The Silent Tangomão: Fictions of Intermediation Along the Rivers of Guinea

abstract:In the first decades of the sixteenth century, the Portuguese Crown issued a succession of increasingly hostile regulations targeting a class of outlaw traders operating at the fringes of the Empire in West Africa: the tangomãos. A Creole adaptation of the Arabic tarjumān, or translator, the tangomãos were interpreters in the broadest sense, insofar as they served an intermediary role socially, commercially, and linguistically, and were a dominant presence in the critical commercial zone along coastal Upper Guinea. This essay first traces an itinerary of appearances of this enigmatic figure over several generations, offering an integrated profile of the tangomão as interpreter and commercial intermediary and situating them with regards to central themes of precolonial West African historiography such as hospitality, brokerage, and creolization. In so doing, this article will also give an account of the pivotal role they played in the assembly of the trading machine that made Upper Guinea the formative site of the Iberian-led first great wave of the Atlantic slave trade. The central argument is that the tangomãos was deployed ambivalently in Portuguese documentation as a figure of both suspicion and utility—and that this ambivalence was productive for emergent ideological formations of large-scale slave-trading.