Falling into history: a case for the restitution of Mbali tombstones and the revival of the realms of memory of the enslaved

ABSTRACT

Building on Valentin Mudimbe’s claim that as soon as African mnemonic devices are removed from their societies of origin, they are inhibited from performing their social functions, this article argues that countless memorials to the enslaved are failing to perform the role they were built for simply because they are now included in collections where they are misclassified as ethnographic objects or African art. This article takes Mbali tombstones from the Kimbari of southwest Angola as an example of such a misclassification. It demonstrates that the writing of settler-colonial monumental histories and concomitant processes of ethnologization have resulted in these tombstones being made to represent a single ethnic group instead of being considered as memorials to the enslaved. It engages with the work of Carolyn Hamilton, Nessa Liebhammer and Dan Hicks to propose a way to remedy their misclassification and thus prompt a reparative rewriting of Portuguese and Kimbari histories. Taking inspiration from the Afro-futurist visions of Angolan movie director Fradique and Portuguese assemblywoman and activist Beatriz Dias, this article concludes by proposing three historical vignettes that reorder Portuguese archival sources and arguing for the restoration of some of the normative agency of the Kimbari.

KEYWORDS:

• Counter-memorialization
• ethnologization
• fallism
• mnemonic crisis
• restitution

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In Fradique’s feature debut Ar Condicionado [Air Conditioner] (2020), dozens of air conditioners mysteriously detach themselves from the concrete walls of Luanda’s colonial-era high rises, plunging with great violence on the crammed backdoor patios of the Angolan capital. While the precise date of this fictional event is never stated in the film, the gently decaying buildings that provide the backdrop for the plot situate it in the long post-colonial, post-civil-war present.¹ In this beautifully shot Afro-futurist tale, the social unrest caused by these abrupt falls is hastily dealt with by populist politicians and television pundits who take turns blame-shifting and proposing magic-bullet solutions for what they wrongly perceive to be a refrigeration crisis. However, in an unexpected twist, Ar Condicionado depicts their inconsequential bickering and never-ending arguments as background noise. In this speculative fiction, the real problem, as the protagonists Matacedo and Zezinha soon discover, is that the fallen air conditioners have been wrongly classified as mere cooling systems. In fact, they had also been filtering and accumulating the memories and dreams of disillusioned city dwellers. Therefore, as Matacedo and Zezinha realize, the impending crisis is, at its very essence, a mnemonic one. Most onerously, the tech wizard Mino reveals to them, Angolan air conditioners will keep failing and disrupting the country’s economy until the memories and dreams that they sequestered are painstakingly recovered and revived.

In the press-release of Ar Condicionado, Fradique confirms that his intention was to film an allegory about the daily struggles of countless Angolans who strive to revive old dreams and gain access ‘to memories they [still] don’t have’.² Therefore, the fictionalized fall of air conditioners from Luanda’s colonial-era high-rises alludes to a real global memory-infrastructure crisis that extends far beyond Angola. Dan Hicks registers the impacts of this epochal event in the packed hallways of the Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford. In The Brutish Museums (2020), Hicks notes that, with the ‘work of restitution’, the ‘dismantling of the white infrastructure of every anthropology and “world culture” museum’ has already begun.³ Like the falling air conditioners in Fradique’s Afro-futurist Luanda, Hicks argues that looted African artefacts need to be severed from their colonial frameworks to (re)become what Valentin Mudimbe describes as African memoriae loci [sites or realms of memory].⁴ In Ar Condicionado, a sudden, violent, redeeming fall indexes this complex transition from cog in the colonial machinery to site of (future) memories. Had the air conditioners remained fixed in place, their mnemonic function would have stayed obscure. However, by detaching themselves and falling, a crisis is triggered that reveals an important aspect of their hidden nature. Throughout Africa, Europe, the Greater Caribbean, and North and South America, white supremacist statues, monuments to enslavers, and colonial memorials have been experiencing a similar fall. From the onset, as Hicks and Nicholas Mirzoeff have remarked, restitution and ‘fallism’ are umbilically tied.⁵ In their view, both movements are nurtured by the kind of radical hope and optimism that are also the hallmarks of civil rights movements and Afro-futurism. Moreover, as they explain, looted artefacts and fallen monuments are alike inasmuch as they need to be removed from their white supremacist pedestals and museum displays to finally recover their full mnemonic and historiographical agency. Up until that point, their function is pretty much that of regular air conditioners, i.e. to maintain a homeostatic environment. Ar Condicionado beautifully captures this transition, allowing us to enthusiastically side with Matacedo and Zezinha and wonder what futures can be spun out of the memories and dreams that are revived in the process.

Inspired by them, the first object this article pays close attention to is a carved-sandstone bas-relief that bears a passing resemblance to Paul Klee’s Angelus Novus (1920), immortalized by Walter Benjamin as the angel of History.⁶ Before its fall, our Angel of negated-History is classified as a ‘Fragment of funerary stele’ and described as ‘Mbali, Namibe, Southwest Angola, stone, relief, 48 * 26 * 13 cm’.⁷ A curled snake rests at its feet where, in keeping with Benjamin’s allegory, one would expect to find an ever-expanding pile of capitalist debris. ‘Fragment of funerary stele’ was last publicly exhibited at the Santa Clara market, Lisbon, as part of the the africas of pancho guedes exhibition (17 December 2010 to 8 March 2011).⁸ In the catalogue of this exhibition, Amâncio Guedes recounts having taken it, alongside several other pieces, from ‘cemeteries lost in the middle of the desert’, c. 1969.⁹ Back then, article 247 of the Portuguese Penal Code of 1886 (extant until 1982) framed his acts as crimes against the memory of the deceased, punishable with up to one year of imprisonment.¹⁰ However, the exhibition catalogue classifies the tombstones as ethnographic objects, simultaneously purging them of their mnemonic functions and absolving Guedes from any moral responsibility. Still today, ‘Fragment of funerary stele’ is neither identified as a historical source that can tell us something precious about the memories and dreams of the individuals who commissioned or executed it, nor as a memorial that honours the person in whose tomb it was originally found. Instead, ‘Fragment of funerary stele’ continues to be classified as Mbali Art, and said to represent the habits, customs, and worldviews of the Kimbari, a loosely defined populational group that includes the descendants of the enslaved Africans whom the Portuguese forcefully resettled to southwest Angola, from the middle of the nineteenth century onwards.¹¹

Carolyn Hamilton and Nessa Liebhammer define the kind of misclassification that affects ‘Fragment of funerary stele’ as ‘tribing’ and describe it as the process wherein ‘collections of objects […] often categorised as ethnographic, [are] historically denied archival status and more recently habilitated as “art”’.¹² Similarly, this article approaches it as an instance of what Valentin Mudimbe has described as the ‘ethnologization’ of African realms of memory. Ethnologization entails first isolating African mnemonic devices from their social contexts, then analysing them according to colonial taxonomies and, finally, exhibiting them as ethnographic indexes of a given ‘latitude, longitude, tribe’.¹³ This process, as Mudimbe explains, progressively dismantled autochthonous memory-infrastructures, and turned whole repositories of African memories into semiotic fodder for colonial anthropologists. Furthermore, as Mahmood Mamdani remarks, it allowed the colonial state to obscure the importance of past migrations and portray ‘the native as the product of geography rather than history’.¹⁴ Ever since, as Hamilton and Liebhammer conclude, key documents, and other physical traces of the pre-colonial or colonial past have been removed from African post-colonial archives, simply because they are still classified either as ethnographic pieces or a-historical tribal Art. While these elements are cut off from their original social contexts and archives, within western museums, they are displayed to reproduce the epistemic violence that scaffolded high colonialism.¹⁵ By being suspended in an eternal ethnographic present and forced to represent vibrant cultures as ruins, these texts and objects create the illusion that African societies are cold, devoid of as much history as future. As Hicks argues, this violence goes unnoticed until white memory-infrastructures fail, finally ‘demanding our attention because action is required’.¹⁶

In 2017, the approval of the creation of an official Memorial to the Enslaved in Lisbon occasioned such an event, disrupting the normal functioning of Portuguese white supremacist memory-infrastructures.¹⁷ This memorial, proposed by the Afro-descendant association DJASS, calls into question the silencing and concealment of African, Afro-descendant, and Black diasporic experiences and memories, occupying a privileged urban space that was previously reserved for re-enactments of a mythical imperial past.¹⁸ Furthermore, the memorial also functions as a ‘counter-monument’, deconstructing any possible consensus about itself,¹⁹ and ensuring, to paraphrase Nora Sternfeld, that the wound is still open and the debate keeps going.²⁰ As Beatriz Dias, founding member of DJASS, explains, the memorial is a space for Afro-descendants ‘to go to take root in [their] memories and tell this history that has been made invisible in [their] public space’.²¹ Therefore, the Memorial to the Enslaved in Lisbon both affirms Black identity, advocates for racial justice, promotes the integration of Afro-descendant memories into mainstream historical narratives, and questions: where can the preserved memories and dreams of the enslaved be found? This pressing question calls for action and demands our attention. As this article will show, there are already thousands of memorials to the enslaved in Portugal. Objects such as ‘Fragment of funerary stele’ prove it. As a group, the identity of the Kimbari was deeply shaped by the fact that they collectively experienced extreme forms of dependency and (re)enslavement. To counter the ‘social death’ and ‘natal alienation’ associated with their condition they developed elaborate funerary rites and public celebrations of their deceased.²² Therefore, ‘Fragment of funerary stele’ and all the other sculptures that are classified in western museums as ‘Mbali funerary Art’ are in fact memorials to the enslaved and their families.²³

This article pays close attention to these memorials and argues that, just as ‘Fragment of funerary stele’, once they fall from their white-supremacist display cases they can enter a fruitful dialogue with the Lisbon Memorial to the Enslaved and help spin new futures out of shared dreams and revived memories. The first section situates the ethnologization of Mbali Art within two broader colonial projects, one historiographic, one ethnographic, that reified the Kimbari as a sui generis ethnic group. The second section subverts the institutional tendency of using Mbali Art as a prompt to extract further information from the Kimbari. It thus argues that to repair the violence done to them, their memoriae loci should be untribed and, accordingly, unsettle Portuguese archives. Showcasing the potentialities of this act of reparation, this section proposes three short vignettes that reorder colonial narratives about the group. It concludes by suggesting that this method can be employed for further interventions and arguing that, to fully redress the damage imposed by tribing, the normative agency of the Kimbari must also be restored.

Instituting and maintaining the limits of the colonial order

In 1959, the Brazilian sociologist Gilberto Freyre argued that Mbali tombstones testify to the birth of a ‘Luso-Tropical’ civilization in Africa.²⁴ According to him, while the Kimbari of southwest Angola originated from the ‘slaves’ that were forced to resettle in Moçâmedes, their funerary art had deeper spiritual roots and expressed the same sensibility as centuries-old Bakongo Christianized artworks. As Freyre admitted, he reached this conclusion after having attended the Missionary Art Exhibition (1951) in Lisbon and visited several Kimbari graveyards in southwest Angola. Through its museography, the Missionary Art Exhibition sought to present the assimilation of African populations to a Christian, anti-communist mindset as a service provided by the Portuguese regime to the western international community (Figure 1).²⁵ Aligning himself with the propaganda of the Salazar dictatorship, Freyre claimed that Mbali tombstones manifested a long-lasting trend of African conversion to Roman Catholicism and Portuguese mores. As many others before him, Freire too identified the Kimbari as a buffer group between other Black ethnic groups and white Portuguese settlers. As the next two subsections demonstrate, while not being recognized as citizens or attaining any other privileges, the Kimbari were nevertheless presented as a group who collectively strove towards integration, thus setting the upper limit of ethnic ‘evolution’.²⁶ By placing them in this liminal structural position, Freyre conceded that the Kimbari had historical agency, while simultaneously construing them as a-historical, ethnic. This seemingly paradoxical synthesis still informs contemporary representations of the Kimbari,²⁷ and sits at the confluence of two broader epistemic projects, one historiographic, one ethnographic.

Figure 1. Gilberto Freyre inspects a Mbali tombstone, c. 1951-52. Source: Gilberto Freyre, Em tôrno de alguns túmulos Afro-Cristãos de uma área africana contagiada pela cultura brasileira, Salvador: Universidade da Bahia, 1959.

Settler-colonial monumental histories

Building upon Friedrich Nietzsche’s definition, the first of the aforesaid projects can be described as a settler-colonial version of monumental history where white settlers are cast as the heroic subjects of change and progress.²⁸ In this version of history, stylistic conventions are used to remove enslaved persons and indigenous groups from official records, paving the way for white supremacist celebrations of colonial endurance and overcoming. Through these conventions, on the one hand, enslaved persons were further dehumanized by being itemised and listed alongside the industrial machinery owned by their enslavers.²⁹ On the other hand, indigenous groups were ‘tribed’ under an ethnonym, approached as part of the African landscape, and considered an exploitable ‘natural’ resource.³⁰

Before the Kimbari begun being deemed an ethnic group, they figured in the colonial reports, official chronicles, and memoirs about the founding of Moçâmedes [nowadays Namibe], which was the first planned settler-colony in southwest Angola.³¹ However, in these documents and the colonial histories they inspired, the yet-to-be-tribed Kimbari are simply described as ‘slaves’, or libertos [‘prize Negroes’], and listed as capital.³² Being treated the same as infrastructure, they were made visible only when they failed by either rebelling or escaping.³³ Simultaneously, neighbouring indigenous groups were assessed by white settlers according to their alleged ‘ethnic occupations’. For instance, in 1919, when drafting a development plan for the colony, Carlos Machado argued that Moçâmedes should take advantage of the ‘instinctive capacity’ of the Kwanyama and Herero to herd, and the Mwila to farm cereals.³⁴ By treating the enslaved as capital and the indigenous as res naturae [things of ‘Nature’], white settlers were able to develop a legitimizing mythology of heroic occupation and progress. Invariably, this mythology was written in the passive voice, hiding any traces of genocidal violence and enslavement. The colony grew, whales were captured, sugarcanes and cotton plants were cultivated, and rum was distilled.³⁵

Besides concealing their labour, monumental histories also conceal the history of how the enslaved Africans and libertos that built Moçâmedes became the Kimbari. In 1839, when these unfree labourers were first moved to southwest Angola, they led the Portuguese to (re)articulate the socio-legal categories Black and Indigenous. At that time, there were two relevant major socio-legal divisions. On the one hand, there was the line that separated the jurisdiction of the Portuguese colony from those of neighbouring indigenous sovereigns. On the other hand, there was the line that distinguished free individuals from those who were enslaved. The first division coincided with territorial borders, however porous and granular, while slavery was still considered legal everywhere. However, the anti-slave-trade laws that were introduced in 1836 and 1842 threw this status quo into disarray.³⁶ This was the case in that, by introducing the legal liminal figure of the libertos, they superimposed a racial division upon the pre-existing territorial and legal ones. In contrast to fully enfranchised emancipated ‘slaves’, libertos had to remain under the tutelage of state-appointed tutors, were forced to serve long indentures, and transmitted their quasi-free status to their offspring. In 1854, this status was extended to include all the enslaved that would have obtained freedom.³⁷ Starting from then, on the Portuguese side of the colonial divide, all ‘slaves’ that attained ‘freedom’ or were brought from the African hinterlands became libertos, thus engrossing the forced labour pool of Moçâmedes. On the indigenous side, colonial agents extracted ‘slaves’ as a resource by buying them from indigenous sovereigns and importing them as libertos.³⁸

While these readjustments simply perpetuated the social dynamics of the internal slave-trade, the new status also allowed for disruptive innovations. Because domestic laws and international treaties associated the status of liberto with Blackness, and barred white and non-Black subjects from acquiring it, they invested the colonial colour divide with a new significance. Henceforward, on Portuguese territories, all free Black subjects and visiting indigenous began facing the risk of being de facto enslaved when listed as libertos. On indigenous territories, new vassalage treaties began equating non-indigenous Blacks to runaway libertos.³⁹ This allowed the Portuguese administration to develop a ‘regime of intervention’ and enforce the extraterritorial application of its laws over those marked as wayward Black subjects.⁴⁰ Simultaneously, the status curtailed the jurisdiction of African sovereigns over their subjects who visited or resided in the colony. This was the case since, if the subjects of African sovereigns were made into libertos, they could not appeal to the courts of their former sovereigns or to the legal plural forums that the Portuguese had maintained until the 1840s.⁴¹ Deepening the asymmetry, no enslaved subjects could ever cross the colonial boundary to become libertos under the tutelage of indigenous masters, simply because they were deemed incompetent to ‘civilize’ them.

The tripartite socio-legal division between settlers, libertos, and indigenous thus became the most significant one, the first category being associated with whiteness, and the last two with Blackness. In this new configuration, libertos had become a buffer group between white settlers and indigenous Africans, allowing the first to incorporate the latter into the colony without ever granting to them the rights reserved to white Portuguese subjects. When the legal category liberto was abolished in 1878, all doctrinal considerations that had sustained it, either by stating the supposedly diminished capacities of freed ‘slaves’, their need for tutelage, or their aversion to work, began informing openly racist discourses about all Blacks.⁴² Concurrently, the notion of indigenous sovereignty was contested until it was formally abolished, in the aftermath of the Berlin Conference (1884–1885).⁴³ Then, most African borders were officially made to coincide with colonial territories and European jurisdictions. This meant that formerly independent African polities, now devoid of internationally recognized sovereignty, became internal ethnic minorities.⁴⁴ Consequently, all Black subjects under Portuguese rule began being subject to a protracted process of ethnologization, including the former libertos who had hitherto been the structural other of the indigenous.⁴⁵ This is when the Kimbari finally became an ethnic group. From then onwards, they began being subjected to the special administrative measures designed to govern internal ethnic minorities typical of systems of indirect rule.⁴⁶

The ethnic mapping of Angola

The second project can be described as ethnographic, and it incorporated both elements of romantic salvage-ethnography and the thrust to create a detailed ethnic map of the colony for administrative purposes. In Angola, this project got under way in 1912, when Norton de Matos appointed the ethnologist José Ferreira Diniz to the position of Secretary of Indigenous Affairs.⁴⁷ Six years later, Diniz published the first systematic ethnic atlas of Angola, providing a pseudoscientific basis for Matos’ ethnically informed reorganization of labour and tax regulations. Ever since then, increasingly detailed ethnic maps were drafted by colonial administrators to support the indigenato [lit. indigenous] regime (1926–1961).⁴⁸ One of the central pillars of this labour regime, the decree of 23 October 1926, provisioned that all Black subjects should be treated as ‘indigenous’ unless they were officially recognized as ‘assimilated’ to Portuguese mores on individual basis.⁴⁹ Classification as ‘indigenous’ forced Black subjects to forfeit their civil rights and political freedoms, pay ‘hut taxes’, and choose between regularly delivering a set amount of cash-crops or providing military service and other kinds of corvée labour.

The project of creating the ultimate ethnic map of Angola led Lopes Cardoso to conduct a thorough survey of all identified Mbali tombstones of the district of Moçâmedes, from September 1962 to March 1963.⁵⁰ Working on behalf of the Instituto de Investigação Científica de Angola [The Scientific Research Institute of Angola], Cardoso also collected Mbali tombstones, a large linguistic corpus, and gathered all the demographic data he could muster from Kimbari birth and death certificates.⁵¹ Besides cataloguing Mbali art, Cardoso proposed to settle an unresolved linguistic dispute between two authorities on the ethnography of southwest Angola: the spiritan missionary-ethnographer Carlos Estermann and the North American minister Gladwyn Childs.⁵² Writing a decade after his Catholic peer, Childs had made remarks about Olumbali, the ‘dialect cluster’ spoken by the Kimbari,⁵³ that directly contradicted Estermann’s account. While the latter defended that Olumbali was closely related to variants of Kimbundo spoken in the northern Creole centres of Luanda, Kissama and Malange, Childs maintained that it was closer to the ‘diasporic’ Umbundu spoken in southern port-towns such as Benguela and Lobito.⁵⁴ Whereas the first hypothesis led credence to Feyre’s deeper spiritual past model, the second questioned the soundness of including the Kimbari in the official ethnic map of the Angolan colony that Cardoso was then working on.⁵⁵

When Cardoso published his findings in 1966, Estermann reaffirmed his position in the preface, insinuating that perhaps Childs had conducted his field-research with ‘a nucleus of mbundo workers that had come from Caconda to earn their bread in Moçâmedes between 1930 and 1940’.⁵⁶ This claim left unaddressed the question of ascertaining if these workers could be legitimately counted as Kimbari. In the body of his report, which found traces of several languages in the analysed corpus,⁵⁷ Cardoso addressed this issue by proposing to distinguish between those that were ‘proper Mbali [or Kimbari]’, those that had ‘become Mbali [or Kimbari]’ and, finally, those that, just as the workers who might have been interviewed by Childs, were simply ‘contratados’ [hired labourers].⁵⁸ This allowed him to claim that Olumbali was a distinct language. However, his differentiation of the Kimbari into various kinds questioned the logic of including them in the administrative ethnic-grid of the colony.

Writing in 1966, five years after the abolition of the indigenato regime, Cardoso was finally open to entertain the option of leaving them out. However, by then, the Kimbari had already been subjected to the indigenato from its inception in 1926 to its abolition in 1961.⁵⁹ Besides imposing on them the abovementioned special taxes, corvees, and civil-rights limitations, this classification created the expectation for the Kimbari to follow traditional leaders and customary laws. The Kimbari often protested these impositions, claiming that their ‘customary law’ was the Portuguese Civil Code and that they had no soba [chieftain] except the one they democratically elected.⁶⁰ According to the stated rules of the indigenous system, this meant that they were collectively entitled to the status of ‘assimilated’, in fair recognition of their enslaved and liberto past. This recognition never came, and Cardoso only conceded that the Kimbari had a point in 1974, the year when the Portuguese dictatorship was brought down by the wear and tear caused by anticolonial wars fought by the African liberation movements.⁶¹ Then, when the existence of a buffer group between white settlers and other ethnic groups was no longer useful, Cardoso finally admitted that the Kimbari were ‘culturally very diversified and that, in their case, we cannot speak of a distinct ethnic group, but rather of a social and cultural status group’. Yet, in 1991, he still retrospectively justified the recollection of dozens of Mbali tombstones as salvage ethnography and thus paved the way for the group to continue to be tribed by having these memorials displayed as ethnographic objects or tribal art.⁶²

The memories and dreams represented in Mbali tombstones

In Fradique’s Ar condicionado, Mino devises a marvellous Afro-futurist device that offers Matacedo and Zezinha the possibility of retrieving some of the memories and dreams accumulated in Luanda’s air conditioners (Figure 2). In Portugal, recent interventions in the public space, such as the Lisbon Memorial to the Enslaved and its interpretative centre, are finally providing an opportunity for some of the memories that are represented in Mbali tombstones to be retrieved. In Beatriz Dias’ Afro-futurist vision of the future, this reparative reconnection with the past will entail a ‘deep analysis of the memory of people who were victims of slavery’.⁶³ This article argues that Mbali tombstones have the potential to enable this process because they are memoriae loci of the enslaved. The following three subsections will demonstrate how the silences and omissions of settler-colonial monumental histories and ethnic mappings of Angola can be countered by accepting these memorials as authoritative documents that warrant a reinterpretation of Portuguese archival materials.

Figure 2. Matacedo retrieves memories and dreams from old air conditioners. Source: Geração 80, Geração 80 Apresenta Ar Condicionado um filme de Fradique. See: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1oyfUHbKe9ImfnMrKpfIY5izFl248na6_/view (accessed 2 December 2022).

Celebrations of craft and unalienated labour

Mbali tombstones often depict the tools of the trades practiced by the persons they pay homage to (Figure 3).⁶⁴ Unsettling colonial monumental histories that invisibilize Black labour using the passive voice, these memorials to the enslaved insist that, either willingly or unwillingly, Black subjects performed all the tasks celebrated by settler-colonial mythic narratives. They force us to acknowledge that, even if white settlers accounted for their labour and its returns as completely alienable, members of the Kimbari community understood it as meaningful and celebrated its fruits. Furthermore, they disprove all historiographic accounts that take the colonial doctrines that justified the exploitation of libertos at face value. As mentioned in the previous section, these doctrines used two main arguments to justify the long unpaid apprenticeships libertos were forced to serve. First, they argued that ‘freed slaves’ lacked the will to work and the skills that would allow them to better their own lot in life. Second, they argued that these skills could not be acquired within Black communities of origin. By documenting the intergenerational transmission of skills within these communities, Mbali tombstones contradict both arguments and call for a different history of skill acquisition in southwest Angola.

Figure 3. Mbali graveyard formerly known as 'Cemitério Indígena de Moçâmedes', in present day Namibe. Source: Archive of the National Museum of Ethnology, Lisbon, series “Trabalhos de Capo Angola 1967 - António Carreira”, positive reproduction from the negative album “Negativos do dossier A-192 A-216”.

This alternative narrative starts in 1843, shortly after Moçâmedes was first settled, when the powerful dona Ana Joaquina dos Santos sent a group of ‘slaves of all trades’ to the new presidio.⁶⁵ These Africans were selected because they had all the skills deemed necessary to establish plantations and fisheries. Meanwhile, the British cruisers in charge of enforcing the Anglo-Portuguese anti-slave-trade treaty of 1842 made it increasingly difficult to transfer large quantities of enslaved Africans to the new colony, without running the risk of having them recaptured and sent to Sierra Leone.⁶⁶ Faced with this threat, Portuguese authorities opted to transfer libertos instead, supposedly to fulfil their apprenticeship contracts in the new colony.⁶⁷ However, the only craftsmen capable of teaching them there were the enslaved Africans that had been previously resettled to the area. In 1849 and 1850, two waves of white settlers came to Moçâmedes, escaping the nativist uprisings of the Praieira revolts in Brazil.⁶⁸ They carried with them their assets, including some of their enslaved dependants, a shipload of tools, and three newly acquired sugar engines. After arrival, these settlers immediately asked the government for ‘slaves’ or, if that proved impossible, ‘apprentices’ to till their vegetable gardens as well as their sugarcane, tobacco, and cereal plantations.⁶⁹ They too depended on enslaved Africans to teach the incoming libertos all the skills needed to operate the fisheries, build their estates and fortresses, cultivate the plantations, and work in the promising meat and fish drying industries.⁷⁰ In fact, while still in Pernambuco, the first group of settlers created a steering committee to manage their migration, charging it with ‘buying’ an enslaved stonemason capable of setting up sugar-processing trains, and acquiring enslaved Africans accustomed to work in plantations and sugar-engines that could also cook and speak the languages of south west Angola, so that they could ‘serve as an example’ and teach others.⁷¹ Ever since, tutoring and transmitting skills became a quintessential part of the life of the proto-Kimbari who, nevertheless, were perpetually considered ‘apprentices’.⁷²

Memories of loss and overcoming

Triumphalist accounts of progress often conceal its profound underlaying human costs. In the case of Moçâmedes, the Kimbari were the ones that performed the highly repetitive, hazardous tasks demanded by the industrialized ‘techno-centric environments’ of the sugar-cane mills and distilleries.⁷³ As Daniel Rood has described, operating highly inefficient sugar-processing trains was such a devastating experience that the libertos and enslaved that manned them often passed-out next to open-lid boiling pans, sleeping whenever and wherever they could. This led to countless working accidents, and ‘so many slaves lost fingers, hands, and arms in the iron wheels of the cane-crushing mill that some estates kept an axe on hand to hack workers free of the machine’.⁷⁴ The dozens of Mbali tombstones depicting severed hands and limbs testify to this bloodshed, that was not always caused by appalling working conditions. As former Governor José d’Almeida realized with horror, in 1878, when some of the settlers found themselves totally depended on recalcitrant ‘emancipated’ libertos to operate their machines, they resorted to a regime of terror, using cotton gins and other apparatuses to purposefully maim and mutilate those who refused to work (Figure 4).⁷⁵

Figure 4. Mbali tombstone situated at the Saco do Giraúl graveyard. Source: Archive of the National Museum of Ethnology, Lisbon, series “Trabalhos de Capo Angola 1967 - António Carreira”, positive reproduction from the negative album “Negativos do dossier A-192 A-216”.

Mbali tombstones testify to these abuses. Furthermore, they also prove that tending sugarcane or cotton plantations, fishing, and whaling were equally hazardous, labour-intensive occupations, providing us with rare glimpses of these realities. Snake bites, for instance, were a common cause of death. In the cemetery of Saint Nicolau, final resting place of the workers and managers of the S. João do Norte sugar-cane and cotton plantation, a tripartite stela used to pay homage to a young girl that was tragically killed by a snake.⁷⁶ Its upper section was removed by Amâncio Guedes c. 1969, and is now part of his collection, catalogued as ‘Fragment of funerary stele’.⁷⁷ This tombstone was chiselled by the enslaved stonemason Victor Jamba (c. 1865–1950), a relative of the young girl who, like him and the plantation, was owned by João Duarte de Almeida (1822–1898). Representing Jamba’s kinswoman, the top stela depicts an angelic figure with a snake at her feet (Figure 5). Underneath, two men and a woman mourn her, contradicting any western-imposed social death. Because he was familiar with Cardoso’s ethnologization of the Kimbari, Guedes felt justified to detach the representation of Jamba’s kinswoman from those of her loving mourning family, symbolically re-enacting her natal alienation until ‘Fragment of funerary stele’ is restituted. This violent re-enactment took place despite the cemetery of Saint Nicolau being well documented.

Figure 5. Mbali tombstone sculptured by Victor Jamba. It pays homage to a deceased kinswoman of the sculptor, who had been enslaved by João Duarte de Almeida. Source: Carlos Lopes Cardoso, A Arte Mbali, p 6.

Other Mbali tombstones depict Kimbari foremen and the slavecatchers that were employed by the settlers to recover those who escaped into indigenous territory. As mentioned in the previous section, because of their liberto past and the post-abolitionist treaties signed between Portugal and local African sovereigns, these runaways could expect no sanctuary amongst their African neighbours. Despite having to face their possible hostility,⁷⁸ Mbali tombstones depicting slavecatchers prove that the Kimbari still took their chances and escaped. The level of violence denounced by the tombstones explains why. It also explains why white settlers found it difficult to hire free workers,⁷⁹ a fact which led them to constantly demand more libertos from the colonial government and lobby for the establishment of a proto-carceral-industrial complex.⁸⁰ Bernardino Castro, the leader of the first wave of white migrants from Brazil, took the first step in this direction, by promoting the ‘humanitarian rescue’ of Africans accused of witchcraft in the Angolan hinterlands.⁸¹ Castro argued that, since according to African laws these individuals were to be executed, the Portuguese had the ‘moral duty’ of buying accused ‘witches’ and forcing them into the same kind of indenture contracts that were forced upon recaptured Africans. The subjects that came to Moçâmedes after being accused of witchcraft had to overcome a double loss, being socially dead not only to the settlers, but also to local Africans who believed they had no trace of humanity left.⁸² Funerary rites involving Mbali tombstones were an important step towards their social rebirth because the denial of burial was one of the punishments indigenous polities imposed on witches.⁸³ By celebrating their dead with great pomp, the Kimbari managed to have the last word regarding their own honour and status as a group.

Dreams of freedom and self-determination

As Erica Ball, Tatiana Seijas and Terri Snyder have recently argued, freedom has been ‘historically gendered male’, and our historiographic understanding of what it means to be free is often biased by patriarchal legal fictions such as the paterfamilias or the liberal right-bearing citizen.⁸⁴ Writing against this grain, Saidiya Hartman proposes that Black African American women should be understood as creative agents, constantly reconceptualizing their own subjectivities and self-determining the meaning of freedom.⁸⁵ Hartman’s argument resonates with scholarship about South America and the wider Black Atlantic, and with previous and ongoing debates about the way African women actively reconfigured gender roles and expectations in the long wake of the slave trade and abolition.⁸⁶ Mbali tombstones contribute to this historiographic ‘revolution’ by offering a rare glimpse on how Black women navigated the many constrains imposed on them by slavery, forced-labour, and rising systemic racism, to refashion multidimensional identities that were deemed worthy of memorialization and celebration (Figure 6).

Figure 6. Two Mbali tombstones, situated in the graveyard formerly known as 'Cemitério Indígena de Moçâmedes', in present day Namibe. Source: Archive of the National Museum of Ethnology, Lisbon, series “Trabalhos de Capo Angola 1967 - António Carreira”, positive reproduction from the negative album “Negativos do dossier A-192 A-216”.

From the onset, African women were enslaved and forcefully moved to the new colony as consorts of the transferred-in libertos they were obliged to marry.⁸⁷ Once in Moçâmedes, some of these women were made ‘apprentices’ of the enslaved Black women that had come there with the white settler-colonists from Brazil, being forced to adapt to their mores, while others became undifferentiated farmhands and herders.⁸⁸ Despite being subjected to several pressures to assimilate, either to the standards imposed by white-settlers, or to the customs that were being codified by ethnologists and administrators with the help of Kimbari men, Mbali tombstones suggest that Kimbari women retained the capacity to self-determine core elements of their identity. These memorials celebrate women as matriarchs, caring mothers, and grandmotherly ancestral figures, while also praising them as craftswomen and professional workers or only depicting them in that role. Flattening irons, washing boards, scissors, and needles and threads are as commonly depicted as saws, plumb-lines, or stonecutting tools. Also, significantly, women are represented wearing either Afro-Brazilian attires and European style clothes or the necklaces, harm bands and scarified skin that is associated with neighbouring African societies. In many cases, when they are depicted as mothers or grandmothers, their children follow their dress-code, being represented as the inheritors not only of their property, but also of their cultural legacy and the outcomes of their personal experimentations with freedom.⁸⁹

Conclusion

As the movement for the restitution of looted African heritage and human remains gains traction, and western museums engage, somewhat perfunctorily, in the reappraisal of their historical role as promoters of scientific racism, colonialism, and white supremacy, new concerns have emerged.⁹⁰ One of these has to do with the ‘uncanny temporality’ that accompanies trauma, to use Norman Spaulding’s expression;⁹¹ concretely, about how it becomes manifest in post-restitution exhibition practices. Recently, a panel convened at the 2022 Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art framed this concern in the following manner: ‘the psychological dimensions of the loss of cultural objects become visible, for instance when the reinstallation of the objects in Africa mimics Western museums’. Members of this panel then questioned ‘how can custodians infuse dreams and life into objects long exiled’?⁹² By identifying the tribing of African memoriae loci as a major issue and tying it both to fallism and the restitution debate, this article proposes an answer. Mbali tombstones must fall into history so that the personal and collective memories and dreams they represent can begin to be recovered and thus trigger a reparative rewriting of Portuguese and Kimbari histories. To demonstrate how this can be achieved, this article proposed three historical vignettes. The historiographic solution here adopted can be replicated and applied to objects that have the potential to be either African memoriae loci, or the sites of memory of western Afro-descendent and Black diasporic communities. In such cases, it complements the restitution of African heritage.

However, can this practice be globalized? The writing of critical histories definitively promotes the overcoming of the worst symptoms of collective trauma and the anxiety-induced circular temporality it imposes on subjects.⁹³ Notwithstanding the fact that such an historiography can also be said to ‘mimic’ western practices, and that, as Shoshana Felman demonstrated, every (re)articulation of past events is bound to re-enact and repeat them to an extent.⁹⁴ Perhaps, then, the way forward lies in accepting a degree of residual trauma as an inevitable consequence of centuries of colonization and exploitation, and granting to these new critical histories the ‘world-creating potential’ of normative narratives.⁹⁵ In other words, a possible solution might rest in allowing them to shape locally-meaningful laws. As Mamdani forcefully argues, the denial of this potential was an integral part of the process of tribing, because ‘if the production of the past is the stuff of history writing, the securing of a future is the domain of law making’.⁹⁶ In fact, when the Kimbari refused to accept the status of ‘indigenous’ as their political identity, and to trade in their oral histories for the trappings of a static ethnic culture, they also claimed Portuguese citizenship, and the right to elect their representatives and be adjudicated by civil courts. Would a restitution of their heritage ever be complete if it focused on returning their memoriae loci at the expense of denying their descendants a residue of normative agency? To do so, would be to repeat the violent gestures of ethnographic collectors who simultaneously denied a past and a future to the human groups they tribed.⁹⁷

In conclusion, past success stories, when the writing of critical histories paved the way for reparative laws, can provide us with inspiration. Such is the case of Portuguese Law 30-A/2015, from 27 February 2015, that grants the right of naturalization to all the descendants of the Sephardi Jews that were once persecuted and exiled from their ‘old and traditional Iberian communities’.⁹⁸ Such a measure would have remained unthinkable without the building of counter-monuments such as the Memorial to the Victims of the Massacre of the Jews of 1506 (2008), and the interventions of public historians.⁹⁹ Seriously considering the aspirations that the Kimbari expressed in 1960s, an analogous law, specifically targeted at the descendants of all those enslaved by the Third Portuguese Empire (c.1820–1975), could be an avenue for further dismantling the racialised hierarchies that existed at the end of colonialism, and paving the way for new policies of care and dialogue.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Correction Statement

This article was originally published with errors, which have now been corrected in the online version. Please see Correction (https://doi.org/10.1080/13688790.2023.2199568)

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia [grant number PTDC/DIR-OUT/30873/2017].

Notes on contributors

João Figueiredo

João Figueiredo has a PhD in High Studies in History (Empire, politics, and post-colonialism) from the University of Coimbra (2016) and a BA Hons in Anthropology from the Faculty of Sciences and Technology of the University of Coimbra (2005). His work focuses on Portuguese colonialism in Angola during the long 19th and early 20th centuries from a historical and anthropological perspective. He has published in the South African Historical Journal, the Nordic Journal of African Studies, Social Sciences and Missions, and Cadernos de Estudos Africanos.

Notes

1 The first Angolan civil war started soon after independence, in July 1975, and the last one ended in February 2002, when the insurgent military leader Jonas Savimbi was killed. David Birmingham, A Short History of Modern Angola, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016.

2 Geração 80 apresenta: Ar condicionado, um fimme de Fradique, press kit, p 4. See: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1oyfUHbKe9ImfnMrKpfIY5izFl248na6_/view (accessed 28 November 2021).

3 Dan Hicks, The Brutish Museums: The Benin Bronzes, Colonail Violence and Cultural Restitution, London: Pluto Press, 2020, p xiii.

4 Valentin Mudimbe, ‘From “Primitive Art” to “Memoriae Loci”’, Human Studies, 16(1–2), 1993, pp 101–110.

5 Dan Hicks and Nicholas Mirzoeff, ‘Fallism and Restitution: Removing Racist Statues and Returning Looted Art Objects’, New African, 17 August 2020. See: https://newafricanmagazine.com/23931/ (accessed 20 November 2021).

6 Walter Benjamin and Hannah Arendt (eds), Illuminations, H Zohn (trans), New York: Schocken Books, 1969, pp 257–258.

7 Alexandre Pomar (ed), The africas of pancho guedes: the dori and amâncio guedes collection, Lisbon: Câmara Municipal de Lisboa, 2011, p 74.

8 See: https://www.terraesplendida.com/en/portfolio-item/pancho-guedes-africas/ (accessed 19 November 2021).

9 Pomar (ed), The africas of pancho guedes, p 74.

10 The Penal Code of 1886 is available here: https://www.fd.unl.pt/Anexos/Investigacao/1274.pdf (accessed 19 September 2022).

11 Iracema Dulley, ‘Naming Others: Translation and Subject Constitution in the Central Highlands of Angola (1926–1961)’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 64(2), 2022, p 379.

12 Carolyn Hamilton and Nessa Liebhammer, ‘Introduction: Tribing and Untribing the Archive’, in Carolyn Hamilton and Nessa Liebhammer (eds), Tribing and Untribing the Archive, vol. 1, Durban: University of KwaZulu Natal Press, 2017, pp 13–48; ‘Ethnologised Pasts and Their Archival Futures: Construing the Archive of Southern KwaZulu-Natal Pertinent to the Period Before 1910’, in Hamilton and Liebhammer (eds), Tribing and Untribing the Archive, vol. 1, p 415.

13 Mudimbe, ‘From “Primitive Art”’, p 103.

14 Mahmood Mamdani, Define and Rule: Native as Political Identity, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012, pp 14, 47 and passim.

15 On ‘missing-ness’ see also: Nicky Rousseau, Riedwann Moosage and Ciraj Rassool, ‘Missing and Missed: Rehumanisation, the Nation and Missing-ness’, Kronos, 44(1), 2018, pp 10–32.

16 Hicks, The Brutish Museums, pp 10, 149–150.

17 See: https://www.memorialescravatura.com/english (accessed 28 November 2021).

18 Elsa Peralta, ‘The Memorialization of Empire in Postcolonial Portugal: Identity Politics and the Commodification of History’, Portuguese Literary & Cultural Studies, 36–37, 2022, pp 156–179.

19 Since 2020, the Memorial to the Enslaved in Lisbon has been criticized by Afro-descendent and Black diasporic activists who disagree with the symbolism adopted. See, for instance, the following interview with Apolo de Carvalho. Marta Lança, ‘Apolo de Carvalho’, https://www.re-mapping.eu/pt/entrevistas/apolo-de-carvalho (accessed 21 September 2022).

20 According to Nora Sternfeld, the term ‘counter-monument’ was coined by Edward Young in 1992 to describe a monument that ‘simultaneously displaces and constitutes the object of memory’. James Edward Young, ‘Counter-Monuments: Memory against Itself in Germany Today’, Critical Inquiry, 18(2), 1992, p 269; Nora Sternfeld, ‘Counter-Memorials and Para-Monument’, Lerchenfeld, 59, 2021, pp 25–30.

21 Gisela Navarro Fernandes and Beatriz Dias, ‘In Conversation with Beatriz Dias, Memorial in Lisbon: Recovering History that was made invisible’, C&, 10 April 2020, see: https://contemporaryand.com/magazines/memorial-in-lisbon-recovering-history-that-was-made-invisible/ (accessed 28 November 2021).

22 Orlando Patterson, Slavery and Social Death, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982.

23 Pomar (ed), The africas of pancho guedes, p 74.

24 All translations are my own. Gilberto Freyre, Em tôrno de alguns túmulos Afro-Cristãos de uma área africana contagiada pela cultura brasileira, Salvador: Universidade da Bahia, 1959.

25 Historical Archive of the Navy, Lisbon (hereafter AHM), personal archive of Full Admiral Sarmento Rodrigues, series 3 ‘Political career’, box 12, document 3.4.06, ‘Exposição de Arte Sacra’.

26 See also: Dulley, ‘Naming Others’, p 379; José Redinha, ‘Angola’, in Fernando Lanhas (ed), A Arte Popular Em Portugal: ilhas adjacentes e ultramar, Lisbon: Verbo, 1970, pp 370–373.

27 See, for instance, Clara Saraiva, ‘Antepassados criadores. Representações entre a Europa e a África’, in Maria Cardeira da Silva and Clara Saraiva (eds), As Lições de Jill Dias: Antropologia, História, África e Academia, Lisbon: Etnográfica Press, 2013, pp 186–204; Frank Herreman (ed), Na Presença dos Espíritos: Arte Africana no Museu Nacional de Etnologia, Lisboa, Gant: Museum for African Art e Snoeck, 2000, p 152; José Redinha, ‘Angola’, pp 370–373; Escultura Angolana: Esboço de Classificação, Luanda: Centro de Informação e Turismo de Angola, 1974, pp 19–22; Marie-Louise Bastin, Escultura Angolana: Memorial de Culturas, Lisbon: Electra, 1994, p 48.

28 Friedrich Nietzsche, ‘On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life’, in Friedrich Nietzsche, D Breazeale (ed) and R J Hollingdale (trans), Untimely Meditations, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997, pp 57–124.

29 As José d’Almeida remarked, until 1878 settlers paid sisa [real estate transfer taxes] on their ‘servants’, listing them under machina agrarian [agricultural machinery]. In his statistics of Moçâmedes, José Nascimento also opts to list the ‘servants’ not as a racialized populational group (i.e. ‘whites’, ‘mixed race’, ‘blacks’), but as a subcategory of ‘machinery’. José d'Almeida, Mossamedes: Apreciações sobre as colonias Portuguezas em Geral e sua Organização Política, Lisbon: Casa da Sociedade de Geographia, 1880, pp 25–26; J Pereira do Nascimento, O Districto de Mossamedes, vol. 1, Lisbon: Typographia do Jornal As Colonias Portuguesas, 1892, p 31.

30 Arquivo Histórico Ultramarino [Overseas Historical Archive], Lisbon (hereafter AHU), ‘Secretaria de Estado da Marinha e Ultramar’ (hereafter SEMU), box 792, ‘Angola 1851 Abril 26: Sobre as instruções para o governador de Angola e Benguela’, ‘Instruções para o Governador de Angola e Benguella (Dadas ao governador de Angola em Port. de 14 de Agosto de 1835), por Sebastião Botelho e Jose Joaquim Lopes de Lima’; Carlos Machado, Colonização do planalto de Huila e Mossamedes: Seu desenvolvimento agricola e industrial, Lisbon: Sociedade de Geografia de Lisboa, 1919.

31 AHU, SEMU, box 823, ‘Angola ano 1798–1895, cx. 2’, doc. n.° 307, ‘Memória: Sobre a industria da cana sacharosa no distrito de Mossamedes’; doc. n.° 619, ‘Relatorio sobre Mossamedes e esperanças que podem haver de sua importancia fuctura’; Anonymous, Quarenta e Cinco Dias em Angola, Apontamentos de Viagem, Porto: Typ. Sebastião José Pereira, 1862; Anonymous collective, A escravatura em Mossamedes – Carta aberta dirigida a S. Ex.ª o Presidente da Republica por um grupo de agricultores, industriaes e commerciantes de Mossamedes, Lisbon: Typographia do Comercio, 1912; António Guimarães Júnior, Memoria sobre a Exploração da Costa ao Sul de Benguella na Africa Occidental, e fundação do Primeiro Estabelecimento Commercial na Bahia de Mossamedes, Lisbon: 1842, Typografia de F.C.A.; Benardino Castro, Apontamentos para a História da Colonisação Portugueza do Sul de Angola, Moçâmedes: Typografia Moderna, 1918; d'Almeida, Mossamedes; Nascimento, O Districto de Mossamedes.

32 ‘Prize negroes’ or ‘liberated Africans’ were the terms used in Cape Town and Sierra Leone to describe the enslaved Blacks who, like the Portuguese libertos, had been liberated from slave ships. Charles R Foy, ‘Eighteenth Century “Prize Negroes:” from Britain to America’, Slavery and Abolition, 31(3), 2010, pp 379–393; Daniel Domingues da Silva, David Eltis, Philip Misevich and Olatunji Ojo, ‘The Diaspora of Africans Liberated from Slave Ships in the Nineteenth Century’, The Journal of African History, 55(3), 2014, pp 347–369; José C Curto, ‘Producing “Liberated” Africans in Mid-nineteenth Century Angola’, in Richard Anderson and Henry B Lovejoy (eds), Liberated Africans and the Abolition of the Slave Trade, 1807–1896, Rochester: University of Rochester Press, 2020, pp 238–256; R L Watson, ‘«Prize Negroes» and the Development of Racial Attitudes in the Cape Colony’, South African Historical Journal, 43(1), 2000, p 140; Tara Helfman, ‘The Court of Vice Admiralty at Sierra Leone and the Abolition of the West African Slave Trade’, Yale Law Journal, 115(5), 2006, pp 1122–1156.

33 On the immediate economic impact of rebellions see: Francisco Amaral, ‘Relatório do Governador do Districto de Mossamedes – Viagem á Huilla’, in Relatorios dos Governadores Geraes da Provincia de Cabo Verde e Estado da India e dos Governadores dos Districtos de Damão, Diu e Mossamedes Referidos ao Anno de 1879, Lisbon, Imprensa Nacional, 1881, pp 13–14. On ‘slave’ flights: José C Curto, ‘Resistência à escravidão na África: o caso dos escravos fugitivos recapturados em Angola, 1846–1876’, Afro-Ásia, 33, 2005, pp 67–86; Roquinaldo Ferreira, ‘Escravidão e revoltas de escravos em Angola (1830–1860)’, Afro-Ásia, 21–22, 1998–1999, pp 9–44.

34 Machado, Colonização do planalto de Huila, p 34.

35 AHU, SEMU, box 823, ‘Angola ano 1798–1895, cx. 2’, doc. n.° 307, ‘Memória: Sobre a industria da cana sacharosa no distrito de Mossamedes’; doc. n.° 619, ‘Relatorio sobre Mossamedes e esperanças que podem haver de sua importancia fuctura’.

36 Arquivo Histórico da Marinha [Historical Archive of the Navy], Lisbon (hereafter AHM), box 311-3, 1842–1879, Escravaturas, document 349, decree of 10 December 1836, article 7; Tratado para a Completa Abolição do Trafico da Escravatura, Lisbon: Imprensa Nacional, 1842, pp 10–11.

37 Curto, ‘Producing “Liberated” Africans’, p 239; J M C N Leite e Vasconcelos, Collecção Official da Legislação Portugueza – 1854, Lisbon: Imprensa Nacional, 1855, pp 836–837.

38 This practice was very similar to the French policy of ‘rachat’. According to Michel Erpelding, since the 1820s, the French government would ‘buy captives from African chiefs, emancipate them, and deport them to French colonies as indentured labourers’. Michel Erpelding, ‘Evidence Requirements before 19th Century Anti-Slave Trade Jurisdictions and Slavery as a Standard of Treatment’, in H Ruiz Fabri (ed), International Law and Litigation: A Look Into Procedure, Luxembourg: Nomos, 2019, pp 117–118.

39 AHU, SEMU, box 792, folder ‘Angola 1850 – Dezembro 2’.

40 Lauren Benton, A Search for Sovereignty Law and Geography in European Empires, 1400–1900, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010, pp 275–276.

41 On the later, see: Roquinaldo Ferreira, Cross-Cultural Exchange in the Atlantic World, Angola and Brazil during the Era of the Slave Trade, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014, pp 88–125.

42 Paulo Cruz Terra, ‘Racism, Labor and Idleness in the Abolition Process: Brazil and the Portuguese Empire in a Global Perspective (1870–1888)’, Revista Brasileira de História, 41(88), 2021, pp 155–177.

43 Andrew Fitzmaurice, Sovereignty, Property and Empire, 1500–2000, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014, pp 271–301; Ieuan Griffiths, ‘The Scramble for Africa: Inherited Political Boundaries’, The Geographical Journal, 152(2), 1986, pp 204–216; Mudimbe, ‘From “Primitive Art”’.

44 Mamdani, Define and Rule, p 46 and passim.

45 Virgílio Coelho, ‘A classificação etnográfica dos povos de Angola (1.ª parte)’, Mulemba, 5(9), 2015, p 204.

46 Mamdani, Define and Rule.

47 Arlindo Barbeitos, ‘Sociedade, Estado, sociedade civil, cidadão e identidade em Angola’, Mulemba, 6(11), 2016, pp 121–163.

48 Maria da Conceição Neto, ‘A República no seu estado colonial: combater a escravatura, estabelecer o “indigenato”’, Ler História, 59, 2010, pp 205–225; ‘Maria do Huambo: Uma vida de “indígena”: Colonização, estatuto jurídico e discriminação racial em Angola (1926–1961)’, África, 35, 2015, pp 119–127; ‘De Escravos a “Serviçais”, de “Serviçais” a “Contratados”: Omissões, perceções e equívocos na história do trabalho africano na Angola colonial’, Cadernos de Estudos Africanos, 33, 2017, pp 107–129.

49 Palmira Pjipilica and Nuno Valério, ‘Estatutos pessoais: a sociedade do império colonial português como uma sociedade de ordens’, Boletim de Ciências Económicas, 57(3), 2014, pp 3339–3362.

50 Carlos Lopes Cardoso, A origem dos Mbali; Estelas Funerárias dos Mbali (um caso de aculturação), Coimbra: Instituto de Antropologia, 1991; Olumbali do Distrito de Moçâmedes (Achegas para o seu estudo), Luanda: Instituto de Investigação Científica de Angola, 1966, p 7.

51 Cardoso, Olumbali do Distrito de Moçâmedes, pp 14–16, 29–37.

52 Members of the Roman Catholic Congregation of the Holy Spirit under the protection of the Immaculate Heart of the Virgin Mary are informal known as spiritans. Carlos Estermann, ‘Coutumes des Mbali du Sud d’Angola’, Africa, 12(1), 1939, pp 74–86; Gladwyn M Childs, Umbundu Kinship and Character, New York: Routledge, 2019 [1949].

53 According to Estermann, olumbali is simply how Nyaneka language speakers refer to the way of speaking of the mbali (olu + mbali) of the coast of southwest Angola (the Kimbari), which they contrast with the way of speaking of the inhabitants of the central Angolan plateau, olunano (olu + nano, i.e. ‘montain’). Therefore, the designation does not refer to a specific language, dialect, creole, or pidgin but to the complex of such ‘ways of speaking’ that is typical of a geographical area (dialect cluster). Carlos Estermann, personal note apud Cardoso, Olumbali do Distrito de Moçâmedes, footnote 1, p 9; Childs, Umbundu Kinship and Character.

54 Cardoso, Olumbali do Distrito de Moçâmedes, pp 7–8; Childs, Umbundu Kinship and Character.

55 Coelho, ‘A classificação etnográfica dos povos de Angola’, p 203.

56 Estermann, personal note apud Cardoso, Olumbali do Distrito de Moçâmedes, footnote 1, pp 8–9.

57 Cardoso, Olumbali do Distrito de Moçâmedes, pp 39–41.

58 Cardoso, A origem dos Mbali; Estelas Funerárias, pp 173, 195, 231; Olumbali do Distrito de Moçâmedes.

59 Carla Abrantes, ‘Repertórios do conhecimento em disputa: trabalhadores indígenas e agricultores no colonialismo português em Angola, 1950’, Anuário Antropológico, 39(1), 2014, pp 195–218.

60 Lopes Cardoso, A Arte Mbali do Distrito de Moçâmedes, Sá da Bandeira, 1.º Encontro de Escritores de Angola, 1963, p 14; Guerreiro, ‘Vida humana no deserto de Namibe’, p 117.

61 Cardoso, Mbali Art – A Case of Acculturation, p 69.

62 Cardoso, Estelas Funerárias, p 249 and passim.

63 Fernandes and Dias, ‘In Conversation with Beatriz Dias’.

64 Cardoso, Estelas Funerárias; Freyre, Em tôrno de alguns túmulos Afro-Cristãos.

65 Oliveira, Slave Trade and Abolition, p 61; Silva, Subsídios para a história, p 10.

66 In 1840, the brig Raimundo Primeiro, a former slave ship, was captured by the British Navy before reaching Moçâmedes, where it carried 70 Black soldiers that had been forcefully conscripted in Benguela. The Raimundo Primeiro was escorted to Sierra Leone and considered a good prize by the Vice-Admiralty Court. Silva, Subsídios para a história da colonização, p 7.

67 Júnior, Memoria sobre a Exploração da Costa ao Sul de Benguella, part 2, pp 17–18.

68 AHU, SEMU, box 792, ‘miscelânea 1838–1860’, un. doc., 6 July 1849, ‘Sobre os trabalhos da comissão de colonos em Pernambuco’: ‘Oitava Acta da sessão da Commissão em dez de Março de mil oito centos e quarenta e nove’.

69 By 19 April 1850, 10 recaptured Africans had already been sent to be ‘distributed’ by the settlers who asked for the ‘support of slaves’. AHU, SEMU, box 792, ‘miscelânea 1838–1860’, un. doc., 20 October 1849, ‘Sobre a posse do Estabelecimento pelo major João Francisco garcia’; folder 4, doc. N, 19 April 1850, ‘Sobre o estado em que se encontra a colonia’: ‘Oficio do Governador de Mossamedes, Secção Colonial L. 1 – N.° 65, António Sérgio de Sousa para o Visconde de Castelões, Ministro da Marinha e Ultramar, 19 de Abril de 1850’.

70 Most of the settlers comprising the first group of 117 migrants were salesmen or undifferentiated farmhands. AHU, SEMU, box 792, ‘miscelânea 1838–1860’, un. doc., 6 July 1849, ‘Sobre os trabalhos da comissão … ’: ‘Relação dos Colonos que Seguiram de Pernambuco pra Mossamedes a bordo do Brigue de Sua Magestade Fidelissema “Douro” e da Barca Brasileira “Tentativa Feliz”, sahidos a 25 de Maio de 1849’; folder 4, doc. N, 19 April 1850, ‘Sobre o estado em que se encontra a colonia’: ‘Oficio do Governador de Mossamedes … ’.

71 In the end, a free stonemason was hired for four years, and three enslaved persons were bought, a ‘mulatto, and a black both sugar-cane planters, and a black cook that can speak lingoa Bunda [Umbumdo], both under twenty-five and free of illnesses’. AHU, SEMU, box 792, ‘miscelânea 1838–1860’, un. doc., 6 July 1849, ‘Sobre os trabalhos da comissão … ’: ‘Nõna Acta da Sessão da Comissão em vinte e quatro de Março de mil oito centos e quarenta e nove’; ‘Decima terceira Acta da Sessão da Comissão em cinco de Maio de mil oito centos e quarenta e nove’; ‘Deciam quarta Acta da Sessão da Comissão em dezanove de Maio de mil oito centos e quarenta e nove’.

72 Anonymous, Quarenta e Cinco Dias em Angola, p 91.

73 Daniel B Rood, The Reinvention of Atlantic Slavery: Technology, Labor, Race, and Capitalism in the Greater Caribbean, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017, p 120.

74 Rood, The Reinvention of Atlantic Slavery, p 20.

75 d'Almeida, Mossamedes, p 13.

76 Cardoso, Estelas Funerárias, pp 13, 209, 215.

77 Pomar (ed), The africas of pancho guedes, p 74.

78 Amaral, ‘Relatório do Governador do Districto de Mossamedes – Viagem á Huilla’, p 19. See also W G Clarence-Smith, ‘Slavery in Coastal Southern Angola, 1875–1913’, Journal of Southern African Studies, 2(2), 1976, pp 222–223.

79 Francisco Amaral, ‘Relatório do Governador do Districto de Mossamedes Referido ao Anno de 1878’, in Relatorios dos Governadores, pp 8–10.

80 AHU, SEMU, box 792, folder 4, doc. N, 19 April 1850, ‘Sobre o estado em que se encontra a colonia’: ‘Oficio do Governador de Mossamedes, Secção Colonial L. 1 – N.° 65’; Anonymous, Quarenta e Cinco Dias em Angola, pp 6–8; Anonymous collective, A escravatura em Mossamedes; Gil Duarte, Bernardino Freire de Figueiredo Abreu e Castro – Fundador de Moçâmedes, Lisbon, Agência-Geral do Ultramar, 1969, pp 90–91.

81 Benardino Freire de Figueiredo Abreu e Castro, untitled, Boletim Official do Governo Geral da Província de Angola 611, 1857, pp 6–7.

82 Aida Freudenthal, Arimos e fazendas: a transição agrária em Angola 1850–1880, Luanda: Chá de Caxinde, 2005, pp 80–81, 97; Anonymous, Quarenta e Cinco Dias em Angola, pp 15–16; António Gil, Considerações sobre alguns pontos mais importantes da moral religiosa, Lisbon: Typografia da Academia, 1854, p 10.

83 Esther Goody, ‘Legitimate and Illegitimate Aggression in a West African State’, in Mary Douglas (ed), Witchcraft Confessions and Accusations, London: Routledge, 1970, pp 207–244.

84 Erica Ball, Tatiana Seijas and Terri Snyder, ‘Introduction’, in Erica Ball, Tatiana Seijas and Terri Snyder (eds), As If She were Free: A Collective Biography of Women and Emancipation in the Americas, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020, pp 1–26.

85 Saidiya Hartman, Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval, New York: Norton & Company, 2019.

86 Dorothy L Hodgson and Sheryl A McCurdy (eds), “Wicked” Women and the Reconfiguration of Gender in Africa, Portsmouth: Heinemann, 2001; Jessica Marie Johnson, Wicked Flesh: Black Women, Intimacy, and Freedom in the Atlantic World, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2020.

87 Joaquim José Falcão, ‘Cópia da Portaria n.° 1205 do Ministro da Marinha e Ultramar ao Governador-Geral de Angola sobre o destino dos escravos achados a bordo do brigue brasileiro Caçador, sobre o Depósito dos Libertos de Luanda e execução das funções do seu Comandante’, in Eduardo dos Santos (ed), Angolana (Documentação sobre Angola), vol. 3, Lisbon: Centro de Estudos Históricos Ultramarinos, 1976, p 117.

88 Castro, Apontamentos para a História da Colonisação, pp 16–17.

89 Cardoso, Estelas Funerárias; Freyre, Em tôrno de alguns túmulos Afro-Cristãos.

90 See, for instance, the reports of the Decolonisation Guidance Working Group, established by the Museums Association of the United Kingdom, and the Reclaiming Restitution (August 2022) report: Molemo Moiloa, Reclaiming Restitution: Centering and Contextualizing the African Narrative, Open Restitution Africa / Africa No Filter, https://openrestitution.africa/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/ANF-Report-Main-Report.pdf (accessed 22 September 2022); Museums Association, Supporting decolonisation in museums, n.d., https://www.museumsassociation.org/campaigns/decolonising-museums/supporting-decolonisation-in-museums/ (accessed 22 September 2022).

91 Norman Spaulding, ‘Trauma, Memory, and the Law’, in Simon Stern, Maksymilian Del Mar and Bernadette Meyler (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Land and Humanities, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020, p 310.

92 See: Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art, ‘From Restitution to Repair – Program’, https://12.berlinbiennale.de/program/from-restitution-to-repair/ (accessed 22 September 2022).

93 Spaulding, ‘Trauma, Memory, and the Law’, pp 289–316.

94 Shoshana Felman, The Juridical Unconscious: Trials and Traumas in the Twentieth Century, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002.

95 Catherine Frank, ‘Narrative and Law’, in Kieran Dolin (ed), Law and Literature, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018, pp 54–57; Renato Rosaldo, ‘Imperialist Nostalgia’, Representations, 26, 1989, pp 107–122.

96 Mamdani, Define and Rule, pp 45–46.

97 Mbogiseni Buthelezi, ‘We Need New Names Too’, in Hamilton and Leibhammer (eds), Tribing and Untribing the Archive, pp 587–599.

98 Law 30-A/2015 is available here: https://dre.pt/dre/detalhe/decreto-lei/30-a-2015-66619927 (accessed 22 September 2022).

99 Simon Schama, The Story of the Jews: Finding the Words, 1000BCE–1492CE, London: The Bodley Head, 2013. On the Memorial, see: https://informacoeseservicos.lisboa.pt/contactos/diretorio-da-cidade/memorial-as-vitimas-do-massacre-judaico-de-1506 (accessed 22 September 2022).