SPACE, PLACE AND APPROPRIATION IN COLONIAL NARRATIVAS

The case of Kassanje fair, Angola (século XIX)

Abstract

The lines that follow are an attempt to verify the potentiality of investigating the relationship between space and society in the region of Kassanje, Angola, in the 19th century, seeking to understand the use of colonial accounts to insert spatial territories beyond the stage of events, but as an important element in the construction of colonial narratives. To this end, attention is drawn to the narrative produced by the Captain and Director of the Kassanje fair, Antonio Rodrigues Neves, and the brief report by his superior, Major Francisco de Salles Ferreira. The testimonies bring important elements for inference not only because of their contents, but because they are part of a colonial production that is closely linked to the context of open conflicts between Portuguese and Africans in the middle of the 19th century, guided by ideals of liberalism and the guarantee of forces policies crippled by trade tensions inherited from Brazil's independence, the gradual decline in the slave trade and attempts at other commercial insertions in Angola. Such an objective opens up a range of questions, such as the reasons that led historiography not to deposit interest in the spatiality of the Kassanje territory and suffered the interaction between space and society in the 19th century African colonial context.