The early demography of moçamedes, 1839-1869: a preliminary analysis

Resumo

The history of Moçamedes remains largely unwritten from an Africanist perspective. This contribution draws upon a number of censuses produced by the Portuguese colonial administration to re-construct the demographic past of this southern Angolan port town from its foundation in 1839-1840 to 1869. A close analysis of these colonial sources clearly demonstrates that the coastal town so often depicted in the (still largely colonial) historiography as forced upon the desert by the white man was anything but. Rather, the early decades of Moçamedes were predicated on the blood, sweat, and tears of thousands of black Africans, some freed, but most enslaved or otherwise bonded, who were largely torn away from their societies elsewhere in Angola and forced to labour in a new environment that was radically different from what they had previously known.