Reviewed by:

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

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...

审阅者：

• 这座堡垒中的许多黑人妇女：葡萄牙非洲帝国的三位被奴役的妇女格拉萨、莫妮卡和阿德沃亚作者：夸西·科纳杜 (Kwasi Konadu)
• 简·胡珀

在《这座堡垒的许多黑人妇女》一书中，夸西·科纳杜探讨了格拉萨、莫妮卡和阿德沃阿这三位非洲妇女如何利用她们的非洲社区和精神实践，在早期大西洋世界积极反对葡萄牙帝国主义。科纳杜试图通过展示这些“普通”女性如何抵抗欧洲权力和反抗帝国的白人男性代理人，来呈现十五和十六世纪非洲人的生活和经历的不同视角。这本书并没有像近年来许多学者所做的那样，关注那些从与欧洲人的婚姻和商业接触中获得影响力的非洲精英女性，而是以三位女性为中心，她们似乎在生活中几乎没有发挥任何作用，在新兴的葡萄牙非洲帝国。科纳杜详细叙述了这些女性的生活，依次讨论了她们的生活，并深入了解了她们被奴役的不同经历、与白人官员的亲密交往以及与其他非洲人（尤其是女性）的关系。他主要关心的是识别他们行为中的反抗因素。文本并没有停留在这些妇女遭受奴役或性暴力的经历上，尽管这些肯定是叙述的一部分，但科纳杜强调了这些妇女的生活如何始终受到葡萄牙新移民与其非洲邻居之间存在的紧张关系的影响。

葡萄牙官员一再试图改变和征服这些妇女，但格拉萨、莫妮卡和阿德沃阿都在米纳（黄金）海岸的葡萄牙堡垒圣乔治达米纳外维持着生活。科纳杜的主要主张之一是关于转换的限制。尽管同意皈依基督教，这些妇女仍然继续从事非洲的精神实践，这为她们提供了欧洲统治堡垒之外的生活，并提供了欧洲和非洲男性无法企及的精神力量。这些妇女积极反抗葡萄牙帝国主义和葡萄牙加强对非洲人的宗教控制的企图。通过拒绝天主教禁止崇拜非基督教神灵和物质物品的教义，这些妇女积极反对葡萄牙的全球统治。

科纳杜项目中最令人兴奋的部分是他利用被忽视的来源将这一主题集中在非洲妇女的经历上。通过对葡萄牙宗教裁判所记录的研究，前两位女性格拉萨和莫妮卡的生活成为人们关注的焦点。科纳杜对文件的使用让人想起詹姆斯·斯威特（James Sweet）关于多明戈斯·阿尔瓦雷斯（Domingos Álvares）的一篇依赖宗教裁判所证词的著作，但他的作品也让人想起最近提倡使用欧洲记录的奴隶叙述的学术研究。科纳杜利用格拉萨和莫妮卡的审判记录来讨论莫妮卡的奴役和解放，以及非洲妇女与西非葡萄牙人之间发展的亲密关系。尽管格拉萨的葡萄牙语显然掌握得很差，但她还是接受了葡萄牙官员的多次面谈和检查。相关个人和团体（包括当地法庭、外部专家和无偿举报者）也制作了记录。所有这些都对她的信仰提出了意见，他们的证词最终将促成将格拉萨流放到葡萄牙的决定[结束第 168 页]。这些女性的叙述令人回味，而且常常令人心碎。读到这些“普通”女性不是精英，而是试图在葡萄牙堡垒的阴影下开创生活的女性，令人耳目一新。然而，这种方法的一个缺点是，书中对这三位女性的讨论不均衡，这种不均衡显然是由于来源材料的限制造成的。葡萄牙宗教裁判所对格拉萨进行了更全面的审查，我们对莫妮卡的了解却少得多，尽管她的案件遵循了类似的轨迹，而且很少有细节可以提供对阿德沃阿生活的洞察。而不是依赖...