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Sarah Tahir

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

continued to significantly intervene in their affairs as postcolonial powers tend to contain a

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

for the purpose of protecting the institution of slavery.

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

wellbeing of Europe’s modern Black population is the “tardy recognition of color-consciousness

long present but earlier denied.”11 As aforementioned, slaves could be marginalized in

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

gatekeepers of Dutch hegemony.15

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.

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