Angola and the River Congo, vol. 1

by Joachim John Monteiro

On the Sunday morning the Marquis attended the garrison’s military mass, and caused much amusement by bringing his band with him, which played during the service. Although he had never before heard mass, his conduct, and that of the head men who accompanied him, was most proper and decorous; they knelt, crossed themselves, and seemed to pray as earnestly as if they had been brought up to it all their lives.

A visit they paid the works at the mines greatly interested them, the steam-engine and saw-mill specially attracting their attention; but the most incomprehensible wonder to them was an ordinary monkey, or screw-jack, which was fixed under one end of a huge trunk of a tree lying on the ground, and on which as many blacks were asked to sit as it could carry;—great was their astonishment to see me lift the whole tree and blacks by simply turning the handle of the monkey. After much clapping of their hands to their mouths, the universal way of expressing surprise by the blacks, the Marquis asked, through his tall secretary, how I had performed the wonderful “fetish?” I explained as well as I could, that it was due to the mechanism inside, but I could see they did not believe me, and I afterwards ascertained that they thought the power was contained in the handle.

The king only spoke a few words of Portuguese, but the tall secretary not only spoke, but wrote it very fairly. He assured me that he had not been taught by the white men, but by blacks whose ancestors had acquired the language from the old missionaries. I am inclined to believe that he must have been a native of Ambaca, or some other province of the interior of Angola, where a great many of the natives at the present day can read and write Portuguese, transmitted from father to son since the olden time.

Some time after the Marquis left, the Portuguese sent a padre from Loanda to join the one at Bembe, and proceed together to San Salvador, with an escort in charge of the officer at Bembe, an ignorant man, who, after the old king had been buried, became frightened and suddenly decamped without allowing them to crown the Marquis of Catende. A second expedition of 100 soldiers was then sent. The priests were welcomed with demonstrations of the greatest joy by the natives, who loaded them with presents; but the military were coldly received, and not a single present was given to them or the officer in command, who, alarmed at their hostility and vexed at the reception given to the padres, again retreated to Bembe as fast as he could, and to screen his want of success and cowardice, intrigued with the Governor-General at Loanda, and the padres were censured for that for which he himself was alone to blame.

Nearly 200 blacks presented themselves to the padres, saying that they were the descendants of the slaves of the former missionaries, and offering to rebuild the church and monasteries, if they were only directed and fed.

Had the Portuguese allowed the padres to go to San Salvador alone, unaccompanied by a military force, which gave an air of conquest to the expedition, a great step would have been made in the introduction of trade and civilization in that part of the interior, and it would have opened the way to geographical discovery. I am convinced that the invincible opposition to Lieutenant Grandy’s passage into the interior was due principally to the fear of the natives that the Portuguese might follow in his steps, and annex the country from whence they derive their ivory.

The soil about Bembe is magnificent, and will produce almost anything. Sugar-cane grows to a huge size, and vegetables flourish in a remarkable manner. During the time I was there I had a fine kitchen-garden, and not only kept the miners supplied with vegetables, but almost every day sent as much as one, and sometimes two, blacks could carry to the fort for the soldiers. Greens of all kinds and cabbages grow beautifully, although the latter seldom form a hard head; all kinds of salad grow equally well, such as endive, lettuce, radishes, mustard and cress, &c.; peas, turnips, carrots, mint, and parsley also flourish, and tomatoes, larger than I ever saw them even in Spain and Portugal. Cucumbers, melons, and vegetable-marrows, we obtained very fine the first season, but the succeeding year a swarm of very small grasshoppers prevented us from getting a single one. Broad beans, although growing and flowering luxuriantly, never produced pods. I gave seeds to the old King of Matuta, and promised to buy their produce from him, and we very quickly had a load of beautiful vegetables every day.

It is almost impossible to estimate the advantage, in a country and climate like Africa, of an abundant supply of fresh salad and vegetables, and yet, although growing so luxuriantly, and with so small an amount of trouble, they are never cultivated by the natives of any part of Angola, and rarely by the Portuguese; the market at Loanda, for instance, is very badly supplied with vegetables.

Benguella and Mossamedes—particularly the latter—are the only exceptions to the general and stupid want of attention to the cultivation of vegetables. The only vegetable introduced by the former missionaries that still exists in cultivation in the country is the cabbage, which is sometimes seen in the towns (generally as a single plant only), growing with a thick stem, which is kept closely cropped of leaves, and as much as four or five feet high, surrounded by a fence to keep the goats and sheep from browsing on it; but I have never seen it in their plantations.

About Bembe a handsome creeper (Mucuna pruriens), with leaves like those of a scarlet-runner, and bearing large, long bunches of dark maroon bean-like flowers, grows very abundantly. The flowers are succeeded by crooked pods covered with fine hairs (cow-itch) which cause the most horrible itching when rubbed on the skin. The first time I pulled off a bunch of the pods I shook some of the hairs over my hand and face, and the sensation was alarming, like being suddenly stung all over with a nettle. I have seen blacks, when clearing bush for plantations, shake these hairs on their hot, naked bodies, and jump about like mad, until they were rubbed with handfuls of moist earth.