Wealth, Land, and Property in Angola: A History of Dispossession, Slavery, and Inequality by Mariana P. Candido

Abstract

Candido offers a critical revision of the history of African societies’ relationship to land use and rights. In the process, she delivers an insightful and fascinating narrative about the contested process of wealth accumulation underpinning the colonial dynamics of dispossession. Candido demonstrates her impressive command of the historiographies of pre-colonial and colonial Africa and the Portuguese Atlantic, as well as her deep familiarity and skillful treatment of Angolan archival sources. The richness of the book, and Candido’s generous and detailed sharing of her archival findings, make this an essential read for scholars of Africa and the Portuguese Atlantic. Candido’s analysis of the integral role of nineteenth-century Western liberalism in the continued enslavement, displacement, and impoverishment of African peoples—through its legal, judicial, and archival promotion of individual property rights—also makes this a crucial work of global economic and political history.The book traces the history of West Central African land regimes from the 1600s to the early twentieth century to demonstrate the complex and diverse ways indigenous societies and peoples claimed and occupied land. Candido discusses claims made by West Central African rulers and individuals, notably women, during disputes between African actors, and with Portuguese settlers and interlopers. This examination underscores the relevance of land to local economic, social, and political interests while successfully dismantling the historical and historiographical trope of “wealth in people,” which has supported erroneous views that Africans emphasized control over slaves and dependents over ownership of land. The author demonstrates how a growing reliance on Portuguese written records and courts to prove land rights, and a Portuguese colonial narrative that dismissed or ignored indigenous African systems of resolution of land disputes, cemented the myth that Europeans introduced the notion of private property to a backward Africa. Practice, rhetoric, and archival biases thus came together to promote greater Portuguese state and settler encroachment in Angola, leading to patterns of land dispossession among its indigenous population.Candido’s focus on land does not distract her from the question of slavery, and she explores the connection between land and territorial dispossession and the rising vulnerability of dispossessed people, which ensured the longevity of slavery in nineteenth-century Angola despite rising Atlantic pressures to abolish it. She highlights West Central Africans’ deployment of written records and court appeals as strategies to protect their interests, socio-economic position, and freedom from slavery, revealing the wholesale impact of European colonialism on African privation and broader racial inequality during the period. The imperial state’s efforts to record people, land, and goods—and to control their integration into an economic system structured around Portuguese interests—shaped laws and their enforcement in ways that limited West Central African self-determination. Indigenous elites, African women, and other economic actors persistently challenged these practices. But in doing so through land transactions, control over people, and consumption of foreign goods traded through an Atlantic system that preyed on African resources, these actors inadvertently shaped a process of wealth accumulation that perpetuated exploitation and inequality.An important insight in this book is that nineteenth-century Portuguese liberal reforms regarding land rights took shape in Angola before they did in Portugal. The championing of private property and individual rights, when viewed from that perspective, was thus not a product of European enlightenment, but a by-product of empire and the commodification of non-European land, people, and resources. Candido’s dexterity in outlining that historical reality puts her work on par with recent critical studies of liberalism and capitalism, such as Lowe’s The Intimacies of Four Continents, which similarly challenge comfy narratives of nineteenth-century Western-led modernity and progress.1