5 - Slaving and Resistance to Slaving in West Central Africa

Summary

INTRODUCTION

Scholars' interpretations of African slavery has ranged from emphasizing the weight of external influences, primarily commerce and contacts with Europeans, to framing slavery as an institution that preceded contacts with Europeans and derived from African systems of forced labor. The focus on proving or discarding these two divergent frameworks, as well as efforts to delineate causes and institutional contours of slavery, have prevailed to the detriment of bottom-up social analyses of slavery. More recently, however, a new breed of studies has begun illuminating the complexity of bondage and resistance. As a result of this scholarship, the emphasis on links between slavery and warfare has been replaced by analyses of mechanisms of enslavement that did not rely on perennial and large-scale military violence.

This chapter focuses on regions under formal Portuguese control in Angola to analyze slaving and resistance to slaving in Central Africa in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It first provides an overview of slavery in the African societies in relation to the emergent Atlantic slavery in the region under Portuguese influence. It then surveys changes in the coastal and internal slave trade so as to sketch an overview of changes in the demographic makeup of Luanda and the Luanda hinterland. It then looks at the transition from warfare to more commercialized mechanisms of enslavement in interior regions that supplied slaves for coastal Luanda and Benguela. Furthermore, it seeks to demonstrate African agency in the context of resistance to slaving by examining the emergence of runaway communities.