The Prince: South Atlantic Anticolonialism and Slave Trading in the Age of Antislavery

This paper complicates the narrative of slave trade abolition in the South Atlantic World through the short life of Prince Nicolau d'Agua Rosada (d. 1860) of the Kingdom of Kongo. A cosmopolitan African who spent his youth in Lisbon and flaunted his Portuguese fluency, Nicolau alarmed the Portuguese when in 1859, he published a piece in a Lisbon newspaper contesting the Kingdom's subjugation to Portuguese rule and asserting its independence. He also suggested himself as the rightful heir to the Kongo throne. Fundamental to Nicolau's claims was support from Brazil, a former Portuguese colony, provided by the Brazilian consul in Luanda. Nicolau also sought the protection of Brazil's monarch, Dom Pedro II, in his audacious political gamble. On the eve of sailing for Brazil, however, he was murdered.

But if this episode reads like a burgeoning transatlantic alliance between a former Portuguese colony and an African kingdom on the verge of becoming one, there is a twist: Nicolau was a slave trader. He sought to finance his ambitions by selling Africans illegally to the French on the coast. This he did by disguising them as "indentured servants," which were one of the many ways in which African (and indigenous) people around the Atlantic world were forced into coercive labor regimes that emerged from the very berth of antislavery.

Building on the pioneering work of Douglas Wheeler, this paper examines the contradictory life of Prince Nicolau – an anticolonial African who engaged in illegal slave trading - through Brazilian, Angolan, and Portuguese archives. In particular, it interrogates how such slave trading practices occurring in a period (after 1856) when Brazil was recognized as fully- committed to slave trade abolition can reveal the entangled histories of political freedom and human bondage.