Ngeve was a 'sambo', that is one-quarter white and three-quarters black. ${ }^{3}$ Her father, the son of an Umbundu chief, had been sent by his father to receive a Western education and his literacy subsequently qualified him to work as a clerk in a Portuguese firm, no doubt involved in the importation of guns, alcohol, cloths and household goods and the export of ivory, beeswax, rubber, animal skins and enslaved people. Ngeve's father had married a mulatto woman - half white half black - named Sophina, whose father was a Portuguese merchant. All along the coast of West Africa - from the Gambia and Senegal (Mathurin-Mair, 1978, pp. 20-26) through Elmina in the Gold Coast and PortoNovo in Dahomey to Angola in Central Africa - European merchants had the support of the Catholic Church and mercantile houses when seeking to marry or form a liaison with well-connected local women. Such unions strengthened the legitimacy of the colonial regime and gave the colonizers an entrée into the culture, politics and economy of the areas that they occupied or wanted to bring under their control; the mulattoes, for their part, gained influence by dint of both their access to capital and education through their European connections and their links with the indigenous social and political networks.  
The Catholic Church had influence in the French and Portuguese colonies in Africa through its placement in its enclaves of religious orders, such as the Capuchins, Franciscans, Carmelites and Jesuits. Ngeve would later recall having seen monks in cowls and vestments in her town and known of holy water;  
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[^0]:    3 A Caribbean colour/racial category. For more on the multiple racial mixtures and colour gradations in the West Atlantic, see Stephens (1989) and Warner-Lewis (2007, p. 119). In Africa, where there was less of an obsession with colour variations, the ethnic categories were not so subtle; Zimmermann, in his letter, refers to Ngeve/Catherine, as she no doubt categorized herself, as a 'mulatto', a term used to connote mixed African-Caucasian ancestry.