Abstract
Officially, the first claim about the nonexistence of homosexuality in the African continent is found in 1871 in the British historian Edward Gibbon’s book The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire: “I believe, and hope, that the negroes, in their own country, were exempt from this moral pestilence.”1 Unedited manuscripts of the Portuguese Inquisition preserved at the Torre do Tombo in Lisbon suggest that we should go at least as far back as the seventeenth century to find the genesis of this myth. In 1630, Cristovão Cabral, the new governor of the Island of Cape Verde, was denounced to the Holy Office for being a self-professed perpetrator of numerous acts of sodomy. In their report the Inquisitors reaffirmed the myth:
It would indeed be against the service of God and of His Majesty to have in Cape Verde a Governor so immersed in this nefarious/execrable sin and so long disgraced, to [go to] this land where he will sin withouthesitation or limit, and where he will introduce this abominable transgression. … As to his mistakes, it is prudent to prevent [them] from the outset and not to allow Cape Verde to become a Sodom … for with his objectionable habits [he could] contaminate the people of that land 2 [author’s emphasis].
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© 2007 Nancy Priscilla Naro, Roger Sansi-Roca, and David H. Treece
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Mott, L. (2007). Historical Roots of Homosexuality in the Lusophone Atlantic. In: Naro, N.P., Sansi-Roca, R., Treece, D.H. (eds) Cultures of the Lusophone Black Atlantic. Studies of the Americas. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230606982_4
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