Jacobus Capitein

Dutch Calvinist and Black Cosmopolitan

Bibliographic Data

ID9250508
AuthorsLevecq Levecq (Kettering University, corresponding author)
Year2013
Volume44
Issue4
Pages145
Publication date2013-01-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueResearch in African Literatures (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0034-5210 • E-ISSN: 1527-2044
PublisherIndiana University Press (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.2979/reseafrilite.44.4.145
OpenAlexW2058496568
LanguageEN
Citations received2
References cited7

Jacobus Capitein has long been a source of interest as one of the few Africans educated in Europe in the eighteenth century, but critics have not been able to shake off the image he created with a lecture he delivered at the University of Leiden in 1742, in which he argued that Christianity is compatible with slavery. This article argues that Capitein is a much more complex figure than the thumbnail sketch might imply. Capitein ended up spending five years in Elmina, on the West Coast of Africa, and the letters he sent to Holland during that time can help, if not dispel, at least modify his image as a mouthpiece for Western colonialism. They tell the story of a man unprepared by his scholarly upbringing to deal with the hardships of life on a colonial outpost, but they also reveal a determination to understand his new social and cultural context, as well as, ultimately, a cosmopolitan flexibility completely at odds with the intellectual stiffness evinced in the Leiden lecture. Capitein was as much an African as a European and, in the end, this multiple, diasporic identity allowed him, if only fleetingly, to rise above the strictures of his upbringing and to acquire his own, unique, cosmopolitan voice. By trying to build on the enlightened form of Calvinism with which he had grown up, he evinces a desire to try to really understand the perspective of others and an ability to think in terms of multicultural, multiracial communities. Capitein was a black Atlantic cosmopolitan who used both his European and his African diasporic experiences to, in his own way, expand the meanings of cosmopolitanism

Sociology · Financial Crisis of the 21st Century · Global Maritime and Colonial Histories

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