During the nineteenth century, immigrant males settled along the coast of West Central Africa to trade in slaves and the commodities of the so-called ‘legitimate’ commerce. As was the case in other ports in West Africa, newcomers generally relied on local intermediaries with knowledge of indigenous cultures to establish commercial networks with African suppliers inland. Many cultural brokers were women with whom incoming traders established commercial and, sometimes, intimate relationships. Several locally born wives or partners were traders themselves, operating in the local, regional and, in some cases, international markets. In Angola, the most successful women merchants became known as donas, a term that originated from the title granted to noble and royal females in the Iberian Peninsula and was subsequently adopted in Portugal's overseas territories to designate women of high socio-economic status living in accordance with Portuguese norms of respectability.

Since the mid-1970s, the participation of African and Eurafrican women in commerce along the western coast of Africa has been the object of a number of studies. Historians in particular have explored the experiences of female merchants known as nharas, signares, and senhoras in West African ports and their involvement in the trade in slaves. In the particular case of Angola, a growing scholarship has highlighted women's agency in the socio-economic fabric of the colony as merchants and cultural brokers.

This chapter dialogues with other works in this volume, particularly with contributions by Hilary Jones and Natalie Everts. Both authors highlight the importance of marriage to European men in advancing the position of women in coastal societies in Senegambia and in the Gold Coast during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. This contribution analyses instances of Catholic marriage between immigrant men and Luso-African women in nineteenth-century Luanda, particularly between 1831 and 1859, a period marked by the ban on slave exports and the expansion of the commerce in tropical commodities in West Central Africa. Although marriage to immigrant men helped advance the career of female traders in previous generations, primary sources demonstrate that in the second half of the nineteenth-century women in Luanda were able to become merchants and acquire wealth out of their relationships with foreign men, often through entrepreneurial activities.

Luanda in the Nineteenth Century

Following its foundation in 1576, Luanda became a place of interaction for people from different parts of the Atlantic world.