The writing as an instrument of porter’s claim. New possibilities for research from the missionary sources

Abstract

The creative and conscious appropriation of the writing by the African porters involved in long-distance trade, during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, in Lunda, demonstrates that writing has become an instrument of workers’ claim. The article is an effort to synthesize this process and a first approach to the possibilities of expanding the analysis to other temporalities and spaces from missionary sources.