In her deeply researched and fascinating monograph, Blacksmiths of Ilamba, Crislayne Alfagali offers an exquisitely detailed social history of the Nova Oeiras iron factory in late eighteenth-century Angola. Founded in the mid-1760s by the governor of Angola, Francisco Inocêncio de Sousa Coutinho, the Nova Oeiras foundry—staffed by highly skilled, waged Ambundu blacksmiths and smelters—was designed to furnish the Portuguese Empire with metal for firearms, shackles, and ship parts. Despite Sousa Coutinho’s colonial ambitions, the Nova Oeiras factory did not end up producing enough high-quality iron to be considered economically viable, and was shut down by the governor’s successor, António de Lencastre, in the early 1770s.
Alfagali’s book offers readers “an Afrocentric perspective” of the iron factory’s rise and demise, which “brings the role of Africans in history to the forefront of the narrative” (11). Challenging colonial historiographies that characterize the collapse of the factory as a story of African indolence, Alfagali argues that the Ambundu, who viewed metalworking as an important spiritual and political activity, purposefully withheld their skills, “resist[ing] the loss of control of their own work process” (248). Reading an array of colonial sources against the grain, Alfagali attempts to recover Black smelters’ and blacksmiths’ agency, skills, and resistance to colonialism at the Nova Oeiras foundry, weaving their lives into a microhistory of ironworking in the Portuguese Atlantic world.
Blacksmiths of Ilamba is divided into five chapters. The first, introductory chapter paints a vivid—albeit somewhat dense—picture of the social, economic, and political constitution of the Kingdom of Ndongo (or Angola) in the early modern period, offering a detailed account of the encounter between Central African polities and Portuguese colonizers. In the second chapter, instead, we learn about Central African cultures and practices of knowledge linked to ironworking, and about the events that led to Sousa Coutinho’s establishment of the town and foundry at Nova Oeiras, inland from the main Portuguese trading post at Luanda. Chapter 3 presents a detailed microhistory of racialized labor relations in the Nova Oeiras iron factory, explaining the variety of ways in which African blacksmiths were surveilled and punished, as well as recovering their creative modes of resistance. As Alfagali suggests, despite not being enslaved, Black metallurgists at Nova Oeiras were “constrained” by “the hierarchical relations and dependence that structured both (European and Central African) societies in the modern era” and by “the coercion inherent in…a compulsory labor relationship” (156). The fourth chapter offers an account of the local Ambundu’s rich and complex metalworking practices and expertise, explaining the role of metallurgical rituals and knowledges in Central African political and religious cosmologies. Lastly, Blacksmiths’ closing chapter discusses the importance of contesting the colonial narratives that demean African techno-scientific knowledges and practices, from early modernity to the present.
This English-language edition of Alfagali’s book, first published in Portuguese in 2018, comes at a particularly crucial time for the history of African technology in anglophone scholarship. In 2023, Jenny Bulstrode published a groundbreaking article, “Black Metallurgists and the Making of the Industrial Revolution,” which argued that the process to turn scrap metal into valuable bar iron—frequently upheld as a central discovery of the Industrial Revolution—was appropriated from Black metallurgists who ran an enslaver’s foundry in Jamaica. Blacksmiths of Ilamba’s clear resonance with Bulstrode’s innovative and important work makes it all the more pertinent to contemporary debates in the history of early modern technology.
While the content of Alfagali’s book is excellently researched and deeply significant to scholars of Renaissance studies as the field expands geographically, culturally, and methodologically, its presentation is somewhat unwieldy, occasionally resembling an unrevised doctoral thesis rather than a polished monograph. There are extensive block quotations from secondary sources throughout the text, and figures often appear rather hastily assembled. The book would have benefited enormously from more careful editorial attention—to make it smoother and attract the wider audience it undoubtedly deserves. This quibble is not to detract in any way from Alfagali’s important and original scholarly achievement. Indeed, early modern historians of science, technology, and colonialism, as well as Renaissance scholars more broadly, will find Blacksmiths of Ilamba rich, compelling, and rewarding.
