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The ruthless analysis by René Pélissier confirms that Portugal, at that time, completely lacked human, financial, and technical resources, and coherence and stability in the colonial administration. In Angola, the majority of whites and mulattos (without disregard of the active role played by the so-called “civilised” blacks during the following Portuguese colonial expansion as the backbone of colonial militias) often felt abandoned to themselves by a busted, impotent, or indifferent metropolis. Consequently, the persistence of the plundering mentality among them was a too frequent cause of conflict.9
The troubled steps leading to the abolition of slavery heightened social tensions and worsened the economic crisis affecting the agonising Portuguese empire. In the 1830s, the Portuguese government appointed a progressivist prime minister, Marquis Sá da Bandeira, whose most important reform was the suppression of the slave trade (1836). The decree, however, could not be enforced adequately and, due to the hostility shown by local slave traders, it did not imply any kind of provision against slavery within Angola. It took Britain’s naval intervention to put an end to the activity in the middle of the nineteenth century. Between 1854 and 1858, Portugal passed a series of cautious decrees aimed at reducing slavery in Angola. Government slaves were freed, and the 1858 proclamation declared that all forms of slavery should be abolished by 1878. Legislation was passed to compensate owners and to care for the freed people, but many of the colonists found ways to circumvent the decree, so that the actual conditions of labour did not change significantly.10 The de facto servitude of Africans in Angola continued until the end of the colonial period and later was one of the leading reasons for a sharp rise in nationalist feeling during the prolonged colonial war.
The Urban Society
At the top of the mid-nineteenth-century Angolan socioeconomic pyramid were the traders who enriched themselves thanks to the slave traffic and barter with the interior; they were established in Luanda mansions, dominated the import-export trade, and were associated with—and wreaked havoc with—political power.11