Warfare, Reputation, and the Politics of Being Kisama in the Atlantic World: Angola, New Grenada, and Brazil, c. 1620–58

Since at least the late sixteenth century, the lands between the Kwanza and Longa Rivers of Angola known as “Kisama” figured prominently in the imaginations of leaders of the Kongo, Ndongo, and Portuguese kingdoms as a hostile terrain inhabited by bellicose and intractable resisters.  This reputation was instrumental in attracting thousands of individually vulnerable individuals who fled neighboring regions where they were either already enslaved or subject to the violent depredations associated with the trans-Atlantic slave trade.  Though always politically fragmented and decentralized, Kisama maintained a singular reputation as home to those who, in the words of one mid-seventeenth-century Portuguese governor, “publicize[d] to the neighboring nations that the arms of Your Majesty do not conquer.”  Kisama’s warlike reputation endured well into the nineteenth century and, by the seventeenth century, had also crossed the Atlantic.

Drawing from archival, linguistic, and oral historical sources, in this paper, I explore the trans-Atlantic politics of being Kisama and its relationship to both the practice and social institutionalization of war.  In contrast to the (in)famous Imbangala, who rejected kinship in favor of new socio-political forms that exclusively emphasized a warrior ethos, those in Kisama cast their practice of war in domestic terms, linking political legitimacy to the cultivations of successful settled, agrarian communities even as the practice of warfare was essential to defending these communities.  By focusing on a protracted war with the Portuguese from 1655-1658, I am able to show the influence of fugitives on both the actual practice of warfare and its political, social, and cultural meanings within Kisama.  Moving across the Atlantic, I examine maroon communities in seventeenth-century New Grenada and Brazil to show how the politics of reputation and the practices of war in Kisama, Angola, helped shape the socio-political contours of mature maroon societies in the Americas.