Malungo, Meu Malungo
ANGOLAN ORIGINS OF MELUNGEONS IN 17TH CENTURY VIRGINIA

by Tim Hashaw


INTRODUCTION

Melungeons are an ethnically-diverse group originating in early 17th century
Virginia, Carolina, Maryland, and Delaware, later settling Kentucky,
Tennessee, Ohio, Louisiana and Texas. Melungeons descend from northern
Europeans, Bantu Africans and eastern Native Americans. Records of land
transactions, marriages, births, deaths, passenger lists, military rosters,
and other sources, show their forebears were English, Irish, Scots, Germans
and Dutch, among others. Blood tests also show European, with lesser
percentages of African and Native American, ancestry. Percentages may vary
between mixed communities. There are clues of yet other ethnicities, but the
founders of Melungia were basically red, white, and black people who
intermingled very early in British America.

This article focuses on the 17th century African origins of Melungeons and
does not dwell in depth on European and Native American ancestry which also
contributed to this mixed group.

A decade after England began settling Virginia, Portugal was preparing to
colonize interior Bantu tribes of Angola, immediately south of Congo. From
1618-21, Portugal waged a massive assault on Kimbundu-speaking subjects of
the highland kingdom of Ndongo. At the time, and generally before the 1660s,
England had no significant direct trade in African slaves. But during the
3-year Portuguese war on Angola, Africans began arriving in the young colony
of Virginia aboard Dutch and English privateers who had robbed Iberian
merchant-slavers on the high seas. To obtain African captives from
1619-1650, British-American colonies like Virginia, relied almost exclusively
upon privateers preying on Portuguese slavers leaving the Angolan port of
Luanda.

THE ANGOLAN ORIGIN OF THE NAME "MELUNGEON"

The name "Melungeon" comes from the Angolan-Kimbundu word malungu which
originally meant "watercraft".   It was brought to Virginia with Angolan
captives arriving by sea in the 17th century. According to John Thornton of
Millersville University of Pennsylvania, and Linda Heywood of Howard
University,

   "In Brazil, which had a heavily Kimbundu-speaking African population, the
term malungu was used
   to mean anyone who had traveled on the same ship together, and gradually
extended (by definition) to
   other close companions or friends. Since the word derives from Kimbundu
(the same word is also used
   in Kikongo) and not Portuguese, there is no reason that it can't also be
used in areas outside Brazil
   where the Angolans went."

The term was borrowed into Portuguese as "melungo" (shipmate) from Kimbundu
and Kikongo. Originally the Angolans in Virginia, as in Brazil, used the
name for those of their captive people who had come to the Americas on slave
ships. Professor Robert Slene wrote an article entitled, "Malunga, ngoma
vem! Africa encoberta e descoberta no Brasil" [Malungu, ngoma comes! Africa
uncovered and discovered in Brazil]. Slene notes that the philologist Macedo
Soares gave as a definition of "malungo"in 1880 (in Portuguese):

   "companheiro, patricio, da mesma regiao, que veio no mesmo comboio"
parceiro da mesma laia,
   camarada, parente." (translated: companion, fellow countryman, from the
same region, who travels on
   the same conveyance, from the same background, comrade, relative).
Soares cites a 1779 Portuguese
   dictionary with the example, "Malungo, meu malungo...chama o preto a
outro cativo que veio com ele
   na mesma embaracao"...

   which is translated (Malungo, my malungo...the black calls another
captive who
   came with him on the same ship)

Slene finds the etymology of the Portuguese word melungo in the Angolan
malungu from the languages of Kimbundu, Kikongo, and Umbundu (spoken in
central Angola). In the modern languages, the definition of malungu can mean
"companion". Thornton and Heywood write:

   "...the idea that the term means "shipmate" and could be extended to
"countryman" or "close friend"
   and"relative" makes great sense to us and gives the term "Melungeon"
great significance."

The name "Melungeon" is likely an English elongation of the Kimbundu malungu,
used by new Angolans in colonial Virginia to describe themselves; companions,
shipmates, fellow passengers who had endured the great Atlantic crossing
together. These first Angolans in British-America were the Ndongo, seized
with their fellow countrymen by the Portuguese who, in 1618, came with a
terrible ally to enslave and colonize.

COUNTRYMEN

Today the beautiful but deadly mountainous district of Malange [or Malanje],
Angola provides most of the maimed poster children in the ongoing effort to
ban landmines. Immediately after the four centuries-old era of Portuguese
colonialism ended in the 1970s, decades of fighting broke out in Angola
between factions struggling to take control.   The Malange highlands were a
battleground during much of that fighting. Many top government offices
remain under Portuguese influence. But 400 years ago, the Malange was home
for the flourishing villages of the realm of the Ndongo.

John Thornton, professor of Millersville University in Pennsylvania, along
with historian Engel Sluiter, provided a great deal of light on the first
Africans in Virginia in recent articles in the William & Mary Quarterly.
Thornton wrote, "The African Experience of the "20. and Odd Negroes" Arriving
in Virginia in 1619", in the 1998 edition of W&MQ. The following account of
the 1618-1620 Portuguese assault on the Ndongo kingdom quotes his research.

The kingdom was centered in a thin stretch of land, 30 miles wide and 50
miles deep between the Lukala and Lutete rivers in the area described as a
"cool plateau region mostly over 4,000-foot elevation". The king who ruled
from the royal capital of Kabasa was Mbandi Ngola Kiluanji.   Ngola was the
title interpreted as "ruler" and became the basis of the name "Angola" under
the Portuguese. Then, during the season of war in 1618, Portugal opened her
assault. This invasion commenced a year before Angolans would begin
appearing in Jamestown, Virginia, far west across the Atlantic Ocean, and
two years before the Pilgrims arrived at Plymouth.

Portuguese governor Luis Mendes de Vasconcelos entered the Angola port of
Loanda [modern Luanda] eager to lead the military campaign into the interior
country.   At the time, Portugal authority was restricted to the port and the
west coast of Angola. His ambition was to capture slaves. During just three
short years, the Portuguese under Vasconcelos would conquer and take tens of
thousands of men, women and children from the Ndongo and surrounding tribes.
Professor Thornton found that from 1618-1621, the number of 50,000 Africans
captured in this expedition was "far more than were exported before or would
be again for some decades."

About 30 years prior to the Portuguese military campaign, the Ndongo had
thrown off their vassal status to the king of Congo in a battle on the
Lukala River. Vasconcelos was not about to under-estimate the Ndongo and
their allies in the highlands. He planned his campaign to include the
mercenary African tribe called the "Imbangala". These hired warriors were
dreaded cannibals who, according to one European eye-witness in the 17th
century, practiced witchcraft and were a "quasi-religious cult devoted to
bloodlust, selfishness and greed", in the words of Thornton. They were
cruel, burying alive any infant born in their camps so that they might always
be ready to move. The Imbangala maintained their numbers exclusively by
training the children of their victims to be warriors. Thornton says of
their battle tactics:

   "The Imbangala generally made a large encampment in the country they
intended to pillage, after
   arriving near harvest time. They forced the local authorities either to
fight them outright, or to
   withdraw into fortified locations, leaving the fields for the Imbangala
to harvest. Once their enemies
   were weakened by fighting or lack of food, they could make the final
assault on their lands and capture
   them. The presence of Portuguese slave-traders who also provided
firearms, made the raiding of people
   as profitable or even more profitable as raiding food and livestock had
been before"

Professing disgust with the customs of the Imbangala, the Portuguese general
nevertheless hired them. Vasconcelos joined three Imbangala companies to his
own infantry and cavalry for the opening assault against the people of the
Angola high country in 1618.

At this time according to Thornton, the Ndongo people were ripe for outside
attack. The brothers-in-law of the king, Mbanda Ngola Kiluanji, had
exploited their standing to commit many crimes and offenses, leaving many
nobles incensed against them. A rebel soba [district chieftain], Kavalo Ka
Kabassa, lured his king into a trap on the Lukala River in 1617 and deposed
him.

Kiluanji's son and heir, Ngola Mbandi, had not yet regained the full support
of his father's rebel sobas when Vasconcelos launched his attack in 1618.
The Portuguese, with the Imbangala companies in the forefront, struck and
defeated the armies of a soba named Kaita Ka Balanga, across the Kwanza
River. With the loss of Balanga's forces, the royal palace in Kabasa was
completely vulnerable and the Portuguese-Imbangala army seized it and took
hundreds of captives for the slave market by the end of 1618.

After the winter season of 1618-19, the military campaign resumed in the
spring of 1619. The Portuguese forces with their African allies killed 95
Ndongo sobas, defeating the armies under them. The untried prince, Ngola
Mbandi, fled Kabasa, abandoning his family and his many wives to be carried
away with a great multitude of Ndongo into slavery; nobles and peasants
alike. Mbandi relocated the center of his fragmented kingdom in the Kindonga
Islands. Later, under the dynamic leadership of the famous Queen Njinga
[1624-1663] the Ndongo battled fiercely and often against Portuguese
incursion for most of the 17th century. Angolan war captives by the tens of
thousands would be shipped westward across the Atlantic to Central and South
American plantations and mines in the New World. Along the way, English
pirates and privateers would attack the Portuguese slave fleets and capture
and divert hundreds of these Angolan war prisoners to the infant North
American colonies of England.

EVENTS, CUSTOMS AND CIRCUMSTANCES IN EARLY COLONIAL VIRGINIA

The first Angolan Africans would come to Virginia at a particular time and
under circumstances which shaped the future for them and their Melungeon
descendants, many of whom as "free" people escaped the horrors of chattel
slavery endured by later Africans.

1. Manpower Shortages in Early 17th Century Virginia

At the fall of the Ndongo capital of Kabasa, the Virginia colony in North
America was but 12 years old. The struggling settlers had recently found
their economic salvation in a new tobacco hybrid, and they needed a large
work force to plant and harvest this lucrative product. Smoking had become
the rage in Europe, and the Virginians, along with their London investors,
were eager to finally declare a profit. However the labor pool of indentured
white servants from England was not satisfying demands for colonial manpower.
A dreadfully high mortality rate, at times reaching and surpassing 50%,
claimed the lives of hundreds of whites who came to work in the colony.

Then, in late August of 1619, months after Portugal conquered the Ndongo
capital and captured thousands of its inhabitants, the first arrival of "20
and odd Negroes" was witnessed in Jamestown, Virginia by John Rolfe, tobacco
planter and widowed husband of Pocahontas. They arrived in a privateering
man-o-war which had weeks early taken a Portuguese merchant-slaver as prize.


2. Equality Among Blacks and Whites in the Early Virginia Class System

Another important event in the development of the Melungeon community was the
custom of indentured servitude in early Virginia.    Newcomers to slave
trading in the early-to-mid 17th century, the English colonists of Virginia
were still relatively unfamiliar with the slave system used by countries like
Spain and Portugual. This is not to say that permanent chattel slavery was
not present almost immediately after Africans arrived in Virginia in the
early 1600s.   But chattel slavery usually attended large plantations and
most of the colonial farms were small before prosperity began filtering into
Virginia about 1650.

In addition some white planters detested chattel slavery. The English system
of indentured servitude allowed the freedom of a servant after a span of
time, usually from 7-10 years. In 17th century Virginia and in other
colonies, some Africans were purchased by small farmers who freed them within
a decade, while other Africans fell into the grasp of large, influential
plantation owners with the political power to lobby for permanent chattel
slavery.

For the early Angolans fortunate enough to go into indenture, custom usually
offered the same measure of class freedoms and rights enjoyed by whites in
17th century Virginia. After about seven years, black and white servants
were released as "free" to purchase land and property for themselves.
Virginia Company rules demanded that former masters provide freemen with
provisions of food, clothing, and livestock so that they could make their own
start in the New World. Free African-Americans can be documented enjoying
the same rights as white freemen in the 1600s. In Virginia, African-American
freemen became tobacco farmers and the wealthier of them purchased black and
white servants who were male and female. Some owned chattel slaves.

African men and women also married whites and Indians. Customarily, because
there were many more black men than black women, more Angolan males married
European women from 1620-1720. The offspring of these legal black and white
unions before 1720 and the offspring of sometimes illegal black and white
unions after 1720, of free Africans and whites, made up the vast majority of
the free people of color. Genealogist Paul Heinegg has determined that more
than 99% of all mixed-blood people in Virginia, the Carolinas, Maryland and
Delaware before 1810 came from free blacks marrying whites. In these states
and in this time period, cases of a white master having a child by a black
female chattel slave, were at one percent. Because of these circumstances,
we can fairly easily trace the patriarchal surnames of 17th century colonial
African-Americans, to their modern descendants.

3. England's Dependance Upon Pirates and Privateers for Slaves in the 17th
Century

England was not yet established as a significant slave trading power from
1620-1650. This coincides with the era during which the Ndongo and other
Angolans were arriving in Virginia and in other English colonies. It is a
hard argument to make that the first Africans were brought in from anywhere
else but Angola. The English colonies relied upon English and Dutch
freebooters attacking Portuguese slavers sailing between West Africa and the
Americas. It would be late in the century before British ships began sailing
out of Bristol to take captives directly from Africa.

Virginians before the 1660s, purchased slaves from men like John Powell who
captained the pirate ship 'Hopewell', and the English Calvinist minister John
Colyn Jope of Cornwall who privateered under a Dutch Marque in the man-o-war
'White Lion'. Another buccaneer visiting the American colonies was Captain
Arthur Guy in the ship 'Fortune' who traded "many Negroes" he had taken from
a Portuguese ship in Luanda, Angola for Virginia tobacco. Captain Daniel
Elfrith sailed another man-o-war to prey on Iberian merchant-slavers, as did
Samuel Axe in the 1630s in the employ of the Providence Island Company owned
by Warwick and Pym. Dutch privateers also called on New Amsterdam (New York)
which traded slaves to the southern colonies. These sea venturers all
concentrated their attacks exclusively on Portuguese and Spanish ships loaded
with Angolan prisoners from 1619-1660. Thorton and Heywood have found,

   "...half a dozen privateering commissions issued by this company
(including Elfrith and Axe) that
   include specific provisions about taking slave ships and delivering them
to Bermuda, Virginia and
   even New England...virtually all, if not all, Africans arriving in
Virginia (or any other colony of
   England or the Netherlands) prior to 1640, and perhaps even after that
for some years, originated in
   Angola (either Kimbundu or Kikongo speaking regions). Our contention is
that until the English
   developed their own slave purchasing posts along the coast of West
Africa...all their slaves
   came from privateering on Portuguese ships, and these in turn almost
all...came from Angola. In De
   Laet's History of the West India Company (pub.1644, a report on all the
privateering activities of the
   WIC from its foundation to 1638), all but one of the ships they took were
from Angola.We don't have
   those sort of records for the English, but if their pattern was similar,
we should expect similar results."

The timing of the privateering raids on these Portuguese slavers from Luanda,
coincided with the relatively short period when liberal Virginia laws gave
Africans equal rights with whites of the same class. In the young 17th
century colonies of Virginia, the Carolinas, Maryland and Delaware, many
mixed groups descending from Angolan ancestors like the Melungeons, began
forming kinships and eventually they formed communities.   Thornton:

   "It is probable that, in the decades that followed, those who survived
the first year in Virginia
   eventually encountered more Angolans from their homeland or from the
nearby Congo, brought
   especially to New York by Dutch traders and resold to Virginia colonists.
These new captives perhaps
   gave a certain Angolan touch to the early Chesapeake."

The common experience of the original Kimbundu and Kikongo-speaking Angolans
bound them together as melungu; shipmates and companions of the arduous
middle passage. This bond was not broken in America. It defined the
Melungeons and other similarly isolated, tight-knit communities, who for
decades survived prejudice and oppression.