In a magnificently researched monograph based on in-depth archival investigation, Mariana Candido considers the rights held in people, things and land that existed in the colonial Angolan coastal town of Benguela and its immediate hinterlands. The overall argument is that Africanist historiography has underestimated African forms of landownership by focusing on the ownership of people (wealth in people). Candido’s focus on African forms of landownership prior to Portuguese conquest, along with the implementation of new forms of property with Portuguese colonialism, attempts to correct this bias. It is an ambitious and thought-provoking argument that raises questions and might require some qualifications.
Land is a vague category. Central Africans were acutely aware of relationships between people and fixed natural resources (in modern capitalist terms, immovable property), as evidenced in different titles and terminologies. There were ‘owners’ of cultivated lands, bush, underground and above-ground resources (copper and salt, for example), fertile valleys, lagoons, fishing grounds and geographic spaces such as caravan routes. There was also conquered land, ruled by appointed imperial administrators, even prior to European conquest. Obviously, Central Africans articulated rights over these resources. Candido’s emphasis on the singularity of landownership in Central African societies tends to diminish some of the varieties in types of relationship between people and fixed resources, reducing a myriad of relationships to the idea of land as communal and oriented around first-comer rights.
Candido contrasts African communal landownership with the imposition of private property on land during nineteenth-century Portuguese colonial rule. The archival evidence generally concerns land held in areas conquered by the Portuguese. It is unsurprising that in such conquered territory land becomes a site of contestation for conquistadores and conquered populations alike. The colony of Angola, in Candido’s description, resembles the settler land grabs of the Cape Colony, the Boer Republics, or, a little later in time, the Kenyan highlands and Rhodesia. In these cases, colonial land acquisition created populations vulnerable to slavery and servitude, as Candido argues for the Angolan case. Yet in Angola the enclosure of land does not appear as complete as in other European settler colonies of the same time period. Candido’s research reveals the agency of colonized Africans who were not enslaved, particularly women, in formal economic activities and colonial property regimes. Perhaps it is a bias in scholarship, but it is difficult to find African women with as much recorded wealth and as much agency in the colonial courts of the Cape Colony or the Boer Republics during the nineteenth century. Portuguese colonialism was brutal, not benign: this reader was left without an explanation for the distinctive agency of these groups in the Portuguese colonial context.
Candido finds that colonial administrators and jurists dismissed African forms of landownership outside the colonial legal regime. Their myths about the lack of African landownership acted, Candido reckons, as an excuse for land expropriation in the name of a progressive and liberal civilizing mission. According to Candido, these colonial theories influenced later Africanist scholarship. Perhaps. But to this reader, these intellectual threads are not well established. Moreover, context matters. The greater influence on later scholarship were discussions within Marxist historiography that identified relationships between different factors of production, land, labour and capital with the mobilization of undercapitalized and land-rich African economies in the emerging capitalist plantation sector of the Atlantic World. Scholars wanted to move beyond Eurocentric Marxist understandings of the relationships between land, labour and capital, particularly the transition between feudalism and capitalism, to one that better explained the dynamic relationship between forms of property in many parts of Africa and the Atlantic World. It was not, as Candido implies, a reification of a theory of liberal freehold and individual property as an intrinsic and ahistorical European system. Of course, scholarship was uneven. The discussion involved many more scholars than those North Americans and Europeans who generally form Candido’s target, including African and Afro-Caribbean scholars. The best adopted dynamic models by focusing on debt and the fungibility of assets in undercapitalized economies (an issue that needs to be appreciated when discussing forms of landownership in an emerging capitalist system). Some others, admittedly, made ‘wealth in people’ a dogma, an unchanging aspect of African law. Candido is correct to push back against this dogma and encourage investigation into the diverse and changing rights in people, things and land.
It is unclear how much colonial theories or colonial archives reveal about landownership beyond the colonial frontier – in this case east of the Kwanza and Kwango rivers. For many Africanist scholars working in a non-colonial context, the wealth in people model, a tired target, has given way to an emphasis on ‘wealth in knowledge as wealth in people’. There is a remarkable opportunity to change that formulation, along the lines of ‘wealth in knowledge as wealth in property’. This formulation would help further investigate the wealth in knowledge, in oral traditions, in language and in material culture that helped to construct property regimes. It will take us beyond the archives that Candido is so adept at using and beyond a singular construct of communal land tenure.
Candido shows that the development of rights in fixed property during the age of Atlantic abolition and in the name of civilization and progress was underpinned by violence that dispossessed and disempowered. Now, another progressive cause stemming from abuses by the wealthy global North, the carbon exchange economy, underpins the dispossession of African lands.Footnote 1 By insisting that African land was never empty but was property dispossessed by colonial and postcolonial elites, such land grabs can be exposed. Like all revealing works of history, Candido sharpens our view of historic and ongoing structures of inequality.
