Luanda

What was Luanda like around 1715?

The Portuguese captain Paulo Dias de Novais, the first governor of Angola, founded the town in 1576 and named it São Paulo da Assunção de Loanda. It stood beside a fine natural harbour, and it became a city in 1605. It was the centre of Portugal’s government in Angola.

By the time Silver & Sails begins, Luanda was more than a century old, but it was still small. Historians think only a few thousand people lived there, and a count of 1781 found under ten thousand. It had forts, including São Miguel on the hill above the bay, a Jesuit college founded in 1623, and from 1684 the seat of a bishop.

Portugal’s power did not reach far. It held the town and some forts inland, and it depended on alliances with local African lords, called sobas, for soldiers, porters and trade.

Who supplied captives to Luanda?

The people sold at Luanda were mostly captured or condemned far inland, by African rulers and traders. By the late 1600s the most important supplier was Kasanje, a kingdom founded around 1630. Kasanje held an official market where captives were sold, and it kept Portuguese traders from going further east. The kingdom of Matamba was another supplier.

Travelling traders called pombeiros, working for merchants in Luanda, carried goods inland on credit and came back with captives. People lost their freedom in wars and raids, but also through debts, as pawns for a relative’s debt, or as punishment for crimes such as witchcraft.

Some enslaved people fought back through the law. The historian Roquinaldo Ferreira found that people in Angola brought cases to local courts, arguing that they had been enslaved illegally. Their petitions help historians hear their side of the story.

Why was Luanda so closely tied to Brazil?

Most ships in Luanda’s harbour came from Brazil, not Portugal, and historians describe Angola as tied more closely to Rio de Janeiro than to Lisbon. The link grew stronger after gold was found in Minas Gerais, in Brazil, in the 1690s. The mines wanted ever more enslaved workers, and Brazilian merchants sailed straight across the South Atlantic to buy them.

They paid in goods. Portuguese and Spanish wines had led the trade until the mid-1600s. After that a strong Brazilian cane spirit called jeribita (or gerebita), a kind of cachaça, took over. The historian José Curto estimates that about a quarter of the people shipped from Luanda to Brazil between 1710 and 1830 were bought with it. Cloth and guns and gunpowder were the other main goods.

African rulers saw the harm the spirits did. In 1689 the ruler of Kasanje asked the governor to stop sending the drinks, which he said were “killing his subjects” (as quoted by Curto).

How many people were taken from Luanda?

Historians count Luanda as the busiest slave-trading port in all of Africa. Recorded voyages show more than a million people carried from Luanda to Brazil, and Curto estimates about 1.2 million from 1710 to 1830 alone.

Brazil, the main destination, received nearly five million enslaved Africans in all, about four in every ten people carried across the Atlantic. Rio de Janeiro took many of the people shipped from Angola.

Luanda was not the whole story. Many people from the same region left from ports to the north that Portugal did not control, such as Cabinda, Ambriz and the mouth of the Congo River. To the south, the Portuguese port of Benguela grew in the early 1700s, and by the 1730s its ships sailed straight to Brazil. Most numbers here are estimates built from surviving ship records.

Who was Queen Njinga?

Njinga Mbande, born around 1582, was a princess of Ndongo, a kingdom inland from Luanda. In 1622 her brother sent her to Luanda to make peace with the Portuguese governor. She was baptised there as Ana de Sousa, but the treaty soon broke down.

She became queen in 1624. The Portuguese backed a rival king, and Njinga spent most of the next thirty years at war with them. In the early 1630s she took over the kingdom of Matamba and made it her base. When the Dutch captured Luanda in 1641 she allied with them, until a fleet sent from Brazil retook the town in 1648. In 1656 (some sources say 1657) she finally made peace with Portugal, which recognised her as queen. She died in 1663, more than fifty years before the game begins.

Her story is not simple. She resisted Portuguese conquest for decades, but her armies also took captives, she sold many to the Portuguese, and her 1656 treaty opened her lands to slave traders. Angolans honour her as a heroine of resistance, and in 2013 a statue of her was unveiled in Luanda.

What can you see in Luanda today?

Luanda is now the capital of independent Angola and one of Africa’s biggest cities. The Fortress of São Miguel, built by the Portuguese in the town’s early years and strengthened in the 1630s, still stands above the bay. The Dutch called it Fort Aardenburgh while they held the town. Inside are painted tiles showing scenes from Angola’s early history, and today it houses the Museum of the Armed Forces.