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Luanda, according to Mary Kingsley writing in 1899, was not just the finest city in West Africa but was the only city in West Africa. It had been founded in the 1570s on a pretty bay with a long protective sand bar and a palm fringe. The upper town housed the governor’s palace and the bishop’s cathedral while the lower town had the customs house and the street markets. But even Mary Kingsley recognised that it had been slow to meet the modern requirements of a city and lay on a water system with stand pipes in the streets for residents. Street lighting, with lamps burning groundnut oil, was only installed late in the nineteenth century and the locals complained, as they had always done, that goats and even pigs roamed through smelly lanes foraging for edible garbage. But despite the backwardness in municipal planning the city was a place where quality trade goods could be sold. Mary Kingsley recommended that merchants equip themselves with fine linen, with coloured yarn, with velvet, with silver lace, with Turkish carpets, with coloured beads, with silk thread and with blue-dyed cotton cloth from the Guinea coast. She also advised her readers to stock up for a merchant venture to Angola on Canary wine, linseed oil, plenty of spices, and white sugar, not to mention fish-hooks and hawks’ bells as well as pins and needles. Items made of English brass were much in demand in Luanda, as were those of pewter, together with every kind of haberdashery. The local toffs liked fine shirts, hats, and shoes for themselves, and surreptitiously bought muskets and gunpowder for their African clients. The question one must therefore ask is: who were the élite consumers of Luanda and how did a little harbour town of exiled convicts and wholesale slave merchants become the sophisticated city whose commercial opportunities were so admired by Mary Kingsley, the voice of British trade?
Three-quarters of a century earlier, Luanda’s commerce had potentially been threatened when its traditional trading partner, Brazil, became independent. In the same year, 1822, the infantry and the cavalry in the Luanda garrison both mutinied and replaced the governor with an interim administration headed by the bishop. Portugal feared that Lord Cochrane, a British admiral then helping to free South American colonies from Spanish rule, might cross the Atlantic to seize Luanda. An army was therefore sent down from Lisbon to arrest the rebels. Once order had been restored Brazil reverted to selling Angola 2,000 barrels of rum and 14,000 cigars each year. Lopes de Lima, the author of an 1840s statistical survey of Angola, reported that textile imports had risen gradually to reach twice the value of rum imports, while wine and gunpowder each came to account for a significant share of Portuguese trade. Ninety per cent of Angola’s exports were still made up of slaves, but Lopes also referred to foraged gum copal, bees’ wax, ivory, and dye plants of lichen. Local traders still used raffia squares, spiralled shells and salt bars as currency but in the city copper macuta coins, worth fifty reis—one penny—also circulated. Each year the municipal market handled 4,000 sacks of beans, 4,000 of maize and 20,000 of cassava-meal. The population statistics given by Lopes are probably less reliable than the trade figures but he guessed that Angola had some 2,000 white people, of whom about 10 per cent were women, and 6,000 mixed-race mestizos, of whom half were women.
A more graphic account of Luanda in the 1840s was provided by another observer, a cultured physician with an insatiable curiosity. On 4 November 1841 George Tams, of Hamburg, sailed into Angola’s magnificent palm-fringed bay. He was the ship’s surgeon on a fleet of five merchant vessels, equipped with assorted trade goods, sent out to Africa to explore commercial alternatives to the trading in slaves. Financing the expedition had been difficult since the markets in London assumed that any vessels going to Angola would expect to trade in slaves though the traffic had theoretically become illegal in 1836. Many merchants at Luanda also assumed, quite wrongly, that they would be able to sell slaves to the German expedition. Tams, like Mary Kingsley, was struck by the colourful aspect of the city and its setting which reminded visitors of the great Bay of All Saints in Brazil. The town, he noted, was dominated by the fortress of Saint Michael as well as by the governor’s palace with its adjacent cathedral. On the foreshore the imposing customs house opened off a broad terrace. The colony’s only paved roads were two steep alley-ways leading from the harbour streets of the lower town, the baixa, to the official buildings of the upper town, the cidade alta. The dwellings of the merchants, all of them still surreptitiously engaged in the sale of slaves, were brightly painted in yellow and white with glazed tiles of red and blue which shone in the sunshine. The tableau attracted the admiration of seafaring men who had spent monotonous months out of sight of land. Visitors also appreciated the fair-like markets held on two wide streets. Housekeeping matrons, accompanied by their domestic slaves, went shopping early in the morning when the fruit and vegetables grown on the Bengo river-side gardens were brought into town. One of these great estates was the one that had been established two centuries earlier by Capuchin missionaries. When, six years before Tams arrived, Portuguese politicians expelled the last friar from the colony, the market gardens were taken over by lay farmers who continued to supply the city with a cornucopia of fruit and vegetables containing everything except the Irish potato. On street corners around the vegetable market cauldrons of tomato soup were constantly simmering and large market mammies sat under picturesque awnings displaying mats and baskets, knives and scissors, textiles and tobacco-pipes, and all manner of useful household objects.
The city of Luanda, although a thriving market town, had no hotels or guest houses and visiting dignitaries either had to sleep aboard ship or else find lodgings with a hospitable householder. Tams was fortunate to be invited to stay with Luanda’s Spanish surgeon-general for the seven weeks of his sojourn. This gave him unusual opportunities to experience daily life in a city dependent almost entirely on the labour of purchased black slaves and conscripted white convicts. An educated middle-class German noticed many aspects of life in Africa’s premier tropical city which might not have been remarked upon either by visitors from Portugal, the colonial overlords long familiar with Angola, or by seamen anxious to get away from the heat and the mosquitoes at the first opportunity. Tams was both fascinated and shocked by the daily routine in a slave-run household. The day began at five in the morning while the air was cool. The surgeon owned a horse and did his medical rounds for three hours accompanied by a slave page who ran beside him. Horses were rare in Luanda but one of the most influential of Portuguese slave dealers, a Masonic political exile called Arsénio Pompílio, lent Tams both his horse and his page to escort him to the farthest edge of the city on visits to the rather grand misericordia hospital. The hospital wards were high and airy, private rooms were available for those with money, and the wooden beds were fitted with good straw mattresses. A little chapel had magnificent views out to sea and across the countryside. Nearby a mean little hospital for soldiers contained fifteen beds which were usually filled with white convicts who had been given such ‘satanic’ punishment lashes that they commonly died. The military nurses were poorly trained and inadequately supervised by the visiting doctor. Although the hospital premises were better than those which Tams had previously visited in Benguela, where the cobweb-festooned pharmacy had little more to offer by way of medication than a few jars of Epsom Salts, the care of patients in Luanda did not greatly impress him and after a cursory inspection the Spanish surgeon-general and his German guest continued their journey among the fee-paying bourgeoisie of Luanda and arrived home for breakfast by eight o’clock.
Breakfast was presided over by Dona Catharina, the surgeon’s Hispanic wife. The meal of veal and peppers was washed down with black tea and strong red wine from Lisbon. A small slave boy went constantly round the table filling up the wine goblets including that of the deep-drinking hostess. When all had eaten their fill, a slave-girl brought in a monkey who scampered round the table eating up the leftovers to the amusement of the guests. After breakfast Tams witnessed one of the most distressing aspects of daily life in a slave-owning household. Children who had, in whatever minor way, offended against the proper performance of their duties were taken down to the courtyard to be punished. Dona Catarina sat on her upper story veranda and relished watching her slaves writhing under the lashes of a whipping. The lady normally surrounded herself with small black girls, negrinhas, who engaged in embroidery. When one of them did not perform with the perfection madam expected she ordered that she be given a dozen beatings on the palms of her hands with the infamous palmatória, the wooden paddle with cone shaped holes which prevented an air cushion from protecting the flesh. On his first day Tams was so horrified by the screams of a tortured child that the punishment was discontinued. Dona Catharina protested, however, that a beating on the hands was ‘mild’ compared to other forms of punishment and that she only used the palmatória to discipline very young or newly-purchased children. The trainee seamstresses were expected to return to work immediately after their ordeal. When the Spanish madam had finished training and disciplining her child slaves she was able to sell them at a much higher price than did rival trainers. While Tams remained in residence, however, the beating of children was normally undertaken while he was out of the house. The perforated paddle, designed to instil terror into adults as well as children, continued to be used on both hands and feet for another hundred years
Household slaves worked long hours in the doctor’s household but after breakfast the family retired during the heat of the day and snoozed until about four o’clock with a short break at noon for an English-style snack of beer and cheese. After sundown the main meal of the day saw the arrival of dinner guests who indulged in pretentious speeches and toasts. If the meal was appreciated by the guests the cook was called in and praised for his efforts but woe betide a cook who did not meet their expectations. After dinner servants who had been trained up to be sold, and whose physical condition had recovered after the harsh punishment regime, were brought to the dining room. The ill-educated guests discussed the merits of each slave paraded before them in the coarsest language and bargained with one another over appropriate bidding prices. Tams did not specify the nature of the ‘coarse language’ but some slave girls were purchased to gratify the lustful craving of their very male proprietors. When a slave was made pregnant by her owner she just might expect some preferential treatment but was not given civic freedom. Luanda households distinguished between concubinas, who were free women but not society wives, and mucambas who were slaves expected to submit to marital duties. Male slaves were also sold, and Tams described the men bidding around the dinner table as having hearts frozen by avarice which beat only for the sake of lucre. When their business was concluded the guests ate cashew nuts and mangoes, drank Angolan coffee, went for an evening stroll, and then settled down to play cards. At the card tables they drank lemonade, served until one in the morning by little slaves whose ages ranged from four to eight years old.
Apart from dinner parties and card games the slave-trading city had a rather limited range of entertainments. Tams referred to a billiard hall and a garrison gin tavern but made no mention of a bull-ring, though twenty years later the city did apparently boast of one. Many members of the merchant class were expatriate bachelors who frequented a dozen saloons run by Spanish or Portuguese madams. The girls had bright black eyes and sold wine and spirits as well as providing personal services. A few of these hostesses married their regular customers and thereafter, as they explained in coquettish fashion to Tams, ceased to provide sexual gratification since Luanda law allowed for the death penalty to be imposed in cases of adultery. In Luanda ‘honest’ women were carefully protected and the Luanda theatre had a separate entrance for married women with a barrier to shelter them from the gaze of male patrons. The city had once hosted a travelling company of actors from Madeira, but more usually plays were put on by theatre companies from Brazil. On Sunday evenings privileged members of society were invited to a ball in the governor’s palace. Intrigue and jealousy were the order of the day among those excluded from the invitation lists while the black, white and mestizo guests became puffed up with pride. Tams witnessed one such ball and said that the military band played a ‘horrible’ fandango while the governor himself soon withdrew to his chambers, leaving his deputy to preside over the ceremony. Many of the ornately dressed crowd had begun life as vagrants, as slaves, as convicts or as exiled politicians, and most if not all had gained their wealth and status by selling slaves to Brazil. After the gala more lemonade was served and ‘carriages’ were called. The hammock-bearers, sleeping on the palace lawn, woke up at eleven at night to carry their owners home escorted by flaming torches. Tams commented unfavourably on the drawn-out farewells which involved ridiculous ceremonial formality. The governor’s ball remained an important feature of Victorian Luanda for many years to come.
Several of the wholesale entrepreneurs in Luanda, as elsewhere in Africa such as Senegal and Mozambique, were wealthy women. Tams was particularly impressed by Dona Anna Oberthaly. She had been born in the deep interior of Angola but then kidnapped and brought to the coast to be sold into a Luanda household as a child slave. She told Tams that she had never been beaten in the manner practised by Dona Catharina, and that when she grew up, and contracted advantageous marriages to become a grande dame, she did not beat her slaves, a claim which Tams could verify by noting that her domestics did not have scars on their backs. Dona Anna’s wealth, and the great pomp of her household, was financed by her success as a serious dealer in export slaves. An equally famous woman trader, though one whom Tams did not meet personally, was Dona Ana Joaquina da Silva, known as the ‘Baroness of Luanda’. On one of her shopping trips to Rio de Janeiro Ana Joaquina allegedly spent the equivalent of twenty million Portuguese reis. Her trading activities not only stretched across the Atlantic but also deep into the interior to reach the empire of the Lunda people. She was reputed to own a thousand slaves and her assets were said, possibly with a degree of jealous hyperbole, to be worth ten times those of the colonial state. Ana Joaquina’s palace and its grounds in the lower city were surrounded by a high wall to protect her property and symbolise her status. Her origins were apparently different from those of her rich and much-bejewelled colleagues, who had begun life as pretty young slave girls, since Dona Ana Joaquina may have had a white father. For a time she was married to a foreign resident in the city, but she built up her huge business enterprise as a very savvy widow who sent her children to be educated in Portugal. One of her trading partners was the Portuguese consul-general in Hamburg, the head of the firm which sent George Tams out to Angola to investigate alternatives to the newly outlawed trade in slaves. This expedition consisted of five ships one of which, the Esperanza, was later sold to one of Ana Joaquina’s colleagues, the widow of a Sardinian medical officer who had been exiled to Angola. One of Ana Joaquina’s own ships was called the Maria Secunda and may have been named patriotically after the then queen of Portugal, though the name was also one given to fashionable red-and-white Chinese necklace beads which she traded. Ana Joaquina’s ship was undoubtedly used to carry slaves, and there are no less than ten listings of its appearances on the far Atlantic shore all the way from the Caribbean to the Rio de la Plata.
The Hamburg ships on which Tams travelled were registered in Denmark, once a major slave-trading nation, and carried the commodities usually in demand at African merchant courts as well as those that might appeal to city households. Among the trade goods which Tams listed were bayonets and sabres, shirts and skirts, felt hats and blue cottons, cigarettes and mouth organs, not to mention Chinese porcelain and beads. The cottons were often of poor quality and heavily starched. The ending of an old royal monopoly on ivory in 1834 had opened up a free market for one of Angola’s most valuable products and Tams witnessed caravans carrying elephant tusks, attached to long bamboo poles. Ivory was henceforth one of a number of alternative exports to slaves. The Hamburg expedition may have been designed to explore such alternatives but everyone realised that the production and transportation of such ‘legitimate’ produce as palm oil, groundnuts, resin, timber, and coffee, were tasks still performed by slaves. Critics in the London press assumed that the expedition’s trade goods from northern Europe would be off-loaded on the little island of Príncipe before being surreptitiously smuggled to the mainland to meet the demands of slavers still shuttling between Angola and Brazil. British merchants complained bitterly that slave labour was cheaper than the free labour now used in the West Indies and so claimed that their West Indian plantations would be ruined unless both Brazil and Cuba were prevented from replenishing their labour stock with fresh slaves. Dona Ana Joaquina had close dealings not only with Cuba and Brazil but also with Uruguay to which she sent a ship when she wanted to buy horses. These horses became important in Angola when her agents needed to travel quickly, and by night, to the small harbours at which slaves were loaded out of sight of British cruisers attempting, with the reluctant connivance of Portugal, to suppress the export trade in slaves. Permission to search United States vessels was not granted to Britain until 1862, until which date 20,000 slaves a year continued to be shipped under the American flag to Cuba.
The great caravans which brought slaves from the remote inland marts fascinated Tams. He watched the columns arriving, each slave with his or her distinctive facial scar markings and speaking a distinctive language. Luanda residents recognised the remote ethnic origins of most slaves. Petty merchants coming into the city with just a few slaves sold some of them for rum which they consumed immediately ‘like Russians’. Many traders were also addicted to the inhaling of tobacco snuff, and Tams noted that any cigar end which he discarded was eagerly seized and crushed to powder in a small mortar using an ivory pestle Although Tams does not mention it Luanda’s Africans also chewed cola nuts as a stimulant. The large caravans brought as many as 2,000 slaves at a time and street scenes became very lively when huge crowds of guards and porters arrived back in town. The slaves were not always available for sale since many had already been bought by envoys, caixeros, who had been sent inland with large sums of credit to make advance purchases. Ana Joaquina appointed one of her ex-slaves as her agent to operate inland on her behalf. She also sent him several times to Brazil to oversee the final auctioning of her human property.
Tams wrote detailed accounts of the journeying of the slave coffles which travelled in single file along the narrow paths of the savanna. Their guards were festooned with bells to ward off carnivorous lions and leopards. Some of the slaves were required not only to walk to their own fated destiny on the Atlantic slave market but were also expected to carry produce for sale in Luanda. Tams could not always tell who was a slave and who was a hired porter though most slaves arrived in town with ropes, or occasionally chains, round their necks and with their hands tied behind their backs. Some slaves were linked together by long poles with forked ends that fitted around their necks. To minimise attempts at escape slaves were often required to sleep with their hands still tied uncomfortably behind them. The guards carried heavy guns and although these were mainly used to kill wild animals they did not hesitate to kill escaping slaves rather than risk being killed themselves. When Tams visited in 1841, the owning and trading of slaves was legal inside Angola and it remained legal for another thirty years. Since the export of slaves to foreign destinations had theoretically been outlawed in 1836, some caravan masters avoided attracting attention to the on-going export trade by bringing their slaves to the coast under cover of darkness rather than in broad daylight. Slaves who had been surreptitiously captured by neighbours while sleeping in village huts, and then sold to ambulating agents for a few bagatelles of trade goods, were hidden all over the city until it was safe to take them to a secluded beach where they could be loaded out of sight. Speed and secrecy were of the essence and most ships managed to sail away before rumour of the loading had reached the patrol boats. A report of 18 January 1845 claimed that a ship avoiding British detection arrived on the coast at 1.10 pm, loaded 450 slaves, and sailed again at 2.45 the same afternoon. One Italian owner was unlucky, however, and his vessel was sunk in the harbour shortly before Tams arrived. When a slave ship was wrecked the slaves shackled to the deck, as well as those in the hold, naturally drowned.
The governor-general of Angola may have had a low regard for the city slave merchants and only attended his own Sunday evening balls with reluctance. Entertaining a black merchant prince from the far interior was quite another matter and required lavish preparation and hospitality. Tams witnessed the arrival of one such embassy. The elderly prince rode in a gorgeous palenquin hammock with a much-tasselled parasol. His armed entourage consisted, Tams alleged, of ‘one thousand’ guards and escorts and the cortège was so impressive that the whole town turned out to line the route to the palace. The musicians led the parade with four-foot-long ivory horns, elaborately sculpted with animal figurines. Some of the drummers had double-ended drums which were held under the arm and squeezed to alter the tone. By contrast the ‘great drum’ was hollowed out of a huge log and the master-drummer sat astride it to play. The marimba thumb pianos had a range of two-and-a-half octaves, according to Tams. As the musical procession paraded through the streets it was showered with macuta copper coins from the upper windows and the prince’s followers were able to quench their thirst with Brazilian rum. The people of Luanda sang and danced with youthful exuberance. The prince’s portable throne was surrounded by four of the principality’s government ministers. The prince himself wore a high royal bonnet to demonstrate his status but unfortunately one of his porters accidentally dislodged this ‘crown’ as he was alighting. The prince was met at the palace door by the governor-general with his attendants and an interpreter. A suite of rooms had been prepared inside the palace for a three day ambassadorial sojourn. The palace tables were richly laden with every kind of appropriate food. While the prince was entertained in style his entourage enjoyed the freedom to roam the town seeking urban amusements not available at an African court.
Not all Angolan princes received such an enthusiastic welcome from the palace. Tams was able one day to visit a little stone fortress on the foreshore which served both as a gun-powder store and as a prison. Seven of the prisoners were skeletal Portuguese mutineers undergoing dungeon incarceration while waiting for their death sentences to be confirmed by Lisbon. One prisoner, in a very dark solitary cell, was a royal prince who had fought a war with the colonial authority in Luanda over an alleged failure to pay taxes due to the Portuguese. He insisted, however, that he was not a feudal dependent of Maria II of Portugal but a loyal vassal of the king of Kongo and that he had therefore been wrongly accused of ‘rebellion’. The governor-general did not accept this protest but once a month the prince was allowed to leave his cell and petition the palace for a reprieve. In his past life the prince had been an ally of the Portuguese and a ‘general’ in the black militia of auxiliaries who had done much of the fighting to claim territory for Portugal. He was entitled to wear all the braid and epaulettes of a Portuguese general. He wore this full-dress uniform on his visits to the palace and was always greeted by crowds as he marched forth in splendour. But his petition was always turned down, the governor having privately resolved that although he would not risk having such a distinguished prince executed for treason he nevertheless deemed him such a dangerous adversary that he would keep him in prison until he died of neglect, which he duly did some years later after a short reprieve. When Tams met the prince he was asked, in perfect Portuguese, whether fair hair indicated that Tams was an ‘Englishman’. After the interview the prince was, as usual, returned to his cell where he had to surrender his uniform and once more don the rags of a convict. He may even have been attached to his cell wall with a chain.
In the course of his visit Tams would have seen people of varying skin colour on the streets of Luanda. The fact that colonisation had been almost exclusively male meant that Angola resembled Dutch-speaking South Africa in its legacy of racial mix. Many of the children of white fathers and black mothers learnt the Portuguese colonial language of their fathers, just as the so-called ‘coloured’ population of South Africa leant to speak Dutch. On a small scale Angola also resembled British India where white soldiers fathered Anglo-Indian children who over time left hundreds of thousands of descendants. In the British and Dutch cases, as well as in Angola, the consequences of miscegenation had lasting social and political repercussions. In the nineteenth century several thousand of these mixed-race mestizos were classified as ‘civilised’, an advantageous status which gave exemption from various forms of conscription, be it in porterage, street repairing or compulsory labour on the city vegetable gardens. Another high-status group in Luanda province were black people who wore shoes and were therefore deemed to be honorary whites—unlike those who walked bare-foot. The struggle to maintain status was partly economic but it also had much to do with a constant search for education. The city made little provision for education and the few private schools struggled when pupils tended to vanish rather than pay fees at the end of term. Literacy did survive, however, not only in the city but also in the provincial towns where people who regretted the passing of the great Catholic missions of old continued to teach their children how to read and write in Portuguese. Literacy gave the ‘children of the province’, the filhos da terra, some of them mestizo but most of them black, access to positions in the administration, in the military, and in the trading houses. A literate cobbler’s son from up-country was even taken to America to help prepare a dictionary of the Kimbundu language for use in Protestant missions. He discovered however that his evangelical hosts, accustomed to the most rigid racial segregation, were utterly dismayed to see a black man arrive in their midst. In Luanda segregation was by class and culture rather than by race.
Some educated Africans in Luanda were members of the Creole ‘aristocracy’ consisting of the scions of families some of which dated back to the seventeenth century. They were readily employed as colonial administrators, officers and teachers and had the advantage that they were more immune to disease than any white Portuguese. The Creoles had the further advantage that they often spoke local dialects. In the nineteenth century some of the great families even owned private regiments of slave militias which could be used to further colonial aspirations at little cost to the empire. Creoles were appointed captains of the half-dozen forts which held the two-hundred-mile Portuguese enclave behind Luanda. They were also given directorships of the great ‘factories’ where goods were stored for the long-distance trade into the deep interior. These families greatly valued receiving colonial honours and titles in return for their services. Their main economic activity, however, remained trading, especially trading in slaves. Some owned provincial plantations that supplied the city with palm oil and black beans and grew the two American crops, cassava and maize, which were the mainstay of the urban diet and a means of feeding the human cargoes on the great slave ships. Some of the grand families had originally been founded by the Jewish merchants who came to Angola. One family which provided nineteenth-century Luanda with teachers and soldiers, as well as politicians and merchants, was the van Dunem clan. Their first ancestor had been a Portuguese refugee who had fled to Holland during a period of Jewish persecution and adopted a Dutch name. Around 1600 Balthasar van Dunem helped the Dutch to penetrate the Atlantic trading system and chose to settle in Angola. Despite some notorious hiccups over the generations the family grew, became black, and prospered. In the 1980s one of its members became prime minister of the independent republic of Angola.
Another aspect of Angolan life which interested Tams was the legacy of Roman Catholicism. Three churches survived in Luanda though the richly decorated cathedral in the upper town, and the small candle-lit church on the market square, were not much frequented. The most prestigious Catholic church was the church of Nazaré on the northern fore-shore. The decorations were of vibrant blue tiles depicting the great battle of Ambuila in which the Portuguese colonial army of 1665, led by a Creole officer, had defeated the king of Kongo and his mercenary musketeers, who were also led by a Creole officer. It was in front of this church that the African élite liked to be seen on high days and holidays, wrapped in their finest cotton prints and wearing their most gaudy head-scarves. Services continued to be held under the authority of the ‘Bishop of Kongo’ whose seat had been moved from San Salvador to Luanda two centuries earlier. Two priests, one black and the other mestizo, were available to conduct services. Tams came to call on a day when the church was thronged with black African worshippers but the priests managed to squeeze him, as an honoured guest, into the corner of a pew and offered him Brazilian sweetmeats washed down with wine. This survival of religious practice was more marked in Luanda than in Angola’s other coastal city, Benguela, where one of the two churches had recently been destroyed when the town had been severely plundered by a highland army. The other Benguela church, although ornately decorated, was little frequented and each mestizo priest who had been sent down from Luanda to serve the local Christians had died so quickly of local diseases that any attempt to appoint a parish priest for the south was abandoned.
Protestant activity in Luanda province began in the 1880s when a highly eccentric mission preacher, a self-appointed bishop called Taylor, tried to establish a self-reliant evangelical mission. As his city agent he appointed an escapee from the struggling watch-making region of western Switzerland. Héli Chatelain, who had worked in America as an interpreter among poor migrants in New York, offered his services to the ‘bishop’ as a polymath who spoke many European languages and understood Portuguese. In Luanda Chatelain soon became quite at home among working-class Africans and then went on to develop contacts with the middle-class population of the colonial city. He husbanded his meagre revenues, partially earned through selling watches, by accepting dinner invitations. The most rewarding of his connections was with the British trading firm of Newton and Carnegie. The English import-export house kept on good terms with the customs house, with the police service, with the city council, and with the Roman Catholic bishopric, by lavishly entertaining dinner guests. To enliven the evenings with intellectual conversations on science or philosophy the directors invited the impoverished Swiss missionary to be an after-dinner speaker and he thus got to know all the important office holders in the city. When he was taken ill, his contacts, right up to the level of the governor-general, afforded him a free bed in the great Luanda hospital. The Luanda carnival was celebrated on the eve of Lent and Chatelain watched wryly as his pompous white landlord was covered with boot polish and showered with corn flour by his wife’s normally cowed friends. This carnival had been a prominent part of city life since the seventeenth century when licensed days of disorder allowed little black people to mock big white ones. The carnival remained an important feature of Luanda society a hundred years after Chatelain witnessed it but by then the white devils were no longer portrayed as Portuguese colonists but as invading South African soldiers.
For all Chatelain’s skilled network-building the Taylor mission was not a success. When forty-odd evangelists arrived they were intellectually ill-prepared and materially ill-equipped. Their extreme beliefs meant that they were reluctant to accept modern medication so they and their children were soon decimated by malaria and dysentery. The American Methodist church eventually adopted the survivors and set up a disciplined network of schools and chapels stretching a couple of hundred miles into the interior. When Freemasons took over Portugal’s republican government in 1910 they discovered that an official Methodist bishop, who had replaced Taylor, was one of their own kind, a member of a Masonic lodge as well as a preacher. The Methodist church grew from strength to strength and education enabled many of its members to seek work in the city and become a backbone of the colonial administration. In the meantime Chatelain obtained Swiss sponsorship to move his sphere of mission activity down to the southern highlands. Luanda’s Creole élite meanwhile extended the city’s commercial, diplomatic and religious influence deep into the interior of West-Central Africa.