Afro-Portuguese pidgin: separating innovation from imitation

Afro-Portuguese pidgin: separating innovation from imitation

John M. Lipski
{presented at the annual meeting of the AATSP, Philadelphia, August 1994}

1. Introduction

1.1. Beginning in the middle of the 15th century, sub-Saharan Africans began arriving in
Portugal, as slaves and laborers (Brásio 1944, Saunders 1982, Tinhorão 1988). Shortly
thereafter, the African presence in southern Spain took on significant proportions, at first via
Portugal, and later supplemented by direct contacts between Spain and West Africa. Africans
arriving in the Iberian Peninsula often learned only the most rudimentary forms of Spanish and
Portuguese, and their halting attempts at speaking European languages earned them the name of
bozal (boçal in Portuguese), a term roughly meaning `savage, untamed.' From the outset, the
pidginized Portuguese and then Spanish spoken by Africans was recorded in literature, first in
poems and later in songs, plays, and prose. The earliest texts come from Portugal, written in the
late 15th century.

1.2. By the early 16th century, the habla de negro appeared in Spanish literature, and
flourished until the end of the 17th century in Golden Age literature. Spanish writers of the
stature of Lope de Rueda, Góngora, Lope de Vega, Calderón de la Barca, and Quiñones de
Benavente, as well as scores of lesser-known writers, routinely presented African characters
speaking bozal Spanish. Beginning in the early 17th century, songs and poems written in Latin
America attributed a similar language to African-born slaves, with the most famous examples
being found in some villancicos by Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz. By the 18th century, literary
representations of Africanized Spanish in Latin America broke away from the Golden Age
patterns, and came to more closely resemble vernacular Caribbean and coastal South American
Spanish of today, as well as Ibero Romance-based creoles. In Spain, literary use of bozal
Spanish virtually disappeared after the end of the 17th century, although a handful of obscure
18th century songs and poems continue the literary stereotype beyond the time period when
bozal language can legitimately be postulated as a common phenomenon in peninsular Spain,
since by the end of the 18th century few African-born bozales were found in the Iberian
Peninsula (cf. Castellano 1961, Chasca 1946, Dunzo 1974, Granda 1969, Jason 1965, 1967;
Lipski 1986a, 1986b, 1988, 1991; Veres 1950, Weber de Kurlat 1962a, 1962b, 1970).
2. The issues

2.1. In Portugal, the literary língua de preto reached its high point early in the 16th
century, in several plays. This literary strategem rapidly declined in prominence thereafter, being
found only in a handful of obscure poems and songs from the mid 16th century onward. This is
initially rather surprising, since Portugal continued to play an active role in the Atlantic slave
trade, with the Portuguese participation (especially via Angola) reaching a high point in the mid
17th century, and still being of significance through most of the 18th century. In reality,
stereotypical Afro-Portuguese pidgin did not disappear from the literary scene, it merely went

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underground, away from stage plays and epic poems, to the streets and working-class
neighborhoods, where it thrived in the form of pamphlet literature (literatura de cordel) and
humorous calendars through the middle of the 19th century. As surprising as it might seem to
readers familiar only with the demographics of contemporary Portugal, these written imitations
closely parallel the rise and decline of black communities in the Iberian Peninsula. Although the
majority of the Africans taken by the Portuguese slave trade were transported directly to the
Americas, a visible black community was found in Lisbon and in other Portuguese cities as far
north as Oporto, beginning in the 15th century and lasting at least through the first half of the
19th century, as evidenced by several documents to be considered shortly.

2.2. In comparison with the vast outpouring of Afro-Hispanic literary language from
colonial Spanish America, only a couple of colonial Afro-Brazilian texts have come to light.
This is also rather unusual, given the liklihood that vernacular Brazilian Portuguese of many
regions was permanently affected by the early bozal African presence (probably via
restructuration or `semicreolization' in the sense of Holm 1988: 9 rather than passing through a
stage of true creolization).

2.3. In the case of early Africanized Portuguese, the existence of Portuguese-based
African creoles (in Cape Verde, Guinea-Bissau, São Tomé, Príncipe, and Annobón) provides
some independent verification of the speech patterns used by bozal Africans who were
acquiring Portuguese. However, the largest stock of information is the literary corpus, which
must be handled with extreme caution. Most of the literary representations were humorous and
unflattering, reflecting prejudice and disdain. A number of texts come from writers who
probably had no personal knowledge of bozal language, but who had learned the facile
stereotypes as part of the cultural milieu of 16th-18th century Portugal. On the other hand, a
comparison between literary texts and independently documented results of Afro-Iberian
linguistic contacts, such as borrowings from Spanish and Portuguese into African languages, or
Iberian-based creole languages, not to mention contemporary Afro-Iberian speech communities
in Africa and Latin America, reveals that many early Spanish and Portuguese authors had a
good ear for bozal language (cf. Saunders 1982: 99-100; Hatherly 1990: 5 expresses some
doubts). The difficulty lies in separating legitimate Afro-Iberian language from mindless
parodies, and also in determining how long distinctly Africanized varieties of Portuguese
(whether spoken as a second language or natively) continued to exist, and when they faded into
a memory kept alive only in anachronistic literary devices (cf. Lipski forthcoming).

2.4. To date, the majority of the work on Afro-Portuguese linguistic contacts have
focused on currently existing creole languages, as well as Brazil, especially the possibility that a
creole or semi-creole with African substrate may once have existed, and that traces of such
early Afro-Portuguese language may still be found in vernacular Brazilian speech. Several
investigators have also examined creoloid features in 15th and 16th century Afro-Portuguese
texts, in an attempt to situate these documents in a wider comparative perspective (e.g. Baird
1975, Costa e Sá 1948, Megenney 1990a, Naro 1978, Teyssier 1959). In today's remarks, I
would like to broaden the examination of Afro-Portuguese language contacts in Portugal, and
only peripherally in other Portuguese-dominated areas. At least the following questions emerge
from a consideration of early Afro-Portuguese texts:

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(1) Which of the linguistic features attributed to Africans were truly present, and which
are due to parody, exaggeration, and stereotyping?

(2) What degree of consistency was found in Afro-Portuguese language across time
and space?

(3) Did anything resembling a stable Afro-Portuguese pidgin ever form in Portugal, to
the extent that specific features had to be learned?

(4) Is there any evidence that non-Africans in Portugal ever deliberately adopted pidgin
features when speaking with African-born bozales?

(5) Did conditions ever exist for creolization of Portuguese in Portugal?

(6) Did an ethnically distinct `black Portuguese,' acquired natively by European-born
blacks, ever exist in Portugal, and if so, what were its characteristics?

2.5. The answers to these questions represent a vast research enterprise. In the few
minutes allotted for this presentation, I will only be able to point out a handful of key texts which
circumscribe the domain of discussion, and indicate a small group of elements which with great
probability were consistently present in Africanized Portuguese across large expanses of time
and space. Although the appropriate conditions were never present for creolization of
Portuguese within Portugal, varieties of pidginized Portuguese were spoken by African-born
bozales. I will tentatively suggest that even after the bozal population dwindled to insignificant
proportions, a number of linguistic features identified with pidgin Portuguese were retained by
the black communities in Portugal, due to a combination of sociolinguistic marginality and ethnic
solidarity. The coexistence of unmarked and `black' Portuguese for possibly as much as 400
years may have contained the seeds for Portuguese-based pidgins and creoles which developed
in other continents, and provided a rich contact environment within Portugal whose full
implications have yet to be explored.
3. The early Afro-Portuguese corpus

3.1. Among the first black Africans arriving in 15th century Portugal were free
emissaries, but slaves were soon to follow. We have no written records of how free Africans
might have spoken Portuguese (and later, Spanish). That Portuguese did become a significant
linguistic presence in West Africa is attested by the numerous early Portuguese borrowings, in
Akan, KiKongo, and later in Bantu languages from South Africa to the Horn of Africa (Atkins
1953; Bal 1968; Bradshaw 1965; Cabral 1975; Kiraithe 1976; Martins 1958a, 1958b; Prata
1983; Raimundo 1933: 69f.). Presumably, the most fluent African speakers of Portuguese
(such as the leaders of the Kongo Kingdom--the Manicongos--and their ministers) spoke with
the substratal features observable e.g. in the contemporary speech of Angolans and
Mozambicans who have attained fluency in Portuguese (cf. Bernardes 1970, Endruschat 1990,
Estermann 1963, Gonçalves 1983, Leite de Vasconcellos 1901, Marques 1983, Perl 1989,
Silva-Brummel 1984). Beginning with the first Christianized Manicongo, Congo kings wrote
extensive letters in Portuguese to the King of Portugal, to the Pope, and to other European
leaders (Balandier 1968, Birmingham 1966, Blake 1977, Duffy 1961, Felgas 1958, Hilton
1985, Miller 1976, Thornton 1983). These texts, however, do not shed light on the Portuguese
spoken by Africans, since they were prepared by Portuguese-born scribes, and are written in

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the flowery formulaic language (Balandier 1968: 53-4) typical of European diplomacy in
centuries past (cf. the texts reproduced in Manso 1877, Brásio 1952) {see HANDOUT # 1}
(Manso 1877: 13). Africans possessing only a passing acquaintance with Portuguese would
speak a rough pidgin, similar to that found in rural regions of contemporary Angola. Their
language does not appear in documents of the time, but it is unlikely that this rudimentary
Portuguese was much different than present-day phenomena under similar circumstances (cf.
Lipski 1985 for a similar situation).

3.2. It is only with the introduction of slaves into the Iberian Peninsula, human entities
designed to be despised, that the historical record begins to comment on black Africans' use of
European languages. Starting in the middle of the 15th century, Portuguese literary writers
imitated the pidginized Portuguese as spoken by African captives. The treatments were rarely
flattering; Africans were depicted as pompous clowns, asserting their African nobility in the
midst of demeaning tasks, or as mindless creatures bent only on dancing and lovemaking. Some
of this coarse stereotyping carried over to the imitations of Afro-Portuguese pidgin, but in
matters of grammar and pronunciation there is reason to accord a measure of validity to the
early texts.

3.3. The first known written example of Afro-Portuguese pidgin is found in the
Cancioneiro geral of Garcia de Resende (Guimarais 1910-17), published in 1516; it is a poem
written by the court official Fernam da Silveira, and dated 1455 (t. I: 204-5) {HANDOUT
#2}. If this dating is accurate (cf. Teyssier 1959: 228-9), it means that an Afro-Lusitanian
pidgin was already in use only a few decades after Portugal had begun exploration of the sub-
Saharan African coast. The poem imitates the speech of a tribal king from `Sierra Leone,' and
contains the first glimmerings of Portuguese-based creoles, as well as exemplifying the type of
broad-spectrum interference that speakers of African languages would bring to Ibero-Romance.

The Cancioneiro Geral contains three other specimins of Afro-Lusitanian pidgin, the
most significant of which (t. V: 195-199) is a text by Henrique da Mota written perhaps half a
century after after Silveira's poem (Leite de Vasconcellos 1933) {HANDOUT #3}. This is a
humorous account in which an African pleads with a European, claiming innocence in an incident
in which a jar of wine was spilled.

3.4. Gil Vicente provides the largest single corpus of early Afro-Portuguese language,
in plays written in the 1520's and 1530's {HANDOUT #4}. The crucial examples come in
Não d'amores (1527), Fragoa d'amor (ca. 1524), and O clérigo da Beyra (1530). Gil
Vicente's texts are important since they represent the bridge between Portugal and Spain as
regards the development of Afro-Iberian language (Baird 1975; Costa e Sá 1948; Saunders
1982: 98-102; Teyssier 1959). Vicente was a prolific writer who used both Portuguese and
Spanish, and was familiar with language and society in the two kingdoms. All of Vicente's
`Africanized' speech is found in plays written in Portuguese (with one very short but important
exception), a language which seeped into the first purportedly `Afro-Hispanic' texts which
began to appear in Spain at approximately the same time. Due to this seamless transition
between Portuguese and Spanish in the representation of Africans' speech in the early 16th
century, a perusal of Vicente's Afro-Portuguese examples promises to shed light on the origins
of Africanized Spanish.

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Vicente's texts provide the earliest examples of a realistic Afro-Lusitanian pidgin,
complete with phonetic, grammatical, and lexical traits which reflect both the imperfect
acquisition of Portuguese by adult speakers of other languages, and direct interference from
African areal characteristics. They permit the first glimpse of how Africans arriving in the
Iberian Peninsula pronounced the new languages to which they were exposed. A comparison
of Vicente's Africanized Portuguese pronunciation with observations on the borrowing of
Portuguese words into African languages, as well as with existing Afro-Lusitanian creole
languages, reveals a high degree of consistency. This in turn adds credibility to other aspects of
Vicente's `Africanized' Portuguese, and justifies the inclusion of these documents in the
reconstruction of early Afro-Iberian speech.

3.5. Another key Afro-Lusitanian text is the `Auto das regateiras' {ca. 1550} by
Antônio Ribeiro Chiado (Chiado 1968) The lesser-known `Pratica de oito figuras' by the same
author (Chiado 1961) also contains `Africanized' Portuguese {HANDOUT #5}.

3.6. A number of other Portuguese texts from the 16th-18th centuries purport to
represent the speech of foreign-born Africans. Although most of the remaining texts arose after
independent Afro-Hispanic language was documented for Spain and Spanish America, the later
Afro-Portuguese texts did not always remain strictly independent from their Spanish
counterparts. In a few instances, Afro-Portuguese songs and poems found their way into
Spanish American areas, and were performed alongside their Afro-Hispanic counterparts.

The `Auto da bella menina' by Sebastião Pires (1922) {HANDOUT #6} is
approximately contemporaneous with the writings of Gil Vicente, and provides corroborative
data on the status of Africanized Portuguese of the early 16th century. This fragment is
considerably different from the previously considered texts, containing a greater amount of
distorted and barely intelligible material. At the same time, it contains striking similarities with
the Vicente and Chiado examples.

An anonymous text, `Auto de Vicente Anes Joeira' (Anon. 1963) appears to come
from approximately the same time period {HANDOUT #7}. This text, unusual in many
respects, contains recurring Afro-Portuguese elements.

3.7. The next group of Afro-Portuguese texts comes from the 17th century, spilling
over into the early 18th century. Most are anonymous songs and poem fragments, evidently
part of a much larger corpus that was performed in musical and stage presentations (Hatherly
1990). These include the anonymous `Sã qui turo' (1647), and several anonymous poems
(Hatherly) {HANDOUT #8}. These texts, which come more than a century after Gil Vicente's
early examples, are consistent with the notion that Africans resident in Portugal would have
acquired greater fluency in Portuguese, with remaining problems being relegated to phonology,
and to occasional grammatical lapses. The language of `Sa qui turo' is a far cry from the broken
Portuguese of the 16th century examples; there is a greater use of functional elements such as
prepositions and articles, verbs are conjugated, and there is some noun-adjective concordance.
The remaining poems, although apparently written by different authors over a considerable time
period, share many important common features. All are found in Afro-Lusitanian creoles,
particularly in the Gulf of Guinea, and most appear in earlier Afro-Portuguese texts.

3.8. Perhaps the most significant text which suggests that Afro-Lusitanian bozal
language survived as a quasi-stable pidgin in Portugal well into the 18th century is a tantalizing

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letter written in Lisbon, purportedly from the `Rei Angola' to the `Rei Minas' (Tinhorão 1988:
191) in 1730 {HANDOUT #9}.

The writer and recipient would be leaders of the African confrarias or religious
brotherhoods and mutual aid societies which arose whenever Africans lived in Portuguese or
Hispanic societies. In cities containing large African populations, these societies were divided
along ethnic lines, with the language and culture of particular African groups being partially
retained in each group. In this case, the term Angola most probably includes speakers of
Kimbundu, but possibly also KiKongo, while Mina refers to members of the Akan group, from
present-day Ghana (the former Gold Coast). The letter in question is an invitation to join in a
religious procession. It is unlikely that this text was written by an African, since it was eventually
published in a collection of vignettes to which black authors would have little access. At the
same time, the consistent use of recognized Afro-Portuguese pidgin elements suggests that such
a language was well enough known to non-African observers in Portugal as to enable a
reasonably accurate imitation. If this is the case, this text would demonstrate that a distinctly
Africanized Portuguese existed in Portugal well into the 18th century, and not simply as a long-
disappeared stereotype remembered only in literary documents. Even more crucially, it would
demonstrate that Africans in Portugal (at least those born in Africa) used a pidgin Portuguese
with consistent structural characteristics when communicating with Africans of other ethnic
groups, rather than simply approximating the received language of metropolitan Portugal. The
demographics of the Iberian Peninsula never favored the formation of an Afro-Iberian creole,
which could have arisen if such inter-ethnic pidgin language had coalesced into a native
language, but the language of this letter provides a plausible hint of the linguistic situation e.g. on
São Tomé, Príncipe and Annobón prior to the stabilization of the creole languages, and of what
may have occurred in colonial Brazil, in areas where the African-born population was in the
majority.

3.9. Beginning in the late 17th century and continuing until nearly the middle of the 19th
century, pidginized língua de preto or língua de guiné found its most consistent manifestation in
hundreds of pamphlets and broadsides, known collectively as literatura de cordel. Most of
these texts contain a formulaic use of stereotyped elements, much as in other ethnic eye-dialect
literature meant for out-group consumption, but their very persistence, side by side with the
existence of a considerable black community, attests to at least some real survival of Afro-
Portuguese speech forms. The most common manifestations were the equivalent of farmers'
almanaques and astrological forecasts, known as prognósticos and lunarios. This literary form
first began ub 1756, as a result of the earthquate which had devasted Lisbon a year earlier.
Known at first as Os preto astrologo, these pamphlets offered humorous comments, mostly
making fun of the precarious living conditions of blacks, e.g. `Fevereiro 6 (seg.), vento e frio,
coitado dos preta que não tem roupa' (Tinhorão 1988: 210). Subsequent reincarnations of this
literary form included the Sarrabal português and Plonostico curiozo. The original pamphlets
faded out after 1760, but reappeared in 1803 with the Plonostico curiozo, e lunario pala os
anno de 1804, pelo pleto Flancisco Suzá Halley. These crude broadsides were published until
the middle of the 19th century, after which the literary use of Afro-Portuguese pidgin
disappeared from the Iberian Peninsula. One example is {HANDOUT #10} (Tinhorão 1988:
215).

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This pamphlet literature is important from a number of viewpoints. First, although some
unrealistic traits are carried over (e.g. the massive replacement of /r/ by /l/), there are also
indications that a stable Afro-Portuguese speech mode was stabilizing. This is suggested by the
consistent signalling of /s/ only on the first element of plural nouns phrases, by the almost
systematic lack of gender agreement, use of invariant vai for `go' and invariant copular sa.
These texts are also important since they raise the probability that some identifiable
ethnolinguistic features were retained in the Afro-Portuguese community at least until the early
decades of the 19th century and perhaps later. Although written imitations of ethnically marked
speech varieties may persist in some forms of literature long after the groups in question have
ceased to use the marked forms, this is rarely the case for pamphlet literature (and such
modern-day equivalents as comic books, tabloids, and trading cards), which is designed to
satisfy the immediate pleasures and prejudices of the masses. In the United States, popular
stereotypes of Irish-, Yiddish- and Italian-influenced English disappeared after the groups in
question shed their ethnolinguistic identifiers. Stories of the Uncle Remus variety were viable
only as long as Gullah was a familiar linguistic phenomenon, at least in the Southeast. Parodies
of rural black English, such as Amos n' Andy, Rufus n' Rastus, etc. were cut short by a growing
social conscience, which no longer tolerated such crude humor at the expense of groups which
lacked the means of effectively countering the negative imagery. Arguably, these skits were
already scheduled for extinction, as the speech forms they were based on receded ever further
from national public awareness. In Portugal, the thriving market for the língua de preto until the
middle of the 19th century effectively brackets the real use of some sort of ethnolinguistically
identifiable `black Portuguese traits.' Even allowing for the exaggeration and outright
misrepresentation inherent in these racist parodies, it is impossible to escape the conclusion that
at least some blacks in Portugal, most notably those born and raised in that country and not
influenced by foreign-born bozal speech, natively used forms which were ethnolinguistically
identified with earlier Afro-Portuguese pidgin. Whether these forms were used exclusively, or in
parallel with non-African Portuguese (e.g. as an in-group manifestation of ethnic solidarity) is
impossible to determine from the available documentation.

3.10. A number of curious documents and folkloric materials complement the Afro-
Portuguese corpus, and give some idea of the range and continuity of Afro-Portuguese pidgin
across time and space. The most striking example comes from another corner of the far-flung
Portuguese empire, the colony of Damão in Portuguese India (Moniz 1925) {HANDOUT
#11}. In a song formerly used by black slaves on the feast of St. Benedict, beginning in the
17th century, we find examples of Afro-Portuguese pidgin similar to those attested for Europe.
This text also gives evidence of having been influenced by the Indo-Portuguese creoles, in
particular use of the preverbal particle ta. The Damão text gives an inkling that Afro-Portuguese
pidgin followed the trade routes of the Portuguese empire, perhaps leaving traces (long since
disappeared) in other regions as well. To cite a parallel example, early Portuguese traders often
took black slaves from the east coast of Africa and sold them to Spanish traders in the
Philippines. Many of these Africans eventually travelled to Mexico via the Manila-Acapulco
galleon route, known in Mexico as the Nao de la China. As a result, very curly hair came to be
known as pelo chino throughout Mexico (Aguirre Beltrán 1972).

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3.11. In the early 20th century, a number of folksongs and skits were transcribed
throughout rural regions of Portugal (Martins 1939: 245, 253, 258-60) {HANDOUT #12}.
Some of these songs retain vestiges of an earlier Afro-Portuguese pidgin, and were sung on
feast days often accompanied by `African' costumes and dances. These fragments have
obviously undergone considerable distortion across time and space, and can no longer be
considered as reasonable approximations to the former speech of blacks in Portugal. However,
most of the basic features of Afro-Portuguese pidgin are found in these fragments.

3.12. In early colonial Brazil, literary Afro-Portuguese pidgin appears in a few texts
until the final decades of the 18th century. By this time, Africanized varieties of Portuguese
were already well-established in Brazil, in many cases exhibiting significant differences from
earlier European Portuguese literary examples. The use of European-derived stereotypes in late
18th century Brazil can most probably be ascribed to literary tradition, and should not be taken
uncritically as a representation of how Africans actually spoke Portuguese at this time. One
interesting document, purporting to represent Afro-Portuguese as used in the transition from
Portugal to Brazil, is a fragment of `O preto, e o bugio ambos no mato discorrendo sobre a
arte de ter dinheiro sem ir ao Brazil', published in 1789 (Coelho 1967: 73-4) {HANDOUT
#13}. This example contains most of the key elements identified in earlier Afro-Lusitanian texts,
but most of the structural changes do not appear to have ever occurred in vernacular Afro-
Brazilian Portuguese. This fact makes the text, and similar pamphlet parodies that apparently
were printed in great numbers, suspect as an indication of the language actually used by Africans
in the later colonial period of Brazil.

3.13. A few other purported Afro-Brazilian texts have come to light, none of which
may be taken at face value. Presumably an early Afro-Brazilian text is (Silva Neto 1963: 40)
{HANDOUT #14}.

A very curious text claims to represent a Portuguese-based indigenous interlanguage of
the early 17th century (Silva Neto 1963: 35-6; Silva Neto 1940: 93-6), but in fact the
linguistic features are those commonly associated with Afro-Portuguese pidgin; moreover, the
text contains references to blacks {HANDOUT #15}. This text contains use of copular sa(r),
paragogic vowels, and a number of other phonological and grammatical modifications
acknowledged for Afro-Portuguese pidgin.

3.14. Several folkloric fragments collected in earlier decades of the 20th century in
Brazil also contain vestiges of earlier Afro-Brazilian pidgin. Bastide (1943: 72) gives the poem
{HANDOUT #16}. Ramos (1935: 247) gives a longer variant of this poem {HANDOUT
#17}. Both poems exhibit loss of nominal and verbal agreement; the second text also makes
extensive use of paragogic vowels, a trait found in early Afro-European pidgins and creoles
(including earlier varieties of Jamaican, Gullah, and Afro-Hispanic pidgin), and preserved in
some contemporary creoles, considered among the most archaic and linguistically conservative
(e.g. São Tomense, Srnan Tongo, Saramaccan).
4. Conditions which favored Afro-Portuguese retentions

4.1. In order to sustain the claim that ethnically marked forms of Portuguese persisted
past the pidgin/bozal stage, to be natively acquired by blacks born and raised in Portugal, it is

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necessary to demonstrate the existence of social and linguistic conditions which would permit,
even force, such a condition. Due to time constraints, I can offer only a quick sketch here, but
the more complete documentation is consistent with the notion of a marginalized `black
Portuguese,' identifiable by blacks and non-blacks alike well into the 19th century.

4.2. The use of sub-Saharan Africans as slaves in Portugal declined rapidly after the
middle of the 17th century, and by the early decades of the 18th century, very few African-born
bozales were entering Portugal. Within Portugal, the plight of the preto scarcely improved from
slavery to free status. As in Spain, blacks were allowed to become apprentices and sometimes
journeymen in the trades, but could never become master craftsmen. Most craft guilds
excluded black members, and due to a combination of economic factors and social pressures
blacks lived in quasi-segregated neighborhoods, at least in the larger cities. Many of the more
menial occupations were virtually reserved for blacks, and thus was consolidated the vicious
circle which equated Africans with servile labor. Blacks were associated, rightly or wrongly,
with criminal elements, and persecuted accordingly, thus adding to their plight. As early as
1535, the Flemish priest Nicolau Clenardo declared that `Os escravos pululam por tôa a parte.
Todo o serviço é feito por negros e mouros cativos. Portugal está a abarrotar com essa raça
de gente. Estou em crer que em Lisboa os escravos e as escravas são mais que os portugueses
livres de condição' (Brásio 1944: 12). A French visitor to Lisbon in 1766 (Dumouriez 1797:
164) noted that `a part of the common distirbances is caused by the Negroes and Mulattoes, of
which there are supposed to be in Lisbon so many as 150,000; by the misery of the people, and
the facility of finding hiding places in the subsisting ruins of this unfortunate city ...' Another
traveller, Link, who visited Lisbon at the end of the 18th century, declared that `la plupart des
voleurs sont des Nègres; il en a ici un très-grand nombre; peut être plus que dans toutes les
autres villes d'Europe, sans même en excepter Londres' (Brásio 1944: 112). A German visitor
to Lisbon in 1842 (cf. Brásio 1944: 114) described thousands of blacks on the streets, and
affirmed that the Portuguese treated them like an inferior race of domestic animals. Other
travellers' accounts paint a similarly bleak picture. Brásio (1944) provides numerous pictures
and accounts of blacks in Portugal throughout the 19th century and well into the 20th century.

Miscegenation occurred at the periphery of the black-white interface, but was never
socially accepted, and thus the large mestizo communities which partially ameliorated racial
segregation in Latin America and even in Spain never formed in Portugal. Until their final
blending into the demographic fabric of Portugal, late in the 19th century, the pretos were
always held as different, both through language and in terms of societal expectations on their
behavior. This discriminatory treatment and physical segregation provided the means by which
ethnically distinct speech forms might survive and even flourish among the Afro-Portuguese
community, much like the linguistic results of racial segregation in the United States.

4.3. Adding to the environment in which a `different' language could be nurtured among
Afro-Portuguese were the numerous religious and social organizations, often organized around
individual African ethnic affiliations. The most numerous were the confrarias or religious
brotherhoods, nominally associated with a parish church, which served as mutual aid societies
for beleaguered Africans, and which also sponsored cultural events which enhanced African
patterns. One of the most interesting societies revolved around the `Congos' of Portugal. Since
Portugal had acknowledged the Kongo Kingdom and its leader, the Manicongo, a special status

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as a nominally sovereign nation, black slaves and freedmen in Portugal attempted to identify
themselves with the Congos whenever possible. They organized themselves into the Confraria
de Nossa Senhora do Rosário and began to reinact the `coronations' of Kongo kings which
took place in Africa. At first these imitations were simple parodies, but they grew in seriousness
and gradually took on a life of their own. Among the black community of Lisbon, the crowning
of the Congo king and court took place until the final decades of the 19th century (Tinhorão
1988: 142-6): `Ainda assim, durante pelo menos três séculos, os negros conseguiram manter
em Portugal a representação ideal de um reino africano, e não apenas em Lisboa (onde em
1894 Pedro de Azevedo via "na mesma cidade uma rainha do Congo como a sua côrte," mas
... também no Porto, onde até meados de Oitocentos os pretos festejavam em todos os meses
de Julho o seu reino perdido ...' (Tinhorão 1988: 146). This fictitious recreation of a Congo
kingdom has paralells in Brazil, and among the negros congos of Panama (Lipski 1989), and
provided a powerful institution around which Afro-Lusitanian solidarity could foster extended
use of distinctive speech forms.

4.4. Another institutionalized manifestation of Afro-Portuguese culture within Portugal
were the numerous religious processions in which the black community participated every year.
This tradition began at least as early as the beginning of the 17th century, with Africanized
vilancicos being performed in chapels and churches, including at the royal court. Many of these
texts were actually in Spanish pidgin rather than Portuguese (cf. Tinhorão 1988: 149), and few
if any were performed by blacks. However, as soon as large numbers of blacks appeared in
Portugal, they began to participate in religious processions and reinactments, beginning with the
Corpo de Deus ceremonies. These ritualized events, and the black participation therein, lasted
until the early 20th century in many parts of Portugal (Tinhorão 1988: 158). During these
processions, blacks would depict increasingly African practices, including dancing and mock
combat. This practice was already established by the early decades of the 18th century, when
an Afro-Portuguese dancer at the celebration of Nossa Senhora do Cabo exclaimed (Tinhorão
1988: 159) {HANDOUT #19}

Sioro eu sava mui pequeno

quando vem do nosso terra,

ca sava mia companhello

elle ensiná palla mi;

is dipogi cus dinhello

za mi forrá.
When asked if similar dances were performed in Africa, he responded:

Sioro ganga, lá fazem

Só cos nosso frecha os buia,

Que lá os pistola na temo

Nem os polvora, nem os bala.
These dances and processions expanded to include other commemorative events, including
Nossa Senhora da Atalaia, the Coração de Jesus, and Holy Week. At each occasion, blacks
chanted and sang, often using elements associated with the early língua de preto, even past the
time when blacks in Portugal had acquired Portuguese as a native language. As in similar
folkloric manifestations throughout the world, the ritualized language of the songs could reinforce

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