Angola Slavery Museum: A Monument to a Painful Past of Trade Activity

Situated some 18 kilometers south of the capital city Luanda,  sits the National Museum of Slavery; a monument using the original building that processed the transferral of thousands of slaves.

The Museum consists of the Chapel and adjacent rooms; it is a tiny two-story building that sits on a beautiful cliff facing the ocean and Mussulo Island. The Museum itself is relatively modest, but in spite of its size and simplicity, the message is big: “it is a testament and a reminder of the history of the Angolan people who lived in the day of slavery and it stands as a monument to those who suffered and were affected by slavery.”

This little museum is of great importance in the history of slavery because over a period of two centuries, through its doors, millions of slaves entered it to be baptized before being sent off on their arduous journey to the colonies in the Americas. The bulk of the slaves exported to the new world departed the shores of Luanda and were sent to Bahia, Brazil, with a good number sent directly to the North America and the Caribbean islands.

According to historians, slavery in Angola existed since the early times. But starting in the 16th century the conquest of Portugal's explorers began the founding of settlements and trade ports which mitigated and expanded the major trading activities with the Imbangala and Mbundu tribes.  These tribes were inherently involved in an internal 'African slave trade' and the arrival of the Portuguese precipitated the beginning of the 'Atlantic Slave Trade'.

For several decades, slave trade with the Portuguese colony of Brazil was an important trade avenue in Portuguese Angola, and also an important supplier of workers for the emerging Brazilian agricultural sector.   Historians note that besides the benefit of two Portuguese colonies, the slave trade also benefited the local black merchants and warriors who profited from the trade. In the 17th century, the  Imbangala tribe became the main rivals of the Mbundu in supplying slaves to the Luanda slave processing market. In the 1750's the Portuguese sold 5,000 to 10,000 slaves annually, devastating the Mbundu

Historic City Series: Sumbe

On the South coast of Angola, a few miles from Luanda, is located the splendorous city of Sumbe, capital of the Kwanza-South province.  Sumbe comes from the word, in the national language kimbundo, “Kussumba”, which in Portuguese means “Buy”.

Historians indicate that the location of the city of Sumbe was significant as the city was always a central trade hub. Regular trade items between the peoples of the interior and the coast occured in the trade of salt and fish, as well as the fabrics brought by the Europeans have long served to feed the supply chain.  Significantly, historians note that Sumbe was a major trade port involved in the transfer and sale of black slaves. 

The importance of the place led the Portuguese colonial authorities to think about the founding of a city, also motivated by the “necessity of defense against incursions of English and French pirates and the link between the realms of Luanda and Benguela, as well as the copper mines”.  It was in this region, more precisely in Kicombo, that the Portuguese-Brazilian Salvador Corrêa de Sá e Benevides first anchored his fleet of caravels from Brazil, in 1648, and prepared the expedition which was to expel the Dutch who occupied Luanda.

According to historical data, the foundation of the city beganon January 7, 1768, when Governor Inocêncio de Sousa Coutinho commanded a brigade of engineers to make the choice of where they should establish a prison under the name of Novo Redondo. Its development took place from 1785 with the construction of the first stone fortress; the first church was built in 1811, while the first health services emerged in 1872 through the doctor Francisco Joaquim Vieira.

According to History, Novo Redondo was the first Angolan place to have home lighting, supplied by the hydroelectric dam of Cambongo’s River, later expanded and improved with the current treatment station for 50 years.

An Angolan Pageant That Seeks to Empower Women

Unlike most beauty pageants, these Angolan contestants wear their prosthetic limbs.  For this is Miss Landmine, a beauty pageant with a unique manifesto that aims to promote female and disabled pride and empowerment.

The event also aims to get people to re-examine established concepts of physical perfection, raise landmine awareness, and challenge inferiority and guilt complexes that hinder creativity in the historical, cultural, social and personal spheres. 

“Miss Landmine ultimately celebrates true beauty, and replaces the passive term of victim with the active term of survivor,” Miss Landmine director and creator Morten Traavik, a Norwegian artist.

Traavik’s unusual project came about in 2003 when he frequently visited war-torn Angola’s capital, Luanda, with his then-girlfriend who had an Angolan father. They could not travel much because of the thousands of landmines littering the countryside that claim countless lives each year. Angola is one of the world’s most heavily mined countries.

“It has been my objective all along that Miss Landmine would have a political or humanitarian impact. We only had one main criterion, that any woman or girl can participate as long as they wanted to. The women taking part are not being regarded as victims to be pitied. Rather, they are just like any other contemporary Angolan woman.”

In 2008, Traavik’s idea became a reality. He collaborated with local and national non-governmental organisations (NGOs) to disseminate information on the pageant that was open to women who had survived landmine explosions.

Miss Landmine was funded by the Norwegian Arts Council and the Norwegian Foreign Ministry, which had played a pivotal role in the global ban against unexploded ordnance (UXO) in December 2008 in Oslo. The pageant was co-funded by the Angolan government and the European Union Mission to Angola.

Angola’s First Lady Ana Pauyla dos Santos crowned Augusta Hurica, 31, representing the province of Luanda, the first Miss Landmine Angola. Hurica won a specially designed and customised prosthesis worth US$15,000 (RM45,000) from one of Norway’s leading orthopaedic clinic.

The Legacy of a Missionary Doctor

Throughout the centuries of past medical ministry, missionary doctors have sacrificed much to serve the needy with vital medical care.   One great example of this commitment and service is Dr. Robert Livingstone Foster.  Dr. Foster was a pioneering missionary doctor in western Zambia and Angola and in conjunction with his son, Dr. Steve Foster, they worked to establish the CEML Hospital in Lubango.

Now in his retirement years, Dr. Foster tells his story about his past work and passion for medical ministry in Africa.  It is truly an enthralling and compelling story as told in his biography 'The Sword and the Scalpel' penned by author Lorry Lutz.  Please see the accompanying video highlighting his life work.  Enjoy!

Furnishing Angolan Schools with Unused Resources

Perched high on Angola’s central plateau, the city of Huambo is home to a fledgling furniture industry now playing a key role in furnishing local schools. Taking advantage of ample supplies of eucalyptus trees, a non-profit NGO is now operating a small-scale furniture factory to produce high-quality desks, chairs and other wooden fittings to meet the needs of the country’s expanding school system.

Angola’s eucalyptus forests stretch along its railroads and were originally created to supply wood to power steam locomotives in the absence of other local fuels. Steam trains along the Benguela Railway crossing Huambo and central Angola ceased to run in the 1970s, effectively ending mass timber consumption. A revamped Benguela line will reopen in late 2012, but the wood-guzzling locomotives have been replaced by modern diesel engines.

Meanwhile, the abandoned eucalyptus trees, left untended, have grown higher and gained greater girths, enhancing their suitability for furniture-making.  Angola has 148,000 hectares of nonnative tree plantations, mainly eucalyptus, with over a third of the total belonging to the Benguela Railway Company.

Around 80% of Huambo’s schools along with their equipment and furniture were destroyed during the country’s long civil war, but since peace returned in 2002 there has been an exciting rebirth in educational provision with pupil numbers rocketing, handing HabiTec a huge and urgent market for its products.

The furniture factory is run by HabiTec Social Enterprise which has 45 Angolan employees, including seven administrative staff. Manual jobs include sawing-machine operators, mechanics and maintenance teams  in seeking to serve Angola’s educational sector. Habitec's aim is to improve productive capacity, focusing on school furniture as the government has established targets to improve the quality of teaching and reduce illiteracy. In order to do this, there needs to be physical school infrastructure – and quality school furniture is the basis of this program.

Battling Malnutrition Problems

(ANGOP May 12)   The UNICEF (The United Nations Children's Fund) representative in Angola, Koenraad Vanormelingen, released current research results that show that 8.2% of Angolan children under 5 years old, a total in the order of 300,000 children, suffer from acute malnutrition.

According to representative Vanormelingen, these country totals are the major cause of morbidity and mortality in Angolan children under five years of age.  These research reflect that in other lessor levels of malnutrition; some 15.6% or one million children suffer from the basic level of malnutrition, while some 500,000 children suffer from chronic malnutrition.

The representative proclaimed that these statistics illustrate a problem of a lack of complete nutrition, not simply the problem of the lack of access to macro nutrients such as protein and sugar.

UNICEF defines acute malnutrition as the nutritional deficiencies that produce reduced Weight to Height anthropometric indicators; producing very physically lean or skeletal appearing body frames. Chronic malnutrition is defined as reduced Height to Weight indicators which will produce stunted growth and other physically limiting conditions such as mental development.