Luso-Africans

Luso-Africans are people of mixed

In the fifteenth and sixteenth century, Portuguese traders settled in Cape Verde and along the West African coast from Senegal to Sierra Leone.^[3][4] Descendants of these traders and of local African women formed the nucleus of a Luso-African community that soon developed a distinctive culture, joining elements of European and local African culture. These Luso-Africans, or "Portuguese" as they called themselves, were commercial middlemen, distinguished by their language (Portuguese and later Crioulo), architecture and Christian religion. As each of these characteristics could be shared by members of adjacent African communities, identity transformations in both directions were relatively common. "Portuguese" identity remained both fluid and contextually defined through the seventeenth century. During the eighteenth and nineteenth century, however, 'Portuguese' were drawn increasingly into a European discourse on identity, one based upon a priori characteristics, primarily skin color. Forced to respond to this imposed identity, Luso-Africans continued to maintain that they were "Portuguese"; however, they also now began to define themselves negatively by reference to what they were not.^{[citation needed]}

See also

• African Portuguese
• Assimilados
• Degredados
• Prazeros
• Lançados
• Lusotropicalismo
• Mestiço
• Órfãs do Rei
• Retornados
• Signares

References