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The Coffee Barons of Cazengo*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 January 2009

David Birmingham
David Birmingham
Affiliation:
S.O.A.S., University of London
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Extract

When the first anti-slavery legislation was enacted for Angola in 1836, Brazilian planters began to experiment with coffee growing in Africa. They had some success during periods of high coffee prices in the 1850s, 1870s and 1890s, when a couple of dozen estates in the Cazengo district produced slave-grown coffee. Far from being abolished, slavery, in minimally modified forms, survived into the early twentieth century. Traditional slave traders were reluctant to invest in local slave crops and most preferred to supply the slave demands of Säo Tome. In Angola a rival peasant sector also evolved in the coffee business. Black smallholders responded with greater alacrity to opening crop markets than did plantations, and much conflict arose over the sequestration of peasant plots by credit-holding shop-keepers. Although the entire nineteenth-century coffee crop from Angola never amounted to a significant share of the international market, the pattern of land and labour exploitation adopted was revived in the mid-twentieth century when the colony became the world's fourth largest coffee producer. In the coffee slump of the 1890s Cazengo planters diversified into sugar cane which later also became a significant part of the modern agro-industry of Angola.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Journal of African History , Volume 19 , Issue 4 , October 1978 , pp. 523 - 538
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1978

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References

1 Lopes de Lima, J. J., Ensaios…, bk iii, De Angola e Benguella (Lisbon, 1846)Google Scholar part i, p. 76. In that year exports of £50,000 were dominated by 50 tons of ivory and 400 tons of lichen dye plants.

2 Production commonly exceeded permissible exports under international agreement. Some of the surplus may have been sold on the Zaïre coffee quota.

3 1941 exports were 14,000 tons.

4 For an analysis of changes in Portuguese imperial economic strategy see Middlemas, Keith, Cabora Bassa (London, 1975)Google Scholar, which describes the process from the Mozambique perspective.

5 Birmingham, David, ‘Themes and Resources of Angolan History’ African Affairs, lxxiii (1974).Google Scholar

6 Arquivo Histórico de Angola (A.H.A.) 13–2–23, fo. 14v.

7 A.H.A. 32–2–23, fo. 58v. It is not ascertained whether this man was white, black or mestizo.

8 A.H.A. 32–2–23, fo. 37.

9 A.H.A. 32–2–24, fo. 62v.

10 Letter from Cazengo dated 19 July 1846 published in the Boletim Official (B.O.) of 8 Aug. 1846. Crude sterling equivalents of 4,500 reis per £ have been given throughout. Pereira Cardozo was an all-round entrepreneur; he also reported on the small iron foundry which he had set up ‘with little vexation to the local populace’.

11 A.H.A. 32–2–23, fos. 22, 55v, 61.

12 The published reports of the BNU (available, for instance, in the library of the Banco de Angola which took over as both the commercial and issuing bank of Angola in 1926) are disappointing. Fuller unpublished reports and correspondence are held by the Arquivo Histórico Ultramarino in Lisbon on limited access.

13 Dona Ana Joaquina is clearly a figure worthy of serious study. Her town residence survives as a dilapidated architectural monument in Luanda. She was more than a grande dame of high society, however, and Mário António claims that she sent an envoy of her own, António Bonifácio Rodrigues, to forestall the great embassy which Rodrigues Graça led in 1843 to the royal Lunda court of the muata yamvo. See Mário António Fernandes de Oliveira, ‘Alguns aspectos da administração de Angola em época de reformas 1834–51’ (unpublished dissertation, Lisbon, 1971).

14 A.H.A. 32–2–24, fo. 98v, 11 Aug. 1876.

15 In 1875, for instance, Norton Carnegie and Company were allocated one convict to work in Cazengo. A.H.A. 18–1–4. The convict register for 1887 to 1910 lists about 100 men assigned to Cazengo. A.H.A. 32–1–39.

16 A.H.A. 18–7–4, 1 Feb. 1894.

17 A.H.A. 32–1–41, 1887–1904.

18 A.H.A. 18–7–3, 14 May 1894. Chicanery in plantation shops remained a serious grievance in Angola until recent times, but it was unusual to find such detailed complaints about the system as are contained in the gruesome report on the death and burial of Bernardo.

19 A.H.A. 18–12–2, 4 July 1906.

20 A.H.A. 18–11–4, 27 Nov. 1908. For more about the Kabuku see the important article based on the Luanda archives by Dias, Jill R., ‘Black Chiefs, White Traders and Colonial Policy near the Kwanza: Kabuku Kambilo and the Portuguese, 1873–1896’, J. Afr. Hist. xvii (1976).Google Scholar

21 A.H.A. 18–12–2, 20 July 1906.

22 A.H.A. 18–6–4, 22 June 1892.

23 A.H.A. 18–6–4, 2 July 1892. The charges on which de Feitas was wanted included torture, private incarceration, homicide, rape of his own daughter, highway robbery with violence, abuse of the civil administration, insults to the judicial authorities, kidnapping and malicious wounding. Other barons were less spectacular in their criminality, but A.H.A. 18–5–4, 4 Dec. 1886, also illustrates the violence of the society.

24 A.H.A. 18–7–2, 10 Sept. 1895.

25 A.H.A. 18–7–4 lists the seventy-five administrators of Cazengo between 1843 and 1894. The sixteenth was a member of the Van Dúnem family, António Pereira dos Santos Van Dúnem Junior. He was probably an army officer, like Balthasar Van Dúnem in the eighteenth century, and the famous revolutionary José Van Dúnem in the twentieth century. See Couto, Carlos, Os Capitaes-Mores em Angola no Século xviii (Luanda, 1972), p. 63Google Scholar. According to Santos, Martins dos, Primeiras Letras em Angola (Luanda, 1974). p. 47Google Scholar, Teresa Van Dúnem was the village school mistress of Cazengo at an unspecified date. In 1896 another Van Dúnem, vulgarly known as Cangraiamvulla, was heavily in debt in the town of Dondo and stole a slave. (A.H.A. 18–8–2, 28 May 1896.)

26 For details of the Angolan military structure in the nineteenth century see the very recent work of Pélissier, René, Les Guerres Grises: Résistance et Révoltes en Angola (1845–1941) (Montamets, 1978)Google Scholar. This is the first volume of his two volume opus on the military history of Angola.

27 A.H.A. 18–7–4, 1 Feb. 1895.

28 A.H.A. 18–12–2, 24 Mar. 1906. (This is the first typewritten document in the archive and heralds an era not of legibility but of chewed flimsies.) Sleeping sickness hit Cazengo hard, and like other aspects of the medical history of Angola is in need of research. It reached the district by 1901 and had not quite burnt itself out by 1910. Plantations obviously suffered particularly from epidemics and by 4 May 1901 anxiety was being expressed about the labour supply already depleted by São Tomé competition (A.H.A. 18–10–3). Medical anxieties about the threat to the whole population were sent to Luanda on 16 Sept. 1901 (A.H.A. 18–10–2). In the early 1870s and again in 1890 Cazengo had suffered small-pox epidemics. As late as 1910, however, the district had no clinic or chemist and relied on herbalists to fight against the leading diseases cited as leprosy, syphilis, elephantiasis, tuberculosis, alcoholism and malnutrition. (A.H.A. 18–12–3, annual report for 1910.)

29 Boletim Official, supplement for 11 Feb. 1846.

30 Cited in Corvo, João de Andrade, Estudos sobre as províncias ultramarinas (Lisbon, 1883).Google Scholar

31 Published on 4 Mar. 1900 in the journal Dia and cited in Memória explicativa e justificativa dos actos da situação da Companhia Real dos Caminhos de Ferro Atravez d'Africa (Porto, 1909), 31Google Scholar. Another commentator remarking on the huge sums of metropolitan public money risked in the Cazengo chimera and the Ambaca ‘Trans-frica’ railway said that soon the map of Europe would no longer show Portugal but ‘The Territory of the Ambaca Company—formerly Lusitania’.

32 A.H.A. 18–6–3, 1889.

33 A.H.A. 18–1–4. Christianity was very nominal and priests or missionaries were rare. In 1854, however, it was recorded in letter-book number 32–1–24 that David Livingstone passed through the district. He carried with him two guns and some scientific instruments but ‘made no converts among Portuguese subjects’. See Livingstone, David, Missionary Travels (London, 1857)Google Scholar, chs. 19–21, for a less laconic account of his visit to Cazengo.

34 A.H.A. 32–1–22, 27 June 1888.

35 A.H.A. 32–2–6, 27 Nov. 1882.

36 A.H.A. 32–2–12 about 1856.

37 A.H.A. 18–7–1, 19 Apr. 1893.

38 A British resident in Angola in 1973 remembered stones rattling on his windows in a Pungo Andongo farmhouse when he was four years old.

39 A.H.A. 32–1–48, 23 June 1917.

40 Junior, António d'Assis, Relatório dos Acontecimentos de Dala Tando e Lucala (Luanda, 1917, 2 pamphlets)Google Scholar. He came back from exile, however, and published a fascinating historical novel entitled O Segredo da Morte about the Mbundu during the old colonial period.

41 Next to coffee and cotton, the Angolan sugar cane industry is the economic sector most in need of historical investigation, and the one most important to the post-colonial state. In Cazengo ninety-five hectares of cane were planted between 1890 and 1895. Seven estates had water or steam-powered mills and some of the rum stills exceeded 1000 litres in capacity. The industry was closed down in 1907 and John Gossweiler wrote a comprehensive report on it for purposes of compensation. (A.H.A. 18–12–3, 14 Jan. 1910.)

42 A.H.A. 18–17–4, 22 Nov. 1916. The Angolan Secretary for Native Affairs suggested that villages be set up in Cazengo for Luba and other returnees from São Tomé.

43 See Lovejoy, Paul E., ‘Plantations in the Economy of the Sokoto Caliphate’, J. Afr. Hist, xix (1978), 341–68.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

44 For a short while Cazengo district was subordinated to a regional governor in Golungo Alto. The changes in the Angola administrative structure were many and complex, and greatly affect the location of archival material. There is a useful, though not always reliable, guide by the former archivist, Milheiros, Mário, Indice Histórico-Corográfico de Angola (Luanda, 1972).Google Scholar

45 Difficulties in recruiting the harvest brigades in Luanda were a factor in the attempted coup d'état of 1977. See Birmingham, David, ‘The Twentyseventh of May,’ African Affairs, 77, 1978.Google Scholar