ANGOLA

................

................NATIONAL

..............GEOGRAPHIC


July 1910, p. 625



ANGOLA, THE LAST

FOOTHOLD OF SLAVERY



ANGOLA, the Portuguese colony on the West Coast of Africa, is a country about as large as France, Switzerland, and Italy combined. Its coast-line on the Atlantic is nearly 1,000 miles in length and has many good harbors. For every thousand people who have heard of the Congo Free State, which borders on the east and north, it is possible that two have heard of Angola, and perhaps one of those knows that from a time some score of years before the inauguration of the Congo State to the present day there has existed in that country a system of slavery which is only comparable with that of the Spaniards in the West Indies. Slaves are brought down from the far interior, often as far as 800 miles, by agents who think they have done well if one-half of their drove survive the journey. At the coast, knowing that it is impossible for them to return home, the slaves bind themselves to a term of service "indentured labor," it is called which never ends, and are shipped to the cocoa plantations of the islands of Saint Thome and Principe.

Angola is classed as a country poor in natural products of the soil and in minerals, but still moderately rich in men, in spite of having been squeezed for generations by the Portuguese. The principal agricultural products are manico, coffee, bananas, sugar-cane, and tobacco. The trade is mostly with Portugal, the chief exports being coffee, rubber, ivory, wax, fish, and palm oil.

The capital of Angola is Loanda, or Saint Paul de Loanda, as it was christened, the oldest Portuguese settlement south of the Equator and once the center of the slave trade between Africa and Brazil. Its splendid harbor offers a safe haven, and it boasts of a mixed population of about 25,000. For administrative purposes the colony is divided into five districts, and at the head is a governor appointed by the Portuguese. The population is estimated at 5,000,000, the greater portion natives, and the number of Europeans being only about 4,000. They have, however, exercised a great modifying influence on the native population inhabiting the western part of the colony as regards their customs and economic condition.



Transcrição sugerida pela leitura do artigo “O país pobre, bonito e honrado da National Geographic”, de Luis Villalobos, na PÚBLICA, de 16 de Maio de 2010