Slavery in Angola encompassed both enslavement within West Central Africa and the forced export of captives through the Atlantic ports of Luanda and Benguela. It developed through changing relationships among African states and intermediaries, Portuguese officials and settlers, merchants, soldiers, and inland trading networks. War, judicial punishment, debt, kidnapping, and political insecurity could all expose people to sale.

Angola was a major source region for the transatlantic slave trade, especially its South Atlantic branch. Luanda and Benguela were closely linked by shipping, credit, imperial administration, and commerce to ports in Brazil. This was not simply a triangular trade directed through Europe: in some periods, Luso-Brazilian merchants and Brazilian demand shaped traffic directly across the South Atlantic. The scale and routes of this forced migration are documented by the public SlaveVoyages database.

The legal ending of slavery was gradual. Portuguese measures culminated in an empire-wide abolition decree in 1869, followed by a transitional liberto status that ended in the late 1870s. Formal abolition did not by itself create free labor. Under later Portuguese colonial rule, coercive recruitment, compulsory labor, and restrictive contract systems continued, so the abolition of legal slave status must be distinguished from the end of forced labor.

The history therefore joins two related but distinct processes: the long conversion of captives into exportable property, and the later replacement of legal slavery by other forms of colonial labor coercion.

External links

SlaveVoyages: Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database