In 2024, I participated in a land claim ceremony in Huambo, Angola, between my friend and a soba (local ruler). To receive legal recognition in the land purchase, both the municipal government and soba had to recognize the ownership of the previous and new owners over the land. In Wealth, Land, and Property in Angola: A History of Dispossession, Slavery, and Inequality, historian Mariana P. Candido addresses the precolonial and colonial roots of this type of land claim. Examining property, legal battles, wealth in people (enslavement), and consumerism, Candido contends that prior to and during Portuguese colonialism, West Central Africans valued land alongside material objects, and they actively participated in the colonial system to gain legally recognized ownership.
Drawing on Angolan-centered court records and ownership documents from Angolan, Portuguese, and Brazilian archives, Candido offers a critical counternarrative to previous Africanist histories that present land as empty and insignificant to West Central Africans. While previous land histories reflect colonial discourses of Africans as uninterested in or “unable to comprehend” property and ownership rights (4), Candido demonstrates that Angolans “owned land, material objects, and people before the twentieth century” and even before Portuguese colonial invasion (7). In a compellingly argued narrative with impressively detailed microhistories, Candido centers the actions, arguments, and resistance of West Central Africans, particularly women, in debates over ownership—of land, goods, and people alike.
The first chapter introduces readers to the shifting ideas about land and property between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries, which reveal that West Central Africans engaged in debates over land before the nineteenth century. Using written and visual records, the chapter brings attention to West Central Africans’ centuries-old perceptions of land ownership and the Portuguese conquistadores’ attempts to justify colonial occupation through inaccurate narratives of land ownership (41).
Chapter Two delves into African and Portuguese land claims in the nineteenth century, in which the Portuguese colonial government “commodified and privatized” land in Angola (65). Yet, as Candido demonstrates, these approaches to land did not exist in Portugal itself. Instead, Angola became a “laboratory” for the Portuguese to experiment with laws around land and ownership before implementing them in Portugal (65).
Centering the emergence of paper culture in Angola, Chapter Three illustrates the colonial government’s development of a “written register” and court records to control and regulate land ownership. The use of written records—wills, titles, bills of sale, and so on—required West Central Africans to provide proof of their ownership claims, which simultaneously undermined oral tradition, reinforced colonial dominance, and forced assimilation to colonial record-keeping practices.
Enslavement, or the commodification of human beings, is the subject of Chapter Four. Here, Candido engages with “property claims over human beings” to uncover how land ownership—“wealth in things”—from previous centuries expanded to encompass ownership over people—“wealth in people” (140–41). Portuguese settlers, enslaved Angolans, and freed Angolans all used writing to petition the colonial government for recognition of their ownership, status, and “wealth accumulation” (166).
Chapter Five investigates the property ownership and rights of libertos (freed people) in the second half of the nineteenth century. Concentrating on the colonial government’s desire to quantify and categorize colonial subjects, it underscores that this period increasingly witnessed the commodification of African labour and dispossession of African people in the face of growing global free markets.
In Chapter Six, Candido delves further into the dispossession of West Central Africans under Portuguese colonialism, particularly the erasure of communal rights in favor of individual property ownership. Specifically, it centers West Central African women who were actively involved in property debates as independent actors. Despite the misogyny and racism inherent in Portuguese colonial policies, many Black and mixed race West Central African women gained rights and property that had been unavailable to them in their local political and economic systems, such as father-daughter inheritance.
Finally, Chapter Seven places West Central Africans in the global context of capitalism, liberalism, and consumerism during the trade in enslaved people. Focusing on the material objects that West Central Africans purchased, gifted, and inherited, Candido illustrates that West Central Africans consciously participated in global consumer trends. This consumerism further reinforced ideas of individual property and shows how elite West Central Africans valued certain products and their quality over others.
Wealth, Land, and Property in Angola includes numerous microhistories of individual African women and men who fought for ownership rights and engaged in global economies. While it sometimes blurs the differences between race and birthplace (i.e., referencing “West African women” rather than “West-African-born white women, Black women, or mixed-race women”), it effectively demonstrates the active role that West African women and men played in the development of a West African economy. However, missing from this history are the oral traditions of West Central African sobas, community leaders, and elders. While Candido acknowledges the significant role that oral tradition has played historically in debates over land, she does not integrate oral histories with current sobas and elders who hold centuries of community memories on these topics. Moreover, family inheritance of material culture and land ownership are ongoing debates, and the inclusion of Angolans’ memories and emotional attachments to such valuables would have enriched Candido’s narrative.
This book is a critical interjection in Africanist scholarship on African land, ownership, and rights. An interdisciplinary contribution, it emerges at the intersection of material culture with legal, social, and family history. Building on Candido’s critical analysis of the Umbundu-speaking and coastal regions of Angola, future research should address the economic and consumerist patterns in the southern and eastern regions, especially in relation to the bordering non-Portuguese colonies. Her methodology and framework could also be beneficial to scholars seeking to center colonized people in the development of local economies, ownership, and consumerism in other colonies within and outside of Africa. By situating West Central Africans in their own histories of ownership, dispossession, and inequality, Wealth, Land, and Property in Angola suggests a necessary step toward the decolonization of African history.
