104 Or uno D. LaraAfrican resistance to European expansion of the slave systemThe Jaga problem comes under this head, or what I have called 'the long
transit of the Jaga, from Africa to the New World'. The Jaga broke in upon a
foursome already at loggerheads: Portugal, Congo, Ndongo and Sao Tomé.
They were very cruel warriors enjoying political, religious and military sup-
eriority. Operating from kilombos, or stockades, they invaded the Kongo and
laid waste the country when Don Alvaro I (1568-87) came to the throne. He
was obliged to abandon his capital, Säo Salvador, and take refuge on an
island in the Zaire. Their invasion disorganized the Portuguese slave trade.
The Jaga invasion should be considered in conjunction with an invasion
of Sumbas and that of the Mane of Sierra Leone at the end of the sixteenth
century and the beginning of the seventeenth. In Guinea, a very belligerent
people, the Bijagos, who inhabited the Rio Grande islands, also inflicted great
destruction and took many captives at the same period. Slave revolts have been
mentioned as taking place in the Cape Verde region, at Cacheu, in the seven-
teenth century (1661).
Diogo Gomes relates in De Prima Inventione Guinée that the Portuguese
were stopped from pursuing the slave trade in the vicinity of Cape Verde and
the Guinea islands by the men of Besagichi, who greeted them with poisoned
arrows. Some caravels were burned. This happened towards the beginning
when the system was getting started, in the middle of the fifteenth century.
The Jaga invasion, in which the Kwango was crossed in 1568 and the
Congo invaded, was also connected with migrations which completely changed
the African interior and upset the balance of power on the Atlantic seaboard :
(a) migration of the Imbangala, who set out from Luanda to found the Kasanje
Kingdom in Angola at the end of the sixteenth century ; (b) Luba migration
from the old Songai empire ; (c) Lunda migration, which followed closely that
of the Imbangala; and (d) Pende migration from the coast eastwards into the
interior in Angola, under pressure from the Portuguese occupying the Luanda
salt-marshes, which were worked by the Pende, and the Imbangala and Jaga
invasions.
The following points might be mentioned:
These migrations were spread over the sixteenth century, starting at the
end of the fifteenth and continuing into the seventeenth, that is, a period which
brought the inhabitants of the African seaboard into contact with the European
slave-traders.
They were not mass migrations in which a whole people was displaced,
but military expeditions with specific targets to be destroyed. When the Jaga
arrived to the west of the Kwango, they lived on a war-footing in their fortified
camps or kilombos between brief and effective raids. Men and women fought
side by side, newborn babies apparently being put to death so as not to hamper