Herman Bennett

A thought-provoking reappraisal of the first European encounters with Africa

In African Kings and Black Slaves, Herman L. Bennett mines the historical archives of Europe and Africa to reinterpret the first century of sustained African-European interaction. These encounters were not simple economic transactions. Rather, according to Bennett, they involved clashing understandings of diplomacy, sovereignty, and politics. Bennett unearths the ways in which Africa's kings required Iberian traders to participate in elaborate diplomatic rituals, establish treaties, and negotiate trade practices with autonomous territories. And he shows how Iberians based their interpretations of African sovereignty on medieval European political precepts grounded in Roman civil and canon law. In the eyes of Iberians, the extent to which Africa's polities conformed to these norms played a significant role in determining who was, and who was not, a sovereign people—a judgment that shaped who could legitimately be enslaved.

This work on Afro-Mexican and Spanish-American history examines neglected Mexican archival church records dealing with marriages and religious transgressions. The author focuses on the years 1622-1788, in the process covering a period when New Spain was home to the largest collection of individuals of African descent in the New World. Instead of a weak, individualistic society dealing with the so-called 'social death' caused by slavery, Bennett tells of an urban community where freedmen were in the majority. He describes personal and family dramas, political issues, and disputes between families. By focusing on phenomena related to peoples of African descent in Mexico, rather than providing a conventional history that interweaves the slavery-to-freedom narrative, Colonial Blackness presents the colonial drama in all its untidy detail. 

In this study of the largest population of free and slave Africans in the New World, Herman L. Bennett has uncovered much new information about the lives of slave and free blacks, the ways that their lives were regulated by the government and the Church, the impact upon them of the Inquisition, their legal status in marriage, and their rights and obligations as Christian subjects.