A Child Taken from the Coast
Jacobus Elisa Johannes Capitein was born somewhere on the Gold Coast around 1717. Almost nothing is known of his family or his birthplace; what is recorded begins with his enslavement as a small child and his acquisition by a Dutch ship's officer, who brought him to the Netherlands at the end of the 1720s. There he was given a European name, baptised, and raised in a household in The Hague as a dependent — not legally enslaved on Dutch soil, but not free in any ordinary sense either.
He proved an exceptional pupil. He was educated in Latin and Greek, and in 1737 he entered the University of Leiden to study theology. That a boy taken from West Africa a decade earlier was matriculating at one of Europe's leading universities was extraordinary, and it was noticed. Capitein was, from the beginning, both a student and an exhibit.
The Dissertation of 1742
In 1742 Capitein defended a Latin dissertation whose argument has defined his reputation ever since: that slavery is not contrary to Christian freedom. The reasoning was a careful piece of Reformed scholastic argument. Christian liberty, he held, is spiritual — freedom from sin — and does not require freedom of the body. Slavery, therefore, is not abolished by conversion, and a Christian may lawfully hold slaves, provided they are instructed in the faith.
The thesis was published in Dutch translation shortly afterwards and went through several printings. It was popular precisely because of who had written it: a formerly enslaved African, arguing in the language of the university that the Dutch trade need not trouble a Christian conscience. It was quoted with satisfaction by people with a direct interest in that conclusion.
How to Read It
There is no honest way to soften the argument. It says what it says, and it was useful to the slave trade. But reading it as a straightforward act of collaboration ignores Capitein's position. He was a young man entirely dependent on the patronage of the church and the West India Company for his career, defending a thesis before examiners whose approval he needed, in a society in which no Black man had any independent standing whatever. Historians have read the text as opportunism, as sincere theology, and as the constrained speech of a man with no room to say anything else. The evidence does not settle the question, and any account that presents one of these readings as certain is overreaching.
Ordination and Return
Capitein was ordained in the Dutch Reformed Church — the first Black man to be so — and in 1742 sailed for Elmina as chaplain to the Dutch establishment there. He was returning, after some fifteen years, to the coast he had been taken from, in the service of the company that had profited from taking him.
At Elmina he preached to the garrison, ran a school for the children of the fort and of Elmina town, and worked on translations into the local language: the Lord's Prayer, the Creed and the Ten Commandments among them. These translations are of real interest as early attempts to render Christian doctrine in an Akan language, and they are among the reasons his name survives in Ghana as well as in the Netherlands.
A Difficult Reception
The mission did not succeed. The garrison was small, transient and largely uninterested in sermons. The town had its own religious life and no obvious reason to abandon it. His school attracted pupils but not the resources to sustain them. When Capitein sought permission to marry a local woman, the church authorities in the Netherlands refused, on the grounds that she was not a baptised Christian, and instead arranged for a Dutch bride to be sent out to him — a decision that says a great deal about how his superiors understood his position between the two societies.
He fell into debt, partly through trading ventures undertaken to support himself, and died at Elmina in 1747, still in his twenties or barely past thirty. He left no institution behind him.
Legacy
Capitein is remembered in the Netherlands chiefly through his dissertation, and in Ghana chiefly as an early Akan-language translator and teacher. Neither memory is complete without the other. He was a genuine scholar, the first of his background to reach a Dutch pulpit, and the author of a text that helped justify the enslavement of people like himself. The contradiction is not a puzzle to be resolved but the substance of his life, and it is the reason he remains one of the most discussed figures in the shared history of the Netherlands and the Gold Coast.
