Muxima

Muxima stands beside the Kwanza River inland from Luanda. Its church and fort overlook a river that served as an important route between the Atlantic coast and the interior of Angola. The Portuguese established a fortified settlement here at the end of the sixteenth century, making the site a centre of military and religious authority.

Muxima also became a gathering point in the slave trade. Captives brought from inland were baptised at the church before being taken towards Luanda and ships bound across the Atlantic. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, slavery and the trade in people shaped the settlement's social hierarchies and the authority of those who governed it, including officials whose military appointments supported their local standing.