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Angola Portuguese Settlers in Angola
The Portuguese authorities and settlers in Angola
formed a
motley group. The inhabitants resented the governors, whom
they
regarded as outsiders. Indeed, these officials were less
concerned
with the welfare of the colony than with the profit they
could
realize from the slave trade. But governing the small
colony was
difficult because any central administrative authority had
to deal
with a group of settlers prone to rebellion. Because
Brazil was the
jewel of Portugal's overseas territories, Portuguese who
immigrated
to Angola were frequently deserters, degredados,
peasants,
and others who had been unable to succeed in Portugal or
elsewhere
in the Portuguese-speaking world.
Owing principally to the African colony's unsavory
reputation
in Portugal and the high regard in which Brazil was held,
there was
little emigration to Angola in the 1600s and 1700s. Thus,
the white
population of Angola in 1777 was less than 1,600. Of this
number,
very few whites were females; one account states that in
1846 the
ratio of Portuguese men to Portuguese women in the colony
was
eleven to one. A product of this gender imbalance was
miscegenation; for example, the mestiço population
in 1777
was estimated at a little more than 4,000.
Besides exporting them, Europeans in Angola kept slaves
as
porters, soldiers, agricultural laborers, and as workers
at jobs
that the Portuguese increasingly considered too menial to
do
themselves. At no time, however, was domestic slavery more
important to the local economy than the exporting of
slaves.
Data as of February 1989
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