Yasuke: In Search of the African Samurai

by Thomas Lockley

  It was only the older children the ghoulish slavers wanted. All boys and girls between five and twelve, and some of the younger women, were roped separately and taken away from the killing field, out of the village, and down to the riverside. There, they were made to squat, waiting helplessly—the enemy guards standing tall over them like giants in their distinctive one-legged pose, weapons ground into the reed-stripped bank. Yasuke and the others shivered in the early morning cold and the mist that came off the river. The reek of smoke and fresh death filled the destroyed village and shrouded them all.

  A 1771 French map of Northeast Africa, by Rigobert Bonne. The port from where Yasuke left Africa is marked as Suaken. His birthplace was probably somewhere in the uncharted territory left of the Nile.

  Soon, the unmistakable sound of their mothers screaming as they were raped, then slaughtered, reached the crouching children. The guards at the riverside went one by one to take their turn in the village. They left at a run, whooping and jumping in delight. Although Yasuke could not understand the language of his captors, he could feel their jokes as they talked, see the crude gestures. These men were delighted at their morning’s work and comparing notes, no doubt joking and boasting at their prowess in the kill and in the brutal sexual assaults which now followed. When at last something resembling silence—at least there were no more screams, only the whimpering of the children around Yasuke—descended again, the victorious warriors who’d been in the village rejoined their brethren, carrying the grain from the granary, and gathered up their lances, clubs and spears. The whole band was in a great mood, chattering and laughing, even singing with seemingly genuine joy.

  Waiting boats appeared and the young captives were herded aboard. Only thirty of the hundred villagers were left alive. Yasuke boarded as if in a dream. He’d wondered about his cattle, the cows that were his job and his family’s whole life. Why did these horrid men not take them? Normally, raiders took only cattle; people were of little value compared to livestock. You could not give a child as dowry to your bride’s father, nor would a child provide life-giving milk for the entire village. As they pushed off, he could hear the cows lowing in distress at the strange atmosphere and the lateness of their morning milking, one which would never come again.

  Late the next day, the boats stopped and then they walked. And walked. Those who fell behind were run through. Many of the young women were pulled aside each night by the warriors for rape; the prettiest, however, were left alone to fetch a better price as virgins in a rich man’s harem. While the land near the river was green and verdant, the farther they got from the water the more sandy and desolate it became. Eventually it transformed into hard desert, rocky outcrops peeking through an endless sea of sand.

  Days after, their captors sold them to another band of lighter-skinned warriors. These were men garbed in long robes with cloths wrapped around their long black hair. The first people Yasuke had ever seen who did not have his ebony-dark skin color. And he was frightened. The raiders who’d destroyed his village had painted themselves white with Nile mud, but these new men had no need of paint. Were they ghosts, taking Yasuke and his kinsmen to be eaten? They rode huge horses and carried curved swords and ornate knives rather than clubs, yet still had spears to prod the captives along their way. They rode on horseback, and dwarfed even the giant men of the slave-raiding party. They also spoke in another language. The tones sounded like poetry or song, but belied their facial expressions. Hard and cruel. By the time they’d reached the sea, half of the original children and young women had perished. Only fifteen were left alive, and in a terrible state. Starving, dirty and covered in their own filth.

  Suakin, in modern-day Sudan, was a shining city built of coral on an island in a lagoon surrounded by the azure waters of the Red Sea. Its walls and palaces were like nothing Yasuke had ever seen. It rose out of the flat desert like a dream as they approached. To the stunned, exhausted and hungry Yasuke it seemed a magnificent and ephemeral mirage.

  Yasuke and his comrades did not enter a palace though, but found themselves in a dark crowded chamber beneath the slave market. The odor of human despair and fear in those cellars was a sharp contrast to the wealth and glory of the city outside, more so when contrasted with the sweet perfumes that the rich slave merchants used to cover the unpleasant stench their wealth was built on.

  * * *

  Yasuke shook himself back to the present.

  That trace, that city of death and despair, was a wavering image from long ago. Fifteen years. Ten thousand miles.

  He was a grown man now. A warrior.

  If anything came out of the mists in Japan, he would be ready.

  Chapter Four

  Seminary Life

  The port of Kuchinotsu resumed its slow and measured pace.

  The Portuguese ship had long ago departed for Macao, and the hundreds of Japanese merchants who’d gathered from every region of the country to buy its cargo had returned to their homes. All that was left now were the fishermen, some farmers and a dozen local merchants.

  Still, Yasuke went through his security routines each day. Those he’d learned from the bodyguards while in India. Every day, every meal, every service. How would I attack Valignano? And then: So, how would I defend him? With needed help and translation from Father Fróis and the Japanese acolytes who were beginning to be able to speak decent Portuguese, Yasuke worked with the local soldiers Arima had left behind to develop defense strategies. He’d developed contingency and emergency escape plans too. He checked and rechecked the guards and lookouts at the village perimeter throughout the day and night. One of Valignano’s later innovations was to recruit and arm a highly effective and dedicated Catholic citizen militia in Nagasaki.

  In 1579, however, there was only Yasuke.

  The Jesuits had no true power or military force beyond the promise of their access to finance and modern weapons, and the protection granted them by local lords. And Valignano, the head Catholic in Asia, was in a war zone. Only miles from a violently anti-Catholic enemy poised to overrun the fief of their host at any time.

  Valignano had little concern about becoming a martyr—a glory often sought by Catholic missionaries—but the position of the Church in Japan was at stake. Yasuke stood as one of the few armed men around him with no local ties or opposing obligations. The African warrior was the last line of defense against any political or religious assassin, a very real and common threat in Japan, as well as against any petty criminal who might have wanted to take advantage. There were usually a few local guards assigned by Arima to help out, but these men were as much spies as protection. In the last resort, they’d obey the whims of the twelve-year-old boy. Aside from Yasuke, Valignano could truly count only on the grace of God.

  In letters back to Europe, Valignano admitted to few of the genuine concerns he faced, besides being very tired and seasick. Military and security matters were essentially left out, especially when it involved anything that could make trouble in Rome. The legality of much of what he did—gunrunning, political maneuvering and tacit slaving—and much of what others did in the name of the mission, was only considered after the act, if at all. Hence a lot of what was done can only be ascertained from vague hints, aspersions and slips in the carefully edited letters which arrived in Rome, or from Japanese sources.

  It was indeed far easier to obtain forgiveness than permission. The mission, in short, could get more done without the Vatican getting in the way and insisting on things being done “as in Rome.”

  For example, the Portuguese king had forbidden his subjects, which included the Jesuits who were under his patronage, from engaging in Japanese slavery in 1570. But such slaving (occurring long before the Jesuits) carried on regardless and the Jesuits were now prime participants in this human trafficking. So far from Europe, the king’s writ held little weight. Jesuit authority legalized slave exports and the order clearly took a cut from the
proceeds. Their mission house in Nagasaki was, in fact, recorded as the center of the business. More than one thousand Japanese slaves a year were exported at this time and then found in bonded labor in places as distant from home as Africa, India, Spain and even Mexico.

  Valignano’s accommodation to non-European languages and non-European norms (such as forms of dress and general adherence to the Japanese diet) was also highly unorthodox, but missionaries argued—as they still do in places like China today—that it was necessitated by local factors, to gain the respect of the people whose souls they strived to save. Valignano essentially established the first European scholarship on China when he ordered that four scholars be assigned in Macao solely to the study of China and its literature, since without the language it was impossible to attempt the so longed-for conversion of China. These scholars “should have their own teachers, a house apart and all the facilities they needed,” he ordered. In Japan, he advocated imitating the ways of Buddhist priests and his leadership led eventually to the first Portuguese-Japanese dictionary, Japanese translations of European texts such as Aesop’s Fables, and Portuguese translations of Japanese tales such as The Tale of Genji, a popular and often racy eleventh-century drama with hundreds of characters, and probably the first-ever widely published work of fiction written by a woman anywhere in the world. Nothing like this would have happened without the loose reins of Rome.

  * * *

  Yasuke had learned a modicum of Japanese in conversation with the locals and began to feel at home with this generally quiet, but friendly people. His appearance still caused a stir, and he’d surely become something of a local celebrity. Valignano had inspected several of the smaller missions within a day’s travel of Kuchinotsu, and he and Yasuke became more familiar with the immediate area. The people of Kuchinotsu reminded Yasuke a great deal of other minor seaport communities he’d resided in during the past five years. It was in the lesser inland villages they visited outside of Kuchinotsu where Yasuke could not help but think again of his own home on the banks of the vast mother river, the Nile.

  For the next nine months, Yasuke and Valignano mainly split time between two locations—the Kuchinotsu seaport where they’d first arrived and Kazusa, a nearby fishing village where Lord Arima had granted the Jesuits some buildings for a seminary. From a security standpoint, Kazusa was the safest of these two, specifically chosen for the unlikelihood of attack. It was several miles farther removed from the anti-Catholic Ryūzōji forces and Arima still had firm control over this location. Kazusa was home to only a few hundred souls, but there was an old Buddhist temple facing out onto a beautiful beach in the lee of a heavily wooded mountain promontory. A peaceful brook bubbled behind it.

  Instead of being destroyed like many ancient places of worship (as Arima had promised), Valignano converted it into the first Catholic seminary in all of Japan. Later, when it was safer to do so, the seminary could move to a location nearer Arima’s Hinoe Castle.

  Valignano wrote the curriculum himself, from scratch. Initially the student body was made up of twenty well-born young men who were under the supervision of one priest and one brother, tasked with preparing the boys for priesthood. There were also guest appearances from visiting clergy.

  The Jesuit belief in education was second only to their faith, and they extended it wherever, and, however, they could. Seminaries and schools were built to train priests who could refute Protestant arguments for reformation, promote Catholic thought and act as missionary beachheads. The Jesuits had opened their first school in Europe in 1548 and founded more than thirty there within the next decade. Valignano had similar plans for Japan.

  Constancy proved an immediate ally in all that progress. Mission life has always been a regulated affair, scored by the ringing of hourly bells, gongs or human cry and on a cyclical, immutable schedule. In this way, the school at Kazusa was no different. The routine made it easier to integrate new acolytes and students into the ever-growing program. When not on the move to neighboring missions with Valignano, Yasuke found himself also constrained to this strict unremitting timetable.

  He rose before Valignano, an hour or more before daybreak, to be ready to start his work when the Visitor awoke. He was already walking the seminary grounds when the mission’s first cocks squawked. Valignano’s first act was to prepare for prayers and mass at dawn while Yasuke completed another security round. There were two schoolwide meals: breakfast at 9:00 a.m. and dinner at 5:00 p.m. At each, Yasuke normally supervised the preparation to ensure poison was not introduced.

  The central portions of Valignano’s day—and, thus, Yasuke’s—were taken up in meetings, writing and study sessions, interspersed by periods of prayer and reflection. Yasuke stood guard or attended to the external security throughout. Most days, Valignano met with one of the native Jesuits, Paulo Yohoken. An elderly scholar of seventy who’d retired from secular life as a medical doctor to follow Christ and join the Jesuits as an acolyte. Highly educated, he’d quickly become the Europeans’ prime source of information on Japan and wider Confucian and Buddhist thought.

  Usually, Father Fróis (the interpreter from the beach), would translate between Valignano and Yohoken, as Valignano took notes from the venerable Japanese doctor and asked seeking questions. Fróis had been in Japan since 1565 and was considered the mission’s most talented linguist and scholar of things Japanese.

  In this manner, the three men thrashed out the system by which the Jesuits would convert all of Japan. Their key strategy was to logically refute the native Shinto gods and Buddhist ways while adapting European religious customs to local tastes and norms. They believed that, where possible, converts—at least the socially important ones—should be persuaded through reasoned debate and sincere religious enlightenment. Promises of guns, silk and lead were fine for getting a foot in the door, but these couldn’t be the whole motivation if Christianity were to thrive in Japan. They needed the ruling Japanese to truly accept Christ.

  The evenings that followed were short. After dinner was litany at 8:00 p.m. and then sleep. It was wasteful to burn candles, though Valignano (notorious for his all-nighters) often made an exception for himself so that he could complete some pressing piece of writing or reflection. And the next day, the entire seminary did it all again.

  While Valignano was known as a harsh taskmaster, and sometimes resented for it, he was also generally fair with his subordinates. He understood his bodyguard needed to keep in shape and have some releases. When Valignano felt he could dispense with his services, Yasuke was given time off.

  In these moments of freedom, and depending on where they happened to be, Yasuke no doubt enjoyed an occasional swim in the river with the seminary students or, when they were in the bigger villages—such as Kuchinotsu where there were small entertainment quarters to cater to visiting sailors—he likely enjoyed a drink with the other soldiers or servants in town. It would have been a good chance to practice his Japanese and to catch up on news and gossip. When he was sure Valignano would not find out, he also most likely pursued brief dalliances with the local women.

  Foreigners were rather surprised, some scandalized, regarding the willingness of both sexes in Japan to engage conjugally outside of marriage. To the Japanese, having sex was often something people merely did for enjoyment. Yasuke arrived in Japan at a turning point for the country and its culture, including sexual culture. Despite long exposure to Chinese ideas, Japanese society was still in the process of absorbing Confucian ethics of human relations, where women take a decidedly inferior role to males. Such ideas had not yet taken root among the less educated lower and rural classes, where women could still pursue their own enjoyment as equally as the men.

  At a minimum, Yasuke likely stole an hour a day for genuine physical and martial training. He had to keep up his fitness and readiness. The seminary students spent their days in study, but there was also ample time for recreation and exercise. Valignano believed in staying ph
ysically active. Yasuke’s exercise would have included sparring with a variety of weapons, swimming, running and wrestling. The Japanese samurai guards were equally faithful in taking time to train, and Yasuke often joined them. For years, he’d made sure to keep up with his physical strength and combat skills. Running, climbing, stretching. He’d learned as a teen from other African slave mercenaries and from the best soldiers in India: the only easy day of training was yesterday. Now, for the first time, he was studying the movements of the Japanese sword—so different from any other weapon he’d tried before. He discovered the power of the first strike, intended to kill an enemy instantly. Then there were new hand-to-hand methods, new wrestling grips, the beautiful power of the naginata, essentially a deadly razor-sharp sword on a long pole that could mow down foes as a sickle cuts back hay. He was learning how he would need to fight if he ever came up against Japanese blades.

  * * *

  In an era when literacy was limited to the privileged few and the scriptures used by the Roman Catholic Church, along with church services, were in Latin, imparting the Word of God was not always an easy task. In the majority of Western Christendom, where the Catholic religion was essentially inherited without question until the great cleaving ruptures of the sixteenth century, missionary work was not a huge challenge; the Church had a captive audience. But elsewhere in the world, where the stories of Christ’s sacrifice were unknown, such tales often made little sense, especially as even the educated local leaders could not read or understand Latin.