Roquinaldo Ferreira, Brown University
Early Anti-Colonialism in Angola: An Atlantic Wide Perspective
My paper draws on a chapter of a book that I am writing on the remaking of Portuguese
colonialism in Central Africa (Angola and Congo) between the 1820s and 1880s. African history
in the broader context of the Atlantic, particularly in relation to Brazil, is the backdrop to
examining the trajectory of José Ferreira Gomes, a black man arrested in 1846 on charges of
plotting a revolt to overthrow the colonial administration of Angola’s second largest city
(Benguela), and eliminate the city’s white population. Ferreira Gomes belonged to a family with
deep connections to Angola and Brazil. His father was a Brazilian man who had made his way to
the highest echelons of Benguela society after being sent to the city as a criminal exile in 1785,
and his mother was the daughter of a powerful African chief from Catumbela, a region near
Benguela.
According to the accusations, Ferreira Gomes had enticed “the Catumbela people to kill a
regente and go to Benguela to kill the whites who they said were taking over their lands”. By the
time of his arrest, the black man had committed “the greatest atrocities in the vicinity of
Benguela, murdering, beating, burning feitorias, and inciting the gentio against the whites of that
city [Benguela]”. Ferreira Gomes also had the support of a powerful African ruler named
Johannes José Gaspar, who was his maternal cousin.
There is no doubt about the potentially catastrophic nature of a revolt and racial violence
in Benguela. Free and unfree blacks far outnumbered whites in Benguela and nearby regions. In
1860, the city’s population was estimated at 5,442 residents, of whom 4,308 were slaves, while
the nearby Catumbela population stood at 5,860 people. In Dombe, also just outside Benguela,
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the population was estimated at 16,550 people. More importantly, there were only 108 whites in
these places – and 78 lived in Benguela proper.
The alleged revolt raises several intriguing questions. How credible were the accusations
of anti-white sentiment against Ferreira Gomes? Why did this man, otherwise a perfectly
integrated member of Benguela colonial society, turn on the colonial regime? How did anti-slave
trade politics breed political and racial instability in Angola and how did this affect Ferreira
Gomes, who was deeply involved in the slave trade? How might Angola’s continuing ties to
Brazil (Ferreira Gomes’s Brazilian father and his African mother lived in Rio de Janeiro) have
influenced Portuguese perceptions of Ferreira Gomes? More importantly, how did political
instability and anti-Portuguese sentiments in Brazil, a former Portuguese colony that had become
independent in 1822, shape Portuguese’s response to events taking place in Angola?
Following Ferreira Gomes’ trajectory, this talk demonstrates that Angola and Brazil – the
two most important axes in the nineteenth-century slave trade - remained tightly integrated even
as the struggle to end the slave trade between the two regions unfolded in the first half of the
nineteenth century. My work first reconstructs Ferreira Gomes’ trajectory in Angola and Brazil.
It also examines how Portugal sought to reshape colonial ties to Angola against the backdrop of
deep social unrest in Benguela, increasing fear about British anti-slave trade activities, and
deepening rivalry with its former colony, Brazil, in South America. By developing an Atlantic
wide perspective, I argue that the alleged revolt reflected resistance to the growth of Portuguese
colonialism in Angola and that the Portuguese response to it – particularly the accusation of
racism against white Europeans - was in part framed by events taking place in Brazil.
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