Deconstructing African Narrative: Enslavement, Resistance, Community, and Displacement in Angola

Roquinaldo Ferreira

In 1738, an enslaved African, José Inácio, who was sent from Luanda, Angola, to Brazil, managed to make his way to Lisbon and filed a petition with the Portuguese Crown describing how he had been unfairly enslaved and asking to return to Luanda. My paper uses José Inácio’s first-hand account of enslavement to examine four issues: enslavement, resistance, community, and displacement. I begin by relying on Inácio’s account about his mother and his own experience with enslavement to structure my analysis. I then draw on records on enslaved Africans to further understand the several ways Africans could fall into slavery. Historians have implied that enslavement was an irreversible act, but my paper shows how some Africans were able to avoid becoming enslaved through resistance and to negotiate their freedom through institutional mechanisms established by the colonial administration in Luanda. I also argue that creolization is a key aspect to understanding African response to Atlantic slaving. Creole Africans were able to form family, and they created community links. Furthermore, the creolized background of Luanda slaves allowed them to circulate throughout several settings in the African-Brazilian Atlantic world. This section of the paper (displacement) challenges the notion that Atlantic slaving was irreversible and seeks to show that Africans sold into Atlantic slaving were able to reconnect with Africa. I seek to shift away from a macroanalysis of slaving and toward the construction of a framework that centers on African perceptions.

[WP# 04CR021]