The Heretic of Cacheu

A stunning global history of West Africa, The Heretic of Cacheu weaves together the tragic histories of the Inquisition and the Atlantic slave trade. Drawing on archival research in three continents and presenting transformative new arguments in a profoundly moving narrative, with this new tour de force, Green confirms himself as the most innovative historian, writer, and thinker of his generation

Ana Lucia Araujo, author of <i>Humans in Shackles: An Atlantic History of Slavery</i>

This book is more than a biography of a great West African settlement. It is also about how Cacheu held the keys to prosperity and progress for generations of Atlantic traders. As in his previous works, Toby Green has, again, given agency to the people of the West African Coast, in this particular case especially to Crispina Peres

Hassoum Ceesay, Director General, National Centre of Arts and Culture, The Gambia

Toby Green has produced a book of rare distinction. Working across a range of inquisition sources, languages and spatial locations, he has shown the emotional effects of imperial slave trafficking on African inhabitants and colonial sojourners in Cacheu, modern-day Guinea-Bissau. To produce this remarkable book, he looks through the crystalline lens of the life story of the richest trader in the town, a woman called Crispina Peres. Green reveals human emotions by exhuming sources that catalogue daily lives governed by politics, fears, betrayal, treachery, promiscuity, affairs, revenge, cruelties, imprisonment and religious confessions. This is a substantial contribution to knowledge and our understanding of the social history of Africans and Europeans in seventeenth-century West Africa

Dr. José Lingna Nafafé, author of <i>Lourenço da Silva Mendonça and the Black Atlantic Abolitionist Movement in the Seventeenth Century</i>

Staggering... He has performed an admirable work of historical reconstruction, despite the enduring difficulty of giving expression to African voices

Michael Taylor, Literary Review

A marvellously detailed account of life on the edge of what is now Guinea-Bissau... conjures up with wonderful vividness the sights and sounds of this distant world... Green knocks old myths on the head: that Africans typically had a "subsistence economy", or lived static lives. He also highlights just how global the material world of these people already was

Noel Malcolm, Daily Telegraph

[This] painstakingly researched study recreates a world in which slavery was a significant but widely disavowed part of everyday life

History Today

A rich microhistory centring on the life story of a fascinating African woman

Mariana P. Candido

The Heretic of Cacheu makes significant contributions to human philosophy, religion, and liberty... Green's work hums with moral urgency... Green returns the African woman to world history, not as a footnote but as a moral compass – a testimony to the power and beauty of religion and the humanity of power. The Heretic of Cacheu is thus both historical reconstruction and ethical reflection, a reclamation of Africa’s agency in the construction of modernity and a reminder to the world of women like Crispina Peres. In this sense, then, the book is not just about Atlantic history; it is a sobering reminder that the conscience of history remains with those who would not be silenced

Toyin Falola

A welcome book...a richly detailed portrait of Crispina's world...a laudable attempt to redress the [colonial] imbalance

Edward Wilson-Lee, TLS