Black History Month Annual Lecture

Join us for our annual Black History Month lecture to be given by Dr José Lingna Nafafé.

Legal, moral, ethical and political debate on the abolition of slavery has traditionally been understood to have been initiated by Europeans in the eighteenth century – figures such as William Wilberforce, Thomas Buxton, Thomas Clarkson, Granville Sharp, and David Livingstone. To the extent that Africans are recognised as having played any role in ending slavery, especially in the seventeenth century, their efforts are typically confined to sporadic and impulsive cases of resistance, involving ‘shipboard revolts’, ‘maroon communities’, ‘individual fugitive slaves’ and ‘household revolts’.

This lecture explores how Lourenço da Silva Mendonça, an African Prince and the historical actors with whom he was involved – such as Black Christians from confraternities in Angola, Brazil, Caribbean, Portugal and Spain – argued for the complete abolition of the Atlantic slave trade 147 years before Wilberforce and his generation of abolitionists.

Speaker biography:

Dr José Lingna Nafafé is an Associate Professor of African and Atlantic History, Department of Hispanic, Portuguese and Latin American Studies, University of Bristol, and was the first Director of the MA in Black Humanities. He is an expert on the Lusophone Atlantic, with inter-related areas, linked by the overarching themes of: Lusophone Atlantic African diaspora, Black Atlantic Abolitionists movement seventeenth, reparations and eighteenth century Portuguese and Brazilian history; slavery and wage-labour, 1792-1850; race, religion and ethnicity; Luso-African migrants; ‘Europe in Africa’ and ‘Africa in Europe’.

He was awarded a British Academy Small Grant to undertake a research project on the integration of African migrants in Northern and Southern Europe, and held a Leverhulme Research Fellowship on “Freedom and Lusophone African Diaspora in the Atlantic”.

He was Co-Investigator for an awarded ERC Advanced Grant project “Modern Marronage? The Pursuit and Practice of Freedom in the Contemporary World”.

Dr Lingna Nafafé’ s second monograph Lourenço da Silva Mendonça, and the Black Atlantic Abolitionist Movement in the 17th Century, was published by Cambridge University Press in August 2022. It was awarded the best book of the year prize by the African Studies Association of the UK, 2024. It is also one of BBC History Magazine’s Books of the Year 2022 and one of the five best books written on ‘The History of Angola’ (pre-20th century), History books’ African History, 2023.

Dr Lingna Nafafé’ s is currently writing a third monograph on: Beyond Wilberforce’s Experiment in Abolitionism: Yellow Fever Epidemic, Unfree Labour and the Market, 1792-1870.

This lecture is free and open to all.

Refreshments will be served from 5 pm. The talk will be followed by a drinks reception.

Open to: Members of Kellogg College, the public,