MANY BLACK WOMEN OF THIS FORTRESS, Graça, Mónica and Adwoa, three enslaved women of Portugal's African empire

176pp., b/w & colour illus., maps, paperback, London, 2022

"This remarkable book recovers from the Portuguese archives the life histories of three women who lived in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries in present-day Ghana. Konadu, an outstanding historian of his generation, presents a lucid, riveting and transformative portrait of gender and politics in the face of the violence of European empires at the dawn of modernity." Toby Green, Professor of Precolonial and Lusophone African History and Culture, King’s College London

"A fascinating picture of the entangled early modern world. Using the rich archival material found in inquisition records, this book provides an important new window onto the daily lives of three Black women in sixteenth-century coastal West Africa, and in Europe." Bronwen Everill, Lecturer in History, University of Cambridge

Kwasi Konadu is John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Endowed Chair and Professor at Colgate University, teaching African histories and cultures. He is the author of Our Own Way in This Part of the World: Biography of an African community, culture, and nation and co-editor of The Ghana Reader.