Abstract
The Portuguese colony of Angola was a major eighteenth-century slaving hub with an intense history of European-African interactions. These relationships were deeply influenced by a longstanding presence of religious orders that had begun proselytization in the region in the sixteenth century. Historiography focusing on missionary activity in Angola, and Africa in general, has the tendency to regard missionaries primarily as agents of the Church and the colonial state, who helped consolidate colonial dominion through proselytization. Researchers sometimes overlook the active participation of religious institutions in slavery and the slave trade. In this historiographical context, eighteenth-century Luanda and its hinterlands can offer a new and unique perspective. By exploring the regular clergy’s involvement in slavery and the slave trade in Luanda and along the rivers Bengo, Dande, and Kwanza, this article examines the ecclesiastics’ role as enslavers and landowners, as well as the complex interplay between West-Central Africans and European missionaries.
Introduction
While much has been written about the presence of religious orders in West-Central Africa, research on this subject has mostly been focused on the religious and political aspects of missionary presence in the region. The economic side of this process is often not as closely considered by scholars. However, the introduction of Catholicism by the Portuguese not only facilitated the creation of political alliances but also helped establish commercial ties with West-Central African rulers.1 This not only applies to ‘secular’ merchants but also to the clergy. Researchers such as Dauril Alden, Carlos Almeida, Arlindo Caldeira, Beatrix Heintze, Mukuna Mutanda, Carlo Toso, and Graziano Saccardo, have pointed out the role that slavery and the slave trade, and in the case of Angola, land ownership, had for the religious orders’ presence in West-Central Africa.2 However, their studies solely discuss the Jesuits and Italian Capuchins’ involvement in slavery, and chronologically only explore the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Simultaneously, the agency of free and enslaved West-Central Africans and the multifaceted relationships they formed with religious orders as a byproduct of the regular clergy’s business dealings have not been extensively discussed by these scholars, with the exception of Carlos Almeida. For other regions of sub-Saharan Africa, these aspects have already been more thoroughly investigated. For example, research by William Francis Rea and more recently Eugénia Rodrigues on the Dominican missions of the Zambezi valley has demonstrated the complexity of the economic and social interactions between missionaries and the local populace.3 Historiography on Brazil has also highlighted the importance of slavery for religious orders even though it has yet to be investigated on a larger scale.4
Eighteenth-century Angola, as a major slaving hub in the South Atlantic, lends itself particularly well to the study of religious orders’ economic activities and the repercussions they had for West-Central Africans.5 This article attempts to demonstrate that the economic side of proselytization in Angola and West-Central Africa as a whole merits much greater attention from researchers. An analysis of the regular clergy’s economic endeavors can provide a deeper understanding of the clerics’ overall role in the region and offers a new perspective on the relationship West-Central Africans formed with the friars. The role of religious orders as landowners and slave owners has never been thoroughly analyzed for this region and chronology. However, in lieu of seeing this as a one-sided interaction solely informed by the perspective of the regular clergy, the agency that West-Central Africans had in their interactions with the friars will take a central place in this study. The first part of this text discusses the specificities of slavery at the convents of Luanda. The second chapter will focus on the situation in the city’s hinterlands, where religious orders owned large amounts of land cultivated by free and enslaved people. A central question will be what characterized the relationships which African rulers formed with the friars and the working and living conditions of free and enslaved West-Central Africans.
Researchers interested in this subject are facing a pronounced dearth of sources regarding religious orders’ participation in slavery and the slave trade in Angola. Moreover, there are very few documents on this subject which permit seeing the regular clergy’s involvement in slavery from the perspective of free and enslaved West-Central Africans affected by it. Archival research at the Academia das Ciências de Lisboa, Arquivo Histórico Ultramarino (Lisbon), Arquivo Nacional de Angola (Talatona/Luanda), and Arquivo Nacional da Torre do Tombo (Lisbon), has revealed that the Third Order of Saint Francis’s economic activities and relationship with West-Central Africans are relatively better documented than those of the other orders. Therefore, this study will mostly focus on source materials concerned with the Third Order’s presence in Angola during the second-half of the eighteenth century. The sources in question are, firstly, inventories of the convent of São José in Luanda elaborated in 1765, 1778, and 1797. These documents, namely the 1765 and 1797 inventories, reflect the efforts taken by the colonial administration in the second-half of the eighteenth century to further bureaucratize the government of Angola and gain insight into the economic activities of the regular clergy.6 Secondly, this study analyses correspondence of Portuguese secular and ecclesiastic officials as well as letters written by African rulers to Portuguese authorities. These source materials, such as the correspondence between the Third Order of Saint Francis’s convent in Luanda and the order’s superiors in Lisbon, echo the various attempts made by the Third Order’s administration in Portugal to more tightly control their brethren in Angola.
Religious Orders and Slavery in Luanda
During the course of the eighteenth century, Luanda—a depiction of the city from this period can be seen in Figure 1—became the largest slaving hub in the Atlantic World, and slavery and the slave trade profoundly shaped the city’s social and economic landscape.7 Enslaved people encompassed about two thirds of Luanda’s 9755 inhabitants in 1781.8 A significant number of enslaved people were thus permanently kept in Luanda and formed the backbone of the city’s labor force.9 Religious orders’ involvement in slavery and the slave trade in Luanda began immediately with the city’s foundation in 1576. The Jesuits became involved in the trade during the first years after the establishment of the Portuguese settlement at Luanda. This sparked a long theological discussion within the order about the morality of participating in such a business.10
View of Luanda in 1755. Courtesy of Arquivo Histórico Ultramarino (Portugal).
Source: Arquivo Histórico Ultramarino (hereafter AHU), Cartografia Manuscrita, doc. 256, “Guilherme Joaquim Paes de Menezes, Vista de parte da cidade de São Paulo da Assunção,” 20 March 1755.
Other religious orders in Luanda were no exception to this; they also owned captives and some sold enslaved people to the Americas.11 After the expulsion of the Jesuits from Angola in 1760, there were three religious orders left in Luanda, namely the Italian Capuchins at the hospício of Santo António, the Third Order of Saint Francis at the convent of São José and the Discalced Carmelites at the convento de Santa Teresa.12 Luanda formed the basis for the orders’ missionary work in the interior of Angola. Whereas the Italian Capuchins by 1750 still maintained seven missionary stations in West-Central Africa, four of which lay in Portuguese Angola, the Discalced Carmelites and the Third Order only were responsible for one mission each.13
The Third Order had been present in Luanda since 1605, however, the number of its members active in the region was always relatively low. In 1797 there were only seven friars living in Angola.14 Moreover, the convent of Luanda had long been regarded as a place of exile for ‘troublesome’ friars by the order’s superiors in Lisbon.15 Four of the aforementioned seven friars had been sent to West-Central Africa as a punishment for their crimes, which included theft and murder.16
The other convents had a very similar number of members. In the late 1790s the Discalced Carmelites, who had come to Luanda in 1659, had four priests and two lay brothers in the city as well as two missionaries in Bango a Kitamba.17 The Italian Capuchin’s hospício, founded in 1648, included four priests and one lay brother in 1797.18 It is important to highlight that all of these three communities were male religious orders and had not accepted novices in Luanda since the late-seventeenth or early-eighteenth century. They were exclusively composed of Europeans during the period analyzed in this study.19
Records on the number of enslaved people owned by the orders are tentative at best, if not downright questionable. According to a document produced around 1765, the Discalced Carmelites owned six, the Third Order four and the Italian Capuchins twelve slaves in Luanda.20 Yet one should be wary of the accuracy of these numbers. The 1778 inventory of the Third Order of Saint Francis’ convent shows a fairly different picture of the scale of the order’s use of enslaved labor at its convent. It refers to a total number of 97 captives owned by the order in Luanda. This record also permits us to gain a unique insight into the lives of the enslaved, for it makes reference to the sex, age group, first name, profession and civil state of the captives. Out of the 97 enslaved people 25 were adult men, 14 young unmarried men, 10 male children, as well as 18 married, 7 widowed, and 23 unmarried women.21
These captives were employed in a variety of different tasks. Out of 39 adult and young men, 24 had a specific skill or were apprentices. Common occupations were jobs that fulfilled everyday demand at the convent. For example, two enslaved persons were barbers and another two were cooks. Others were employed on the Third Order’s land plot at Maianga, then a locality bordering the outskirts of Luanda in direct vicinity to the Third Order’s convent. There, captives produced chalk and bricks, herded cattle and cultivated vegetables.22
Another significant group of enslaved people worked as carpenters and bricklayers.23 Besides being useful in the maintenance of the convent’s buildings these skilled craftspeople could be rented out to others and thus gain the friars some additional income through their labor. So-called escravos de ganho were common throughout the Atlantic World. In Luanda, captives owned by religious orders were sought after craftspeople.24 Religious orders would often ensure that young enslaved people received training in a craft, since they intended to use the labor of these enslaved people in the maintenance of the order’s own properties and/or wanted to have the captives earn money for them as escravos de ganho.25
The Third Order’s escravos de ganho were self-rental slaves, that is, they could roam around the city freely, search for and contract work on their own. However, they had to hand over their earnings or at least a part of it to the friars. This ‘fee’ amounted to 400 réis per day.26 Escravos de ganho had—because of the nature of their work—certain advantages that other enslaved people did not experience. They could achieve significant physical mobility because masters had to allow them to move around freely in the city to find work.27 Their position also allowed them to accumulate money more easily, which in turn could be used to save up for manumission.28 The relationship between friars and captives was based on mutually recognized social norms and hierarchies, and at least certain groups of enslaved people were allowed to maintain spaces of autonomy.
In contrast to the male captives, we unfortunately have very little information on the lives of enslaved women at the Third Order’s convent. Given that the 1778 inventory does not mention any specific crafts exercised by these women, it is possible that they were employed primarily in domestic tasks such as preparing food, sewing or cleaning and taking care of children. Nevertheless, it is also possible that they worked outside the convent. It was common for enslaved women in Luanda to work as street vendors or provide domestic services to the populace of the city.29 The sources, however, do not permit to definitely state what occupations the enslaved women of the Third Order had.
A significant number of these enslaved women were married and lived with their families. In fact, the document describes enslaved women exclusively by their civil state (married, widowed, unmarried).30 Religious orders usually encouraged Christian marriage and the formation of families among their captives. This was motivated by religious concerns but also had more worldly reasons. Children resulting from marriages between captives increased the number of enslaved people owned by the order and allowing such unions also avoided potential tensions between the friars and the enslaved.31 Moreover, deciding who could marry whom also was a way of exercising control over the relationships of enslaved people.32
Enslaved people were frequently subject to sexual violence perpetrated by their masters, particularly enslaved women.33 Despite their vows of chastity, the friars of the Third Order maintained sexual relations with enslaved women, which eventually gained them some criticism from Portuguese officials. Governor João Jacques de Magalhães (1738–1748) even claimed that two members of the Third Order—called Frei Marcelino and Frei Manuel—had built berths inside their convent to house two enslaved women with whom they had sexual relations.34 That enslaved women owned by the Third Order experienced an abusive environment is further underpinned by the fact that friars also harassed women outside the convent. For example, the governor accused Frei Manuel of aggressively harassing black women in the locality of Maianga.35 Hence, enslaved women owned by the regular clergy could be as much subject to violent treatment and sexual violence as those pertaining to secular owners. This demonstrates that it is important to avoid a priori assumptions about the treatment enslaved people faced by the clergy. Benign acts and brutal treatment could go hand in hand, as James Sweet has shown for the Jesuits in eighteenth-century Bahia, and as Carlos Almeida highlights for the Capuchins in seventeenth-century Kongo.36
The close quarters living conditions of the senzalas (slave quarters) certainly worsened this situation. All enslaved people and their families lived in relatively small and confined spaces located in direct proximity to the respective convent.37 In the case of the Third Order the physical proximity with the friars was even greater, for the senzala was directly integrated into the structure of the convent itself.38 Life with the clerics was certainly not free of conflict and some enslaved people tried to escape from the convents. In the 1778 inventory only one man named Matheus Domingos was declared fugitive by the friars of the Third Order.39 Other source materials also reference enslaved people fleeing from the convents of Luanda.40 One motivation for flight was certainly the control the friars exercised over one’s life. Another potential cause for flight was the threat of being sold to the Americas. Like their brethren in Brazil, religious communities in Angola collectively bought and sold enslaved people.41 While religious orders’ collective participation in the slave trade in eighteenth-century Angola is not very well documented, sources show that convents occasionally sold off captives during this period.42 Besides economic reasons for vending captives, the sale of an enslaved person could also be a form of punishment. The Capuchins, for instance, chastised particularly ‘unruly’ slaves in this manner.43 Being shipped across the Atlantic meant facing the horrors of the Middle Passage and servitude in the Americas. Enslaved people in Angola frequently attempted to avoid this fate by fleeing from their owners when they suspected that they would be sold to the Atlantic slave trade.44
Whereas some captives reverted to flight, others found solace in their faith. Religion was a central element of community building and identity for enslaved people in Luanda and those enslaved by the regular clergy were no exception.45 The convents made sure that all of their slaves were baptized, as can be inferred from the captives’ Christian Portuguese names.46 In some cases, the enslaved also had their own churches or chapels built right next to the slave quarters. For example, the senzala adjacent to the convent of the Discalced Carmelites had its own chapel dedicated to the African saint Efigenia of Ethiopia as can be seen in Figure 2.47 This chapel had images of two Ethiopian saints, namely Saint Elesban and the aforementioned Saint Efigenia. Both of these images were venerated there until the demolition of the chapel in the second-half of the nineteenth century.48 It was very common for free and enslaved Africans throughout the Portuguese Empire to venerate black saints.49 Especially the worship of the Ethiopian saints Elesban and Efigenia had grown significantly during the early-seventeenth century, which was intimately linked to the rise of the transatlantic slave trade.50 In eighteenth-century Rio de Janeiro, for example, existed a black confraternity dedicated to the cult of these two saints.51
The cidade baixa (‘lower city’) of Luanda in 1755. In the upper-left corner the map shows the Discalced Carmelites’ convent with its senzalas and the chapel of Santa Efigênia. Courtesy of Arquivo Histórico Ultramarino (Portugal).
Source: AHU, Cartografia Manuscrita, doc. 255, “Guilherme Joaquim Paes de Menezes, Planta topográfica de parte da cidade de São Paulo de Assunção,” 20 February 1755.
Many religious orders, including the Discalced Carmelites, actively used the stories and images of black saints in an attempt to create ‘relatable’ Christian role models for Africans and people of African descent.52 Thus, the choice of Efigenia as the patron saint of the chapel could have been both an initiative of the enslaved or the Carmelites. In any case, Christianity definitely had a significant influence over the lives of those enslaved by the regular clergy. Some were also employed in roles related to the daily ecclesiastical activities at the convents. For example, Domingos, a young enslaved man, served as a sexton—a person responsible for looking after the church building, ringing bells as well as digging graves—at the church of the Third Order.53 Considering that much of religious life in Portuguese Angola was characterized by a mixture of West-Central African and Christian practices it is important to underline that people enslaved by religious orders certainly also included non-Christian elements into their religious practices.54
Agriculture, Slavery, and the Slave Trade in the Luanda Hinterlands
The presence of religious orders in the hinterlands of Luanda had both religious and economic motives. In their primary function as missionaries, the regular clergy maintained several missions in Portuguese Angola. By 1750 there were missionaries in Calumbo (Third Order of Saint Francis), Bango a Kitamba (Discalced Carmelites) as well as Bengo, Massangano, Mbwila, and Kahenda (Italian Capuchins).55 While the Capuchins were very keen to assure that none of their brethren attempted to seek worldly benefits, the Third Order and the Discalced Carmelites were deeply involved in interior trading. Colonial authorities often reported that Franciscans and Carmelites went to the interior explicitly for trading and not for missionary work.56 In 1743 the Portuguese Overseas Council even proposed the expulsion of the Third Order from Angola due to the constant complaints about the order’s mercantile activities.57
Landownership was equally important. Religious orders owned a significant number of agricultural estates (arimos) the rivers Dande, Bengo and Kwanza. These arimos situated along the rivers of the interior had been established during the earliest phase of Portuguese expansion in this part of West-Central Africa in the late-sixteenth century. The agricultural estates—and urban properties—religious orders owned had been the land of West-Central African communities before it was seized from them by the Portuguese.58 Religious orders benefitted immensely from the seizure of West-Central African lands in Angola. The regular clergy accumulated a significant amount of property through land grants by the Portuguese Monarchy and colonial governments as well as donations—often as part of bequests—by private Portuguese and Luso-African landholders. The most prominent example is perhaps the Society of Jesus. The Jesuits were one of the largest landowners in Angola prior to their expulsion in 1760. Their considerable patrimony was a direct result of generous donations made to them by the colony’s first governor, Paulo Dias de Novais, during the late-sixteenth century. Furthermore, the Jesuits received bequests from wealth private individuals, such as that made by slave merchant-turned-Jesuit Gaspar Álvares in the early-seventeenth century.59 As in the case of religious orders in Brazil, agricultural estates were primarily intended to support the community of an individual convent. The order’s provincial superiors usually did not get involved with a convent’s administration of its estates.60
In 1797 the Discalced Carmelites owned a total of 37 arimos located in the districts Dande and Golungo.61 The Third Order of Saint Francis possessed 30 arimos situated in the Dande district as well as along the river Kwanza.62 The Italian Capuchins, on the other hand, only had one arimo at Quidonga on the Bengo River, which was part of their hospício at the same location.63
On these agricultural estates a variety of crops were cultivated; common agricultural products included flour, beans, milho (either millet or sorghum), palm oil and an array of different fruits (the exact varieties of which are not specified by the source). Locally other products like macunde (cowpea) and balla (ground sorghum) could also be found.64 The arimos provided a major part of the foodstuffs sold in Luanda and formed part of the basic alimentation of the city’s population.65
The role of religious orders as landowners and enslavers deeply influenced the relationship the friars built with the local population. West-Central African rulers (sobas), forged alliances with the regular clergy or sometimes with individual friars when they saw it as advantageous. While these relationships were often voluntary and of mutual benefit, the earliest phase of Portuguese colonization saw sobas being legally subordinated to Portuguese landholders, whom they had to pay an annual tribute.66 However, in the early-seventeenth century various sobas violently rebelled against their subjection to Portuguese landholders and the Portuguese Crown abandoned this practice.67
Yet similar arrangements continued to exist well into the eighteenth century. In a 1738 letter penned to the capitães-mores of Angola, the Third Order’s Prior states that Quimbar Paulo Afonso Manuel Ialla ‘pertained’ to his convent and explains that the quimbar had no territory of his own and that all land he cultivated with his subjects had been granted to him by the friars.68 The term quimbar has many different meanings and what exactly a source’s author intended to express by using this word is not always clear. In most cases quimbar either describes a free or enslaved African itinerant trader or a subordinate of a soba serving in the Portuguese military as part of a vassalage treaty between the soba and the Portuguese.69 Be it as it may, the Third Order providing him and his subjects with land put Paulo Ialla in a relationship of dependency with the convent.
This illustrates a situation in which West-Central Africans had to rely on Portuguese and Luso-African landholders for access to cultivatable land. The Portuguese seizure of arable land—which disregarded West-Central African land tenure practices—and the instability in the region accompanied by warfare and slave raiding restricted the amount of cultivatable land available to West-Central African communities.70 West-Central African rulers provided labor through their subjects and paid the Portuguese and Luso-African landholders an annual fee in the form of agricultural produce or other commodities for being allowed to stay on the land and grow crops for their own sustenance.71 It is, nevertheless, important to stress that the provision of subjects as laborers was often not something that West-Central African rulers freely agreed to. Nor did they or their subjects necessarily receive any compensation for it. The Portuguese frequently claimed that sobas as Portuguese vassals were obliged to provide laborers, not only to the colonial administration but also to private individuals.72
Sobas acted as political and economic intermediaries for the Portuguese administration. Portuguese colonial rule was unstable and the Portuguese monarchy did not have the personnel and military capacities to permanently occupy large territories in West-Central Africa.73 Since the late-sixteenth century, the Portuguese therefore relied on creating partnerships with sobas through the signing of vassalage treaties, often setting West-Central African rulers under military pressure beforehand. Sobas were among other things obliged by these contracts to provide military support and pay tribute to the Portuguese as well as to accept missionaries and convert to Christianity. West-Central African rulers could profit from the strengthening of commercial ties with the Portuguese and could obtain support when their authority was challenged.74 However, the treaties often one-sidedly benefited the Portuguese and local officials sometimes blatantly ignored the contracts. Moreover, people living in areas controlled by Portuguese vassals were still vulnerable to enslavement despite official protection.75
Sobas were also important trade partners for Portuguese and Luso-African merchants, this includes religious orders.76 Friars serving in the hinterland missions often maintained strong ties with local West-Central African rulers.77 Through their links with sobas, the regular clergy could also act as an intermediary between them and colonial authorities, as was sometimes the case with the Discalced Carmelites and the soba of Bango a Kitamba.78 Another good example for such an alliance is the connection between Soba Cristóvão Bonbo a Lunga and the Third Order of Saint Francis. Cristóvão Bonbo a Lunga frequently sold enslaved people to the friars, however, problems arose when the friars began to suspect the soba of selling them enslaved people who had run away from their enslaver.79 Allegedly the soba’s ploy was to provide shelter to enslaved people on the run, only to later claim them as his captives and sell them to hinterland traders. Cristóvão Bonbo a Lunga eventually sold one of these enslaved people who had attempted to flee their captivity to the Third Order. When the friars in Luanda became aware of the situation, they invited the soba to visit them at their convent. Bonbo a Lunga accepted the invitation in good faith, only to find himself getting handcuffed and put into the convent’s improvised jail immediately upon his arrival.80 The friars then demanded that he compensate them by handing over four enslaved people, and provide them with 35 porters for transporting goods in the Bengo region. Additionally, the clerics wanted to take a large amount of his land and confiscate all of the flour he and his subjects had produced in the prior year.81
After initially giving in to the order’s demands to regain his freedom, Cristóvão Bonbo a Lunga used his good contacts in Portuguese officialdom. He wrote to Baltazar van Dunem, captain of the Ícolo district, who eventually would support him in his effort to reclaim his property and reputation. Around the same time the friars had used a similar scheme on another West-Central African fidalgo (nobleman) named Cuço. The Third Order had illegally imprisoned two of Cuço’s subjects who had come to visit Luanda at their convent. The fidalgo claimed that the friars had not given them any food during their illegal confinement. Subsequently Cuço made a petition to Governor Rodrigo César de Meneses (1732–1738) who ensured on his behalf that the convent’s Prior would release the two prisoners.82
Even though the sources themselves do not directly mention that these two people were captured to be enslaved, it is possible that this may have been the intention of the friars. The kidnapping of free Africans in order to enslave them was widespread in Angola and Benguela.83 Since the Portuguese were dependent on the collaboration of sobas, colonial authorities would in some cases intervene when relatives or subjects of rulers had been illegally enslaved.84 Governor Rodrigo César de Meneses’s intervention was meant to ensure the fidalgo’s future collaboration with Portuguese authorities, which the friars of the Third Order had undermined with the kidnapping.
Both of these cases demonstrate that on the one hand, the friars did not stray away from inflicting violence and extorting West-Central African rulers. One the other, we see that sobas were not passive subjects to the friars’ caprices, but rather made use of their position as colonial intermediaries and trading partners for Portuguese officials to defend themselves against the friars’ whims.
While sobas and their subjects provided a significant part of the labor force of the arimos, the agricultural estates were also cultivated by enslaved people directly owned by the religious orders. The volume of enslaved people living on the regular clergy’s agricultural estates is difficult to estimate. The clerics had ample incentive to hide the total number of slaves they owned from both secular and ecclesiastic authorities. A common tactic was to claim that exact numbers could not be reported because contact with the enslaved in the interior was difficult and seldom.85 Thus, the inventories examined here never give any concrete figures and at best only vaguely state that there were ‘many’ captives.86
A cursory examination of the Jesuits’ properties in the interior of Angola prior to their expulsion gives us an impression of the potential scale of slavery on religious orders’ agricultural estates in the interior. The Jesuits owned 1080 enslaved people of whom 750 lived on arimos in the hinterlands of Luanda. The largest arimo held 294 captives while the smallest one only had one enslaved person.87 The existence of large arimos with hundreds of enslaved people implies a relatively large-scale agricultural production. Aida Freudenthal and Roquinaldo Ferreira have argued that a plantation-based economy only was fully established in Angola in the mid to late-nineteenth century as a result of a shift in colonial policy towards the expansion of agricultural production.88 Recent research on the interior of Benguela by Esteban Salas on the other hand has shown that agricultural production under Portuguese rule in the period between 1760 and 1860 was quite similar to other colonial plantation systems, even if a largely plantation-based economy only became fully formed later in the nineteenth century.89 Our observations correspond to some extent with those made by Salas. The quantity of enslaved laborers on some estates and the implied large scale of agricultural production, suggests the formation of a plantation-based economy in Angola was already beginning to take shape by the mid to late-eighteenth century.
The exact origins of these enslaved people working on religious orders’ arimos are unclear. In regard to the Italian Capuchins, we know that nearly all of them had come under the order’s control through gifts and donations by wealthy benefactors.90 It is possible that the same applied to a large part of the captives owned by the other orders, records show that some of the Third Order’s captives in fact had come from donations in the form of capelas, but given their involvement in the slave trade a significant part of them could also have been directly purchased by the orders.91
The lives of the enslaved on the arimos differed to some extent from the social microcosm of Luanda’s convents. Captives on religious orders’ properties were mostly not directly supervised by the clerics themselves, simply because the number of friars was insufficient to do so. According to the Portuguese military officer and chronicler Elias Alexandre da Silva Corrêa, landholders did mostly not intervene in the lives of the enslaved, especially in regard to sexual relations, marriage, and religious expression.92 While many landholders did indeed not directly supervise their own estates, they hired supervisors to do the work for them as was noted by Corrêa himself.93 The regular clergy also relied on supervisors to control the population of its agricultural estates. For example, the Third Order employed an enslaved man named José João as an overseer who regularly travelled from Luanda to the interior.94 This phenomenon was not unique to Angola, religious orders in Brazil also made extensive use of enslaved people as estate managers and overseers. Through their profession these individuals held a high status among the enslaved.95 The existence of supervisors indicates that the enslaved people on arimos were subject to restrictions and not simply left to their own devices as suggested by Corrêa.
Besides growing crops for the colonial landholders to sell, the enslaved were allowed to produce food for their own sustenance and normally would be granted one or two days a week to take care of their fields. Work on the arimos was separated between genders in a way similar to pre-colonial West-Central African agricultural production. According to Corrêa, women took care of field work, while men were mostly responsible for weaving, hunting, and military service.96
It is worth noting that the living conditions of enslaved people at the Capuchins’ arimos slightly differed from those endured by the captives of other orders. For one, the captives were under direct supervision of at least one missionary serving at the order’s hospício on the Bengo River. Secondly, the Friars Minor did not sell the harvest of the agricultural estates to yield profit; the agricultural output was solely destined for the sustenance of the missionaries and the enslaved people. Therefore, the role of the enslaved was mostly restricted to agricultural tasks and transporting the baggage of traveling missionaries.97 Their distinct status granted the slaves of the Italian Capuchins the name escravos da missão or escravos de Santo António.98 Yet in other aspects their situation did not differ greatly from that of other enslaved people working on agricultural estates in the hinterlands. Their personal freedom in terms of religious expression and personal relations was perhaps even more restricted considering that they were often directly supervised by missionaries. In fact, the Capuchins frequently interfered in the family life of their slaves and severely chastised disobedient slaves.99
Esteban Salas has recently highlighted that the usage of slave labor for agricultural production in the interior of Benguela was just as violent as on plantations in the Americas.100 The working and living conditions of enslaved people were configured by an economic framework built on the commercialization of their bodies and the exploitation of their labor force. During the eighteenth century, the increasing pressures of the Atlantic slave trade strongly impacted the lives of the free and enslaved inhabitants of the Angolan interior.101 Slavery in the Portuguese colony of Angola was not that different from enslavement in the Americas.102 Working and living conditions on arimos should be seen within this context. Enslaved people on agricultural estates in eighteenth-century Angola faced many of the same threats as other captives. They could be sold by their owner at any time and were subject to supervision. Slavery on agricultural estates in the Angolan interior was not ‘milder’ than other forms of enslavement. This includes the properties of religious orders.
That slavery on arimos was not a ‘milder’ form of enslavement is also highlighted by the fact that captives on agricultural estates frequently resisted their enslavement and attempted to obtain better living conditions. Captives knew how to take advantage of conflicts within Portuguese colonial society. A good example is the slaves of the Society of Jesus. When the Jesuits’ large patrimony was dissolved in the early 1760s, the enslaved people living on the order’s arimos feared that the change of ownership could result in worse living conditions or even in them being sold to the Americas. Burgeoning unrest within the slave community of the Jesuits’ arimos caused the Portuguese authorities to quickly give in to their demands out of fear of a largescale slave rebellion and mass slave flight. The Governor granted the captives two days per week, Friday and Saturday, for taking care of their own sustenance replacing the previous agreement the slaves had made with the Jesuits of one day per week (Sunday).103 Moreover, the enslaved were reassured that they would not be sold, but rather that they could stay with their families on the arimos.104
In addition to the subjects of sobas and enslaved people owned by the religious orders, there was a third category of laborers found on the arimos, namely free dependents.105 Free people had a central role in pre-Portuguese agricultural production, however, Portuguese agricultural estates in sixteenth and seventeenth-century Portuguese Angola relied predominantly on slave labor.106 By the early eighteenth century, enslaved people greatly outnumbered free dependents in some parts of the Angolan interior like in the Ícolo district. Meanwhile, in other regions of the colony—like Muxima and Mpungu a Ndongo—free dependents were represented in larger numbers than enslaved people.107
Agricultural production on religious orders’ estates was not exclusively sustained by slave labor. In 1778 only 19 out of 32 arimos owned by the Third Order had any slaves working on them, even those with captives were said to house very few enslaved people.108 In this situation, the so-called forros agregados (free dependents) could substitute slave labor where it was not available.109 These free workers and their families often held one-year contracts that could be annually renewed.110 Like sobas, free dependents were expected to pay an annual fee to the landowner for being allowed to stay on the property.111
Colonial landholders also appropriated West-Central African social mechanisms to extract more revenue from the local populace, which can be seen as part of a broader development that saw African social institutions being coopted by Europeans and Luso-Africans to generate captives for the slave trade.112 The Third Order, for instance, received tribute payments in beeswax and also obtained enslaved people from its arimos on the Kwanza through a practice called quixingi. Quixingi is defined by the source as an Kimbundu term that describes the inheritance one receives from deceased free dependents and slaves.113 It is unlikely that most of these persons actually owned captives during their lifetime. The family of the deceased probably had to provide a captive to the friars independent of any real inheritance. The origins of this practice are unclear; however, one can surmise that quixingi may have had its roots in lineage slavery or was an outcome of the close links between agricultural production and kinship in Angola.114
These were not the only obligations that free West-Central Africans in the hinterlands had. They were also forced to fulfil services such as transporting goods, collecting firewood, repairing roads, military service, and, perhaps most significantly, they also had to pay tithes to the Portuguese administration.115 It is also important to note that free people were crucial to the functioning of the slave trade. Slave traders depended on the conscription of West-Central African villagers as porters for their journey to slave markets in the interior.116
In this constellation, the arimos of the religious orders were particularly attractive to free workers because the properties of the regular clergy were exempt from any such duties by royal privilege since the seventeenth century.117 Landowners without royal privilege had a hard time attracting forros to their agricultural estates and they began competing with each other over the available free labor force. Joseph Miller has argued that the free and enslaved population of the Angolan interior declined during the second half of the eighteenth century.118 Such a decrease in available work force may explain why colonial landholders conflicted over the use of free laborers on their estates. However, the generalizing conclusions Miller presents in his book Way of Death should always be taken with a grain of salt since he did not make extensive use of sources from Angolan archives.119 Still, controlling free laborers seems to have been an important point of contention between colonial landholders in the second half of the eighteenth century in Angola.
The privileges free people enjoyed on the regular clergy’s properties were a thorn in the side of two very influential groups of Angolan society. In the second-half of the eighteenth century, Portuguese officialdom in conjunction with secular landowners and slave traders unsuccessfully attempted to crackdown on the religious orders’ privileges, claiming that the exemptions from military service, tithes and other duties were detrimental to the Crown’s interests.120 While the forros were landless dependents at the mercy of rural landowners, they understood how to exploit dissentions within the property-owning class and negotiate better living conditions. Forros frequently left one arimo to work on another when landowners raised the annual fee or the free persons could simply not pay the established levy.121 The Third Order stated that as soon as the Portuguese administration had started to collect tithes on their arimos, the forros simply went on to other properties still exempt from taxes.122
Conclusion
The presence of the Third Order of Saint Francis and other religious orders in early modern West-Central Africa cannot be disassociated from the enslavement of Africans. Slavery and the slave trade formed the economic backbone of eighteenth-century Angola and religious orders saw slavery as a way to finance and support their missionary work or simply used it to generate profit. These economic interests were part of the ground on which the relationship between West-Central Africans and the friars was formed.
The relations of the friars to enslaved West-Central Africans were multifaceted. Enslaved people were under constant pressure from the friars, be it through violent treatment or the threat of being sold to the Americas. To resist these pressures, the enslaved formed communities through kinship ties and religion. Simultaneously, enslaved and free people in the hinterlands exploited dissensions within the property-owning class and colonial administration to achieve at least somewhat better living conditions for themselves and their families. Thus, captives and free people employed various strategies to ameliorate their situation. These tactics ranged from resistance to gaining the trust of the clerics.
West-Central African rulers saw the clerics as potential trade partners and had much interest in forming long-standing commercial relationships with the friars. Moreover, the orders could also provide cultivatable land to the sobas and their subjects. All of these business dealings, however, created new dependencies that could turn out unfavorably for sobas. Yet many West-Central African rulers had close links to colonial officials, especially capitães-mores, who could protect or at least help them against the friars in such cases.
This broad array of relationships between friars and West-Central Africans puts into question the prevalent point of view which often reduces the relationship between clergy and local populace to religious and political aspects. West-Central Africans, whether free or enslaved, were not passive in this process; they actively shaped their relationship with the friars and sought to maintain or expand their autonomy whenever possible. The economic activities of the regular clergy underpin that proselytization should be regarded as a multi-faceted process that cannot be separated from the economic interests of its agents.
Acknowledgments
I would like to thank Carlos Almeida and Eugénia Rodrigues as well as the editors and anonymous reviewers of African Economic History for their helpful advice. This text also benefited immensely from the commentaries made by the participants of the workshops 18th Century Africa (University of Cambridge, June 2021) and Life after Slavery (Radboud University Nijmegen and University of Glasgow, December 2020). Research for this study was conducted as part of a PhD project funded by FCT—Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia (SFRH/BD/144573/2019).
Footnotes
Philipp Hofmann (p.hofmann{at}edu.ulisboa.pt), PhD Candidate in African History, Centro de História da Universidade de Lisboa.
↵1. The best example would be the early contacts between the Portuguese and the kingdom of Kongo, see, for example, Anne Hilton, The Kingdom of Kongo (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985), 50–68; Marina de Mello e Souza, “Catolicismo e Comércio na Região do Congo e Angola, Séculos XVI e XVII,” in Nas Rotas do Império: Eixos Mercantis, Tráfico e Relações Sociais no Mundo Português, eds. João Fragoso, Manolo Florentino and Antonio C. J. de Sampaio, 2nd ed., (Vitória: EDUFES, 2014 [2006]): 257–74; John K. Thornton, A History of West Central Africa to 1850 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020), 51–5.
↵2. On the Jesuits’ participation in the slave trade in sixteenth and seventeenth-century Angola, see Dauril Alden, The Making of an Enterprise: The Society of Jesus in Portugal, its Empire, and Beyond, 1540–1750 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996), 213–18; Arlindo M. Caldeira, “Os Jesuítas em Angola nos Séculos XVI e XVII: Tráfico de Escravos e ‘Escrúpulos de Consciência’,” in Trabalho forçado africano. Articulações com o poder político, eds. Alexander Keese (Porto: Campo das Letras, 2007), 47–82; Arlindo M. Caldeira, Escravos e traficantes no império português: O comércio negreiro português no Atlântico durante os séculos XV a XIX (Lisbon: Esfera dos Livros, 2013), 203–11; Beatrix Heintze, Studien zur Geschichte Angolas im 16. und 17. Jahrhundert: ein Lesebuch (Cologne: Rüdiger Köppe Verlag, 1996), 232–49. On the Italian Capuchins’ involvement in slavery, see Carlos Almeida, “Escravos da missão—notas sobre o trabalho forçado nas missões dos capuchinhos no Kongo (finais do séc. XVII),” Revista TEL 5, no. 3 (2014): 40–59; Mukuna Mutanda, “La question des «esclaves d’Église» détenus par les Pères capucins au Kongo et en Angola (1645–1835),” Revue Africaine de Théologie 15, no. 30 (1991): 163–79; Graziano Saccardo, Congo e Angola con la storia dell’antica missione dei cappuccini, 3 vols. (Venezia-Mestre: Curia provinciale dei Cappuccini, 1982–1984), 3:283–306; Carlo Toso, L’Anarchia Congolese nel Sec. XVII: La Relazione Inedita di Marcellino D’Atri (Genoa: Bozzi Editore, 1984), XXXI–LII. The secular clergy’s ties to the slave trade have been recently discussed by Júlia Orioli, see Júlia Porphirio Orioli, Identidade e mobilidade na comunidade de comerciantes de escravos em Angola no final do século XVIII (Master thesis, Universidade de Brasília, 2013), 63–111; Júlia Porphirio Orioli, “Trajetórias, mobilidade social e comércio no Atlântico no século XVIII: o padre angolano Lourenço da Costa de Almeida e seus familiares,” Temporalidades 11, no. 1 (2018): 231–48. For European missionaries’ relationship to slavery and the slave trade in late-nineteenth-century West-Central Africa, see Jelmer Vos, “Child Slaves and Freemen at the Spiritan Mission in Soyo, 1880–1885,” Journal of Family History 35, no. 1 (2010): 71–90.
↵3. William Francis Rea, The Economics of the Zambezi Missions, 1580–1759 (Rome: Institutum Historicum Societatis Iesu, 1976); Eugénia Rodrigues, “Os “cafres da religião”: escravatura, trabalho e resistência em Moçambique no século XVIII,” in África: Brasileiros e Portugueses, Séculos XVI–XIX, eds. Roberto Guedes (Rio de Janeiro: Mauad X; Antigo Regime nos Trópicos Grupo de Pesquisa do CNPq Brasil, 2013), 147–74.
↵4. Researchers have dedicated less attention to the involvement of the clergy in slavery in Brazil than one might expect, considering the significant historiographic production on Brazilian slavery published in the last few decades. However, academic production on this subject has increased in recent years with an emphasis on the nineteenth-century history of Benedictine properties, see Robson Pedrosa Costa, Os Escravos do Santo: Uma História sobre Paternalismo e Transgressão nas Propriedades Beneditinas, nos Séculos XVIII e XIX (Recife: Editora UFPE, 2020); Vitor Hugo Monteiro, Escravos da Religião: Família e Comunidade na Fazenda São Bento de Iguassú (Recôncavo do Rio de Janeiro, Século XIX) (Curitiba: Editora Appris, 2021). Two notable works on earlier periods are Elisabeth A. Johnson, Ora et labora: Labor transitions on Benedictine and Carmelite properties in colonial São Paulo (PhD diss, John Hopkins University, 2009); Stuart B. Schwartz, “The Plantations of St. Benedict: The Benedictine Sugar Mills of Colonial Brazil,” The Americas 39, no. 1 (1982): 1–22. Recent research on the Jesuits involvement in slavery includes, for example, Marcia Sueli Amantino, A Companhia de Jesus e a Cidade do Rio de Janeiro: O Caso do Engenho Velho, Séculos XVII e XVIII (Jundiaí: Paco Editorial, 2018); Carlos Alberto de Moura Ribeiro Zeron, Linha de fé: a Companhia de Jesus e a escravidão no processo de formação da sociedade colonial (Brasil, séculos XVI e XVII) (São Paulo: Edusp, 2011). Further, James Sweet gives various examples of the agency of Africans enslaved by religious orders in Brazil, see James H. Sweet, Recreating Africa: Culture, Kinship, and Religion in the African-Portuguese World, 1441–1771 (Chapel Hill, London: University of North Carolina Press, 2003). Franciscans’ slave ownership in Brazil has been touched upon by Venâncio Willeke, however, his work has a somewhat apologetic tone, see Venâncio Willeke, “Klostersklaven in Brasilien,” Archivum Franciscanum Historicum 69, no. 3–4 (1976): 423–43.
↵5. The term Angola, as it is used in this article, refers to the so-called Kwanza corridor or rather the territories under formal Portuguese control in West-Central Africa (excluding Benguela and hinterlands) that reached from Luanda on the coast to the fortress of Mpungu a Ndongo in the east.
↵6. On the bureaucratization process, see Catarina Madeira Santos, Um Governo “Polido” para Angola: Reconfigurar Dispositivos de Domínio (1750–C.1800) (PhD diss, Universidade Nova de Lisboa, 2005); Catarina Madeira Santos, “Administrative Knowledge in a Colonial Context: Angola in the Eighteenth Century,” British Journal for the History of Science 43, no. 4 (2010): 539–56. The earliest known inventories from the Arquivo Nacional da Torre do Tombo are a direct consequence of the bureaucratization efforts under Governor Sousa Coutinho (1764–1772). Arquivo Nacional de Angola (hereafter ANA), cod. 3, “Ofício (cópia) do governador e capitão-general de Angola, Francisco Inocêncio de Sousa Coutinho, ao secretário de estado da Marinha e Ultramar, Francisco Xavier de Mendonça Furtado,” 30 June 1765, 174–75v. The general attitude of the Portuguese monarchy towards religious orders in Brazil during the second-half of the eighteenth century is discussed in Johnson, Ora et labora, 174–208.
↵7. See Roquinaldo A. Ferreira, “Slavery and the Social and Cultural Landscapes of Luanda,” in The Black Urban Atlantic in the Age of the Slave Trade, eds. James Sidbury, Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra and Matt D. Childs (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013), 187–208; Joseph C. Miller, Way of Death: Merchant Capitalism and the Angolan Slave Trade 1730–1830 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1988); Daniel B. Domingues da Silva, “The Atlantic Slave Trade from Angola: A Port-by-Port Estimate of Slaves Embarked, 1701–1867,” International Journal of African Historical Studies 46, 1 (2013), 105–22; Daniel B. Domingues da Silva, The Atlantic slave trade from West Central Africa, 1780–1867 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2017); Daniel B. Domingues da Silva, “The Supply of Slaves from Luanda, 1768–1806: Records of Anselmo da Fonseca Coutinho”, African Economic History 38 (2010): 53–76.
↵8. For a demographic analysis of eighteenth-century Luanda, see José C. Curto and Raymond R. Gervais, “A dinâmica demográfica de Luanda no contexto do tráfico de escravos do Atlântico Sul, 1781–1844,” Topoi 4 (2002): 85–138, 113–20; José C. Curto, “Sources for the pre-1900 population history of sub-saharan Africa: the case of Angola, 1773–1845,” Annales de démographie historique 1 (1994): 319–38; Maximiliano M. Menz and Gustavo A. Lopes, “A população do Reino de Angola durante a era do tráfico de escravos: um exercício de estimativa e interpretação (c. 1700–1850),” Revista de História (São Paulo) 177 (2018): 1–35.
↵9. Ferreira, “Slavery and the Social,” 189–91.
↵10. On the theological discussion surrounding the Jesuits’ involvement in slavery in Angola, see Luiz Felipe de Alencastro, O Trato dos Viventes: Formação do Brasil no Atlântico Sul, 2nd ed. (São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 2020 [2000]), 168–79; Luiz Felipe de Alencastro, “Portuguese Missionaries and Early Modern Antislavery and Proslavery Thought,” in Slavery and Antislavery in Spain’s Atlantic Empire, eds. Josep Maria Fradera and Christopher Schmidt-Nowara (New York: Berghahn Books, 2013), 43–73; Zeron, Linha de fé, 159–88.
↵11. Arquivo Nacional da Torre do Tombo (hereafter ANTT), CLNH, mç. 49, doc. 73, “Notas dos rendimentos dos conventos da cidade de Luanda,” after 1765, 2v; ANA, Correspondência com entidades da colónia 1771–1772, “Carta do governador e capitão-general de Angola, Francisco Inocêncio de Sousa Coutinho, ao capitão-mor do Dande, Martinho Teixeira de Mendonça,” 25 November 1771, 10v, in Arquivos de Angola 3, no. 28 (1937): 315.
↵12. Even though some Portuguese sources utilize the term convento, the Capuchins did not formally have a convent at Luanda, but rather the missionaries were living in a hospício without enclosure. Archivio Storico de Propaganda Fide, SRC, Africa, Angola, Congo, vol. 5, “Informazione del Regno di Congo e d’Angola,” 294–300, in Carlo Toso, Il Congo nella seconda meta’ del XVIII secolo: Il “breve ragguaglio” di P. Cherubino da Savona (Rome: L’Italia Francescana, 1976), 180–81. Unfortunately, there appears to be no eighteenth-century map showing all of the city’s convents, however, there are various seventeenth and nineteenth-century depictions of Luanda that indicate the location of these buildings, see, for instance, Biblioteca Nacional do Brasil (hereafter BN), Cartografia, ARC.022,03,029, “Loanda: capital de Angola,” 1862; Nationaal Archief, Kaartcollectie Buitenland Leupe, 4.VELH619–63, “Johannes Vingboons, D Stadt Loandas Pauli,” 1665. A slightly altered copy of Johannes Vingboons’ 1665 map, augmented with a legend, can be found as, BN, Cartografia, ARC.016,09,033 ex.2, “Andrea Antonio Orazi, Pianta della cittá di Loanda, ó, S. Paolo metropoli del regno d’Angola,” 1698.
↵13. Saccardo, Congo e Angola, 2:311.
↵14. AHU, CU, Angola, cx. 86, doc. 22, “Relação dos religiosos da Terceira Ordem do convento de São José,” 16 September 1797.
↵15. Saccardo, Congo e Angola, 1:164–67.
↵16. All seven members of the Third Order in Angola in 1797 were ordained priests. No laypeople are mentioned. AHU, CU, Angola, cx. 86, doc. 22, 16 September 1797.
↵17. AHU, CU, Angola, cx. 86, doc. 22, “Relação dos Carmelitas Descalços do convento de Santa Teresa,” October 1797.
↵18. AHU, CU, Angola, cx. 86, doc. 22, “Hospício dos Capuchinhos Italianos em Luanda,” 22 September 1797.
↵19. AHU, CU, Angola, cx. 57, doc. 9, “Ofício do governador e capitão-general de Angola D. António de Lencastre, ao secretário de estado da Marinha e Ultramar, Martinho de Melo e Castro,” 3 February 1773.
↵20. ANTT, CLNH, mç. 49, doc. 73, after 1765, 3, 4v, 7.
↵21. The document actually indicates 98 enslaved people; however, one widowed woman named Gracia Paulo is listed as already deceased. The number of captives at the convent actually diminished towards the end of the eighteenth century. In 1797 only 59 enslaved people were said to be owned by the Third Order in Luanda. Academia das Ciências de Lisboa (hereafter ACL), SV, ms. 793, “Inventário do convento de São José,” 12 November 1778, 12–14; AHU, CU, Angola, cx. 86, doc. 22, 16 September 1797.
↵22. ACL, SV, ms. 793, 12 November 1778, 10v–11.
↵23. ACL, SV, ms. 793, 12 November 1778, 10v–11.
↵24. Ferreira, “Slavery and the Social,” 190; Roquinaldo A. Ferreira, Cross-Cultural Exchange in The Atlantic World: Angola and Brazil during the Era of the Slave Trade (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 93–94.
↵25. See, Johnson, Ora et labora, 122.
↵26. ANTT, CLNH, mç. 49, doc. 73, 1v.
↵27. João José Reis, “The Revolution of the ‘Ganhadores’: Urban Labour, Ethnicity and the African Strike of 1857 in Bahia, Brazil,” Journal of Latin American Studies 29 (1997): 455–93, 459. For a thorough study of escravos de ganho in nineteenth-century Bahia, see João José Reis, Ganhadores: a greve negra de 1857 na Bahia (São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 2019).
↵28. Mariana P. Candido, An African Slaving Port and the Atlantic World: Benguela and its Hinterland (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 118.
↵29. Arlindo M. Caldeira, “Luanda in the 17th Century: Diversity and Cultural Interaction in the Process of Forming an Afro-Atlantic City,” Nordic Journal of African Studies 22 (2013): 72–104, 87, Candido, An African Salving Port, 117; Vanessa S. Oliveira, “Donas, pretas livres e escravos em Luanda (Séc. XIX),” Estudos Ibero-Americanos 44, no. 3 (2018): 447–56, 452.
↵30. ACL, SV, ms. 793, 12 November 1778, 13–14.
↵31. Costa, Os Escravos do Santo, 37, 216.
↵32. Almeida, “Escravos da missão,” 41.
↵33. Sweet, Recreating Africa, 72. The condition of enslaved women in early-nineteenth-century Angola has most recently been the subject of a study by Mariana Candido and Vanessa Oliveira, see Mariana P. Candido and Vanessa S. Oliveira, “The Status of Enslaved Women in West Central Africa, 1800–1830,” African Economic History 49, no. 1 (2021): 127–53.
↵34. AHU, CU, Angola, cx. 36, doc. 3424, “Carta do governador e capitão-general de Angola, João de Magalhães, ao rei D. João V,” 12 December 1739, 1v–2v.
↵35. AHU, CU, Angola, cx. 36, doc. 3424, “Carta do governador e capitão-general de Angola, João de Magalhães, ao rei D. João V,” 12 December 1739, 1v–2v.
↵36. Carlos Almeida, ““Ajustar à Forma do Viver Cristão”: Missão Católica e Resistências em Terras Africanas,” Cadernos de Estudos Africanos 33 (2017): 59–80, 71; Almeida, “Escravos da missão,” 45–53; Sweet, Recreating Africa, 59–60.
↵37. A good example of this type of structure is the Discalced Carmelites’ convent, which can be seen below in Figure 2.
↵38. ACL, SV, ms. 793, 12 November 1778, 10v–11.
↵39. ACL, SV, ms. 793, 12 November 1778, 12v.
↵40. ANTT, CLNH, mç. 49, doc. 73, 2v; Carta do governador e capitão-general de Angola, Francisco Inocêncio de Sousa Coutinho, ao capitão-mor do Dande, Martinho Teixeira de Mendonça, 25 November 1771, ANA, Correspondência com entidades da colónia 1771–1772, 10v, in Arquivos de Angola 3, no. 28 (1937): 315.
↵41. On Brazil see, for example, Costa, Os Escravos do Santo, 43; Schwartz, “The Plantations of St. Benedict,” 3, 8; Willeke, “Klostersklaven,” 425–26.
↵42. The Carmelites as well as the Third Order are documented as having sold captives collectively. ANTT, CLNH, mç. 49, doc. 73, after 1765, 2v; ACL, SV, ms. 793, “Carta do comissário do convento de São José, frei Clemente José de Mello, ao provincial da Ordem Terceira,” 22 May 1778, 1v.
↵43. Almeida, “Escravos da missão,” 53.
↵44. On the flight of enslaved people in Portuguese Angola, see José C. Curto, “Resistência à Escravidão na África: O Caso dos Escravos Fugitivos Recapturados em Angola, 1846–1876,” Afro-Ásia 33 (2005): 67–86; Roquinaldo A. Ferreira, “Slaving and Resistance to Slaving in West-Central Africa,” in The Cambridge World History of Slavery, eds. David Eltis and Stanley L. Engerman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 111–31; Roquinaldo A. Ferreira, “Slave Flights and Runaway Communities in Angola (17th–19th centuries),” Anos 90 21 (2015): 65–90; Aida Freudenthal, A recusa da escravidão: quilombos de Angola no século XIX (Luanda: Ministério da Educação e Cultura, 1999); Heintze, Studien zur Geschichte, 232–49.
↵45. Ferreira, Cross-Cultural Exchange, 91–92.
↵46. ACL, SV, ms. 793, 12 November 1778, 12–14
↵47. AHU, Cartografia Manuscrita, doc. 255, 20 February 1755. This has also been noted by Lucilene Reginaldo, see Lucilene Reginaldo, Os Rosários dos Angolas: Irmandades de africanos e crioulos na Bahia Setecentista (São Paulo: Alameda, 2011), 67–68.
↵48. The two images in question appear to have survived at least until the mid-1930s. Unfortunately, their current whereabouts are unknown. Manuel Nunes Gabriel, Padrões da Fé: As Igrejas Antigas de Angola (Braga: Editora Pax, Arquidiocese de Luanda, 1981), 128.
↵49. Lucilene Reginaldo, ““África em Portugal”: Devoções, Irmandades e Escravidão no Reino de Portugal, Século XVIII,” História (São Paulo) 28, no. 1 (2009): 289–319, 309–10.
↵50. Erin Kathleen Rowe, Black Saints in Early Modern Global Catholicism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019), 32, 55–56.
↵51. Mariza de Carvalho Soares, People of Faith: Slavery and African Catholics in Eighteenth-Century Rio de Janeiro (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011), 151–53.
↵52. Anderson J. Machado de Oliveira, “A Santa dos Pretos: A Apropriações do Culto de Santa Efigênia no Brasil Colonial,” Afro-Ásia 35 (2007): 237–62, 239–40; Anderson J. Machado de Oliveira, Devoção negra: Santos Pretos e Catequese no Brasil Colonial (Rio de Janeiro: Quartet; Faperj, 2008), 214–29. The veneration of Black saints also played an important role in the Antonian movement in Kongo, see John K. Thornton, The Kongolese Saint Anthony: Dona Beatriz Kimpa Vita and the Antonian Movement, 1684–1706 (Cambridge, New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998). On the general role of black saints in the early modern Catholic world, see Rowe, Black Saints. The links between proselytization and slavery in colonial Brazil are discussed in Bruno Hoffmann Velloso da Silva, A Ordem Cristã no Governo dos Escravos: Normas para a Cristianização e Tratamento dos Escravos no Brasil Colonial (1697–1759) (Master thesis, Universidade de Brasília, 2011).
↵53. ACL, SV, ms. 793, 12 November 1778, 13.
↵54. See, Fereira, Cross-Cutlural Exchange, 177–88. Also see on religious life in Angola, for example, Linda M. Heywood, “Portuguese into African: The Eighteenth-Century Central African Background to Atlantic Creole Cultures,” in Central Africans and Cultural Transformations in the American Diaspora, eds. Linda M. Heywood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 91–116; Kalle Kananoja, “Healers, Idolaters, and Good Christians: A Case Study of Creolization and Popular Religion in Mid-Eighteenth Century Angola,” The International Journal of African Historical Studies 43, no. 3 (2010): 443–65.
↵55. Saccardo, Congo e Angola, 2:311. However, it is worth mentioning that in the late-eighteenth century, regular clerics also sometimes served as parish priests in other areas. Hence, the presence of the regular orders was not exclusively limited to these locations. Biblioteca Arquiepiscopal de Luanda, livro 12, Provisões e Mandados, 1782–1834, 7v, 13, 22.
↵56. Portuguese officials frequently expressed their preference for the Capuchins over other religious orders, mainly because of the Carmelites and Third Order’s involvement in the hinterland trade. ANA, Ofícios para o reino, cod. 5, “Carta do governador e capitão-general de Angola, Miguel António de Melo, ao ministro da Marinha, Rodrigo de Sousa Coutinho,” 3 October 1797, 9–10, in Arquivos de Angola 7, second series, no. 27–29 (1950): 77–78; AHU, CU, Angola, cx. 36, doc. 3424, “Carta (cópia) do tabelião António da Silva Pereira Vasconcelos ao governador e capitão-general de Angola, João de Magalhães,” 6 August 1738; AHU, CU, Angola, cx. 36, doc. 3424, 12 December 1739; AHU, CU, Angola, cx. 36, doc. 3424, “Carta (cópia) do bispo de Angola, frei António do Desterro, ao governador e capitão-general de Angola, João de Magalhães,” 15 July 1741.
↵57. AHU, CU, Angola, cx. 36, doc. 3424, “Consulta do Conselho Ultramarino ao rei D. João V,” 16 May 1743, 1–1v.
↵58. On the long process of seizure of land from West-Central Africans by the Portuguese, see Mariana P. Candido, “Conquest, Occupation, Colonialism and Exclusion: Land Disputes in Angola,” in Property Rights, Land and Territory in the European Overseas Empires, eds. Bárbara Direito, Susana Münch Miranda, Eugénia Rodrigues, and José Vicente Serrão (Lisbon: CEHC-IUL, 2015), 223–33; Mariana P. Candido, Wealth, Land, and Property in Angola: A History of Dispossession, Slavery, and Inequality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022); Freudenthal, Arimos e Fazendas.
↵59. See, Caldeira, Escravos e traficantes, 180–85; Caldeira, “Os Jesuítas em Angola,” 53–55; Heintze, Studien zur Geschichte, 99–100. On agriculture in eighteenth-century Angola, see Joseph C. Miller, “The Significance of Drought, Disease and Famine in the Agriculturally Marginal Zones of West-Central Africa,” The Journal of African History 23 (1982): 17–61, 51–52; Oliveira, “Gender, Foodstuff Production and Trade;” Venâncio, A Economia de Luanda, 70–90.
↵60. Schwartz, “The Plantations of St. Benedict Plantations,” 22.
↵61. AHU, CU, Angola, cx. 86, doc. 22, 7 October 1797.
↵62. AHU, CU, Angola, cx. 86, doc. 22, 19 September 1797.
↵63. AHU, CU, Angola, cx. 86, doc. 22, 22 September 1797.
↵64. ANTT, CLNH, mç. 49, doc. 73, after 1765, 1–1v, 4–4v, 6.
↵65. Caldeira, “Luanda in the 17th Century,” 86; Freudenthal, Arimos e Fazendas, 149–50; Oliveira, “Gender, Foodstuff Production and Trade,” 61–62.
↵66. Freudenthal, Arimos e Fazendas, 81–82. On tributes and the relationship between landowners and sobas in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, see Ilídio do Amaral, O Consulado de Paulo Dias de Novais: Angola no Último Quartel do Século XVI e Primeiro do Século XVII (Lisbon: Ministério da Ciência e da Tecnologia, Instituto de Investigação Científica Tropical, 2000), 225–43; Caldeira, “Os Jesuítas em Angola,” 54–55; Heintze, Studien zur Geschichte, 193–211.
↵67. Caldeira, “Os Jesuítas em Angola,” 54–56.
↵68. AHU, CU, Angola, cx. 36, doc. 3424, “Carta do ministro da terceira ordem, frei João do Nascimento, aos capitães-mores de Angola,” 20 August 1738.
↵69. On quimbares as itinerant traders, see Ferreira, Cross-Cultural Exchange, 59. A list of examples that explicates various usages of the term quimbar can be found in Beatrix Heintze, Fontes para a História de Angola do Século XVII: Memórias, Relações e Outros Manuscritos da Colectânea Documental de Fernão de Sousa (1622–1635) (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 1985), 1:126–27.
↵70. See, Candido, Wealth, Land, and Property, 49, 55–58; Freudenthal, Arimos e Fazendas, 150.
↵71. ACL, SV, ms. 793, “Carta do comissário do convento de São José, frei Clemente José de Mello, ao provincial da Ordem Terceira,” 30 October 1778.
↵72. For an in-depth discussion of this topic, see Crislayne Alfagali, Ferreiros e fundidores da Ilamba: Uma história social da fabricação de ferro e da Real Fábrica de Nova Oeiras (Angola, segunda metade do séc. XVIII) (Luanda: Fundação Dr. António Agostinho Neto, 2018), 175–207.
↵73. Candido, “Conquest, Occupation, Colonialism and Exclusion,” 224–25.
↵74. Ferreira, Cross-Cultural Exchange, 39–42; Beatrix Heintze, “Der portugiesisch-afrikanische Vasallenvertrag in Angola im 17. Jahrhundert,” Paideuma: Mitteilungen zur Kulturkunde 25 (1979): 195–223, 201–12.
↵75. Candido, An African Slaving Port, 202, 205–6. The enslavement of vassals is extensively discussed in Ferreira, Cross-Cultural Exchange, 52–87.
↵76. Ferreira, Cross-Cultural Exchange, 38–39.
↵77. This also parallels similar developments observed for eighteenth-century Mozambique, see Rodrigues, “Os “cafres da religião”,” 152. AHU, CU, Angola, cx. 42, doc. 3958, “Carta (cópia) do tenente da companhia de cavalos, Francisco Xavier de Andrade, ao governador e capitão-general de Angola, D. António Alvares da Cunha,” 9 December 1754, 1; Orioli, Identidade e mobilidade, 101.
↵78. ANA, cod. 88, “Carta (cópia) do governador e capitão-general de Angola, Manuel de Almeida e Vasconcelos, ao missionário de Bango a Kitamba,” 2 March 1795, 39–39v; ANA, cod. 88, “Carta (cópia) do governador e capitão-general de Angola, Manuel de Almeida e Vasconcelos, ao capitão-mor de Golungo, Vicente Ruiz Fialho,” 11 December 1795, 230–31v.
↵79. On illegal enslavement, see Mariana P. Candido, “The Transatlantic Slave Trade and the Vulnerability of Free Blacks in Benguela, Angola, 1780–1830,” in Atlantic Biographies: Individuals and Peoples in the Atlantic World, eds. Jeffrey A. Fortin and Mark Meuwese (Leiden, Boston: Brill, 2014), 193–209; José C. Curto, “Struggling against Enslavement: The Case of José Manuel in Benguela, 1816–20,” Canadian Journal of African Studies 39, no. 1 (2005): 96–122.
↵80. AHU, CU, Angola, cx. 38, doc. 3606, “Carta do capitão-mor do distrito de Ícolo, Baltazar van Dunem, ao governador e capitão-general de Angola, João José Jacques de Magalhães,” 22 February 1747; AHU, CU, Angola, cx. 38, doc. 3606, “Carta do ministro do convento de São José, frei José de Santa Cecília, ao soba Cristóvão Bonbo a Lunga,” before 1747.
↵81. AHU, CU, Angola, cx. 31, doc. 3014, “Carta do governador e capitão-general de Angola, Rodrigo César de Meneses ao rei D. João V, 20 March 1735,” 1–1v; AHU, CU, Angola, cx. 38, doc. 3606, “Carta do soba Cristovão Bonbo a Lunga ao capitãomor do distrito de Ícolo, Baltazar van Dunem,” around 1747.
↵82. AHU, CU, Angola, cx. 38, doc. 3606, “Petição do fidalgo Cuço,” before 3 May 1747.
↵83. On this subject, see, Mariana P. Candido, “African Freedom Suits and Portuguese Vassal Status: Legal Mechanisms for Fighting Enslavement in Benguela, Angola, 1800–1830,” Slavery & Abolition 32, no. 3 (2011): 447–59; Candido, An African Salving Port, 191–236; Mariana P. Candido, “The Vulnerability of Free Blacks in Benguela, Angola, 1750–1830,” in Atlantic Biographies that Cross the Ocean, eds. Jeffrey A. Fortin and Mark Meuwese (Leiden: Brill, 2013), 193–209; Mariana P. Candido, “O Limite Tênue entre Liberdade e Escravidão em Benguela durante a Era do Comércio Transatlântico,” Afro-Ásia 47 (2013): 239–68; José C. Curto, “Experiences of Enslavement in West Central Africa,” Histoire sociale / Social History 41, no. 82 (2008): 381–415; José C. Curto, “Struggling against Enslavement: The Case of José Manuel in Benguela, 1816–20,” Canadian Journal of African Studies / Revue Canadienne des Études Africaines 39, no. 1 (2005): 96–122; José C. Curto, “The Story of Nbena, 1817–1820: Unlawful Enslavement and the Concept of “Original Freedom” in Angola,” in Trans-Atlantic Dimensions of Ethnicity in the African Diaspora, eds. Paul E. Lovejoy and David V. Trotman (London and New York: Continuum, 2003), 43–64; Ferreira, Cross-Cultural Exchange, 52–87; Roquinaldo A. Ferreira, “Tribunal de Mucanos: Slavery and Freedom in Angola (17–19th Centuries),” in O Colonialismo Português: Novos Rumos da Historiografia dos PALOP, eds. Centro de Estudos Africanos da Universidade do Porto (Vila Nova de Famalicão: Edições Húmus, 2013), 135–53.
↵84. Candido, An African Slaving Port, 225–26.
↵85. ACL, ms. 793, 30 October 1778, 4–6v.
↵86. ACL, ms. 793, 12 November 1778, 12–15v; AHU, CU, Angola, cx. 86, doc. 22, 19 September 1797; AHU, CU, Angola, cx. 86, doc. 22, 22 September 1797; AHU, CU, Angola, cx. 86, doc. 22, 7 October 1797; ANTT, CLNH, mç. 49, doc. 73, after 1765.
↵87. AHU, CU, Angola, cx. 47, doc. 4291, “Ofício do governador e capitão-general de Angola, António de Vasconcelos, ao secretário de estado do Reino e Mercês, Sebastião José de Carvalho e Melo,” 29 July 1760.
↵88. See, Freudenthal, Arimos e Fazendas, 54–55, 125–26; Roquinaldo A. Ferreira, “Agricultural Enterprise and Unfree Labour in Nineteenth-Century Angola,” in Commercial Agriculture, the Slave Trade & Slavery in Atlantic Africa, eds. Robin Law, Suzanne Schwarz, and Silke Strickrodt (Oxford: James Currey, 2016), 225–42.
↵89. See, Esteban A. Salas, Making Portuguese Colonial Governance: Slavery, Forced Labor, and Racial Ideology in the Interior from Benguela, 1760–1860 (PhD diss, University of Notre Dame, 2021), 37, 216; Esteban A. Salas, “Women and Food Production: Agriculture, Demography and Access to Land in Late Eighteenth-Century Catumbela,” in African Women in the Atlantic World, eds. Mariana P. Candido and Adam Jones (Woodbridge: James Currey, 2019), 55–69.
↵90. Mukuna, “Esclaves d’église,” 165–66; Saccardo, Congo e Angola, 3:297; Toso, L’Anarchia Congolese, XLVII.
↵91. ACL, ms. 793, 12 November 1778, 14–15v.
↵92. Corrêa, História de Angola, 1:112–14.
↵93. Corrêa, História de Angola, 1:112. On this also, see Venâncio, A Economia de Luanda, 82–84.
↵94. AHU, CU, Angola, cx. 36, doc. 3424, 20 August 1738; AHU, CU, Angola, cx. 38, doc. 3606, around 1747.
↵95. The use of enslaved administrators for rural properties in Brazil was especially widespread among the Benedictines because of a lack of personnel, see Costa, Os Escravos do Santo, 133; Johnson, Ora et labora, 111–16; Schwartz, “The Plantations of St. Benedict,” 20.
↵96. Corrêa, História de Angola (Lisbon: Ática, 1937), 1:113. See, Freudenthal, Arimos e Fazendas, 85–88; Venâncio, A Economia, 85.
↵97. On the Capuchins’ escravos da missão, see Almeida, “Escravos da missão;” Mukuna, “Esclaves d’église;” Saccardo, Congo e Angola, 3:271–306.
↵98. ANTT, CLNH, mç. 49, doc. 73, after 1765, 6.
↵99. Almeida, “Escravos da missão,” 45–53. For a discussion of religious orders’ interference in the relationships of their captives in Brazil, see, for example, Costa, Os Escravos do Santo, 60–73; Monteiro, Escravos da Religião, 85–148; Schwartz, “The Plantations of St. Benedict,” 18–20.
↵100. Salas, Making Portuguese Colonial Governance, 108.
↵101. Ferreira, Cross-Cultural Exchange, 67.
↵102. See, Candido, Wealth, Land, and Property, 139–40.
↵103. Granting enslaved people one day per week to take care of their own fields was also common on Benedictine properties in Brazil. Schwartz, “The Plantations of St. Benedict,” 20.
↵104. AHU, CU, Angola, cx. 46, doc. 4279, “Ofício do governador e capitão-general de Angola, António de Vasconcelos, ao secretário de estado do Reino e Mercês, Sebastião José de Carvalho e Melo,” 7 July 1760, 1v; AHU, CU, Angola, cx. 46, doc. 4286, “Ofício do governador e capitão-general de Angola, António de Vasconcelos, ao secretário de estado do Reino e Mercês, Sebastião José de Carvalho e Melo,” 29 July 1760, 1v.
↵105. Freudenthal, Arimos e Fazendas, 95–97; Venâncio, A Economia de Luanda, 80.
↵106. António de Oliveira de Cadornega, História Geral das Guerras Angolanas (Lisbon: Agência Geral das Colónias, 1942), 3:47; Freudenthal, Arimos e Fazendas, 92–93; Thornton, A History of West Central Africa, 120.
↵107. Alexandre Bittencourt Leite Marques, “Os escravos residentes nos enclaves coloniais dos sertões de Angola, África Centro-Ocidental (século XVIII),” in Anais Eletrônico do XIII Encontro Estadual de História (15 e 19 de Setembro de 2020): “História e mídias: narrativas em disputas”, eds. ANPUH Pernambuco, Universidade Federal Rural de Pernambuco, Last Accessed 24 April 2021, https://www.encontro2020.pe.anpuh.org/resources/anais/22/anpuh-pe-eeh2020/1601753981_ARQUIVO_5adae911dfd0d549c02d508685d1b510.pdf, 5–6.
↵108. ACL, SV, ms. 793, 12 November 1778, 14–15v.
↵109. Whereas in Portuguese America forro usually refers to a once enslaved individual who gained his or her freedom through manumission, forros in the context of West-Central Africa simply refers to free-born Africans. Forro agregado, from Portuguese agregar (to add), can be roughly translated as ‘free dependent’.
↵110. Venâncio, A Economia de Luanda, 80.
↵111. AHU, CU, Angola, cx. 38, doc. 3631, “Carta do ministro do convent de São José, frei José de Santa Cecília, ao governador e capitão-general de Angola, João Joaquim Jacques de Magalhães,” 7 May 1747.
↵112. Other examples of this appropriation process would be the so called baculamentos (tributes paid by sobas to the Portuguese king) as well as the use of mucano trials to generate slaves in the eighteenth century, see Candido, An African Slaving Port, 214–16; Ferreira, Cross-Cultural Exchange, 69–71; Aida Freudenthal and Selma Pantoja, Livro dos Baculamentos: Que os Sobas deste Reino de Angola pagam a Sua Majestade (Luanda: Ministério da Cultura; Arquivo Nacional de Angola, 2013).
↵113. ANTT, CLNH, mç. 49, doc. 73, after 1765, 4.
↵114. Joseph C. Miller, “Imbangala Lineage Slavery (Angola),” in Slavery in Africa: Historical and anthropological perspectives, eds. Suzanne Miers and Igor Kopytoff (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1977), 205–23. See Freudenthal, Arimos e Fazendas, 79–83.
↵115. David Birmingham, Central Africa to 1870: Zambezia, Zaïre and the South Atlantic (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 82.
↵116. Miller, Way of Death, 265–68.
↵117. AHU, CU, Angola, cx. 36, doc. 3424, 20 August 1738.
↵118. Miller, Way of Death, 265–68.
↵119. For a recent critical reevaluation of Miller’s book Way of Death, see Mariana P. Candido, “Capitalism and Africa: Revisiting Way of Death Thirty-Five Years after its Publication,” American Historical Review 127, no. 3 (2022): 1439–48.
↵120. AHU, CU, Angola, cx. 38, doc. 3606, “Carta do governador e capitão-general de Angola, João Jacques de Magalhães,” 28 December 1746; ANA, cod. 3, “Ofício (cópia) do governador e capitão-general de Angola, D. Francisco Inocêncio de Sousa Coutinho, ao secretário de estado da Marinha e Ultramar, Francisco Xavier de Mendonça Furtado,” 9 May 1765, 167v–68.
↵121. AHU, CU, Angola, cx. 38, doc. 3631, “Carta do ministro do convento de São José, frei José de Santa Cecília, ao governador e capitão-general de Angola, João Joaquim Jacques de Magalhães,” 7 May 1747, 1.
↵122. ANA, cod. 252, “Petição (cópia) dos irmãos da ordem terceira de São Francisco de Luanda,” before 2 September 1779, 33v–34; ACL, SV, ms. 283, “Carta (cópia) do governador e capitão-general de Angola, António de Lencastre, ao secretário de estado da marinha e do ultramar, Martinho de Mello e Castro,” 15 July 1778, 69–71v.
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