From the foundation of Luanda in 1575 the Portuguese presence in West Central Africa was organised around the acquisition of captives, through direct campaigning up the Kwanza, through alliance with the Imbangala warrior bands, and through the purchase of people taken in wars fought by African states. Ndongo was progressively destroyed, its ruler Njinga waging a long resistance from Matamba; Kongo, a Christian kingdom that had dealt with Portugal on treaty terms since 1491, was defeated at Mbwila in 1665 and dissolved into civil war that itself generated captives. The Dutch occupation of Luanda in 1641-48 interrupted but did not end the traffic. The consequence was that this stretch of coast became the single largest source region of the Atlantic slave trade, and Brazil its principal destination. The scale of the internal disruption — populations moved out of raiding zones, states reorganised around the supply of captives, the depopulation of some districts and the fortification of others — is described in Portuguese and missionary sources and in African oral tradition, but has never been quantified.
Portugal established colonies at Luanda and Benguela and waged and financed wars against Ndongo, Kongo and their neighbours, exporting captives on a scale that made West Central Africa the largest single source of the Atlantic trade
No population figure for the Kongo, Ndongo, Matamba and Ovimbundu lands in this period is reliable enough to serve as a denominator; Joseph Miller and John Thornton work instead from export series and from the demographic effects of removals on age and sex structure. What is well documented is the outflow: the Slave Voyages database records some 2.8 million captives embarked from West Central Africa between 1575 and 1750, the largest single regional stream of the Atlantic trade.
No defensible figure exists. Portuguese campaign accounts and missionary reports describe heavy mortality in the wars of the Kwanza valley, in the great famines and epidemics that followed them, and among captives held at Luanda awaiting shipment, but the colonial records were kept to track exports and duties, not deaths, and no reconstruction has produced a total.
Campaigns that destroyed settlements and carried off their inhabitants, the holding of captives in coastal pens before shipment, and the taking of children among the captives are documented in Portuguese governors' correspondence, Capuchin missionary reports and the customs records analysed by Menz and Lenk.
Angola