Vagabond States: Boundaries and Belonging in Portuguese Angola, c. 1880-1910
Melnysyn, Shana
2017
Abstract
At the end of the nineteenth century, Angola was ostensibly “Portuguese.” But colonial settlement and bureaucracy in the south central African territory were limited to the Atlantic ports of Luanda and Benguela and a few small military outposts in the hinterland. The transatlantic slave trade had brought an influx of novel commodities and people to Angola’s shores since the end of the fifteenth century, gradually transforming the modes through which people defined identities and loyalties. Against the notion that a “slaving frontier” moved steadily inland and left relative stability in its wake, this dissertation shows how a diverse patchwork of political structures and authorities persisted into the twentieth century, confounding metropolitan Portuguese agents. Following Vellut’s articulation of a “lusoafrican frontier, some historians have grouped the motley mix of exiles from Portugal who ran off into the bush, mestiços born of their local liaisons, and black Angolans adopting Portuguese language, dress, and religion as “Luso-Africans.” While this classification performed useful work in previous histories of Angola, I argue that we should only use it carefully and critically, giving preference to emic categories to broaden the descriptive range. Locally forged categories of people— intermediary traders and scribes such as Ambaquistas and Mambari—performed and disseminated colonial authority from an early date by building trade networks deep into the continent. Their social and racial fluidity enabled them to navigate political and commercial networks with ease and diplomacy, bridging worlds. Luso-Africans and colonial agents had to contend with existing idioms of power recognized by people whom the state classified as gentio (unassimilated “gentiles”) well into the twentieth century. These gentio frequently rejected colonial influence through violent uprisings such as the Mbailundu Revolt of 1902—one of the largest in Angolan history and an important conflict that has received relatively scant attention from researchers. Political elites from the Mbailundu Kingdom in Angola’s mostly Umbunduspeaking central highlands targeted Luso-African traders and Portuguese colonial agents, suggesting they were attempting to draw stricter boundaries between subjects of Mbailundu and all others who did not belong in their territory. Contributing to scholarly debates on Portuguese colonial power as “weak” or “subaltern,” this dissertation shows how traders of indigenous and mixed descent circulated European objects and affects, spreading colonial aesthetics and logics. Despite the dearth of Portuguese institutions such as schools, courts, or missions throughout most of the vast territory of Angola, these new players created their own niche. When the Mbailundu Revolt broke out in 1902, local elites defending “traditional” authority targeted intermediaries and Europeans as threatening outsiders who would no longer be tolerated. Portuguese authorities condemned Luso-African traders as instigators who stoked moral outrage. The state also accused Anglophone Protestant missionaries as inciters of revolt, resenting their superior wealth and the rapport they enjoyed with the Revolt’s leaders and with the gentio. Through microhistorical analysis of conflicts, oral histories and ethnographic observation, this work probes the nature of anxieties and misunderstandings that characterized this violent colonial situation, and shows how this violence continues to echo in twenty-first century Angola.Subjects
Portuguese colonialism Racial identity & "creolization" Anticolonial rebellion
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