Mariana Candido

Exploring the multifaceted history of dispossession, consumption, and inequality in West Central Africa, Mariana P. Candido presents a bold revisionist history of Angola from the sixteenth century until the Berlin Conference of 1884–5. Synthesising disparate strands of scholarship, including the histories of slavery, land tenure, and gender in West Central Africa, Candido makes a significant contribution to ongoing historical debates. She demonstrates how ideas about dominion and land rights eventually came to inform the appropriation and enslavement of free people and their labour. By centring the experiences of West Central Africans, and especially African women, this book challenges dominant historical narratives, and shows that securing property was a gendered process. Drawing attention to how archives obscure African forms of knowledge and normalize conquest, Candido interrogates simplistic interpretations of ownership and pushes for the decolonization of African history.

While there have been studies of women's roles in African societies and of Atlantic history, the role of women in West and West Central Africa during the period of the Atlantic slave trade and its abolition remains relatively unexamined. This book brings together scholars from Africa, North and South America and Europe to show, for the first time, the ways in which African women participated in economic, social and political spaces in Atlantic coast societies. Focusing on diversity and change, and going beyond the study of wealthy merchant women, the contributors examine the role of petty traders and enslaved women in communities from Sierra Leone to Benguela. They analyse how women in Africa used the opportunities offered by relationships with European men, Christianity and Atlantic commerce to negotiate their social and economic positions; consider the limitations which early colonialism sought to impose on women and the strategies they employed to overcome them; the factors which fostered or restricted women's mobility, both spatially and socially; and women's economic power and its curtailment.

This study examines the mechanisms that African women employed to accumulate wealth and property during the nineteenth century. After the ban on slave exports in 1836, West Central Africans looked for new economic activities and shifted their focus and energy to the trade in commodities as legitimate commerce expanded in Benguela. In the process, African women achieved new social and economic positions in the colonial setting, accumulating dependents and goods. The concentration of dependents, including enslaved ones, clustered wealth in fewer hands and altered notions of land access and rights. Primary sources reveal consumption patterns that suggest that property was accumulated in different ways, and that such accumulation spread far into the interior. This article emphasizes African women’s role as active agents of change on the coast and in the interior of Benguela during this time of economic transformation, making extensive use of kinship, affinity and economic networks that already existed.

Women represented the majority of the enslaved in western Africa, where they were valued for their productive and reproductive capacities. Enslaved women performed agricultural and domestic work, retail sales, and contributed to extend kinship groups bearing children fathered by their masters. In his work on the Sokoto Caliphate, Paul E. Lovejoy emphasized the sexual dimension in the enslavement of women. Lovejoy has argued that although women provided important productive labor, free men also considered physical attraction when acquiring enslaved women. Sexual abuse was an important aspect regarding women’s experience in captivity. In dialogue with Lovejoy’s scholarship, this article examines the experiences of enslaved women in Luanda and Benguela, the two major ports of Portuguese Angola, particularly their exposure to sexual violence. Drawing upon unexplored baptism records produced between 1800 and 1830, this study stresses how slave owners abused enslaved women in Luanda and Benguela, which resulted in the birth of children. Some infants were freed by their fathers while the majority lived under slavery as did their enslaved mothers.

This article explores the nature and expansion of slavery in Benguela, in West Central Africa, during the nineteenth century, engaging with the scholarship on second slavery. Robert Palmer, Eric Hobsbawm, and Janet Polasky have framed the nineteenth century as the age of contagious liberty, yet, in Benguela, and elsewhere along the African coast, the institution of slavery expanded, in part to attend to the European and North American demand for natural resources. In the wake of the end of the slave trade, plantation slavery spread along the African coast to supply the growing demand in Europe and North America for cotton, sugar, and natural resources such as wax, ivory, rubber, and gum copal. In Portuguese territories in West Central Africa, slavery remained alive until , when enslaved people were put into systems of apprenticeship very similar to labor regimes elsewhere in the Atlantic world. For the thousands of people who remained in captivity in Benguela, the nineteenth century continued to be a moment of oppression, forced labor, and extreme violence, not an age of abolition. After the  abolition of slave exports, local merchants and recently arrived immigrants from Portugal and Brazil set up plantations around Benguela making extensive use of unfree labor. In this article, I examine how abolition, colonialism, and economic exploitation were part of the same process in Benguela, which resulted in new zones of slavery responding to industrialization and market competition. Looking at individual cases, wherever possible, this study examines the kinds of activities enslaved people performed and the nature of slave labor. Moreover, it examines how free and enslaved people interacted and the differences that existed in terms of gender, analyzing the type of labor performed by enslaved men and women. And it questions the limitations of the "age of abolition".

European colonial powers established the contemporary boundaries of Angola during the Conference of Berlin (1884–1885). However, colonialism dates to the 15th century, when Portuguese merchants first contacted the Kingdom of Kongo along the Congo River and established early settlements in Luanda (1575) and Benguela (1617). Parts of the territories that became known as Angola in the early 20th century have a long history of interaction with the outside world, and as a result European primary sources provide much of the information available to historians. The reports, official correspondence, and diaries were produced by European men and are therefore problematic. However, by reading against the grain scholars can begin to understand how women lived in Angola before the 20th century.

Some, such as Queen Njinga, had access to political power, and others, such as Dona Ana Joaquina dos Santos e Silva, enjoyed great wealth. Kimpa Vita was a prophet who led a movement of political and religious renewal and was killed as a result. Most women never appeared in historical documents but were fundamental to the economic and social existence of their communities as farmers, traders, artisans, mediums, and enslaved individuals. The end of the slave trade in the 1850s led to the expansion of the so-called legitimate trade and plantation economies, which privileged male labor while relying on women’s domestic contributions. The arrival of a larger number of missionaries, colonial troops, and Portuguese settlers by the end of the 19th century resulted in new policies that stimulated migration and family separation. It also introduced new ideas about morality, sexuality, and motherhood. Women resisted and joined anticolonial movements. After independence, decades of civil war increased forced displacement, gender imbalance, and sexual violence. The greater stability at the end of the armed conflict may favor the expansion of women’s organizations and internal pressures to address gender inequalities.

This article focuses on the presence and commercial dominance of Brazilian-born agents in Benguela, in West Central Africa.  In this study I stress the central role of Brazilian-born individuals in sustaining the slave trade that in many ways excluded Portugal’s control. My interest is in their participation in the organization and supply of the slave trade on the coast of Africa, emphasizing the bilateral connections between important ports in the South Atlantic world that constrained Portuguese metropolitan power. Brazilian-born agents played crucial roles in slave trade organization, exports, and implementation of the colonial administration. This case also shows that cultural exchanges did not occur solely from Africa to the Americas; people, crops, and ideas also migrated from west to east, transforming life in Benguela.

Este artículo analiza los lazos entre la región comprendida entre Veracruz y Centroamérica y los puertos de Luanda y Benguela, y busca entender las implicaciones del comercio esclavista en Benguela al otro lado del Atlántico que se iniciaron en el siglo XVI y se mantuvieron hasta finales de la era esclavista. De ser un pequeño puerto, Benguela cobró importancia y se convirtió en uno de los principales puertos esclavistas en la costa africana. El comercio alteró sus relaciones sociales y costumbres: desde ampliar el uso de la mano de obra esclavizada hasta inclusive adoptar granos del Nuevo Mundo, como la yuca, en la dieta local. La trata de esclavos transatlántica impuso cambios como lo fue la conformación de sociedades esclavistas en África, similar a las transformaciones impuestas en América. La estrecha interacción con comerciantes extranjeros, llevó a la creación de una comunidad atlántica con fuertes vínculos con Luanda, Río de Janeiro, Cartagena, Lisboa y Veracruz, alianzas comerciales que fueron consolidadas a través de matrimonios con mujeres locales. Así como los centros urbanos en las Américas vieron la expansión de la esclavitud y la llegada de poblaciones foráneas, los habitantes originales de Benguela que emigraron a otras regiones más al sur, alejadas del comercio atlántico, fueron remplazados por inmigrantes, libres y esclavizados, venidos del interior así como por comerciantes europeos y del Nuevo Mundo. En suma, el comercio transatlántico de personas impuso cambios dramáticos a la población local que podía ser esclavizada y enviada hacía las Américas o forzados a adaptarse a la imposición de una sociedad colonial.

In past decades, new studies have explored the role of gender in the shaping of colonial societies on the African continent. Yet, most of the scholarship has focused on the twentieth century and not much attention has been paid to previous periods. Records from Benguela allow us to see the role of African women in an earlier era, their access to land and labor, and to explore the impact of new forms of production and control. In this study, I explore mechanisms through which women had access to land and accumulated property and wealth in Benguela during the nineteenth century. The study explores the lives of African women, analyzing their family connections and commercial partnerships in order to understand land access, wealth accumulation, and social mobility. Colonial sources, including parish and land records, allow us to investigate how women built their wealth, established social networks, created new kinship relationships, and had access to property. In the process they claimed new social and economic positions in the colonial setting, accumulating dependents [End Page 136] and properties. While processes of claiming land and developing agricultural exploitation were not available to all, some women managed to capitalize on their social connections. Gender, or the negotiation of relational identities with other social actors, became a key factor in this process. Land, perceived as genderless in the historiography, became a space for economic gain and the assertion of agency by local African women. Caught between shifting politics among the colonial power and local rulers, women negotiated new social and economic spaces.

Few African sailors boarded transatlantic slave ships, but their importance exceeded their numbers. They played important roles in the operation of the slave trade, especially along the African coast during slave acquisition. Based on Portuguese ship licenses, this study discusses the presence of African enslaved seamen on board Portuguese vessels. Although in captivity, slave sailors enjoyed some degree of freedom

This study explores the presence of merchants from other African ports, such as Ouidah and Porto Novo, in Benguela. It focuses on their strategies in Benguela to guarantee participation in the trade and forge new alliances. This study brings attention to the existence of diasporas within the African continent in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and focuses on the role of African traders in shaping the new commercial networks.

Based on the analysis of ecclesiastical documents, this study explores how African women lived in the port town of Benguela from about 1760 to 1860. This period includes the height of the transatlantic slave trade, its decline and abolition, and the slow shift towards legitimate trade. Through specific cases revealed in baptism, marriage and burial records, the article presents short stories and explores African women's interaction with foreign men, their economic roles, and their participation in a Christian community. The study also discusses how African women made use of parish venues to establish rights and to record their wishes in order to protect loved ones, in a process that secured social and economic mobility for the next generations. Résumé A partir d' une analyse de documents ecclésiastiques, cette étude s' intéresse à la vie des femmes africaines dans la ville portuaire de Benguela entre 1760 et 1860. Cette péri-ode inclut l' apogée du trafic d' esclaves transatlantique, son déclin et son abolition, ainsi que l' évolution progressive vers un commerce légitime. Au travers de cas spéci-fiques, révélés par les documents de baptême, de mariage et d' enterrement, cet article présente de courtes histoires de vie et explore les relations de ces femmes africaines avec les hommes, leurs rôles économiques, et leur participation à une communauté chrétien. L'étude montre également comment des femmes africaines ont utilisé les

This article focuses on the vulnerability of free blacks in Benguela, in West Central Africa, during the first decades of the nineteenth century at the height of slave exports. After the
British abolition of the transatlantic slave trade in 1807, slavers moved south of the Equator leading to the pressure for more captives and the expansion of violence around
Benguela. Focusing on the case of a free black woman, Dona Leonor de Carvalho Fonseca, this study discusses how she was captured, enslaved, transported to the coast,
and sold. However she did not remain in captivity for a long time, since she was able to claim the principle of ‘original freedom.’ A legal mechanism created by the vassalage
treaty, the principal of original freedom differentiated the local population between vassals and non vassal, Christians and non-Christians. The case of Dona Leonor illus-
trates how a free black could be subject to arbitrary capture, but also could claim original freedom and hence be protected from enslavement. Like her, others were able to bring
freedom cases to the attention of Portuguese authorities and dispute their enslavement. These cases allow us to explore how, where, and why people were captured. It also
shows the importance of vassalage treaties in defining who could or not be enslaved. By the early nineteenth century, Portuguese legislation regulated legal and illegal enslavement
opening the space for captives to challenge their status. The freedom suits stress the vulnerability of the population living around the Portuguese settlements, and show how
the pressures of the international slave market spread instability, even among those who were supposed to be protected by colonial law.

O envio forçado e sistemático de mais de doze milhões de africanos para as Américas transformou profundamente tanto as regiões que receberam a mão de obra escrava como as sociedades africanas direta ou indiretamente atingi-das pelo comércio de escravos. No início, as nações europeias transportaram muitos africanos escravizados para os espaços metropolitanos, mas o desen-volvimento das atividades produtivas nas ilhas atlânticas e colônias america-nas fizeram com que o grosso do tráfico fosse desviado para estas regiões. 1 1 A partir de meados do século XVI, a presença africana tornou-se significativa em alguns paí-ses europeus. Ainda que em grande parte fossem escravos, muitos africanos ou residiam na Europa por vontade própria (como comerciantes, estudantes, diplomatas, etc.) ou tinham al-cançado a liberdade depois de desembarcados (permanecendo no continente como trabalha-dores livres). Segundo as estimativas, havia cerca de 100 mil indivíduos de origem africana na Espanha, 40 mil em Portugal, 10 mil na Grã-Bretanha e 4 mil na França. Ver Norma Myers,

O número de estudos sobre a história das mulheres no continente africano aumentou consideravelmente nas últimas décadas. A maioria, entretanto, dá atenção ao século XX, enfatizando a participação feminina no período colonial e no pós-independência .

As part of an edited volume celebrating the career of Paul Lovejoy, this study dialogues with Lovejoy's scholarship on slavery and concubinage. By looking at manumission of enslaved women, this study analyzes how personal and sexual relationships were crucial in securing freedom in Benguela. These relationships were not voluntary and were shaped by daily violence and power dominance, yet enslaved women were able to negotiate their freedom with their masters and partners and guarantee manumission for themselves and their descendants.

This chapter explores the spread of violence during the height of the transatlantic slave trade in Benguela and how it affected the lives of free individuals. It examines the mechanisms of capture around Benguela and the ability of enslaved Africans to challenge their enslavement and claim original freedom.

The occupation of territories, the rule over land and the definition of property rights, were major concerns in the making and long-term development of the European overseas empires. They were also strongly interrelated with other key aspects of the empire-building process, including sovereignty claims, territorial expansion, settlement, taxation, power relations, social mobility, labour organisation, economic development, indigenous rights and the relationship between colonisers and colonised in its multiple dimensions. Although focusing mostly on the Portuguese empire, this book deals with other colonial settings too, covering a timespan that stretches from the 15th to the 21st century, thus including also some reflections on the post-colonial legacy of European imperial ventures around the world.

Part of an edited collection of studies on the connections between Africa, Brazil and Portugal, this study focuses on an overlooked aspect of the Atlantic world: the links between the ports of Salvador in Bahia, Brazil, and Benguela in West Central Africa. Although the historiography stresses the West Africa-Bahian link, demographic analysis reveals the large number of West Central Africans deported to Bahia.