Legal, moral, ethical and political debate on the abolition of slavery has traditionally been understood to have been initiated by Europeans in the eighteenth century – figures such as William Wilberforce, Thomas Buxton, Thomas Clarkson, Granville Sharp, and David Livingstone. To the extent that Africans are recognised as having played any role in ending slavery, especially in the seventeenth century, their efforts are typically confined to sporadic and impulsive cases of resistance, involving ‘shipboard revolts’, ‘maroon communities’, ‘individual fugitive slaves’ and ‘household revolts’.

This lecture explores how Lourenço da Silva Mendonça, an African Prince and the historical actors with whom he was involved – such as Black Christians from confraternities in Angola, Brazil, Caribbean, Portugal and Spain – argued for the complete abolition of the Atlantic slave trade 147 years before Wilberforce and his generation of abolitionists.