Comment by benbreen | Hacker News Reader

Comment by benbreen | Hacker News Reader

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Interesting discussion here, and I certainly don't disagree that humans are resilient. All I'll add (re: point 4) is that I literally spent 2-3 months translating letters sent by Portuguese soldiers stationed in 17th century Angola as part of my PhD research. Those guys were among the most deeply unhappy individuals I've ever encountered in an archive. They were completely unable to cope with the severity of disease and death all around them. I think they're more of the norm than many recognize, because most of us don't spend time reading through primary source letters in archives. I think that spending a lot of my mental life in the 17th century makes me fairly well placed to imagine what it's like to lose a child in that world, and I really don't see what you'r arguing here reflected in the archives.

If anyone reading this is interested, btw, the depiction of a fictional Thomas Cromwell's loss of a child in Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall struck me as incredibly well-observed and accurate. I really loved that part of the book.

How were the Angolans coping? Did you encounter them in the archives?

Yes, in the form of thousands of African slaves (visible more via their absence, but showing up obliquely in complaints about "the cadavers of the blacks" being eaten by hyenas). Suffice to say that they were not coping well either, since Angola at this time was one of the centers of the Atlantic slave trade. The only person in these letters who seems at all calm is Queen Nzinga of Ndongo, an independent African ruler who communicated with the King of Portugal via a couple letters. But her family again proves my point - her brother, the former ruler, committed suicide due to his grief at his kingdom's loss of power. 17th century archives are basically a non-stop litany of enslavement, murder, illness, and complaints about lack of basic necessities.

The one exception among the archives I've looked at are those of the Royal Society - but then again, those archives describe medical experiments that would be considered completely appalling today (like trying to replace a madman's blood with that of a sheep). People might be resilient, but by and large they were not having a good time in this period, and they knew it.

Maybe I'm misunderstanding, but you're stating that there weren't primary sources directly involving the Angolans that you encountered? Just inference? Are there known records of their folkways concerning death?

Call me cynical, but any time a person near to power "commits suicide" or otherwise recuses themselves from the scene (present or historically), I generally take their volition in the matter with a very large grain of salt.

The vast majority of the surviving primary sources weren't written by Angolans. But because Portuguese Angola was centered around slave trading, the sources produced by the colony certainly involved Angolans: reports of slaver's raids, counter-attacks by African military leaders, surgeons remarking on slaves' diseases, etc.

Vincent Brown The Reaper's Garden is a great guide to diasporic African folkways surrounding death in the early modern period. He argues that enslaved Africans mobilized their social practices surrounding death as a way of asserting a kind of underground political power in plantation societies. At any rate, you won't find many people studying the history of the Atlantic slave trade or colonial Africa who think that people were coping adequately with the situation. The debate is more about whether it was so shatteringly destructive that it led to a total "social death" or whether some elements of culture and personhood were able to survive. I am in the second camp. But like I said, people were deeply psychologically and often physically scarred in this period.

Okay, so there aren't primary sources. That's totally fine, though at this point, it's moot to speak about the relative ability for a traditional culture to cope with elevated mortality since we've moved into dealing with conjecture purely in slave economies created by conquerors and entirely subaltern peoples.

Just curious, earlier you stated that you spent "a lot of [your] mental life in the 17th century", where does that reach extend to? Is it just Portugal or is it specific to the Atlantic Slave Trade?

All history is conjecture. The primary sources relating to 17th century Angola exist, they're just sparse. I just told you that Queen Nzinga sent letters to the King of Portugal, for instance. If you're genuinely interested in this, John Thornton and Linda Heywood both give good surveys of what sources are available and what they can tell us.

I work on early modern Britain, Portugal, and their colonies.

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