The Portuguese authorities and settlers in Angola…

The Portuguese authorities and settlers in Angola form a motley group.

The inhabitants resent the governors, whom they regard as outsiders.

Indeed, these officials are less concerned with the welfare of the colony than with the profit they can realize from the slave trade, but governing the small colony is difficult because any central administrative authority has to deal with a group of settlers prone to rebellion.

Because Brazil is the jewel of Portugal's overseas territories, Portuguese who immigrate to Angola are frequently deserters, degredados, peasants, and others who had been unable to succeed in Portugal or elsewhere in the Portuguese-speaking world.

Owing principally to the African colony's unsavory reputation in Portugal and the high regard in which Brazil is held, there is little emigration to Angola in the 1600s and 1700s.

Thus, the white population of Angola in 1777 is less than sixteen hundred.

Of this number, very few whites are females; one account states that in 1846 the ratio of Portuguese men to Portuguese women in the colony was eleven to one.

A product of this gender imbalance is miscegenation; for example, the mestizo population in 1777 is estimated at a little more than four thousand.

Besides exporting them, Europeans in Angola keep slaves as porters, soldiers, agricultural laborers, and as workers at jobs that the Portuguese increasingly consider too menial to do themselves. ]

At no time, however, is domestic slavery more important to the local economy than the exporting of slaves.