For more than seventy years, Africa has been regarded as a land-abundant and labour-scarce continent in mainstream economic and social history. This scholarship has been partially inspired by the Nieboer–Domar thesis, which, in short, contends that land surplus and insufficient manpower led polities, and economic and social elites, to invest in the accumulation of wealth in people rather than in amassing wealth in land. In the case of Africa, specialists hold that land abundance and people's scarcity led to the creation of lineages and the establishment of dependency ties as a means to gather wealth. Wealth in people, on the other hand, has been regarded by scholars as one of the key explanations for the existence of widespread warfare, slavery, and other forms of dependency in the continent, and for the involvement of African polities and economic elites in the different streams of the commerce in enslaved Africans.
The new book by Mariana P. Candido, Wealth, Land, and Property in Angola, not only challenges this dominant historical narrative in various ways, but also unveils its colonial roots in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. By so doing, it also calls for a “decolonization” and “gendering” of African economic and social history, and for the setting up of a research agenda in which African perspectives and knowledge are given their rightful place in the main historical narrative.
Firstly, by analysing in detail the rich evidence gathered from various Angolan, Brazilian, and Portuguese historical archives, Candido demonstrates that in coastal West Central Africa people accumulated wealth not only in people, but also in land. Rulers, elites, as well as commoners not only “claim[ed]” and register[ed] land [from as early as] the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries”, but also “entered into a series of disputes over property in the nineteenth century” with Portuguese colonial settlers (p. 1). This evidence attests not only to the importance given by West Central Africans to landownership, but also makes clear the existence of local landownership rights and regimes, and how these clashed with European property ownership ideas from as early as the precolonial era, and continuing into the colonial period (Chapter One). Simultaneously, the existence of these archival records is a testimony to how Europeans and Africans had to negotiate regimes of landownership and how African rulers, elites, and commoners made use of the judicial institutions, and juridical ownership laws of the colonizers, to register property on individual terms as a means to safeguard their ownership rights vis-à-vis the Europeans, in the meantime creating an African bureaucracy and developing a written culture to prove ownership (Chapters Two and Three).
Secondly, the land claims filed by Africans, the land registers made in their names, and the land disputes between them and European colonial settlers also called into question the idea that land was abundant, and occupation and control over land was undisputed. On this point, Candido's argument is fourfold. On the one hand, she argues that “land was not easily accessible in West central Africa”, unlike what has been posited by scholars do far. This situation was in part due to “[r]ides, warfare and political instability” (pp. 12–13). On the other hand, Candido contends that “warfare was also intended to expand territory, indicating that land control mattered” (pp. 12–13). In addition, she argues that nineteenth-century land disputes between colonizers and Africans are justified “given the scarcity of available land and thus the high value placed on it” (pp. 14–15). Together, these arguments challenge in various ways the land-abundance–labour-scarcity thesis.
More importantly, Candido shows that the idea of Africa as a continent where land was abundant, vacant, and underexplored is a narrative developed by the European colonial powers in the nineteenth century based on European assumptions, sanctioned by colonial scholars, “that non-European populations, in Africa, in the Americas, or in Asia, were incapable of comprehending and protecting the basic concept of ownership” (p. 5). Mariana goes as far as claiming that: “In many ways the recognition of private ownership of land in nineteenth-century Angola was a mode of dispossession that continued in the twentieth century and later” (p. 17), and, I would argue, facilitated appropriation of resources and labour during the colonial era. By unveiling the colonial roots of the land-abundance–labour-scarcity thesis Candido's book is, in my opinion, calling for a decolonization of African economic and social history and a renewal of this sub-field, which should pay more careful attention to African ideas, concepts, perceptions, uses, and practices in the reconstruction of the historical past of the African continent and its populations (Chapter Six).
However, the innovative character of Wealth, Land, and Property in Angola does not limit itself to questioning the land-abundance–labour-scarcity thesis. Candido's book also moves away from the most conventional narratives of African economic and social history in two other important ways. She does so, firstly, by refusing to look at Africans solely or mainly as sources of manpower, opting to pay attention to Africans as owners and consumers, not only of people (Chapters Four and Five), but also of land and other goods (Chapter Seven). Secondly, Candido refuses to write a male-centred African history. She shows that African women can be found in the archival paper trail not only as enslaved, but also as owners of people, land, commodities, and luxury items, and they defended their ownership rights in colonial institutions whenever these had been contested (Chapter Six).
One big question remains: Is Angola an exception or the rule? If it is the rule, then Candido's book makes a major contribution to the historiography of West Central Africa, and proposes a radical transformation in the ways in which specialists look at the African precolonial and colonial past.
