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The first definition grouped the whites, regardless of their social, economic, and academic condition, with the acculturated mulattos and blacks who had adopted European habits and customs. Black people who kept on living according to the native way of life, that is to say “those who, born overseas from native mother and father, could not differentiate themselves through their own education and customs from the common representative of their race”, were judicially considered to be “noncivilised”.13 This division obviously caused various frictions because of the social and racial discriminations implied. From the 1860s, the resulting concerns found vent in the local press and were backed, on one side, by the settlers aiming to safeguard the status quo, criticising the authorities if they allowed mulattos and blacks to intervene in the colony’s public life, and on the other side, by the Africans protesting against social injustice and claiming emancipation. A few decades later, in an article published in the newspaper O Arauto Africano (1890), journalist José de Fontes Pereira even suggested that if the British wanted to trade with the “masters of the country”, they had better address themselves directly to Africans, and not to the Portuguese. However, who were these “Africans”?
Retailers and civil servants; provincial senate and provincial government officers, magistrates, clerks, copyists, and subordinate staff; customs treasurers, agents, collectors, and scribes; lawyers and court-room employees; garrison, recruiting centres, and fortress commanders, warrant officers and privates; chaplains, minor and regular canons, deacons, and parish priests; land or estate owners—this is an outline of the range of positions and, consequently, of the scale of power reached by this Euro-African elite during the cycle of slavery and its slow decay over the course of the nineteenth century. The conjunction of these sectors enables us to understand how this kind of colonial bourgeoisie was deeply rooted in Angola and disconnected from the metropolis, and how its economic links were far stronger with Brazil—or better with the Brazilian colonial bourgeoisie involved with the traffic—than with Portugal.
In conclusion, on one side, the colonial bourgeoisie and the metropolitan bourgeoisie were complementary but, on the other, far from sharing a constant and absolute reciprocal identification, they were divided by deep divergences and opposing economic interests.