The Women Who Ran Senegambia
When it came to the relations between men and women, 17th century Cacheu — a port town in today’s Guinea-Bissau — was a very different place to the world of Counter-Reformation Portugal, where young girls were dressed in nun’s wimples in the streets of Lisbon to prepare them for a life of seclusion. While in the halls of the Inquisition of Lisbon it was men who commanded — as Inquisitors, notaries, scribes, and translators — and women appeared only in the guise of those to be condemned, Cacheu was a very different place. Where in 17th-century Europe, women’s activities were hampered by (male) administrative power, Cacheu was different. The most powerful trader in the town of Cacheu was a woman called Crispina Peres, whose success and challenges to the patriarchy of empire eventually saw her arrested in 1665 by the Portuguese Inquisition on trumped-up charges of “witchcraft.”
There are several ways in which the power of women emerge through Peres’ inquisition trial. The first is that the documents exist at all. This was the sole Inquisitorial trial taken throughout the 17th century from Guinea-Bissau. Given the acknowledged fact that Inquisitorial procedures were often a means of gaining revenge on one’s enemies, this sole extant trial could only have been taken against an exceptionally powerful individual. The number of enemies that Crispina had is clear from the trial records. And the more powerful the person, the larger the number of their enemies.
Moreover, many of the witnesses pointed the finger not only at Crispina’s “heretical” activities, but also at those of many women who were friends of hers. These women were said also to make sacrifices in Cacheu’s religious shrines known as chinas. For when the original accusation was formulated in the pages of the trial, it was not only against Crispina but also against “Genebra Lopes and Isabel Lopes, single, Black women resident in [Cacheu].” For in Cacheu, women ran their own households, supported one another in commercial business, and were the clear commercial, religious, and social rivals of the upstart (male) Atlantic traffickers in the town.
The evidence of Sebastião Vaz, a boatswain and resident of Cacheu, can stand as representative of this:
He knows as a matter of certainty that when there is need, or something is lost, Genebra Lopes, a single Black woman, resident of this settlement of Cacheu, buys palm wine and chickens and sends them and sometimes goes to the shrine … And he heard her say many times that it was [done] with that intention because … when they buy these things to make sacrifices in order for the stolen or lost [goods] to appear, they will scream, saying in their loud voices that they want to sacrifice it.
This gives a startling image of what often happened in Cacheu. When thefts took place, successful trading women whose goods had been taken would buy palm wine and chickens and then roam the streets shouting loudly that they were going to make a sacrifice to the china – with the known implication that bad things happened to whomsoever was the thief, if they didn’t return what they had taken. According to Vaz, all of this happened in Vila Quente, a neighborhood run by women.
Women’s power and agency in Cacheu was not therefore limited to the likes of Crispina Peres — to those who could rise to commercial dominance and the autonomy which went with it. There was also a whole neighborhood — Vila Quente — in which women ran the households and the religious life. What was it, then, about daily life in Cacheu which meant that many women had such autonomy?
Women’s capacity to occupy powerful roles in Cacheu mirrored the world around them. In the micro-kingdoms near Cacheu, female rulership was also a factor in political life. In her book on the micro-state of Pachesi, Gambian historian Ralphina Phillott de Almeida describes how there were at least three female rulers in the earlier phase of Pachesi prior to 1750. And 50 years or so before Crispina’s trial, the trader João Bautista Pérez described offering a flagon of wine to the queen of Cassão on the Gambia river.
Crispina’s influential position wasn’t therefore an anomaly for Senegambia. What, then, were the roots of this influence which she held? A key aspect was fluency in multiple languages. Multilingualism in West African languages gave women like Crispina a huge advantage in business dealings, where local rulers trading with Cacheu might speak Mandinka, Pepel, and/or Bainunk. These language ties also connected to her heritage, since the kinship ties she had through her Bainunk mother Domingas were important in making initial contacts with rulers.
This makes the roots of female empowerment in Cacheu clearer. These Atlantic towns were characterized by the intermarriage of Atlantic traffickers with Senegambian women. However, unlike in the Americas, the Atlantic heritage of the male traders was not an advantage. In fact, it was the reverse. In Cacheu, these men’s spouses had much greater reach: women’s autonomy was cemented by their linguistic abilities, kinship networks and the greater access which all this gave them to healers and the potential for better health empowered them.
Trade was at the heart of Cacheu’s life, and the ways in which it was conducted by the town’s men and women were vital in shaping the roles each had, and the experiences that they had of life.
If women dominated the marketplace in Cacheu, their commercial role there was driven by these patterns of trade. Prominent women such as Peres commissioned ships which then plied on trading voyages from the Gambia river in the north to Sierra Leone in the south. Most of the trading voyages themselves, however, were conducted and crewed by men, and these journeys all required long absences from Cacheu.
Meantime, while the men lived it up and aged fast, things were different for the women of Cacheu. Surviving account books provide precious information which show how they had their own independent lines of work. They tended to work in a range of small-scale trades, as well as running small businesses. They made their living selling goods on credit to itinerant male traders, while at the same time developing their own independence.
Women of Cacheu often made small purchases from traders, either for themselves or to sell on in some small business deal. One woman, Guiomar, brought some wax and wine from the trader João Bautista Peres, in 1619. Domingas Lopes bought two measures of kola nuts, chickpeas, Rouen cloth, and some handkerchiefs, while Esperança Vaz bought the same items in addition to wine. These women ran their households, sorted out the provisioning — and it seems also often sold small bits of stuff here and there to their friends and neighbors who came passing by.
This detail adds another layer to the sense of what this town was like. The busiest area was down by the port, where much of the haggling for provisions, wax and cloth was done. These women traders in Cacheu thronged around the place. They were known in Kriolu as regateiras (hawkers, or peddlers). Then they would go back to Vila Quente, where little bits of business here and there also went on as people came in and out of one another’s houses for what they needed. Meanwhile, other women who were not yet living in their own independent households, but still worked as servants or household slaves of Atlantic traffickers, also did business on their own account: one, Maria Rodrigues, the servant (criada) of António Vaz, bought raw cotton from Manoel Bautista Pérez in 1614.
This last piece of evidence on raw cotton also indicates a core element of the economic life of women in Cacheu. This was in spinning and supplying cotton for the looms that were so important to weavers of the cloths that dominated town fashions. This pattern was in keeping with general Senegambian practices, where women tended to spin cotton while men did the weaving. In Cacheu, not only did women run the marketplace, therefore, but there were other trades open to them through which they could achieve economic independence — and through which a skilful negotiator like Crispina might eventually rise to prominence.
Economic and social independence usually go together. Crispina was the most successful trader of her era in Cacheu, but she was also just the tip of the iceberg. Most successful women traders in the town also acted as household heads. Far from being an anomaly, Crispina’s life and household embodied the world she came from, something which tells us how far different this world was from that of the Inquisitors who arraigned her before them. It was small wonder that they felt threatened by it.
Just as, in patriarchal societies, older men often marry younger women, so in Cacheu the reverse was the case. In fact, women appear often to have married younger men, as was the case with Crispina and her bedbound husband Jorge: as he put it to the cotton-spinner Maria Mendes, “men marrying older women was a laborious matter,” which according to Mendes ‘impl[ied] that he could not do anything with her’ — and also that it was not something that was all that rare in Cacheu.
Older women might well marry younger men in a setting like Cacheu, where ambitious men from Portugal and Cabo Verde arrived, and where economic networks were likely the established domain of women who were older. This was upside down to the usual way of things in the Portuguese empire. But beyond the inverted relationship of age and marriage, Cacheu upended the gender norms of the Portuguese empire in countless ways. Many economically independent women lived in all-female households in Vila Quente. Here, they ran their small-time trading businesses. Their homes were often also the destinations of the itinerant men who roamed about the town when they returned from their trading voyages, looking for a relationship of some sort.
That women ran their own households is made clear by a piece of testimony from Crispina’s trial, in which the Friar Sebastião de São Vicente said that he had heard that the priest and vicar of Cacheu, Antonio Vaz de Pontes, was “having an affair with another parda [mixed-heritage] girl whose name he cannot recall, who lives in the house of Isabel Lopes, a Black woman, and single, resident in [Cacheu].” In other words, Lopes ran the house, in which other women also lived.
The priest Vaz de Pontes had clearly assimilated well into the ways in which the town worked. Other witnesses confirmed that he was a frequent visitor to Lopes’ house, some saying that there his partner Catalina was expecting a child with him, and others that he had visited her straight after mass on Ash Wednesday (when he should have been more spiritually engaged). Meanwhile, when Vaz de Pontes gave his own evidence, he mentioned “the white and parda women, who headed their households.” Such households were clearly the norm, not the exception, in Cacheu.
With such strong economic, social, and emotional autonomy, women in Cacheu had sexual independence. Even a priest like Vaz de Pontes thought nothing of having a relationship with his girlfriend Catalina in Isabel Lopes’ house. When, a few years before the trial of Crispina Peres, the reprobate Capeverdean priest Luis Rodrigues was also tried by the Portuguese Inquisition, evidence from Farim (100 miles or so upriver from Cacheu) made it clear that in these communities women were free to choose their sexual partners as they wanted to. It was, after all, Rodrigues who was placed in the Inquisitorial dock as a priest, for soliciting women in the confessional. The women of Farim, on the other hand, clearly felt they had the social freedom to participate in raunchy parties at his house. As one witness put it,
the said priest always went around with a shirt half-undone, and full of wine, ordering dances to take place at his house where he brought together both pagan and Christian women, and all this with a great fanfare and producing a huge scandal in everyone since he committed sins with them.
This remarkable and rare evidence gives a new perspective to gender relations in 17th-century West Africa. Women’s sexual freedom was complementary to their lives in Cacheu. It was they who kept the town’s economy and social life going, while their men were absent, ill, raging drunkenly at their social impotence or dying. Their economic dominance and cultural capital gave them the freedom to run their own households, welcoming in other women who needed a place to live. There they sought to care for the health of those they loved as best they could, whether children, lovers, girlfriends, or spouses in decline.
For Crispina, her dominance in this setting proved her downfall: for her own Inquisition trial stemmed from these roles which she filled in her community. The women of Cacheu were able to move about with freedom from one place to another, as the cotton-spinner Lianor Ferreira did from Cabo Verde to Farim, and as Crispina herself had done in her life. This kind of freedom of movement and autonomy was just a workaday aspect of daily life. Yet this independence in their daily lives was shocking to arrivals from Portugal, and so became the source of many rivalries. These tensions then spilled over into these Inquisitorial trials — as the constant references to quarrels, drunkenness, and disputes make clear.
All this can begin to bring together a sense of what these women’s lives were like. They moved around, traded and often shouted loudly in the streets of the town if they needed to go and make a sacrifice to the china in Vila Quente. Their voices and inclinations shaped Cacheu. As the work of Ferreira and of the other women we have discussed here shows, cotton and textiles were important to them. Fashion counted, and women had an important place in supplying cotton to weavers and in selecting fabrics. They often wore blue-and-white cotton shifts, made of the same cotton as the men wore, with another hanging loose from their shoulders.
On the other hand, it would be a mistake to think that these relations were somehow static. There is strong evidence that the increasing violence associated with the transatlantic traffic in enslaved Africans affected gender relations. With men lost in warfare and captured for enslavement (with the strong preference by traffickers for male captives), women in rural settings and away from the urban spaces of the ports and other commercial towns had to take on a much greater labor burden.
Thus, while there may have been freedom and autonomy for successful women in Cacheu and Vila Quente, they were also very much the lucky ones. The autonomy of their lives was an important and little-known aspect of gender relations in West Africa in the 17th century, but it was part of a larger global transformation that would have immense consequences for West Africa’s relationships with the world and for those caught up in its tragedies.
Excerpt adapted from The Heretic of Cacheu: Crispina Peres and the Struggle over Life in Seventeenth-Century West Africa by Toby Green, published by The University of Chicago Press. Copyright © 2025 by Toby Green. All rights reserved.
