The Transatlantic Slave Trade and the Vulnerability of Free Blacks in Benguela, Angola, 1780–1830

CHAPTER EIGHT

THE TRANSATLANTIC SLAVE TRADE AND THE VULNERABILITY OF FREE BLACKS IN BENGUELA, ANGOLA, 1780–1830

Mariana P. Candido

In recent years scholarship on the transatlantic slave trade and Atlantic history has seen a dramatic increase. We now know the number of people exported in the transatlantic slave trade and its organization, and size, however, few studies focus on the processes of enslavement on the African continent. Through the analysis of Portuguese colonial records, this study examines mechanisms of capture around Benguela and the ability of Africans to claim freedom. My contribution focuses on the port of Ben­ guela, a Portuguese colony since 1617, from where at least 679,000 people were exported to the Americas, mainly to Rio de Janeiro and Bahia, in Brazil.1 The sources employ in this study reveal fragments of individual lives although no slave narrative has been located so far. Yet, these frag­ ments allow me to reconstruct cases and explore how some people in West Central Africa were captured and discuss the vulnerability of free blacks around African ports. Often slave narratives described the personal experience of the processes of enslavement and they gained attention from the public in part because of the lively descriptions of violence. Olaudah Equiano and Baquaqua are two of the Africans who reported how they were enslaved. Baquaqua described how he was tricked at a young age when he was invited to visit a nearby ruler, intoxicated with alcohol, and enslaved. Long distance traders transported him to the coast and sold him to trans­ atlantic slavers.2 Equiano also described being kidnapped, alongside his sister, in his own village.3 Though neither Baquaqua nor Equiano had any

1 David Eltis and David Richardson, Atlas of the Transatlantic Slave Trade (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010), 151. 2 Robin Law and Paul E. Lovejoy, eds., The Biography of Mahommah Gardo Baquaqua: His Passage from Slavery to Freedom in Africa and America (Princeton, NJ: Markus Wiener Publishers, 2001), 136–8. 3 Olaudah Equiano, The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano or Gustavus Vassa, the African (printed for, and sold by the author, 1794), 32.

194 mariana p. candido adult protectors, they each survived the Middle Passage and revealed their slaving experience. Slave narratives are not the only way to venture into people’s enslavement. Randy Sparks recreated the saga of Little Ephraim Robin John and Ancona Robin Robin John, two members of the ruling elite of Old Calabar who were seized by an English slave trader and sold in the island of Dominica.4 James Sweet reconstructed the life of Domingos Álvares from his training as a spiritual leader and healer in Naogon to his capture under Dahomean forces. Sweet followed Domingos across the Atlantic to unveil his successful activities as a healer in Pernambuco and Rio de Janeiro, and the attention he attracted of the Holly Office inquisi­ tors, who deported him to Lisbon and afterwards to Castro Marim, in southern Portugal.5 These tales reveal the fragility of people’s freedom as a result of the spread of violence in the interior and along the coast of West Africa. Yet, all of these cases happened in West Africa, mainly in the Bight of Benin and Biafra, and they are used to represent enslaved people from the whole African continent. However, most Africans were enslaved in West Central Africa, roughly what constitutes Angola, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Congo and the southern part of Gabon today. In fact, 45.5 per cent, or over 5,650,000 African slaves, embarked from the ports of West Central Africa, almost 700,000 of them from Benguela alone. So far, no biographical account of people taken from West Central Africa has been published, although some studies begin to provide evi­ dence of individual stories.6 This study is a contribution to the debate on how people were enslaved, focusing on Benguela and its interior. Using Portuguese colonial documents, such as trial cases and official correspon­ dence, I will explore cases of people who were kidnapped and enslaved in areas nearby Benguela. The cases analyzed here are those that caught the attention of the colonial bureaucracy. I realize they were a minority and

4 Randy J. Sparks, “Two Princes of Calabar: An Atlantic Odyssey from Slavery to Free­ dom,” The William and Mary Quarterly, 59.3 (2002), 555–584; Randy J Sparks, The Two Princes of Calabar: An Eighteenth-Century Atlantic Odyssey (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 2004). 5 James Sweet, Domingos Álvares, African Healing, and the Intellectual History of the Atlantic World (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011). 6 Paul E. Lovejoy, “The Provenance of Catherine Mulgrave Zimmerman: Methodological Considerations” (paper presented at Tubman Seminar, York University, Toronto, October 12, 2010); José C. Curto, “The Story of Nbena, 1817–20: Unlawful Enslavement and the Concept of ‘Original Freedom’ in Angola,” in Trans-Atlantic Dimensions of Ethnicity in the African Diaspora, edited by Paul E. Lovejoy and David Trotman (New York: Continuum, 2003), 43–64; and Mariana P. Candido, “African Freedom Suits and Portuguese Vassal Status: Legal Mechanisms for Fighting Enslavement in Benguela, Angola, 1800–1830,” Slavery and Abolition, 32, 3 (2011), 447–459.