The Demographics of Age and Gender in Massangano, Angola (1795–1829)

Abstract

This work investigates whether empirical evidence confirms a commonly accepted assumption about the demographics of the parts of Africa affected by the transatlantic slave trade: that they were characterized by an excess of women and a low proportion of children. This idea tends to pervade studies of large geographical areas that focus on specific years. This paper takes a new approach, examining the demographics of age and gender in a small geographical area, the Angolan town of Massangano, over a larger period of time, based on three decades of population maps encompassing the end of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth century. The results show that to a large degree the age and gender distribution of the town’s population does not correspond to the axioms traditionally accepted by historiography.