Many Black Women of this Fortress: Graça, Mónica, and Adwoa, Three Enslaved Women of Portugal's African Empire by Kwasi Konadu (review)

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• Many Black Women of this Fortress: Graça, Mónica, and Adwoa, Three Enslaved Women of Portugal’s African Empire by Kwasi Konadu
• Jane Hooper

Many Black Women of this Fortress: Graça, Mónica, and Adwoa, Three Enslaved Women of Portugal’s African Empire. By kwasi konadu. London: Hurst, 2022. xiii + 176 pp. ISBN 978-1-78738-697-6. $29.95 (paper).

In Many Black Women of this Fortress, Kwasi Konadu examines how three African women, Graça, Mónica, and Adwoa, used their African communities and spiritual practices to actively work against Portuguese imperialism in the early Atlantic world. Konadu attempts to present a different perspective on the lives and experiences of Africans in the fifteenth and sixteenth-century by demonstrating how these “ordinary” women resisted European power and defied white male agents of empire. Rather than focusing on elite African women who derived influence from marriages and commercial contact with Europeans, as [End Page 167] many scholars have done in recent years, the book centers on three women who would seem to exercise little agency in their lives, embedded in the emerging Portuguese African empire. Konadu provides detailed narratives about each of these women’s lives, discussing each in turn, and offers insights into their different experiences of enslavement, intimate dealings with white officials, and relationships with other Africans, particularly women. He is primarily concerned with identifying elements of defiance in their actions. The text does not linger on these women’s experiences of slavery or sexual violence, although those are certainly part of the narrative, but instead Konadu emphasizes how the women’s lives were consistently colored by the tensions that existed between Portuguese newcomers and their African neighbors.

Portuguese officials repeatedly sought to convert and subjugate these women but Graça, Mónica, and Adwoa all maintained lives outside of the Portuguese fortress on the Mina (Gold) Coast, São Jorge da Mina. One of Konadu’s primary assertions is about the limits of conversion. Despite agreeing to convert to Christianity, these women continued to engage in African spiritual practices that provided them with a life outside of the European-dominated fortress and offered spiritual powers beyond the reach of European and African males. The women actively defied Portuguese imperialism and Portuguese attempts to cultivate their religious control over Africans. By rejecting Catholic teachings that forbade the worship of non-Christian gods and material items, these women were actively working against Portuguese global domination.

The most exciting part of Konadu’s project is his use of overlooked sources to center this topic on African women’s experiences. The lives of the first two women, Graça and Mónica, come into focus through a study of Portuguese Inquisition records. Konadu’s use of documents reminds one of James Sweet’s writings about Domingos Álvares that rely upon Inquisitorial testimonies, but his work also recalls recent scholarship advocating for the use of European-recorded slave narratives. Konadu uses records produced by the trials of Graça and Mónica to discuss enslavement, and manumission in the case of Mónica, and the intimate relations that developed between African women and Portuguese in West Africa. Despite her apparently poor grasp of Portuguese, Graça was interviewed and examined repeatedly by Portuguese officials. Records were also produced by interested individuals and groups that included local tribunals, external experts, and unpaid informers. All of these offered opinions about her beliefs and their testimony would ultimately contribute to the decision to [End Page 168] exile Graça in Portugal. The accounts of the women are evocative and often heart-rending. It was refreshing to read of these “ordinary” women who were not elites but rather women attempting to carve out lives in the shadow of the Portuguese fort. One drawback to this methodology, however, is that the three women are unevenly discussed in the book, the unevenness clearly produced by the limitations of source material. Graça was more fully examined by the Portuguese Inquisitorial court, we know far less about Mónica, even though her case followed a similar trajectory, and very few details remain to offer insights into the life of Adwoa. Rather than relying upon...