On the Portuguese Influence on the Early Development of African Catholicism: The Case of Annobon

In my book Afro-Atlantic Catholics: America's First Black Christians (2022), which will be discussed at a roundtable in the 2024 AAR conference, I present a new theory on the development of Black Christianity in the Americas. The goal of this paper is to complement this panel discussion with a presenation that debates the Portuguese influence on the early development of African Catholicism. It does so with a focus on the little-known African Atlantic island of Annobón. 

What singles out Annobón, an originally uninhabited island that was colonized by the Portuguese with enslaved laborers from the nearby island of São Tomé, is that its charter generation had much in common with that of enslaved communities in the Americas that originated from parts of Africa with a historically strong Portuguese influence. In the Americas, however, the latter’s Luso-African customs came under pressure by the policies of the colonial powers and the interaction with captives from other parts of Africa. What singles out Annobón is that neither of this happened. For this reason, it is credible to say that when Claretian missionaries in the late-nineteenth century reported about the local variant of Catholicism they encountered in Annobón, they were writing about a religion that stood close to the syncretic variants of Catholicism that in the early-modern era developed in parts of Africa with a strong Portuguese influence and, subsequently, to the religious customs of many Africans captives who at that time arrived in the Americas. In other words, the importance of Annobón to our understanding of enslaved communities shaped by Luso-African identities parallels that of Maroon communities to our understanding of enslaved communities shaped by Indigenous African identities. This makes Annobón a unique starting point to identify and study of early forms of Black Catholic religiosity in the Americas.