Focusing on the line separating freedom and slavery in Benguela in West Central Africa, this study addresses a series of debates in the historiography of slavery and slave trade in Africa. Challenging a historiography that tends to portray every African slave as a captive of war, this study explores the cases of individuals kidnapped and betrayed. In some cases, they were able to retell their stories of capture, allowing an understanding of the enslavement process as an individual experience, rather than a collective and unanimous one, emphasized by demographic studies. Some of these slaves were captured in regions along the coast during the early nineteenth century, contesting the idea of the progressive and chronological movement of the enslaving frontier. Some Africans were captured and enslaved along the coast, not in the interior. Portuguese colonial agents were directly involved in the systematic capture of free Africans.
Slavery; capture; Benguela; freedom inquisitors