22 - Waves of Sedition across the Atlantic: Liberal Politics in Angola in the Wake of Brazilian Independence (c. 1817–1825)

Summary

This chapter investigates the reverberations of the Oporto liberal revolution and Brazilian independence on the Portuguese colony of Angola in West Central Africa. Angola was the largest supplier of enslaved labor for recently independent Brazil, yet the ties between the two regions stretched well beyond the transatlantic slave trade. A cultural and social continuum connected the South Atlantic World, and the chapter argues that such ties acquired a political dimension in the wake of the Oporto revolution and Brazil’s secession from Portugal. To trace how Angola’s coastal elites responded to the end of Portuguese colonialism in Brazil, the chapter reconstructs the trajectory of a single individual, the Luanda born Domingos Pereira Diniz, who became the president of the Benguela Junta, a governmental body which endorsed a petition in which Benguela’s elite requested the right to become an overseas province of independent Brazil.