Enslaved Females in Moçâmedes, 1855: Age, Families, Work, and Resistance

Abstract

This contribution analyzes the presence and experience of enslaved women in Moçâmedes in 1855. Despite representing only 30% of the local enslaved population, these women played essential roles in the social and economic formation of the recently founded town. The age distribution of the captives reveals a concentration in potentially reproductive ages, but the local slave society did not reproduce itself biologically. The near absence of stable enslaved families indicates that reproduction was not encouraged by slaveowners. Many women headed single-parent households, caring alone for young children while working to support them. Enslaved women worked mainly in agriculture, harvesting orchil, and in domestic service, participating intensely in the main economic activities. Their work, however, remained largely invisible in the official documentation of the time. Bodily marks—scars, red-iron marks, and other signs of violence—evidence the suffering imposed by slavery. Female resistance included both everyday strategies and organized escapes, many of them collective. Taken together, this study recovers fragments of these women's lives, making their experiences, contributions, and forms of resistance more visible within the context of a slaving frontier.