Cassare or calissare was the term applied to the marriage alliances, largely in West Africa, set up between European and African slave traders; the "husband" was European and the wife/concubine African. This was not marriage under Christian auspices, although there might be an African ceremony; there were few clerics in equatorial Africa, and the "wives" could not marry since they had not been baptized. Male monogamy was not expected. As such, concubinage is a more accurate term. The multinational Quaker slave trader and polygamist, Zephaniah Kingsley purchased the Wolof princess, Anna Kingsley, who had earlier been enslaved and sold in Cuba, after being captured in modern-day Senegal.
Effects of Cassare Marriages on the Colonial Trade
“During the slave trade, these cassare marriages were central in establishing the cross-cultural connections that made trade possible.” The marriages functioned as an integral economic tool to integrate European men into the culture. West Africans embraced the arrangements as they provided some assurance that the children that resulted from these relationships would belong to the African families. As these slave-trading posts in West Africa were not colonial societies, where interracial marriages were directly subversive to power hierarchies, cassare marriages offered some stability in the trade relationships in West Africa for three centuries. By the nineteenth century, these marriages lost their practical purpose as interracial marriage was more directly monitored, and opposition to these marriages increased throughout the Atlantic world. ==See also==