ABSTRACT
The Ovimbundu, who live on the Benguela Highland of central Angola, have been in contact with Europeans since their emergence as a people in the sixteenth-seventeenth centuries. The Ovimbundu arose from a fusion of two stocks, one that of the 'Jagas', a conquering race who invaded the Benguela Highland in the sixteenth–seventeenth centuries. He tells us that the Jagas were warlike cannibals who recruited their numbers by taking adolescents from the peoples they conquered. This society did not reproduce itself normally by descent since all children born were put to death. The significance of the trade in social life is reflected in the mystical explanations of success in business found in Umbundu religion. It may be suggested that the conditions of the trade in which wealth was dependent on contact with Europeans created not only the Umbundu esteem for 'shrewd behaviour' and their willingness for social change, but their marked docility and submissiveness towards Europeans.
