Please join us for a conversation with Africanist historian Toby Green, who will be in dialogue with Five historians of global Africa and the African diaspora: Hassoum Ceesay, Mariana P. Candido, José Lingna Nafafé, Robin Phylisia Chapdelaine, and Ana Lucia Araujo, who draw in his recent book The Heretic of Cacheu: Struggles over Life in a 17th-Century West African Port (Allen Lane and University of Chicago Press, 2025) to discuss the connections of West Africa with Europe, the Americas, and Asia during the era of the Atlantic slave trade. Using Green’s work as a framework, the panel will examine the role of West African religions and Catholicism in these exchanges and their importance in understanding this long and painful history. More than anything else, the speakers will consider the great variety of oral, material, and written archival sources, to address the central role of women in West African and Atlantic economies, as traders, healers, wives, mothers, and enslaved workers.
