Land grabbing in West Central Africa has a long history. Since the late sixteenth century, different local actors have clashed over who has the right to use land and have claimed rights over occupancy. Control over land, resources, and people represented power in different contexts, and not every actor shared a common understanding about claims and rights. At the early contact between Europeans and African leaders on the coast of Africa in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, in some regions, such as Elmina, landlords authorized European settlement and establishment of trading posts. In these circumstances, African rulers charged rent to European traders, who recognized the authority and followed the negotiated rules over trade operation and construction of fortresses, for example.Footnote ¹ This kind of agreement neither represented subjugation nor limited African rulers’ control over their territory or subjects. However, in West Central Africa, Portuguese agents claimed that these agreements represented conquest or acquisition of territory, leading to the foundation of the towns of Luanda (1576) and Benguela (1617), and expanding dominium rights over territories and their inhabitants. For more than three centuries, the Portuguese empire employed different policies regarding land rights and access, in part due to the resistance of African authorities but also due to the limited knowledge possessed by the Portuguese Crown about the peoples who inhabited West Central Africa, their legal practices, and their political organization.Footnote ²

This chapter examines that long history of land use and rights, from the late sixteenth century to the late eighteenth century, underscoring changes. Ndembu and Ndombe populations regarded first settlers’ rights of occupation, usually understood as rights of possession. Other groups figure into the analysis as well, but Ndembu and Ndombe people are important since they inhabited the north and south of the Kwanza River, respectively, and nowadays their descendants are identified as Kimbundu and Umbundu speakers, respectively. The long shift observed here is therefore not limited to a single region or community of West Central Africa. As in other regions of the African continent, first settlers hosted the migrant population and provided them access to land, but later-comers did not enjoy ownership rights, such as harvesting tree crops or the ability to host other migrants. Clashes happened when migrants who were granted rights to use land sought to transform their temporary privileges into more permanent rights of ownership, or when strangers, including the Portuguese, acted as de facto landlords.

Between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries, ideas about land use or occupation morphed into ownership rights. The events and changes that took place in this time period formed the basis for the eventual implementation of property rights in West Central Africa during the nineteenth century. The Portuguese presence and colonialism in this region date back to the late sixteenth century, so they existed alongside the West Central African notions of land occupation and sovereignty for hundreds of years before the nineteenth-century transformation. How rulers and commoners expressed ideas about wealth is also an important matter for understanding the economic history of this region and for placing West Central Africa in the growing scholarship on the dynamics of property and expropriation in the colonized world.Footnote ³ Contrary to conventional understanding expressed in the literature, West Central Africans grappled with debates about land tenure and rights well before the late nineteenth century.

Documents record how some West Central African groups, particularly Kimbundu speakers such as Caculo Cacahenda and other Ndembu populations north of the Kwanza River, understood land rights. However, for other regions, particularly south of the Kwanza River, the dearth of detailed and dated evidence renders a clear reconstruction of property regimes a challenge. The fact that Ndombe or Kwanyama societies did not dispose of or sell land, or that land was not commodified, does not indicate the absence of an idea of use or occupation rights. Nor does it suggest that land use and occupation rights were static. Assuming that things belong to an individual reinforces the intrinsically violent aspect of asserting rights over people and resources and denies the community’s shared commitment to common goals. Recognized rights over a plot of land come at the expense of someone else who cannot enjoy the privilege. If an individual belongs to a person, it is because the enslaved person’s rights are denied. In different African societies, land rights are intimately connected to the ability to host people and rely on their labor, and West Central Africa is not an exception.Footnote ⁴ Thus, as I will examine in later chapters, there is a clear connection between asserting rights over people and land.

While written documents and narratives of migration clearly indicate that the West Central African population exercised rights in land and had political and territorial authority, colonialism was based on possession of land and controlling people. Rights of possession or dispossession of land were not stable categories for any of the actors involved but were the result of intense disputes and conflicts among social groups and between elites and the lower classes. In the context of European invasion and conquest in West Central Africa by the late sixteenth century, local rulers, the sobas, and their subjects resisted land expropriation, though not necessarily in successful ways. “Violence against enclosure, for instance, reflected a variety of point of views – on positions, on intrusions, on trespass, indeed on property rights.”Footnote ⁵ In many ways, the resistance was also against conquest more broadly and in opposition to the Portuguese’s assumption that they could claim rights over the territories and people they occupied.Footnote ⁶ The reigning interpretation has obscured the evidence of a counterhistory, which recognizes West Central Africans grappling with land rights since the sixteenth century.

West Central African Notions of Land Use and Occupation Rights

One of the challenges for understanding local practices of land rights is the lack of any systematic recording of how the Bantu populations south and north of the Kwanza River, as well as non-Bantu groups such as the Nyaneka, !Kung, and Nkhumbi, dealt with jurisprudence, including ownership and transmission regime. By the time evidence about ownership rights began to be recorded in the early twentieth century, the issue of who enjoyed rights over land, people, and cattle had already caused dispute, dispossession, and contestation for centuries. Colonial officials systematically missed out registering Axiluanda or Ndombe interpretations and understanding of land occupation, which rendered them as lacking land tenure regimes. Fast forward 80 years, and then, by the second half of the twentieth century, scholars helped spread the notion of precolonial societies characterized by the absence of land tenure regimes.Footnote ⁷ Early accounts paid attention to how West Central African rulers claimed dominium rights, but not necessarily how common people exercised or claimed rights, particularly in relation to land use and access. Dispersed accounts provide some clues and reveal how the local population related to land tenure regimes, but most of them were collected in the late nineteenth or early twentieth century. By then, the notion that land could be bought and sold was consolidated in Europe, and jurists, missionaries, and colonial officers assumed that individual property rights were superior to other forms of ownership, such as collective ones.

For the communities that inhabited West Central Africa and its interior, and probably most of western Africa, land rights had been based on the principle of first occupation: Land belonged to the groups who arrived first, occupied it, and used it for cultivation or animal husbandry. Military conquest could also establish rights over lands. Land rights were collective, and kinship guaranteed access to the land by living and deceased members. Rights of use and occupation were transmitted to following generations, resulting in competition and negotiation with neighboring populations. This practice justified, for example, the idea that the Ndombe people were the first occupants of what became known as the Cattle Bay, as well the Axiluanda as the first settlers of the Luanda coast and inland (see Map 1.1). Ancestors guaranteed rights over possession and use of the land, and the heads of lineages arbitrated claims for its use through a series of obligations and patron–client links.

Map 1.1 Political Organizations of West Central Africa

This system was not so different from the Portuguese concept of land conquest and occupation that prevailed until the mid-nineteenth century. Individuals could use the land, but its ultimate dominion rested on the Crown, not on individuals. In the areas under Portuguese rule, land access in Angola was regulated through the sesmaria regimen put into effect in mainland Portugal and its empire until the nineteenth century. According to the sesmaria, individuals could lease land for cultivation and assume the responsibilities related to its costs, thus freeing the state from investment. The land was not seen as owned but held, which allowed individuals to use it for cultivation or grazing, without having the right to dispose of it.Footnote ⁸ Thus, individual property rights over land did not exist in Portugal when conquistadores arrived in West Central Africa, putting the lie to narratives that individual ownership over land had always existed in Europe, a central argument used to justify land seizure and colonialism in the late nineteenth century. West Central African and Portuguese populations shared similar understandings about occupation and land rights.

Besides migration narratives that establish first settler claims among several West Central African groups, some chiefs appropriated the language and mechanisms of creating proof for their land claims, forming their own state archives to document their rights over land occupation. Éve Sebestyén, Ana Paula Tavares, and Catarina Madeira Santos have located written documents dating back to the seventeenth century that demonstrate that dynastic lineages kept records legitimizing their access to power and their privilege as the first settlers.Footnote ⁹ Most of these documents are written in Portuguese, but some are also in Kimbundu, showing chiefs appropriated writing and the paper culture to strengthen their political and territorial authorities. State archives, such as the Caculo Cacahenda archive, provide rich information that place Ndembu populations as legitimated landlords divided into different chiefdoms, as can be seen in Map 1.1 (an issue examined further in Chapter 3). These documents recorded migration, settlement, and the founding of villages to verify and validate traditions of land use and rights, probably an attempt to prevent Portuguese claims over Ndembu territory. They also describe in careful detail the boundaries of villages. It is not clear the intent of the Ndembu elite in creating the records and eventually the archive, but one can imagine their goal was to employ these documents as evidence for any possible land claims.

In fact, for most of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the colonial administration recognized sobas, dembos, and mani as lords of their lands in different colonial records and in some cases arbitrated land disputes between neighboring rulers. In 1739, the governor of Angola, João Jacques de Magalhães, wrote to the ruler of Caculo Cacahenda, Dembo Sebastião Francisco Xeque, recognizing him as the recently invested ruler with the support of his subjects and councilors (macotas) and tributary rulers (sobas). In this letter, Magalhães states,

Dom Sebastião Francisco Xeque is the lord of the lands of Caculo Cacahenda, able to enjoy all the honors, privileges, liberties, exceptions, and honesty, as his predecessors, with close relationship with the Majesty [of Portugal]. … Dom Sebastião Francisco will enjoy the same conditions as those who preceded him in those lands and is obliged to [provide] the same service to me and those who will succeed me in the services of Your [Portuguese] Majesty.Footnote ¹⁰

Illustration 1.1 Portrait of the ruler of Caculo Cacahenda with his advisors, early twentieth century. The photograph reveals the different textiles worn as well as the variety of symbols of power, including shoes, hats, and scepter.

(Source: “O Dembo Caculo Cahenda e seus principais macotas,” Arquivo Histórico Ultramarino.)

In oral traditions and written documents, ruling elites claimed rights of land occupancy based on narratives of migration and occupation of territories, which consolidated rights over resources such as land, rivers, lakes, and fauna and flora. In 1798, the soba of Humbe, identified as Nkumbi , argued that he had jurisdiction over his lands since “his ancestors had secured possession from time immemorial.”Footnote ¹¹ Firstcomer narratives settled disputes among several societies, mixing early settlement and ancestors’ origins with access to land and full membership rights in their societies. Insiders were considered landlords, demonstrating that the argument claiming that land tenure regimes did not exist in African societies needs to be revisited.Footnote ¹² In 1759, several sobas wrote to the governor of Angola to complain about the behavior of Jesuit priests who had “usurped the lands of their ancestors, with the evasion and cunning that were natural to them.”Footnote ¹³ The residents along the Bengo River also complained about losing control over their land for more than fifty years.Footnote ¹⁴ These cases from the eighteenth century reveal that Portuguese administrators recognized African sovereigns as the legitimate occupiers of the land despite the encroaching actions of the Jesuit priests.

Struggles for power and land were closely related, and their records on paper created an interesting dynamic between local forms of knowledge, paper culture, and legitimization. A few years later, another conflict over occupation rights emerged. In 1768, the soba Muxixi, from the interior of Luanda, claimed to be the occupant of the lands of Ilamba, where the governor intended to establish a Royal Foundry to tap into steel resources.Footnote ¹⁵ The manager of the foundry notified Governor Inocêncio de Sousa Coutinho that the soba and the residents of the presidio de Massangano had different interpretations regarding land tenure. The residents of the colonial presídio claimed that they had bought the land from the soba, to which the governor replied that this purchase was illegal since sobas could not sell their land. Sousa Coutinho determined that any unoccupied land could be taken until the original owners could present ownership titles.Footnote ¹⁶ Written titles were unavailable, casting the firstcomers as outsiders in their own territory in a process that predated the European takeover of African lands in most of the African continent by 150 years.Footnote ¹⁷

The issue of control over land also settled dynastic disputes. Rulers rushed to prove that their ancestors were the first to arrive and settle in disputed lands, in some cases creating paper trails that proved precedence over claims and questioned the presence of recently arrived groups in their lands. A new Caculo Cacahenda ruler came to power in the 1810s, and as the new sovereign, he requested the Portuguese a new charter (carta patente) that recognized his rise to power and his role as landlord. Despite the earlier correspondence between his predecessor and the colonial administration in 1739, the newly inaugurated Dembo Caculo Cacuhenda demanded written evidence of his power. The governor of Angola, José de Oliveira Barbosa, sent the charter stating that Dembo Sebastião Miguel Francisco Xeque was “the new Dembo and landlord of the Caculo Cacahenda lands, including all of his macotas and people, after the resignation of the previous Dembo, Sebastião Francisco Xeque.” In 1812, the Angolan governor then confirmed “Dom Sebastião Miguel Franscisco Xeque in the role of Dembo, lord of his lands.”Footnote ¹⁸ Other local rulers rushed to claim dynastic lineage rights and set territorial boundaries that could consolidate claims and inheritance rights for their descendants. In 1821, Chief Caputo Cazombo produced the following record:

Firstcomer narratives justified inalienable land rights and are also very similar to oral narratives that legitimate claims elsewhere in Africa. An individual who could prove firstcomer rights based on clearing and occupying land was able to transmit these rights to heirs, in this specific case to Caputo CaCazombo’s biological daughter and son. In addition, African rulers such as Caputo CaCazombo employed geographical and political markers to set the limits of their territories, such as rivers or the lands of neighboring chiefs. These accounts served as proofs for their subjects, neighboring rulers, and the colonial administrators of the land and ruling legitimacy to protect the interests of the lineage in the present and in the future. Political and territorial boundaries were not stable and subject to changes, as in the case of rivers changing courses or neighbors migrating to new territories.

Clashes over Land Use and Occupation Rights

The Portuguese Empire prioritized policies for fixing people to land and space. In the 1676 Regimento do Governo de Angola, the king of Portugal noted, “You will know about land and who has dominium over them. I have been informed that land grants were distributed to promote agriculture, although many have not been cultivated. The lands not occupied should be distributed to praiseworthy people (pessoas beneméritas), with the condition they will cultivate them within five years.”Footnote ²⁰ Local conceptions of land use and access were clashing with the European notion of control and dominium. The Portuguese administration expected land to be cultivated and its use to be limited to a specific person; it disregarded communal use or land reserved for religious purpose or occupied by spirits. These policies imposed the idea of permanent settlement and the notion that transhumant groups could not enjoy land use and rights, yet transhumance has remained part of Iberian life into the twenty-first century. Africanists have spent decades debating whether African societies had notions of individual ownership or land regime and how wealth was accumulated.Footnote ²¹ Communal use of land, for example, did not indicate general access to use of land since descendants of enslaved people and marginal members of society were excluded from decisions regarding land. Land access was political, and marginalized groups could till the soil but as dependents of more-powerful patrons or clients, very similar to feudal regimes in Europe.

West Central Africans also exercised rights of use and of disposal over movable goods, such as things and cattle, as well as over human beings, known in the historiography as wealth in people.Footnote ²² Men and women did not necessarily enjoy the same patterns of land rights and use; however, some historical documents reveal that both West Central African men and women owned cows, chickens, pigs, and sheep as part of their personal wealth, as well as accumulating material goods such as jewelry, baskets, pottery, and farming tools.Footnote ²³ African rulers and commoners accumulated wealth in movable and immovable things that were considered individual property. Early travelers observed the desire of local rulers to acquire things that were infused with value, that expressed wealth, and that became instruments of power, such as the political elite of Kongo accumulating crucifixes carved in ivory, copper, and brass. They also purchased outfits to project power, mixing imported garments with locally produced clothes, as with the woven mpu cap that symbolized power in the Kongo court.Footnote ²⁴ Reports from the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries reveal several currencies operating in West Central Africa, such as nzimbu, a variety of clothes, salt, and copper manillas [a form of currency], as well as an intense trade in manufactured goods such as baskets and pottery.Footnote ²⁵ Things were accumulated, individually owned, and bequeathed to heirs. They had market value and were exchanged for other commodities, allowing men and women to accumulate things over time.Footnote ²⁶

Supposedly, the accumulation of things was intimately related to the recruitment of dependents. The thinking goes like this: Goods created dependency and patron–client relationships, expanding debt and enslavement in what became known as wealth in people. Rulers and elites accumulated things due to their allure and the ability to attract dependents, consolidating a system based on holding the rights to another’s labor and reproduction as the main organizing concept among West Central African societies.Footnote ²⁷ According to John Thornton, wealth in people was “the preeminent form of private investment and manifestation of private wealth.”Footnote ²⁸ In the 1970s, Suzanne Miers and Igor Kopytoff proposed that rights-in-persons was “an integral part of African system of kinship and marriage”Footnote ²⁹ and shaped all social relationships, creating bonds of rights, obligation, respect, and protection. Following this argument, rights could “be manipulated to increase the number of people in one’s kin group, to gather dependents and supporters, and to build up wealth and power.”Footnote ³⁰ West Central African specialists embraced Miers and Kopytoff’s notion of rights-in-persons and pushed it forward as a cornerstone to understanding the social, political, and economic lives of West Central African societies.

Wealth in people became so central to understanding West Central African societies since it was presumably the system behind the expansion of productivity and control of people. According to Joseph Miller in 1988, “Permanent, real wealth resides in dependents’ abstract collective obligations to provide future material goods upon command, in respect, and in prestige.”Footnote ³¹ Two years later, Jan Vansina argued that “wealth in goods was still converted into followers.”Footnote ³² The goods, such as alcohol, gunpowder, or textiles, that rulers demanded in exchange for captives or signatures on vassalage treaties were acquired with the intention of creating a larger pool of dependents as free or enslaved subjects.Footnote ³³ Historians propose that the main goal of lineage heads was to accumulate people, which explains warfare in the region but also the fact that during the Atlantic slave era male captives were sold to overseas markets while women were retained as captives locally. Anthropologist Wyatt MacGaffey argues that women were the source of wealth in people since they could expand lineages.Footnote ³⁴

Owning people and controlling their labor was important, which explains the broad existence of slavery as an institution in West Central Africa by the time Europeans arrived at the end of the fifteenth century. Thornton also links wealth in people with the fact that landownership did not exist. According to Thornton, “their only recourse was to purchase slaves, which as their personal property could be inherited and could generate wealth for them. They would have no trouble in obtaining land to put these slaves in agricultural production, for African law made land available to whoever would cultivate it, free or slave, as long as no previous cultivator was actively using it.”Footnote ³⁵ Yet it is important to stress that people faced restrictions as to where they might cultivate land since raids, warfare, and political instability made people vulnerable to slave raiders.Footnote ³⁶ Also, as the sobas’ complaints from earlier in this chapter reveal, rulers had a clear understanding about land rights, such as the case of Caculo Cacahenda discussed before.

Wealth in people as a concept eventually became a model to explain West Central African societies, even though specialists in other regions of the African continent emphasized the existence of slavery and other forms of dependency as different categories rather than lumping them together with wealth in people.Footnote ³⁷ Control of people was part of a system in which people were seen as property that could be bought and sold, yet those who could accumulate people could also acquire things such as alcohol, weapons, and copper manillas. A husband with several wives and children could expand cultivation and produce more food to feed more dependents. In different farming societies, seeds and later the harvested crops were individually owned.Footnote ³⁸ As traders amassed dependents, they were socially perceived as wealthier, gained status in the community, and could aspire to political roles. Linda Heywood showed how Ovimbundu traders who profited from long-distance trade displayed their recently acquired wealth by marrying additional wives, expanding their families, acquiring cattle and slaves, and incorporating material possessions associated with Western style, such as wearing pants and shoes.Footnote ³⁹ This process inevitably eroded old political elites and led to the rise of merchants as the new political leaders in the highlands of Benguela. Héli Chatelain, a Swiss missionary and linguist who lived in Angola from 1885 to 1889 and returned to Luanda later, stated, “In the absence of metal or paper money to represent capital, a large number of wives, of children, and hence a wide circle of blood-connection and influence, is considered the best investment and most substantial element of wealth.” This influenced how later scholars understood property and wealth in West Central Africa as, solely, the accumulation of dependents.Footnote ⁴⁰ Yet, if wealth was solely expressed in the accumulation of dependents, it is difficult to understand the economic motivations of rulers to sell their most prized investment.

It is problematic to mix slavery with other forms of control of people, such as marriage, patronage, parenthood, overlordship, and so on, under the umbrella of wealth in people because not all types of relationships necessarily share the same coercion and employ violence as in slavery.Footnote ⁴¹ Wealth in people and slavery were important forms of accumulation in West Central Africa, yet they are not so different from how planters in Brazil, Cuba, or Jamaica, who also invested in enslaved people, enriched themselves. West Central Africans produced things and accumulated wealth in goods before contact with Europeans and during the centuries of the transatlantic slave trade and the Portuguese presence in the region, as evidenced by the ivory carvings and masks displayed in museums around the world.Footnote ⁴² Thus, wealth in people and wealth in things were not different but part of systems of accumulation that had gone through transformations for centuries, in part due to their connection to the global markets.

Changes Related to Possession and Ownership

It is only with the European liberal revolutions of the eighteenth century that the notion of land as belonging to an individual, rather than a collective possession, prevailed.Footnote ⁴³ That is, the concept of individual property has a history. In Europe or in Africa, before the consolidation of liberalism in the nineteenth century, land was held and not owned. For England and France, it was during the eighteenth century that small landholders lost rights over communal use of land and exclusive property rights to land emerged.Footnote ⁴⁴ In Portugal and Spain, it was during the nineteenth century that land was centralized on single owners and common rights disappeared. Land acquired an economic aspect related to production and its value as an asset, a commodity that could be rented, bequeathed, or mortgaged. Yet land also had, and has, social and political values that cannot be easily measured, and its value is associated with one’s relationship with another. The economic value of land rests on individuals enjoying rights to it on the principle of occupation. We can argue that “property is theft” as defined by the nineteenth-century French philosopher Pierre-Joseph Proudhon since it assumes that not everyone enjoys the same rights.Footnote ⁴⁵ But it is more than this. As defined by Sara Berry, property rights were “negotiable and contested – shaped and reshaped over time by multiple, sometimes conflicting forces.”Footnote ⁴⁶ In West Central Africa, as well as in Portugal and other European monarchies before the nineteenth century, property claims over land, people, and things were based and shaped by notions of kinship, community membership, and context. The difference between the public and the private were blurred, and occupation and use rights were never stable, with rulers keeping land in tenure for ancestor, and subjects securing occupation recognitions.Footnote ⁴⁷

During the process of conquest in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, Portuguese explorers and the monarchy employed the principle of territorial occupation and subjugation to justify claims of sovereignty, classifying some use of land as legitimate, such as cultivation or mining, while dismissing others, such as burial rights or spirit occupation, as unused land or empty territory. However, it was necessary to recognize the rights of the local population to the land and its use due to the limited power of the European invaders as well as the lack of an idea, in Europe, of individual property rights. In the context of expansion and conquest, European empires made claims over lands and their people, the concept of dominium, but did not necessarily treat land as belonging to an individual. In the case of Angola, the idea was that unlike in the Kingdom of Kongo where a monarch could clearly be identified as the legitimate occupant of the territory, in the regions north and south of the Kwanza River the land was classified unused and unoccupied. It was thus the moral duty of Europeans to conquer and colonize it, similar to the debate regarding land occupation in the colony of Brazil, where the indigenous population was also seen as incapable of making the land productive and profitable.Footnote ⁴⁸

Different conceptions of sovereignty and jurisdiction were at the center of these interactions. According to Thornton, “slaves were the only form of private, revenue-producing property recognized in African law. By contrast, in European legal systems, land was the primary form of private, revenue-producing property, and slavery was relatively minor.”Footnote ⁴⁹ It must be noted, however, that even in several parts of Europe, particularly in Portugal, land was held, not necessarily individually owned, before the nineteenth century – thus, European and African land regimes were closer than nineteenth- and twentieth-century jurists and colonial officers projected into the past. According to the interpretation of these jurists, private property had always existed and was a hegemonic concept in European law.Footnote ⁵⁰ In contrast, land on the African continent was abundant, labor was scarce, and tenure regimes were unknown. Primary sources, however, reveal that African rulers exercised dominium over their territory, employed their power to control people, free or enslaved, in order to clear and cultivate the land, and presented indigenous claims. There is plenty of evidence that demonstrates the clashes of different conceptions of land use, access, and tenure between African rulers and Portuguese conquistadores, especially in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries when European military and demographic power was limited. In theory, however, the conquered land was under the domain of the Portuguese Crown, which claimed rights over taxation and distribution, even if it was difficult to implement it.Footnote ⁵¹

In 1571, a Portuguese royal decree named explorer Paulo Dias de Novais as representative of the interests of the Catholic Monarchy in its attempt to expand and conquer the world. A nobleman, a fidalgo, he was instructed to “submit and conquer the Kingdom of Angola, [to impose] Catholic worship and celebrate the Holy Catholic Faith and enact the Holy Gospel.”Footnote ⁵² The decree authorized Dias de Novais to conquer land along the coast and in the interior, and whatever he encountered – land, people, or mineral wealth – would be considered part of the land grants (sesmarias) issued by the Portuguese Crown in the form of hereditary possession. The language employed is very similar to the land grants issued to the capitão donatários in Brazil during the same time.Footnote ⁵³ The land that came under the management of Paulo Dias de Novais was occupied land. Seven settled groups lived on the island of Luanda. Without their knowledge or consultation, they were assigned as the property of Paulo Dias de Novais in 1571. They did not accept these arbitrary decisions, and decades of conflict followed Novais’ arrival, known in the Angolan historiography as guerras de conquistas. These were in fact conflicts of jurisdiction sparked by the refusal of local chiefs to recognize any Portuguese dominium rights over land and people. Luanda was not empty land, and its seizure by Portugal was the product of territorial conquest and exclusion of the indigenous inhabitants.Footnote ⁵⁴

Novais distributed his land grant to fellow conquistadores, most of them noblemen, and the Society of Jesus received land grants in the form of sesmarias in recognition of their service and collaboration with the conquest. In the language of the time, the sesmeiros, the grantees, became amos or masters, a term used for European kings and princes but which was also used for new feudatories in the Kingdom of Angola, the imaginary space created by the Portuguese empire. Masters held control over the land and the people who occupied it, with the ability to enslave, exploit, and even sell people. Although the Crown could cancel the donation in the case of ill practice, the grantees, the capitão donatários, enjoyed full authority and power over the lands granted to them. These land grants also became a hereditary possession that excluded any claims that native chiefs and their subjects could have over their properties. In fact, African rulers were distributed among conquistadores and the Catholic clergy as part of the sesmarias and could be put to work. In many ways, this territorial occupation and political subjugation were part of the same process of establishing dominium claims at the expense of the native population.Footnote ⁵⁵

Among many obligations, African authorities had to pay taxes to the new landowners, in most cases in the form of enslaved people. In 1590, for example, the tributes that the Society of Jesuits collected from local chiefs and the population over “their” lands totaled at least 300 captives of war.Footnote ⁵⁶ Portuguese conquistadores blurred the lines between land grants and rights over land occupants, claiming control over people. The amo, master, Garcia Mendes Castelo Branco requested from the Portuguese Crown “the soba [the ruler] Caculo Quehacango, with all his canda (his clan).”Footnote ⁵⁷ Due to his land grants, Castelo Branco was able to organize at least three slave voyages between Luanda and the ports of Cartagena de Índias, Veracruz, and Jamaica between 1599 and 1618, transporting, in a single voyage in 1599, more than 500 enslaved Africans to Cartagena de Índias. Many of these enslaved people were subjects or enslaved by ruler Caculo Cacahenda, discussed earlier. By the end of the sixteenth century, land grants and the slave trade were intertwined, which favored the consolidation of the amos as the largest slave traders of Angola.Footnote ⁵⁸

The land concessions eventually led to disputes between the conquistadores, the Jesuits, and the administrators, who saw the rise of the amos as slave traders as a threat to the Crown’s control over trade. Under the unification of the Iberian Crown, the system of amos was eliminated and the sobas were put under the direct control of the Crown.Footnote ⁵⁹ In the regulation of the new governor of Angola, D. Manuel Pereira Forjaz, the King of Portugal stated on March 16, 1607, that “sobas suffered extortion and abuses, including enslavement, at the hands of the amos, which was against justice, law, and what was convenient to the services of God and the Portuguese Crown, which impairs the good will and the piece in the land … sobas deserve to be treated with respect and the same liberty enjoyed by other vassals.”Footnote ⁶⁰ The comparison between sobas’ and vassals’ rights led to the creation of a new juridical space. The sesmaria model was abandoned, in part due to the limitation of the Portuguese Crown in establishing territorial claims beyond Luanda. Eventually, the administrative efforts focused on controlling and taxing the trade in human beings to address the demand in the Americans for coerced labor.

Dominium also represented control over any mineral resources in the territory. In 1666, after the signature of the vassal treaty between the Portuguese Crown and the ruler of Wandu, the assumption was that the soba had lost control over the copper mines in his territories, a clear indication that his legal claims over his territory’s mineral resources were terminated.Footnote ⁶¹ In a similar case, the vassal treaty of 1682 forced the ruler of Kakonda to allow the settlement of Portuguese officers and the construction of a fortress in his territory.Footnote ⁶² So the debate over occupation and jurisdiction could not have been initiated in the nineteenth century. In fact, when changes over property rights occurred in the nineteenth century, they happened in a context of intense disputes and negotiations going back to the sixteenth century in what constituted the colony of Angola, in West Central Africa.Footnote ⁶³

The lack of recognition of the African land-tenure system was a constant theme, going back to Carta de doação of Paulo Dias de Novais by the end of the sixteenth century. However, as Assan Saar notes, “the generalization about the absence of land ownership in Africa is risky.”Footnote ⁶⁴ The fact that Europeans did not recognize African claims or co-opt indigenous legal systems is the result of colonialism that naturalizes occupation and expropriation of indigenous peoples. Before the nineteenth century, African rulers and their subjects who showed loyalty and established alliances with the Portuguese conquerors were recompensed with the recognition of their territorial claims, although they were required to open their territories to traders and Catholic priests and pay tributes to the Portuguese Crown, among other obligations.Footnote ⁶⁵ Yet local notions of land occupation and tenure were far from guaranteed under colonial rule. Although the colonial administration recognized sobas’ territories and their control over resources, foreign settler pressure to expropriate land undermined their jurisdiction claims and allowed expropriation of land during the nineteenth century.Footnote ⁶⁶

Land was initially perceived as abundant and, after the initial land removals around Luanda and Benguela in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, the Portuguese empire focused its economic interests on the transatlantic slave trade. The removal of people from the territory became a privileged activity, which brought about depopulation and increased the availability of land above and beyond its already perceived abundance. However, there were concerns related to learning about the territory and its people. The 1676 Regulation of the Government of Angola, for example, suggested that governors should “inquire about all land grants, who oversaw the distribution, who had the power to grant land, and who owned it.”Footnote ⁶⁷ The concern was to verify whether the granted lands were cultivated, not necessarily to determine the legitimate occupants or who had rights over land. In the case of disputes, whoever was able to present a title would be recognized as the landowner, a system that clearly prioritized a single form of land rights, the enclosed model in which land was owned. In the case of Ilamba and Lumbo, where the Portuguese Crown intended to establish steel production, the Royal Foundry of Nova Oeiras, this decision led to the dismissal of the local Mbundu population, who were spread across several different polities, as the legitimate occupiers and colonial occupation of the territory.Footnote ⁶⁸ Land-control struggles were constant, and it was through occupation and dispossession that colonial administrative centers were created along the coast, such as Luanda and Benguela, as well as in the interior, the inland presídios, casting the conquered as outsiders in their own land.

In the second half of the eighteenth century, efforts were made by Portuguese officials to identify territories and their occupants, as well as the way property and land tenure operated in an attempt to increase governability.Footnote ⁶⁹ In the context of the Enlightenment and territorial expansion, and the enumeration of population, maps, residential lists, African states, and their political organizations spread in the late eighteenth century in efforts to increase colonial knowledge about the African population and how ownership rights operated. In 1750, the colonial administration organized an inventory of the local authorities of the district of Calumbo, identified as sobas , quilambas, and quimbares, increasing the hands each ruler had to provide as labor to the Fábrica de Ferro de Novo Belém, the Royal Foundry of Novo Belém, as part of their taxation. According to the list, sixty-eight rulers were able to provide from 3 to 1,000 dependents who could work for the benefit of the Portuguese Crown. In addition to labor, the rulers’ taxation also included a percentage of the crops they cultivated; some also had to provide animals such as goats, chickens, or pigs. Sobas Gola Quimbi Antonio da Silva and Caciata Cacavungu, who had salt mines in their territories, were required to pay their taxes with salt.Footnote ⁷⁰

The efforts to count and control did not necessarily lead to collection of information about existing land regimes. For example, in 1772, Governor Antonio de Lencastro ordered the demarcation, description, and inventory of the property belonging to all Black and white subjects in the colony of Angola, in alphabetical order.Footnote ⁷¹ Along the coast and in the inland presídios, colonial officers enumerated residents, the number of inhabitants in each household, as well as the production of crops and cattle in a clear process of land enclosure under the rubric of better administration and expansion of agriculture.Footnote ⁷² The lists are meticulous, providing information on the location of each household, their type of construction (one or two floors, bricks, pau a pique, or thatched roof), and the number of free and enslaved dependents. It is unclear whether the house or the piece of land was perceived as personal property, but the fact is that some of the lists include information such as “houses that belonged to Joaquim José de Andrade,” or “owned by the tavern keeper Amaro.”Footnote ⁷³ This suggests efforts to generalize a Portuguese land tenure system built around restrictions. It privileged smallholder plots where agriculture was practiced. Decades later, many of these residents put their land plots up for sale, demonstrating that the land had been privatized and commodified.Footnote ⁷⁴

At the borderlands outside of Portuguese jurisdiction, officers listed the names and sizes of African states and made efforts to delimit territories, incorporating local notions of fluid frontiers and mobile capitals. Expressions such as “land of Galangues,” “soba Canina’s lands,” and “territories of Ginga and Cassange” in official documents (as well as in Map I.2 in the Introduction) reveal how Portuguese officers had limited knowledge of the territory, recognized African jurisdiction over their countries, and incorporated local practices of using trees, rocks, and rivers as political limits in the colonial space.Footnote ⁷⁵ It also suggests that these lands were not under colonial control but under the jurisdiction of African rulers, as their dominium, and that the administration recognized them as such.

Vague notions of lands and territories accord with how the landscape was mapped: The local power struggles between African rulers, their neighbors, and the colonial presence created an imaginary political space for Europeans. In 1798, an unidentified colonial officer produced a report about the land possession of the soba of Humbe and his disputes with his neighbors. In this rich report, there is a clear recognition of Humbe’s territory and his rights over his land and people. According to the account, “previously, the sobas of Humbe, Kiluanji, Mutahucamba , Kilombo Kiacatubia, Bango A Kitamba, Bumba Danla, Gonguembo, and Mussuço Hembo were vassals of Queen Njinga, who later came under the control of the [Portuguese] Majesty. They had and have their lands from the south to the north, crossed by the Kwanza River, until the shores of the river Lombige.”Footnote ⁷⁶ Ruler Mussuço began to slowly settle his people within the limits of Humbe, sending macotas (the heads of lineages and the ruler’s advisers) to establish themselves there. They later tried to claim Humbe’s territories as their own “without having rights over them.” The account continues, “In the lands of the Soba Mutta Hucamba, between the rivers mentioned earlier, the intrusion of macotas from Dembo Caculo is not allowed.”

In the lands of the soba Quilombo Quiacatubia, there was an alliance with smaller rulers, the sobetas, regarding who could settle. Afraid of what the Dembo Caculo Cacahenda intended, the soba of Humbo then “under a strange way against the laws of the [Portuguese] Majesty and the law of his state, usurped most of his lands, lands that [Humbo] owns since the establishment of his state, securing possession in time immemorial by his ancestors as the natural lords of their land. [The soba] cannot accept that the Dembo [Caculo Cacahenda], who is unable to secure access to the land through justice (or the law), unfairly removed [Humbe and his people] from the land due to the fact that [Dembo] is [militarily] stronger and more powerful.” The soba requested the King of Portugal to “order the Dembo Caculo Cacahenda to stay in his lands, and to not usurp the land of others.”Footnote ⁷⁷ This account was probably produced by the ruler of Humbe and stresses his conception of land use rights, and his role as the legitimate occupant transmitted through his ancestors. In his own words, he was the natural lord of the communal land, with usage and tenure rights based in generations of remembered history. Yet the colonial archive does not recognize the authorship of the letter or even how colonial officers apprehended local knowledge to justify land expropriation.Footnote ⁷⁸ Humbo, located south of the Kwanza River but north of Benguela and east of Benguela-Velha, was at the borderland of the Portuguese empire, a clear space in which rulers could claim dominium and negotiate them with the colonial powers and neighboring leaders who aspired to occupy the land and claim rights. As the ruler said, conflicts could arise: “If he does not secure the restitution of his land, there will be war between him and his allies and the Dembo Caculo Cacahenda, with death, violence, and cruelty, that your excellency can avoid among your vassals.”Footnote ⁷⁹

Before the nineteenth-century enclosure, conflicts over land use and occupation relied on customs and practice drawn from de facto occupation, not necessarily recognized as legitimate by all the actors involved. The competition for land increased in the nineteenth century with the end of slave exports and the establishment of the plantation economy, as well as the consolidation of the idea in Europe that “property is the most absolute way of possessing things.”Footnote ⁸⁰ In this moment of transformation, legislation was established to guarantee de jure rights, that is, officially sanctioned. The process in which de facto rights are transformed into de jure rights was and is inherently political and privileges the claims of those in power. The debates over land use before the nineteenth century centered on the negotiations between law, colonization, and the claims for sovereignty that both Portuguese and local rulers employed.

Conclusion

Contested land regimes, natural resources, and wealth accumulation have been the norm in West Central African history. Before and even during Portuguese colonialism, rulers and commoners collected material goods and invested in items associated with expanding networks of free and enslaved dependents. Conflict over land use and occupation rights predates the nineteenth century, and different actors clashed over rights and claims. Firstcomers, latecomers, and Europeans disputed rights over land, cattle, and people due to their different and competing views regarding legitimate actors of conquest, possession, use, and control.

Ideas about accumulation, wealth, and rights underwent profound changes over three centuries. Since the early seventeenth century, local rulers and colonial officers contested and negotiated rights, jurisdiction, and control. Competing frameworks for origins, access, and occupation rights existed in the pre-nineteenth-century period. However, the consolidation of the liberal idea of individual rights over land and people in the nineteenth century privileged the notion that things and people belong to an individual rather than the possibility of shared communal use as was the case in most of the African continent. The fact that African societies did not dispose of or sell land, or that land was not commodified, does not indicate the absence of the idea of use and occupation rights. Scholars’ assumption that things belong to an individual, or even to a state, reinforces the intrinsically violent aspect of asserting rights: If there is a recognized right over land or a person, it is at the expense of someone else who cannot enjoy this privilege.

One of the challenges of understanding local practices of wealth and rights is the paucity of records privileging how West Central African societies, among them the Ndombes, Kilengues, Kakonda, Bailundu, and Bienos, exercised these rights. By the time evidence about customary law was recorded in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, local societies had been transformed by three hundred years of conquest and colonialism. Scholars repeated the idea that West Central Africans lacked property rights or notions of individual ownership produced by colonial bureaucrats, without questioning how this colonial knowledge was created and for what purpose. Scholars also embraced the notion, introduced by the liberal revolutions in the eighteenth century, that land can be bought and sold and treated as a commodity. Yet the evidence available in colonial archives reveals that African rulers claimed jurisdiction and occupation rights, and they exercised land tenure.

Rights over land and people, in many ways the consolidation of individual ownership over communal rights, are not a stable category but the result of an intense negotiation among social groups and between elites and the lower classes. Historicizing the notion of property is central to any understanding of knowledge production about the past. Evidence, observations, and history itself have changed over time. Assumptions that landed property is a mark of a superior system must be decentered. The risk is falling into a pattern of acclaiming the existence of ownership notions and rights before the nineteenth century as something positive, as if owning land indicates a rational economic system. Ownership of land, of people, in the end reveals that the history of accumulation corresponds with dispossession and the exacerbation of inequalities.