Paper short abstract:

This paper analyzes two ambassadors’ categories used through the 17th and 18th centuries by both Zambezian peoples and Portuguese, focusing on a larger discussion of the region's slavery characteristics, showing how these categories were often somewhere between slavery and freedom.

Paper long abstract:

Being known as Mutumes or Manamucates, ambassadors were commonly used through the Zambezi Valley at the 17th and 18th centuries by both native peoples and the Portuguese established there. Sometimes they were described in the sources as slaves or captives, but usually with a relative or absolute high social status. This paper analyzes these categories, trying to address its characteristics, similarities and changes through time and space, often opening a larger discussion on slavery and its particular features in the region.

For the modern scholar, the word slavery carries with it some characteristics usually present on the stereotype of its Atlantic form - chattel slavery -, but not on others, specially on the Zambezian case. For this reason, Igor Kopytoff (1982) argued that slavery should only be used as an evocative concept, not useful for cross-cultural use. The analysis made on this paper does not use a simple slave-free antimony as an analytical tool, but an approach borrowed from Ancient History studies - first proposed by Moses Finley (1964) - of comparatively studying each category through a bundle of claims, privileges, immunities, liabilities, and obligations. This approach is obviously limited to what could be found on the available Portuguese contemporary sources, but the analysis of Mutume and Manamucate categories - and some of its associated status as Sachikunda and Bazo de Porta - proved to be very useful and able to bring light to some of its particular features.