Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Dr. Ryan
Black Europe
3 February 2019
How Europe Failed its Black Population in Terms of Visibility, Acknowledgment, and Archival
Migrants, refugees, and multi-generational immigrants add diversity and cultural richness
to Europe as a whole which it simply could not achieve without their contributions. Historically,
the African ancestors of European multi-generational immigrants made culturally iconic periods
possible with their work by, for example, propelling gondoliers which facilitated travel in
renaissance Venice and ultimately the development of an art form specific to Italy.1 The
hegemonic narrative which European actors put forth is one of humanity, royalty, and grandeur,
without acknowledgment of the people who they oppressed, who slaved away for their
monarchic figures, and whose descendants resultantly face the modern-day consequences of
alienation and invisibility. Countries which have previously colonized African countries and
significant amount of Europe’s African/Black population, like the United Kingdom and France
for example, who have one and a half million and two and a half million Black citizens in them
respectively; there are most likely more who do not get counted for lack of documentation.2
What are lesser known about and studied are the Black populations of smaller countries such as
the Netherlands, which notably has over half a million Black citizens, and their histories. These
populations were comprised of individuals whose bodies were historically occupied by white,
1
Kate Lowe, “Visible Lives: Black Gondoliers and Other Black Africans in Renaissance Venice,”
Renaissance Quarterly 66, no. 2 (Summer 2013): 412-452.
2
Allison Blakely, “The Emergence of Afro-Europe: A Preliminary Sketch” in Black Europe and the African
Diaspora edited by Darlene Clark Hine, Trica Danielle Keaton, and Stephen Small (Urbana-Champaign:
University of Illinois Press, 2009), 4.
wealthy Europeans for lucrative and social gain at the expense of the Blacks’ severe obscurity,
both in terms of societal marginalization and national records, throughout their lives and beyond
Monarchic figures enslaved Blacks to bolster their public image and deliberately treated
them to regal paraphernalia to obscure their realities of deprivation and cruelty to the public and
generations to follow. Hence, they were both rejected by their society as Black Europeans and
unacknowledged as slaves as well—rendering them worse than invisible. In her article, Black
Africans in Renaissance Europe, Annemarie Jordan dedicates a section to exploring the lives of
the slaves who worked under Catherine of Austria in Lisbon, Portugal during the latter part of
the 16th century.3 As a European country and colonial power, Portugal was a pioneer in terms of
utilizing slavery as a means of achieving heightened status.4 Slaves of different ethnic identities
were stereotyped in accordance with appearance and background; “Moorish slaves [were
favored] because they were considered beautiful [yet] as Muslims they were considered to be
untrustworthy … Black Africans were deemed ugly but faithful, while mulattos were especially
liked because they were more Caucasian in appearance, and Christian.”5 These descriptions,
coupled with the fact that Catherine intentionally bought many of her slaves, which were labeled
“pieces” in account books, directly from West Africa through a Portuguese captain in
present-day Senegal for the better rates that came with buying them from the “source,” reveals an
exceedingly grotesque level of objectification that was inflicted on Black slaves over lower-class
3
Annemarie Jordan, “Images of Empire: Slaves in the Lisbon Household and Court of Catherine of
Austria,” In Black Africans in Renaissance Europe edited by T.F. Earle and K.J.P Lowe, (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2005): 155-180.
4
Ibid.
5
Ibid, 156.
white slaves.6 African slaves could have also been bought from private individuals and gifted by
the queen’s husband as well, essentially commodifying them.7 Their value was maximized by
providing education and gifts of clothing and bedding to them so that they could fulfill their roles
as slaves to the queen while upholding her standard of regality for the public eye. Certain slaves
most likely required Portuguese education to carry out their roles as entertainers and informers
over slaves who merely cleaned and cooked.8 Additionally, even slaves who were entrusted with
more “lavish” jobs which supposedly bettered their lives and offered them social mobility like
being the court jester, such as João de Sá Panasco who received awards for his work, were
otherized and discriminated against by their white peers for having darker skin, causing them to
experience the oppression which came with the stacked identity of being part of both a destitute
class and racial minority.9 Authentic, raw accounts detailing what Panasco and other slaves of his
kind truly experienced rarely exist; historians can only speculate what happened to them, as
Jordan’s 27th footnote, “The records are not clear about Panasco’s appointment, although a 1547
document describes him as …,” speaks to.10 Slave narratives can easily get whitewashed by
virtue of slaves never having had the opportunity or means of writing their own stories down,
with very few exceptions. Hence, their future generations are left piecing their realities together
while still being influenced by the continual, dominating European rhetoric that Catherine and
other monarchic slave owners acted out of humanity and mercy, voiding many slaves’
posthumous visibility.
6
Ibid, 161-162.
7
Ibid.
8
Jordan, Images of Empire, 162.
9
Ibid, 161.
10
Ibid, 160.
The lack of visibility which arose out of the absence of African slaves’ documentation
helped obscure their realities to the world and enabled slave owners and traders to continue their
atrocities. The slavery which took place in the Netherlands in the sixteenth century exemplifies
the impacts that the loss of archives and narratives can have on a group of people united in their
struggles. In accordance with Allison Blakely, one of the most pressing issues threatening the
accordance with their darker skin colors, but their oppression would not stop there. The massive
imbalance of power and mobility imposed on Africans by white Europeans would develop
throughout time with its roots in enslavement. The Dutch became global leaders in the slave
trade at the beginning of the seventeenth century. The slaves they captured were subject to
mass-baptisms which forced them to adopt new identities for the sole purpose of serving Dutch
owners who would guise their slaves as “Christian employees” to the general population.12 Their
visibility was equally impacted by the narrative that Zeeland authorities put forth about their
humanitarian efforts to end slavery in their capital city in 1581.13 Contrarily, Middleburg (in
Zeeland) became the center of the Dutch slave trade, carrying out over thirty percent of it
between 1601 and 1803.14 Additionally, the total absence of slavery as a term for an official
system which was being utilized all throughout Europe as well as the acknowledgment of
different slaves’ ethnic and religious backgrounds and coinciding discrepancies in treatment
11
Dienke Hondius, “Blacks in Early Modern Europe: New Research from the Netherlands,” in Black
Europe and the African Diaspora, edited by Darlene Clark Hine, Trica Danielle Keaton, and Stephen
Small (Urbana-Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2009), 29.
12
Ibid, 39.
13
Ibid.
14
Ibid, 40.
from national records makes it nearly impossible to uncover their truths in all of their violence
and cruelty. As Dienke Hondius mentions in “Blacks in Early Modern Europe: New Research
from the Netherlands,” “Since slavery did not officially exist, no official emancipation or
liberation was possible, and everything remained informal…,” thereby protecting slavery in the
Netherlands with a deliberate lack of record-keeping and truth-telling by national authorities and
Blakely, Jordan, and Hondius’ articles are testaments to the immense difficulty to be
found in tracing the lives of African slaves by virtue of the white, privileged Europeans who
owned and controlled them obscuring the true details of their experiences with their own
narratives of what happened, bolstering the institution of slavery in doing so. Hence, as Hondius
cogently put it, “We are [still] depending on written records by white Europeans … we can trace
[only] glimpses [and] remnants of the reactions of the Africans.”16 The work of a diverse
population of historians is still necessary towards reconstructing those few remnants of African
slaves’ experiences so that as a global society, we may never repeat the evils which devastated
their lives in any form. Reclaiming identity and visibility for Black and African Europeans will
require embracing the tenacity of their ancestors and connecting over a shared interest in
empowering people to embrace their Blackness, and not let it dehumanize them any longer.
15
Ibid, 41.
16
Ibid, 31.