Chapter 3 examines how the exile of the Ndongo royals to Salvador and Rio de Janeiro was aligned with power struggles in Luanda. The House of Ndongo was led by a generation that rejected the Portuguese alliance that its predecessors had endorsed. The new generation broke away from this alliance when Portugal was gaining independence from Spain. The chapter focuses on the royals’ lives in Brazil, on what they saw there of the treatment of enslaved Africans and Indigenous people, how their stay was shaped by African slave communities, Black Brotherhoods, and how these experiences shaped Mendonça’s discourse in the Vatican. It examines the case of runaway slaves and connects it with those of Quilombo dos Palmares. It looks at how this community forged a political and economic alliance with Cristovão de Burgos, a judge in the High Court of Salvador. Palmares provoked the governing authorities in Bahia to reconsider their strategy, which led them to send the royals to Rio. The authorities in Brazil feared that the exiled royals’ status could help fortify the enslaved fugitives’ community, which would endanger Portuguese economic interests.

This chapter examines probate inventories and other primary documents to chart the integration of Bahia’s dendê economy within the post-abolition transitions of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It reconstructs four socioecological processes fundamental in that synthesis: the expansion of dendê cultures and landscapes in and around nineteenth-century Salvador; the interactive emergence of transatlantic economies, landscapes, and religions on the bay island of Itaparica; the persistent proliferation of dendê landscapes despite official disregard and illegibility; and the complementary intensification of dendê and cacao production on the post-abolition Southern Coast. This chapter demonstrates how networks of people, plants, places, and power interacted across time and space to assemble and reproduce a transatlantic dendê economy combining nourishment, ecology, and spirituality.