ABSTRACT
This chapter seeks to shed new light on an issue which has, until recently, been largely neglected by Africanists, historians and anthropologists alike namely, the Portuguese inquisition in Africa. In the 1970s a Portuguese naval historian, Avelino Teixeira de Mota, who had worked in the colonial service of what was then Portuguese Guinea in the 1950s, hinted at the existence of documentation that illustrated denunciatory activity in the Cape Verde islands and the Guinea coast in the sixteenth century. The intertwining of religious and secular interests is evidenced by the fact that in the period from the 1640s to the 1660s both a governor of Cape Verde and a commander of Cacheu were familiars or official informants of the Portuguese Inquisition. The first signs of heightened tensions between the metropolitan Inquisition on the one hand, and the female members of Christianized communities on the other, surface in the Guinea region in the 1650s.
