Silencing Genocide: The Jesuit Ministry in Colonial Cartagena de Indias and its Legacy

Cartagena de Indias was one of the most important ports in the European trade in enslaved Africans in the 16th and 17th centuries. During this time, the Jesuits carried out a ministry to the enslaved Africans arriving at this port, which has lived on through its historical legacy. The Jesuit Peter Claver is now a saint in the Roman Catholic Church and Alonso de Sandoval’s De instauranda Aethiopum salute (“On the Salvation of the Africans”) is an essential resource for scholars of the early European trade in enslaved Africans in the Americas. This article examines this ministry in the context of the destruction of African life that occurred through colonization and enslavement, arguing that the ministry played an essential role in the destruction of African life. This article also examines the role that the historical legacy of the ministry has played and continues to play in the silencing of this destruction to the present day, leading to a fundamental misunderstanding of the Catholic and Jesuit relationship to the destructive processes of enslavement and colonization