Paper short abstract:

Interrogates political & intellectual histories of Kisama, a decentralized societies in central Angola that emerged from opposition to state violence & slave trade in 16th & 17th century Angola; develops theory of fugitive modernities for comparative study within early modern African Atlantic world.

Paper long abstract:

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 Italian priest, "glorify in a certain independence." Drawing from archival, linguistic, and oral historical sources, in this paper, I explore the fugitive politics of being Kisama in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Interrogating the complex and often contradictory textures of political identities formed in opposition to centralized states in late sixteenth and early seventeenth-century Angola, I analyze the different ideologies of political legitimacy and their relationship to violence that emerged within Kisama during the early seventeenth century, contrasting them with other state and non-state political practices in the region. In particular, I focus on comparing the political practices of Kisama with those of the (in)famous marauding Imbangala bands who, by the 1630s, coalesced in the powerful state of Kasanje. I argue that Kisama and the Imbangala/Kasanje represent two distinct polarities of fugitive modernities, a concept that helps us comprehend politics beyond and against the state in early modern Africa.