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Angola SETTLEMENT, CONQUEST, AND DEVELOPMENT
The Demographic Situation
As the spheres of interest in the African interior
became
clarified, European nations turned to fulfilling the
obligation
imposed by the Berlin Conference of effectively occupying
all
territories claimed. For Portugal, meeting this obligation
involved
not only the conquest of the independent African kingdoms
of the
interior but also an attempt to settle Portuguese farmers.
Immigration in the late nineteenth century was
discouraged by
the same conditions that had deterred it earlier: a
difficult
climate and a lack of economic development. Although there
were
less than 10,000 whites in Angola in 1900 (most of whom
were
degredados), there was a substantial increase in
white
female immigration; the male-to-female ratio that year was
a bit
more than two to one. Concomitantly, there was a drop in
the ratio
of mestiços to whites; whereas mestiços had
outnumbered whites in 1845 by more than three to one, in
1900 this
ratio was reversed. Africans still constituted more than
99 percent
of the population in 1900. Their numbers reportedly
declined from
an estimated 5.4 million in 1845 to about 4.8 million in
1900,
although scholars dispute these figures. Whites were
concentrated
in the coastal cities of Luanda and Benguela. In addition
to
farming and fishing, Europeans engaged in merchant
activities in
the towns and trade in the bush. In the south, colonies of
farmers
who had settled earlier in the century had dwindled into
small
outposts, as many settlers returned to Luanda.
In the late nineteenth century, Africans controlled
trade in
the plateaus of the interior, despite Portuguese
expansion. The
Ovimbundu proved highly successful intermediaries on the
southern
trade route that ran from the Bié Plateau to Benguela. The
Ovimbundu were more competitive than the sertanejos
(people
of the frontier, as Europeans and their representatives in
the
rural areas were called), who often had to pay tribute and
fines to
African chiefs through whose territory they traveled. By
the mid1880s , the Ovimbundu by and large had replaced the
sertanejos. The Chokwe and Imbangala also took
advantage of
their positions in the interior to extend their control
over the
region's trade. Nonetheless, by the late 1800s Portuguese
encroachments and the imposition of European rule limited
the
political freedom of these Africans and diminished their
prosperity.
Data as of February 1989
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