Series de Laurent. Funciones holomorfas en un anillo

Benguela predominance in the mineiro slave population followed that of the Angolas and lasted from about 1780 to 1840. During this period the Benguela-based merchants were able to compete effectively with Luanda’s slave traders in supplying the markets of Rio de Janeiro and Bahia. Although the presence of Benguelas can be detected in Minas Gerais from the earliest lists of slaves, so far there have been few attempts at explaining who the slaves that claimed this identity were. Benguela, apparently referred to the port itself, but the majority of the slaves who became Benguelas in Brazil did not identify themselves as Benguelas in Africa. As has been shown, the term Angola was interpreted in various ways by Central Africans. One of the meanings of Angola was the city of Angola or Luanda, and in this sense, Benguela was a similar term in that it referred to the port where the slaves began their Atlantic crossing. These unfortunate individuals originated in the hinterland of Benguela and in the central highlands, both in areas on or near to the coast and further into the interior, so that several overlapping slaving frontiers existed.⁶⁵ However, as has been argued in the case of Angola, Benguela was similarly a term used by people in Benguela, especially to refer to slaves born in the port town.⁶⁶

According to Miller, the farmers of the central highlands, known later as Ovimbundu, shared similar linguistic traits but did not claim political unity throughout the entire plateau in the eighteenth century. The largest and most powerful polities in this area included Wambu, Mbailundu and Bihe. The leaders of these polities claimed descent from seventeenth-century Jaga and competed fiercely with their neighbors. The most pressing need for ordinary people in this area was protection against the armies of the others. Frequent raiding made agriculture difficult unless fields were protected by major lords like those of Mbailundu and Bihe. A number of Luso-African traders living in these communities sought to benefit from the unstable conditions between these polities and created alliances with African rulers through marrying local women.⁶⁷

Most of the people caught as slaves in the Benguela hinterland were

65 Candido 2006.

66 Candido 2011a.

67 Miller 1988, pp. 28-30.

Umbundu speakers. They were enslaved by the raiding bands of competing polities, and there were no large-scale political traditions comparable to the kingdom of Kongo in this area. The Atlantic Creole culture had made few inroads to the interior beyond Benguela by the end of the eighteenth century.

Caconda was the only place in the interior where the Portuguese presence was more permanent.⁶⁸ In Brazil, Benguelas could not fall back on a Christian tradition like the Congos, because the spread of Catholicism was hampered by a lack of missionaries. This did not, however, prevent the “invention” of Benguela identity in Minas Gerais and in other regions of colonial Brazil where they ended up.

Those who adopted a Benguela identity began to acquire this identity in the same way as those who became Angolas. A collective Benguela identity began to take shape when these unfortunate individuals were enslaved and taken to the port town of Benguela. While awaiting shipment in its barracoons, they began to forge bonds that were enforced during the Middle Passage to Brazil.

Despite having little contact before their enslavement, these slaves soon found that they spoke mutually intelligible dialects and languages that united them linguistically. They also found unity through widely held cultural practices and religious beliefs that were not so different from those of Angolas. Like other identities claimed by Central Africans in Minas Gerais, Benguela identity was not a construct forced on these individuals by outsiders, but there were many unifying factors on which they could lean while building meaningful connections between each other.

Besides denoting the port town, Benguela was also conceptualized as a more extensive administrative unit known as the Reino de Benguela. Thus, it was differentiated from the Reino de Angola. The city of Benguela was naturally the major town. The Reino de Benguela also included the inland fort of Caconda and the areas about 20 to 25 kilometers around these settlements.⁶⁹ If Portuguese control in the Reino de Angola was often only nominal, in Benguela it was even more so. Benguela itself was a relatively small town. By the end of the eighteenth century its population was around 3,000 inhabitants. Benguela was geographically isolated and had a reputation of being unhealthy, which limited its attractiveness. According to Candido, the number of whites remained under 100 between 1797 and 1815. Almost all of these were men. In 1797 there were nine white women but in 1809 only two white women were listed in the census data. The mulatto population was slightly more numerous and gender balanced.

In 1800, there were 143 mulato males and 158 mulata females.⁷⁰ The presídio of Caconda had a population of about 13,000 inhabitants in the late eighteenth

68 Candido 2006, p. 183.

69 Heywood 2002, p. 95.

70 Candido 2006, pp. 135, 152-155.

and early nineteenth centuries. Few whites lived in Caconda. Between 1797 and 1850, census collectors never classified more than 31 people as whites. There were considerably more mulattos in Caconda, but proportionally these few hundred individuals in the 1797-1818 censuses represented only 2% to 4% of the population.⁷¹

Taking into account the differing background of the Benguelas, it is not surprising that Benguela emerged as a separate “nation” in Brazilian slave society. In 1723 in Mariana, 106 out of 1,526 slaves present in the parish of Nossa Senhora do Carmo were identified as Benguelas.⁷² While the presence of Benguelas was recorded in Minas Gerais from the early phases of mining, the term Benguela sometimes appeared in conjunction with the term Angola in mineiro sources. The origin of slaves was, at times, recorded as “Benguela de Angola” or “Benguela of Angola”, as in some cases in the matriculation of slaves in Serro do Frio in 1738.⁷³ This could signify that these Benguelas were first exported to Luanda before they were transported across the Atlantic, as was the case before 1716 when the direct shipments of slaves between Benguela and Rio de Janeiro commenced. However, by the 1730s the stopovers of Benguela ships in Luanda had become rarer, although the shipment of slaves from Benguela to Luanda continued until the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.⁷⁴ It is possible that slaves who were listed in 1738 had already arrived in Brazil much earlier, but it is also possible that slave-owners recognized the affinities between Benguelas and Angolas. For Central Africans, these affinities would have been obvious, and Benguelas certainly had naturally closer relationships with Angolas and Congos than with West Africans.

There are few documents that would reveal the self-ascribed identities of Benguelas in colonial Minas Gerais. However, two Inquisition trials of Benguelas enslaved elsewhere in colonial Brazil offer such precious information.

The first one is the case of a twenty-year old slave named José, who was accused of sodomy in the archbishopric of Bahia in 1703. In discussing his genealogy, José said that he was “born in Benguela” (natural de Benguela) and that his parents were Manoel Luis and Maria, both from Benguela. José revealed that he had been baptized in Luanda, which means that, from Benguela, he was first taken to Luanda, before commencing on the Middle Passage to Bahia.⁷⁵ In 1742, a slave named Manoel de Sousa was accused of bigamy in Pernambuco.

Manoel, about 45 years old at the time of his interrogation, claimed that he was born in the “backlands of Benguela, colony of Angola” (sertões de Benguela Reino de Angola). Having been enslaved as a small child between five and six

71 Candido 2006, pp. 188, 197-198.

72 Candido 2011a, p. 188.

73 APM, Casa dos Contos, Códice 1068, Serro Frio: Escravos, Livro de Matrícula da Capitação.

74 Candido 2011a, p. 187.

75 ANTT, TSO/IL, Processo 6478, ff. 6-6v.

years of age, Manoel did not remember the names of his parents but somewhat confusingly claimed that both had been born and had lived in the city of Benguela. Manoel had thus been taken to Brazil around 1702 and had been baptized in Pernambuco because, according to him, the “blacks brought from his land” to Pernambuco were not baptized. Manoel’s case suggests that, unlike José, he was transported directly from Benguela to Brazil instead of being taken to Luanda first or that, at least, he had not stayed long enough in Luanda to receive baptism.⁷⁶

The provenance of Africans was not always so clear to whites who recorded them in different registers and so an individual slave could have been recorded with various identities by different people. This is well illustrated by a case concerning a squabble between a slave-owner and a local priest about a marriage of slaves in Matozinhos around 1830. Because of the disagreements between the owner and the priest, the slaves were married privately by their owner without the official approval of the Church. Judge Joaquim Gonsalves Moreira, who reported the case to the provincial authorities, recorded the slaves in question, Sinfronio and Jacinta, as Angolas, while his friend, Father José Soares Diniz, in his report of the case marked them as Benguelas.⁷⁷ This suggests that affinities between Benguelas and Angolas were so close that they were sometimes confused by whites, but it also demonstrates that African origins were not always recorded rigorously with attention to the actual identities assumed by enslaved Africans. This might have been even more pronounced when African couples were recorded together. In this case, for example, it is possible that one of the slaves in question was identified as an Angola, with the other being Benguela.

Sometimes the African “nation” appeared in sources with a more precise origin. Rezende has found two such examples from mineiro sources in the early eighteenth century. These were recorded as Quibundo Banguela and Mondongo Banguela. Quibundo was also recorded by itself without being connected to other terms.⁷⁸ Quibundo was recorded separately also in Salvador in the same period.⁷⁹ The use of these terms indicates that the individuals who communicated these identities to their owners were clearly trying to keep the memory of their homeland alive. They succeeded in the sense that their owners took them seriously and recorded them in the capitation. There is no doubt that others who claimed the Benguela identity in Brazil could have claimed similar, more precise origins than the general Benguela “nation”. However, emphasizing such a separate identity could have isolated such individuals from other slaves.

76 ANTT, TSO/IL, Processo 9110, ff. 15v-16v.

77 Corrêa 2005, pp. 111-118.

78 Rezende 2006, p. 131.

79 Souza 2006.

This was probably not the case with persons who managed to recreate a double identity, as shown by the examples cited above. These individuals continued to identify with their actual home village or polity, but they also took on the new identity of an African “nation”, in this case Benguela, which emerged in Brazil.

The relative number of Benguelas among African-born slaves in Minas Gerais increased in the final decades of the eighteenth century. Brügger and Oliveira, who have studied the parish registers of São João del Rei between 1782 and 1822, have shown that in burial records the percentage of Benguelas went up from 13.2% between 1782 and 1790 to 30.2% in 1791-1800. In the 1790s, Angola was still the major “nation” recorded in the burial records, but Benguela surpassed Angola in the first decade of the nineteenth century. The actual number of Benguelas had thus surpassed Angolas in São João del Rei already in the 1790s, because burial records never reflect the actual number of provenance groups in any given year. The individuals who were buried at a certain time had already been present in the given location for an undefined number of years. The findings of Brügger and Oliveira confirm Bergad’s data gleaned from a different set of sources, which also show that the proportion of Benguelas surpassed that of Angolas in the 1780s.⁸⁰

Brügger and Oliveira have also shown that the Benguelas of São João del Rei were well organized and showed a high degree of unity. They were able to do so through their membership in the local rosary brotherhood of the blacks.

The Benguelas were organized within the “Nobre Nação Benguela” or the “Noble Nation Benguela”. The documentation that demonstrates the organization of Benguelas within the brotherhood is a book containing a register of masses that were bought by Benguelas and other registers of economic transactions.

Although the book was started in the year 1803, the documentation within it shows that the congregation of Benguelas was already in existence by 1793.

Benguelas functioned as a unified group for most of the nineteenth century.

The registers show that, in 1871, they paid for masses to be said for the soul of a member called João da Cunha Preto.⁸¹

Brügger and Oliveira found that Benguela was the major African

“nation” among the members whose origins were registered when they were admitted to the brotherhood between 1750 and 1848. Still, they were surpassed by Brazilian-born crioulos and crioulas. At the same time, Benguelas were not able to dominate in positions of authority within the brotherhood. Only five Benguelas held administrative positions within the brotherhood, compared to 48 crioulos, 25 Angolas, and 24 Minas. Benguelas were surpassed even by Congos, who held 10 administrative positions in the same period. Members attaining administrative positions within the brotherhood required economic

80 Brügger and Oliveira 2009, p. 185; Bergad 1999, pp. 151-152.

81 Brügger and Oliveira 2009, pp. 187-188.

resources. Angola and Mina freedmen, who had been present in larger numbers for a longer time in São João del Rei, had probably been able to gather greater wealth than Benguelas, who for the most part of the eighteenth century had been less prominent among the African-born population.⁸²