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Toby Green, "The Heretic of Cacheu: Crispina Peres and the Struggle over Life in Seventeenth-Century West Africa" (U Chicago Press, 2025)
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Hello, everybody.
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This is Marshall Po. I'm the founder and editor of the New Books Network. And if you're listening to this, you know that the NBN is the largest academic podcast network in the world. We reach a worldwide audience of 2 million people. You may have a podcast or you may be thinking about starting a podcast. As you probably know, there are challenges basically of two kinds. One is technical. There are things you have to know in order to get your podcast produced and distributed. And the second is, and this is the biggest problem, you need to get an audience. Building an audience in podcasting is the hardest thing to do today. With this in mind, we at the NBM have started a service called NBN Productions. What we do is help you create a podcast, produce your podcast, distribute your podcast, and we host your podcast. Most importantly, what we do is we distribute your podcast to the NBN audience. We've done this many times with many academic podcasts and we would like to help you. If you would be interested in talking to us about how we can help you with your podcast, please contact us. Just go to the front page of the New Books Network and you will see a link to NBN Productions. Click that, fill out the form, and we can talk. Welcome to the New Books Network.
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Hello, and welcome to another episode on the New Books Network. I'm one of your hosts, Dr. Miranda Melcher, and I'm very pleased today to be speaking with Professor Toby Green about his book, published by the University of Chicago Press in 2025, titled the Heretic of Crispina Perez and the Struggle over life in 17th century West Africa, which takes us, as the subtitle suggests, to 17th century West Africa to explore a really interesting place. Well, one place, yes, that we're mainly focused on, but part of the story here is how this one place that one can visit, as Toby has and I'm sure he'll tell us about, is very much connected to a lot of other places as well, economically, culturally, religiously, as we're going to be discussing and looking at a particular place and a particular person even can actually untangle and unveil all sorts of intriguing connections that maybe otherwise we would miss. So there's a lot to get into here on kind of multiple different levels, and I think we're going to therefore have quite an intriguing conversation. So, Toby, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast.
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Thanks, Miranda. Thanks very much. It's nice to be talking about the book with you. Thank you for having me.
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Well, I'm very pleased that you've said yes could you start us off by introducing yourself a little bit and tell us why you decided to write a book? I mean, who is Crispina Perez, and why did you want to write a book about her?
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Okay, so I'm a historian of West Africa in this period, particularly the region around this around Cache, around what's today Guinea Bissau, Senegal, Gambia, Sierra Leone. And I published a couple of books about this region. Well, one book about this region before, which was published by Cambridge in 2012, the rise of the Transatlantic Slave Trade in Western Africa, 1300-1589. And then another broader book about kind of inequality, because that's one of my main research focuses, is the history of inequality in this period and its exacerbation in the era of the transatlantic slave trade and traffic in human captives from Africa. And so that was called A Fistful of Shells, that was published also by Chicago University Press in 2019. So I was aware for a long time, and I've been working on materials related to Crispina Perez for a long time. So the backstory here is that, yes, she was tried by the Portuguese Inquisition for heresy in lisbon in the 1660s, arrested in Cacheu, taken by ship to the Cape verde Islands, just 300 miles off the coast of Senegal, and then to Lisbon in chains by ship. And that trial is a remarkable historical document which I've worked on with two colleagues, the three of us, Philip Havik, Filipo Ribeiro de Silva, and myself, we published a kind of critical scholarly edition of the trial document itself about five years ago. But there are other historical materials. And putting them all together, it gives one of the most complete insights that I know of that could be done on daily life in this part of West Africa at that time, which is something which has been done for other world regions. But for African history, there hasn't really been an attempt to do something in that way, because these materials are quite scarce. So they're very precious historical materials. And I've been doing research of one kind or another in this part of West Africa for 30 years. So I was able also to bring that knowledge and the many different areas I know in that place in that region, friends I have, and the knowledge I've gained over that time into rereading this, this document and trying to put some of those connections together which you described.
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C
So some of the connections that you've made in this book, I mean, we're going to talk about, I think a number of them, but one of them that kind of jumped out to me when I first started reading it was kind of very apparent at the beginning, because it has to do with how you've structured the book and arguments you're making around kind of time and how it's treated in historical analysis. I mean, as you mentioned, right, there have been analyses done for other parts of the world, sort of along these lines, but Africa, West Africa, has been sort of left out of a lot of things. And that's, as you've mentioned, something you're tackling pretty directly in this book, amongst other things. So can you tell us about kind of how you're taking those sorts of things on right at the beginning, when we're talking about how you've structured and put this book together?
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Yeah, it's an interesting thing. So, yes, I mean. So one of the things about. I mean, historians, it's funny, you know, we write about the past. You know, obviously time is a pretty important aspect of what we're doing, but we're usually actually pretty bad at writing about time. It's a bit like something. It's something which is just there. You know, we don't question the way that it's constructed by historical documents, the way that. That shapes the narratives we tell and how we might even think about questions of causation and so on. But actually, you know, there's been quite a lot of work done about the way in which that construct of time is very much a Western construct, it might be called a colonial construct. There's a wonderful book by a scholar called Giordano Nanni called the Colonisation of Time. And of course, time, actually. So in time in this region of West Africa in the 17th century was conceived completely differently. So one of the things I've tried to do in the book, it's very much more a cyclical view of time. And so one of the things I've tried to do in the book is bring that framework of time into the way I've structured it. So because the book is constructed of fragments in many ways, fragments of evidence, fragments of knowledge, fragments of testimonies, we come back to them in different ways in different places through the book. And that's a way of trying to, in a way, reproduce that idea of time in the book. So it's not just a linear narrative, necessarily. At the same time, I do actually try to tell a story as well, which does have a linear quality, which is the story of Crispina Perez's arrest, trial in Lisbon and her return to West Africa eventually in 1668.
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C
So that's, I think, a really key element of this. The Time and the fragments and putting them together in a way that maybe challenges how we would expect a story like this to be told from sort of traditional historiographical perspectives. But you are challenging some other ideas too. So can we add in sort of ideas and assumptions about, for instance, economics and social change that you're also tackling in the book?
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So, you know, one of those would be, you know, conventional economic ideas around markets, growth institutions, which have emerged over the last 70 or 80 years globally, often called in shorthand institutional economics, or these days, new institutional economics, and has been the basis really of liberal economics since its foundation, really. And this idea has it that institutions are what build strong economic frameworks. And so therefore, in order to grow, you know, to grow successful economic frameworks, you need to build strong institutions. And that kind of institutional framework has been of the essence of neoliberal economic policies globally since the 80s, the Washington Consensus, as it's called, and so on. And that's been quite significant in the economic approaches by economists. New economic history of a region like West Africa So the recent Nobel Laureate for Economics, Darren Acemoglu, has done a lot of work, Harvard economist, precisely on this question of how the argument is that over the period of European colonization, as it began from the 16th century, institutions were undermined in areas of what today is called the Global south. And that that was one of the main points of economic increased economic fragility of those regions. So fundamentally what I do in the book is, I suppose one of the arguments is it depends what institutions we're talking about, because in the neoliberal framework, the institutions which are trying to be rebuilt are generally kind of, in some way or other externalized. There wouldn't be what we call autonomous, certainly not autonomous economic institutions coming out of autonomous economic systems from different parts of the world. And so one of the things I do is, well, actually, okay, one of the most powerful institutions in the early modern Atlantic world was in fact the Inquisition. And the Inquisition had, in this case, what the Inquisition did was actually target Krzpina Perez, who was actually the most powerful trader in Kashiau and a very important part of the economic fabric of the town, because they wanted to attack her power. So really it depends whether these institutions are internally generated or externally generated as to how effective they're going to be for producing economic well being.
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C
So let's then talk more directly about the figure at the centre of the book. Well, figures, I suppose. Can you tell us about these key people and how they or Crispina especially kind of became so Important that she was targeted for these sorts of economic reasons.
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So a couple of things to say about this. So her trial, this is the only trial which was made, a full trial which was made of anybody, in fact, in this part of West Africa by the inquisition in the 17th century. So that already is an indication that she was an extremely important person, because, you know, it was an extremely significant institutional effort on the part of the institute of the Inquisition to arrest her. There were various political, you know, in fact, although there was a kind of proto colonial presence of the Portuguese in cashel in the 1660s in what's today Guinea Bissau, that that presence was really often under attack and under threat. And there certainly was no full political control of the Portuguese in Cachel. They were very much guests, in fact, in some way or other of political allies in the region. And so, yeah, that meant that it was an extremely significant effort to arrest Krishpina. And they only did that because she was a very powerful person. And she challenged various aspects of the colonial. The increasing, increasingly institutionalized frameworks of colonial power. First of all, because she was a woman. So, you know, the fact that she was the most powerful trader in Cacho as a woman was sort of something which. The increase, we know, the really reductively patriarchal settings of lisbon in the 17th century, for instance, and people who'd come from there found impossible to accept. I mean, Lisbon was a. Was a city in the 17th century where girls, young girls who were destined to be entered into a convent, were dressed in wimple. Nuns. Wimples, at the age of four or five. So, you know, this was not a setting which could really tolerate that kind of, you know, female power. And in fact, it was a town, as I described in the book. It was a town, you know, Cashel was a town which was largely run by women. You know, not only was Crispina Perez the most important trader, but, you know, most of the small scale economic activities, small shops, lots of the. Lots, lots of the business transactions, and quite a lot of the crafts, in fact, were run by women. So the religious life of the town was certainly run by women, in spite of the fact there was a Catholic presence there. But it was very minor compared to the African religious practice and indeed Islamic. So all of this meant that Crispino Perez challenged in many different ways the imperial frameworks which the Portuguese were trying to impose. So in many ways, it was a kind of statement by the Portuguese empire at a time when it was under threat from different European empires. But also within West Africa, its power was being Challenged increasingly by different groups. It was a kind of attempt to assert power by making the step and arresting.
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Got it. Okay. That's helpful to understand the context of what's going on here. Can we talk more, though, about the role of women in Cacho and kind of what enabled them to have so much power? Right. She's the most powerful, but as you've mentioned, she's not an outlier. So what is the system that the Portuguese are so upset about?
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Well, I mean, there's lots of things to unpack here. So, yeah, she. Crispina Perez, is. So she's of mixed heritage. So her father was Portuguese. Her mother was of the Beynank people, which were quite widespread at this time across different parts of what's today southern Senegal, the Cazamance region, and northern Guinea Bissau. But what's clear is that she's of this mixed heritage, but she has nothing to do with her father, really, in terms of her upbringing. She's brought up entirely by her mother and her maternal grandmother. So that. So this was already telling us, you know, that the role of women in terms of cultural environment, language, linguistic heritage, also actually political connections is much more significant than that of the Portuguese father. And this is actually a pattern across this region. So there were different, you know, at different points. Portuguese men arriving at different times. They often formed families in the region. But. But the children they had were brought up in a. In a. An entirely. Basically, entirely West African setting. We know that as well, specifically with Crispina, because when she went to Lisbon for her trial, she. She needed an interpreter. So she didn't speak Portuguese. She. She spoke Riol, which is the. Which is the Vernac, was the vernacular Creole language spoken in Kasho. And she also spoke a number. A number of languages from West Africa, Mandinka and Patel and other languages. So this tells us that in many different ways, about the importance of women in establishing the social and cultural environment of Kashiel. That's one aspect. But we can also bring in aspects of. One of the interesting aspects of the trial I found and which I note in the book and which brings out the real cultural differences in gender roles between Portugal and Cacho at this time is a moment is to do with marriage. So at one point in the trial, Crispina says that a relative of her husband's, George, was very angry with them and therefore that his testimony should be discounted because they had refused to pay a dowry when he had wanted to marry one of Crispina's daughters. Now, why have they done this? Well, because in the West African context, it is not the role of the parents of a bride to pay a dowry. It's actually the role of the parents of the groom to pay a bride price, which indicates that actually, women are more valued in the society in many ways. You could argue that than was the case in Portugal, where. Where the parents of a bride have to pay, effectively the groom's family in order for the marriage to take place. So it's the reverse in West Africa. So that's an indication really, of the different types of gender roles which existed and which filtered through into a setting like Cachoeux.
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Yeah, that's really interesting to understand because things like how marriages work, of course, go kind of right to the heart of how a community is organized. And so really, you know, that difference there just kind of very starkly shows that we're talking about two very different ideas of kind of how people are meant to relate to each other and how things are meant to work. So if we expand out then from kind of that one particular incident, this does give us insight into more broadly, like what Kashu was like at the time. So can you take us, I mean, as you do in the book, like, into sort of everyday life and walking around, like, what was it like to live there? What was changing? What wasn't? What was the vibe?
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Yeah, so it's. Okay. That's an interesting question. Thank you, Miranda. Yeah. I mean, so that's one of the things I tried to do in the book is really build up a picture of that through fragments like the one I've just discussed. And so the first thing to understand, of course, is that the global population in the 1650s, 1660s, was far smaller than the population we see in the world today. So we're probably. It's at least a tenth smaller. And in 1600, so 50 years before, it's about a 16th of what the world population is today. So towns, cities were much, much smaller than they today. So somebody going to cacheu from 2026, walking into it in the 1660s, probably think this is, you know, really not hardly even a town. It's like, you know, it's. It's, It's. It's. It's almost like a great. A large village with a few different neighborhoods in it, with a few colonial buildings on the waterfront, but that would be it, really. And the church, you know, be part of that. There was a very small fortress, but it. But it was repeatedly overrun by whenever. So, for example, and whenever the local, the pepel king who lived nearby, wanted to Achieve something in the dialogue with the Portuguese, he would simply send his troops in to occupy the water sources. And then, of course, the Portuguese had nothing they could do but accept whatever was demanded. So this is an indication of the kind of nature of the political context. So there's the waterfront, where. So this is the hive of activity. And there are different types of economic activity. The one which you'd find most regularly, in fact, is probably the one which involved small scale trading expeditions and setting off by, you know, in large open canoes, almadillas, which would. Or what we might call these days, pirogues also, which would travel around the network of rivers and creeks which really characterize the geography, the physical geography of this region. So it's an area with huge numbers of rivers and creeks, mangroves, swamps. And in fact, during the rainy season, there are actually waterways which connect Kasho right the way, you know, several hundred miles north, about 200 miles north, to the Gambia river in what's today the Gambia. And in fact, that was a main trading artery which people used to trade up. And it would, you know, they'd go on trading expeditions which take a couple of months, Calling in here and there to pick up, you know, to meet trading contacts and come back to Kashuk. So, and then you also have local trading, you know, people bringing provisions to sell in the market, Coming from across the. To the north bank of the river, to the south bank, bringing progues of provisions such as, you know, millet rice and so on. So that's kind of one aspect. Then, of course, there's the transatlantic slave traffic. So Kasho is the largest transatlantic slaving port in this part of West Africa at this time. Compared to other parts of western Africa. In the 17th century, its traffic is not as significant and large as it would be in, say, Angola. It's still very significant. And you have 12 to 15 ships every year coming to Kashel in order to trade for enslaved Africans. And so this is a significant aspect which drives the economic. The kind of macroeconomic framework of the town as well. And obviously huge levels of human suffering and fear, cruelty, all kinds of things bound up with that. And so there's a sort of very painful and complex relationship here between regional economies within West Africa, which are largely based on production crops, but also textiles. So cloth is being traded and woven in the town and, and. And leather work, tailors, other kinds of, you know, craft activities, trades, you know, beings, you know, skillful work being carried out in different ways and. And contribution to the economy of the town, intersecting with the horrifying history of the transatlantic slave traffic. So it's a. It's a. It's a. It's a very complicated social, economic environment, as, of course, so many are.
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C
Yeah. I mean, the complexity and the nuance is why this sort of history is both interesting and important. But thinking about kind of the impact every day of this sort of mixture, like, was it. What was it like to sort of walk around in such a place that was so reliant on enslavement? Like, was it scary? Was it sad? Did it smell bad? Or was it sort of a normal town that we might think of that happened to have nasty bits, as many towns do? Like, how did that work?
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Well, I mean, I'm afraid, as a lot of human history indicates and, you know, histories today indicate, you know, people can go about their daily lives well aware that appalling things are happening, you know, either around them or, you know, with things that they're very well aware of. And. And they have to. Because, you know, how else can you live your life on one level, on another level, of course, it has a massive impact on your social. Your psychic being. And that influences many things which take place as well. In terms of enslavement, it's important to be aware that, you know, there are many different levels of this. And most of the captives who were trafficked across the Atlantic did not come from Kasho. They were brought to Kasho. They were usually prisoners of war or criminals who had. Who just as. In fact, in a. Obviously a different way. But the practice of exporting criminals was obviously something that the British did to Australia, you know, in the 18th century. So it's not as if, in fact, this is obviously the psychic and cultural and economic impacts on Africans. And the African diaspora is. Is an enormous. Is of an enormity which we're still, as a global community, grappling with. But on the other hand, it's not something which we should say, oh, look, you know, West African communities are happy to do this, because the British, in a way, did something quite similar when it came to the convicts going to Australia. So those are the people who are coming to Cacho enslaved for export to the Americas. So if you are a person in Cachoeu, you're not necessarily afraid of that. That you might, however, be a member of a trading household. You might be a member of Crispina Perez's household. And then you might be afraid because for a number of reasons, you might be, in fact, a kind of enslaved household member doing various tasks for Krishna, running Messages, preparing the food and so on. And you would be in the legal condition of enslavement. In fact, one of her household slaves at one point. There's a very haunting moment in the document, in the trial document, where it's described how she had been there and then she had gone to the Americas. So she'd been enslaved for human traffic and taken to the Americas. So people in those conditions were obviously desperate to achieve freedom and escape that condition. And in fact, one of the main witnesses in her trial was a household slave of Crispina Perez, called Sebastian. And he said in the trial that he'd done all this because he had been promised his freedom by people who were plotting against Crispina Peres. So that gives a sense that actually below the surface there were huge tensions, rivalries, hatreds bound up in the fears which went alongside the transatlantic traffic.
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C
Yeah, no. Adding more complication and nuance to the story. But of course, people, or at least many people, are not working all the time. Obviously, if one's in a condition of enslavement, you have a lot less control over that. But not everyone in the town is. So what did people do besides their work? I mean, you talk in the book, for example, about socializing. You talk a lot about alcohol and the role that it plays. Can we add that in?
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Yeah, we certainly can. So, I mean, and there's a. There's a gender dimension here, as I mentioned, you know, a lot of the. So that's an important thing to bear in mind. You know, the trans transatlantic slave trade targeted men particularly because wanting men to do the brutal, brutalizing agricultural labor in the New World. Women. So women. Women. That's one of the reasons, of course, as well, why women had, you know, did have a prominent role in the town. They weren't so afraid of enslavement in that way. And so they, you know, so religious practice and what, you know, was also an important part of. Of daily life. So funerals remain an extremely important part of socialization in Guinea Bissau to this day. They're called tokachur in Creole. And, you know, there's evidence from the materials we have that, yes, people would buy alcohol, cloths to bring to funeral. Well, I was going to say celebrations, but in the West African context, that is in many ways what they are. And, you know, we also have evidence of two or three day parties which are one of the. In another inquisition trial document of a priest from Cape Verde who lived in Guinea Bissau for some time. He was said to host in his house in Another town. Coming back also to what we discussed earlier, really, in a sense, in terms of the relationship to time, people had a different relationship to time, and in many ways, it was not driven by what we might call clock time, but by events. So you sit down, you start socializing, you drink some palm wine, you drink some rum, which might have been brought into trade on one of the transatlantic Atlantic ships. And you might do some of this alongside your work. You might be a carpenter working on one of the ships. You might be a colker, who's somebody who repaired leaks on the ships. You might be making a cooper, making barrels. We know that all these trades existed in Kashil. And at the same time, you sit with your friends and you're chatting, and, you know, time goes on, and, you know, it might be for a day, but as we saw from the example I just gave of the priest, it might be for three days, you know, and so it relates very much to that, a sort of different relationship to that.
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C
Yeah, that's definitely interesting and helpful to see how these different threads that we're discussing sort of relate to each other. One thing, however, that we haven't really talked about yet kind of seems like one we should definitely include, because, of course, many of the fragments that you're pulling together here are related to, as you said, the files from the Inquisition. Now, the Inquisition is many things, but at least at its core, is meant to be a religious body. And yet what we've been talking about in terms of why Krishpina has been targeted seems to have a lot more to do with definitely her economic power, her gender role, even maybe her political power. So what is religion doing here?
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A
Well, I mean, it was often the case that people arrested by the Inquisition while arrested for heresy were actually being targeted because they were powerful people in one way or another in their communities, particularly, in fact, in the colonies of the Spanish and Portuguese empires. So in that way way, it sort of fits with that. But, you know, so Crispina Perez was a baptized Catholic. As I said, she was of mixed heritage, and there were, you know, quite a large number of baptized Catholics, but in the. In Cacheo and in the surrounding region. But this was an area of what we might call religious competition. So the Catholic. Catholic religion was important, but in fact, as the Brazilian historian Thiago Mota has shown, there was also an established. Islam was of increasing significance in this region. From the 16th century. There were itinerant preachers who also traded, called the Jahanque, who were very significant in from the Gambia river basin. Down to Kasho and beyond. And so the Catholicism was in. Felt itself in, you know, in competition with that also, of course, with the, you know, the Protestant empires. The Dutch were, you know, met the, you know, pretty much the major imperial power at this point, even more so than the English, who were rising as well. And so there was competition with that. And then, of course, there was competition with the African religious practice as well. So Kushpina herself was arrested for consulting healers, known as jabakos. So, and the healers were effect, some of them were Muslim, and some of them were African religionists and conducted African religious practices and rituals as part of the healing process. And we know from the evidence that, in fact, that the main. The biggest. The biggest neighborhood in Cacho was a place called Vila Quinchi or the hot town. And this was an area where, you know, there were daily. Daily religious practice was carried out at the big shrine there, which is known as a china. And celebrations are different, religious celebrations, different kinds, very much a regular part of life from the perspective of West African religions. So this was very much a religious melting pot. It was in fact, you know, what we might very much call a multicultural environment. And that's very significant, in fact, because, in fact, people. These different religions were coexisting, and actually people were sharing very much in one another's practice. So Crispina was a Catholic. Yes, she did go to. She did go to church, but she also went to these other festivals as well. And so that was a grounds for heresy for the Catholic Church because she was not practicing Catholicism in the way in which it should be practiced. She had been baptized, and in some ways, they would see her as having recanted. So that was the ground, the religious ground for the trial.
- [31:44]
C
Now, okay, that's helpful to understand, but as you mentioned, so much of what explains this trial and kind of why the Portuguese kind of bothered, you know, they put a lot of effort into this. Right. And it wasn't just for reasons to do with her. It was about kind of all these other things that were happening. And you, in fact, have a great kind of phrase in the book that I think sums up a lot of this, that her trial was, quote, a bellwether indicating the changing winds of global politics, economics, and society in the 1660s. We've talked about a number of threads. Are there any other ones we want to add in?
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A
So let's take a step back and think about this from the imperial point of view. So in my book, A Fistful of Shells, I discussed how this decade was really at very much a key transitional decade. If you look at the data on the transatlantic traffic, for instance, you can see that it's after this decade that it really begins to increase, not only from this region, but actually more intensively still from regions such as what's today, you know, Benin, what was then the kingdom of Alada, became Dahomey, southern Nigeria, Angola. It really intensifies after this decade. So this decade represents a real shift and an intensification, effectively, of European imperialism, in which, you know, this trial can be seen as one, a marker of that. But we can also reflect here, coming back to what I've been saying about time and space. You know, it's also the decade in which, you know, Isaac Newton and began to develop the ideas linking to the theory of gravity. So it's also a decade in which ideas about the world and ideas which would lead to the kind of normative ideas of time which I talked about at the start linked to imperialism, were also developing. So it's an important decade when it comes to ideas about the relationship between people and the world and how that's playing out, out in an imperial setting. How does that play out in this trial? So that's really significant because one of the other reasons why Krishna is really being arrested is because not only is she an economic and political threat, but this worldview, this consultation of African healers, is of course, also a threat to this emerging materialistic worldview linked to the rise of European empires. So there's a kind of, if you might call almost a metaphysical aspect to this, that. That actually empire is many things, but one of the things it is is an ideological project. And a worldview which is completely contrary to that is a significant challenge to that. So this also indicates, you know, the fact that this was the motivation behind the trial indicates that this is also somehow latent, perhaps, you know, unconscious. Perhaps in the unconscious. This is part of. Part of what is going on as people are grappling with these massive transformations which are taking place and which they're experiencing and they're living through at the same time.
- [34:38]
C
Yeah, that's definitely an important element to add in here. Now, before I ask you about what Cashew is like today, is there anything else we want to Discuss around its 17th century history?
- [34:48]
A
Yeah, I mean, I think I just want to come back to this question of healing, I think, because the last chapter of the book is about living, healing and dying in cacho and medicine. And I think this is a significant aspect of. Of this question of the emergence of science. The Emergence of medicine. And how that's. And how come back to your comment about this being a bellwether, I think it's also a bellwether for future trajectories of medicine and its links to colonialism. So in fact, in the 20th century, when formal European colonial power was politically dominant in Africa, there was a clear relationship between medicine and colonialism. And power over the labor of Africans in Africa was linked to power over their physical labor was linked actually to power over their bodies, medical power, their bodies, various kinds of experiments linked to, for example, in the 1950s, oral polio vaccine trials in Congo, Burundi and Rwanda, which I touch on in the book. But you can see this taking shape in the 1660s in Cashel. You can see this kind of, as I say, a kind of protocolonial trial, protocol, political process. And it's linked to Crispina Perez's relationship to medicine. And in fact, what's really fascinating is that as I talk about in that final chapter, you know, many of the medical, many of the medical processes, you know, medical treatments which are offered, you know, scientific analysis done more recently shows that, for example, so Crispina's husband George suffers from arthritis. And in fact many of the herbs which are, which were given, which are prescribed to him were known to now to have anti inflammatory properties. So if you're suffering from arthritis, that's exactly what you should be prescribing something. And the other fascinating thing is that most of the herbalists were women. You know, a large number of them were women. And of course, medicine was not only increasingly linked to colonialism, but it was also linked to patriarchy often. So this is another way in which this trial not only indicates the way that times were changing towards things that become more and more familiar in the 20th century and still disturbing to this day, but also indicate just how different this cultural and social space of Kashiu at the time was.
- [37:11]
C
Yeah, that's a really, really interesting piece of this. And in many ways kind of goes back to what you were saying around the sort of existential ideological questions of the trial of kind of whose knowledge gets to count and why. That, as you said, definitely appears in later centuries after the 17th. But if we bring it all the way up to the current century, Kasho is somewhere that still exists. Right. One can go there. What is it like when you've been.
- [37:39]
A
Well, I mean, Cashau. So I mean, the few things to say, you know, Guinea Bissau today as we speak, is in a political crisis. There were aborted elections in December and there's A transitional military government at the moment, which is in keeping with, in fact, as some of your listeners will know, there have been a number of similar events in West Africa in the last three or four years, particularly in the former French colonies, Burkina Faso, Mali, Guinea. And this is linked to the failures of. Of liberal democracy, I think, to answer to the social and particularly the economic needs of postcolonial Africa. And anybody who knows the region knows that's been a comprehensive failure and that this has created many, many social and economic problems in the region. Now, in the case of Guinea Bissau, so Kasho was in the north of Guinea Bissau, and Guinea Bissau was the last country in West Africa actually to achieve independence because it was a Portuguese colony. And unlike the British and the French, who began decolonization in the late 1950s, the Portuguese at that time were in the Salazar dictatorship, which conceived of their African colonies, as they put it, in a part of Portugal, overseas provinces, and refused to decolonize. And so there were independence wars which were fought in all those countries, culminating in independence in 1974. And so it was the last country to achieve independence. It's got one of the lowest populations of any country in Africa, a little over 2 million. So it's a very small country. And this has obviously had a significant impact in the social and economic life of a town, like I show, which is a small town. It was always a small town, as I said, and it's still a. A very small settlement, kind of, with large neighbourhoods around it, just as was the case, in fact, in the 17th century. And the old. There's a sort of main drag you kind of drive down when you arrive into the town where the old. Where the colonial buildings of the 20th century are found not in very good repair. And then you go down to the waterfront and, you know, the curious thing about it, in a way, is that it's completely clear to me, having immersed myself in both the 17th century and knowing the town from the 21st century, that there was far more activity, I think, in the 17th century it was a far more vibrant setting. The economic and social life was, in a way, there was greater access to the needs for social and economic reproduction in a way in the 17th century than is the case today. And that's quite striking.
- [40:41]
C
Yeah, that is indeed very striking. And I think, therefore, quite a good place to end our discussion on the book with a whole bunch of things to take away and think about. What, may I ask, therefore, are you taking away and thinking about next? Obviously, this book is related to previous projects you've worked on, are you still on these sorts of topics? Are you moving on to something else or taking a nap for six months? What are you up to now?
- [41:04]
A
Well, taking a nap sounds good, but I've never, unfortunately, never been very good at that. I'm actually just finishing a book with a colleague from the Gambia, Hassom Sise, who is director general of the national center for Arts and Culture in the Gambia. We've written together a very short history of Africa. So that's been very exciting, very challenging indeed to write a short history of the continent. But also I think, and we both felt, because we both worked together, in fact, on educational projects. So we both worked together on a project to create a free textbook for the West African Secondary School Certificate in Education, which is given to countries where English is the language of instruction. So Gambia, Sierra Leone, Ghana, Nigeria, Liberia. So we worked on a free textbook with colleagues in Ghana, Sierra Leone and Nigeria for that. So we worked on education before. And so one of the reasons we wanted to do this was we felt that really that kind of book would be extremely useful for teachers, students in West Africa, but also outside West Africa. So that's what I'm doing at the moment.
- [42:09]
C
Yeah, no, that does sound useful indeed. So best of luck to you and your colleague in progressing that project. And of course, while you're doing it, listeners can read the book we've been talking about titled the Heretic of Cashew, published by the University of Chicago Press in 2025. Toby, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast.
- [42:26]
A
Miranda, thank you very much.