The variety of roles played by women in African history has largely escaped detection by contemporaneous observers. In the case of colonial Angola, the Portuguese naval officer José Joaquim Lopes de Lima stated in the mid-1840s that men took as many wives as they could support because, 'in this barbaric region only the women and the enslaved cultivate the land and perform all of the rural and domestic tasks: such occupations are deemed unworthy of any free men'. He further commented that 'it is they [the women] who have to support their husbands (or rather their masters) and children' (Lopes de Lima, 1846, p. 198). The British scientist and explorer Joachim John Monteiro, who worked in the colony during the 1850s and 1860s, made a similar assessment in reference to the area of Ambriz and its northern environs, stressing that '[w]omen's work is entirely restricted to cultivating the ground and preparing the food' (Monteiro, 1876, p. 157). Nevertheless, official records provide evidence that women also engaged in local and long distance trade in nineteenth-century Angola, not to mention before.