Angola and the River Congo, vol. 2

by Joachim John Monteiro

About a mile from the high town, on the road south to Calumbo on the River Quanza, is an old and deep well called the “mayanga,” where hundreds of blacks flock daily to draw a limited supply of clear though slightly brackish water, but the best to be had in Loanda, the usual wells affording water quite unfit for drinking purposes.

The vegetation about Loanda is scanty, but a milky-juiced, thin-stemmed euphorbia, called “Cazoneira,” and the cashew-tree, grow very abundantly on the cliffs, and inland about the “mosseques;”—mandioca, beans, &c., grow sparingly in the sandy, arid soil.

Oxen thrive, but very little attention is given to rearing them, Loanda being supplied with cattle from the interior for the beef consumed by the population.

Angola is one of the penal settlements of Portugal, where capital punishment was abolished some years ago, and whence the choicest specimens of ruffians and wholesale assassins are sent to Loanda to be treated with the greatest consideration by the authorities. On arriving on the coast, some are enlisted as soldiers, but the more important murderers generally come provided with money and letters of recommendation that ensure them their instant liberty, and they start grog-shops, &c., where they rob and cheat, and in a few years become rich and independent and even influential personages.

Although most of the convicts are sentenced to hard labour, very few are made to work at all; but I must do these gentlemen the justice of saying that their behaviour in Angola is generally very good, and murders or violence committed by them are extremely rare, though they may have been guilty of many in Portugal,—the reason of this furnishes an argument against the abolition of capital punishment; it is because they have the certainty of being killed if they commit a murder in Angola, whereas in their mother country they may perpetrate any number of crimes with the knowledge that if punished at all, it is at most by simple transportation to a fine country like Angola, where many have made their fortunes, and where no hardships await them.

In Angola they are thrashed for every crime, and none survive the punishment if such crime has been of any magnitude. One of the few cases that I remember at Loanda was that of two convicts who agreed to kill and rob another who kept a low grog-shop, and who was supposed to be possessed of a small sum of money. They accomplished their purpose one night, and returned to the hut where one of them lived, to wash away the traces of their crime, and hide the money they had stolen. A little girl, the child of one of the murderers, was in bed in a small room in the hut at the time, and heard the whole of the proceedings. Before leaving, the other assassin, suddenly remembering the presence of the child in the adjoining room, declared that she might have heard their doings and that it was necessary to kill her also, lest she might divulge their crime. The monsters approached her little bed for that purpose, but she feigned sleep so successfully that they spared her life, thinking she had been fast asleep.

The next day the child informed a woman of what she had heard the night before, and the inhuman father and his companion were arrested, tried, and condemned to receive a thousand stripes each. They were thrashed until it was considered that they had had enough for that day, but luckily both died on their way to the hospital. At the investigation or inquest held on their bodies, the doctor certified that their deaths had been caused by catching cold when in a heated condition on their way to the hospital from the place of punishment!

In Angola convicts cannot run away, nor would they meet with protection anywhere, and they would most certainly be killed off quietly for any crime they might commit, and no one would care to inquire how they came by their death.

The police of Loanda are all blacks, but officered by Portuguese. They manage to preserve public order pretty well, and are provided with a whistle to call assistance, as in Portugal. No slave is allowed to be about at night after nine o’clock unless provided with a pass or note from his master.

The lighting of the city is by oil-lamps suspended at the corners of the streets by an iron framework, so hinged as to allow the lamp to be lowered when required for cleaning and lighting, and it is secured by a huge flat padlock.