Vanessa S. Oliveira. Slave Trade and Abolition: Gender, Commerce, and Economic Transition in Luanda. Women in Africa and the Diaspora Series. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2021. Illustrations, maps, tables. 272 pp. $79.95 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-299-32580-0.
Reviewed by John K. Thornton (Boston University)
Published on H-Africa (September, 2021)
Commissioned by David D. Hurlbut (Center for Global Christianity and Mission, Boston University School of Theology)
Vanessa S. Oliveira seeks to resolve two main issues in her book. First, how did Angola, and particularly its capital Luanda, weather the drastic changes brought on by the transition from the slave trade to “legitimate” commerce? Second, to what degree did women participate in this change and what role did they play in the larger economy of the region?
The question of this transition has been tackled a number of times in the past ten years, although on the whole it has not been addressed significantly for Angola. Not surprisingly, Angola was different from the other regions of Africa, and particularly from West Africa, because Angola was a colony that encompassed a large area with a diverse population organized in a variety of ways. While English and French colonies sometimes controlled territory in Angola, this territory was usually relatively small in area and had populations that primarily serviced the immediate needs of the export economy. Thus the whole scope of the transition was not included, and the African polities that were primarily affected were not fully documented.
Angola had the same service economy as other Atlantic ports, but it also had a colonial hinterland that extended a great distance into the interior and had populations numbering in the hundreds of thousands. It included slave plantations, quasi-independent African polities, and nearly equally independent groups of settlers with their own estates. It had a population that was multilingual and multiracial and ranged in status from slave to nobleman.
Even though Oliveira has chosen the city of Luanda for her focal point, the merchant elite of the city had rural properties often located many miles away from the city, and so the town and country are not easily separated. For precisely this reason, Oliveira’s study is important as it can reveal the nature of the transition in areas that had many different relationships with the export slave trade. In West Africa this sector is poorly understood, while in Angola the problem is more clearly defined.
Thanks to the colonial nature of the settlement in Angola, substantial documentation is available to use as primary sources. Oliveira’s sources include records of sales, price series (statements of prices over time), legal contests, and marriage records, along with official reports and travelers’ accounts. Exploiting this wealth of resources is a challenge, and a glance at the footnotes reveals the lengthy and laborious research that lays behind this brief but full book.
Oliveira demonstrates that, in most ways, women, one of the targets of her research, played a relatively minor role; typically less than 10 percent of the documented mercantile and ownership activity was conducted by women. However, this did not prevent a handful of women from flourishing and even becoming dominant. Certainly Dona Ana Joaquina dos Santos Silva was the most visible of these women; her magnificent mansion now houses the Court of Justice on Luanda’s marginal (seaside park). Her commercial enterprises spanned a whole range of activities, from slave trading and illegal slave trading (after 1839), to experimenting in developing new exports from agricultural enterprises that sought to balance the colony’s payments. Furthermore, one of her trading agents, Joaquim Rodrigues Graça, served as Portugal’s ambassador to the Lunda Empire, where she was already well known as a leading merchant.
The rise of women to the top of Luanda society was unusual, and what appears from Oliveira’s account to be an important engine of success was longevity. The most successful women were born in the colony, typically of mixed race, and thus were well prepared for the perils of the tropical climate. And they were well placed to manage fortunes and see opportunities because they belonged to a community that educated at least some of its female members. At the same time, Portuguese merchants coming from the metropole typically needed and wanted to marry local women with at least some capital, as they possessed the linguistic and cultural skills to promote their businesses. Such men greatly assisted their wives’ ascent even as they used their wives’ funds as startup capital. However, when they died, and they did often quickly, the wife was able to use this enhanced capital to attract even more powerful men. After several such widowhoods, they were powerful, independent, and rich.
Oliveira’s research reaches to all levels of society and includes the lower levels where women, with relatively limited capital, were able to take advantage of the growth of an agricultural economy producing cash crops and used their role as primary producers in agriculture to advance. Here agricultural skills and cultural capital were outstanding in achieving what limited success they were able to win. When Portugal passed laws, following the suppression of the slave trade, women took advantage of the situation, and so cases of abuse against women showed up in court records. These court documents record, as has been done elsewhere, that female slave owners could be as brutal and violent as males.
Slave Trade and Abolition is a solidly researched and clearly argued book that will advance our knowledge of the many unique features of Angolan and Luandan society. Its conclusions match and at times offer interesting contrasts to studies of the role of African women elsewhere along the Atlantic coast in the crucial period of transition.
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Citation:
John K. Thornton. Review of Oliveira, Vanessa S., Slave Trade and Abolition: Gender, Commerce, and Economic Transition in Luanda.
H-Africa, H-Net Reviews.
September, 2021.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=56688
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