$Unique_ID{how00683} $Pretitle{} $Title{Civilizations Past And Present The Portuguese Impact Upon Africa} $Subtitle{} $Author{Wallbank;Taylor;Bailkey;Jewsbury;Lewis;Hackett} $Affiliation{} $Subject{portuguese trade africa states african kongo century country angola coastal see pictures see figures } $Date{1992} $Log{See Portuguese Forts*0068301.scf } Title: Civilizations Past And Present Book: Chapter 16: European Expansion: Exploration And Colonization, 1400-1650 Author: Wallbank;Taylor;Bailkey;Jewsbury;Lewis;Hackett Date: 1992 The Portuguese Impact Upon Africa Unlike the Spaniards in America, the Portuguese came to West Africa as traders rather than settlers. Their activities were largely dictated by circumstances. When they arrived in the fifteenth century, the West Africans had already built strong centralized states, with complex bureaucracies and effective fighting forces. Africans were also quite involved in the slave trade, which the Portuguese exploited by furnishing quicker sea transportation between African depots and also providing a way around Muslim middlemen, who had previously dominated the caravan trade of northwest Africa. The Portuguese In West Africa Portuguese coastal trade did not decisively divert traffic on the trans-Sahara routes until the seventeenth century, although it did somewhat intensify commercial and political competition among the Sudanese states. One of these was Songhai, which replaced Mali after 1468 as the dominant power on the upper Niger, maintaining an extensive empire, until it fell to Moroccan invaders in 1590. The next great Muslim kingdom in the area was Kanem-Bornu, during the reign of Mai Idris Alooma (1580-1617). Muslim elites in these and other Sudanese states often alienated their non-Muslim masses and were constantly involved in conflicts, within and beyond their borders. Regional disunity and contention contributed more to the destruction of Songhai than Moroccan conquest or the shift of trade routes to the Atlantic. Yet the continuing Sudanese monopoly of the caravan trade in gold and slaves caused the Portuguese to value highly their direct water route to Guinea in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Portuguese slaving on the West African coast developed gradually in accordance with negotiated agreements and local laws. Most coastal rulers carefully controlled commercial traffic with the interior, using this monopoly to bargain forcefully with the Portuguese, who were permitted only a very few fortified posts on the mainland. In these enclaves, Portuguese men and slave women produced a tawny population, which ultimately conducted most local trade with the host countries. The most independent Portuguese operations, however, were confined to offshore islands, such as Arguin, the Cape Verdes, and Sao Tome. [See Portuguese Forts: This map of western Africa from the 16th century shows the Portuguese forts along the coast. Rulers in the West African states permitted the portuguese to operate coastal stations but generally excluded them from the interior of the continent. Courtesy Werner Forman Archives] One of the original coastal kingdoms was Benin, located in the forests of southern Nigeria. The land had been ruled by kings, called Obas, since the eleventh century. When the Portuguese arrived, Oba Eware the Great (1440-1473) ruled a large empire, which possessed a formidable army. Benin City, the capital, was a bustling metropolis, with wide streets, markets, and an efficient municipal government. The huge royal palace awed Europeans who chanced to see it, although the Portuguese - and later the Dutch - were generally prohibited from living in the city. The few visitors who gained entrance were amazed by the native metal work, such as copper birds on towers, copper snakes coiled around doorways, and beautifully cast bronze statues. Portuguese relations with the Obas and other rulers along the Guinea coast were relatively calm during the sixteenth century, after Benin began participating in the slave trade. The government completely controlled all transactions, while Portuguese traders paid taxes, followed official procedures, and conducted business only with the Oba's representatives. Portuguese visitors were regularly if not frequently invited to attend court, and the Obas at times sent emissaries to Lisbon. Oba Orghuba (1550-1578) actually became a Christian and admitted missionaries to the country. By the end of the sixteenth century, slaving had become the major Portuguese commercial activity in West Africa. Although effectively limited in Benin, Portuguese traders operated on a larger scale among other coastal states, where they gained some political influence. They were particularly successful in the small kingdom of Warri, a Niger delta vassal state of Benin. Shortly after 1600, the Warri crown prince was educated in Portugal and brought home a Portuguese woman to be his queen. Warri supplied large numbers of slaves, as did other nearby states, which were now competing fiercely with one another. Before long, even Benin would accept dependence upon the trade to control its tributaries and hold its own against Europeans. The Portuguese And The Kongo Kingdom Farther south, near the mouth of the Congo River, the Portuguese attained their greatest success in Africa. The early navigators found a recently united Kongo Kingdom, still steeped in African traditions and maintaining a matriarchial system, in which the king was heavily influenced by the queen mother and other women on his council. Portuguese ships, goods, and their Catholic religion so impressed the monarch that in 1483, he invited the visitors to Christianize and modernize his country. Later he received Portuguese advisors and missionaries, reorganized his government, founded churches and schools, and even sent his chiefs, as well as his own son, to study in Portugal. He made Portuguese the official language, encouraging everyone to adopt European dress and manners, while changing his own name from Nzinga Myemba to Dom Alfonso. Many friendly letters subsequently passed between the two monarchs, Dom Alfonso of Kongo and Manuel of Portugal. This happy state of affairs did not last long. As Alfonso became more dependent upon the Portuguese and more alienated from his own people, Portuguese slave traders from Sao Tome ranged over the country. No longer satisfied with treaty terms which gave them prisoners of war and criminals, they ignored the laws and bought everyone they could get, thus creating dissension and weakening the country. Driven to despair, Alfonso wrote to his friend and ally, Manuel: There are many traders in all corners of the country. They bring ruin ... Every day, people are enslaved and kidnapped, even nobles, even members of the King's own family. ^5 [Footnote 5: Quoted in David Lillingray, A Plague of Europeans (New York: Penguin, 1973), p. 20.] Such pleas brought no satisfactory responses. For a while, Alfonso curbed the worst abuses, until he was shot by disgruntled Portuguese slavers while he was attending mass. Although the Kongo kingdom lasted for more than another century, retaining its Christian churches and many Portuguese ways, it faced serious internal difficulties, until civil war brought its collapse in 1641. Upon losing their privileges in Kongo, the Portuguese concentrated their influence to the south in Angola, at the court of a Kongo vassal. Soon, they provoked a war in which Ndonga, the former tributary state, won its independence. By 1575, the Portuguese were following a more direct policy. Using black mercenaries, equipped with firearms, and sometimes allied with the feared Jaga cannibals, they began a long war of conquest. In the last stages of this war, they met the stubborn resistance of Queen Nzinga of Angola, a former ally, who finally broke with the Portuguese and rallied her country against them. These campaigns, even this early, were slave hunts as well as military operations. By 1650, after Angola had been completely conquered, the black cultures and states in this area, once so flourishing in the 1400s, were almost completely destroyed. Portuguese Angola was never a very successful colony. It functioned primarily as a haven for slavers, amid the violence and vice which such a purpose entailed. The government sought to create a colony of settlement, sending female orphans and prostitutes as prospective wives for the colonists, but such efforts failed miserably. Angola, and its capital of Luanda, remained a sleepy outpost, containing a minority of Portuguese men, fewer white women, an increasing population of mulattoes and an indigenous population of Africans. The Portuguese In East Africa Portuguese exploits in East Africa were similar to those in Kongo and Angola. Here the native states were militarily weaker than most in the west. Moreover, the rich Swahili coastal cities, north of the Zambezi, were divided, militarily weak, Muslim, and strategically well located for trade with Asia, a combination that guaranteed Portuguese aggression. The Swahili people scorned the Portuguese for their poor manners, unclean habits, and tawdry trade goods; but the cities had been prosperous and peaceful for so long that they could not effectively defend themselves. They were therefore plundered from Kilwa to Mombassa. At Mombassa, Portuguese sailors broke into houses with axes, looted, and killed before setting the town afire. The sultan of Mombassa wrote to the sultan of Malinde: He raged in our town with such might and terror that no one, neither man nor woman, neither the old or the young, nor even the children, however small, was spared to live ... ^6 [Footnote 6: Quoted in Robert Rotberg, A Political History of Tropical Africa (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1965), pp. 85-86.] To control commerce, the Portuguese built fortified stations, from which they attempted to collect tribute and maintain trade with the interior. An early one, at Mozambique, became the main Portuguese port of call for vessels on the Asia route. In the 1590s the Portuguese built a fort at Mombassa, hoping to intimidate other cities and facilitate naval operations against Turks and Arabs in the Red Sea. Such efforts diminished the coastal trade but failed to achieve any military objectives. In the 1520s, the Portuguese established regular diplomatic relations with Ethiopia, through the efforts of Queen Helene, the emperor's mother and the real power behind the throne. Helene sought Portuguese aid against Muslim invaders, but she died in 1525 and the projected alliance was not completed until the 1540s. Subsequently, a Portuguese contingent helped defeat a Muslim army which had almost taken over the country. For the rest of the sixteenth century, relations between Portugal and Ethiopia continued to improve. Ultimately, a Jesuit delegation was successful in popularizing Catholicism and converting Emperor Susenyos (1604-1632). But the arrogant zeal of Alphonso Mendez, who became head of the mission in 1626, led to bloody rebellion. The next emperor expelled the foreigners, and Ethiopia once again isolated itself from the rest of the world. On the southeast coast, along the Zambezi River, Portuguese missionaries and traders penetrated the interior after 1561. Their arrival precipitated a bloody war which raged for fifteen years between the Portuguese and Vakaranga, a vast tributary empire, controlling seven hundred miles of the upper Zambezi. Finally, the Vakarangan monarch, known to the Portuguese as the Monomotapa, signed a treaty, granting trade rights and permitting missionaries into his country. Along with them came Portuguese adventurers, who established plantations (prazos) along the Zambezi, took black concubines, and fathered mulatto families. These women and their offspring often managed the estates, overseeing other black slave workers. Such conditions ultimately brought Vakarangia a fate similar to that of Kongo. The Monomotapa lost credibility amoung his subjects and was forced to seek Portuguese protection. This led to more discontent over Portuguese plantations and slave trading. Ultimately, warriors from Changamire, a central African state, drove both the Portuguese and the Vakarangas from the internal plateau. The Portuguese impact upon Africa was not as immediately disastrous as Spanish effects upon the New World, although great damage was inflicted in Kongo, Angola, Vakaranga, and among the Swahili city states. Here were precedents for much greater African disasters in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. By their emphasis upon slavery, the Portuguese helped wed emerging black African states to war, militarism, rigid autocracy, and superstition. African economies were depressed because they did not develop their own productivity. The trade also promoted guilt and shame among Africans who enslaved each other. Even in this era, before the trade reached its peak, it created an enduring synthesis of African and European evils.