On an ancient map of Seville there is a plot of arable land named ‘huerta de la mulata’ – literally orchard of the black woman.

It was fashionable in the 15C for the wealthy white elite and the upwardly mobile of Seville including clerics, artists and merchants to keep enslaved Africans. Drawing on his research, Cosano imagines one such person, Oliva, working as an assistant to a doctor and becoming  highly regarded for her knowledge of medicine among the African community of Seville. Documents suggest Spanish slave-traders (negreros) and owners often bought and sold enslaved Africans and moved them from place to place, even from colony to colony, and Cosano speculates the enslaved community may therefore have picked up botanical knowledge from the West Indies as well as  from their African homelands; on an ancient map of Seville there is a plot of arable land named ‘huerta de la mulata’ – literally orchard of the black woman, where Cosano speculates medicinal herbs, as well as crops, may have been grown.  He also imagines an enslaved African named Domenguillo, an assistant to a printer, who becomes skilled not only as a typesetter but as a linguist: it might not have been uncommon for enslaved Africans to know several languages – the language of their homeland, Spanish and then any of the many other languages around at the time, which included Portuguese, French and German.
 
Of black people living now in Seville, I saw few. A woman squatting near the hotel selling paper handkerchiefs. A man on a makeshift mat sleeping under a coat. A man playing a drum in a square. A couple of street stall holders. A delivery bike guy.

From the 15th century,then  onwards for  some four hundred years, there was an imbalance of military power that violently tilted the African population towards the colonies and Europe. In the 21st century there is a similar imbalance of (economic) power, causing a similar tilt and bringing the new black migrant presences to Europe. My general impression of Seville was that the people there had become used to Seville/Spain no longer being the centre of the universe.  They appeared to suffer less than the English from what the academic Paul Gilroy described as ‘post colonial melancholia’. Yet the invisibility of the black presence in Seville makes me cautious in this view. Until Seville publicly acknowledges the less glorious stretches of its past, I suspect it must still suffer from some similar, self-deluding amnesia.

One interesting difference in English and Spain legislative approaches to slavery is exemplified through the English ‘Somerset’ case. In Somerset v Stewart (1772)  the judge, Lord Mansfield invoked the concept of haebus corpus in his judgement freeing the African, Somerset. Mansfield declared the institution of  slavery so ‘odious’ it could never be a part of English common law. The Somerset case eased the conditions of the the min. 10,000 people in England at that time whose status was akin to slavery. This is not to say England treated enslaved Africans any better, merely that, after the Somerset case at least, English slave traders and merchants  never risked bringing Africans, as slaves, onto British shores: Slavery in British (and Spanish) colonies continued until well into the 19C.