famine and disease in the history of angola c. 1830–1930...4 see, for example, henrique a. dias de...

Journal of African History, 22 (1981), pp. 349-378 349Printed in Great Britain

FAMINE AND DISEASE IN THE HISTORY OF ANGOLAc. 1830-1930*

BY J I L L R. DIAS

I T is generally recognized that European conquests in Africa before about1930 coincided with a period of ecological and epidemiological disaster.1 Thisapparently came about through interaction between social and economicchanges accompanying the nineteenth-century expansion of European tradeand colonial power, and local climatic and disease environments. The exactnature of the process has only recently begun to receive systematic researchat the regional level.2 This essay presents a preliminary survey of evidencerelating to famine and disease in Angola, attempting to relate this to thegeneral background of historical change during a century which began withcommercial expansion and ended in world depression. The purpose of theessay is partly to underline the importance of reconstructing Angola'smedical history, as well as to make some contribution to ongoing research intothe historical reconstruction of the African climate.3 In this west-central zoneof Africa, climatic instability contributed to maintaining a precarious balancebetween food resources, population and disease. By examining the interactionof this physical environment with changes in the colonial export economy itis also hoped to contribute to a better understanding not only of the impactof Portuguese colonialism in Angola, but of contemporary problems ofunderdevelopment. The gradual substitution of the overseas slave trade bycommerce in raw materials and cash crops gave rise to far-reaching changesin European and African structures in Angola. It will be argued here that therewas a significant relationship between these changes and the worseningfamine and epidemic crises by the end of the century; and that the commercialinstability and depopulation resulting from such crises contributed to thedifficulties experienced by the Portuguese in developing viable economicalternatives to the overseas slave trade in Angola before the twentieth century.The essay will try to explore some of the connexions in this complex processof interrelated changes. It is not intended to be a simple, mechanistic inter-pretation of events. Much of what follows is, necessarily, highly speculative

* I am especially grateful to Joseph C. Miller and Gervase Clarence-Smith, as wellas to the editors of this Journal, for their helpful criticism of previous drafts of this essay.Any remaining errors of fact or interpretation are my responsibility alone. I also gratefullyacknowledge a grant from the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, Lisbon, which financedpart of the research undertaken for this paper.

1 P. D. Curtin, S. Feierman, L. Thompson and J. Vansina, African History (London,•978), 552-3-

2 See, for example, John Ford, The Role of Trypanosomiases in African Ecology (Oxford,1071); G. W. Hartwig and K. D. Patterson (eds.), Disease in African History: anIntroductory Survey and Case Studies (Durham, N.C., 1978); Helge Kjekshus, EcologyControl and Economic Development in East African History: the Case of Tanganyika1850-IQ50 (London, 1977); John Iliffe, A Modern History of Tanganyika (Cambridge,>979)-

3 See Sharon E. Nicholson, 'The Methodology of Historical Climate Reconstructionand its Application to Africa', Journal of African History, xx, 1 (1979). 3>~49-

available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0021853700019575Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 54.39.106.173, on 15 Jul 2020 at 18:06:11, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use,

https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms

https://doi.org/10.1017/S0021853700019575

https://www.cambridge.org/core

35O JILL R. DIAS

and does little more than call attention to issues and questions needingfurther discussion and research. It is hoped that these will be more fullyexplored by others.

I. GENERAL HISTORICAL PATTERNS OF CLIMATE, POPULATIONAND DISEASE IN ANGOLA

The irregularity of Angola's rainfall increases south-westwards from thecentral highland plateau towards the Atlantic, reaching an extreme at thecoast (Map i). The belief that the aridity of the coastal lowland is a recentphenomenon caused by careless destruction of tree cover has been frequentlyexpressed since the nineteenth century.4 However, the climate of Angola'swestern zone seems to have undergone no perceptible change since thesixteenth century, when missionaries contrasted the aridity of the coastal stripnear Luanda with the better-watered, more productive inland districts.5

The systematic collection of meteorological data in Luanda was begun asearly as December 1857. But observations varied in regularity over the nexttwenty years, and it is only from 1878 onwards that a complete set of rainfallfigures is possible (Fig. 2). Elsewhere, observations were sporadically recordedin Kongo by Catholic missionaries in Sao Salvador between 1884 and 1887,and in Sao Salvador and other centres of Portuguese occupation, such asCabinda, Huambo, Lubango and Mossamedes, from the 1910s. In commonwith most other European colonies in Africa, however, networks of meteor-ological stations systematically recording data for every year were only setup in Angola during the late 1940s and 1950s.6 Information about climatein Angola before these years has therefore to be drawn mainly from thereports and correspondence of colonial officials.

The droughts and famines highlighted by missionary and official sourcesfrom the sixteenth century onwards stand out as extraordinarily severe criseswithin a generally unfavourable pattern of irregular rainfall and precariousfood supplies. The effects of drought were intensified by primitive farmingtechniques and lack of irrigation, which seriously restricted the amount ofcultivable land. Crops were sown along the margins of streams and rivers,the more distant ground being used only when rain was more plentiful.7 The

4 See, for example, Henrique A. Dias de Carvalho, Expedifao Portugueza ao Muatia-nuva: Meteorologia, Climatologia e Colonisafao (Lisboa, 1892), 176; Alberto CarlosGermano da Silva Correia; 'O Clima, a Nosgrafia e o Saneamento de Luanda', RevistaMedica de Angola, 11, iv (August 1923), special number dedicated to the First Congressof Tropical Medicine in West Africa, 397. Angola, n, vi (June 1924); A Provincia deAngola, 12 July 1932.

5 See, for example, letters of Padre Baltasar and another unnamed missionary, 25August 1578 and 15 December 1587, published in Antonio Brasio, Monumenta MissionariaAfricana-Africa Ocidental (first series, Lisbon, 1952, continuing) in, 171-2, 375.

6 For a useful guide to the literature on meteorology in Angola published before 1950,see Herculano Amorim Ferreira, Bibliografia Meteorologica e Geofisica de Angola (Luanda,'955)-

7 See, for example, Elias Alexandre da Silva Correia, Historia de Angola, 1782 (Lisboa,1937). 1. m ; for descriptions of the extent and quality of cultivation in the Luandahinterland by the 1840s and 1850s, see Anais do Conselho Ultramarino, Parte Nao Oficial,2 volumes (Lisboa, 1867), passim; Boletim Oficial do Governo da Provincia de Angola(BOGPA), passim; David Livingstone, Missionary Travels and Researches in Sot4th Africa(London, 1857); see also the many reports of colonial officials contained in the macosrelating to Angola in the Arquivo Historico Ultramarino (AHU), Lisbon.



https://doi.org/10.1017/S0021853700019575


12°

FAMINE AND DISEASE IN ANGOLA

14° 16°

35i

10°-

12°-

14°

16°

18°

18°I

20°I I

22°I I

24°

A N G O L A

•10°

•12°

-14°

12'

Map i. Lines of equal coefficient of variability of rainfall. Source: Dario X.Queiros, Variabilidade das Chuvas em Angola (Luanda, 1955).

introduction of new, drought-resistant crops, such as manioc, did somethingto reduce the risk of total crop failure besides increasing overall foodproduction. Almost everywhere, however, it was sufficient to cause hungerif the seasonal rains were not very abundant, or even if they were late.8

The persistence of similar conditions over centuries is shown by African8 According to Father Antonio Barroso, an annual rainfall of 800 millimetres was the

minimum necessary to ensure the success of native cultivation in the Congo district; seeA. J. de Sousa Barroso, 'O Congo, Seu Passado, Presente e Futuro', in Antonio Brasio(ed.), D. Antonio Barroso (Lisboa, 1961).



https://doi.org/10.1017/S0021853700019575


352 JILL R. DIAS

cultural and political forms, which were intimately linked to awareness ofthese precarious climatic conditions. The first missionaries noted the import-ance of rain-making ceremonies in Kongo, Kisama and at the court of theking of Ndongo, whose power may have derived in large part from belief inhis magical ability to make the rains fall.9 In the south of Angola, whereecological conditions were most precarious, the centralized power of nine-teenth-century Ovambo kings were justified by the need to organizeactivities essential to the survival of the whole community, particularly thedigging of reservoirs to store water from floods.10 Not surprisingly in an areawhere rains are short and very variable in timing and quantity, much of Kwan-yama poetry is preoccupied with hunger and drought.11

The size and distribution of population in Angola by the early 1800sprobably owed more to these long-term climatic influences than to morerecent events like the overseas slave trade. Throughout Angola, fertile andhealthy areas capable of supporting dense populations, given African tech-niques of land use, were relatively few. Settlements were confined mainly tothe river valleys. It seems unlikely that the agricultural resources of eitherKongo or the Kwanza district could ever have supported the several millionpeople suggested by early missionary estimates, even allowing for trade infoodstuffs.12 Except in more fertile areas, such as the floodplains of theKunene and Kubango rivers in the south, or of the middle Kwango river,forming the Baixa of Kasanje, further north, Angola's population mustalways have been small in relation to the size of the region. Even in these morefavoured areas, demographic growth would have been periodically checkedby drought or epidemic.13

The earliest recorded drought in the coastal district around Luanda seemsto have occurred in 1587—8.14 The most recent was in 1977-8.15 In between,periods of scarce rainfall, lasting from one to three years and bringingexceptional hunger, have occurred at least once every decade. Occasionally,a more prolonged series of drought years, simultaneously affecting inland aswell as coastal regions, caused more widespread and severe famine conditions.

9 Brasio, Monumenta Missionaria, 11, 495-512; in, 375; vn, 505. See also J. C. Miller.,'The Atlantic Zone' in D. Birmingham and P. Martin (eds.), History of Central Africa(forthcoming).

10 See W. Gervase Clarence-Smith and Roger Moorsom, 'Underdevelopment andClass Formation in Ovamboland, 1845-1915', Journal of African History, xx, ii (1979),369; W. G. Clarence-Smith, Slaves, Peasants and Capitalists in southern Angola lH^o-i^b(Cambridge, 1979), 75.

11 See Padre Carlos Mittelburger, 'A Chuva e a fome entre os Cuanhamas', EstudosUltramarinos, vi (1956), 131-72.

12 See Brasio, Monumenta Missionaria, in, 256-9; J .Thornton, 'Demography andHistory in the Kingdom of Kongo 1550-17 50', Journal of African History, XVIII, iv(i977),507-30; A. G. Hopkins, An Economic History of West Africa (London, 1973), 14-17.In Zambia, less than one-fifth of the total land surface can be cultivated according toindigenous methods: see A. D. Roberts, A History of Zambia (London, 1976), 11-12.

13 See Miller, 'The Atlantic Zone'; also A. Urquhart, Patterns of Settlement andSubsistence in South Western Angola (Washington, 1963); Gladwyn Murray Childs,Umbundu Kinship and Character (London, 1969), 1-8.

14 Brasio, Monumenta Missionaria, in, 375.18 Personal communication of Henrique Abranches and Joao Manuel da Costa Feijao,

Frankfurt, 15 July 1980.



https://doi.org/10.1017/S0021853700019575


FAMINE AND DISEASE IN ANGOLA 353

One such period can be discerned in the 1790s.16 It seems to have beenrepeated again in the 1870s.17 Data for other parts of Angola are less frequent,although a similar pattern is discernible for the western provinces of theKongo kingdom in the second half of the seventeenth century, when droughtsalso averaged one per decade.18 The worst famines occurred in the south ofAngola, especially in the basins of the rivers Kunene and Kubango, which wereparticularly subject to prolonged periods of rain failure.

Droughts were regularly preceded or accompanied by locust invasions andby plagues of other crop-destroying pests, such as rats, frogs and ants, whichmultiplied rapidly in the dry weather.19 Locusts may have invaded differentparts of Angola at least twice in every decade.20 Such invasions were reportednine times in Kongo between 1642 and 1664.21 Luanda was threatened around1835 and again in 1841 by a cloud of locusts coming from the north-east,which darkened the sky over the town for several hours as it headedsouthwards in search of more abundant vegetation. The inhabitants used tofear such visitations as precursors of drought.22

Periods of scarce rainfall were also usually followed by years of abnormallyhigh pluviosity, causing floods. Rivers flooded easily due to obstruction bysand and vegetation. The river Dande was particularly subject to flooding inits lower reaches as a result of heavy rains falling on highland areas to thenorth and east. Exceptionally heavy rain, destroying newly planted crops nearthe Dande, Bengo, Kwanza and Lukala rivers, was noted following most ofthe droughts recorded from the 1850s onwards.23

Local African economies were profoundly affected during these calamities,not merely through the destruction of crops but by such consequences as thedrying out of lakes, for example in the Icolo e Bengo district, where freshand salted fish from lagoons formed an important dietary supplement andbasic item of exchange.24 The dispersal of the Kisama during a severe droughtin the late 1850s temporarily halted salt production, causing a shortage at a

" J. C. Miller, 'Drought, Famine and Crisis Strategies in Western Central Africa',J. Afr. Hist., forthcoming. »' (Footnote deleted.)

18 See Thornton, 'Demography and History', 529, footnote.10 See, for example, BOGPA, 693 (8 January 1859); AHU, Angola, Correspondencia

dos Governadores (CG), caixa 45, report of the chefe of Muxima, enclosed in letter 168of the Governor General, 23 June 1875; BOGPA, 1889, 259 (22 June), 407. In thetwentieth century, a plague of rats was reported in Catete following the drought of 1930-3 :see A Provincia de Angola, 31 August 1933.

20 See Angola, n, 5 (May 1934), where it is claimed that locusts normally came everythree or four years.

21 Thornton, 'Demography and History', 529, footnote. A plague of locusts alsofollowed drought in the same area in 1793: see Silva Correia, Histdria, II, 229.

82 George Tarns, Visita as Possessoes Portuguezas na Costa Ocidental a"Africa, 2volumes (Lisbon, 1850), 11, 28-30.

!3 See BOGPA, 643 (28 January 1858), 644 (30 January 1858), 651 (20 March 1858),655 ('7 April 1858); AHU, Angola, CG, caixa 38, letter 224 of the Governor General,23 July 1868; BOGPA, 1872, 22 (1 June), 228-9; AHU, Angola, 2' Reparticao, 2" Seccao,pasta I, reports of the chefes of Barra do Dande and Icolo e Bengo, enclosed in letters ofthe Governor General, 134(29 May 1873) and 212 (31 August 1873); AHU, Angola, CG,report of the chefe of Muxima enclosed in letter 168 of the Governor General, 23 June1875, e t c - Popular horror of floods in Angola is well expressed in the story 'A Quianda',of Oscar Ribas, Quilanduquilo (Luanda, 1973), 85-94.

" BOGPA, 690 (18 December 1858).



https://doi.org/10.1017/S0021853700019575


354 JILL R. DIAS

Table i. Annual rainfall: Luanda 1858-1974.

o ID o i n o m o i n o m o i n0 0 0 0 C n 0 > O O > - ' - C M C \ I C 0 C » >

0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 G O C O C Q C T C T C Q C D O T O )

in p« ISCD CD

o inr 1—en en

Sources for Table 1

For the period 1858-1900: BOGPA, weekly and annual rainfall figures publishedirregularly, with some years missing entirely; A. Carlos Germano da Silva Correia,'O clima, a nosografia e o saneamento de Luanda', Revista Medica de Angola, 11,iv (August 1923), 392-C; Observatorio Meterorologico de Luanda, ObservafoesMeteorologicas e Magneticas, I, i8jg-8i (Lisboa, 1882), for 1878, 1879, 1880 and1881; Anaes do Observatorio do Infante D. Luis, 1883 (Lisboa, 1886); and Anon.,'Urn Estudo meteorologico de Angola', Boletim da Sociedade de Geografia deLisboa, xxxv (1917), 25-40. It should be pointed out that there is a considerablediscrepancy between the figures of Silva Correia and those of the author of theBoletim article for some years of the 1890s. The Boletim figures have been used forthe present table, as these purport to be based on the totals registered in the JoaoCapelo observatory in Luanda, while the origin of Silva Correia's totals is not clear,Silva Correia's values for the years that differ are as follows (mm). 1892, 325; 1893,600;1895,825;1896, 750;1897,500;1898,650;1899, 390;1900,325;1901,550;1902, 325; 1907, 550; 1908, 575; 1909, 1025. For the years 1901-1974: seeRepiiblica Popular de Angola: Servifo Meteorologico do Observatorio Joao Capelo,Ano de 1974 (Luanda, 1977), 60.

moment when demand for this basic exchange item was high on account ofthe ivory trade.25 The disappearance of pasture following drought and locustplagues decimated herds of cattle, an important symbol of wealth and stapleof local trade betwen and within African societies, especially in the south ofAngola.26 Economic recovery from drought, locust or flood was hindered bythe inability of farmers, impoverished by their losses, to buy new seed ormanioc plants to renew plantations, those usually reserved for the purposehaving been destroyed.27

Local trade in foodstuffs helped to alleviate the impact of bad harvests.Thus food surpluses produced by Imabangala farmers in the fertile Baixaof Kasanje were perhaps important in staving off famine among less fortunate

25 BOGPA, 660 (22 May 1858), 679 (2 October 1858).26 See, for example, BOGP A, 39 (29 September 1888), report of high mortality among

cattle due to rain failure, in the Novo Redondo district. See also Clarence-Smith, Slaves,Peasants and Capitalists, 58-9.

27 See, for example, reports of Portuguese chefes in BOGPA, 1858, passim.



https://doi.org/10.1017/S0021853700019575



neighbours, like the Cokwe, whose homelands consisted of sandy, infertilesoils which were more susceptible to drought.28 Within the Portugueseenclave centred on Luanda, traders from the better-watered highlands ofGolungo, Mbaka and other more northern and eastern districts carriedfoodstuffs to the markets along the river Kwanza to exchange for other goods,especially salt produced by the Kisama. During severe coastal droughts, themarkets of Dondo, Massangano or Muxima received an influx of grain andflour from districts as far distant as Kasanje and Tala Mugongo in thenineteenth century, in response to high prices in stricken areas.29 Colonialofficials repeatedly emphasized the importance of cereals from Mbaka instaving off famine in Cambambe and other districts near the Kwanza. Suchtrade patterns underlay the relatively greater wealth and agriculturaldevelopment within the Luso-African community of the Mbaka region andthe emergence of the Ambakistas as specialized intermediaries in the overseasslave trade during the eighteenth century. Ambakista traders exchangedcereals and flour in Dondo and other Kwanza markets for salt which theytook to Kasanje to purchase slaves and ivory; they also exchanged flour andother foodstuffs directly for slaves from the Kisama during the frequentdrought and hunger crises afflicting the latter.30

Those people within easy striking distance of forested regions, such as theCazengo or Libolo highlands, resorted temporarily to ancient techniques ofgathering fruits and edible roots. As late as the twentieth century, in yearsof hunger, Africans procured kissari, the carrot-like root of a creeper growingbetween the coffee bushes in Cazengo.31 Opportunities for gathering weretemporarily increased by changes in the Angolan export economy. Duringthe drought affecting coastal areas in the late 1850s, the chefe of Libongoobserved that collection of orchilla weed for sale to European traders hadsaved the lives of many.32 However the scope for such activities was limitedat this date since they could only go on freely in the remaining enclaves ofland not controlled by African or European ' owners' who normally employedtheir slaves in these occupations. A minority also became vagrants, roamingthe countryside with escaped slaves and other fugitives, whom they joinedin robbing crops at the next harvest time.33

The widespread emigration of whole families during hunger crises seemsto have been a magnification of a more regular, underlying pattern of seasonalmigration occurring annually in the dry months between June and

28 J. C. Miller, 'Cokwe Trade and Conquest' in D. Birmingham and R. Gray (eds.),Pre-Colonial African Trade (London, 1970), 187; also Miller, 'The Atlantic Zone',forthcoming.

20 BOGPA, 643 (23 January 1858); 652 (27 March 1858). Manuel Ferreira Ribeiro,Estudos Medico-Tropicais Durante os Trabalhos de Campo Para 0 Caminho de Ferro deAmbaca na Provincia de Angola, iSyj-8 (Lisboa, 1886), 248.

30 See Arquivo Historico de Angola, Luanda (AHA), codice 2-4-18, relatorios of thechefe of Dondo, 1 September and 4 October 1857; AHU, Angola, CG, letter 233 of theGovernor General, 22 June 1865; J. J. Monteiro, Angola and the River Congo (2 vols, 1875,reprinted, London, 1968), 1, 59, 68-9.

31 Alberto de Souza Maia Leitao, Relatorio da Visita sanitaria nos concelhos de I'este deLoanda mais victimados pela doenca do somno (Porto, 1900), 53.

31! BOGPA, 655 (15 April 1858).33 See BOGPA, 659 (15 May 1858), reports of the chefe of Zenza do Golungo.

13-2



https://doi.org/10.1017/S0021853700019575


356 JILL R. DIAS

\%-MATAMBANf,(GINGA)

Slump ^L-DuquedeBraganp,

C a"n ? 2~ i 2^Ambaca- ' -S ft .MalangePungo U Q

*Andongo ^ KASANJELIBOLO \ "^(IMBANGALA)

, , . . . , . , N QUIBOCO' AMBOIM \ (COKWE)

LUNDA

(OVIMBUNDU)

NGANGELA

V

Map 2. Sketch map of Angola c. 1830-1930.

November.34 Most headed for moister, more fertile valleys and lowlands.Here they settled on land controlled by local chiefs and village heads. Theseallowed the wealthier newcomers to make plantations in exchange for money,crops or trade goods.35 Many returned to their homelands when the rains

34 See, for example, A. Sarmento. Os Sertoes d'Africa (Lisboa, 1880); BOGPA, 1886,31 (31 July), 828-9; 39 (25 September), 997; 46 (13 November), 1197; 1888, 42 (20October), 710. Further information on population dispersal from the lower Kwanzadistrict during droughts is scattered through documents relating to the concelho ofCambambe in the AHA.

35 See, for example, BOGPA, 659 (15 May 1858), report of the chefe of Icolo e Bengothat Kisama chiefs were allowing inhabitants of that region to make plantations in theirlands upon payment of 600 reis for any sized plot.



https://doi.org/10.1017/S0021853700019575



began. However, the recurrence of more prolonged drought crises resulted ina permanent drift of people eastwards and southwards towards more fertile,densely populated areas, such as the Kwango valley or the Ovimbunduhighlands. Here, the strongest joined other foreigners as client-retainers inthe service of warlords, like the chief of Bie.36 The weaker accepted moreextreme conditions of servitude, contributing to the large unfree populationsobserved in Mbaka, Kasanje or Bie by the mid-nineteenth century.37 Theneed to maintain food supplies to support this large population during the'hungry' months no doubt influenced the annual wars and cattle raidsmounted by Ovimbundu chiefs on neighbouring regions from the eighteenthcentury onwards.38 Such fugitives from hunger would also have providedchiefs in Kasanje or the Ovimbundu kingdoms with a ready supply of slavesto sell for shipment overseas.

The majority of Africans living in the Portuguese concelhos north of theKwanza chose servitude to other Africans as a means of saving themselvesfrom starvation during droughts in preference to working for their colonialmasters as labourers or porters. A minority were driven by necessity toprocure work as porters for European trade, and some three or four hundredinhabitants of Cambambe were employed on government road buildingduring the crisis of the late 1850s.39 However, the district governor noted withdespair that Africans in general would rather die of hunger before voluntarilyseeking such labour to feed themselves.40 For their part, European traderstook advantage of hunger crises to engage porters at less than the sums theywere forced to pay when times were normal, and often gave them no wageat all beyond a daily ration of food.41

Prolonged hunger crises led to malnutrition, lowering resistance to disease.The spontaneous appearance of skin sores and increased mortality rates fromdisease amongst the African population of the Kwanza and Bengo regions werenoticed particularly following droughts.42 Malarial fevers, diseases of thedigestive tract, especially those described as 'dysentery' or 'diarrhoea', andrespiratory diseases, including bronchitis, pneumonia and tuberculosis, werethe most common and widespread endemic diseases in Angola by thenineteenth century. Together they were responsible for approximately halfthe deaths reported annually in Luanda, excluding years of smallpox epide-mics, from the 1850s.43 Malarial fevers and dysentery predominated during

36 Ladislaus Magyar, Reisen in Siid-Afrika in denjahren 1849 bis 1857 (Leipzig and Pest,1859), 125-6, 159, 245, 279-80, references from W. G. Clarence-Smith,'Class Formationin the Central Highlands of Angola, 1840s to 1910s' in Franz-Wilhelm Heimer (ed.), TheFormation of Angolan Society (forthcoming).

37 Ibid.; J. C. Miller, 'Slaves, Slavers and Social Change in Nineteenth CenturyKasanje', in Franz-Wilhelm Heimer (ed.), Social Change in Angola (Munich, 1973); J. J.Lopes de Lima, Ensaios Sobre a Estatistica das Possessoes Portuguezas... (1846), in, 4-A,fig. 1.

38 It would be interesting to know how far the imperative of seasonal hunger influencedboth the replacement of raiding by caravan trading and the later massive labour migrationof the Ovimbundu: compare, for example, G. T. Nurse, 'Seasonal Hunger among theNgoni and Ntumba of Central Malawi', Africa, XLV, i (1975), 7.

39 BOGPA, 657 (11 May 1858). 40 BOGPA, 656 (24 April 1858).41 AHU, Angola, CG, caixa 23, letter 788 of the Governor General, 16 August 1857.43 See, for example BOGPA, 660 (22 May 1858), 663 (12 June 1858); AHU, Angola,

CG, caixa 38, letter 165 of the Governor General, 21 June 1868.43 Hospital deaths represented only a fraction of the real numbers dying from these and

other diseases. They are however useful in showing the general trend. In 1865-6, years



https://doi.org/10.1017/S0021853700019575


358 JILL R. DIAS

the rainy season from October to May. The notorious wave of fevers, orcarneirada, which recurred annually in Benguela and Luanda during thesemonths, swept away a good portion of their European and African inhabitantsassisted by poor hygiene and overcrowding.44 During the cooler, more humidmonths of the cacimbo, from June to October, respiratory diseases may havesuperseded malaria as the most widespread cause of death. These were theworst months for Africans, who were particularly prone to pneumonia,bronchitis and tuberculosis on account of malnutrition and poor livingconditions.45

Malnutrition also favoured the outbreak of epidemic diseases. The principalinfectious/contagious diseases which recurred in epidemic form in Angolafrom the sixteenth century onwards were yellow fever, smallpox, measles,46

influenza,47 and possibly bubonic plague48 and trypanosomiasis (sleepingsickness). Though yellow fever was probably endemic on the Angolan coastby the nineteenth century, Angola was generally believed to be exempt fromthe terrible epidemics which periodically struck Brazilian and even Portugueseports.49. The only outbreak to be officially declared an epidemic occurred inLuanda in i860. It was possibly provoked by the arrival of several hundrednon-immune soldiers from Portugal. The spread of yellow fever at this time

when no epidemics were recorded in Luanda, these diseases caused 159 of 212 hospitaldeaths. In 1881, the proportion was 184 out of 281 deaths. In Dondo, death certificatesfor the five months from June to November 1876 show that the same diseases caused 124out of 293 deaths recorded. The mortality figures were as follows:

Luanda Dondo

Malarial feversDysentery, diarrhoea, etc.Respiratory diseases

1865/66

774834

1881

82

4161

554326

Sources: BOGPA, 1866, 439, 1881, 438-9; AHA, avulsos, 23-2-2.44 The term carneirada literally refers to malarial fever: see Novo Michaelis (7th edition,

1970), 11. For an account of the carneirada in Luanda see Silva Correia, Histdria, l, 80;Ferreira Ribeiro, Estudos, 63.

45 Ferreira Ribeiro, Estudos, 35 and 79. A total of 3,955 people received treatment atLuanda's military hospital during 1865-6. The most frequent diseases were the following:malarial fevers, 1298; dysentery, diarrhoea etc., 351; respiratory diseases, 252; syphilis,342. Source: BOGPA, 1866, 439.

46 Epidemics of measles affecting Luanda and inland populations were reported in 1871and 1889: BOGPA, 1871,3(21 January), 26-7; 1889,44(2 November), 671; Silva Correia,'O Clima', 461.

47 A serious influenza epidemic was reported in Luanda in 1864-5 a n d again in 1876-7:see BOGPA, 3 (14 January), Silva Correia, 'O Clima', 461. The worldwide epidemic ofinfluenza of 1918-20 also spread rapidly throughout Angola: see, for example, BOGPA,1919, Appenso; Cuanza-Norte, 30 January 1919; Silva Correia, 'O Clima', 463-4.

48 If outbreaks of bubonic plague had occurred in the nineteenth century, they attractedno official attention before the early 1900s. Fears of an epidemic in 1905 were not realizeduntil 1921: see Silva Correia, 'O Clima', 440-53; A. Damas Mora, 'A Peste en Angola',Revista Medica de Angola, 111, iv (August 1923), 317-29. See also. A Provincia de Angola,23 May 1932, et passim.

49 See, for example, the letter of Dr Januario Viana de Resende, Physico Mor,published in BOGPA, m (11 May 1850).



https://doi.org/10.1017/S0021853700019575



was also favoured by climatic conditions, coinciding with a period of excessiveheat and rainfall following several years of severe drought.50

The most feared of the infectious/contagious diseases affecting Angola wassmallpox. An alternating rhythm of drought and epidemic smallpox can bediscerned going back at least to the seventeenth century. Outbreaks ofsmallpox were provoked especially by Portuguese troop movements duringcompaigns of conquest.51 The migration of people into more denselypopulated districts in years of bad harvests also favoured epidemics bycreating new foci of non-immune population, physically weakened by hunger.This pattern was true particularly of the coastal towns, which received aninflux of immigrants from other districts during droughts. Thus during aperiod of scarce rainfall between 1837 and 1841, Benguela was invaded bya multitude of starving people seeking food. This was followed by a smallpoxepidemic.52 Epidemics also spread rapidly in Luanda and Benguela amongthe slaves, crowded together in unhygienic conditions, awaiting shipment toBrazil.53 The hope expressed by Governor-General Daun in 1836, thatabolition of the overseas slave trade would make such epidemics things of thepast, proved sadly premature.54 Smallpox continued to reach epidemicproportions at roughly five- to ten-year intervals before the 1920s.55

2. ECONOMIC AND POLITICAL CHANGE AND PATTERNS OF FAMINEAND DISEASE C. 183O-IO3O

The periodic recurrence of famine and epidemic crises in Angola by thenineteenth century was not more unusual than the regular visitations ofepidemic and famine which had long afflicted different parts of Europe.56 Ineighteenth-century France, as in Angola, conditions of existence for the massof the people were marginal. Any fluctuations or changes in the delicatebalance between population and resources thus directly affected their ability

60 See Faust ino Jose Cabra l , Relatorios sobre a Epidemia de Febre Amarela em Luanda,i860 (Lisboa, 1861); Silva Correia, 'O Clima', 379-482; idem, 'O Problema da febreamarela em Angola e os seus climas maritimos', Revista Medica de Angola, in, iv (August1923), 247-308.

61 One of the earliest references to smallpox is the epidemic of 1627, which coincidedwith a period of drought and seems to have been provoked initially by Portuguese troopmovements during campaigns against Queen Nzinga in the late 1620s. ' Many thousands'of Africans died in this epidemic according to one report: see Brasio, MonumentaMissionaria, vn, 494: Antonio de Oliveira de Cadornega, Historia Geral das GuerrasAngolanas 1680 (reprinted Lisbon, 1972), I, 140. Another smallpox epidemic is referredto in 1670: see D. L. Wheeler, 'A Note on smallpox in Angola', Studia, nos. 13 and 14(Janeiro-Julho 1964), 353. An epidemic of smallpox was similarly spread throughoutKongo by a Portuguese expeditionary force in 1793: Silva Correia, Historia, 11, 193-228.

82 See the article by Antonio Augusto Dias based on documents in Benguela'smunicipal archive, published in A Provincia de Angola, 26 January 1933.

83 Silva Correia, Historia, 11, 80; Arquivos de Angola, 2" serie, xx, nos. 79-82 (January-December 1963), 80, letter of Dom Miguel Antonio de Melo, 12 March 1799.

54 AHU, Angola, CG, caixa 1, letter of the Governor General, 11 June 1836. Daunhimself died of fevers while visiting Pungo Andongo two months after writing this letter.

" (Footnote deleted.)58 See, for example, Fernand Braudel, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World

in the Age of Philip II (London, 1975), i, especially pp. 328-34; also, G. E. Labrousse,Esquisse du mouvement desprix et des revenues en France au XVIII' siecle (2 volumes, 1933).



https://doi.org/10.1017/S0021853700019575


360 JILL R. DIAS

to survive. It can be argued, in the case of Angola, that the drain of populationduring the era of the overseas slave trade had contributed to maintaining thisbalance, despite the short-term negative effects of slave raiding in disruptingfood supplies. However, it was radically upset by the economic and socialchanges set in motion in consequence of new demands from the industrializedcountries of northern Europe in the nineteenth century. The process beganas early as the 1830s with the growth of the wax and ivory trade and thebeginnings of European commercial agriculture. This led to importantdemographic changes through the growing African, as well as European,demand for slaves. By the 1850s, increasing numbers of Africans at differentsocial levels throughout Angola were investing profits from wax or ivory inmen and women to till the fields, augment the size and power of village clansand extend personal economic productivity and political power.57

Drought stimulated this domestic slave trade, speeding up social changes.Some nineteenth-century observers held that suppression of the overseasslave trade was resulting in the slaughter, during famines, of people formerlysold as slaves. As one writer graphically put it, they were 'simply taken outand knocked on the head to save them from starvation' .58 This viewpoint mayhave been propagated originally by persons opposed to abolition. It iscontradicted by colonial documents of the late 1850s, which give a rare,close-up glimpse of the effects of drought on the slave trade in the Kwanzadistrict. In October 1857, following two years of drought and crop failure,men and women from Kisama inundated local markets on the north bank ofthe Kwanza, exchanging their own, or their relatives', freedom for small bagscontaining a mixture of manioc flour, beans, maize and groundnuts. Demandfor slaves was very high. African inhabitants from the nearby villages andsurrounding districts of Mbaka, Duque de Braganca, Malange and TalaMuGongo flocked to the Kwanza to purchase the unfortunate victims. Dondowas the most important centre of this commerce. A large proportion of thevictims were children, sold by-their relatives for three or four dishes of fuba(maize flour) or five to six beiramesb9 of cloth. This was less than half whatthey would have fetched in normal times.60 Their purchasers returned to theirvillages carrying their new slaves, weakened by hunger, on their backs or inslings.61 Some of those enslaved in this manner succeeded in escaping andfleeing back to their homelands after a few months.62 A further unknown

57 On this, see particularly M. Klein, 'Slavery, the Slave Trade and LegitimateCommerce in Late Nineteenth Century Africa', Etudes d'Histoire Africaine, 11 (1971),5-28; also Jill R. Dias, 'Changing Patterns of Power in the Luanda Hinterland: TheImpact of Trade and Colonisation on the Mbundu c. 1845-1920' in Franz-WilhelmHeimer (ed.), The Formation of Angolan Society (forthcoming).

58 Monteiro, Angola and the River Congo, 1, 59, 68-9.59 A beirame was a standard length of very fine cloth.60 According to the explorer and botanist Frederick Welwitsch the minimum price of

a slave around 1859 was 25 milreis: see A Cultura do Algodao (Anonomous, Lisboa, 1962),appendix.

61 See AHU, Angola, CG, pasta 23, copy of report of the Governor of Golungo Altodistrict, 1 October 1857; see also AHA, codice 2-4-18, reports of the chefe of Dondo, 1September and 4 October 1857.

62 AHU, Angola, CG, pasta 23, report of the Governor of Golungo Alto, 1 October1857; BOGPA, 662 (5 June 1858); 666 (3 July 1858). According to Monteiro, Angolaand the River Congo, 1,68-9, the Kisama deeply resented the advantage taken of their plightby Ambakista traders.



https://doi.org/10.1017/S0021853700019575



proportion were probably resold profitably to European traders for clandestineshipment abroad. The rest stayed as concubines, caravan porters or fieldworkers.

Village populations in many parts of Angola were thus increasing throughimports of slaves. More slaves were also accumulated in villages as a resultof the slump in slave exports in the 1850s.63 Regional increases in populationdensity resulting from these developments were noted particularly among theCokwe, Imbangala, Ovimbundu and lower Kongo peoples.64 The effects ofcommercial expansion were also evident in new agglomerations of populationconcentrated at strategic inland markets, notably Dondo, in the Luandahinterland.65 As for Luanda itself, calculations based partly on census returnsindicate that the town's African population more than doubled between the1840s and 1850s.66

The implications of these and other economic changes for domestic foodproduction in Angola constitute a subject needing more research. In somelocalities more plentiful slave labour gave rise to increases in African foodproduction, particularly in response to demands set up by the long-distancecaravao trade.67 But the demographic changes of this period were unsupportedby any transformation in agricultural techniques or facilities of crop storage.Food supplies thus remained subject to periodic crop failures due to climaticirregularities or locust invasions. The potential violence of such crises wasincreased by these new pockets of population density, many of whichoccurred in areas of poor soils, subject to frequent droughts. Such was thecase, for example, of Quiboco, inhabited by the Cokwe,68 or of the regionscentred on Luanda and Dondo.

The vulnerability of rural and urban populations to the impact of droughtmay have been further increased in some areas by the establishment of new,more precarious patterns of regional interdependence. In some districts,former sellers of foodstuffs were transformed into buyers by changes in theexport economy. During the time of the overseas slave trade, for example,large surpluses of manioc, beans and maize had apparently been producedby the inhabitants of Kongo in order to supply slave caravans going to thecoast. This pattern was reversed by the 1860s, when the same people werefinding it more profitable to devote time and labour to producing peanuts and

63 Miller, 'Slaves, Slavers and Social Change', 24-5.64 Ibid.; Miller, 'Cokwe Trade and Conquest', 187; 'The Atlantic Zone'; Sarmento,

Os Sertdes d'Africa, 160-1; Luis Simph'cio Fonesca, 'Districto dos Dembos', Anais doConselho Ultramarino, 11, 86-9; Clarence-Smith, 'Class Formation in the CentralHighlands of Angola, 1840s to 1910s', forthcoming.

65 For the evolution of Dondo in the 1850s, see particularly AHA, avulsos, Cambambeand codice 2-4-18.

66 Luanda's population was calculated at c. 5,605 in the early 1840s, based on censusreturns of the previous half century: Lopes de Lima, Ensaios, ill, 4-A, fig. 1. A censustaken in 1850 put the population at 12,565: BOGPA, 303 (9 July 1850). The 1861 censusrecords a population of 13,412: BOGPA, 1862. The Brazilian doctor Saturnino Sousae Oliveira believed it was nearer 18,000 in 1864, including 16,690 fixed townspeople anda floating population of around 1,500: Saturnino Sousa e Oliveira, Relatorio Historico daEpidemia de Variola que grassou em Luanda em 1864 (Lisboa, 1866), 235.

67 See, for example, Livingstone, Missionary Travels, 379-80; Clarence-Smith andMoorsom, 'Underdevelopment and Class Formation', 373.

68 Miller, 'Cokwe Trade and Conquest', 187.



https://doi.org/10.1017/S0021853700019575


362 JILL R. DIAS

coffee for export. These were exchanged for food in the coastal markets ofQuissembo, Ambriz and Luanda.69 Similar developments were noted in partsof the Luanda hinterland, especially Cazengo, by the 1860s.70 The scale andimplications of such changes need more research. However, there are someindications, based on the evidence of contemporary observers, that thepopulations of these regions suffered increasingly from food crises during thesecond half of the century, especially during the droughts affecting the coastalzone.

In general, Africans found cultivation of coffee or peanuts for export moreremunerative than expanding food production to supply the growingpopulation of Luanda. Luanda had long faced a chronic grain shortage.Reasons for this included the unreliability of harvests near the coast, theslowness of transport from the interior and neglect of food production by thetown's residents, whose efforts were directed chiefly towards the slave trade.71

The failure of food supplies to keep pace with population growth in the townbecame even more pronounced in the nineteenth century. As the century woreon, Luanda's inhabitants suffered steadily worsening hunger crises, especiallyin years of drought.72

Overcrowding on the basis of inadequate food and poor hygiene ledinevitably to malnutrition and outbreaks of disease, especially smallpox.There are no figures whereby the relative mortality of smallpox epidemicsin different centuries can be compared. It is likely, however, that thedemographic changes of the nineteenth century increased both the frequencyand the scale of smallpox epidemics in Angola. Particularly important wasgreater population mobility due to the expansion of African trade networks.Caravans of people, many hundreds strong, were converging regularly onLuanda and Dondo from all parts of the interior by the 1850s.73 Furthersouth, Ovimbundu caravans, composed of several thousand people, left Bietwice yearly with wax and ivory for Catumbela and Benguela at the samedate.74 Such caravans frequently carried smallpox with them. Once theyarrived at their destinations the disease quickly assumed epidemic proportionsamid the overcrowded, insanitary quarters occupied by the fluctuatingpopulations of African traders. Such points, in turn, acted as diffusion centresfor the infection, which was carried rapidly to other ports and villages by seaand river as well as by land.

It seems fairly certain from contemporary descriptions that most of thesmallpox visitations affecting Angola in the second half of the century wereof the virulent, eruptive strain of the virus - variola major - rather than themilder variola minor. It attacked mainly the less-immune African population,with relatively few cases or fatalities among the Europeans. Africans inhabitingthe Kongo and Kwanza regions called the disease 'ki-ngongo' ('great

69 Monteiro, Angola and the River Congo, I, 83-5; AHU, Angola, CG, pasta 34, letter39 of the Governor General, 24 January 1865; pasta 35, report on the state of the provinceby Antonio Ignacio da Silva, 16 June 1865.

70 AHA, codice G(s)3-33, relatorio of the Governor General, 1867.71 J. C. Miller, 'Commercial Organization of Slaving at Luanda, Angola, 1760-1830'

in Henry A. Gemery and Jan S. Hogendorn (eds.), The Uncommon Market (New York,1979), 96-

72 See BOGPA, passim. 73 T a r n s , Visita, 1, 2 0 3 ; BOGPA, passim.74 Clarence-Smith, 'Class Formation in the Central Highlands', forthcoming; Tarns,

Visita, 1, 105; BOGPA, passim.



https://doi.org/10.1017/S0021853700019575



suffering') and sometimes 'ki-beta' ('great punishment').75 The majorityshunned European medical aid, preferring to apply their own remedies as lateas the twentieth century.'6 The usual treatment was to isolate the sufferer ina special hut with a relative or kimbanda (witch-doctor) who anointed thepatient's body first with palm oil and later with clay. This treatment wasfollowed even by the so-called civilisados, the more socially prominent Africansof inland centres of Portuguese power and trade, who were assimilated indiffering degrees to European culture.77

African resistance to smallpox inoculation, which was repeatedly com-plained of by colonial officials in Angola, supports the view that the practicewas unknown among the indigenous societies of south-central Africa.78

Inoculation, or variolation,79 was introduced into Angola by the Portugueseas early as 1803, though attempts were neither systematic nor successfulbefore the 1820s. At this date, experiments were concerned particularly withinoculating slaves sent to Brazil, in order to avoid mortalities during the voyageand the introduction of smallpox into Brazilian ports.80 No further attemptsat inoculation are officially recorded before the epidemic of 1864.

The 1864 smallpox epidemic is by far the best documented of the wholeperiod before the 1920s. It reached Luanda from the north as part of a widerepidemic sweeping southwards across the African continent. The far southof Angola received it during 1865, designated Ojotjukoroka, or 'the year ofthe smallpox' in Herero historical traditions.81 The chance visit of a northAmerican steamer carrying supplies of the human smallpox virus led to theinoculation of over 11,000 people in Luanda between February, when theepidemic began, and July.82 Smallpox inoculation was also practised at thistime by some groups of Africans in Luanda, notably Cabindans, many ofwhom were said to have died as a result.83 The mortality rate among smallpoxvictims in this epidemic ran at over fifty per cent. Two-thirds of the threehundred or so cases officially recorded in Luanda between February and April

76 Sousa e Oliveira, Relatorio, 183; BOGPA, 1865, iv (21 January), 20; v (28 January).South of the Kwanza, smallpox was called ' Ochingongo' or ' Oxingongo': see F. Antonioda Silva Maia, Licoes de Gramatica de Quimbundo (1964); Gregoire Le Guenec and JoseFrancisco Valente, Dicionario Portugues-Umbundu (Luanda, 1972).

76 See, for example , A H U , Angola , 2" Repar t icao 2a Seccao, pas ta 1, repor t of the chefeof Massangano enclosed in letter 157 of the Governor General, 1 June 1873; BOGPA,1902, iv (25 January), 34-5. See also Sousa e Oliveira, Relatorio.

77 BOGPA, 1864, xxxv (27 August), 294; 1865, iv (21 January), 20; v (28 January).Similar treatment was applied in other parts of West Africa: see, for example, MaryKingsley, West African Studies, 1899 (reprinted 1964), 158.

78 See Eugenia W. H e r b e r t , ' S m a l l p o x Inocula t ion in Afr ica ' , Journal of AfricanHistory, xvi , iv (1975), S39~59-

79 Inoculation, or variolation, refers to the process of transferring smallpox from aninfected person to uninfected persons, who thereby contract it mildly and become immunefrom the disease. Vaccination, through infection with cowpox, was not adopted in Angolabefore the twentieth century.

80 Manuel dos Anjos da Silva Rebelo, Relacoes entre Angola e Brasil 1808-1830 (Lisboa,1968), 29-30; J. C. Feo Cardoso de Castello Branco e Torres , Memorias (Paris, 1825), 365.

81 Heinrich Vedder, South West Africa in Early Times (London, 1938), 150, cited byWheeler, 'A Note on Smallpox ' , 360.

82 Sousa e Oliveira, Relatorio, 161; A H U , Angola, C G , pasta 33, letter 167 of theGovernor General , 1 July 1864.

83 Sousa e Oliveira, Relatorio, 163.



https://doi.org/10.1017/S0021853700019575


364 JILL R. DIAS

1864 ended in death.84 One doctor who treated victims of the sicknessconcluded, on the basis of careful calculations, that around half of Luanda'spopulation of 18,000 actually contracted the disease. Of these, nearly 5,000died.85 The epidemic was also estimated to have carried off a quarter of thepopulation concentrated in the important trading district of Cambambe.86

Official statistics sent from Benguela, Mossamedes and some of the inlandconcelhos put the number of known deaths from smallpox at 11,535-87 Thereal figure was undoubtedly far higher.88

The 1864 epidemic was the first to seriously threaten the rising prosperityof the colonial economy based on' legitimate' commerce. It struck particularlyat the incipient cotton, sugar and coffee plantations based on slave labour,exposing the fragility of such enterprises. More powerful members of thecolonial community moved fast to prevent capital losses through the deathsof their slaves. Joao Caetano Sarmento, one of Angola's most prominentEuropean entrepreneurs, had all his slaves in Luanda, Benguela Velha andDombe Grande inoculated against smallpox at the start of the epidemic. Healso sent supplies of the smallpox 'vaccine' to Mossamedes and Benguela,where more than three hundred slaves belonging to other people wereinoculated and saved from the disease. Two of his partners, despatched toDondo to start inoculation, arrived too late to prevent the spread of thedisease.89 Some slave owners inhabiting inland districts sent their slaves tobe inoculated in Luanda.90 One leading African proprietor and resident ofAlto Dande, Antonio Gouveia Pinto, also carried out inoculation locally athis own expense, allegedly with good results.91 Others were less fortunate.Lopo Goncalves Fortunato, another African landowner of the Nzenzadistrict, wrote that divine providence had reduced him to a pitiful state,having lost all his slaves and two daughters in the epidemic.92 Many otherinland proprietors, white as well as black, who had invested their tradingcapital in slaves in order to develop plantations of coffee, sugar or cotton forthe colonial market, may also have faced ruin for similar reasons. In this way,

84 Alberto Carlos Germano da Silva Correia, 'A Variola em Angola' in Separata do i°Congresso de Medicina Tropical, Luanda ig22 (Luanda, 1924), 4.

85 Sousa e Oliveira, Relatorio, 235-6.86 BOGPA, 1865, 4 (21 January), 20.87 BOGPA, 1864, 32 (6 August), 268; 50 (10 December), 470; 1865, 4 (21 January),

20; 5 (28 January). The population of the towns and districts for which these statisticsof mortality were produced totalled 85,601 in the 1861 census: BOGPA, 1861.

88 Both sets of figures are undoubtedly far from accurate, though they may be usefulin indicating the rough proportion of people who died. Sousa e Oliveira, Relatorio, 236,believed that all the figures supplied by colonial officials of inland districts were suspect.The general opinion, which he believed to be near the truth on the basis of informationhe received, was that mortality caused by this epidemic throughout Angola exceeded25,000. A more recent opinion computes the real total to have been nearer 70,000 cases,with approximately 40,000 deaths: Silva Correia, 'A Variola', 3,5. For further details ofthe 1864 epidemic see Joao Baptista de Oliveira, 'Relatorio sobre a Epidemia de Bexigasque grassou em Luanda nos mezes de Marco a Outubro de 1864', in Sousa e Oliveira,Relatorio, 243-81; also, Mario Antonio Fernandes de Oliveira,' Um Brasileiro Cooperante("Avant la lettre") em Angola', Boletim da Sociedade de Geografia de Lisboa, Serie 97,nos. 1-3, 4-6, (Jan.-Marco, Abril-Junho 1979).

89 BOGPA, 1864, 39 (24 September), 339-40; 1865, 16 (15 April); 25 (17 June), n o .90 Sousa e Oliveira, Relatorio, 163. 91 BOGPA, 1864, 24 (11 June), 195.82 BOGPA, 1864, 37 (10 September), 322.



https://doi.org/10.1017/S0021853700019575



the 1864 smallpox epidemic set a pattern of losses which would be repeatedin future epidemics.

A similar disaster was repeated within less than a decade. The 1872-3smallpox epidemic appears to have been equally as virulent and widespreadas the epidemic of 1864, though far less information has survived. This waspossibly because its worst effects were felt inland rather than at the coast. Firstnews of the outbreak came from Sao Jose de Encoge (Uige).93 Reports fromthe hinterlands of Ambriz, Luanda and Benguela were soon speaking of'many' fatalities daily and few recoveries.94 Mortality and panic caused bythis epidemic in Kongo led the king to request Portuguese help in combatingit.95 When it was over, the chefe of Golungo Alto claimed it had 'withoutexaggeration' killed a third of the district's population.96

Despite evidently high mortality rates, the devastation caused by smallpoxepidemics should not be overstressed. Though 'many' people were reporteddying from smallpox in Malange and Kasanje in July 1873, food continuedto be abundant and cheap in both districts.97 This implies that outside thesemore densely populated centres the rhythm of daily life continued relativelyunbroken by the epidemic. Much of the depopulation reported duringsmallpox epidemics also resulted from flight rather than death. Terrorinspired the flight of large numbers of people across considerable distances.Part of Luanda's population fled the town during the epidemic of 1864.98

During the 1873 outbreak, groups of Kisama fled southwards from infectedareas near the Kwanza into the concelho of Novo Redondo, carrying contagionwith them.99 Similar patterns were probably repeated throughout Angola asthe epidemic spread.

African strategies of quarantine may have done something to check theeastward spread of smallpox epidemics, although they probably broke downbefore the influx of people fleeing from stricken areas. It was said that, duringthe 1864 epidemic, the king of Matamba ordered commercial relationsbetween his people and the Portuguese concelhos to be cut. Those of hissubjects who contracted smallpox by continuing to frequent Portuguesetrading centres were compulsorily isolated in remote parts of the bush.100

Probably the most effective result of such strategies was to paralyse thecolonial economy. As the 1864 epidemic swept eastwards, Portuguesemerchants were left stranded by the refusal of Songo or Imbangala chiefs toprovide porters.101 Commercial transactions in the east were similarly halted

03 Silva Correia, 'A Variola', 5.04 See, for example, reports of the chefes of Alto Dande, Malange, and Golungo Alto,

etc., enclosed in AHU, Angola, 2" Reparticao 2a Seccao, pasta 1, letters 134(29 May 1873),200(23 Ju'>' '873), 204(24 July 1873) and 212 (31 August 1873) of the Governor General.

05 AHU, Angola, 2" Reparticao 2a Seccao, pasta 1, letter of the king of Kongo, 8 June1873, enclosed in letter 173 of the Governor General, 1 July 1873.

06 BOGPA, 1876, 12 (18 March), 156-8.07 AHU, Angola, 2" Reparticao 2" Seccao, pasta 1, report of the chefe of Malange, 31

July 1873; ar>d letter 200 of the Governor General, 23 July 1873.98 AHU, Angola, CG, pasta 33, letter 176 of the Governor General, 26 July 1864.09 AHU, Angola, CG, 2" Reparticao 2" Seccao, pasta 1, report of the chefe of

Massangano, enclosed in letter 157 of the Governor General, 1 June 1973.100 BOGPA, 1865, 5 (28 January). Similar strategies were observed in West Africa in

the 1890s: see Kingsley, West African Studies, 158-9.101 Jornal do Comercio, 4 September 1864 and 2 October 1864.



https://doi.org/10.1017/S0021853700019575


366 JILL R. DIAS

in 1873 as the Imbangala temporarily abandoned all trading activities andCokwe, Ginga and Songo traders refused to enter Kasanje.102

The intensification of external trade pressures and colonial intervention inAngola from the 1870s onwards both influenced the growing severity offamine and disease and was influenced by it. A commercial 'boom' in rubberand, to a lesser extent, in coffee, produced a fever of gathering and marketingthese products among Africans in most parts of Angola. European trade andagriculture expanded within the colonial enclaves centred on Luanda,Benguela and Mossamedes. New pockets of white settlement and farmlandsprang up in the Porto Amboim hinterland and the Huila highlands. Theslave trade also increased as a result of the rapidly rising demand for labourby Sao Tome planters eager to benefit from the island's cocoa 'boom'.Finally, the initiation of a more vigorous programme of colonial expansionled to the beginnings of military occupation of Kongo, Luanda and theOvimbundu highlands.

These activities reinforced earlier demographic changes which had begunas a result of Portuguese demands for wax and ivory. Population movementincreased, particularly in the Kongo and Ovimbundu highlands, as peopleflocked to gather rubber. Additionally, the 1870s saw the start of a massmigration of Cokwe villages in pursuit of rubber, but provoked by populationpressures built up as a result of the wax and ivory trade.103 Unprecedentedconcentrations of labourers were also being gathered together to work onEuropean plantations or on colonial enterprises, such as the Ambaca railway,by the 1880s. Further migrations of people to construct the Benguela andMossamedes railways or to work in the copper mines of Namibia began in the1900s.104 The increased oscillation of people back and forth from their villagesto work on plantations or railways, gather coffee or rubber, or to trade, helpedspread disease on a scale unknown during the previous four centuries. Part,at least, of this movement was probably inspired by threat of starvation. Thisin turn may have been aggravated particularly by European alienation ofAfrican farmland and the growing emphasis on the colonial export economyat the expense of subsistence.

In areas affected by the spread of white plantations, times of greatest changecoincided with periods of ecological crisis. The pressure of white farmers ontraditional African grazing and farmland was most intense in the south ofAngola and in the coffee-producing zones north of the river Kwanza by the1860s. In the south, ecological crisis had aided Nyaneka resistance to the firstPortuguese attempts at conquest and settlement of the Huila highlands. Asevere drought, accompanied by locusts and a devastating outbreak of cattledisease between 1863 and 1869, provoked the withdrawal of white settlers andthe abandonment of forts begun in the 1850s.105 The situation was however

102 AHU, Angola, 2a Reparticao 2a Seccao, report of chefe of Malange in letter 220 ofthe Governor General 23 July 1873; BOGPA, 35 (27 August), 293.

103 Miller, 'Cokwe Trade and Conquest', 187.104 Clarence-Smith and Moorsom, 'Underdevelopment and Class Formation', 377.105 BOGPA, 1867, 47 (23 November), 566; 1868, 7 (15 February), 63-72; 1869,

14 (3 April), 178; 1864, 51 (17 December), 480; 1865, 45 (4 November), 204; Clarence-Smith, Slaves, Peasants and Capitalists, 77; idem, 'Capitalist Penetration among theNyaneka of Southern Angola, 1760s to 1920s', African Studies (Johannesburg, 1978),166-7.



https://doi.org/10.1017/S0021853700019575



reversed during a further long period of drought between 1879 and i884,106

This drought which affected the population as far inland as the country ofthe Ngangelas, coincided with a renewed struggle for land between Portugueseand Boer settlers and the Nyaneka inhabitants of the Huila highlands. Itended in the latter being driven offmuch of the best land by the mid-i88os.107

Their economic distress was increased by repeated outbreaks of cattle diseasebetween 1884 and 1888.108 Encroachment on grazing land by Mossamedessettlers also led to conflict with Herero pastoralists in this period, as droughtmade pasture scarce.109

The process by which African families lost control of land to foreignersduring such crises was most explicit in the Portuguese enclave north of theriver Kwanza. In the Cazengo and Golungo Alto districts, the almostuninterrupted series of droughts, floods and smallpox epidemics, lastingthroughout the 1870s into the 1880s, coincided with a European scramble toobtain land for plantations. Successive crop failures bankrupted hundreds ofsmall African coffee and peanut producers, forcing them to sell or abandontheir plots to local or incoming purchasers and creditors. Other families whotemporarily emigrated to nearby districts to escape famine found their fieldsarbitrarily usurped on their return by wealthier neighbours and immigrantseager to extend and consolidate coffee and sugar estates.110 Expropriation ofAfrican farmland was further aided by mortality and flight during repeatedsmallpox epidemics. This process resulted in a major redistribution ofproperty in Cazengo in favour of European settlers and the replacement ofa predominantly African, smallholding economy by large-scale plantations.

The degree to which Africans were allowed to continue farming part of theland taken over for plantations, under a system of share-cropping or labourservices, is not yet well known. But it is certain that they were excluded fromthe most fertile patches. Successive ecological crises, through their interactionwith European trade and settler pressures, thus triggered off complex processesof impoverishment, threatening to make the effects of famine more severe.A pattern was set which was to be repeated many times in different parts ofAngola before the 1960s, the social and political implications of which awaitmore detailed study.111

10e AHU, 1* Reparticao 2" Seccao, Angola, pasta 4, letter of the commissao municipalof the concelho of Bumbo to the Governor General, 14 March 1884; and letter no. 130of the Secretary General, 17 March 1885, enclosing a report of the missionary Joaquimde Jesus de Annunciacao Folga of his journey to the Ganguelas. Both are published inM. A. Fernandes de Oliveira and C. A. Mendes de Couto (eds.) Angolana, 11 (1883-7)(Lisbon, 1971), 554 and 556.

107 Clarence-Smith, 'Capitalist Penetration among the Nyaneka', 169; Slaves, Peasantsand Capitalists, 82-3.

108 B O G P A , 1 8 8 5 , 4 ( 2 6 J a n u a r y ) , 5 9 ; 1 8 8 6 , 5 2 ( 2 4 D e c e m b e r ) , 1 4 0 5 ; 1 8 8 8 , 2 4 ( 1 6June), 409.

100 Rodolpho de Santa Brigida de Sousa, 'Subsfdios para a historia da colonizacao dodistrito de Mossamedes durante o seculo XIX', Boletim da Sociedade de Geografia deLisboa, 7 (6), 396-414.

110 D. Birmingham, 'The Coffee Barons of Cazengo', Journal of African History, xix,iv, (1978), 523-38; Dias, 'Changing Patterns of Power'.

111 The social and political implications of losses of land and cattle within Africansocieties in southern Angola is analysed by Gervase Clarence-Smith in 'Underdevelop-ment and Class Formation', Slaves, Peasants and Capitalists and 'Capitalist Penetrationamong the Nyaneka'.



https://doi.org/10.1017/S0021853700019575


368 JILL R. DIAS

The effects of famine provoked by the almost constant food crises of the1870s were plainly visible in the physical aspect of the population. 'Themajority of inhabitants of this land are mummies rather than human beings',wrote Luanda's medical officer in 1876.112 The extreme weakness of Africanporters hired from the Golungo Alto district resulted in fourteen deathsduring a four-day march to Massangano in 1877.113 Five or six people a daywere reported dying from starvation in Luanda in 1878.114 The effects offamine were aggravated not only by smallpox but also by the spread of Tungapenetrans, known to the English as 'sandflea' or 'jiggers', a grub whichpenetrates and lays its eggs under the skin. This parasite, which may haveoccurred already in the past, is thought to have been (re-)introduced intoAngola by a British ship arriving at Ambriz from Rio de Janeiro in 1872. Itwas soon transported inland along caravan routes throughout the territory.Though harmless if promptly extracted, it caused the deaths of innumerablepeople through dirt and ignorance. When the eggs were left to develop theycaused ulcers swiftly followed by gangrene. Even when it did not cause death,the parasite paralysed movement since it mainly affected the feet. Tradingcaravans were brought to a standstill. The magnitude of the problem was suchthat in 1875 it was proposed to set up a special hospital in Luanda. Ulcerscaused by Tunga penetrans were the most frequent ailment treated and secondonly to smallpox as a cause of death in Luanda's hospital between July andOctober 1877.u5

The debilitating effects of hunger and disease in the decade of the 1870smay go far towards explaining why the social and political tensions generatedby the spread of white plantations did not explode in revolt within thePortuguese enclave. Only the Dembos chiefs succeeded in expelling Portu-guese settlers and officials from their lands before the end of 1872. Attemptsto extend the revolt to other parts of Portuguese territory were crippled bythe combined effects of starvation, due to rain failure, smallpox and the Tungapenetrans which prevented movement. Most of the chiefs who tried to leadrevolt in the Golungo and Mbaka districts after 1872 were forced to sue forpeace by 1876.U6

The renewal of Portuguese military compaigning to the east and south ofthe Kwanza, as well as in Kongo, in the late 1870s, became a further elementspreading famine and disease. Between 1879 and 1926, warfare was almostcontinuous in different parts of Angola.117 The mode of military conquestusually followed was that of burning all fields of crops in order to crushresistance. This caused additional dislocation of people fleeing from advancingmilitary columns or in search of food, contributing, in turn, to the outbreak

112 Silva Correia, 'O Clima', 414.113 Ferreira Ribeiro, Estudos, 15. l u AHU, Angola, CG, pasta 48.116 See Ferreira Ribeiro, Estudos, 36, 39; BOGPA, 1875, 2 (29 January), 25; 36 (4

September), 510; R. Hoeppli, M.D., D.Sc, 'Parasitic Diseases in Africa and the WesternHemisphere. Early Documentation and Transmission by the Slave Trade', Ada Tropica,Supplementum to (Basel, 1969), 169-77. I a m grateful to Joseph C. Miller for kindlysupplying this reference.

116 AHU, Angola, 2" Reparticao 2a Seccao, pasta i, relatorio of the chefe of GolungoAlto, enclosed in letter 204 of the Governor General, 24 July 1873; BOGPA, 1876, 12(18 March), 156-8.

117 Rene Pelissier, Les Guerres Grises, Resistances et revokes en Angola (1845-1941)(Orgeval, 1977), 188.



https://doi.org/10.1017/S0021853700019575



and spread of epidemics, especially smallpox. Smallpox inoculation wasroutinely practised by doctors in Luanda from the 1870s118 and was also usedto control epidemics in Dondo and Malange in the same period. But therewere few attempts to combat epidemics in rural areas before the twentiethcentury. Further smallpox epidemics were recorded in 1882-3 and 1886-7.119

Worst affected were the districts where population continued to be relativelydense, especially Ambaca and Cambambe, where the number of deaths wasdescribed as 'excessive' in 1882.120 These outbreaks culminated in anothermajor epidemic in 1890-1, although allegations of high mortality rates putout by Luanda newspapers were officially condemned as 'alarmist'.121

The commercial crisis caused by the 1890—1 epidemic well illustrates thecontinuing fragility of colonial economic structures despite the increasedvolume of external trade. The crisis was provoked as Ovimbundu porters,upon whom carriage of goods between Luanda, Dondo and Cazengo prin-cipally depended, fled from the disease. In August 1890, four millionkilograms of coffee were accumulated in the Cazengo district with no meansof transport to Luanda. This temporarily caused a serious lock-up of capital,contributing a further setback to the struggling European plantationeconomy.122

On the other hand, smallpox epidemics contributed to social change withinthe colonial sector by encouraging the rise of a free labour force. The shortageof labour created during epidemics benefited a growing minority of Africansable to dispose freely of their services as porters or labourers in the last quarterof the century. Thus, in the 1872-3 smallpox outbreak, porters who wereimmune from the disease had been able to command double the normal wagefor carrying goods between Luanda and Kasanje.123 Similarly, the wages ofday labourers in Luanda increased threefold during the epidemic of 1890— 1.124

Outside the colonial enclaves, many people fleeing from famine andepidemic probably lived by adapting ancient survival techniques of gathering

118 Permanent centres of inoculation were established in Luanda in the 1870s: seeBOGPA, 1870, 41 (8 October), 578-9; 1871, 3 (21 January), 36-7; 1872, 29 (20 July),323. For measures taken by colonial authorities in different parts of Angola duringepidemics of smallpox, see BOGPA, 1864, 14 (2 April), 115; 17 (23 April), 134-40; 23(4 June), 181—6 and supplement; AHU, Angola, 2" Reparticao 2a Seccao, pasta 1, letter200 of the Governor General, enclosing report of the chefe of Malange; AHA, codice 6-1 -1 o,fos. 4V, 35 v, 46 v-47, 74; avulsos, 23-2-2, President of the Camara Municipal of Dondoto the chefe of the concelho, 2 December 1876. There was some attempt to inoculate thepopulation of the Humpata district during the 1882 epidemic: BOGPA, 1882, 34 (26August), 587. See also F. Diniz, 'Proteccao e assistencia as populacoes indi'genas daprovi'ncia de Angola', Boletim da Sociedade de Geografia de Lisboa, 33° serie, 7 and 8(July/August 1915), 274-319. An epidemic in 1877 affected Calumbo, Dondo andMalange: see BOGPA, 1877, 6(10 February), 95; 13(31 March), 203. Africans purchasedin the interior to be sent as contract labourers to Sao Tome arrived there with smallpox:BOGPA, 1878, 29 (20 July), 542.

119 Silva Correia, 'A Variola', 8-10. 12° BOGPA, 1882, 20 (20 May), 344.1S1 AHU, Angola, 1* Reparticao 2* Seccao, pasta 10, letter 347 of the Governor General,

14 August 1890; BOGPA, 1891, 8 (21 February).122 AHU, Angola, 2* Reparticao 2* Seccao, pasta 14, letter 322 of the Governor General,

11 August 1890.123 AHU, Angola, 2* Reparticao 2* Seccao, pasta 1, report of the chefe of Malange,

enclosed in letter of the Governor General, 1873.114 British Foreign Office, Annual Series, Diplomatic and Consular reports on Trade and

Finance, nos. 1105, 1065, 1333.



https://doi.org/10.1017/S0021853700019575


37O JILL R. DIAS

to producing foraged coffee or rubber for export. However, the commercial' boom' in these commodities may also have led to further neglect of foodproduction. In Kongo, economic recovery from two prolonged periods ofdrought, between 1883 and 1889 and from 1894 to i897,125 was hindered byoverspecialization in the production of coffee. The Uige district was said tobe suffering a permanent hunger crisis on this account.126 Expansion of therubber trade made the situation even more acute. Preparation of the rubberproduced in Kongo was allegedly done exclusively by women normallyemployed in food cultivation. Their involvement in the rubber trade was saidto be causing the almost complete neglect of basic crop cultivation aroundSao Salvador in the i88os.127 It is hard to say how localized an effect this was.The argument must certainly not be overstated, especially as an oppositeeffect was noted on the Ovimbundu highlands in the same period. Here, thethreat of a food crisis caused by the fever of rubber gathering was apparentlyaverted by intensifying slave cultivation of maize in response to the stimulusprovided by the long-distance caravan trade and market for foodstuffs at thecoast.128

Conditions of survival seem to have been growing more precarious forAfricans in many parts of Angola at a moment when the slave trade wasescalating in response to European demands for labour, particularly fromplanters in Sao Tome. Many people continued to seek relief from starvationby selling their relatives, or through voluntary enslavement. Traffic in slaveswas especially intense in the hinterland of Novo Redondo during the foodcrises of the late 1870s. Large numbers of people, desperate with hunger,resorted to selling their relatives and children to the agents of licensed labourrecruiters. A record 512 people were embarked in a single shipload for SaoTome by the Banco Nacional Ultramarino's recruiters in October 1877.Usual shiploads averaged between fifty and two hundred.129 Similar scenesmay have taken place during the droughts affecting Kongo, where traffic inslaves for Sao Tome was also intense before the 1900s.

The population inhabiting the Portuguese concelhos between the riversDande and Kwanza seems to have been roughly halved between 1876 and1898, with little or no recovery before 1930.13° A similarly drastic decrease

125 Barroso, 'O Congo' 109; Jaime Forjaz de Serpa Pimentel, 'Clima do Congo:Ligeiros Dados sobre as Condicoes Meteorologicas do Districto do Congo e Duas Palavrasacerca de seu clima', Revista Portugueza Colonial e Maritima, i° ano, 2° semestre (Lisboa,1897-8), 665-72.

126 BOGPA, 1889, 25 (22 June), 404; 37 (14 September), 570.127 Barroso, 'O Congo', 113.128 Childs, Umbundti Kinship and Character, 209-10.129 AHU, Angola, 20 Reparticao 2" Seccao, Curadoria Geral, no. 4, Alfredo Trony to

the Minister of the Navy and Overseas Affairs, 26 October 1877.130 This assessment relates to the following concelhos: Muxima, Massangano, Cam-

bambe, Pungo Andongo, Icolo e Bengo, Barra do Bengo, Barra do Dande, Alto Dande,Golungo Alto, Nzenza do Golungo, Calumbo and Dembos. The population of thesedistricts was calculated at between 200,000 and 300,000 in censuses taken from the 1820sonwards. In 1876 the population was said to total around 228,435. In 1898 it was downto 115,172: compare Ferreira Ribeiro, Estudos, 254 and Annuario Estatistico, 1898,3. Whilefar from accurate, these figures reflect an obvious and dramatic trend. In 1928, thepopulation of the district of Cuanza-Norte was put at 140,527: see Augusto Ornelas andBruno de Mesquita, Relatorio da Missao Medica de Assistencia aos Indigenas do Cuanza(1929), 15. See also Jacinto de Sousa, Relatorio da Missao Medica Volante de Assistenciaaos Indigenas do Dande (Lisboa, 1928).



https://doi.org/10.1017/S0021853700019575



was believed to have occurred throughout the region northwards from theDande to the Zaire river by the 1920s.131 Some observers believed the drainof manpower to Sao Tome to be a major cause of this population decline.132

But when the demographic history of Angola is finally written, reasons forthe decline will probably be found less in the three to four thousand peopleannually exported to Sao Tome than in the increased migration and mortalitycaused by famine and disease. Of particular importance was the spread oftrypanosomiasis, or sleeping sickness, transmitted through the bite of tsetseflies, in the last quarter of the century.

Although sleeping sickness was probably not unknown in this region beforethe nineteenth century, the disease attracted no official attention until the1870s.133 The earliest known reference to it comes from the Malange district,where it was said to be 'raging' in 1870.134 By the mid- 1870s, an epidemicof sleeping sickness had engulfed the whole of the lower Kwanza district,stretching southwards as far as Novo Redondo and northwards to the Bengo,Dande and Nzenza rivers.135 First reports of a similar epidemic in Kongo datefrom the 1880s, though sleeping sickness could have been widespread thereas early as the 1860s.136

The spread of sleeping sickness in Angola at this time, though not wellunderstood, was probably related with changes in the Central African diseaseenvironment through forest clearance or the shooting out of game. Theincreased number and frequency of trading caravans circulating over largedistances may also have helped in the dispersion of the sickness. In this respectit is suggestive that the first report of the disease comes from Malange, animportant terminus and trade entrepot from the 1860s and Ginga, Imbangala,Cokwe and Ambakista caravans. If they had crossed tsetse infected areas,these caravans would have converged on Malange accompanied by manypeople in the early and most infectious stages of the disease. As they movedon westwards to the markets and plantations of the more heavily infestedtsetse fly zones near the Kwanza and Lukala rivers, conditions would havebecome increasingly favourable to outbreaks of sleeping sickness. Manypersons infected with T. gambiense, the commonest form of sleeping sicknessin Angola, would have survived for two or three years. The parasites, ortrypanosomes, transmitting the disease thus had a good chance of being pickedup and further transmitted by large numbers of tsetse flies.137 The woodland

131 See, for example, Avelino Manuel da Silva, Servifo de Assistencia aos Indigenas noDistrito do Congo, ig30 (Lisboa, 1930).

132 See, for example, Maia Leitao, Relatorio, 127-8.133 Elderly inhabitants of Golungo Alto questioned in 1900 agreed that sleeping sickness

was first noticed in the area around 1873. However, doctors also learned that the diseasewas not unknown previously, knowledge of it having been handed down through thegenerations: see Maia Leitao, Relatorio, 15, 44-5 and 98-9.

134 BOCPA, 1870, 52 (24 December), 723; 1871, 27 (8 July), 335.138 AHU, Angola, 2* Reparticao 2" Seccao, reports of the chefes of Barra do Bengo,

Nzenza do Golungo and Massangano, enclosed in pasta 45, letter 94 of the GovernorGeneral, 30 July 1875; pasta 46, letter 26, 22 January 1876; and pasta 47, letter 386, 25October 1877.

136 AHU, Angola, 1" Reparticao 2" Seccao, pasta 5, 'Relatorio da Viagem ao Bembedo Conego Antonio Jose de Sousa Barroso', published in Angolana, 11, 447. Many of theslaves imported into Martinique from the Congo region in 1869 were infected withsleeping sickness: see Frank L. Lambrecht, 'Aspects of the Evolution and Ecology ofTsetse flies and Trypanosomiasis', Journal of African History v, 1 (1964), 19.

137 Lambrecht, 'Tsetse flies and Trypanosomiasis', 5-9.



https://doi.org/10.1017/S0021853700019575


3 7 2 J ILL R. DIAS

coffee plantations of the Cazengo and Golungo Alto districts provided idealbreeding conditions for the fly population, which may have multipliedfollowing the clearance of forest brush by planters.138

Conditions were possibly made even more favourable to propagation ofsleeping sickness in the Kwanza district by a relatively sudden influx ofpopulation. Between 1878 and 1898, the number of whites resident in thePortuguese concelhos between Luanda and Malange jumped from 600 to over6,000.139 African labourers imported to work on the handful of white-ownedcoffee plantations in the Cazengo highlands rose from around 1,000, in 1867,to over 16,000 in 1887.140 Several thousand more labourers were employedon construction of the railway from Luanda to Malange. The first part of theline from Luanda to Funda, in the Icolo e Bengo district was inauguratedin 1888. By 1899, the line was complete to the Lukala river. Portuguesedoctors of the 1930s believed this relatively sudden accumulation of peoplein an area heavily infested with tsetse flies to have been responsible for theincreasing intensity of sleeping sickness in this district by the late 1890s.141

A violent outbreak of sleeping sickness among agricultural workers on theCazengo plantations in 1895 spread rapidly to the population centres alongthe river Kwanza. It was further disseminated by panic and flight. Wholevillages were abandoned in the Cazengo, Cambambe, Kisama and Massan-gano districts. Many of the refugees were probably already infected with thedisease. They would have founded new settlements, or joined other villages,near the more fertile river margins which were often the habitat of tsetse flies.The cycle would then have repeated itself.142

More research is needed into the demographic impact of sleeping sicknessby the early 1900s, but it seems safe to say that in Angola, as probablyelsewhere in Africa, it caused an enormous increase in the rural death rate.Sleeping sickness differed radically from smallpox in being highly infectiveover several months; in having an exponential rate of increase throughman/fly contacts; and by the fact that all cases were one hundred per centfatal at this date. With one exception, all the doctors visiting the regionbetween the rivers Zaire and Kwanza from 1900 onwards agreed in attributinglarge decreases in population mainly to the effects of sleeping sickness.143 Yetthe fact remains that their opinion was formed largely from impressionisticdata based on hearsay, or on conversations with plantation managers, local

138 A. Damas Mora, A Luta contra a Molestia do Sono em Angola (Luanda, 1934), 223.Similar conditions existed in Uige.

139 Compare AHU, Angola, CG, statistical chart of population, 20 February 1878 andAnnudrio Estatistico, 1898, 3.

140 Dias, 'Changing Patterns of Power', forthcoming; the number of labourers on theCazengo plantations was apparently reduced to around 4,000 by 1895: see Birmingham,'The Coffee Barons of Cazengo', 529. During 1914, a total of around 13,000 labourerswere employed in the same district, roughly 5,000 of whom were day labourers: F. Diniz,Negocios Indigenas (Lisboa, 1913-18), 11 (1914), 73. 141 Damas Mora, A Luta, 1.

142 Ibid. 4. Silva, Servico de Assistencia aos Indigenas no Congo, 10-11; AlexandreSarmento, 'Historia breve de uma grande obra: O Combate a Doenca do Sono emAngola', Boletim Clinico e Estatistico (Hospital do Ultramar), 11 serie, ano vn, no. 3 (1953),25-

143 The exception was Maia Leitao, Relatorio. But see Annibel Bettencourt, AyresKopke, Jose Gomes de Rezende junior and Annibel Correia Mendes, Doenca do somno.Trabalhos executados ate 6 de Agosto de igo2 pela missao enviada a Angola pelo Exmo.Ministro da Marinha (Lisboa, 1902). See also Damas Mora, A Luta; Sarmento, O Combatea Doenca do Sono, etc.



https://doi.org/10.1017/S0021853700019575



residents, chiefs and village heads. The need for caution in assessing the deathrate from the disease is revealed by the report of Dr Alberto de Souza MaiaLeitao, who visited the concelhos of the Luanda hinterland in 1900. The worstof the epidemic in Cazengo was apparently over by this date. He found veryfew people actually suffering from sleeping sickness. He describes a highlyuneven and localized disease pattern, the worst affected points at this datebeing the population centres along the margins of the river Kwanza,especially Dondo. This led him to the conclusion that the high mortality ratesbeing claimed from the disease were greatly exaggerated. In his view, the mostimportant factor in the 'frightening' decrease of population in the Kwanzaand Lukala districts was the very high infant mortality rate, which hecalculated at ninety per cent.144

In localities stricken by the disease the effects were devastating. Thereseems no doubt that many villages on both sides of the Kwanza sufferedwholesale depopulation around the turn of the century, for which sleepingsickness was at least partially responsible.145 One-third of the forty-five deathsrecorded in Dondo's hospital in February 1899 were from sleeping sickness.146

This was a tiny fraction of those that must have perished outside.Commandants of divisions in the same concelho reported entire chiefdomswiped out through mortality and flight.147 By 1903, Dondo's health officerwas describing the mortality rate from sleeping sickness as 'trulyterrifying'.148 Similar reports were heard from Kongo, where one missionarypassing through Molemba described a macabre sight of bodies, wrapped incloths, awaiting burial on all sides, while the survivors toiled constantly tobury the dead.149 Though the causes of trypanosomiasis were discovered in1904, no legislative measures were taken against it until 1911. The legislationdid little more than call attention to the problem. Sleeping sickness continuedto rage in epidemic form throughout northern Angola until about 1921, andmeasures against it did not become effective until the late 1920s.150

To the higher levels of mortality caused by sleeping sickness must be addedthe continuing high death rate from malaria. This was high in Luanda incomparison with other European towns in west Africa in the 1870s,151 and

144 Maia Leitao, Relatorio, especially 127-8.145 See particularly Sarmento, O Combate a Doertfa do Sono, 26, quoting from the report

of Dondo's medical officer, Dr Annunciacao Velho in 1911. See also Mattenklodt, 'DieKisama', in Koloniale Volkerkunde, I (Jahrgang, 6, 1944), 75. I am grateful for this lastreference to Dr Beatrix Heintze. See also BOGPA, 1903, 13 (28 March), 192.

146 BOGPA, 1899 (12 March); by contrast, in Luanda, only one death was listed fromsleeping sickness out of a total of 60 recorded during the same month.

147 AHA, avulsos, maco 16-9-4, commandant of Nhangue Apepe to the chefe ofCambambe, 15 April 1899.

148 See BOGPA, 1903, 30 (25 July), 447, 40 (3 October), 600; 190, 14 (2 April), 229;27 (2 July), 478-9, etc. The psychological impact of sleeping sickness in Dondo aroundthe turn of the century is skilfully evoked in the novel by Antonio de Assis Junior, OSegredo da Morta, 1935 (reprinted, Lisboa, 1978).

140 Portugal em Africa, 10 (1903), 347.150 See Damas Mora, A Luta; Sarmento, O Combate a doenca do Sono. For legislation,

see BOGPA, 1911, 33 (19 August) et passim; also BOGPA, 32, i° Serie, 2 August 1926.161 See Ferreira Ribeiro, Estudos, 194, footnote. The most acute form of the disease was

referred to as palustre perniciosa at this date (pernicious malaria). Of 29 known cases inLuanda in 1871, 21 ended in death. Altogether there were 1,130 cases of malarial feversrecorded in this year in Luanda hospital, with a total of 31 deaths: see Silva Correia,,'OClima', 413.



https://doi.org/10.1017/S0021853700019575


374 JILL R. DIAS

seems to have increased during the late 1880s. Annual hospital deaths fromthe disease in Luanda reached a peak between 1893 and 1904.152 Increasingpopulation density in Luanda was obviously a factor in this. But another partof the explanation may lie in the voluntary or forced migration from otherregions of Africans to work as wage labourers in the Luanda district, wherethey were unprotected from malaria by acquired or inherited immunities. Ithad been observed as long ago as the 1870s that Africans in the Luandahinterland often suffered grave consequences from malaria when they movedfrom one area to another.153 By the i38os and 1890s, most of the labouremployed in Luanda, on the plantations of the hinterland or in constructionof the Ambaca railway, was imported from other districts, notably Libolo.The commoner forms of malaria, if not necessarily fatal, were extremelydebilitating and lowered resistance to other diseases.

The impact of malaria and sleeping sickness in northern Angola wasmatched in the south by a sweeping plague of rinderpest, a contagious diseaseof cattle and wild game which may have been introduced into Africa viaEritrea, through cattle imports from Europe.154 Within only a short time ofreaching Angola in the late 1890s, rinderpest had spread to all areas, possiblydestroying over ninety per cent of the herds in southern, central and easternparts of the colony by 1899.155 The effects of rinderpest were aggravated in1898 by locust invasions which devastated crops in the Mossamedes andLuanda hinterlands.156 These crises were followed by a further majorepidemic of smallpox. It apparently began in Bie in 1901, and was spread toall parts of Angola by Ovimbundu porters. Mortality was reported higheverywhere, including Luanda.157 Catholic missionaries fought a losing battleto persuade Africans of the benefits of inoculation in southern Angola, andalso in the Luanda district, where deaths from smallpox were described as'innumerable'.158 Finally, the 1900s and 1910s were marked by an almostuninterrupted sequence of drought, flood and locust plague. The worst effectswere experienced in the south, where they culminated in the terrible faminesof 1911 and 1916.159

These disasters weakened African rulers at a moment when Portuguesemilitary pressures were at their most intense.160 In some regions, excessive

152 Silva Correia, 'O Clima', 416; see also BOGPA, 1904, 27 (2 July), 478-9: malariawas said to be 'raging' in Dondo in this year.

153 Ferreira Ribeiro, Estudos, 38. By 1929, between 50 and 100 per cent of workers onEuropean plantations in the Kwanza district were migrants from other districts: seeOrnelas and Mesquita, Relatorio, 13.

154 See Curtin, Feierman, Thompson and Vansina, African History, 553.155 See Clarence-Smith and Moorsom, 'Underdevelopment and Class Formation',

375; Clarence-Smith, Slaves, Peasants and Capitalists, 59. Deaths from cattle disease,possibly rinderpest, were already raising the price of meat in Luanda in 1895: BOGPA,1895, 11 (16 March). See also BOGPA, 1899, 2 (14 January), 21; 6 (11 February), 82.

156 AHU, Angola, i" Reparticao 2" Seccao, caixa 18, letter 295 of the Governor General,21 March 1898.

157 See BOGPA, 1902, 4 (25 January), 34-5. Silva Correia, 'A Variola'. Similarlysevere epidemics of smallpox were also reported from Guinea, Cape Verde and Mozam-bique in 1901-2: see Portugal em Africa, 8 (1901), 320, 375, 443 and 71.

158 Portugal em Africa, 8 (1901), 561, 623, 626 and 721; 10 (1903), 356.159 Clarence-Smith and Moorsom, 'Underdevelopment and Class formation', 375;

Clarence-Smith, Slaves, Peasants and Capitalists, 77.160 Pelissier, Les Guerres Grises, 188.



https://doi.org/10.1017/S0021853700019575



losses of manpower and cattle hastened the military defeat of chiefs throughtheir inability to mobilize resistance on the scale of previous decades. Thiswas most evident in the south of Angola, where the deaths of around a quarterof a million people from starvation between 1911 and 1916 undoubtedlyfacilitated Portuguese victory over the Kwanyama in 1915.161 In the north,the uninterrupted epidemic of sleeping sickness between the 1890s and 1910salso aided Portuguese conquest. The decimation of the population betweenthe rivers Bengo and Dande, the west flank of the Dembos district, enabledJoao de Almeida to invade the area without incident in 1907. The epi-demic continued to rage intensely among the population of the Dembos after1909 and was explicitly recognized by Portugese military commanders to haveplayed an important part in allowing them to establish colonial authority andcontrol there by 1919.162

On the other hand, depopulation of Portuguese territory created an acuteshortage of labour for European plantations. If this was not the chief causeof the crisis in the colonial economy by the turn of the century it was animportant contributory factor. Increasing scarcity of manpower raised thepurchase price for Africans to work in the plantations of Angola and Sao Tomeby several hundred per cent between 1880 and 1900.163 Combined with hightransport costs to the coast this caused a grave lack of capital among Europeanplanters in the Luanda district. Many consequently succumbed more readilyto bankruptcy as a result of falling coffee prices and a slump in the rubberand rum trades around 1900. The plantations entered a prolonged crisis inthe early 1900s from which they did not emerge significantly until after 1945.

As for the vast majority of people, malnutrition continued to be the mostwidespread and serious problem by the twentieth century, especially in areasaffected by the spread of European trade and agriculture. There were severalreasons. A major long-term factor was the poor food value of manioc, thebasic crop of African farmers and staple diet of the poor throughout thecoastal zone for more than a century. Worst affected were the populationsof the towns, particularly Luanda, where the poorer majority had less chanceto vary their diet than in rural areas.164 The shooting out of game, effects ofrinderpest, and enforced colonial laws against hunting, after 1910, caused adecline in meat consumption. This led to important economic and dietarylosses in the lives of people almost everywhere.165 Thirdly, alchohol addictionwas increasing everywhere in Angola due to the expansion of Europeanproduction of cheap rum, main exchange currency of the rubber trade. It wasalso used to pay labourers on the the plantations which produced it. Therewere about forty plantations principally engaged in producing rum for

161 Pelissier, Les Guerres Grises, 488.102 See Joao de Almeida, ' Relatorio da Colona de Operates aos Dembos', in Relatorio

da Seccao de Agricultura do Governo Geral de Angola (Luanda, 1907), 101-63; DavidMagno, Gnerras Angolanas (Porto, 1934).

163 See British Foreign Office, Annual Series, Diplomatic and Consular Reports on Tradeand Finance: Portugal, no. 1069.

164 See, for example, F. Duque da Fonseca and Joaquim Xabregas, 'Problemas deNutricao de Angola - Aspectos de Luanda', Boletim do Instituto de Angola, 8 (1957). Alsocompare Roberts, Zambia, 11.

166 See, for example, Ferreira Ribeiro, Estudos, 246; Helio A. Esteves Felgas, AsPopulacoes Nativas do Congo Portugues (Carmona, 1958), 37; Clarence-Smith, Slaves,Peasants and Capitalists, 70.



https://doi.org/10.1017/S0021853700019575


376 JILL R. DIAS

domestic consumption in Cazengo and Golungo Alto alone by 1900.166

Alcoholism was a recognized problem in the Luanda district at this date aswell as among the Ovimbundu further south.167 Combined with poor foodit was a powerful factor in weakening resistance to disease, especiallytuberculosis.

Food shortages in the climatically unstable Luanda district were alsoaggravated by the growth of the European plantation economy. Cultivationof basic food crops was neglected on many sugar and coffee estates. The massof labourers contracted to work on them suffered the most. Many employerswere unable or unwilling to provide adequate daily rations at the prices askedby the middlemen who marketed African food surpluses.168 Thus a very poordaily diet, combined with frequently appalling work conditions, contributedto the high levels of mortality observed among plantation workers.169 Thecontinuing white immigration and rapid growth of towns, such as Malange,was straining food supplies still further by the 1910s. Increases in localAfrican production of cereals in reponse to high prices were hindered by lawsobliging the majority to work as wage labourers on European estates.170 Thegrowing amounts of maize produced by African smallholders in more distantregions, in response to improved rail communications with the coast, werechannelled almost exclusively into the export market. The white settlernewspaper, Cuanza Norte, announced a generalized hunger crisis in theKwanza and Lukala districts following a season of low rainfall, in July 1918.In this month, a labourer earning a monthly wage of 12 to 25 milreis wasrequired to pay 36 milreis for basic fopdstuffs.171 Correspondents stressed theurgent necessity of averting famine through increasing food cultivation onthe plantations and importing machinery to improve agricultural techniquesand manufacture of cereals.172 However, the question of improving domesticfood supplies continued to be largely ignored by the government in the 1920s.On the contrary, the risk of famine became even more widespread followinglaws imposing forced cotton growing on African farmers to the exclusion offood crops.

The effects of world depression were made all the more terrible in Angolathrough a drought, claimed as 'the greatest within living memory'173

between 1930 and 1933. It was accompanied by one of the most prolongedand dreadful locust invasions so far reported in the twentieth century. Redlocusts invaded Angola from the east, laying their eggs over the wholeterritory. The avalanche of destruction lasted until well into 1934.174 The

166 Leitao, Relatorio, 12.167 Leitao, Relatorio, 113; Silva Correia, 'O Clima', 430-2; Douglas L. Wheeler and

D. Christensen, 'To rise with one Mind: the Bailundo War of 1902', in Franz-WilhelmHeimer (ed.), Social Change in Angola (Munich, 1973); Clarence-Smith, Slaves, Peasantsand Capitalists, 65.

168 Eduardo Augusto Neuparth, Apontarnentos para a Historia da Companhia Agricolade Cazengo (Lisboa, 1904), 22.

169 Leitao, Relatorio. In this report, much of the mortality among labourers on theCazengo plantations is attributed to yaws, or framboesia. See also Alfredo Gomes da Costa,'A Higiene e a assistencia ch'nica aos Trabalhadores das Fazendas Agricolas da Regiaodo Amboim', Revista Medica de Angola, 11, iv (1923), 367-75.

170 D i n i z , Negocios Indigenas, 1 (1913) , 8 3 . m Cuanza Norte, 11 July 1918.172 Cuanza Norte, 11 July 1918. 173 A Provincia de Angola, 10 March 1932.174 See A Provincia de Angola, 1933-4, passim.



https://doi.org/10.1017/S0021853700019575



effects on the population were most visible in the towns, where many wageearners had also been thrown out of work by the depression. In Lobito, groupsof cadaverous adults and children roamed the streets during 1932, in searchof food.175 More than ever, Luanda became a population of 'livingskeletons'.176 By this date, sleeping sickness and smallpox had been broughtunder control. However, other fatal diseases, particularly tuberculosis, werewidespread and infant mortality rates remained very high.177 Malariaremained very acute in form and incidence throughout northern Angola andin the river valleys of the Kwango and Kwanza as late as 1944.178 Faminerecurred again in the early 1940s. In August 1940, drought and depressioncombined to make one kilogram of maize more valuable than a kilogram ofcoffee in Cazengo.179 Drought was followed by abnormally heavy rains whichdestroyed crops in the Huambo, Novo Redondo, Benguela and Kwanzadistricts during 1943.18° The hardships caused by such crises and the slowprogress of the colonial government in resolving them should not, perhaps,be ignored when assessing the background to the emergence of the modernnationalist movements in Angola in the 1950s.

This last point begs the further question of how far ecological crisesinfluenced patterns of African resistance in Angola. The relationship betweenhunger and revolt, a common enough theme in European history, has beenlittle emphasized in studies of African resistance. Yet new insights may begained into the timing and nature of revolts against colonial authority inAngola by considering them from this perspective. This paper has tended tostress the weakening effect of famine and epidemic crises as a discouragementto effective resistance. Yet economic hardship resulting from less mortal crisesof hunger or disease could also have been important in bringing grievancesagainst the abuses of Portuguese domination to the point of revolt. This isnot to argue that such crises were an automatic trigger to revolt, nor that allrevolts were really subsistence crises; but simply that on occasions, hungeror epidemic acted as a stimulus to popular participation in revolts ostensiblyconcerned with other issues and objectives.

It is not difficult to find examples of coincidences between ecological crisisand revolt in Angola. For example, the Mbailundu rebellion of 1902coincided with the particularly severe run of rinderpest, drought andsmallpox crises around the turn of the century. The so-called 'revolt ofCatete' in 1922, when African producers demonstrated against forced labourand concessions of land to white planters, also coincided with the end ofa drought and an outbreak of plague estimated to have killed at least fivehundred people in Catete alone.181 Much more needs to be done to assess thesignificance of such coincidences in relation to the facts surrounding each

"* AHU, Sala 12, Angola Diversos, caixa 1, letter addressed to Dr Armindo Monteiro,30 September 1932; also Angola 3, 31 March 1933.

no ^j provincia de Angola, 15 January 1934.177 See particularly the article by Dr Damas Mora in A Provincia de Angola, 23 August

1932. Angola (3, 31 March 1933) pinpointed tuberculosis as having provoked a notabledecline in population throughout the colony.

178 James S. Simmons, Global Epidemiology, a Geography of Disease and Sanitation, n(Philadelphia, 1944), 325-34, cited by Wheeler, 'A note on smallpox in Angola', 355.

i?o ^ Provincia de Angola, 20 August 1940.180 See O Estandarte, XI, 97 (1943). I am grateful to Dorothy Keet for this reference.181 See Silva Correia, 'O Clima', 440-53; Damas Mora, 'A Peste', 317-29.



https://doi.org/10.1017/S0021853700019575


378 JILL R. DIAS

particular revolt. Such an approach may prove especially useful in analysingthe revolts which occurred in the Kongo kingdom from the 1880s onwards.In particular, the important and widespread revolt in Kongo between 1913and 1915 coincided with a period of markedly irregular rainfall and hunger.Distress from hunger possibly catalysed popular grievances against abusesof tax collection or labour recruitment into open violence. The revolt mightalso have been psychologically reinforced by the belief that rain failure andperhaps other calamities, such as sleeping sickness, were caused by neglectof traditional ritual observances, bringing down the wrath of Nzambi.182

African converts to Christianity in Cabinda attracted violent hostility throughtheir refusal to join processions and offer sacrifices to the rain spirits at thistime.183 Such supernatural beliefs would have provided a unifying forcewhich may help in explaining the pan-Kongo nature of the movement to expelthe Portuguese.184 No revolt on a similar scale occurred again in Angola before1961. In this year, uprisings in the coffee belt of Kongo, the forced cottonfields of Kasanje and the musseques of Luanda marked the beginning of thelong war of liberation. It would be interesting to know whether their timingwas influenced by crop failure and high food prices engendered by theirregular rainfall of the previous three years. The latest and clearest exampleof the hunger/revolt connexion is, of course, the attempted coup d'etat of May1977, in Luanda. The political circumstances of this revolt are confused, butit would seem to have been caused fundamentally by a severe food crisis,aggravated in this year by drought.188

SUMMARY

In Angola, climatic instability contributed to maintaining a precarious balancebetween food resources, population and disease long before the nineteenth century.Periods of exceptionally irregular rainfall, lasting several years, were preceded oraccompanied by plagues of locusts which caused famines at least once every decade.The coastal lowland and the extreme south were especially vulnerable. Prolongedhunger crises led to malnutrition, lowered resistance to disease and epidemicoutbreaks, especially of smallpox. A rhythm of drought and smallpox can bediscerned in Angola, at least since the seventeeth century. From the 1830s thegradual decline of the overseas slave trade and rise of commerce in raw materialsand cash crops brought important demographic changes. These contributed to theworsening famines and epidemic crises of the late nineteenth century. Commercialinstability and rural depopulation hindered the growth of Portuguese plantationprosperity. Soon after, however, similar crises aided Portuguese military conquestin Angola by weakening African ability to mobilize effective resistance. In thetwentieth century malnutrition continued to be the most widespread problem ofAngola's Africans and on occasion it drove them to revolt.

182 Angola. The Organ of the Angola Evangelical Mission, no. 2, vol. 12 (February 1914),11. Nzambi was the High God and creater of all things, who controlled the condition ofthe whole natural world: see Roberts, Zambia, 73.

183 Angola, The Organ of the Angola Evangelical Mission, o p . cit .184 See Pelissier, Les Guerres Grises, 232-48.186 For an analysis of the causes of this attempted coup see D. Birmingham, 'The

Twenty-Seventh of May. An Historical Note on the abortive 1977 coup in Angola', AfricanAffairs, LXXVII, 309 (October 1978), 554-64.



https://doi.org/10.1017/S0021853700019575


famine and disease in the history of angola c. 1830–1930...4 see, for example, henrique a. dias de...

Documents