It has been repeatedly shown in this chapter that it was not until the 20th century that Portugal was able to extend its influence and administration to the whole of Angola. The area that today constitutes Lunda Norte is a case in point in that it was one of the last of Angola’s territories to be settled by the Portuguese.
The Lunda empire or commonwealth (Vansina 1998), the powerful confederation of Bantu-speaking states that, as shown in Map 8 below, comprised the area that is Lunda Norte today, was known to the Portuguese since at least the 18th century.
MAP 8 Luba-Lunda states (Enciclopædia Brittanica, Inc.)
In fact, the empire of the Mwata Yamvo (i.e. the title given to the rulers of the Luba-Lunda empire) was the source of a considerable amount of the slaves that the Portuguese bought from the Kimbundu-speaking Mbangala traders in Malanje and then shipped to Brazil. During the 19th century, following growing international opposition to the transatlantic slave trade, the Portuguese had to look for alternative sources of profit, which they found in trading wax, ivory and rubber. The Lunda commonwealth soon became one of the most important suppliers of these goods, but until 1860-1861 direct access to it was blocked by the Mbangala, who were not willing to give up their century- old monopoly of trade with the land of the Mwata Yamvo (Heintze 2004: 185)28. After several military actions against them in 1850-51, 1852 and 1860-61, the Portuguese were finally able to gain direct access to the Lunda region. In fact, from the mid-19th century
onwards several Afro-Portuguese traded in slaves, wax and ivory with the Mwata Yamvo on behalf of the Portuguese and at least two diplomatic missions were sent to Luanda by the Lunda ruler. In fact, from 1862 to 1887 an Afro-Portuguese colony existed near Mussumba, the capital of the Lunda empire. Heintze (2004: 34) notes that many of the members of this colony spoke Portuguese and some could also read and write it, but she also gives evidence that their proficiency in the language varied greatly:
(…) tinha tido uma educação europeia, sabia ler e escrever e estivera sempre ao serviço de europeus. […] António Bezerra vivera também bastante tempo entre os Mbangala, os Songo, os Chokwe, os Lunda e os Luba e conhecia por isso as línguas desses povos, embora, segundo consta, as misturasse com frequência e a sua tradução dessas línguas para português fosse muito insatisfatória.” (Heintze 2004: 98)
Joanes era cristão, trajava à moda europeia, dominava a língua portuguesa, revelando, aliás, um grande talento no que respeita à aprendizagem de línguas, sabia ler e escrever e granjeou grande popularidade em todo o lado devido à facilidade com que estabelecia contactos com as populações. No tempo de Wissmann, Joanes vivia perto de Malanje, numa localidade denominada Mieketa” (ibid. 106-7)
Roberto nasceu em Benguela, mas vivia já há muitos anos como carregador de maxila em Luanda. Tinha uma presença humilde ou mesmo submissa e era muito solícito, mas continuava a ter dificuldade em falar e escrever o português”. (ibid. 141)
Paulo falava um português muito simples e rudimentar em termos gramaticais, pelo que nem sempre era fácil perceber o sentido exacto daquilo que ele pretendia exprimir. Contudo, os seus conhecimentos linguísticos foram suficientes para desempenhar a função de intermediário dos portugueses e é fundamentalmente aos seus esforços de persuasão que se deve a assinatura de um contrato oficial de protecção e submissão entre Muteba, o Caungula do Lóvua, e Henrique Dias de Carvalho (pelo rei de Portugal) a 31 de Outubro de 1885” (ibid. 151)
Heintze’s description of the linguistic skills of the Afro-Portuguese who lived in the Lunda are particularly interesting when compared to the descriptions provided by other authors concerning the Portuguese spoken by Afro-Portuguese traders in interior Angola (e.g. Valkhoff 1966). In fact, Heintze’s quotes above suggest that what others have termed pidginized or creolized varieties of Portuguese in Angola, hence suggesting the existence of relatively stable restructured varieties of Portuguese there, were most likely interlanguage varieties of Portuguese which differed according to the degree of proficiency of the speakers. In other words, these quotes suggest that the Portuguese used by these Afro-Portuguese traders in interior Angola was no more a Portuguese-based pidgin or creole than the simplified varieties of English used by native speakers of Portuguese with little proficiency in English to communicate with members of the British
community in Portugal are English-based pidgins or creoles. For both the Afro-Portuguese traders in Angola and the native speaker of Portuguese in Portugal, Portuguese and English, respectively, are foreign languages which they only use to communicate with people who have these languages as their primary languages. However, in their daily lives they use their mother tongue (i.e. a Bantu language in the case of the Afro-Portuguese trader and Portuguese in the case of the Portuguese). Surely, if it were possible to compare the speech of two Afro-Portuguese traders with similar levels of proficiency in Portuguese, one would most likely find recurrent linguistic traits, the same way one finds similar linguistic tendencies in the speech of two native speakers of Portuguese with similar levels of proficiency in English. However, these similarities are more the product of the extent of contact with their respective target languages and the number of contexts in which they used them than the product of pidginization or creolization. In short, Heintze’s quotes above seem to support the claim made earlier in this study that the hypothesis of a stable, widespread Portuguese-based pidgin or creole ever having developed in Angola is unlikely.
In fact, the low proficiency in Portuguese depicted by such prominent members of the Afro-Portuguese colony in the Lunda suggests that the language was mostly useful in diplomatic contacts between the Portuguese and the Lunda nobility only. In daily-life communication with the population, Kimbundu, Luba and other related Bantu-languages, or even mixed varieties of the Bantu languages, were the most widely used languages in the region during this period (Heintze 2004: 75). In fact, as already noted, it was the fact that the Afro-Portuguese could speak these languages fluently that made them so valuable for Portuguese interests in the Lunda in particular and in interior Angola in general.
In 1884, an official Portuguese expedition, led by Major Henrique Dias de Carvalho, was sent to the court of the Mwata Yamvo at Mussumba. According to publications of the time (i.e. Jesus 1896 - June: 244), the three main goals of the expedition were those of establishing official contact with the Mwat Yamvo, exploring the little known territories east of Malanje and founding a religious and commercial mission. However, the true motivation behind Carvalho’s expedition to the Lunda, which was sponsored by the Sociedade de Geografia de Lisboa, was collecting geographic and ethnographic data on the Lunda that might strengthen Portugal’s case for including the region within the borders of colonial Angola. In fact, from the 1870s onwards, the region had attracted the interest of several European powers, who argued that the Cuango river should be the limit of the Portuguese colony of Angola; they had sent travelers to the region to explore its geography and peoples as well as to investigate the true extent of Portuguese rule there. This explains
why on his way to Mussumba, Carvalho signed protection treaties with several Lunda chiefs (Pélissier 1997a: 354).
On arriving in Mussumba, Carvalho found an empire on the verge of collapse due to successive invasions by the Cokwe, a Bantu people who had started migrating north from southern Angola in the 1840s (von Oppen 1993: 63-ff) in search of new sources of bee wax and ivory, which they sold in large quantities to the sertanejos in Bié and the Mbangala in Kassanje. At first, the Cokwe maintained good relations with the indigenous peoples of the areas they migrated to. According to von Oppen (1993: 68-69):
They achieved these good relations partly because they settled in the remotest places and did not compete with the residents for scarce resources. They recognized local power structures and paid for example every second tusk they hunted to the Mwata Yamvo, who began to depend on them for his ivory exports. It is probable that much of the ‘great amount of ivory’ exported from Nuclear Lunda in the 1850s was actually produced by Cokwe hunters, since Nuclear Lunda were generally described as being poor hunters and traders. Cokwe immigrants also brought labour which they were willing to hire out locally to the residents, and they knew subsidiary skills, such as divining, ironwork and carving.
However, in the 1880s, as the demand for both slaves and “legitimate goods” such as rubber increased and the Lunda rulers became increasingly dependent on “armed bands of Chokwe as mercenaries for internal power struggles” (ibid. 85) the relations between the two peoples deteriorated:
Na outrora tão poderosa ‘Commonwealth’ lunda, que não possuía reservas de borracha e cuja influência se devia principalmente ao seu papel de fornecedora de escravos, os Chokwe em expansão imiscuíam-se com um prontidão crescente nas querelas entre os dirigentes em disputa por cargos e influência, contribuindo, com os seus assaltos para captura de escravos e com a sua disponibilização de mercenários para confrontos internos, significativamente para a desestabilização e a decadência do estado. O culminar deste processo, cuja complexidade não é possível reproduzir aqui, consistiu finalmente na conquista e devastação da capital lunda pelos Chokwe” (Heintze 2004: 73-74)
Therefore, in an attempt to obtain Portuguese military support against the Cokwe, the Mwata Yamvo agreed to submit his territory to Portuguese protection (Pélissier 1997a: 355). In 1891, in a conference held in Lisbon, Portugal and Belgium reached an agreement as to the partition of the Lunda territory. Portugal lost Mussumba but got to keep the area between the Rivers Kuango and Kasai. Therefore, the Lunda district was officially created by the Portuguese in 1895:
… englobava todas as terras compreendidas entre o Cuango, o curso inferior do Cassai e a fronteiro com o Estado independente [i.e. the Congo Free State], ou seja: tudo o que os portugueses tinham salvo das garras de Leopoldo II. A sede era fixada, teoricamente, em Capenda Camulemba [i.e. 500 Km from Dundo] e, praticamente, em Malanje. Estavam previstos para lá 240 soldados de primeira linhas, duas companhias móveis e uma bateria. O primeiro governador foi Dias de Carvalho. (Pélissier 1997a: 359 - my emphasis)
However, until 1913, the Lunda district was the stage of several military confrontation between the Portuguese and the Cokwe over the control of the territory and no real settlement policy was enforced there. Some stations were created by Henrique Dias de Carvalho in 1896 when he returned to the region as the first governor of the newly-founded Lunda district29. However, despite the establishment of these stations, Portuguese had virtually no effective rule over the territory. In fact, it is probably not a coincidence that the creation of the Lunda district coincides with the return to their homelands of the Afro-Portuguese who had settled around the Lunda capital in the 1860s:
Devido aos distúrbios políticos na ‘commonwealth’ lunda, já pouco restava naquela época do esplendor de outrora. Os colonos empobrecidos, que só com muito esforço conseguiam manter a sua neutralidade em relação aos conflitos entre os diversos grupos lunda ou entre os Lunda e os Chokwe e que se sentiam ameaçados pelas bexigas que há anos assolavam a região e pelos invasores chokwe, já só esperavam uma oportunidade para abandonar a sua pátria recente e regressar a Angola. Essa oportunidade surgiu com a expedição de Carvalho, pelo que, em Julho de 1887, Rocha, com a sua família e uma série de outros ambaquistas, deixou Luambata para sempre.
Moreover, the troops stationed at the few military posts established in the district were overwhelmingly African (Pélissier 1997a: 362). Therefore, it is likely that the most widely spoken languages in the region during this period continued to be Lunda, Luba, Cokwe and Kimbundu.
The last two decades of the 19th century and the first decade of the 20th witnessed several military confrontation between the Cokwe and the Lunda, on the one hand, and between the Cokwe and the Mbangalas and the Portuguese on the other, especially in the area that is today occupied by Lunda Sul. However, as noted by Pélissier (1997a: 351):
Apesar da multiplicidade das campanhas (umas vinte) … a resistência dos Ambundos e dos Lundas-Quiocos seria pouco convincente. Cada uma das tribos dessa região subpovoada foi derrotada sem necessidade de operações muito importantes. […] uma etnia belicosa como a dos Quiocos, em plena febre conquistadora, seria aliada objectiva dos Portugueses. Ao desfazer o poderio do mwata Yanvo, destruiu o império Lunda e, com ele, um centro potencial de resistência.
29 According to Jesus (1896 - June: 247) these were Ferreira do Amaral (military post), Ferreira de Almeida (village), Costa e
In fact, as the slave trade became impossible and the ivory and rubber trade dwindled, the Portuguese had very few reasons to invest heavily in the effective settlement of such a remote and sparsely populated region (Pélissier 1997a: 352). However, this situation changed in 1912, when diamonds were found in Chiumbe (the current province of Lunda Sul). In the following years several prospecting expeditions were organized along the frontier with the Belgian Congo (Pélissier 1997a: 380-ss) and in 1917, the Companhia de Pesquisas Mineiras de Angola (PEMA), founded in 1912, created DIAMANG (Companhia dos Diamantes de Angola) to whom it transfered its diamond prospecting and mining rights. As noted by Pélissier (1997a: 387), DIAMANG revolutionized the power relations between Europeans and Africans in Lunda:
Enquanto que, antes de 1913, a Lunda era uma região afastada e sem maior importância política que no Moxico, que Portugal ia ocupando lentamente à sua maneira, a Diamang, a partir de 1917, exigia trabalhadores, muitos trabalhadores, para que as jazidas fossem rendosas. Onde encontrá-los senão nos sobados locais? O recrutamento de contratados iria, pois, introduzir na sociedade tradicional novas e brutais tensões que, por vezes, entre os Quiocos, deram origem a explosões. (ibid. 387)
The first headquarters of DIAMANG were in Chitato but in 1920 they were moved to Dundo, where they stayed until Angola’s independence from Portugal in 1975 and the creation of ENDIAMA in 1981. As Pélissier (1997a) puts it: “Do nada de 1917, a DIAMANG ia, em poucos anos, transformar-se no maior empregador de Angola” (ibid. 389). A giant step towards this was the division of the Lunda district into two parts in 1917 (i.e. the Lunda district, whose capital was Saurimo, was separated from the district of Malanje) and the agreement that DIAMANG signed with the Portuguese government in 1921:
O contrato estabelecido com o governo da colônia de Angola era excepcional. A companhia detinha a exclusividade da prospecção de diamantes em todo o território. Além disso, estava isenta do pagamento de impostos relativos a bens alimentícios e têxteis, máquinas e outros equipamentos industriais relativos à prospecção mineradora. Outro privilégio da Diamang referia-se à exclusividade de toda e qualquer atividade comercial na área da sua concessão. O contrato também obrigava o Estado a ajudar no recrutamento de mão-de-obra indígena necessária ao funcionamento da companhia. Por seu lado, a companhia deveria prestar assistência médica, instruir e elevar o moral dos nativos. O Estado receberia, em troca da concessão, 40% dos lucros da empresa, índice que posteriormente foi elevado para 50%. (Varanda 2004: 262)
However, before DIAMANG could take full advantage of this agreement, the last rebellious Cokwe chiefs within the company’s concession area had to be militarily subdued. According to Pélissier (1997a: 395) this was easily achieved by the Portuguese military in 1926/28. According to the same source, from this date onwards all organized
resistance against the Portuguese (and DIAMANG’s) presence in the Lunda district was definitively defeated:
A história da Diamang não entra na história da resistência da Lunda, pois esta cessou praticamente assim que se consolidou aquela gigantesca organização, que, pelo sistema de vigilância inerente à sua actividade, pelo enorme poderio económico, tanto no plano internacional como no plano interno, pelas suas necessidades de mão-de-obra (6000 homens por ano na década de 1930), pelo seu paternalismo eficiente e asséptico, iria ser o motor da Lunda e encarnar em muitos aspectos, até aos nossos dias, o mundo branco e mesmo o Estado, que durante muito tempo se manteria secundário na concessão, de tal maneira o pesa da Diamang influenciava as suas decisões. (Pélissier 1997a: 396)
The establishment of DIAMANG led large amounts of Cokwe people to cross the border to the Congo and Zambia and consequently to the need to recruit workers from the neighboring Kimbundu-speaking district of Malanje. Nonetheless, many Cokwe remained in the concession area of DIAMANG, so that, as noted by Pélissier (1997a: 389), it was among the Cokwe that the company would recruit most of its workers. This was true during the entire period of DIAMANG’s activity in Lunda. In fact, as shown by Mendes (1966: 60), in the 1960s, Lunda was among the regions of Angola that most heavily depended on local workers for the success of its economy (i.e. 25,000 workers), even if significant short duration migratory movements from Malanje, the Congo and Zambia are recorded (cf. Martins 1963; Rela 1970: 55). Therefore, it is not likely that significant changes occurred in the district’s sociolinguistic setting, i.e. the predominant languages in the region continued to be Cokwe, Kimbundu, Lunda and Luba.
White workers were also sent to Lunda to perform more specialized tasks, but their numbers were very low compared to the large mass of unskilled Bantu-speaking workers:
Em 1920 existiam vinte empregados brancos e 2.300 trabalhadores indígenas. A década de 1930 viu este número subir para 150 empregados brancos e dez mil trabalhadores nativos. No final do decênio seguinte havia 240 empregados e 15 mil trabalhadores indígenas, enquanto no final dos anos 1960 poder-se-iam encontrar mais de seiscentos empregados brancos e cerca de 25 mil empregados indígenas.(Varanda 2004: 263)
Moreover, many of the highly skilled white workers, including those hired to manage African workers, were not Portuguese, so it is unlikely that their arrival in Lunda during the entire period of DIAMANG’s activity there brought along any significant increase in the number of Portuguese speakers in the region. This is so not only because there is evidence that in the early days of DIAMANG English was the lingua franca (Martins
1963: 19), but also because, in fact, well into the 1960s, the white population of the district in general was very small:
… exceptuando a cidade do Luso e os estabelecimentos da Companhia dos Diamantes de Angola instalados nos postos administrativos do Candulo e do Luachimo, e uma ou outra vila ou povoação mais importante (Teixeira de Sousa, p.e.), o povoamento branco resume-se a alguns e muito dispersos estabelecimentos, em que a existência é devido à malha administrativa. (Rela 1970: 32-33)
Therefore, the penetration of the Portuguese language in the overwhelmingly Bantu-speaking environment of the Lunda was achieved not by the influx of white Portuguese-speaking workers itself but by subsidiary activities of DIAMANG in the region, namely those of its health department:
As ambulâncias … percorriam cada setor sanitário-administrativo … mapeando os indivíduos e visitando todas as aldeias existentes. Diversas ações profiláticas e curativas eram levadas a efeito, assim como o recenseamento das populações, persuasão dos doentes a submeterem-se a tratamento (que, no caso da doença do sono, chegava a durar nove meses) e reorientação dos casos mais graves e de grávidas para os prédios sanitários centrais. As campanhas móveis provaram ser um importante instrumento na criação de um conhecimento minucioso da área e de suas populações. […] As campanhas … promoviam o contato de membros da