A Slaveholding Town: Slaveowners and their Captives in Moçâmedes, 1855

Abstract

This article investigates slave owners and their human assets in a port town founded in southern Angola, Moçâmedes, in the mid-nineteenth century. It draws on an 1855 register of slave owners and their captives to better understand the inhabitants of this coastal urban landscape founded fifteen years earlier. Unlike the city imposed on the desert by light-skinned “men” painted by colonial and post-colonial observers, this was a new frontier society built with slave labor. A significant percent-age of this land remained in the hands of a large number of individual owners, while the majority was held by a handful of free inhabitants. However, regardless of their owners, enslaved individuals engaged in a multitude of occupations in Moçâmedes - working in agriculture, harvesting orchella weed, performing street trades, fishing in the nearby seas -, which made Moçâmedes a “slave town”.