Venerable Teresa Chicaba

Teresa Chikaba, OP (Ewe: Chicaba or Chicava; c. 1676 – 6 December 1748) was an African princess captured by Spanish traders and brought to Spain, where she was enslaved. She later gained freedom and became a Dominican nun. She is an official candidate for sainthood in the Catholic Church, currently being titled "Servant of God". An account written by a priest in 1752, shortly after her death, is the primary source for her biography, based on his interviews with her and on her writings (no longer extant). Kidnapped at the age of nine, Teresa de Santo Domingo could recall only a few details of her life prior to enslavement. She was born in the territory known to seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Portuguese navigators as La Mina Baja del Oro, the part of West Africa that extends through present-day eastern Ghana, Togo, Benin, and western Nigeria. She was named Chicaba. The names of her parents suggest that her people were Ewe. Chicaba was kidnapped by Spanish sailors and sold into slavery. She was sent to the island of São Tomé, where she was baptized and given the name Teresa. During her childhood she was exported to Spain. Perhaps her youth, her illness during the arduous first leg of the Middle Passage, or maybe her enslavers’ belief that the gold bangles (manacles) she wore were signs of her exalted social status convinced the traders that she might bring a special profit in the Spanish market. Juliana Teresa Portocarrero y Meneses, then Duchess of Arcos and later the third wife of the 2nd Marquess of Mancera, purchased Chicaba. The marquess had served as viceroy of New Spain and, during his tenure there, had been a protector of the writer and nun Juana Inés de la Cruz. As a member of the retinue of this religious aristocratic household, the young slave habituated herself to the piousness of her mistress and developed an intense spiritual life that in time became her key to freedom.