# African intervention in Portuguese daily life: work and celebration  
Present throughout the country from north to south, on the coast and inland, Africans performed a wide range of diverse and indispensable tasks for Portuguese daily life, in the fields, cities and maritime-colonial enterprises, particularly as sailors in the Portuguese caravels. While they carried out most domestic activities, agriculture, fishing, craft activities and commercial tasks such as retailing essential products, characterized their spheres of integration and participation in the lives of the communities in which they lived. This included, for example, constant and essential intervention in the maintenance of urban structures - such as water supply, waste disposal, street cleaning and transport - on which Portuguese cities  
and towns depended. More than in rural areas, it was in cities that Africans, both enslaved and free, had a wide range of tasks that allowed them a certain autonomy. In addition to the tasks associated with urban management and hygiene - sweepers, carriers, handlers - as well as indispensable services such as water supply, which led the authorities to build, manage and control the use of spouts, mainly by women, they were also engaged in commercial activity focused on food goods - agricultural products, fish and manufactured products - as well as the sale of other consumer goods, such as charcoal. Men were given heavier tasks, including transport of people and goods, information dispatch and distribution of messages, as well as craft production, such as pottery, carpentry, iron and leather work, goldsmithing, weaving, shipbuilding, working in the navy and fishing.