Abstract
Urban colonization in Angola grew out of the Berlin Conference (1884–5) and the expectation that colonizing powers demonstrate effective occupation in order to receive international—European— recognition for their territorial claims. In response, Portuguese elites rediscovered their long-neglected coastal settlements along the Angolan and Mozambican littorals and began to make substantial investments in infrastructure, including railways, ports, and administrative and military buildings. On Angolas south-central coast, the frontier town of Catumbela, long known as an embarkation point for slaves headed to the New World, developed as a result of a boom in rubber exports. Portuguese and Luso-African traders established trading houses and rebuilt the small town to reflect a Portuguese aesthetic. With the decline in world rubber prices by 1910 and the exhaustion of elephant herds in the Angolan interior, the local trading economy declined while a new sugar industry developed on the plains surrounding Catumbela, based on irrigation from the Catumbela River and favorable tariff access to the Portuguese market.
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Notes
Anthony King, Urbanism, Colonialism, and the World-Economy: Cultural and Spatial Foundations of the World Urban System (London: Routledge, 1990), 1.
Garth Andrew Myers, Verandahs of Power: Colonialism and Space in Urban Africa (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2003), 9–10.
James Duffy, Portuguese Africa (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1959), 2.
Hudson Institute, Angola: Some Views of Development Prospects, vol. 1 (New York: Hudson Institute, 1969), 133.
William Cunningham Bissell, “Between Fixity and Fantasy: Assessing the Spatial Impact of Colonial Urban Dualism,” Journal of Urban History 37, 2 (2011): 208–29.
John Garner, ed., The Company Town: Architecture and Society in the Early Industrial Age (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 4.
Philip Bonner and Karin Shapiro, “Company Town, Company Estate: Pilgrim’s Rest, 1910–1932,” Journal of Southern Afican Studies 19, 2 (June 1993): 171–200;
Robert Home, “From Barrack Compounds to the Single-Family House: Planning Worker Housing in Colonial Natal and Northern Rhodesia,” Planning Perspectives 15 (2000): 327–47.
J. Douglas Porteous, “The Nature of the Company Town,” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 51 (November 1970): 127–42.
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For an overview of the 1902 Ovimbundu rebellion, see Douglas Wheeler and C. Diane Christensen, “To Rise with One Mind: The Bailundo War of 1902,” in Social Change in Angola, ed. Franz-Wilhelm Heimer (Munich: Weltforum Verlag, 1973), 53–92.
Augusto Bastos, Monographia de Catumbella (Lisbon: Tipografia Universal, 1912), 44.
Ibid., 67–9. The Portuguese abolished slavery in the coastal towns under their control in 1869. Slaves became libertos (freedmen) subject to certain restrictions until 1878, when they were completely freed and called pretos livres (free blacks). In spite of these reforms, the slave trade from the interior continued and purchases of slaves in the coastal regions were commonly referred to as serviçães. See Linda M. Heywood, “Slavery and Forced Labor in the Changing Political Economy of Central Angola, 1850–1949,” in The End of Slavery in Africa, ed. Suzanne Miers and Richard Roberts (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1988), 415–36.
Another destination for Africans “contracted” in Catumbela was the southern port of Moçamedes. See W. G. Clarence-Smith, “Slavery in Coastal Southern Angola 1875–1913,” Journal of Southern African Studies 2, 2 (April 1976): 214–23.
For a defense of the use of serviçães in Moçamedes from the colonists’ perspective, see Viuva Bastos, A Escravatura em Mossamedes: Carta Aberta dirigida a S. Ex. o Presidente da República por um grupo de agricultores, industriaes e commerciantes de Mossamedes (Lisbon: Typographia do Commercio, 1912).
José Redinha, Distribuição Étnica da Província de Angola (Luanda: Centro de Informação e Turismo de Angola, 1965), 20.
José do Sacramento e Sousa, Relatório da Alfândega de Benguela Relativo ao ano de1915 (Lisbon: Imprensa Nacional, 1918), 70.
For a comparative process in French African colonies, see Gwendolyn Wright, “Tradition in the Service of Modernity: Architecture and Urbanism in French Colonial Policy, 1900–1930,” in Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World, ed. Frederick Cooper and Ann Laura Stoler (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 322–45.
For more about the “sanitation syndrome,” see Bill Freund, The African City: A History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 79.
In 1952 the Gabinete de Urbanização Colonial became the Gabinete de Urbanização do Ultramar (Town Planning Committee for the Overseas Territories). J. M. Fernandes, “Arquitectura e Urbanismo no Espaço Ultramarino Português,” in História da Expansão Portuguesa, vol. 5, 1930–1998, ed. F. Bettencourt and K. Chaudhuri (Lisbon: Círculo de Leitores, 1999), 334–83.
José Manuel Fernandes, Geração Africana Arquitectura e Cidades em Angola e Moçambique, 1925–1975 (Lisbon: Livros Horizonte, 2002), 9.
Luiz de Sousa Lara, A Indústria do Açúcar na Economia do Império Conferência Realizada na Sociedade de Geografia em 6 de Março de 1936 (Lisbon: Sociedade Industrial de Tipografia, 1936), 16.
International Congress for Housing and Town Planning, Housing in Tropical Climates (Lisbon, 1952), 20.
Abdou Maliq Simone, For the City Yet to Come: Changing African Life in Four Cities (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004), 142.
Vicente Ferreira, Estudos Ultramarinos, 2 (Lisbon: Agenda Geral do Ultramar, 1954), 173.
For the revolt in the north, see Douglas Wheeler and Rene Pelissier, Angola (London: Pall Mall, 1971). For the revolt in Baixa de Caassanje, see Aida Freudenthal, “A Baixa de Cassanje: Algodão e Revolta,” Revista International de Estudos Africanos, no. 18–22 (1995–1999): 245–83.
For an overview of ideas about colonial spaces, culture, and identity, see Akhil Gupta and James Ferguson, “Beyond ‘Culture’: Space, Identity, and the Politics of Difference,” Cultural Anthropology 7, 1 (February 1992): 6–23.
Marissa Moorman, Intonations: A Social History of Music and Nation in Luanda, Angola, from 1945 to Recent Times (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2008).
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© 2012 Marcelo J. Borges and Susana B. Torres
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Ball, J. (2012). “Little Storybook Town”: Space and Labor in a Company Town in Colonial Angola. In: Borges, M.J., Torres, S.B. (eds) Company Towns. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137024671_4
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