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Administrative knowledge in a colonial context: Angola in the eighteenth century

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 October 2010

CATARINA MADEIRA SANTOS
CATARINA MADEIRA SANTOS*
Affiliation:
Centre d'Etudes Africaines, Ecole des hautes études en sciences sociales, 96, bd. Raspail, 75005 Paris, France. Email: cmadeira@ehess.fr.
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Abstract

This essay analyses the circulation of political models and administrative practices drawn from the Enlightenment statecraft of metropolitan Portugal and their inscription in specific colonial contexts of Angola in the mid-eighteenth century. The purpose here is to show how these models had to be ‘unpacked’ when confronted with foreign contexts, reconfigured and even reinvented for local circumstances. During the 1750s, the Lisbon government conceived a new imperial project to territorialize the colony through the intellectual and physical appropriation of this Central African space. In order to do so, three levels of this administrative knowledge are distinguished: the quantification and systematization of information, cartography, and the archive. For each, this essay demonstrates how they were made available to, appropriated by or transformed by both the colonial and the African societies in the colonial context.

Type
Research Article
Information
The British Journal for the History of Science , Volume 43 , Issue 4: Circulation and Locality in Early Modern Science , December 2010 , pp. 539 - 556
Copyright
Copyright © British Society for the History of Science 2010

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References

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5 This article is based on research for my doctoral dissertation: Catarina Madeira Santos, ‘Um governo polido para Angola: reconfigurar dispositivos de domínio (1750–c.1800), unpublished, Universidade Nova de Lisboa/Ecole des hautes études en sciences sociales, 2005.

6 The Marquês de Pombal, Parecer que o Conde de Oeiras apresentou a Sua Magestade sobre o que ainda falta para se restituir a Agricultura, Navegação, e o Commercio de Angola contra os monopólios vexações e dezordens que fizeram os objectos das leis de onze e vinte e cinco de Janeiro de mil setecentos e cincoenta e outo, 20 November 1760, AHU, codex 555, §87, ff. 59r–59v. I am in the process of preparing a critical edition of this document.

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11 ‘Report of Marquês de Lavradio on letters sent by António Álvares da Cunha’, Lisbon, 6 August 1754, AHU, box 39, doc. 62 A; ‘Report of António Álvares da Cunha on the military reform in Angola’, Lisbon, 23 May 1759, AHU, box 42, doc. 67; ‘Consultation of the Overseas Council’, 5 December 1791, AHU, Codex 481, ff. 10v–12v.

12 I have borrowed this expression from Chrétien, Jean-Pierre, ‘Les premiers voyageurs étrangers au Burundi et au Rwanda: les “compagnons obscures” des “explorateurs”’, Afrique & histoire (2005) 4, pp. 37–72Google Scholar.

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14 Jean-Baptiste d'Anville, ‘Description géographique de la partie de l'Afrique, qui est au sud de la ligne équinoxiale, représentée dans la carte que j'ai dressée par l'ordre et conformément au dessein de son excellence monseigneur Dom Luis da Cunha, Ambassadeur extrada-ordinaire et plénipotentiaire du roi de Portugal’, Sociedade de Geografia de Lisboa.

15 Pombal, op. cit. (6), ff. 40 and 72.

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18 For a study of the rhetoric of political discourse in the Pombaline period, see M.L. Buescu, ‘Uma nova retórica para um novo discurso’, in Pombal Revisitado: Comunicações ao Colóquio Internacional organizado pela Comissão das Comemorações do 20. Centenário da Morte do Marquês de Pombal, Lisbon: Editorial Estampa, 1984, pp. 171–187.

19 Letter from the governor of Benguela, Alexandre José Botelho de Vasconcelos, 11 February 1799, AHU, box 90, doc. 47.

20 Letter from the governor, António Álvares da Cunha, to Diogo de Mendonça Corte Real, 8 August 1753, AHU, box 38, doc. 82.

21 Letter from Governor Dom Miguel António de Melo to Dom Rodrigo de Sousa Coutinho, 3 December 1797, AHU, box 86, doc. 66.

22 On the map of Luís Cândido Pinheiro Furtado, see Teixeira da Mota, A., A cartografia antiga da África Central e a travessia entre Angola e Moçambique 1500–1860, Lourenço Marques: Sociedade de Estudos de Moçambique, 1964, pp. 105–111Google Scholar.

23 It is important to note that the 1885 map of Angola based on Hermenegildo Capelo and Roberto Ivens's expedition of 1881 shows a completely open frontier to the east in keeping with the earlier map of 1791 compiled by Pinheiro Furtado. See Capello, H. and Ivens, R., De Benguella às Terras de Iácca. Descripção de uma viagem na África Central e Occidental, 2 vols., Lisbon, 1881Google Scholar.

24 Letter from Dom Miguel António de Melo to Dom Rodrigo de Sousa Coutinho, 3 December 1797, AHU, box 86, doc. 66.

25 This section is based on a wider research project on writing in Angola. See Madeira Santos, Catarina, ‘Entre deux droits, les Lumières en Angola (1750–1800)’, Annales, HSS (2005) 60, pp. 817–848CrossRefGoogle Scholar; idem, ‘Escrever o poder. Os autos de vassalagem e a vulgarização da escrita entre as elites africanas Ndembu’, in Beatrix Heintze and Achim von Oppen (eds.), Angola on the Move: Transport Routes, Communications, and History, Berlin: Lembeck, 2007, pp. 173–182; idem, ‘Écrire le pouvoir en Angola: les archives Ndembu (XVII–XXème siècles)’, Annales, HSS (2009) 64, pp. 767–795; Madeira Santos, Catarina and Paula Tavares, Ana (eds.), Africae Monumenta, vol. 1: Arquivo Caculo Cacahenda, Lisbon: Instituto de investigação científica tropical, 2002Google Scholar; Madeira Santos, Catarina (ed.), Africae Monumenta, vol. 2: Arquivos Mufuque Aquitupa, Ndala Cabassa e Pango Aluquem, in pressGoogle Scholar.

26 Arquivo Histórico Nacional de Angola, codex 240, f. 82v, Luanda, 5 October 1811.

27 Miller, Joseph Calder, Kings and Kinsmen: Early Mbundi States in Angola, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976Google Scholar.

28 On the emergence the figure of the secretary of state within the framework of traditional Ndembu institutions, see Madeira Santos and Tavares, op. cit. (25).

29 List of things which belong to the Ndembu Mufuque Aquitupa state, 1890; List of things which belong to the Ndembu Mufuque Aquitupa State, 2 May 1896, in Madeira Santos, Africae Monumenta, op. cit. (25).

30 On the subject of writing practices in a colonial context, see Bhavani Raman, ‘Document Raj: scribes and writing under early colonial rule in Madras, 1771–1860’, unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, 2006; and Ogborn, Miles, Indian Ink: Script and Print in the Making of the English East India Company, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

31 Madeira Santos, ‘Entre deux droits’, op. cit. (25), p. 826.

32 For the best-known expression of the traditional view of centre–periphery diffusionism, see Basalla, George, ‘The spread of Western science’, Science (1967) 156, pp. 611–622CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed.