#SlaveryArchive with historian Toby Green, author of The Heretic of Cacheu

Join us to discuss The Heretic of Cacheu: Struggles over Life in a 17th Century West African Port (Penguin/Allen Lane, 2025) by Toby Green (King’s College London)

Get the book here and use code UCPNEW to get 30% off https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/H/bo259109554.html

In 1665 Crispina Peres, the most powerful trader in the West African slave trafficking port of Cacheu, was arrested by the Inquisition. Her enemies had conspired to denounce her for taking treatments prescribed by Senegambian healers: the djabakós. But who was Peres? And why was the Portuguese Inquisition so concerned with policing the faith of a West African woman in today’s Guinea-Bissau?

In The Heretic of Cacheu Toby Green takes us to the heart of this conundrum, but also into the atmosphere of a very distant time and place. We learn how people in seventeenth-century Cacheu built their houses, what they wore, how they worshipped – and also the work they did, how they had fun, and how they healed themselves from illness.

The conversation will be moderated by Ana Lucia Araujo (Howard University) and Alex Gil (Yale University)

Toby Green is an award-winning historian and Professor of Precolonial and Lusophone African History and Culture at King’s College London. Elected Fellow of the British Academy in 2024, he published more than ten books, which have been translated into 12 languages, including The Rise of the Transatlantic Slave Trade in Western Africa (Cambridge University Press, 2012). His book A Fistful of Shells: West Africa from the Rise of the Slave Trade to the Age of Revolution (Allen Lane and University of Chicago Press, 2019) won the American Historical Association: Jerry Bentley Prize and the British Academy: Nayef Al-Rodhan Prize for Global Cultural Understanding. Toby Green has worked widely with colleagues across Africa, organizing events in collaboration with institutions in Angola, Ghana, Guinea-Bissau, Mozambique Sierra Leone and the Gambia. Green writes extensively for the media, including in recent years, the London Review of Books, New Statesman, Prospect, and UnHerd. He has worked on curriculum change in the teaching of African history both in the UK and in West Africa, and has been a member of the UK government’s Model History Curriculum Advisory Group.  Green’s work has been funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, the British Library, the European Union, and the Leverhulme Trust. In 2017, he was awarded the prestigious Philip Leverhulme Prize for History. He is also one of the editors of African Economic History. He recently published The Heretic of Cacheu: Struggles over Life in a 17th-Century West African Port (Allen Lane and University of Chicago Press, 2025).