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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 18 August 2022
In 1684, Lourenço da Silva de Mendonça from the kingdom of Kongo in the Indies ‘arrived in Rome to take up an important role for Black peoples’. That role was to bring an ethical and criminal kufunda (case) before the Vatican court, which accused the nations involved in Atlantic slavery, including the Vatican, Italy, Spain and Portugal, of committing crimes against humanity. It detailed the ‘tyrannical sale of human beings … the diabolic abuse of this kind of slavery … which they committed against any Divine or Human law’. Mendonça was a member of the Ndongo royal family, rulers of Pedras (Stones) of Pungo-Andongo, situated in what is now modern Angola. He carried with him the hopes of enslaved Africans and other oppressed groups in what was a remarkable moment that, I would argue, challenges the established interpretation of the history of abolition.
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