysis both the role of Africans who lived in Africa were it affected by the political relations between Africans and Europeans, as explained in the letters of Queen Njinga of the Ndogno, developed a creole culture in the New World.

          First any slave culture may be developed from a military conquest.  Before 1624, it was believed by many Eurocentric historians, Portuguese envoys were accessed communications between the Ndogno tribes- an effort to open trade for slave labor.  According to Thornton, “after 1624, they became embroiled in a long series of wars that might be called the Wars of the Ndogno Succession, in which Portuguese officials hoped to place a pliant king on Ndogno’s throne and met with resistance of Queen Njinga” (Thornton, pg. 100). In a complementary study, McKnight and Garofalo examine the first hand account of Queen Njinga, as she addressed the Portuguese military commander Bento Baanho Cardosa in 1626, which opened political communications of European diplomacy.  At a time when commerce, not industry was deemed as the superior form of economic activity, Kathryn McKnight and Leo Garofalo maintains the Ndogno were a people that embraced a great ethic of self-improvement. Queen Njinga writes “[I] t caused me great grief that an Aires’ fortress there were Portuguese forces there that I have received with great kindness because they were vassals of the king of Spain, to whom I recognized obeisance as a Christian… that in Ambaca a large force had gathered waiting for Your Honor to move against me to free the Portuguese held in captivity. Nothing is accomplished by force and to so would bring both me and them harm because everything can be done peacefully and without force.”(McKnight and Garofalo, pg. 43).  Queen Njinga consciously embraces her Christian faith for herself and her people as part of their identity as members of a progressive Atlantic community. The ambivalence, with which she did so, is key to Thornton’s argument that the Ndogno wars were multivariant to the development of a creole culture in the New World.

Next, McKnight and Garofalo pay particular attention to explaining how Portuguese and Ndogno changed in relations, according to Queen Njinga’s letter to the general of Angola in 1655.  Her letter, motivated by a desire for economic advancements, Matamba (Ndogno) immigrants established precarious and sometimes unruly settlements that gradually became more cohesive. How is this possible?  Thornton argues, “whereas the conquest of land necessarily required administration of larger areas and expansion of military resources, the acquisition of slaves only required a short campaign that need not create any new administrative conditions”(Thornton, pg. 106). Please read the following excerpt of Queen Njinga’s letter in 1655 (McKnight and Garofalo, pg. 47):

The one I have the most grievance with in Governor Salvador Correia {de Sà} to whom I gave the slaves Your Lordship knows about and made two hundred banzoes for Commander Rui Pegado who arrived as an envoy of his majesty, may God protect him, and assured me that my sister would be brought back to me and that there would be complete peace. I decided I could not break my royal word (and accepted his assurances). Because of this and other treacheries, I roam the forest, far from my own lands, with no one to inform His Majesty, may God protect him, from unease, when to be at peace with the said commander and His Majesty’s Governors is what I most desire.  (Pg. 47)

This attainment of ideological stability and emergence of family networks in Africa and across the Atlantic was attainable because of stable ruling elites, like Queen Njinga.

Conclusively, McKnight and Garofalo’s analysis of primary sources that openly and cleverly argue Thornton’s argument that “slaves, although no longer surrounded by their familiar home environment relationships, village, and family, were nevertheless not in a culture wilderness when they arrived in Americas”(pg. 205). Motivated by a desire for economic advancement, Portuguese immigrants Africans established precarious and unruly settlements that became more cohesive with the attainment of ideological stability as seen in the emergence of family networks. .