The Extraordinary Journey of the Jaga Through the Centuries: Critical Approaches to Precolonial Angolan Historical Sources

Abstract

The ancient kingdom of Angola, or more precisely Ndongo—which until 1671 essentially existed in the area north of the Kwanza River in presentday Angola—and the neighboring state of Kasanje, which was established by the Mbangala around 1630—belong to what is historiographically one of the more privileged areas of Africa, the history of which is documented by written sources extending back into the sixteenth century. These sources are even quite numerous, and, because of their diverse nature, often complement each other. Thus there are documentary as well as narrative sources, eyewitness accounts as well as other types. Particularly primary, but also secondary (as well as “tertiary” and “quaternary”) sources differ greatly in quality. Despite such differences they share one common factor: virtually without exception they were written by members of foreign, non-African cultures, who came to the area as conquerors, slave traders, and missionaries.However, the greatest problem these sources pose for historians is not their bias—for their authors were all more or less deeply involved in the contemporary political and economic circumstances that they purport to document. Rather, by far the gravest problem for anyone wishing to write not just Portuguese colonial history, butAfricanhistory, is that none of these authors, unlike those who wrote about neighboring Kongo, lived at the African courts or among Africans (let alone were intimately aquainted with their culture), so that they were not able to observe or experience events directly from the inside. This considerably reduces the scope of the history that can be reconstructed and risks unjustifiably narrowing or distorting the historical perspective. The few exceptions, such as the reports told by the English slave trader Andrew Battell and the comprehensive syntheses left us by Antonio Cavazzi—both of which unfortunately have been published only as second or third hand renderings of their accounts—thus are accorded even greater historiographical weight.