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Angola before 1900: A Review of Recent Research
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 23 May 2014
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Since the last published survey of scholarly research and general research conditions in Angola (Bwrmingham, 1974), much has changed. An independent government has begun to implement fresh policies bearing on scholarly research and on education. Numerous studies have appeared abroad, although historical works on the period before 1900 and ethnographies of Angola's rural areas—the subjects of this research note—have been less plentiful than analyses of the rapid and spectacular political changes that have taken place in the last three years. Research on the earlier periods of Angola's history have filled in several of the gaps that until recently limited our knowledge of the region anachronistically defined to include all the territories now within the independent nation, even though Portuguese “Angola” before 1900 comprised only a small area around the coastal towns of Luanda and Benguela.
Current research on Angolan history builds on bases laid down by several imaginative scholars of the 1950s and early 1960s, beginning with James Duffy's overview of Portuguese rule in Angola and Mozambique (1959, 1962). Numerous Portuguese-language surveys have also been available, as well as a variety of Portuguese and French-language studies of the Kongo kingdom in northwestern Angola. More immediately, Jan Vansina (1966) and David Birmingham (1966) initiated efforts to integrate the history of Africans in Angola into modern African historiography. Recent works also draw on Douglas Wheeler's studies of nineteenth century Portuguese policy in Angola and on the origins of the autonomous intellectual community of Luanda (1963, 1971, 1972, 1973), whose members founded the first improvement associations and semi-political movements that preceded the formation of the Movimento Popular para a Libertação de Angola (MPLA) and the present government of the independent nation of Angola.
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- Copyright © African Studies Association 1977
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