[^0]:    1 Arquivo Histórico Militar, Lisbon, 2-2-3, doc. 14, Francisco Xavier Lopes, Descrição da Catumbela (Usos e costumes dos seus indígenas e construção do reduto de São Pedro), 1847, fl. 4.  
and Asian societies as barbaric, biologically distinct and therefore inferior, to be conquered and dominated. The notion according to which African women were independent, hard-working and productive led to their representation in European literature and etchings as lascivious, subject to bestial behaviour, and profoundly threatening to European order and social norms (Ugo Nwokeji, 2001, pp. 47-68; Morgan, 2011). The notion of gender was therefore fundamental to the definition of slavery in various societies. While in the Americas children inherited their mother's legal status, in Muslim African societies it was the father's status that defined a newborn's legal standing. Societies in the Americas under the slavery regime placed emphasis on the maternity of enslaved women, virtually ignoring paternity in the legal sense.