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Seven years after George Tams, of Hamburg, reported on life in Luanda in 1841, another traveller, Ladislaus Magyar from Budapest, described the societies along the estuary of the Congo River. The trading communities he visited feared that he might be an English spy sent to report on the river harbours from which they were still shipping slaves, but in fact he was an ordinary merchant from Hungary. Magyar reported that the Congo trade was thriving in 1848 and he estimated that as many as 20,000 slaves a year might still have been leaving northern Angola. The traders, one of them an old friend whom Magyar had known in Uruguay, came from a dozen countries and had stocks of trade goods estimated to be worth two million Spanish dollars. Traders’ lives, Magyar noted, tended to be short as they indulged in sexual and alcoholic excesses and were soon felled by the malarial miasmas of the swamps. In addition to selling slaves they maintained a brisk trade in palm oil which gradually became one of the ‘legitimate’ commodities which attracted modern traders to Angola in the second half of the nineteenth century. The metropolis of the river was at Boma, on the north bank, a Victorian city of some size and distinction. In the 1870s it became the headquarters of the immense trading association created by Leopold, King of the Belgians. Here Magyar witnessed columns of slaves chained together with iron neck-rings rather than with the wooden shackles used in southern Angola. Once a dealer had bought a column of a hundred or so slaves he washed them, fed them, dressed them, and forced them to dance to the music of drums until they were fit and presentable enough to be sold. The price of a strong male was an ‘assortment’ of goods, known as the ‘trade ounce’ in West Africa, consisting of cotton, gun-powder, brandy, bone-handled knives, copper bangles and other items to the total value of about eighty Hungarian florins. Young women were enclosed in separate compounds, painted with red dye-wood, and taught the amatory arts until they could be locally sold for a suitable price to a polygamous ménage or to an expatriate harem. Female children were rarely sold abroad, according to Magyar, but were sent back to the slave-hunting grounds until they were of child-bearing age and could take part in the replenishing of human stock in the interior.
Dona Ana Joaquina of Luanda fame used some of her cohorts of slaves to create farms which grew crops to feed the city and the merchant vessels which called there. When David Livingstone met her in 1854 he was impressed by her apparent willingness to use her slaves productively inside Africa rather than sell them overseas in an export trade which he so abhorred. She bought extensive estates in Luanda province and treated the slaves who worked them so well that they enjoyed the prestige of being Dona Ana Joaquina’s servants and did their utmost not to offend her. The grande dame of Luanda society did not, however, abandon her Atlantic interests and, unbeknown to Livingstone, her agents were still stationed up and down the coast where they became skilled at knowing how to dodge the naval patrols appointed to suppress the slave trade. Ana Joaquina’s jealous rivals were sure that she was the richest landowner in all Angola and that her chain of trading ‘factories’ stretched as far as São Tomé. It was Ana Joaquina who put up the capital for an ambitious trade mission 700 miles into the deep interior of Angola. Her Portuguese associate, a Brazilian backwoodsman called Rodrigues Graça, reached the heart of the Lunda empire in 1846 and established diplomatic relations with King Naweji II. Old-style colonisers, however, were not thrilled by Ana Joaquina’s various initiatives. Her sharpest critics were concerned that by growing sugar cane in Angola, and investing in the local production of rum, she was undercutting the profits which they made by importing Brazilian rum. Having risen to the top of the social tree, Ana Joaquina lived in her Luanda palace until around 1860 and then died on a voyage to Lisbon. Interminable law suits broke out over the multi-national web of credit and debit transactions which she had controlled.
The economic development of north-central Angola depended particularly on two provincial communities, one up in the foothills of Cazengo and the other down by the river at Dondo. Cazengo was important as the centre of a coffee industry, one which by the late nineteenth century was more successful than the other attempts to create an alternative to slaving, be it whaling, wheat growing, tobacco curing, rum distilling or even coal prospecting and copper mining. From a few paltry tons of coffee produced in the last years of Dona Ana Joaquina’s life, the crop rose briefly to 11,000 tons in the mid-1890s. Initially coffee was a peasant crop grown under the high tree-cover of the Cazengo hills. Over the years, however, the white traders and black chiefs who organised the transport of coffee to Luanda, or to the harbours further north, established plantations. Farmers who imprudently took out loans to finance an increasingly prosperous life-style found that, when the crop failed, they lost their land to the merchants who had advanced credit to them. Coffee farmers became impoverished workers on what had previously been their own land. As the industry grew, the colonial government decided that the seventeen political chiefs of the Cazengo district were actually vassals of the Portuguese crown and that the governor-general was therefore entitled to make grants to white settlers of any land that appeared to be vacant. Controversial land purchases and land seizures proliferated, colonial influences grew, and by the end of the century it was said that no African chief any longer had any effective authority in Cazengo. When prices failed, however, the repercussions were felt in the city. The Portuguese colonial bank had a Luanda branch which invested heavily in coffee plantations since Angolan land was cheaper than coffee land in Brazil. Some speculators who took out mortgages with the bank were Brazilians who thought that slaves in Africa would be cheaper than the poor white immigrants from Europe who were now hired to help harvest coffee in Brazil. Thus it was that, twenty years after slavery had been nominally outlawed in Angola, one third of the Cazengo population, over 3,000 people, were still slaves. Ironically 300 of them were ‘owned’ by the English trading house of Newton and Carnegie, the firm which used to invite the Swiss Héli Chatelain to its dinner parties. Apart from the slaves the population of the district consisted of 100 Europeans, 1,000 free Africans listed on the voters’ register, and something over 10,000 ‘other natives’. Modern communications reached Cazengo only slowly, first by a steam boat to Dondo harbour down on the Kwanza River, then by the jerry-built railway heading towards Ambaca, and finally by a telegraph cable up from Luanda. Colonial ministers in Lisbon had dreamt of a ‘New Brazil’ but this was not to be found in Cazengo: 3,000 slaves did not match up to 300,000 slaves still working in Brazil, and 3,000 tons of coffee did not match up to 300,000 tons produced by Brazil.
The second economic focus behind Luanda was Dondo on the Kwanza River. The southern margin of the river was used to establish moderately successful sugar plantations but the colonial authorities never managed to penetrate beyond the bank and into the land where local miners quarried valuable bars of rock salt. Dondo became the head of a caravan route leading south to the highland and to the trading kingdoms of Bailundu and Bihé. It was a collecting point for a range of foraged and hunted produce including ivory. Dondo was not, however, a particularly successful river port for the coffee growers since the trail from the north had to negotiate the expensive ferry crossing over the Lukala River. This ferry was owned by a powerful chieftain, Kabuku Kambilo, who not only had African legitimacy but was also a colonel in the colonial militia. Kabuku’s role in the colonising process was interestingly ambiguous as the Luanda government fluctuated between thinking that the future lay in the hands of settlers and believing that the future lay in the hands of land-owning chiefs. When the colonial impulse revived in Angola in the 1880s the chiefs lost out. The colonisers even built a bridge across the Lukala River and deprived Kabuku of a significant revenue stream. As settlers moved in, restlessness broke out among dispossessed land-owners. Matters were made worse by a devastating epidemic of sleeping sickness along the river. The small steamer service, which had been established in 1867, proved so unreliable that the railway pioneers built a spur on their Ambaca line to reach Dondo. In theory the train carried passengers as well as goods but when Héli Chatelain tried to ride the line, after coming up river on the steam boat and enjoying a holiday on a lush sugar plantation, he missed the weekly connection. For some years, however, trade at Dondo remained brisk and the little town appeared wealthy. Many of the river-side traders belonged to Jewish families from Portugal or the Atlantic islands and many of the streets were given Jewish names.
While the Cazengo coffee and Dondo sugar industries enjoyed limited success, the attempt to revive copper mining in Kongo was a dismal failure. Copper had been mined there on a small scale in the seventeenth century and in the 1850s a British firm tried to exploit the mine again. The West African Malachite Copper Mining Company built an iron loading-pier on the coast at Ambriz and hired a thousand bearers to carry all the necessary parts of a steam engine and water pump into the interior. Each porter received ten handkerchiefs and 300 blue beads for each 130-miles round trip during which he was expected to carry half a hundredweight of equipment. The management would have liked to use donkeys, mules and even camels from the Cape Verde Islands but all died. When the miners set up camp they hired houseboys from Cabinda as servants and washermen. These Cabindans were paid in Manchester cloth which they sold on in exchange for child slaves costing twenty-eight yards each. To operate the mine the company recruited ten Cornish miners but failed to equip them with mosquito nets as a result of which the men soon died of malaria. The mine manager, J.J.Monteiro, was much better supplied and he and his wife were carried up to the mine with all the necessary equipment for their comfort, nets, tents, portmanteaux, bedding, soap, an India rubber inflatable bathtub, and a set of cane chairs made in Madeira. The costs in money and men were enormous but whereas the old Kongo artisans had extracted a hundred or more tons of ore each year the company produced no copper and eventually went bankrupt.
The Ambaca district of Angola, nearly 200 miles inland from Luanda, was very different from other northern territories. Unlike many Angolans who lived under the authority of headmen, chiefs and princes, people in this area did not obey ‘traditional’ rulers nor did they worship ‘traditional’ gods. They considered themselves to be ‘Portuguese’, moradores, and to be the loyal subjects of the Portuguese king. Most of them were black and were sometimes spoken of disparagingly by proud, white, Portuguese. A significant minority of ‘Ambaquistas’ were mixed-race mestizos and were sometimes seen by explorers from northern Europe, including David Livingstone, as inferior to true black Africans. Although only a small proportion of the Ambaca citizens had a close white ancestor, most of them spoke Portuguese with greater or lesser fluency. In contrast to the Gold Coast, where Portuguese words were incorporated into a ‘pidgin’ language mixed with English, spoken Portuguese in Angola remained relatively stable. More strikingly many Ambaquistas wrote Portuguese as well as speaking it and some of their archives are still preserved in Lisbon. The German explorers who travelled the Ambaca trade paths noted that the caravan leaders all carried quills, ink and paper. When their supplies ran low they made their own ink from gun-powder and wrote on the dried leaves of palm trees. They acted as secretaries to indigenous princes, and even served the great ruler of the Lunda ‘empire’. These Ambaquistas were not only important as scribes but also as interpreters. They all spoke the Kimbundu language of their maternal ancestors as well as the Portuguese lingua franca of traders, travellers and explorers. In addition to being literate the Ambaca people were very proud of being Christian. They may not have practised day-today Christian worship but being baptised was an important feature of their special identity. Monogamy was much less prized, however, and an Ambaca trader often had a wife and family in each of the great trading entrepôts that stretched throughout Angola. The most active of the traders aspired to travel across the country once every year or two, maintaining good relations with the ruler of each chiefdom. In addition to language and religion, the Ambaquistas carried with them European architectural traditions and built themselves square houses, with windows, in sharp contrast to the often large and magnificent round ones built by the ‘aboriginal’ Angolan élites.
One striking feature of Ambaca identity, particularly noted in sketches and early photographs, was their sartorial style. The symbolic importance of footwear persisted into the nineteenth century. Ambaca people always wore shoes and to keep up appearances the role of cobbler was important. Leathertanning and shoe-making were skills introduced to the trade entrepôts of the interior so that any Ambaca trader could present himself at each political court properly shod. Ambaca travellers also needed to be proficient tailors. They wore neatly sewn shirts and immaculately cut coats, or even overcoats. Equally important was the need to wear sharp trousers on important public occasions rather than the everyday loin cloth of raffia. When bouts of racism later pitted illiterate immigrants against educated Africans, it was black youths wearing trousers who were most at risk of being attacked by gangs of white vigilantes. In addition to shoes and trousers, the citizens of Ambaca also wore broad-brimmed straw hats. This status symbol was quite different from the high-status hats worn by the chiefs with whom they did business. Another feature of wealth and prestige was the mode of travel adopted. Ordinary people, farmers, fish-wives, salt miners, and slaves all walked everywhere, slowly covering up to ten miles on a good day. Ambaquistas walked too, but if very rich they could travel in a palanquin hammock. The hammock was slung from a stout pole carried by relays of strong men, two of whom could carry a high-status Ambaquista, or a foreign explorer, over rough ground at speed. Hammock-bearers were sometimes accompanied by guards, armed with double-barrelled shot-guns made in Birmingham. Some hammocks had canopies and curtains to keep off the sun, or shield them from the staring eyes of village children. The use of hammocks was made necessary by the scarcity of transport animals. David Livingstone, who crossed Angola in 1854, objected, however, to being carried and instead rode awkwardly on a riding ox trained by the Ambaquistas. Livingstone’s ox was called Sinbad and had a notoriously bad temper. Some Ambaquistas managed to hire donkeys and a few even imported horses but the climate did not suit them well. The difficulty of keeping pack animals was such that abortive attempts were occasionally made, as at the copper mine, to introduce camels into Angola.
The great caravans led by Ambaca merchants faced significant transport challenges when carrying alcohol and cotton into the interior. The return ‘commodity’ had consisted historically of slaves who were driven like cattle. As the trade in slaves was gradually replaced by a ‘legitimate’ trade in ivory, the heavy and expensive loads needed not only to be carried but also carefully protected by armed guards. Following the development of a free market in ivory in the 1830s it became profitable to fetch tusks from far deeper in the interior but this involved ever more negotiations over porterage. A second legitimate commodity which came to the fore when the Brazilian slave market closed down was bees’ wax. It was not until the 1860s that Rockefeller invented paraffin oil for lamps. Before that Angola sold quantities of candle wax. The next commodity to be traded was rubber, initially the vine rubber of the forests and later the root rubber of the savannahs. Rubber and wax were heavy to carry, like ivory, but they earned lower profit margins with which to pay for porters. To assemble a team of long-distance porters it was sometimes possible to buy slaves from a dealer who no longer had an export market. Bought slaves could be cheaper than the annual fee for hired conscripts from the state carrier corps. Assembling a caravan of porters, sometimes a thousand strong, was a slow process and in the weeks it took to muster a team those who waited for the departure date had to be housed and fed. Even once the caravan was under way delays were common. Each river crossing, whether by bridge or canoe, was liable to incur tolls which had to be negotiated. In some places previous caravans had left legacies of mistrust by abusing villagers and peace had to be restored, sometimes at considerable cost and with several rounds of rum. In the villages fear of witchcraft and sorcery was ubiquitous and any caravan thought to be carrying evil spirits suffered harassment and legal expense. When porters protested at the excessive weight of each load, or at the distance they were expected to cover each day, too much coercion led to rebellion and too little to a further slowing of progress. Weather conditions could make or break a caravan’s profit margin as happened in the great drought of 1860. Epidemics could be even more devastating than drought or flood, and nineteenth-century Angola saw occasional plagues of smallpox as well as sleeping sickness. Theft was ever a problem with a few gills of red wine being siphoned off a barrel or a few lengths of calico being cut off a bale. Attacks by bands of brigands, intent on seizing a whole caravan, were not unknown. Another great risk involved the need to assign partial loads of trade goods to agents known as pombeiros. They needed to be credit-worthy when exploring all the by-ways of the great merchant network that was Angola. Although ivory, wax and rubber became the major export items of Angola’s international trade, internal trade retained many of its historic features. Salt was always a key commodity as shown in the oral traditions of the Lunda empire which dwell on the pioneers who discovered remote salt pans. Thirty-kilogram loads of salt could be used to measure the price a slave. Child slaves, who were easy to train, were valued and could be purchased at about two bars of rock salt per year of age. To buy a good tusk of ivory it might be necessary to sell up to half a dozen slaves.
One scion of the great Luso-African families of the Ambaca diaspora was Lourenzo Bezerra whose trading career spanned half a century. He was familiar with all the towns of the old hinterland of Luanda and at an early age established good relations with the principalities of the Lunda ‘common-wealth’ at the heart of Africa. The great Lunda ‘emperor’, Naweji II, who governed the deep interior from 1821 to 1852, asked Bezerra to supply his court not only with western cattle but also with good quality dogs and hens. In the 1840s it was Bezerra who enabled the first official Portuguese embassy, financed by Dona Ana Joaquina, to reach the Lunda court. Bezerra enhanced the royal gardens by establishing fields of pumpkins and tobacco. Equally significantly he also introduced education, including mathematics and craft apprenticeships, to the city. His clients learnt how to spin and weave cotton and how to tailor clothing. Carpentry was another western skill that Bezerra brought so that chairs and chests could be locally fashioned. Even more popular was his ability to teach rum distilling and cigar rolling. Such was his status that Bezerra married one of the Lunda royal daughters and built a village of his own with fifty compounds near the queen mother’s royal estate. He added ivory to his original slave business and over his life-time apparently bought no fewer than 600 tusks, some from the famous Luba people of the upper Congo. When he could not recruit reliable carriers for long distance stretches he hid hoards of ivory in the beds of streams. When, on one occasion, he went to retrieve a hoard, the Lunda emperor provided him with a caravan of 2,000 porters and an armed escort led by no less than five noblemen. Other members of the Bezerra family became familiar with the great trade paths and so enabled a generation of European surveyors, prospectors, explorers, diplomats and fortune hunters to map out the land that was to become Portuguese Angola in the twentieth-century. The greatest of these travellers was a former head of the Luanda public works department, Dias de Carvalho, who spent four years exploring the Lunda empire in the 1880s. His eight stout, illustrated, volumes covered everything from language and climate to ethnography and economy. Scholarship, however, was by no means confined to white explorers and one well-furnished Ambaca household contained not only the epic poems of Camoes, and the scientific works of Humboldt, but also atlases, maps, and English dictionaries.
England had traditionally been Portugal’s most valued ally, but the development of trade in Angola contributed to a series of political and diplomatic spats. From the 1840s the British government had sought to prevent slave-trading by patrolling the Angolan coastline. The northern harbour of Ambriz, ruled by a marquis only loosely allied to Portugal, was a major assembly point for slaves awaiting shipment to the Americas and the Lisbon government had reason to fear that the British might seize it. In 1855 Portugal opportunistically decided that while Britain was enmired in the Crimean War it would be a good moment to lay claim to Ambriz. The British Foreign Office retorted that Portugal had no ‘effective’ presence on which to base such a claim, to which the Portuguese Foreign Office replied that it was not aware that Britain had had any ‘effective’ occupation on the Falkland Islands, to which it had recently laid claim. Lord Palmerston, Britain’s peppery prime minister, held fairly negative attitudes towards the Portuguese and was once reported to have said that he found it expedient occasionally to administer a sound chastisement to the semi-barbarous nations of the world. He was referring not only to China but also to Portugal. Lisbon suggested that the matter of the Kongo coast be submitted to neutral, international, arbitration but Britain flatly refused the suggestion for fear that the case should go against the British interest, as indeed did two later arbitration decisions concerning Guinea and Mozambique. Instead the two parties battled out a compromise in which Portugal took control of the port of Ambriz but guaranteed not to allow access to the great slaving ships. Twenty-odd years later this agreement on limiting the trade in slaves and slave-like labourers was still a dead letter as Henry Morton Stanley, the American explorer of the Congo, reported while visiting Angola in the 1870s. His blunt opinion was that while Portugal was—of course—passionately opposed to the horrendous trade in human flesh it had no means of impeding the daily business of smugglers. He also pointed out that Portuguese settlers in Angola used slaves extensively and would rise up in rebellion if the authorities tried to interfere with their business activities. At the time much ‘human freight’ was being shipped under the guise of ‘indentured workers’ to the cocoa islands but Stanley preferred to blame the sale of ‘coolies’ for São Tomé on ‘Portuguese Africans’ rather than on genuinely ‘European’ Portuguese. Stanley also trotted out an old mantra which claimed that by buying convicts from the African tribal law courts Portuguese traders were saving condemned men and woman, especially witches, from death by execution.
The diplomatic spat over the control of Ambriz was followed by a wholesale political crisis throughout the kingdom of Kongo. When Henry II of Kongo died in 1857 two of his nephews claimed the throne in the conventional matrilineal style which insisted that a king’s successor should be the son of one of his sisters. One such nephew, Pedro, was a moderniser who had good relations with the Portuguese and wanted missionaries sent to the court to ensure a Christian coronation. He managed to obtain the royal paraphernalia, the crown and the throne. His rival, Alvaro, did not favour a Portuguese connection but had good links with French slave traders at Boma on the Congo River who were shipping ‘free blacks’ to the Caribbean planters of Martinique. The French provided Alvaro with enough good quality textiles to bribe the Kongo electors into choosing him, rather than Pedro, as their king. A third party in the negotiations, Prince Nicholas, was not himself a candidate since he was a son of Henry II, not a nephew. In 1845 Nicholas had been sent to Lisbon for his education and he now served as a senior civil servant in the Luanda administration. Although Nicholas supported the Portuguese candidate, Pedro, he protested that the Portuguese were quite wrong to think that Pedro was a vassal of the king of Portugal. The two kingdoms were equal allies, he said, and had been so since the sixteenth century. Kongo was not to be seen as subservient to Portugal in the feudal style. When Nicholas’s protest at the Portuguese claim to sovereignty over Kongo was published in Lisbon, the news trickled down to Luanda and caused uproar. The Brazilian consul-general in the city warned the prince that white animosity might endanger his liberty and that he would be wise to escape from Luanda. Nicholas fled up the coast to take refuge in an American trading post and hoped that a Royal Navy patrol vessel might ferry him to safety. This was not to be, however, and a military unit loyal to Prince Alvaro threatened to burn down the foreign trading post unless the hapless American merchants handed over the refugee prince. Nicholas was summarily executed and Alvaro’s men appeared to be in the ascendancy. The governor-general at Luanda took fright and immediately sent an armed expedition into Kongo to protect Prince Pedro, his preferred candidate for the throne. The expedition was initially too small to be effective and the governor-general decided to accompany reinforcements but they too were worsted and the governor-general himself was wounded in battle. This catastrophe was so damaging to the amour propre of Portugal that Lisbon felt obliged to send an expensive European expeditionary army out to Africa to ensure its diplomatic ascendancy at San Salvador, the Kongo capital, and to repel the encroachment of French commercial interests. The European regiment fought its way across Kongo to deprive Alvaro of the capital city. This was already but a shadow of its former self and its population, once estimated at 18,000 souls, had dwindled. The eleven long-ruined churches dedicated to St Joseph, St John, St James, St Michael, the True Cross, the Immaculate Conception, the Rosary, the Holy Ghost, the Redemption and the Misericordia had never been rebuilt and even the great cathedral was semi-derelict. The Portuguese soldiers found that further damage had been inflicted on the decaying royal city by Alvaro’s force, and in the fighting the centuries-old royal archive was apparently burnt down. Eventually Prince Pedro was crowned by two Catholic missionaries with the name Pedro V, and he reigned over his capital city, if not over his fragmented country, for the next thirty-odd years. Portugal decided that the cost of occupation was too great since half of its complement of 750 soldiers had died of disease within the year. When it withdrew a colonial fortress was retained in the south of the kingdom and named after Pedro V, but this was Pedro V of Portugal, not Pedro V of Kongo.
It had been unusual for a governor from Portuguese Luanda to lead an army to war in the interior as had happened in Kongo in 1860. The hundred-odd governors who ruled Angola after 1820 mostly lived comfortably in their palaces, served on average for two years, and had minimal impact on territorial expansion. They were, nonetheless, rewarded with a salary which amounted to one fifth of Angola’s entire budget. This bounty was supposed to discourage them from illegally engaging in trade to the detriment of a merchant class which was operating ever further into the hinterland. The policy did not always have the intended effect and many governors continued to earn a significant bounty from illicit commercial activity. One controversial governor, however, not only desisted from trading in slaves himself but even tried to apply a law outlawing the export trade to others, thus causing such a furore that he had to sail hastily back to Lisbon. After the high human cost, not to mention the high financial cost, of attempting to impose domination over Kongo in the 1860s further adventurism was discouraged for a generation. The next governor-general who did make his mark was Ferreira do Amaral who governed sternly for four years from 1882 at the height of the scramble for Africa. He was a man of colonial experience who had once served as a junior commander in Angola’s far south where he had attempted to encourage the immigrant communities, notably in the fishing industry. When he became governor-general he aspired to establish inland agricultural settlements for European convicts. He soon came to recognise, however, that future prosperity would lie not in the hands of convicts but rather in the hands of free migrants. He decreed that settlers who needed slave-like labourers should be granted indentured workers on five-year contracts which could be legitimately and automatically renewed wherever and whenever they were required. This policy of virtually permanent conscription caused such a virulent workers’ rebellion on the south coast that he decided to react harshly. He ordered that no fewer than 400 ‘trouble-makers’ should be shipped to Mozambique. For an Angolan this was the ultimate punishment, exile as a militia soldier required to fight in a distant colony.
In the 1880s, still within the life-time of Pedro V of Kongo, one episode in Portugal’s renewed search for overlordship was a draft Anglo-Portuguese treaty drawn up in almost comical style by two members of European royal households, neither of whom had any experience in African affairs. The envoy in London of ‘the most faithful king of Portugal and the Algarve’ was described—to demonstrate the importance of the draft treaty—as a peer of the realm, an honorary secretary of state, a commander of the noble and illustrious order of St James, a representative of the grand cross of Charles III, and the holder of merit awards for science, literature and the arts. His opposite number, representing ‘the queen of Britain and empress of India’, was Lord Leveson, earl of Granville, a knight of the garter, Lord Warden of the Cinque Ports, constable of Dover Castle, chancellor of London University, and secretary of state for foreign affairs. These two dignitaries agreed that Portugal would allow all trade conducted by any nation to flow out of Kongo, both to the coast and down the Congo River, without let or hindrance of any kind other than the payment of the customs dues imposed by Portugal on its own citizens. Every assistance would be given by the Portuguese authorities to any vessel, whether sail or steam, that was wrecked on the coast or in the river and no duty would be charged on any goods salvaged.
The draft treaty was intended to facilitate the commodity trade of Holland, France and England which had grown in volume since the outlawing of slavery in North America in the 1860s. In exchange for Dutch gin, French wine or Manchester cotton, Holland, France and Britain bought thousands of tons of ‘legitimate’ produce. A leading Dutch firm had twenty-six trading posts along the river and down the coast. In one year a French firm bought 1,500 tons of shelled peanuts, fifty barrels of rubber and twenty-five tons of ivory. Hatton and Cookson of Liverpool were one of several English enterprises whose agents bought palm oil in particular. The traders of all nations, would be allowed, under the terms of the proposed Anglo-Portuguese treaty, to establish merchant factories, to travel unhindered, and to buy land on which to set up family households. Portugal would be permitted to raise any tolls required to manage river navigation but would not charge duty on any goods merely in transit through its territory. Equally important and controversial was a clause that insisted that missionaries of every Christian denomination should be allowed to evangelise freely in all territory granted to Portugal and be permitted to open consecrated burial grounds, chapels, and schools for converts. The revealing sting in the tale of the draft treaty was Article XII in which the Portuguese agreed to do all in their power to help Britain end the trade in slaves, a trade which had in theory already been abolished on previous occasions by Anglo-Portuguese agreement. Britain’s interest was not so much to support Portugal as to keep France out of the Congo River by permitting it to become a Portuguese highway.
Opponents of the Anglo-Portuguese draft treaty rapidly mobilised their efforts. Leopold of the Belgians, whose private colonising association was active on the north bank of the river, had powerful friends in the British parliament and they were reluctant to approve the Portuguese treaty. Leopold also lobbied Paris, and eventually the opponents of Portugal gathered in Berlin in November 1884 to find a different solution to the Congo question. Portugal was allowed to have the south bank of the river but Leopold’s ‘association’ was deemed to be a sovereign state and given control of the north bank. In compensation Portugal was granted an Atlantic enclave at Cabinda several miles north of the river mouth, a grant which was to have reverberating consequences in the twentieth century when petroleum was discovered there. The Berlin Conference unexpectedly carried over into the New Year and widened its agenda to decide how other disputes over colonial claims should be resolved without resort to armed conflict between European nations. This resolving of European disputes was, however, to be achieved without resort to the opinions and sensitivities of the African peoples whose legal, political and diplomatic rights were totally ignored in the ensuing European ‘scramble’ for land and labour. King Pedro V of Kongo ruled for another half-dozen years after the closing of the Berlin congress but it was his successors who paid the price for the decisions taken there.
One sequel to the Berlin Congress was the decision by the Baptist Missionary Society of Great Britain to establish a mission station in the Kongo royal capital. Unlike the Methodist mission, which Americans developed eastward out of Luanda, the Baptist mission had a sphere of influence which stretched northward across both banks of the Congo River and as far as Kinshasa. When British Baptist preachers arrived in San Salvador, the king’s city, Angola’s governor-general became so alarmed that he used a gun-boat to ferry a Catholic missionary up the coast to establish a rival mission. The Catholic initiative was not immediately followed up, however, and the Baptists became a dominant Christian influence in what became ‘Portuguese Congo’, the northern part of Angola. This arrival of a Baptist missionary society had deep repercussions for Angola’s future. The urban focus of mission opportunity became Kinshasa, in the Belgian Congo, and in the first half of the twentieth century many Angolans migrated there in search of jobs and education. Those who remained behind in Angola suffered from the ever increasing labour demands of colonial enterprises. In particular the Portuguese logging companies in the forest enclave of Cabinda, north of the Congo River, were given the right to recruit ultra-cheap conscript workers from territory south of the river. Conditions in the logging camps were so oppressive, and the loss of labour on Kongo farms so painful, that in 1913 severe protests broke out. In an urgent search for a scape-goat the Portuguese blamed the Reverend J.S. Bowskill, a Baptist minister, for fomenting disloyalty to the colonial state, and locked him up, thus creating a diplomatic incident which reached the House of Commons in London. Conditions remained so oppressive that many Angolans migrated permanently across the border to work in the Belgian Congo. They became French-speakers, rather than Portuguese-speakers, and gained access to the clerical or craft training that was available under Belgian rule but rarely under Portuguese rule. The effects on northern Angola of the Belgian link, and of the Baptist presence, had lasting consequences throughout the twentieth century.