The Two Quilengues and the Baculamento Taxation System

Abstract

The Portuguese colonial state’s imposition of taxes on two separate groups of chiefdoms with the same name, Quilengues, evidences how the appropriated precolonial tribute system called baculamento was used to extract foodstuff and not only enslaved people in Angola and Benguela in the 1790. This was part of the Portuguese interest in controlling territories in addition to trade, two central features of their long-run colonial expansion in West Central Africa preceding the colonial rule that consolidated after the Berlin Conference (1884–1885). This was the scenario of the production of norms linking precolonial and colonial cultivation, taxation, and social categories to secure access to land, water, and cultivation. Thinking about the plantationocene demands examining the uneven agencies of those involved in it, their trajectories in their societies of origin, and how colonial expansion affected cultivation in West Central African societies already before the consolidation of cash-crop plantations in late nineteenth century.