Catholic missionaries in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Africa more commonly than Protestants purchased slaves to build their mission stations. This article provides a micro-historical analysis of the redemption of child slaves by the Holy Ghost Fathers in Soyo, West Central Africa, in the years immediately preceding the colonial partition of Africa. It argues that the Spiritan missionaries liberated slaves for instrumental rather than humanitarian reasons. As local freemen were difficult to control, the mission depended for its growth on the import of slave children. Furthermore, since the missionaries operated on the same markets and paid the same prices for slaves as regular buyers, their purchasing practices showed a strong resemblance with ordinary slave trading.
Brian Stanley, The History of the Baptist Missionary Society, 1792-1992 (Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 1992), chap. 4.
2.
The allusion is of course to David Brion Davis, Slavery and Human Progress (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1984). It should be added that the second part of this work highlights the evangelical dimension of abolitionism and its secular accomplishments. For the general argument, see his Inhuman Bondage. The Rise and Fall of Slavery in the New World (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2006), chap. 12.
3.
See in particular Jean Comaroff and John Comaroff, Of Revelation and Revolution: Christianity, Colonialism, and Consciousness in South Africa, vol. 1 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), chap. 3.
4.
Paul E.Lovejoy, Transformations in Slavery. A History of Slavery in Africa, 2nd ed. (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 262.
5.
Adrian Hastings, The Church in Africa, 1450-1950 (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1994), 266.
6.
Trevor R. Getz, Slavery and Reform in West Africa: Toward Emancipation in Nineteenth-Century Senegal and the Gold Coast (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2004), 60-63, 109-10, 122. See also Suzanne Miers and Richard Roberts, eds., The End of Slavery in Africa (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1988), introduction.
7.
For an overview of Protestant and Catholic policies in Central Africa, see William Gervase Clarence-Smith, "The Redemption of Child Slaves by Christian Missionaries in Central Africa, 1878-1914," in Child Slaves in the Modern World, ed. Gwyn Campbell, Suzanne Miers, and Joseph Miller (Athens: Ohio University Press, forthcoming).
8.
See Martin Klein, Slavery and Colonial Rule in French West Africa (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 115-19, 173-76; Miers and Roberts, The End of Slavery in Africa, chapters 2-5, 8, 15, and 16; and for an overview, Lovejoy, Transformations, 259-66.
9.
In the early twentieth-century account by Joaquim Alves Correia, Civilizando Angola e Congo. Os missionários do Espírito Santo no padroado espiritual português (Braga: Tipografia Sousa Cruz, 1922), there is no mention of the Soyo mission. In the English literature on Angola and Congo, the Spiritan missions in central and southern Angola have received attention through the work of Linda Heywood, Contested Power in Angola, 1840s to the Present (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2000), and William Gervase Clarence-Smith, Slaves, Peasants, and Capitalists in Southern Angola, 1840-1926 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1979). The early history of the Landana mission, in what became the Angolan enclave of Cabinda, has recently been studied by Phyllis Martin, "Life and Death, Power and Vulnerability: Everyday Contradictions at the Loango Mission, 1883-1904," Journal of African Cultural Studies 15, no. 1 (2202): 61-78.
10.
The term Kongo is used to describe the region formerly covered by the Kongo kingdom, which is roughly demarcated by the Atlantic coast in the west, the river Kwango in the east, the river Congo’s south bank up to Malebo Pool (Kinshasa) in the north, and the river Loge (Ambriz) in the south. The people living within these geographical boundaries all speak one or another variety of the Kikongo language. By contrast, Congo denotes the river as well as the larger region surrounding it. Soyo was, from its conversion to Christianity until Angolan independence, also known as Santo Antonio.
11.
This settlement pattern dates back to at least the seventeenth century. See John K. Thornton, The Kingdom of Kongo: Civil War and Transition, 1641-1718 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1983), 19.
12.
N. Schrag, "Mboma and the Lower Zaire: a Socioeconomic Study of a Kongo Trading Community, c.1785-1885," PhD diss., Indiana University , 1985.
13.
António Brásio, ed., Angola, vol. 1 (1596-1867) (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1966), 515. In 1881, the Portuguese priest Barroso observed that the old port was practically deserted. See António Brásio, ed., D. António Barroso: Missionário, cientista, missiólogo (Lisboa: Centro de Estudos Históricos Ultramarinos, 1961), 93.
14.
For a brief overview, see Sabakinu Kivilu, "La dynamique de l’espace au Bas-Zaire. Quelques données d’analyse sur les voies de communication de 1855 à 1938," Cultures et développement 11 (1979): 247-59.
15.
Arquivo Histórico Ultramarino (Lisbon, henceforth AHU), Angola, Maço 864, Relatório da Missão do Lunuango, 1906-1907 and 1907-1908.
16.
AHU, Angola, 1a Rep., 2a Sec., Pasta 19, Padre Tavares to Bispo de Angola e Congo, S Antonio 19-6-1899; ibid., Padre Taborda to Bispo de Angola e Congo, S Antonio 27-8-1899.
Brásio, D. António Barroso, 485. See also Thomas Lewis, "The Ancient Kingdom of Kongo: Its Present Position and Possibilities," Geographical Journal 19, no. 5 (1902): 545.
19.
Archives générales de la Congrégation du Saint-Esprit (Chevilly-Larue, henceforth AGCSSp), 3L 1.4 b 6, I, Augouard, Boma 8-6-1881.
20.
Thornton, Kingdom of Kongo, 66, 73. The last Capuchin priest visiting Soyo was almost certainly Serafino d’Acqui circa 1800. See Louis Jadin, "Les survivances chrétiennes au Congo au XIXe siècle," Études d’Histoire africaine 1 (1970): 144. Others have argued that Italian missionaries were still around in 1830. See Gil Marchal, "Santo António do Zaire," Portugal em Africa 4 (1947): 274; Francisco António Pinto, Angola e Congo (Lisboa: Livr. Ferreira, 1888), 369. Father Duparquet claimed in 1877 that he had spoken with elderly people who still remembered the old priests. AGCSSp, 3L 1.3 a 6, Duparquet, Landana 5-1-1877.
21.
Brásio, Angola, vol. 1, 516-17; Pinto, Angola e Congo, 366-68.
22.
Lovejoy, Transformations in Slavery, 12-15; Igor Kopytoff and Suzanne Miers, "African Slavery as an Institution of Marginality," in Slavery in Africa: Historical and Anthropological Perspectives, ed. Miers and Kopytoff (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1977).
23.
Class relations may have been more crystallized in earlier centuries, as Thornton, Kingdom of Kongo, suggests.
24.
Brásio, D. António Barroso, 138-39.
25.
AGCSSp, 3L 1.5 a 2, Visseq, St. Antoine 30-6-1883.
26.
John H.Weeks, Among the Primitive Bakongo. A Record of Thirty Years’ Close Intercourse with the Bakongo and Other Tribes of Equatorial Africa, with a Description of Their Habits, Customs, & Religious Beliefs ( London: Seeley, Service & Co, 1914), 67.
27.
Among the many critiques of the Kopytoff and Miers slavery-to-kinship continuum, see esp. James L. Watson, ed., Asian and African Systems of Slavery (Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 1980), introduction.
28.
For the political ramifications of slave-free distinctions, see Wyatt MacGaffey, Custom and Government in the Lower Congo (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1970); Kongo Political Culture: The Conceptual Challenge of the Particular (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000).
29.
Wyatt MacGaffey , "Kongo Slavery Remembered by Themselves: Texts from 1915," International Journal of African Historical Studies41, no. 1 ( 2008): 62.
30.
Richard Cobden Phillips, "The Lower Congo; a Sociological Study," Journal of the Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland 17 (1888): 230. On the social mobility and emancipation of slaves in Kongo, see also MacGaffey, "Kongo Slavery," 68.
31.
AHU, Angola, Maço 864, Relatório da Missão do Lunuango, 1906-07.
32.
See Wyatt MacGaffey, "Economic and Social Dimensions of Kongo Slavery (Zaïre)," in Slavery in Africa, ed. Miers and Kopytoff.
33.
AGSSp, 3L 1.8 a 8, Magalhães, Landana 28-9-1912.
34.
AGCSSp, 3L 1.4 b 4, Augouard, St. Antoine 23-1-82, 12-11-82; John H. Weeks, "Notes on Some Customs of the Lower Congo People," Folk-Lore 19-20 (1908-1909): 479.
35.
Contemporary observers, not by definition reliable, hardly ever mentioned the practice. But for a reference to slave offerings at funerals, see E. Delmar Morgan, "Notes on the Lower Congo, from Its Mouth to Stanley Pool," Proceedings of the Royal Geographical Society and Monthly Record of Geography 6, no. 4 (1884): 184.
António Brásio, ed., Angola, vol. 2 (1868-1881) (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1968), 387, 434. See also AGCSSp, 3L 1.4 b 6, IV, Augouard, St. Antoine 12-10-1882.
38.
François Bontinck, "La mission spititaine de Boma (1880-1890)," Zaïre-Afrique 136 (1979): 363-75.
39.
For the political impact on the mission of a drought in 1881-1882, see the correspondence from Augouard in AGCSSp, 3L 1.4 b 6.
40.
For example, António Fernandes de Oliveira and Carlos Alberto Mendes do Couto, ed., Angolana (Documentação sobre Angola) II (1883-1887) (Lisboa: Centro de Estudos Históricos Ultramarinos, 1971), 497. See also Richard F. Burton, Two Trips to Gorilla Land and the Cataracts of the Congo (London: Sampson Low, Marston, Low & Searle, 1876), vol. 2, 73-74. For the term "kukulu," see J. Troesch, "Le royaume de Soyo," Aequatoria 25, no. 3 (1962): 95.
41.
AGCSSp, 3L 1.4 b 4, Carrie, Boma 2-9-1880; 3L 1.5 a 2, Visseq, St. Antoine 8-5-1882, 29-5-1883, 19-11-1883, 4-5-1884.
42.
AGCSSp, 3L 1.4 b 6, Augouard, St. Antoine 6-2-1882; 3L 1.5 a 2, Visseq, St. Antoine 7-3-1885.
43.
AGCSSp, 3L 1.4 b 6, Augouard, St. Antoine 6-2-1882.
44.
AGCSSp, 3L 1.5 a 2, Visseq, St. Antoine 30-6-1883, 19-11-1883.
45.
Martin, "Life and Death," 68.
46.
AGCSSp, 3L 1.3 a 6, Duparquet, Landana 6-10-1873.
47.
AGCSSp, 3L 1.4 b 6, Augouard, St. Antoine 1-1-1882.
48.
AGCSSp, 3L 1.5 a 2, Visseq, St. Antoine 4-9-1883. This pattern was also common at the Spiritan mission in central Angola. See Heywood, Contested Power in Angola, 52.
49.
In the early 1880s, the Congo mission, with its schools in Landana, Boma, and Soyo received an annual subsidy of seven thousand francs from the fund of St. Enfance to support the mission children. AGCSSp, 3L 1.3 a 6, Carrie, Landana 15-4-1882. For slaves, the missionaries were generally instructed to pay no more than one hundred francs.
50.
AGCSSp, 3L 1.3 a 6, Duparquet, Landana 8-10-1873.
51.
AGCSSp, 3L 1.3 a 6, Duparquet, Landana 10-2-1875.
52.
Owen White, Children of the French Empire: Miscegenation and Colonial Society in French West Africa, 1895-1960 (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1999), chap. 2.
53.
In the Luanda hinterland, a distinction existed in the 1850s between "shoe-wearing Blacks" (pretos calçados)-the bigger chiefs, who were considered equal to whites and exempt from forced labor duties-and "barefoot Blacks" (pretos descalços). See Aida Freudenthal, Arimos e fazendas. A Transição agrarian em Angola (Luanda: Chá de Caxinde, 2005), 153.
54.
AGCSSp, 3L 1.3 a 6, Duparquet, Landana 6-10-1873, 8-10-1873, 5-1-1877.
55.
We should be careful not to stereotype African work cultures. As Frederick Cooper points out, "the myth that women did all labor was the counterpoint to the belief that African men spent their time fighting." See Cooper, "Conditions Analogous to Slavery: Imperialism and Free Labor Ideology in Africa," in Beyond Slavery: Explorations of Race, Labor, and Citizenship in Postemancipation Societies, ed. Frederick Cooper, Thomas C. Holt, and Rebecca J. Scott (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000), 115.
56.
As quoted in MacGaffey, "Kongo Slavery," 68.
57.
Susan Herlin Broadhead, "Slave Wives, Free Sisters: Bakongo Women and Slavery c. 1700-1850," in Women and Slavery in Africa, ed. Claire C. Robertson and Martin A. Klein (Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 1983).
58.
See esp. Thomas O. Beidelman, "Contradictions between the Sacred and the Secular Life: The Church Missionary Society in Ukaguru, Tanzania, East Africa, 1876-1914," Comparative Studies in Society and History 23, no. 1 (1981): 73-95; "The Organization and Maintenance of Caravans by the Church Missionary Society in Tanzania in the Nineteenth Century," The International Journal of African Historical Studies 15, no. 4 (1982): 601-23; Johannes Fabian, Out of Our Minds: Reason and Madness in the Exploration of Central Africa (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000).
59.
AGCSSp, 3L 1.3 a 6, Duparquet, Landana 7-11-1875. On the French emigration scheme, see François Renault, Liberation d’esclaves et nouvelle servitude: les rachats de captifs africains pour le compte des colonies françaises après l’abolition de l’esclavage (Abidjan: Nouvelles Éditions africaines, 1976).
60.
AGCSSp, 3L 1.5 a 2, Visseq, St. Antoine 30-8-1885.
61.
AGCSSp, 3L 1.3 a 6, Duparquet, Landana 4-1-1877. The principle of caveat vendor was common on slave markets throughout Kongo. See MacGaffey, "Kongo Slavery," 65.
62.
AGCSSp, 3L 1.4 b 6, II, Augouard, St. Antoine 6-2-1882, 4-3-1882, 9-4-1882.
63.
AGCSSp, 3L 1.4 b 6, II, Augouard, St. Antoine 30-10-1881.
64.
AGCSSp, 3L 1.4 b 6, II, Augouard, St. Antoine 14-11-1881, 20-12-1881.
65.
AGCSSp, 3L 1.4 b 6, II, Augouard, St. Antoine 6-2-1882.
66.
AGCSSp, 3L 1.4 b 6, II, Augouard, St. Antoine 2-12-1881.
67.
AGCSSp, 3L 1.4 b 6, V, Augouard, Landana 13-5-1883.
68.
AGCSSp, 3L 1.4 b 6, V, Augouard, Landana 13-5-1883.
69.
AGCSSp, 3L 1.3 a 6, Carrie, Landana 15-4-1882.
70.
AGCSSp, 3L 1.3 a 6, Duparquet, Landana 8-10-1873.
71.
AGCSSp, 3L 1.4 b 6, II, Augouard, St. Antoine 2-12-1881.
72.
AGCSSp, 3L 1.8 a 11, Magalhães, Landana16-10-1913.
73.
As quoted in MacGaffey, "Kongo Slavery," 65.
74.
AGCSSp, 3L 1.4 b 6, II, Augouard, St. Antoine 1-1-1882.
75.
AGCSSp, 3L 1.4 b 6, II, Augouard, St. Antoine 20-12-1881, 6-2-1882.
76.
AGCSSp, 3L 1.4 b 6, II, Augouard, St. Antoine 2-12-1881.
77.
AGCSSp, 3L 1.4 b 6, II, Augouard, St. Antoine 1-1-1882; 3L 1.5 a 2, Visseq, St. Antoine 19-11-1883.
78.
AGCSSp, 3L 1.4 b 6, II, Augouard, St. Antoine 22-1-1882.
79.
AGCSSp, 3L 1.4 b 6, II, Augouard, St. Antoine 6-2-1882.
80.
See also MacGaffey, "Kongo Slavery," 65.
81.
Robert Harms, Games against Nature: An Eco-Cultural History of the Nunu of Equatorial Africa (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 164.
82.
A map of the lower Congo River around 1850 in The National Archives (Kew, henceforth TNA), FO925/488, shows a path along the south bank connecting Soyo with Boma.
83.
AGCSSp, 3L 1.3 a 6, Duparquet, Landana 7-11-1875.
84.
MacGaffey, "Kongo Slavery," 62.
85.
Schrag, "Mboma and the Lower Zaire," 32-35, 126-35, 147-52, 281.
86.
See in particular Walter Hawthorne, Planting Rice and Harvesting Slaves: Transformations along the Guinea-Bissau Coast, 1400-1900 (Portsmouth: Ohio University Press, 2003) and the articles by Hawthorne, Andrew Hubbell, and Martin Klein in the Journal of African History 42 (2001): 1-65.
87.
Jelmer Vos, "Slavery in Southern Kongo in the Late Nineteenth Century," in Trabalho Forçado Africano: Experiências Coloniais Comparadas, ed. CEAUP (Porto: Campo das Letras, 2006), 325-29.
88.
AGCSSp, 3L 1.3 a 6, Duparquet, 15-6-1876.
89.
AGCSSp, 3L 1.4 b 4, extract from Le message de Saint-Joseph, March 1881, 73.
90.
See Martin, "Life and Death," 63.
91.
TNA, FO93/6/5.
92.
AGCSSp, 3L 1.4 b 6, II, Augouard, St. Antoine 20-12-1881.
93.
AGCSSp, 3L 1.4 b 6, II, Augouard, St. Antoine 6-2-1882.
94.
AGCSSp, 3L 1.4 b 6, I, Augouard, Boma 8-6-1881.
95.
Igor Kopytoff, "The Cultural Context of African Abolition," in The End of Slavery in Africa, ed. Miers and Roberts.
96.
Weeks, "Notes on Some Customs," 32. See also Thomas Lewis, These Seventy Years: An Autobiography (London: Carey Press, 1930), 367. In the Sundi district, the practice was associated with pigs instead of goats. See MacGaffey, "Kongo Slavery," 70. The practice had also much in common with the establishment of master-client relationships as described by Kristin Mann, "Owners, Slaves and the Struggle for Labour in the Commercial Transition at Lagos," in From Slave Trade to "Legitimate" Commerce: The Commercial Transition in Nineteenth-Century West Africa, ed. Robin Law (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 159-64.
97.
See several letters in AGCSSp, 3L 1.5 a 2.
98.
AGCSSp, 3L 1.4 b 6, III, Augouard, Boma 2-9-1882; 3L 1.5 a 2, Visseq, St. Antoine 29-5-1883, 15-6-1883, 30-6-1883.
99.
AGCSSp, 3L 1.4 b 6, II, Augouard, St. Antoine 30-10-1881.
100.
AGCSSp, 3L 1.4 b 6, IV, Augouard, St. Antoine 17-12-1882.
101.
AGCSSp, 3L 1.4 b 6, IV, Augouard, St. Antoine, 25-10-1882, 27-10-1882.
102.
AGCSSp, 3L 1.5a 2, Visseq, St. Antoine 2-11-1884.
103.
AGCSSp, 3L 1.4 b 6, Augouard, St. Antoine, 9-4-1882; 3L 1.5 a 2, Visseq, St. Antoine 19-6-1882. See also Wyatt MacGaffey, "The West in Congolese Experience," in Africa and the West, ed. Phillip D. Curtin (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1972), 54-57; and Schrag, "Mboma and the Lower Zaire," 211.
104.
AGCSSp, 3L 1.3 a 6, Carrie, Landana 30-10-1878. See also Martin, "Life and Death," 64-65.
105.
AGCSSp, 3L 1.4 b 6, IV, Augouard, Banana 31-1-1883.
106.
AGCSSp, 3L 1.5 a 2, Visseq, St. Antoine 29-6-1882.
107.
AGCSSp, 3L 1.5 a 2, Visseq, St. Antoine 26-1-1884, 1-6-1884, 13-1-1885, 9-3-1885.
108.
AGCSSp, 3L 1.5 a 2, Visseq, St. Antoine 22-2-1883; Paris, Banana 22-2-1883.
109.
AGCSSp, 3L 1.4 b 6, II, Augouard, St. Antoine 14-11-1881, 2-12-1881, 13-1-1882.
110.
AGCSSp, 3L 1.4 b 6, II, Augouard, St. Antoine 6-2-1882, 19-4-1882.
111.
Miguel’s age is never mentioned in the sources, but like many other "boys" who played key roles in the establishment of Christian missions throughout Africa (assisting white missionaries on their travels, translating Bibles, opening and teaching at outstations, etc.) he was probably a young adult already. In European imperial discourse on Africa, "African men were almost invariably portrayed as childlike." Comaroff and Comaroff, Of Revelation and Revolution, 117.
112.
AGCSSp, 3L 1.4 b 6, III, Augouard, Boma 10-8-1882.
113.
AGCSSp, 3L 1.5 a 2, Visseq, St. Antoine 12-1-1884, 13-7-1884.
114.
AGCSSp, 3L 1.5 a 2, Visseq, St. Antoine 15-10-1885.
115.
Annual Report of the Baptist Missionary Society (1886), 104.
116.
For the wider Congolese and African context, see Roland Oliver, The African Experience (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1991), 237-38; Richard Gray, Black Christians and White Missionaries (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1990), 62, 95-96; Wyatt MacGaffey, "Ethnography and the Closing of the Frontier in Lower Congo, 1885-1912," Africa 56, no. 3 (1986): 267; Ruth Slade, King Leopold’s Congo: Aspects of the Development of Race Relations in the Congo Independent State (London: Oxford University Press, 1962), 163.
117.
See the correspondence from Visseq in AGCSSp, 3L 1.5 a 2; and 3L 1.4 b 4, Visseq, Rapport sur la mission, St. Antoine 1885. See also Brásio, Angola, vol. 4, 66-73.
118.
António Brásio, ed., Angola, vol. 3 (1882-1889) (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1969), 524-7; D. António Barroso, 498.
119.
Clarence-Smith, "The Redemption of Child Slaves."
120.
AGCSSp, 3L 1.8 a 8, Magalhães, Landana 28-10-1914.
121.
AGCSSp, 3L 1.18 a 4, Moreira, Landana 15-10-1924, 27-10-1925.
