Um Portuense em África

In the mid-1860s, Silva Porto decided to entitle his writings Viagens e apontamentos de um portuense em África. The idiosyncratic nature of the title’s second part is a good place to begin unpacking some of the biographical and cultural meanings associated with how Silva Porto identified himself. The choice of the demonym Portuense, i.e., an inhabitant of Porto, cannot be reduced to an expression of Silva Porto’s attachment to his birth city. It points to a much more interesting process of cultural exchange that reveals Silva Porto’s life trajectory and identity.

In 1836, aged nineteen and having lived in Brazil for seven years, Silva Porto adopted the name of his hometown as his surname to distinguish himself from other people in Bahia surnamed Silva (^{Cordeiro 1891}: 3). But this distinctive function of the name¹⁰ would only acquire the idiosyncratic sense implied in the title after he crossed the Atlantic three years later.¹¹ In 1839, already in Luanda and after working for some time as a clerk in two taverns, Silva Porto decided to join one of the long-distance trading caravans that often arrived and departed from the city.¹² So he began his career as a sertanejo, a term that described itinerant traders in the interior (sertão). In 1840, he established himself in Viye, an African polity and by then an established trading center with a resident community of migrant traders connecting Benguela (and at times Luanda) to the markets in the highlands and East Central Africa. Silva Porto arrived in Viye at an opportune time, marked by a cycle of expansion of trade and an increasing number of immigrant traders involved. According to the tradition he recorded, Viye had been politically constituted in the seventeenth century, and its population resulted from people migrating from the South and the Northeast who had settled and mixed with those living in the region.¹³ This population was also shaped by their involvement in multi-scale trade dynamics, which earned it Silva Porto’s label of a “cosmopolitan people.”¹⁴

Viye’s political expansion and connection with the trans-Atlantic slave trade meant that many of these contacts occurred in contexts of violence, subjugation, and raids.¹⁵ The end of the eighteenth century brought intensified contacts with the Portuguese, following a series of military campaigns and the attempt to establish an official presence in the highlands through the creation of a settlement named Amarante.¹⁶ In 1791, according to Silva Porto’s records, António Francisco da Conceição, a Brazilian trader from Bahia, had been nominated by the governor-general to occupy the post of “capitão-mor e juiz da provincia do Bihé,” with the task of attracting “vassals” and expanding the “dominions” of the Portuguese crown by “the just and gentle means of peace, justice and commerce.”¹⁷ After a period of hostility towards foreign traders in the early nineteenth century, the 1830s saw the election of a new sovereign, Mbandua, more favorable to traders,¹⁸ as well as a new Portuguese (nominal) authority with the appointment of Francisco José Coimbra, a trader of Goan descent from Caconda.

Like most immigrant traders in Viye, Silva Porto established his own settlement (povoação), which he improved and expanded over time. In writing, he referred to it as Belmonte, a name given by a fellow sertanejo, evocative of the beauty of the surrounding landscape, but the local population called it “Proto” or “Porto” since traditionally all povoações of some size had the name of their founder or chief.¹⁹ Thus, to resume the argument above, Silva Porto had adopted the name of his land of birth to distinguish himself in Brazil, but later this distinction occasioned that, according to local political traditions, his surname became the identifier of his place, turning Porto into a Luso-African toponym. Identifying as a Portuense captured this meaning, almost becoming a self-referential adjective. Furthermore, the choice of Portuense is also significant considering its likely alternative, A Portuguese in Africa. It indicates that the way Silva Porto idealized his connection to Portugal did not prevail over his identity ties with his native Porto and his African Porto, i.e., Belmonte. This idiosyncrasy does not mean that Silva Porto did not hold strong convictions about what the Portuguese colonial project should be and the benefits of its extension to the central highlands. Nevertheless, as the military occupation of the central highlands only took place at the time of his death, he never wrote with any certainties or support derived from an effective colonial presence in Viye.

Biographical Sketch of Silva Porto’s Archive

What I am referring to here as Silva Porto’s archive corresponds to what exists today in the Public Library of Porto and the Geographical Society of Lisbon. The collection in Porto includes thirteen bound manuscript volumes, with 4,664 numbered pages, whereas the collection in Lisbon is larger and more diverse. Overall, it contains five bound manuscript volumes;²⁰ a 75-page manuscript entitled Memorial de Mucanos, which consists of an account of the reparations Silva Porto had to pay for various crimes and offences committed by people who were part of his settlement, according to the local legal and political customs; more than sixty smaller manuscript notebooks, with a variable number of pages, including travel accounts, vocabularies, and different notes; a wealth of correspondence, including two bound volumes with copies of the official correspondence concerning the 1877-1880 scientific expedition,²¹ two other bound volumes with more copies of Silva Porto’s correspondence, and fifteen folders with hundreds of letters sent by Silva Porto but mostly received by him; several other separate documents; and finally, photographs and personal objects. These vast and rich materials contain elements that could help us imagine what once constituted Silva Porto’s archive and library in Viye, which included not only the book from which Montesquieu’s quotation was extracted but many others he comments on the text. A thorough study of his correspondence alone might allow the identification of other documents and similar archives, namely of other traders or even of the court of Viye and other polities in the region. This article, however, focuses only on what is accessible today in the two institutions mentioned above.

Scholars of West Central Africa have known Silva Porto for many decades and drawn from his archive in their analysis of long-distance trade and the region’s political history.²² Part of the brief sociohistorical contextualization of Viye presented in the first section was based on Silva Porto’s archive, showing his interest and efforts in collecting, interpreting, and recording this type of information. Although I cannot expand here on the ways he came to write about the region’s social and political history, it is a critical dimension of the use historians have made of his writings, even if sometimes to express their reservations. Missionary and anthropologist G. Childs, for example, who worked in the central highlands during the colonial period, doubted the information provided by Silva Porto (for instance, about the political genealogy of Viye) as it did not conform with that of other more recognized observers such as the explorer A. Serpa Pinto and the missionary John Tucker (^{Childs 1949}: 172).²³ Nevertheless, these were later observers. If we consider that literacy was part of the dynamics of trade in Viye, as attested by the letters in the archive, what distinguishes Silva Porto from other traders was not the practice of writing and recording events relevant to the control of commercial operations but rather his tenacity and archival zeal. Both show that Silva Porto was, to some extent, convinced of the importance of his writings.²⁴ The closest and most widely used source in the historiography is the book published by the Hungarian trader Lázló Magyar (1818-1864), who lived in the region between 1849 and 1857.²⁵ Official colonial sources for the region are not as abundant as those for coastal areas such as Luanda or Benguela, given the weakness of the colonial presence in Viye until the end of the century. The same applies to ecclesiastical and missionary sources, as Catholic and Protestant missions only established themselves there in the 1880s.

Considering its size and potential, his archive remains a relatively underexplored source, especially if considered as a whole.²⁶ Two sets of challenges help to explain this. The first concerns issues of access and time, leading most researchers to resort to the existing editions of Silva Porto’s writings, which, valuable as they are, correspond to only a limited portion of the whole. Related to this is the lack of an updated catalogue of what is at the SGL. Although there are at least three descriptions of the archive (the most recent was published in 1977), they are not well known to researchers.²⁷

The second set of challenges concerns the text itself. Silva Porto’s handwriting is reasonably legible, although Luciano Cordeiro, one of the founders of the SGL who received Silva Porto’s materials after his death, thought it was “tight” and “tortuous,” “reminiscent of zigzags through closed forests” (^{Cordeiro 1891}: 5). The main difficulty emerges from a degree of syntactical incoherence that renders some parts difficult to understand. In addition, the vocabulary reflects a cultural and linguistic mixture between mainly, but not exclusively, nineteenth-century Portuguese, Kimbundu, and Umbundu, which can be demanding to read and merits its own analysis. It reflects Silva Porto’s life, namely his education, migratory experience in Brazil, and, on the other side of the Atlantic, and his reading habits. Silva Porto had an advanced understanding of Kimbundu and Umbundu, and he possibly spoke a mixture similar to the written text, almost a “creole language,” in Cordeiro’s words (1891: 5).

In addition to these challenges, further issues arise regarding the series of volumes with his notes, starting with correctly characterizing and dating them. Although I cannot elaborate on their analysis here, I want to highlight three critical aspects for an understanding of the archive. The first contradicts the perspective that the volumes in Porto and Lisbon constitute two parallel versions of the manuscript, with the latter being the draft and the former the more polished version. The second aspect is that they reflect a combination of genres, including travel accounts, diary entries of periods when he was not travelling, biographical and ethnographic vignettes and chapters, vocabularies, comments on books and newspaper articles, and copies of correspondence and official documents. They are an archive within the archive, which raises the question of whether seeing them as “diaries” (diários) captures the richness and complexity of the text. My analysis suggests that seeing them as diaries does not capture the complex and changing ways Silva Porto conceived his writings. Making sense of this complexity is the third aspect because the volumes reflect three distinct literary projects emerging at different times. As such, the SGL collection is not incomplete, as it has been hypothesized, and cannot be seen as a parallel version of the BPMP (^{Santos 1986}: 15).

Briefly, Silva Porto’s first literary project was a travel book. It included a series of five travel accounts and a chapter on “native customs and habits,” which he entitled Cinco viagens ou costumes e usos gentilicos. It was written between mid-1846 and 1856, and Silva Porto tried to publish it in Lisbon. It is unclear what happened to this manuscript, but it was possibly similar to SGL’s first volume. The second project was what Silva Porto named diário dos meos apontamentos, “diary of my notes,” which he began on 25 October 1860. Only two of the eighteen volumes bear this title, one in the SGL, starting on 25 October 1860 and ending on 31 July 1862, and the other in the BPMP, which continues from 1 August 1862 until 20 April 1866.²⁸ These two volumes include uninterrupted daily entries covering Silva Porto’s life during these years, including a period between January and September 1863 during which he lived in Benguela, and several journeys, namely to Benguela and to Bulozi or Lui as he always wrote. Finally, the third project was what became known as Viagens e apontamentos de um portuense em África, which resulted from Silva Porto’s decision to revise his work in 1866. The motivation behind it is unclear, but he had recently read Major Gamitto’s O Muata Cazembe, the account of the 1831-1832 expedition to Kazembe, published in Lisbon in 1854. This reading likely inspired him to resume the idea of publishing a travel book. Shortly afterwards, he decided to change its title to Viagens e apontamentos. He writes about this in the first entry of what would otherwise be the third volume of the diário, which was then also renamed Viagens e apontamentos.

The new title already points towards a larger literary project taking shape, which two years later, in 1868, went beyond a simple revision and became a fusion of all his writings, i.e., his first work (the travel book) and the diários that had just been renamed Viagens e apontamentos. His motivation was again connected to one of his readings, this time a book published in Lisbon under the title Exame das viagens do doutor Livingstone (^{Lacerda 1867}). It was the first time that Silva Porto came across what David Livingstone had written about their meeting sixteen years earlier.²⁹ Lacerda’s vehement argumentation against Livingstone’s pioneering claims and portrayal of the Portuguese and their continued involvement with the slave trade left Silva Porto no other choice but to pen his reply. The same day he finished writing his comments, he began that larger literary project.³⁰ In February 1869, he began rewriting the new Viagens e apontamentos de um portuense em África, his magnum opus. This initial momentum, however, faded in the face of the immensity of the task of going through everything he had written thus far. The revision of the first book alone took Silva Porto more than three years to finish. In the meantime, he was still writing the other Viagens e apontamentos, the diaries, by then on the sixth volume. In the end, he only revised the text until 3 June 1864, roughly halfway through the second diário.³¹

In sum, the revised Viagens e apontamentos de um portuense em África, which today correspond to the first, second and third (“3 bis”) volumes at the BPMP,³² were written roughly between 1869 and the 1870s, although they cover a period from 1846 to 1864. In turn, the unrevised Viagens e apontamentos constitute a sequence that flows from the diario starting on 25 October 1860 to the tenth volume ending on 13 March 1884.³³ These are not structured in chapters like the others because they are, after all, a continuation of Silva Porto’s diario dos meos apontamentos, even if their writing was influenced by the motivations and contingencies associated with the other literary projects. At the end of 1884, Silva Porto traveled to Portugal and donated the ten volumes to the Commercial Geographical Society of Porto. The last three volumes were written after this. The eleventh is unique because it was written three times, with copies sent as gifts to the Government of Benguela and the Geographical Societies of Porto and Lisbon. The last two volumes cover the final three years of Silva Porto’s life. He still managed to send the twelfth volume to Porto in February 1890, but the last one was brought to Portugal and handed to the SGL after Silva Porto’s death.³⁴

Historicizing Silva Porto’s archive and unravelling his messy writings as conforming to different literary projects emerging at different times contribute to a better understanding of the source. It cautions against the propensity of assuming a diary entry date as the date of writing, which can be problematic since the first three volumes of the Porto collection were written after the subsequent three, although they cover prior events. It also draws attention to issues of interpretation and vocabulary changes associated with the revisions that cannot be addressed here. Nevertheless, these projects have in common that they were all written by Silva Porto in West Central Africa, either in Viye, Benguela, or while travelling. Thus, along with the rest of Silva Porto’s archive, they reflect the characteristics of the changing and moving African worlds he inhabited.

A Luso-African Archive: Exploratory Notes

Building on the archive’s biographical sketch elaborated above, this section serves as a research program aimed at exploring the archive’s potential for a study from below of the trading community of which Silva Porto was part during almost all his life. Some of the questions guiding this future research include the following: who was part of that community? How was it constituted at the crossroads between trade and the movement of people, languages, cultural habits, and things? Which practices and forms of sociality characterize it? How did they relate to the hosting society? How did it change over time?

While scholars such as L. ^{Heywood (1984}) and M. E. Madeira ^{Santos (1986}) paved the way for this research, they did not engage in historicizing the archive nor examined in depth the categories and practices of classification emerging from it. This is one way to begin answering the questions raised above. The trading community in Viye during the early years of Silva Porto’s residence in the 1840s can be grasped thanks to a survey undertaken by Joaquim Rodrigues Graça, a trader and resident in Golungo Alto (above the Kwanza), who was there between 1843 and 1846.³⁵ The title of the survey indicates the social diversity of this trading community and the categories used to classify people-“Map of the residents of the province of Bihé, natural children of the Portuguese who emigrated from the two markets of Benguela and Luanda, as well as from other presídios [fortresses] and districts, in addition to the itinerant traders that are established here.”³⁶

The reference to “natural affiliation” alludes to the children of unofficial marriages between African women and Portuguese immigrants coming from multiple places besides Benguela and Luanda, as well as other itinerant traders. Graça listed by name an impressive number of one hundred moradores,³⁷ whom he characterized according to origin, employment, place of residence, and “quality” (qualidade). The latter described a physical attribute (skin color) according to four classificatory terms: preto, pardo, branco, and cabodo.³⁸ The vast majority of this resident trading community was composed of men whom Graça considered “Black” (54), followed by those of mixed heritage (42), hypothetically the “natural children.” In terms of origins, they were primarily locals from Viye (52), who in turn were mainly pardos (27) and cabodos (4), which indicates later generations of immigrant traders of Portuguese or Brazilian extraction. But there were also traders from Ambaca (16), Golungo Alto (11), Luanda (7), Pungo Andongo (5), trading centers, colonial administrative and military posts on the hinterland of Luanda, and finally Caconda, the fortress and trading post to the southwest of Viye (3). Finally, six were identified as “White,” four coming from Lisbon, one from Madeira, and one from Porto, who was evidently Silva Porto.

Besides showing how socially diverse the trading community in Viye was in the 1840s, the survey identified those one hundred men as one particular social group. The categories used reveal the interplay between who classifies and what/who is being classified, so their examination furthers our understanding of how they operated in Viye, a context historically marked by the interaction between people with different cultural backgrounds.³⁹ The people listed by Graça composed a heterogeneous group with four things in common: they were all men with Lusophone names, considered moradores of foreign origins (even if these origins were in the past, as in the case of the immigrants’ descendants), and involved in trading activities. Graça considered three trade-related occupations: negociantes, i.e., traders who made up the majority of the group, also known as sertanejos; agências, a term that probably referred to men responsible for recruiting porters, commonly known as pombeiros;⁴⁰ and finally, fewer in number, there were caixeiros, i.e., clerks or bookkeepers.

From this analysis, we can grasp something about the division of labor within the group. Men from different origins and “qualities” could become negociantes and caixeiros, but the same did not apply in the case of agências, who were all “qualified” (i.e. categorized) as “Black.” Thus, we can infer that trade was associated with some upward social mobility, as men from different origins and “qualities” could become traders and clerks. However, at the level of agências, i.e., pombeiros, the fact that all men were “qualified” as “Black” suggests that those otherwise categorized tended not to do this work. Another question can be raised about who is missing from the survey and why. Other people involved in trade, such as women, porters, servants, or enslaved people, were not listed possibly due to status, meaning they were not considered moradores (but their dependants).⁴¹ At the same time, there were other traders, pombeiros, and clerks in Viye who were also not listed because they were not moradores, but worked within the realm of the sovereign and the country’s political elites. This points to the autonomy attributed to this group of migrant traders vis-à-vis the Viyen society. One final revealing aspect of the list concerns the category “qualidade,” mobilized by Graça based on an empirical ascription of the terms preto, pardo, branco, and cabodo. As mentioned above, most moradores were considered “Black,” but there were a significant number of mixed-heritage people and six “Whites.” It is not difficult to assume that the second group were the “natural children” of older immigrants of European extraction with African women. However, we cannot rule out that some of those Graça considered “Black” could also be descendants of or related to those unions, especially those listed as being from Viye. This nuance raises the question of the relevance of such distinctions and the person making them, and Graça was indeed an outsider on an official mission. So other questions arise: was this perspective consistent with local practices of categorizing people in Viye? Were these categories used, and if so, were they used similarly? How was this group of immigrants and their descendants, resident in Viye and involved in trading, perceived locally?

Silva Porto’s archive is a rich source for exploring these issues further because it contains countless detailed narrations of multiple people involved in trade, not only moradores. Many of the names on Graça’s list appear in his writings, making it possible to research their trajectories and experiences.⁴² However, the richness of the archive also lies in the access it provides to a perspective that is different from other more official colonial or outside sources. It is significant that terms such as pardo or similar were used in official sources concerning other regions, as discussed by M. ^{Candido (2008}) for the case of the Caconda censuses or C. ^{Madeira Santos (2019}), but are practically absent in Silva Porto’s writings. In turn, the most common way in which Silva Porto referred to traders was through the word brancos, articulated in various expressions, such as brancos naturais do paiz e europeus or brancos estranhos e naturais do paiz (respectively, “native and European whites” or “foreign and native whites”). In one of his vocabularies, Silva Porto explained that the word for “white” was “Quindér or Xindér,” which was given to Europeans and their descendants.⁴³ “Foreign whites” were the immigrant traders who were able to create their own settlements in Viye, like Silva Porto, and their offspring were “native whites” regardless of their “quality.”⁴⁴ Further analysis is needed about second-generation traders coming from other trading posts outside Viye and how they were perceived; likewise regarding the place of women and other people who composed the povoações dos brancos, especially enslaved people and servants, their backgrounds and social trajectories; not to mention the group’s interactions with the “Bianos,” whom Silva Porto described as the “children of the soba,” a “cosmopolitan people,” itself also very heterogeneous as mentioned in the first section.

Much remains to be studied about this group from a critical analysis of Silva Porto’s Luso-African archive, including which other cross-cultural practices characterized the group, such as language, religion, or norms associated with the regulation of social and economic life. Considering linguistic practices, Silva Porto’s writings show a mixture of several languages, mainly Portuguese, Kimbundu, and Umbundu, as mentioned above. His transit between these languages is remarkable. Often words introduced as Portuguese were not part of the official lexicon, demonstrating their incorporation in the local use of the language-for example, capata is described as “the Portuguese term here applied to the inebriating drink prepared from maize cobs”;⁴⁵ or the word libata, “Portuguese term here applied to settlements [povoações] in general,”⁴⁶ whose translation to Umbundu is also provided as “himbo or quimbo,” challenging the expectation that this latter language would be preferential among those living in Viye, including the trading community, as it was the predominant language of the region.⁴⁷ Thus, another facet of the research potential of Silva Porto’s archive regards the field of socio-historical studies of African languages and language contact in this region.⁴⁸

The analysis of these practices allows us to understand the processes of mixture and distinction that characterized Luso-Africans and their social interactions in Viye during this period. Many of these topics are raised and discussed in the historiography on social groups and identities in contexts historically marked by contacts between Portuguese or other immigrant and local African populations, particularly in West and West Central Africa, and the term Luso-African has become somewhat consolidated to refer to them.⁴⁹ This historiography goes back several decades and has intersected with debates on creolization in the Atlantic world, so the case of Viye is worth exploring in dialogue with it.⁵⁰ Its relevance lies, to a large extent, in the possibility of advancing M. ^{Candido’s (2018}) discussion regarding how the processes of creolization also affected the interior. The history of Viye was marked from early on by the movement and crossing of people with diverse backgrounds, as well as by multi-scale trade dynamics. The arrival and establishment of foreign traders, namely those of European and Brazilian extraction, from the end of the eighteenth century onwards was not a novelty from the local point of view. Traders like Silva Porto were always on the move, looking for business opportunities, but they also relied heavily on having suitable domestic arrangements, including functioning establishments and trusting relationships, and, in sum, on their successful insertion within the local society.