António da Silva Porto

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This article is about the slave trader in Angola. For the naturalist painter, see António Silva Porto.

Antonío Francisco Ferreira da Silva Porto (24 August 1817 - 1890) was a Portuguese slave trader and explorer in Angola. He married a prominent woman from the Bié kingdom of the Ovimbundu people who were prolific traders.

Silva Porto was born to a poor family in Porto, Portugal. At age 12 he sailed to Rio de Janeiro, Brazil where there were many profitable coffee plantations dependent on slave labor. Porto apprenticed himself to learn the dynamics of the slave market, trading, and the coffee industry during the 10 years he spent in Brazil. He then moved directly from Brazil to Luanda, Angola's capital from where over 4 million slaves would be shipped to the New World.

At one point Silva Porto housed David Livingstone and helped Livingstone find the route to Luanda. Neither one of them seemed to like each other.

Porto was an advocate for development of the interior of Angola. Though Portugal seemed more interested in colonizing the coast. For years, Porto was a sort of diplomat between the Portuguese colonialists and the Ovimbundu people. When he saw that the destruction of the Ovimbundu as a kingdom was inevitable he wrapped himself in a Portuguese flag, lay down on a dozen kegs of gunpowder and then lit them. He did not die immediately but the burns from the self inflicted injury killed him the next day.

The town of Kuito was named after him until Angola's independence in 1975.

[edit] References

(Portuguese) Pamphlets on Silva Porto, Sociedade de Geographia de Lisboa, Typographia do Commercio de Portugal, 1890. Online at Google Books.[1]
(Portuguese) Viagens e Apontamentos de um Portuense em Africa: Diario de Antonio Francisco Ferreira da Silva Porto, published 1986, edited by Maria Emilía Madeira Santos at the Library of the University of Coimbra.