Ambriz

Ambriz lies on the Atlantic coast of Angola north of the mouth of the Dande River, in a land of low coastal plain, dry scrub and baobab-dotted hills that gives way inland to wetter, wooded country. Fishing was a long-standing livelihood on this shore, and the coast was open to the sea in a way the rest of the Angolan shoreline was not.

The country belonged to the Kongo world. Its people were Kongo, who farmed millet, sorghum and later cassava, kept goats and fished the shore. The area was part of the Mbamba province of the old kingdom of Kongo, whose authority in the coastal districts weakened over the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Portuguese power from Luanda, founded in 1576, controlled the coast to the south, and the Ambriz shore lay beyond its customs. Traders came to the beaches of Ambriz to buy ivory, copper cloth and captives, exchanging them for cloth, firearms and rum, while the Kongo chiefs of the coast controlled the paths from the interior.