Slave Trade and Abolition: Gender, Commerce, and Economic Transition in Luanda

"Vanessa Oliveira’s book centres on women as commercial agents and cultural brokers in Luanda during the 19th century. While Heywood focused on political leaders, Oliveira centred her analysis on powerful economic actors, such as the donas , who had an active role in the transatlantic slave trade. Oliveira also reconstructed the experiences of women traders, who moved goods, controlled production—including the food business—and navigated to new business opportunities when the transatlantic slave trade came to an end. It’s a very innovative research and book, particularly in the types of primary sources Oliveira analysed to stress women’s agency. For instance, Oliveira read and analysed several tax and ecclesiastical records, a painstaking investigation, to counterpoint colonial and missionary reports that tend to ignore women. The result is that she was able to examine how many bags of cassava flour, beans or maize, women produced in Luanda during the 19th century. Oliveira also looked at the family and financial connections of coastal traders with economic elites located in the interior of the continent. The result is that Oliveira demonstrates that African women were important economic agents during the era of the slave trade, but also played a crucial role in the establishment of cash crop economies. As Ferreira did in his book, Oliveira examined the case of individuals, such as Ana Joaquina Santos Silva, who looked for creative ways to continue exploiting enslaved labour locally. These donas , similarly to their counterparts in other African ports, were not abolitionist. They did not question the morality of the slave trade. In fact, they were committed to perpetuating violence and profiting from the sale of human beings. And, when the anti-slave trade agenda arrived in Angola in the 1830s, these merchants tried to figure out ways to make sure that they continued to participate in a global economy and that their personal fortunes did not dwindle. Oliveira shows that Luanda’s economy and society were dependent on the internal slave trade, and turned, in the 1830s, to an economy exploiting enslaved people locally. Oliveira examines the role of women merchants in the contraband and human trafficking in the 1830-1860 decades, as well as their investment in new plantations, including of sugar cane, palm oil, and coffee heavily dependent on enslaved labour. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter All of the women examined in Oliveira’s book were locally born, i.e. they were Africans, although what we would call ‘colourism’ plays a big role in their success and economic mobility. While most were classified as Black in historical documents, Oliveira shows that several were identified as mixed race or white. Most of them were related to local elites. They were well connected, linked to African rulers and chiefs. The daughters of Portuguese men or Brazilian-born men and local women also played economic roles, but unlike the daughter of local chiefs, the relatives of Portuguese men were labelled as white in historical records. Oliveira examines how colour classification affected their marriage choices. She shows that, in some cases, merchant women were from families that had monopolized trade for several generations. Some also ran family businesses, while their husbands travelled to interior markets or to Portugal and Brazil. Oliveira’s book examines the role of women as slave owners in 19th-century Luanda. Important in this book is the fact that donas , the merchant women, became attractive marriage partners for impoverished Portuguese or Brazilian-born men, who arrived in Luanda lacking connections and capital. Marriage to local merchant women offered these immigrant men access to established commercial elites, financial support, free lodging, and translators. These locally born women spoke Kimbundu, knew the best markets to acquire wax, ivory, or coffee, controlled large numbers of free and unfree dependents, and had vast knowledge about the territory and cultures, as well as therapeutic skills. Oliveira stresses the role of African women as intellectual and economic agents."