The Making of Quilengues: Violence, Enslavement and Resistance in the Interior of Benguela, 1600-1830

The Making of Quilengues: Violence, Enslavement and Resistance in the interior of Benguela, 1600-1830 is a history of small-scale societies in West Central Africa during the age of the Atlantic slave trade, starting with the oldest references to Mbangala nomadic warriors that inhabited the region to the latest references about the soba of Socoval, the most powerful African ruler of Quilengues. There are three main themes in this dissertation. One is the political and cultural composition of the immediate backlands of Benguela from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries. A second topic is that of the long historical process of Portugals conquest of this area during the period under scrutiny. Lastly, this dissertation explores the role of both locals and foreigners in the development of the Atlantic slave trade from Benguela.

While a considerable portion of the historiography on West Central Africa focuses either on Portuguese commercial and cultural penetration into the interior or on the kingdoms of Kongo and Ndongo, this dissertation is centred on the history of small-scale decentralized societies scattered throughout one extensive area in the backlands of Benguela, that is Quilengues. These are social formations often ignored or understudied in favor of the history of larger and centralized political units. One of the goals of this doctoral dissertation is to highlight different reactions and responses from local African rulers and their peoples to the economic stimuli emanating from the coast after the official arrival of the Portuguese in the early seventeenth century. A second objective is to advance an Africanist perspective of the history of Quilengues where Africans are agents of their own history, thus moving beyond a simple analysis of Portuguese penetration into the interior of West Central Africa.

This dissertation shows that resistance, in its varied forms, was a fundamental factor that slowed down Portuguese colonial ambitions in the interior of Benguela. As evidenced here, Portuguese explorers arrived in West Central Africa with a clear project of conquest and colonization. However, logistic limitations and local resistance delayed such a process until the early twentieth century, when the Portuguese overcame most of these limitations (such as transportation and communications), and found themselves in a better position to effectively expand and occupy the territory under their colonial domain.