History of the World/History of the World (Bureau Development, Inc.)(1992).BIN/dp/0068/00683.txt

Text File | 1992-10-11 | 13KB | 236 lines

$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.