Mbangala Erotic

The Mbangala, who enter the Portuguese record as Imbangala, are one of the few peoples in the region whose identity was assembled on purpose, in the field, out of whoever could be recruited. They appear around 1600 as roving war bands in the plateau country of central Angola, organized not by descent but by the kilombo: a fortified camp that worked as an initiation society. Young men taken in raids were put through its rites, anointed with an ointment their elders said turned aside iron, and came out Mbangala. Titles were positional, held in a fixed order rather than passed from father to son, which is unusual in a region where lineage was the ordinary grammar of authority. A camp that reproduces by adoption instead of birth can double in a season, and theirs did. The fullest early description comes from Andrew Battell, an English sailor who lived among them for months and whose account also seeded a cannibal reputation that later European writers repeated without checking.

That capacity to absorb strangers made them the hinge of the seventeenth century in Angola. Portuguese commanders hired them against Ndongo; Njinga, Ndongo's most formidable ruler, took up their military organization and their leaders as allies in turn. By the 1630s one band had settled the Baixa de Cassanje, the low floodplain of the Kwango in what is now Malanje Province, and converted mobility into a tollgate. For nearly two centuries the kingdom of Kasanje held the roads that carried captives from Lunda country west to Luanda, taking its cut and keeping competitors off them. This is the uncomfortable center of Mbangala history and it is better stated than softened. Kasanje's grip slipped in the mid nineteenth century as Chokwe and Ovimbundu caravans simply went around it, and Portuguese columns finished the kingdom militarily in the early twentieth. In January 1961 the same floodplain, by then planted in cotton under a concession company, rose against forced cultivation; the massacre that followed is generally counted as the opening of Angola's war of independence.

Today Mbangala live mostly in Malanje, speak Kimbundu, and are usually counted among the Mbundu. One trace of them went further than they did: the word kilombo crossed the Atlantic with captives to Brazil, where quilombo came to mean a settlement of people who had escaped slavery. The war camp's name outlived the war camp, as a word for freedom.