The Benguela District Court and its Historical Archive

Benguela is a coastal city in Angola with a population of around 600,000 inhabitants. It is also the capital of the Benguela province, which has over two million inhabitants according to the 2014 census, the most recent carried out in Angola.Footnote ⁸ Its settlement goes back several centuries, although limited archaeological and historical research prevents us from dating the occupation of the coastal area.Footnote ⁹ By the early seventeenth century Ndombe people raised cattle along the rivers now called Cavaco and Coringe, and lived under different chiefdoms. The main political leader appears to have been Peringue, or at least Portuguese conquistadores identified Peringue as a powerful political leader.Footnote ¹⁰ Oral traditions indicate that Benguela was called Ombaka, meaning “trading center” in Umbundu, suggesting that farmers, fishers, and cattle raisers flocked to the coast and exchanged goods there, including hives, dried fish, and copper mined in the interior. A complex commercial network existed in this region that connected coastal and inland populations, but by the early seventeenth century the arrival of Portuguese forces disrupted and altered long-distance trade. The local Ndombe were kidnapped and forced to work for the benefit of the small Portuguese force, building a fortress and raising some permanent buildings. This also represented the slow displacement of the pastoral communities settled in the area, who searched for safer regions away from the Portuguese intruders and Atlantic slavers.Footnote ¹¹

The arrival of the Portuguese transformed the landscape and resulted in the establishment of a colonial town similar to other spaces such as Goa, Salvador, or Rio de Janeiro. From this new coastal settlement the slave trade expanded during the seventeenth century, with the demand of slave traders in Havana, Cartagena, Lima, and Buenos Aires.Footnote ¹² After the Dutch attack and occupation of Benguela (1641–48), the links with the colony of Brazil became stronger after troops led by Rio de Janeiro’s Governor, Salvador Correia de Sá, regained Portuguese control of the town in 1649. This event initiated a close relationship between colonial officers and traders based in Brazil and their peers in Benguela, all under Portuguese colonial control. After the 1650s Brazilian-born soldiers patrolled Benguela, joining Portuguese-born men who had spent years in Salvador, Recife, or Rio de Janeiro before crossing the Atlantic to serve in the Portuguese colonies on the African continent. In many ways these agents, whether Brazilian born or not, arrived in Benguela influenced by their experience in Brazil, including expectations and ideas regarding slavery and racial hierarchies.Footnote ¹³ This long history of displacement and violence is not clearly visible in Benguela’s buildings and landscape. Unlike other African coastal cities that have preserved the slave castles or have built memorials to remember the victims of the transatlantic slave trade, Benguela did not. Yet many buildings provide clues about this past and contain rich documents that tell the history of colonialism, slavery, and dispossession.Footnote ¹⁴

At Benguela’s main square, the jardim da administração municipal, an imposing building stands: the Benguela District Court, shown in Figure 1. In one of the building’s storage rooms lie 2,034 court case documents from the colonial period. These lawsuits were filed between 1850 and 1945 and tell the history of African born men and women who fought for rights or who were granted a hearing. They also reveal that law was a key tool in enforcing Portuguese colonial power and enabling the removal and exclusion of African populations. These documents have enormous potential for the writing of a different history about law and justice in West Central Africa, a history that unearths the daily engagement with the law of men and women who are often marginalized in hegemonic narratives about the making of law in Angola.Footnote ¹⁵

Figure 1.

Untitled 1950s postcard depicting the colonial administration buildings in Benguela’s main square, currently occupied by the Tribunal da Comarca de Benguela. Private collection of Mariana Dias Paes.

Since 2017 the authors of this article have been collaborating on the project “História e Direito em Angola: os processos judiciais do Tribunal da Comarca de Benguela (sécs. XIX–XX).”Footnote ¹⁶ The project’s goal was to organize and describe this collection, having used some of the documents on court cases in different individual publications, and to publish an inventory with open access.Footnote ¹⁷ Since the inventory and its introductory text are only available in Portuguese, we present our finding here for an Anglophone audience, considering recent debates over the colonial archive, documentary heritage, and public history.

In other former African colonial jurisdictions records of court cases exist, but in many cases they are summaries of protocols or court registers that describe the case and the decision, with little detail. They tend to be from the last two decades of the nineteenth century and from the twentieth century.Footnote ¹⁸ In contrast, the documents available at the TCB are complete court cases, including information about the conflict, all litigants’ petitions, witnesses’ depositions, transcription and translation into Portuguese of informants’ testimonies, and judges’ decisions. Some cases include eventual appeals sent to superior courts in Luanda or even Lisbon, Portugal.Footnote ¹⁹ Moreover, detailed descriptions of non-Portuguese legal systems and on how people conducted their lives outside of Portuguese jurisdictions appear in these documents. Thus these records offer an extraordinary set of narratives about how people regulated their lives in Benguela and its interior, and how West Central Africans perceived law and justice in the second half of the nineteenth and first half of the twentieth centuries.

The TCB was created in a context of expansion of Portuguese colonial presence in the mid-nineteenth century and efforts to make the territorial occupation more effective, and subsequently legitimize the dispossession of West Central Africans. The mid-nineteenth century was a moment of economic shift, due to the European pressure to bring the transatlantic slave trade to an end and the expansion of the plantation economy along the West Central African coast.Footnote ²⁰ While the documents provide rich information for the legal, social, and cultural history of the region, it is also important to understand the context for the establishment of this specific colonial court and how its creation transformed the judicial structures of local Umbundu-speaking communities.

In addition, the expansion of the judicial system in a context of economic shift exacerbated the fact that since the fifteenth century Portuguese colonialism relied on the expansion of a network of secular and ecclesiastical judicial officials and institutions.Footnote ²¹ Thus, since the establishment of Luanda as the Portuguese commercial and political colonial center in 1575, Lisbon administrators started to appoint judicial staff to fill offices in Portuguese colonial towns. These included Luanda and Benguela along the coast, but eventually other places inland such as Ambaca and Caconda. In many ways the European elites imagined a cohesive administration that could be imposed on different spaces, including territories in the Americas, Asia, or Africa that they did not physically control. However, intentions did not result in concrete or viable control, as some scholars have already explored.Footnote ²²

We have very little information on the judicial positions in West Central Africa and who held them. According to the current state of scholarship, the first ouvidor (a judge that heard appeals from first-instance judges) of Angola took office in 1650, the first juiz de fora (first-instance judge appointed by the Crown) of Angola in 1722, and the first juiz de fora of Benguela in 1776.Footnote ²³ It is not clear if these neat divisions among officers existed in Umbundu legal systems.

From the nineteenth century onward, Portuguese judicial administration in West Central Africa underwent a series of reforms.Footnote ²⁴ In 1836, a decree established that the Province of Angola consisted of a single judicial district that was composed of Luanda, Novo Redondo, Benguela, and the presídios (military/administrative outposts).Footnote ²⁵ Benguela only gained autonomy as a judicial district (comarca) in 1852.Footnote ²⁶ There is currently no information on how exactly these reforms affected chiefdoms and states in Benguela and Luanda’s interior.

Until 1856, litigants could appeal cases heard in Benguela and its interior to courts in Lisbon. In 1856, in the framework of Portugal’s project to expand its colonial control in West Central Africa, the Portuguese government created the Luanda Court of Appeals. It had jurisdiction to hear appeals from all West Central African Portuguese colonial jurisdictions such as Angola, and São Tomé and Príncipe. The Luanda Court of Appeals heard twenty-nine cases from the Benguela district in 1856, but it is not clear where these documents have been stored.Footnote ²⁷ These cases from Benguela judicial district were fewer than the thirty-five from Luanda judicial district, but far more than the six from São Tomé judicial district.Footnote ²⁸ We currently have no information on whether these records have been saved, or even where the collection of the Court of Appeal records may be.Footnote ²⁹

After the independence of Angola (in 1975) the TCB kept the court cases from the colonial period. The TCB is not the only Angolan institution that keeps historical judicial proceedings. For example, the Angolan National Archives (ANA hereafter) holds several uncatalogued judicial proceedings in its collection. There is a possibility that cases from Benguela and its interior are located somewhere among the hundreds of boxes at the ANA collection, but the lack of an inventory makes it difficult to identify these documents.Footnote ³⁰

As for cases judged in the Benguela judicial district, in 2015 researchers José Curto, Frank Luce, and Catarina Madeira-Santos identified 149 documents held at the TCB storage room.Footnote ³¹ However, this effort was limited to a small part of the collection. In our project mentioned earlier, we had the advantage of collaborating with faculty from the Katyavala Bwila University in Benguela to maximize efforts and engage with Benguela historians and law professors who had access to the TCB collection. This allowed us to go beyond the 149 legal records that Curto, Luce, and Madeira-Santos identified in 2015.

The TCB encompasses two buildings (Figure 1). The historical one was built during the nineteenth century, although the precise date is not clear. It contains storage space, administrative quarters, and judges’ offices. The more recent building is where hearings currently take place. In the framework of our project we first identified the existence of court case documents on top of bookshelves on the first floor of the historic TCB building. The same room stores hundreds of nineteenth- and twentieth-century law books and more recent documents, as can be seen in Figure 2. We did not read nor identify these books in the framework of our project.Footnote ³²

Figure 2.

Legal books at the Tribunal da Comarca de Benguela, 2017. Photograph by Yacine Daddi Addoun.

After our initial identification, cleaning, and description of all the colonial court case documents in the smaller room, in July 2019 the TCB staff showed us another storage room where an even larger number of court case records are kept. Due to time, funding, and personal constraints, as well as the COVID-19 pandemic, we decided to focus on the 2,034 court case records stored in the smaller room. Thus the results presented in this article encompass a relevant part of this important collection, but not its entirety.

Several important points should be clarified. First, the TCB is a courthouse. It does not function as an archive, nor does it have archivists responsible for the organization and conservation of historical documents. Second, the legal case documents are piled on top of the shelves without any clear organization, which makes them difficult to access, consult, and cite.Footnote ³³ Third, it is the TCB employees who, informally, maintain these records, without proper training and the absence of a controlled environment or protection against insects. The conservation of these documents faces several obstacles – physical threats such as heat, dust, sunlight, as well as biological ones such as insects, rodents, and fungi. The presence of chemical agents such as humidity and cleaning products accelerate the damage risk. Yet despite all of these problems, in addition to Angola’s four decades of anti-colonial and civil war, these documents have survived.

Describing and Analyzing the Benguela District Court Collection

The support of Katyavala Bwila University was invaluable in describing TCB’s historical collection. The first phase of our project was cleaning and organizing the collection. We organized the documents into twenty-six piles, maintaining their original order (Figure 3) and numbering the stacks from one to twenty-six. Thus this organization is neither chronological nor by type of document. Given the conditions of storage and consultation of the documents, we cannot guarantee that this organization will be maintained in the coming years.

Figure 3.

Numbered piles of court cases at the Tribunal da Comarca de Benguela, 2017. Photograph by Mariana Dias Paes.

Next, we photographed the court cases’ covers and first pages. We then proceeded with a description of the collection in the form of a dataset. The dataset was built with information gathered from these covers. In cases where the cover lacked precise information, we consulted the first page of the case. The information produced was: type of judicial proceeding, first-instance court, appeals court, year the judicial proceeding began, litigants’ name, and litigant’s gender. Occasionally the cover contained additional information. In such cases we gathered this data under “observations.”

By taking the decision of using only information available at the cover of each court case, much valuable information was left out of the inventory. A complete reading of each case could indicate the legal and economic status of litigants and witnesses, who were the lawyers that took part in the case, the precise location of the conflict, and so on. Nevertheless, pursuing other information in addition to the ones we gathered, would entail financial costs and time constraints that we were not able to overcome. Also, the information of the cover of court cases is usually what archivists use to describe these kinds of documents. In this sense, the dataset and the inventory present analogous information that archives in Portuguese-speaking countries produced for judicial documents.

Our project identified 2,034 court cases. The dataset and the published inventory follow the organization of cases in stacks. In the sections corresponding to each stack, individual court cases are described in ascending chronological order. In the case of two or more proceedings initiated in the same year, they follow an increasing alphabetical order based on plaintiff’s first name.

The column “year” refers to the year in which the court case was initiated (Figure 4). The initial year of thirty-seven court cases could not be identified. The initial year of the lawsuit does not necessarily correspond to the date of the facts discussed in the case. Several conflicts started years before a court case was filed to settle them. Also, the fact that the oldest case dates to 1850 does not mean that colonial judges did not hear any conflicts or proceedings in Benguela and its interior before this date. As we mentioned earlier, colonial judicial institutions had existed in the region since at least the eighteenth century, although we have not been able to locate the cases they heard. Thus we can assume that these earlier documents were either destroyed or placed elsewhere.

Figure 4.

Court cases from the Benguela District Court by start year (1850–1945).

As “jurisdiction of origin,” we identified the court where the lawsuit began. In very few cases the jurisdiction of origin was already a second-instance court, such as the Luanda Court of Appeals or the Lisbon Court of Appeals. In the case of letters rogatory, we considered the court that received and processed the letter rogatory. We identified the court that issued the letter rogatory in “observations.” The jurisdiction of origin does not necessarily coincide with the place where the conflict took place, since not every town or village in West Central Africa had colonial judicial institutions. Some level of “forum shopping” also seemed to have occurred because sometimes litigants filed court cases in other cities or villages even when there was a judge in the locale where the conflict began, as can be seen in the map (Figure 5). This suggests a detailed knowledge of the legal bureaucracy in which litigants actively looked for more “friendly” judges and courts.

Figure 5.

Angolan jurisdictions of origin of the Benguela District Court’s cases (1850–1945).

Of the total 2,034 court cases, 1,674 name Benguela as the jurisdiction of origin (82 percent). Although many places have changed names since the independence of Angola in 1975, we have maintained the name and spelling used in the judicial cases, such as Novo Redondo rather than Sumbe. The jurisdiction of origin could not be identified for 198 cases (less than 10 percent of the total). The remaining 8 percent of cases were filed in various jurisdictions of southern Angola, Portugal, Mozambique, and São Tomé and Príncipe, as can be seen in Table 1. Litigants filed appeals in 75 of the total 2,034 cases. The Luanda Court of Appeals heard forty-nine appeals. Other judicial courts in Luanda, in Benguela itself, and in Lisbon heard appeals from different individuals (see Table 2).

Table 1.

Jurisdiction of origin of the Benguela District Court’s cases (1850–1945).

Table 2.

Appeals in court cases of the Benguela District Court’s collection (1850–1945).

Based on how the Portuguese judicial system operated, there should be more appeals that did not return to the first-instance court in Benguela and remained in the archives of the second-instance courts. As for the Luanda Court of Appeals, ANA holds at least part of this collection. Lisbon Court of Appeals’ case documents are at Arquivo Nacional da Torre do Tombo (Portugal National Archives, ANTT hereafter), but they are not catalogued. This prevents researchers from locating and consulting them.Footnote ³⁴ As for the collection of the Portuguese Supreme Court (Supremo Tribunal Justiça, STJ hereafter), we recently learned that it was mostly destroyed due to lack of space and infrastructure. The STJ’s archive maintained court cases originally filed in colonial jurisdictions. We were able to identify one from Benguela, from 1916.Footnote ³⁵ It is not clear if other case documents existed before and were discarded.

We identified 189 types of court cases within the TCB collection. This variety of lawsuits attests that courts played a central role among Benguela’s population, who considered these institutions as legitimate authorities to adjudicate different kinds of conflicts. Four types of lawsuits were filed more than a hundred times: inventories (300), justifications (195), assemblage of a deceased person’s assets (163), and debt executions (126). These most common lawsuits involved property dispute (over things, people, and land) and reveal the importance of litigation for the Benguela society.

Justifications were court cases that were usually filed before another complaint. They were used to create proof of a claim before the filing of the main case. For example, if someone intended to claim rights to a land plot but lacked written proof of this ownership, the person could file a justification. In this judicial procedure judges summoned witnesses who could attest that the plaintiff had in fact exercised possession over the claimed land. The justification record solidified on paper that the community recognized the plaintiff’s possession as legitimate. With the sentence in hand, it was easier to prove ownership rights in other kinds of legal disputes.Footnote ³⁶

The other three types of court cases – inventories, assemblage of assets, and debt executions – reinforce the claim that West Central Africans accumulated and transmitted wealth in material goods.Footnote ³⁷ Over the decades, scholarship on colonial Angola has claimed that West Central Africans only relied on the accumulation of free and enslaved dependents to achieve wealth and social prestige. The collection at the TCB makes it clear that this was not the case. Throughout the centuries West Central Africans not only accumulated “wealth in things,” but also made extensive use of colonial institutions to assert, protect, and transmit wealth.

Litigants

Most recent scholarship on colonial courts in Africa tends to focus on former British and French jurisdictions during the second half of the nineteenth century and the twentieth century. They usually stress that at least for a certain period both the French and the British did not allow non-Europeans to file cases in colonial courts. Non-Europeans usually had to solve their conflicts within the so-called “Native Courts.”Footnote ³⁸ The Portuguese situation had important differences when compared to the most well-known colonial jurisdictions. We are not advocating for Portuguese colonial exceptionalism, but simply recognizing that African legal histories need to consider the fact that, in certain places and times, African agents resorted to colonial courts.Footnote ³⁹

First, the Portuguese built a complex judicial network in West Central Africa well before the Berlin Conference (1884–85). Until the mid-nineteenth century, Portuguese colonial courts heard any kind of case, regardless of the skin color, legal status, gender, or birthplace of the litigant.Footnote ⁴⁰ Research on court cases in Portuguese territories in Europe and the Americas has examined the arguments that indigenous populations, enslaved men and women, and religious minorities such as Muslims and Jews utilized in courts. The Benguela District was no different from other regions. Within the TCB’s collection one can find African men and women, both free and enslaved, litigating and petitioning to Portuguese judges.

A group of elite African women – donas – gained prominence among litigants in the TCB court cases.Footnote ⁴¹ Eighty-five donas participated in court cases as plaintiffs or defendants. Most were litigants in one or two court cases, following the pattern of the total collection. However, some stand out from this pattern, having litigated in three or more cases, as can be seen in Table 3.

Table 3.

Donas who litigated in three or more cases of the Benguela District Court’s collection (1850–1945).

We have been able to identify 1,469 litigants as men and 225 as women. Thus donas composed 38 percent of female litigants. As other scholars have shown for other parts of the African continent, a surprising number of African women appealed to colonial courts.Footnote ⁴² More attention to the TCB records could reveal new information about women’s social networks, as well as historicize the institution of marriage, for example, or even understand morality and sexuality. These records provide much needed details about people’s intimate lives, as well as the role women played in society. The economic role of West Central African women has received scholarly attention in recent years, in part due to the rich primary sources available for the colony of Angola.Footnote ⁴³ The TCB collection adds to this material, contributing new and untapped information. Free, freed or enslaved West Central African women were not on the margins of documents; single, married, and widowed women were active historical agents, and their roles are clearly registered in court cases. One aspect that may not be familiar to every scholar is the fact that Portuguese law did not prevent women from inheriting and owning property.Footnote ⁴⁴ These legal possibilities were not intended to benefit colonial subjects. However, as the TCB collection clearly reveals, West Central African women learned about the law and the advantages it could bring them, as well as its challenges.

The woman who litigated most frequently was Dona Teresa de Jesus Ferreira Torres Barruncho. Dona Teresa was born in Novo Redondo. Her first husband was Joaquim Ferreira Torres, a merchant in Luanda. When he died, she married the Portuguese José Luis da Silva Viana who held numerous colonial offices, including that of governor of Benguela, and also acted as a trader.Footnote ⁴⁵

A TCB court case reveals that in 1854 Dona Teresa’s second husband, Silva Viana, was involved in the smuggling of human beings. The document describes the taking, seizure, examination, evaluation, and deposit of 194 captives awaiting shipment in Cuio.Footnote ⁴⁶ Since the export of enslaved Africans had been prohibited since 1836 in the Portuguese Empire, the case reveals the illegal nature of the activity and the involvement of the highest colonial authority in the trade in enslaved people.

After Silva Viana’s death Dona Teresa continued to operate in the long-distance trade. Like other members of the colonial elite, she invested in the accumulation of dependents and enslaved people. In addition to owning human beings in Benguela, Dona Teresa consolidated her position as the owner of farms in Luacho, Dombe Grande, and Equimina. At this time she was married to the newly arrived governor of Benguela, Vicente Ferrer Barruncho, sworn in in 1856.Footnote ⁴⁷

The considerable number of cases in which Dona Teresa litigated shows her ability to use colonial institutions to collect debts from partners, register the sale of property, and exercise possession over enslaved people. In the 1860s she acquired land from smallholders. Some were impoverished Brazilian and Portuguese immigrants who had recently arrived in Benguela and were unable to make their land productive. Aware of the colonial law that required cultivation within five years of the land grant, Dona Teresa filed a petition to the Overseas Council asking to be nominated administrator of unproductive land. As a result, she incorporated three agricultural estates in Dombe Grande. One of them held more than 300 enslaved people who cultivated sugarcane and cotton.Footnote ⁴⁸

In 1861 the Portuguese Overseas Council authorized a concession of 9,259 hectares to Dona Teresa. However, this land was occupied by sobas, local rulers, who lost their property since they were not able to provide evidence of ownership as required by Portuguese courts.Footnote ⁴⁹ As a result of her economic consolidation and commercial expansion, Dona Teresa established the Teresa Barruncho Society, a lucrative export company, and one of the largest suppliers of cotton to the colonial administration.Footnote ⁵⁰

In 1868 Dona Teresa initiated a judicial dispute with a local soba, Kipumo, arguing that he was incapable of making his land productive. This was an argument that colonial officers used in order to seize and redistribute indigenous land. The colonial government sided with Dona Teresa, ordering Kipumo to vacate his land. In many ways, the government helped the businesswoman to recruit impoverished and disposed farmers. The colonial government also offered low interest loans, provided labor in the form of freed people forced to work, and sold machinery at cost.Footnote ⁵¹

Very few litigants took part in ten or more court cases, as can be seen in Table 4. Legal records allow us to reconstruct these cases, which might not be registered in other primary sources. For example, looking at other primary sources did not allow us to understand the central economic role Dona Teresa played in Benguela; it was the legal records that reveal the extent of her investments and properties. Most of these main litigants were part of the colonial administration and were involved in slave trade activities or in cash crop production.

Table 4.

Main litigants in court cases of the Benguela District Court’s collection (1850–1945).

As can be seen in Table 4, another one of the main litigants was José Ferreira Gomes, a member of one of the wealthiest families in Benguela. Using court cases from the TCB collection, Roquinaldo Ferreira reconstructed the history of two generations of the Ferreira Gomes family, attesting that such documents are important in different types of research, including biographies and microhistories. In 1785 Francisco Ferreira Gomes was born in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, and served in the colonial all-Black militia, which implies he was a Black man. In 1800 he was convicted of a crime in Rio de Janeiro and sent to Benguela in exile. In Benguela he established ties with the prominent Gaspar family and married Florinda Josefa Gaspar, the daughter of Joanes Gaspar, Dombe Grande’s ruler. Francisco Ferreira Gomes and Florinda Josefa had several children, including José Ferreira Gomes, also known as Gomes Júnior, one of the main litigants in the second half of the nineteenth century.Footnote ⁵²

Gomes Júnior managed his parents’ business after his parents relocated to Rio de Janeiro in the 1830s. He took part in the transatlantic slave trade despite its prohibition in Brazil (1831) and in Angola (1836). Gomes Júnior also exported orchella weed, a sought-after lichen used in dye-making industries, and held offices in the colonial administration. Like several Benguela merchants, he invested in the so-called licit trade in raw materials such as leather, cotton, or lichen as a front for his activities in the smuggling of enslaved people. In the context of international pressure to ban the transatlantic trade, Gomes Júnior diversified his investments and secured access to land, where he employed captive labor. He also established factories on Egito Beach and Equimina that functioned as warehouses, sometimes with their own anchorages.

In 1845 Gomes Júnior was accused, with his brother Joanes Ferreira Gomes, of participating in a racially motivated conspiracy to attack the property of white residents of Benguela. They were accused of instigating the Black population of Catumbela to “go to Benguela to kill white people, who they said were appropriating their land.”Footnote ⁵³ The governor of Angola even stated that the “Black Ferreira Gomes are pertinacious enemies of the whites and have constantly conspired against them.”Footnote ⁵⁴ The accusations of conspiracy and of racial violence were mechanisms for the colonial administration to legitimize the violence against locals. Gomes Júnior sought refuge on the land of his maternal uncle, the soba of Catumbela, but was eventually captured, sent to Luanda, convicted of the crime of sedition, and condemned to prison in Pungo Ndongo Unnecessary. Unlike his brother, who died while on route to São Tomé where he was to serve his sentence, Gomes Júnior returned to Benguela a few years after the events, but with diminished power and prestige.Footnote ⁵⁵ The court cases provide much more nuanced details about the economic activities of Benguela residents and offer insights into the domestic and public lives of historical agents who were not necessarily the governors or high colonial officers who produce historical records that survive.

In contrast to the considerable litigation of locally born donas and of Black elite men, West Central African commoners mainly litigated in one or two court cases. It is noteworthy that many also acted as witnesses, judicial officials, and lawyers. Leonardo Africano Ferreira, for example, was not only a litigant in sixteen cases, but also acted as a lawyer in many others. The TCB records help us understand the scope of training and activities of African clerks and lawyers. Their agency in colonial courts is a consolidated topic in African history,Footnote ⁵⁶ yet we have limited information on these individuals in Angola.Footnote ⁵⁷ The TCB collection will allow the development of further research on this topic, and will insert Angola in the broader debates on African clerks and lawyers in colonial courts.

It is hard to identify the ethnic group of most of the African litigants in court cases. In some instances, birthplaces are mentioned, but it is not clear how these individuals identified themselves or were identified by others. However, it is noteworthy that Cabindas were explicitly identified as such on the covers of the court cases. In thirty-six cases notaries explicitly identified Cabinda litigants, and, in two cases Cabindas were victims of crimes. More research needs to be done to understand the historical meaning of this ethnonym. An initial reading suggests that Cabindas in the TCB documents tended to be sailors or linked to maritime activities.Footnote ⁵⁸ In Benguela in the second half of the nineteenth century the appearances of this term, an ethnonym associated with the northern part of West Central Africa, raises questions about cultural and linguistic diversity and the makeup of the population. It is not clear if a Cabinda community settled in Benguela, but their presence in court cases and not in other types of primary sources raises questions.

More interesting that the cases of Dona Teresa or José Ferreira Gomes is the fact that legal cases provide new information on common folks, such as the Cabinda sailors, or women and men who lived in Benguela. Further research might reveal if, and how, their use of the colonial courts differentiated from the wealthier residents. These records can also offer new insights into population displacement, enslavement and paths to freedom, family structure, and so on.

Access to the colonial courts was not constant. Liberal legal ideals were consolidated among Portuguese jurists in the nineteenth century. Legal liberalism and racial theories reshaped the way Portuguese courts interacted with local legal systems. From the second half of the nineteenth century, Portuguese jurists and administrators began to consider local legal systems as transitory since they would be progressively removed with the introduction of “civilized” European legal categories in the colonies. From the 1880s onward, in the context of the Berlin Conference (1884–85), the idea that non-European populations were not included as citizens of the Portuguese Empire became increasingly widespread. Therefore the law to be applied in the colonies differed from that in the metropolis.Footnote ⁵⁹

These new conceptions of law also impacted the numerous reforms in colonial judicial organization that took place throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In 1878 Minister and Secretary of State for Navy and Overseas Affairs Tomás António Ribeiro Ferreira presented a report on the administration of justice in the colonies. He stated that in Africa “justice resides either in the cruel will of a savage, or in the court of the sorcerer, and there the punishments are exclusively capital punishment.”Footnote ⁶⁰ He also linked the forced implementation of Portuguese law with the “civilizing mission”: “To implement justice in these countries, but true justice, humanitarian justice, fraternal justice, Christian justice, the justice that gives to each what is his own by levelling classes and individualities, is the greatest benefit that European domination can bring them.”Footnote ⁶¹

In 1920 the Ministry of Colonies divided the colonial territory into different administrative areas. Councils were to be set up in regions where there was a predominance of “white or assimilated” population, or where “the indigenous population had reached a special degree of education and progress.” The Civil Circumscriptions, on the other hand, were areas where “completely dominated and pacified, but not civilized, indigenous peoples” lived. Finally, the territories of “indigenous peoples not yet fully pacified” would be governed by captains and be subject to a military regime. Thus the forms of administrative and judicial organization, as well as the laws that would be applied in resolving conflicts, depended on how the colonial authorities perceived the “degree of civilization” of the local populations.Footnote ⁶²

In the following decades the issuance of the Indigenous Statute deeply affected judicial organization in West-Central Africa. In 1926 the Portuguese government promulgated the Political, Civil and Criminal Statute of the Indigenous People of Angola and Mozambique. This decree determined that the administration of justice to the “indigenous” should take place in a special forum. From then on, the Special Courts for Indigenous People (Tribunal Privativo dos Indígenas) began operating. Portuguese judicial officers presided over these courts and were assisted by two experts in the application of “customary law.” However, the colonial government only regulated the existence of these courts in Angola in 1939. Even then, scholars claim that in practice Special Courts were not the main institution responsible for adjudicating cases involving indigenous litigants, but administrative officials, such as Chefes do Concelho, were increasingly responsible for these cases.Footnote ⁶³ Future research may draw on TCB documentation to ascertain whether there was in fact a weak institutionalization of the Special Courts for Indigenous People in Angola, and whether other courts continued to hear cases involving indigenous litigants.

Final Remarks

The court case records held in Benguela are extremely rich for any scholar interested in the experiences of Africans, including enslaved and freed individuals, poor and elite women, and local authorities, usually identified as sobas. These documents were created at a time of economic and political transition, from the legal export of enslaved human beings and the transition to legitimate commerce until the administrative shifts that affected colonial empires in Africa, including the Portuguese, after the end of the Second World War. These sources reveal that African men and women sought the colonial courts to negotiate rights, despite the violence and nature of this institution. The arguments and reasonings that litigants and witnesses used allow us a glimpse into local norms and understandings of what was considered, right and wrong, fair and unfair. Although the inventory is available in open access online, we have been unable to secure a digitization project with our Benguela partners.

Unlike other colonies, the so-called “customary law” was not codified in Angola. TCB records are thus a vital source of information about legal understandings of the different populations that coexisted in Benguela and its immediate interior. In the legal proceedings we can view local norms, although it is a challenge to see how ideas about right or wrong may have changed over time and space. Besides much-needed information about legal systems, these records also reveal the actions of African lawyers, clerks, and translators who had an active role in the institutionalization of colonialism.

There are many limitations to the TCB collection. They are colonial documents; restricted to a limited number of colonial subjects who lived around colonial centers. They normalize Portuguese values and norms; and give an illusion of a social and legal order. Yet they offer intimate details of peoples’ lives and provide alternatives to missionary and other accounts that privilege the perspective of elders or chiefs. As the individual cases we have briefly discussed, the TCB records demonstrate that African women were active legal agents. They went to court to secure rights, to challenge elders and local rulers, and to protect the interests of loved ones. The records also suggest that Benguela was more ethnically diverse than previous studies have shown. The TCB records indicate that West Central Africans were more than legal agents, they produced legal knowledge, elaborating forms and employing arguments that helped them assert their rights.