A Slaveholding Town: Slaveowners and their Captives in Moçâmedes, 1855

ABSTRACT This article investigates slave owners and their human assets in a port town founded in southern Angola, Moçâmedes, in the mid-nineteenth century. It draws on an 1855 register of slave owners and their captives to better understand the inhabitants of this coastal urban landscape founded fifteen years earlier. Unlike the city imposed on the desert by light-skinned “men” painted by colonial and post-colonial observers, this was a new frontier society built with slave labor. A significant percentage of this land remained in the hands of a large number of individual owners, while the majority was held by a handful of free inhabitants. However, regardless of their owners, enslaved individuals engaged in a multitude of occupations in Moçâmedes - working in agriculture, harvesting orchella weed, performing street trades, fishing in the nearby seas -, which made Moçâmedes a “slave town”.

摘要 本文针对19世纪中期安哥拉南部港口城镇莫桑梅德斯（Moçâmedes）的奴隶主及其所拥有的人力资产展开研究。本研究依托1855年的奴隶主与被奴役者登记名册，旨在更全面地理解这座十五年前始建的沿海都市聚落的居民生态。不同于殖民与后殖民观察者笔下那些由浅肤色"男性"在荒漠上强行营建的城市，莫桑梅德斯是一座依靠奴隶劳动建成的新兴拓荒社会。该城镇的大片土地掌握在大量个体奴隶主手中，而剩余多数土地则由寥寥数位自由居民持有。不过，无论所属奴隶主身份如何，被奴役者在莫桑梅德斯从事着多种多样的职业：从事农业生产、采集奥彻拉草（orchella weed）、开展街头营生、在邻近海域捕鱼等——这也让莫桑梅德斯成为一座"奴隶城镇"。