In 1807, Britain prohibited its subjects from engaging in the export of captives in West Africa and slave trading was slowly replaced by exports of palm oil, groundnuts, and other tropical commodities. The Portuguese trade in captives, however, remained legal south of the equator. It was not until 1836 that authorities in Portugal declared the illegality of slave exports from its overseas territories in Africa. As a result, only after the 1830s did this region experience the rocky transition to so-called legitimate commerce in tropical commodities, when the collapsing exports of slaves encouraged intensified uses of captives within the region, including in the Portuguese enclaves of Angola.
Slave Registers of Angola
Vanessa S. Oliveira
Between 1514 and 1867, an estimated 12.5 million enslaved Africans forcibly left the continent destined for the Americas. Nevertheless, an important proportion of the captives generated by wars and raids did not cross the Atlantic Ocean remaining on African soil. Slavery was an important element in Africa even before the arrival of Europeans. However, the slave trade transformed slavery from a marginal institution into a central element of African societies. In fact, after the prohibition of slave exports in the nineteenth century, the use of captives in productive activities intensified within Africa.1
1Paul E. Lovejoy, Transformations in Slavery: A History of Slavery in Africa. 3rd edition (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012).
In spite of the fact that illegal slave trade operations from Luanda had ceased by the 1850s, the trade community established in the colonial capital persisted in organizing shipments of captives from northern coastal areas close to the Congo River and smaller ports to the south directed to Brazil and Cuba. In 1850, the importation of enslaved Africans was finally made illegal in Brazil. This definitive termination of the trade had a deep impact throughout Angola, as Brazil had been the main destination of the captives embarked along the coast of this New World Empire. Many slave traders left Luanda and relocated in Portugal, Brazil, and to a lesser extent in New York while others saw their businesses vanish.
With decreasing demand from Brazil, the price of captives dropped all along the coast and in its interior. 2 As a result, in the Portuguese enclaves, former slave dealers intensified the use of captives in several activities in urban and rural contexts. As the population of Luanda grew from 5,605 in 1844 to 12,565 in 1850, the need for more housing, foodstuffs, and production of basic goods also expanded. 3 Traditionally a slave society, Luanda met part of this demand by bringing large numbers of captives into its population. The number of slaves residing in the capital reached 6,020; representing about 48 percent of the total urban population. Enslaved men and women performed domestic services in households, peddled in the streets of the town, and were rented out for their skills. Some enslaved men received training in artisan crafts working for the colonial administration or in the various workshops throughout the city. 4 Slaves also tended to the land in arimos (agricultural properties) producing foodstuffs for subsistence and for urban populations, as well as in the newly established plantations growing sugar, cotton, and coffee for the external market. Others still worked as porters transporting tropical commodities from the interior to the coast.
2 António Gil, Considerações sobre alguns pontos mais importantes da moral religiosa e systema de jurisprundência dos pretos do continente da África Occidental portuguesa além do Equador, tendentes a dar alguma idea do character peculiar das suas instituicções primitivas (Lisbon: Typografia da Academia, 1854), 252-253.
3 José C. Curto, “The Anatomy of a Demographic Explosion: Luanda, 1844-1850,” International Journal of African Historical Studies, n. 32 (1999), 396.
4 Vanessa S. Oliveira, “Trabalho escravo e ocupações urbanas em Luanda na segunda metade do século XIX,” in Selma Pantoja and Estevam C. Thompson, eds., Em torno de Angola: narrativas, identidades e as conexões atlânticas (São Paulo: Intermeios, 2014), 263-268.
On 10 December 1854, a decree emanating from Sá de Bandeira, then President of the Conselho Ultramarino (Overseas Council) in Lisbon, demanded that slaves throughout its overseas possessions had to be registered, with failure to comply resulting in captives having their status transformed into libertos (freed persons).5 Through compulsory registration, the administration could get a sense of the labor resources available in the areas under Portuguese control to promote the economic development of Angola. The decree generated a series of slave registers in Luanda and in the districts of the interior, which provided names, sexes, places of origin, ages, body marks, and occupations of captives, as well as the names and the places of residence of slave owners. Thirteen registers housed in the Arquivo Nacional de Angola relate to the enslaved population of Luanda and its interior, including the presídios (interior military-administrative units) of Ambaca, Tala Mugongo and Pungo Andongo, the district of Icolo e Bengo and the fair of Cassanje. They provide data on nearly 13,000 enslaved Africans laboring in towns and rural areas, stretching from Luanda to the bend of the Kwanza River, between 1854 and 1873.
5 José de Almada, Apontamentos Históricos sôbre a Escravatura e o Trabalho Indígena nas Colónias Portuguesas (Lisboa: Imprensa Nacional, 1932), 40-41.
There is no information available on how and who collected the data in these registers. We do not know whether government officials went to households or whether masters came to a specific place set by the state to register their captives. Similarly, questions can be raised about who actually provided the information found in these registers: was it only masters or did enslaved Africans themselves have any input? Were translators used for Africans unable to speak Portuguese? These questions remain unanswered. Meanwhile, some masters, especially those living in areas further in the interior, where the Portuguese administration was weak, may have chosen not to register their captives so as to avoid payment of the registration costs and taxes. This evasion, however, could lead to the loss of non-registered captives, which the state was at liberty to dispose of without compensation. Nevertheless, this data most likely accurately indicates the range of uses of slave labor in Luanda and the immediate interior following 1850, when the illegal shipments of captives entered its phase of decline.
Vanessa S. Oliveira is a historian working on African history, colonialism, women, gender and sexuality. This website results from the project “A Social History of Slavery in Luanda, 1854-1873,” funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and the Royal Military College of Canada.