A History of West Central Africa to 1850

"This was a difficult one, because John Thornton has written several important books about Angola, including The Kongolese Saint Anthony (1998). The reason why I selected A History of West Central Africa is that it is a survey text, giving unity to different parts of this region that tend to be studied in isolation. Rather than focusing on a single African state, or solely on the colony of Angola, Thornton summarizes the scholarship into a single volume, making this history accessible for people who do not have the time or energy to read ten or twenty different books about West Central Africa. It also brings new research into the nature of the state in the central highlands. This book covers the political history of the territory that we call Angola nowadays. It examines relationships between the different populations that lived there, from the 15th century to the mid-19th century. Thornton’s book encompasses the period of contact with Europeans, the expansion of the transatlantic slave trade, and the effects of abolition. It combines decades of research, writing and reflection about the region. It is an important title to anyone trying to familiarize themselves with the political organization and populations of Angola. In my previous book, An African Slaving Port and the Atlantic World: Benguela and its Hinterland (2013) , I came across lots of information about free and enslaved women and I assumed I would write a book about women in Angola. In the Angolan archives, I found records of women claiming land rights and registering ownership of houses. Soon, it became clear that property claims were gendered. Men and women made different claims and used legal strategies to solidify their wealth. My archival findings puzzled me: one of the central arguments in African history is that land was abundant in Africa. According to different generations of historians, African populations did not have individual ownership of land. Instead, African rulers and powerful men exercised rights in people, i.e. they accumulated dependents, which explains the existence of slavery in Africa before the arrival of Europeans. The argument, according to these scholars, was that powerful people expressed their wealth by accumulating and recruiting people, who laboured for them. It soon became clear that what I was writing was not a book about women, but a study focusing on how West Central Africans conceptualized land rights and use. Wealth, Land and Property is a book about land grabbing and its link with enslavement and the accumulation of things. Women play a big role in this study, but I also wrote about how local male rulers expressed claims over land and people. It became clear that local leaders had very clear conceptions of occupation of land, they knew their territory, and they had conceptions of who could or couldn’t cultivate, graze their animals, or bury their dead. West Central Africans had land tenure. It became clear that dispossession legitimized colonialism. Claiming that indigenous populations were not aware about land rights justified European land grabbing, territorial occupation, and colonial imposition. Land removals also facilitated enslavement; it exacerbated population displacement and violence. Wealth, Land and Property challenges the notion that land was plentiful. It examines land records, transactions, and struggles, while also considering competing ways to stress wealth. While writing this book, it became clear that I could not understand land tenure in this part of the African continent without discussing land grabbing and removal, enslavement, and exploitation of African labour. My book also discusses the role of Africans as global consumers, by examining the items that men and women accumulated during their lives. It reveals that societies along the coast and in the interior of Angola were connected to global economic networks."