António da Silva Porto

António Francisco Ferreira da Silva Porto (24 August, 1817 - 1890) was a Portuguese trader and explorer in Angola, by the time a Portuguese territory known as Portuguese West Africa.

Silva Porto was born to a poor family in Porto, Portugal. He was born António Francisco Ferreira da Silva but would add the surname Porto as an homage to his hometown. At age 12 he sailed to Rio de Janeiro. Silva Porto apprenticed himself to learn the dynamics of trading and the coffee industry during the 10 years he spent in Brazil. He then moved directly from Brazil to Luanda, Portuguese West Africa's capital. At one point Silva Porto housed David Livingstone and helped Livingstone find the route to Luanda. Neither one of them seemed to like each other. Livingston accused him of being nothing more than an ordinary slave trader. Porto was an advocate for development of the interior of Angola and miscegenation. He married a prominent black woman from the Bié Kingdom of the Ovimbundu people and had several mullato children with her. However, by that time, Portugal seemed more interested in developing and colonizing the coast. For years, Silva Porto was a sort of diplomat between the Portuguese colonists and the native tribes of the Ovimbundu peoples. When he saw the Belmonte "embala", the place where he were living, destroyed by a fire, and after the disatrous 1890 British Ultimatum, the old man wrapped himself in a Portuguese flag, lay down on a dozen kegs of gunpowder and then lit them. He did not die immediately but the burns from the self inflicted injury killed him the next day. The town of Kuito, founded by the Portuguese and named Belmonte at that time, was renamed Silva Porto after him until Angola's independence in 1975. [ [http://km-stressnet.blogspot.com/2008/02/silva-porto-do-brasil-frica.html Silva Porto: do Brasil a África] ] [ [http://geohisthariabie.blogspot.com/2006/09/kuito-nasceu-em-belmonte.html Kuito nasceu em Belmonte] ]

References

* "Pamphlets on Silva Porto", Sociedade de Geographia de Lisboa, Typographia do Commercio de Portugal, 1890. Online at Google Books. [http://books.google.com/books?vid=OCLC25375901&id=3oALAAAAIAAJ&pg=PA1&lpg=PA1&dq=intitle:%22Silva+Porto%22]
* "Viagens e Apontamentos de um Portuense em Africa: Diario de Antonio Francisco Ferreira da Silva Porto", published 1986, edited by Maria Emilía Madeira Santos at the Library of the University of Coimbra.

ee also

*Kuito