4

Land and Labour in the South

In the southern half of Angola a quasi-autonomous colony existed for some centuries with its own governor inhabiting a small palace in the dusty port city of Benguela which had been founded in 1617. The population around the city were semi-nomadic peoples who were dependent on their cattle and moved up and down the coast seeking fresh water and edible grasses. The city people were not only in-comers from all over the south who had either been brought there as slaves, or had sought opportunities to enhance their welfare by trading, but also migrants from the Portuguese enclaves as far north as Cabinda. The history of Benguela province in the nineteenth century was deeply affected by three phases of international commerce. The first, as in the north, was the opening up of the ivory trade in the 1830s, after which caravans penetrated ever deeper into the southern interior. The second, which evolved slowly from the 1870s, was a particularly profitable trade in wild rubber. And the third dimension was the revival of the old trade in workers, effectively slaves, who were shipped to the island of São Tomé no longer to grow coffee but now to grow cocoa. These three long-distance systems of trade generated other forms of economic production. Food for the caravans had to be grown, some of it in the environs of the city but much of it on the highland of the interior. Sugar also started to be cultivated, primarily to make rum which was a major trading commodity for the buying of ivory or rubber or slaves. A successful fishing industry affected the little out-ports of south Angola and provided dried protein for the colonial work force on the long merchant trails to the interior.

In 1848 the Hungarian trader Ladislaus Magyar moved his field of operations from north Angola to south-central Angola. For health reasons he abandoned the pestilential Congo valley for the salubrious highland behind Benguela. There he acquired an agricultural estate in a fertile valley in the kingdom of Bihé. To set up a trading business Magyar converted the money he had earned in five years of travelling the Atlantic shipping routes into suitable merchandise for a trading expedition to the interior. His stock included 10,000 metres of cloth, 1,000 litres of brandy, twenty large barrels of gunpowder, three tons of salt, twenty rifles, and an assortment of shells, beads, mirrors and knives. His gold coin he kept for contingencies and emergencies. The cargo was made up into carefully checked, if heavy, loads and enough porters were hired to carry his thirty-six tons of stock. To reach the highland safely Magyar and his porters, with their caravan manager flying the Hungarian flag, joined a trading expedition returning home to Bihé which set out from Benguela in January 1849. The advance party consisted of 150 highland hunters who acted as guards to clear the road ahead. A thousand porters carried Magyar’s heavy loads and a thousand independent traders tagged along behind. The rear was secured by men with heavy ‘rifles’ who were slung about with cartridges. The weaponry not only provided protection but was also used to hunt game and provide the company with meat. When the caravan reached its destination, after forty days of up-hill marching, each porter was paid off with yards of cloth and bottles of brandy.

Once Magyar had chosen a site suitable for his trading compound he sent a carefully chosen diplomatic gift to the king of Bihé. This consisted of two red blankets, two flintlocks, two barrels of brandy, two kegs of gun-powder, 250 yards of cloth and 300 gun flints. He was thereupon invited to make a visit to the king’s capital. This involved a slow ceremonial progress lasting several days. His retinue eventually wended its way through the city streets and past the many alleyways lined with thatched houses and curtained compounds. The power of the monarch was symbolised by the display of the skulls of enemies whom he had worsted and traitors whom he had executed. The town was divided by a stream which Magyar had to ford on the back of one of his slaves—to the great merriment of throngs of children. After the customary delays of protocol Magyar eventually reached the fearsome king’s personal compound but was told that the king was ‘busy’ and could not see him until the next day. Eventually Magyar was invited to address the king’s official linguist. An exchange of gifts took place and permission was granted for Magyar to settle permanently in the kingdom. The king even lent him a mule to carry him back to his newly-granted home. Magyar spent the next month building two stout walls around his compound, two houses in the European style, and fifty huts for his staff. In his domain he kept herds of cattle, sheep and goats and cultivated fields of maize and beans. His household consisted of thirty servants, some of them free men and others slaves whom he had bought. Some servants were former debt pawns who had bought their own freedom. Others were regular slaves who had been branded, like cattle, with their owner’s property mark. Slaves, like livestock, had to be sheltered from thieves and prevented from straying. Magyar’s slaves found it advantageous, however, to remain with a good owner who granted them a set of new clothes twice each year. Some of Magyar’s male slaves married free women and therefore fathered free children. Several of his female slaves bore their master mestizo children in traditional colonial fashion. In the course of time the Bihé king became so pleased with his own ‘white man’ that he offered Magyar one of his forty-four daughters as a wedded bride. The fourteen-year-old princess was a cultured child whose grandmother had served as a high-status concubine in a near-by Brazilian household. At her wedding the little princess was not only decked out in fine clothes and hair beads but also wore a gold crucifix around her neck. Over the next years she bore Magyar five children and although only two survived to adulthood their descendants were still living on the coast at Benguela a hundred years later.

In the 1850s Magyar travelled widely on business, corresponded regularly with his father in Hungary, and even when on the remotest trading paths of eastern Angola kept up with world news through French and Brazilian newspapers delivered to him. The idea, peddled by later European adventurers, that Angola was a terra incognita at the heart of a dark continent was far from true. Communication with the outer world was slow, but it was regular. Magyar was able, in his surviving magnum opus, to provide a detailed account of all the kingdoms and principalities of the Ovimbundu highland. When he heard, on the efficient bush telegraph, that David Livingstone was travelling north from the Cape he set off towards the upper Zambezi to meet him. The surly Scotsman, however, was in no mood to meet a rival ‘explorer’. Another important figure in this busy trading world was Magyar’s young Portuguese neighbour, Silva Porto, but Livingstone disparagingly refused to meet him too. Silva Porto ran a successful trading empire for fifty years but Magyar himself was rather less successful. After one expedition Magyar had garnered a hundred lion skins and a huge haul of ivory but he was later attacked and robbed by rival traders. Soon after Magyar also lost his royal patron, his father-in-law, when a coup brought a jealous nephew to the throne of Bihé and Magyar had abruptly to leave the highland. He died in penury on the coast. His hope of sending the eldest son of his beloved princess to Hungary for his education never materialised. Magyar’s father in Budapest tried to send his grandson 150 gold coins through one of the Benguela trading houses but the money never arrived.

Magyar’s most famous neighbour, Silva Porto, was a Portuguese backwoodsman who had started as a book-keeper in Oporto, worked for a few years in Brazil, and then spent much of the rest of his long life as a caravan entrepreneur in the kingdom of Bihé. He arrived there in 1838. Two years before there had been a great rumpus when the king heard that Portugal intended to outlaw the buying of slaves. Portuguese traders had to flee from the highland. When they returned they brought temporary protection from the ‘barbarities’ of the fierce Bihé king in the form of a black militia commanded by a locally-born Portuguese Indian. The slave trade soon revived and within ten years there were reported to be one hundred ‘Portuguese’ traders in the kingdom, most of them black but a few of them mestizo or, in the case of Silva Porto, white. Some traders had hitherto supplied highland slaves to thirty-odd merchant houses in Luanda via the river port of Dondo. Silva Porto, however, used the long-distance path to Benguela and it was this trail which was adopted by Magyar. In return for slaves, traders regularly brought back commodities much in demand in the highland kingdoms: salt, rum, calico, gun-powder, and Belgian muskets from Liège or shot-guns, stamped with Victoria’s crown, from Birmingham. When George Tams passed though Benguela in 1841 he estimated that 20,000 slaves were being illegally exported each year. Slaves became a standard unit of currency in Bihé and a ten-year-old child could be exchanged for a head-load of bees’ wax. Although business flourished the traders felt insecure when they were at the mercy of kings engaged in their own fierce disputes, especially over questions of royal succession. Efforts to persuade the colonial government, down on the coast, to send an expensive military expedition to conquer Bihé and provide expatriates with security were all in vain. Trade nevertheless continued to expand and elephant tusks became so scarce that Silva Porto began seeking them in the far-off Zambezi territory. There the local Lozi king was not much interested in the assortment of trade goods which Angola could offer but he was interested in buying Angolan slaves to cultivate the farms on his great flood plain. Part of the slave trade was thus reversed and captives were herded east in exchange for ivory carried west. By the 1860s Silva Porto was even buying slaves from the Luba people of the upper Congo.

As the commercial networks reached ever further, they eventually overlapped the ivory and slave-trading networks based on Zanzibar. When East African traders, armed with guns, reached the upper Congo they established a kingdom of their own and elected one of their leaders, Msiri, as their king. One of this king’s wives, Maria, came from Angola. When Leopold’s armies of mercenaries closed in on the upper Congo Msiri was murdered and it was Maria’s son who inherited his throne. This Angolan connection took on a more lasting dimension when a mission of Plymouth Brethren spread out along the trade paths which crossed the borderland between the Indian Ocean and the Atlantic. The Plymouth mission eventually became a significant feature of Angola’s Christian tradition. In the meantime cross-continental trade continued to grow. As the world demand for ivory to make billiard balls, dominoes, piano keys and knife handles rose, international competition became ever more intense and merchants came all the way up from Cape Town to outbid the Angolans by offering better assortments of trade goods. They brought advanced Snyder firearms and even made payments in gold coin. To diversify their enterprises some highland entrepreneurs had once tried to grow cotton and benefit from the peak in cotton prices which briefly occurred during the American Civil War. When the war ended, and cotton prices fell, they hoped that rubber would be their salvation, though nothing quite matched the value of ivory.

The role of rubber in the economic evolution of Angola features in the work of a white Angolan sociologist from Benguela, Artur Pestana, who wrote classical novels under the nom de plume Pepetela. His book Yaka was named after the god-like mask with amber eyes who watched over the well-being of a trading family which ran a typical Portuguese store piled high with sacks of produce. Excitement came to Benguela town when the great caravans laden with rubber arrived down from the highland. Thousands of porters celebrated their safe return to the coast and money flowed with music and dancing and drinking. The good times did not last, however, and the great boom in rubber, which had accompanied the European proliferation of electric cables with rubber-coated insulation, collapsed early in the twentieth century. Wild rubber was replaced on the world market by plantation rubber from Brazil and Malaya. One proud fictional chief, arriving in Benguela with a huge haul of rubber, carried by his caravan of porters, was so shocked by the derisory price he was offered for his hard-won harvest that he publicly and dramatically set fire to all his latex bales rather than selling them at a loss. The wild rubber trade never did recover, though a later generation briefly sought to revive it during the Second World War when Japan conquered Malaya. Benguela storekeepers had meanwhile reverted to living on the margins of prosperity and diversifying their business as best they could.

Another focus of Portuguese activity on the Ovimbundu highland turned on the Luso-African town of Caconda. This district, a hundred miles inland from Benguela, probably had more ‘civilised’ settlers in the early twentieth century than the comparable Ambaca district in the hinterland of Luanda. The southern highland was healthier than the rest of Angola and the long-distance southern trade became ever more profitable. The export trade in de facto slaves to São Tomé was active but there were also a series of attempts to use purchased labourers inside the colony. A number of absentee São Tomé plantation owners in Lisbon thought that they could buy large tracts of land around Caconda and use local slaves to plant tropical crops without the expense, or the political hazard, of taking them to their estates on the island. This São Tomé initiative was less than successful but colonisation on the Caconda lands took on a wholly new and unexpected dimension when Dutch-speaking immigrants began to infiltrate the district. The South African Boers, hitherto settled in the far south of Angola, began to move into the Caconda district with their retainers and bought slaves to serve as relatively expensive farm labourers and as wagon drovers. The cost of slaves had risen when the search for rubber had penetrated ever deeper into the interior and had required longer columns of porters to bring produce to the coast. Porters from remote lands were, moreover, not always available to local employers and many finished up on schooners, or steamers, which took them off to São Tomé after they had put an unwitting thumb-print on a labour contract.

In the midst of all this activity the district commissioner at Caconda tried to live a lifestyle he deemed to be compatible with his status. Porters coming up from the coast brought him crystal glasses from which to drink his champagne and a fully sprung mattress for his bed. The invoices for his domestic purchases listed foreign plates, bowls, tureens, butter dishes and water pitchers, as well as fancy coffee pots, teapots, china cups, wine glasses and three decanters for brandy. Such extravagance compared sharply with the more usual imports consisting of drums of cooking oil, boxes of dried cod fish, metal cans of lamp oil, and kegs of red wine. Meat was surprisingly scarce on the highland and ‘civilised’ Angolans—white and black—preferred dried salt-fish imported from Europe even when living in the deepest interior. Bread was a luxury and imported wheat was alleged to be almost as expensive as salt, head-loaded up from the drying pans at Benguela. High living had a long history among the élite citizens of Angola but the cost of hiring skilled porters who could carry fragile loads up the escarpment to the highland was exorbitant.

The task of a self-important commissioner was essentially that of a district magistrate and a tax inspector. He was supported by a ‘professor’, a doctor, a nurse, a judge, and a ferry master. He spent municipal money maintaining the prison, lighting the main street, and hosting music festivals. The Caconda district even had a school run by a Catholic mission. The campus was an hour’s walk out of town but, although secluded, lonely male settlers nevertheless clustered round the girls’ dormitory like bees round a honey pot. The school catered for 200 children, some of them Boers and mestizos. The district as a whole apparently had a population of about 3,000 mestizo, white, black, and Indian ‘Portuguese’. Caconda also allegedly had about 40,000 African ‘hearths’ on which hut-taxes could be imposed. Tax collectors found it expedient, however, to minimise the census returns on taxable subjects since they were afraid of penetrating, unless accompanied by armed soldiers, into villages beyond the environs of the city. A reduced hut-tax roll may also have enhanced their opportunities for making undeclared illegal profits. The unreliability of the census figures became particularly notorious at election time. In 1884 309 votes were registered, in 1901 the number had risen to 1,439, but in 1894 over six thousand ballot papers had allegedly been cast though they were hastily burnt before they could be checked. The votes were always for the absentee candidate nominated by Lisbon. No votes ever seem to have been cast in Caconda for an opposition candidate, or for a local dignitary.

The Caconda commissioner had particular difficulty in recruiting ‘native militias’ needed to hunt down robbers, such as the ones who looted the forty-nine-man caravan which brought the imperial consul of Germany on a visit to Caconda in 1900. The garrison at Caconda consisted of fewer than a hundred soldiers and fifty militiamen. When it came to protecting the district from Kwanyama raiders, who came up from the south, the commissioner depended on the Boer community for protection. In return he gave them licences to hold modern rifles, even Martini-Henry ones, and also the right to keep as booty any cattle they captured during their campaigns. In addition to the problem of security, questions relating to bribery regularly exercised the authorities. When a ‘native chief’ brought a gift pig to the commissioner it generated an extensive correspondence over legal malpractice. The bigger law cases facing a magistrate, however, were the ones concerning the ownership of slaves. Slaves who ran away from brutal masters or mistresses were soundly thrashed at the town pillory before being unquestioningly returned to their owners. If justice were to be sought by an African he or she was better advised to approach one of the missions in the district for help.

A very rare insight into the nature of Angolan slavery by one of its victims turned up unexpectedly when the autobiography of a young Angolan was unearthed in the Swiss archive of a Basel Mission station in Cameroun. Salomo Paipo was enlisted for plantation service at the turn of the century in a village some miles north of Caconda.

Our town was in a peaceful grassland and was open to all traders. One day a party of Portuguese arrived and asked our headman if they might recruit workers. To facilitate the deal they gave him a dash of various kinds of brandy and some beautiful textiles. They explained that any recruit would be given a free passage home after two years’ service, and thus the headman called out ‘whoever wants to sign up for labour duty should step forward’. Several of us boys, Kolombo, Ngondja, Kaloko, came forward as did many adults who were willing to follow the recruiting agents. While we got ready the white men purchased cattle, sheep, goats, pigs and hens which our herdsmen offered to drive to the coast. At the beach a clerk took our names and we then loaded all the livestock on board a tramp steamer. We also loaded potatoes, onions, corn, rubber and palm kernels. Once the ship had weighed anchor we were all inoculated and our clothes were sprayed with strong disinfectant. The next day we steamed amid canon salutes into Luanda harbour and the livestock was unloaded. We then sailed on to Cabinda where the traders who came aboard spoke the pidgin English of Liberian Kru Boys and sold a quantity of ducks. An interpreter enabled me to buy some dried cassava for the voyage. Twenty-four hours later we anchored off the beautiful island of São Tomé which has many fine brick-and-tile houses. Here we were lowered into a dingy and rowed ashore. The island seemed covered in pineapples, coconuts, melons, oil-palms, cocoa trees and coffee plantations.

This peaceful and optimistic autobiographical account of labour recruitment in southern Angola is in sharp contrast with the eyewitness description of a travelling journalist who crossed the same region a short while afterwards, in 1906. Henry Nevinson wrote a series of articles on ‘a modern slavery’ for Harper’s Magazine. His account was one of violent kidnapping rather than material inducement. Héli Chatelain saw copies of Harper’s Magazine and wrote discreetly to his friends to say that they seemed to be accurate in every particular. Two years later, when William Cadbury walked up the recruitment trail from the coast, he too saw evidence of a much more violent side to the labour recruitment than that revealed by the Basel document. He found discarded wooden shackles piled up at the side of the path. They had been removed from captives who had been marched down to the coast from the far interior and who had only been unshackled so that they could sign labour contracts as though they were free men and women. This was a far cry from the account of the carefree village lads who had signed up with Salomo a short while before. Violent methods of recruitment were not the only problem which the people of southern Angola faced and the question of the working conditions on the islands to which they were taken also became very controversial. The Cadbury report said that the island work schedules were not too severe, the diet was apparently adequate, and the better plantations had infirmaries to tend the sick workers who had been expensively imported from the mainland. Indentured labour practices were no worse than those applied to the Indian and Chinese ‘coolies’ who kept the British Empire turning. One feature, however, was unacceptable to a philanthropic cocoa buyer: the lack of any tradition of repatriation. Salomo had been promised a contract of two years but most serviçais were enlisted for five years. But at the end of five years, Cadbury complained, the workers were automatically signed up for another five-year term, and then another, and another, so that none of the highland recruits from Caconda and elsewhere ever returned home. This, said Cadbury, amounted to slavery and unless repatriation were to be introduced to the island regime he and his fellow chocolate manufacturers would cease buying Portuguese cocoa beans.

Salomo would not have agreed with Cadbury’s assessment that working conditions on the beautiful plantations were acceptable by the norms of late Victorian imperialism. His description of life on São Tomé contrasts sharply with his light-hearted account of the journey to the island. Work, he said, was a constant torment. Labouring began at dawn and did not cease till the noon-day lunch bell rang. The afternoon shift carried on till nightfall. Living quarters for horses and oxen were better than those for the men and women who gathered the harvest or for the child workers who sorted the fruits. Far from appreciating the infirmaries which were proudly shown to visiting dignitaries, Salomo reported that any worker who claimed to be ill was accused of shirking and was whipped until the blood flowed. One of Salomo’s companions was so severely beaten that he hanged himself. Furious planters refused to grant him a dignified burial but had his corpse incinerated on the public highway. Had Salomo remained a plantation worker he felt sure he too would have died, but by good fortune he was taken on as an apprentice by a carpenter who travelled round the island doing house repairs. Since his master liked to take long lunch breaks, and to indulge in competitive ninepin bowling with his mates, the apprentice had lighter working conditions and shorter hours than his fellow Angolans. Soon, however, a dour and violent new labour agent arrived and when indentured men asked when they would be allowed to go home the agent became so angry that indenture became slavery, as Cadbury said. Salomo solved his predicament by stealing a boat and allowing the Atlantic currents to drift him, over ten hungry and thirsty days, to the coast of German Kamerun where he was rescued by villagers, taken to the Swiss mission, given an education, and trained as a school master who could write an autobiography.

Salomo left his native Caconda at much the same time as English adventurers arrived to roam across the plateau and beyond. One of the most remarkable Englishmen who explored Angola early in the twentieth century was a big-game hunter, Major Percy Powell-Cotton. He employed the world’s most skilled taxidermists and set up an astonishing diorama of stuffed animals, ranging from elephants to aardvarks, all in a naturalistic African setting, on his family estate in Kent. The rarest of his specimens was the Giant Sable Antelope from Angola. During the Angolan civil wars of the 1990s it was feared that the last of these majestic beasts had been eaten by famished guerrillas but when a possible survivor was found the ministry of tourism attempted to match its DNA with that of the major’s specimen. In the 1930s the daughters of the family returned to Africa and used their skills as amateur anthropologists to study the customs of Angola’s people. They bought an old pick-up truck, loaded it with salt from the Benguela salt pans, and—to the astonishment of local settlers who had never before seen women drivers capable of keeping an old motor running on their sandy trails—set off to explore the highland. At each village they offered a bag of salt for permission to use their ciné camera to film initiation rituals and dances as well as weddings and funerals. They were also interested in arts and crafts and filmed the beating of bark-cloth and the smelting of iron ore. They filled their truck with every type of carving, pottery and basket-work which they brought home to expand their father’s diorama into one of the best of Angola’s small ethnographic museums, much visited by later generations of children and tourists in Kent. Some of their exhibits they gave to the Pitt-Rivers Museum in Oxford.

Powell-Cotton was not the only turn-of-the-century Englishman to venture into the deep interior of Angola. One army captain, who had served the British in the Anglo-Boer war, penetrated as far as Kasanje, 300 miles north of Caconda, but was murdered in a petty squabble over the price a butcher wanted to charge him for a goat. Other Britons, geologists, prospectors and miners, combed the district for opportunities but caused much distress at the religious missions by buying slaves to do their digging and staff their households. The main witness to these events was Héli Chatelain who spent ten years on the highland after the self-sufficient, and very evangelical, Taylor mission which he had helped to found had failed in the hinterland of Luanda. Chatelain’s new mission, established on the Caconda highland, aspired—like the Taylor mission—to be self-reliant with minimal dependence on Swiss church subsidies. The mission ran an important highland store, established a pharmacy, set up a bank, built a saw-mill and operated a granary with its own water-driven corn-mill. It did business with all the expatriate communities of the highland and hired out its artisans and carpenters. Although Chatelain approved of new business enterprises he strongly disapproved of the moral climate which came in their wake. His store maintained a strict prohibition on the selling of tobacco and snuff, to which the African population was becoming addicted, and also refused to trade in alcoholic spirits from which old-style traders earned a large share of their profit. The most important British enterprise from which Chatelain hoped to gain a benefit was the building of the railway up from Benguela. To his dismay, however, the route eventually chosen did not pass through Caconda but went further north, to the African town of Bihé where Magyar and Silva Porto had once been the great caravan masters. Relations between the Swiss missionary and the railway engineers deteriorated when Chatelain visited the building site. He tried to protest about the labour conditions that he witnessed. The British consul-general in Angola came to inspect progress on the line but refused to meet Chatelain. The concessionaire was hiring Indian ‘coolies’ on indentured contracts to build the line because they were cheaper than African navvies. They were also less likely to flee from the building sites into the unknown African wilderness. Chatelain’s main objective in Africa was to improve labour conditions but the British consul was quite unwilling to recognise that many Indians were dying of starvation and fever. The railway’s use of indentured labour from India severely limited any moral high ground which Britain might have used to protest about the Portuguese trade in indentured workers for their cocoa islands.

The Swiss mission which Héli Chatelain created had arrived in Caconda in 1897. At the time an international conference was held in Brussels to revitalise the world campaign against slavery. This crusade appealed to Chatelain and he devoted the rest of his life to campaigning against slavery. He gained support from American philanthropists and when he established his new mission station on the highland he called it Lincoln after the president who had outlawed slavery in the United States. The Swiss anti-slavery league which sponsored him was run by his sister and was loosely connected to the Presbyterian Free Church in Lausanne. The mission eventually flourished for a hundred years but in its first ten years it went through severe difficulties. The Caconda commissioner claimed that it was not a mission at all but a common trading venture. The Union Castle shipping line agreed and, although the Swiss bookstore was the official agent for the British and Foreign Bible Society, the mission workers were refused the discount which the shipping company granted to bona fide preachers seeking berths. The Swiss recruits themselves were a bit surprised that Chatelain, who in his youth had been a keen singer of Methodist hymns, did not insist that his workshop staff take part in religious services. He seemed more devoted to wagon trading than to proselytising. The mission wagon, with a full team of eighteen oxen, travelled through the villages selling an assortment of goods such as might have been found in the seasonal fair of any Swiss village. The heavy commodities were sugar, salt, cooking oil and soap but in addition Chatelain sold padlocks, door-locks, pen-knives, brass nails, shirt buttons, rings, belts, kerchiefs, hats, gun-flints, paper, mirrors, needles, matches, mouth-organs and bracelets. The supply of wagons, especially for Boer customers, became a key part of the mission business plan. Chatelain corresponded with the Illinois firm of Studebaker, which built great wagons for the American plains, and explained that the ones needed in Africa had to be very rugged, and to have chain harnesses for twice as many oxen as those used on the American prairies. Although the Boers depended on Chatelain for the supply, and maintenance, of their wagons they deeply resented his interference in their domestic affairs and especially in their treatment of their slaves. This resentment was echoed by the district commissioner of Caconda and his Portuguese settlers who also used slaves extensively. Eventually, by a piece of chicanery which brought in the governor-general while avoiding a diplomatic incident, the commissioner managed to have Chatelain expelled from his highland. He accused the mission of failing to fill in a tax return on liqueur sales, a commodity which, as everyone knew, was emphatically not traded by the mission store. Many Caconda residents who owed the Swiss bank money cheered at Chatelain’s departure and some would even have liked to burn the mission down and destroy all its financial records. To get away safely Chatelain sought the help of a distinguished Catholic priest, Mathias Delgado. Chatelain himself died in 1908 but for the next thirty years Delgado carried on his friend’s work on African languages. He eventually became a professor of Bantu language studies and edited two volumes of the great history of the Angolan wars which had been written in the 1680s by Cadornega, an old Jewish scholar who had lived out his days in African exile after his mother had been sentenced to be burnt at the stake on the main Lisbon square for practising Hebrew worship.

In the last years of the nineteenth century politicians in Lisbon were increasingly exercised over problems of empire. Portugal had long aspired to extend its Atlantic territory across Angola to Mozambique, an ambition which inevitably brought it into conflict with Britain. In 1878 a Portuguese army officer, Major Serpa Pinto, had crossed south Angola from Benguela to the Lozi Kingdom before heading down to Pretoria and Durban. He published his two volumes of travels in London and was later sent to Mozambique where he sought to acquire Lake Malawi for Portugal, thereby wrong-footing both the British prime minister, Lord Salisbury, and the maverick entrepreneur, Cecil Rhodes. Missionaries brandishing the Scottish name of Livingstone, claimed the lake for themselves and Salisbury dared not offend Scottish sensibilities. In Cape Town Rhodes claimed possession of the gold-bearing regions inland of Mozambique and used financial inducements from his diamond mines to buy support for his actions in both British houses of parliament. Thus it was that when Portugal laid claim to a cross-continental swathe of Africa, Lord Salisbury found it expedient ‘mildly’ to remonstrate. His ultimatum of January 1890, banning Portugal from claiming territory along the middle stretch of the Zambezi, may have seemed mild to him but to the Portuguese it was a dagger in the back wielded by their oldest ally. It caused an uproar, the effects of which lasted for a generation. The future of Angola as the Atlantic gateway to the whole of Central Africa crumbled. Portugal’s inability to counteract such rampant British imperialism brought traders such as Silva Porto to despair. In April 1890 the disillusioned old man wrapped himself in the Portuguese flag, sat on a barrel of gun-powder, and lit the fuse. The explosion reverberated around the Portuguese empire.

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