An African Slaving Port and the Atlantic World: Benguela and its hinterland by Mariana P. Candido

Abstract

Reviewed by: An African Slaving Port and the Atlantic World: Benguela and its hinterland by Mariana P. Candido Raquel G.A. Gomes An African Slaving Port and the Atlantic World: Benguela and its hinterland By Mariana P. Candido. New York, Cambridge University Press, 2013. On the pages of An African Slaving Port and the Atlantic World, Mariana Candido provides fundamental improvement to the expanding research field on the history of West Central Africa. The book is the first full-length history of Benguela and its hinterland to appear in English, facing therefore all the success as well as the challenges offered by trying to cover more than two hundred years of history. The reader will soon find out that Mariana Candido has taken the best of her training as an historian both in Brazil and in North America, not only incorporating and questioning several historiographical debates but also revealing a meticulous approach to her sources. Dealing with questions that emerged while she was working on her doctoral dissertation, Candido carried out substantial archival research in Angola, Portugal, Brazil and North America to explore the idea that Benguela "was already important in the Portuguese empire in the seventeenth century" (37), playing a significant role in the world system economy. Precisely because the book is pioneering in the field, the first two chapters of An African Slaving Port concentrate on introducing Benguela to the reader, offering an early history of the relationships established between Portuguese and local populations while also discussing the Portuguese conceptions of an overseas empire. These chapters also reveal a great part of the challenges involved in trying to conceive an African history of Benguela: for many years, Ralph Delgado's A Famosa e histórica Benguela has informed most of the researches on the area—a product of Portuguese colonialism, Delgado's work was part of a historiography that for many years was used to glorify and celebrate the colonial presence in Africa. In her first chapter, Candido recaptures the history of Benguela in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, when the search for minerals such as copper and silver revealed that the area's wealth lay not in its natural resources, but in its location as a gateway to densely populated areas. As the South Atlantic slave commerce started to take shape in the seventeenth century, Benguela consolidated its position as an important slave port. The second chapter follows the Portuguese advance into the hinterland, as well as the expansion of Enlightenment ideas in the mid-eighteenth century that led to tight control over overseas territories and to the use of endemic violence to enforce Portuguese presence in the area while African rulers struggled to maintain their sovereignty. We are introduced to some aspects of the social history of the port and to the emergence of a Luso-African society that was shaped by the intense cultural exchanges going on to facilitate slave exports. The third chapter highlights the relations between Benguela and the South Atlantic World by exploring the organization of the slave trade and the role of Portuguese agents in the commercial networks established in the hinterland, and showing how the links between Brazil and Benguela were consolidated by the transAtlantic slave trade. Candido's account of the effective integration of Benguela into the Atlantic economy, however, is sometimes blurred by the lack of exploration of the quantitative data available. Candido makes clear, at several moments in her writing, that her book concentrates on the social, political and cultural changes taking place in Benguela over more than two hundred years and that she is trying to offer a different perspective from those usually presented by research concentrating mainly on demographical data, for instance. But it might have been interesting for Candido to fill some of the gaps in the understanding of economic chances in Benguela at the time, as this is truly needed. A dialogue with the recent Brazilian historiography focusing on the Atlantic could help to broaden some perspectives presented by the author.1 The last two chapters offer the best parts of An African Slaving Port. Although recent critics have indicated that Candido constantly relies on individual narratives without presenting enough evidence to corroborate...