Search

From the beginning of European overseas expansion in the fifteenth century, religious missions occupied an important place in the internal organisation of colonial empires. Their contribution to the ideological structuring of imperialism and the interaction with local populations is undeniable. With the emergence of the new imperialism and the scramble for Africa (after the 1870s), the missions, often anticipating the colonial political and administrative presence, enhanced their role as advocates of Europe's "civilising mission", above all through the education of the colonised peoples. For Portuguese decision-makers, the religious missions, with a multi-century tradition, had an important role in defending territorial claims overseas and promoting the empire's nationalisation. However, the lack of national missionaries, Christianity's inter-confessional competition in the nineteenth century and the emergence of international legal rules protecting missionary activities hindered Portugal's strategies. Using sources from several archives (in Lisbon, the Vatican, and elsewhere) to emphasise the role of a transnational missionary staff and the international law of missions, this text intersects these aspects, examining their convergence in the controversial case of the exit and replacement of Jesuit missionaries in Mozambique in 1910–1911, to demonstrate the need to look at the missionary issues in the Portuguese overseas domains from perspectives that go beyond nation and empire. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores, through a close reading of newspapers and publications connected to the Portuguese libertarian movement, anarchist discourses and practices around understandings of "race" in Portugal in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. A contribution is made both to studies of Lusophone anarchism as well as broader labour movement history where analyses of the interconnections between race and colonialism have been sparse. Portuguese anarchist understandings of race are placed within the context of broader ideas on internationalism within the anarchist movement, contemporary theories of the inheritance of racial characteristics and contestations against notions of nationhood and nationalism. The specific context of Portuguese colonialism and the development of anthropology in the country form the backdrop against which anarchist ideas are analysed. The article argues that while anarchism disrupted certain tropes within racial and colonialist discourse, it also reinforced some cultural categories and rigidified understandings of race, culture and social development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article aims to analyse Appunti per un periplo dell'Africa (1954), a travel book written by Emilio Cecchi that narrates the writer's impressions and experiences in some Portuguese African colonies. The text is influenced by fascist propaganda, linked to imperialism, and shows the tendency to present African populations as the object of colonization. We consider the various stereotypes and images that Cecchi uses in the representation of the colonized people of the Portuguese territories in Africa, in particular in discourses focused on race, women, dance and the colonial system. It turns out that Cecchi's work is fully inserted into the ideological context of the early twentieth century, reaffirming a colonial discourse that supports the primacy of the civilized European over the primitive African and giving into the fascination for the exotic, typical of colonial literature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper aims to prompt a reflection on preliminary conditions of analysis of some specificities in the development of Portuguese colonial policies, present in the oldest experience undertaken in Brazil and, more recently, in the last quarter of the twentieth century, in African countries. Numerous modern and contemporary works of fiction have focused, directly or indirectly, on the drift of a colonial mentality within the former Portuguese colonies. The memory of this experience, which implies tense regimes of epistemic cohabitation, has been identified by critics as one of the structuring traits of contemporary times. This article intends to identify the answers that the literary field has tried to offer to the legacy and heritage resulting from this experience, based on theoretical and methodological premises available in the post and de-colonial fields of study. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article offers a narrative of the effects of transnational work spurred on by the League of Nations in Geneva. It begins with the Report on Employment of Native Labor in Portuguese Africa, which was presented to the League of Nation's Temporary Slavery Commission in 1925. From there the story moves to Angola where the Portuguese government attacked Congregational Missions, missionaries, and Angolan protestants who were perceived to be involved in the Report's production. Despite this violence, Angolans flocked to mission schools and churches in numbers that far outpaced the ability of foreign missionaries to meet demand. As a result, Angolan pastors and teachers took the helm in spreading mission activities into villages and areas where services were requested. By the 1960s, these Angolan-controlled networks would become important organizing centres for anticolonial resistance. This article argues for the importance of the Angolans' reactions to state oppression during the interwar years and how it contributed to the post- World War II, anti-colonial revolution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Part of a broader effort to bring the land question to the fore of scholarship about colonial Mozambique, this article looks at how legal colonial thought about land and property, part of the growing body of knowledge about topics of interest to the colonies, developed among Portuguese colonialists in the early twentieth century, especially with regard to African access to land. Different contributions to this thought will be analysed to enquire the role the land question played in the Portuguese colonial project in Africa. The main theories and debates about the land question held in Portugal will then be analysed alongside theories and debates about this same topic within an increasingly internationalized field of colonial thought, in which Portuguese colonialists also took part. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The main goal of this article is to present the challenges for Portuguese colonial policy during the First Republic (1910-26), focusing on the international pressures against the survival of the Portuguese Empire. The article is divided into three parts: in the first we outline the state of the art regarding the questions to be raised. This is followed by an analysis of Portuguese colonial policy in the post-Versailles international context, particularly Afonso Costa's negotiations for war reparations. In the third part, we examine particular aspects of the relationship between Portugal and the League of Nations in relation to colonial questions: namely, forced labour and the illicit trafficking of opium. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyzes the representation of December 1961 in two Goan short stories: the Portuguese-language "Rucmá, a mulherzinha de Salém" by Maria Elsa da Rocha and the Konkani-language "Guerra" by Sheela Kolambkar. I argue that these two stories avail themselves of the suggestive potential of the genre to represent Liberation not as a clean break in the socio-historical development of the territory, as it appears predominantly in the English-language literature of the territory, but as a discontinuity, which, in the wake of colonialism, left behind a tangle of undefined hopes, obscure fears and unsettled issues. Both "Rucmá" and "Guerra" represent the period prior to the Indian military action as a chronotope of uncertainty, which Liberation deepens rather than resolves. Writing post-1961, in a climate of growing tension during the democratization of Goa, the authors seem to advocate for social unity based on a recognition on the part of the two principal religious communities of Goa of a certain conformism in relation to colonial rule. In conclusion, I pose the question of whether this appeal to unity has a conservative function. The proposition underlying the article is that an internal literary comparatism, which juxtaposes the various languages of Goa, might shed light on attitudes concerning the main social facts and historical events in the territory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In December 1966, the city of Macau erupted in mass protests and rioting targeted at buildings and symbols of Portuguese rule—unrest that was countered by military force that left eight residents dead, hundreds wounded, and dozens in jail. In the aftermath of the violence, protests continued, as community leaders used Cultural Revolution rhetoric and tactics to try to force the Portuguese administration to accede to a series of escalating demands that included a written apology for its “crimes.” As the Macau governor tried to convince Lisbon to allow him to compromise, China’s central government and the Guangdong province government got involved, local residents refused to sell food to Portuguese residents, and thousands of Red Guards over the border in Guangdong province seemed poised to invade. This Macau version of Cultural Revolution ended with a historic scene: the Portuguese governor of Macau sitting at a table under an enormous portrait, signing a written apology to all Chinese residents of Macau, agreeing to close all of Kuomintang (KMT) agencies in Macau, and surrendering custody of seven KMT “spies” to mainland China. Through archival materials, newspaper reports and in-depth interviews, this article argues that the Macau 123 Incident was not simply a spillover of Cultural Revolution radicalism, but combined anti-colonial political grievances, anti-KMT political action, and Cultural Revolution-style political rhetoric and tactics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

From 1932 to 1975, Portugal's control over the colony of Mozambique hinged on an experiment with racial hierarchies. Portugal's governing strategy led local populations to classify and organize themselves according to imposed racial categories such as white, mestiços (i.e., mixed-race), Indian, and indigena (or black). But, at the onset of increased international and local pressure that culminated with independence wars across its overseas provinces, Portugal substituted enforced distinctions with the idea of a non-racial identity. These efforts coincided, and perhaps even facilitated, the opening of commercial photography studios as well as the proliferation of photographic equipment in Mozambique. The life and work of the Mozambican press-photographer Ricardo Rangel, who started his career as a darkroom assistant, provide visual and oral records to reflect on these historical changes. To such ends, I trace Rangel's career through the evolution of professional photography and its relationship to the contemporaneous development of Portugal's racial politics and press censorship. First, I consider Rangel's entry into the darkroom and the skills he acquired. Here, I highlight how the taking and viewing of photographs informed how Portugal's racial policies unfolded in people's daily lives. I then consider Rangel's entry into the newsroom as a press-photographer and the editorial debates that engulfed his pictures. As his negatives, prints, and historical memories of them illustrate, Rangel did not merely insert racially marginalized groups into the visual and historical record. Aesthetic debates surfaced around Rangel's photographs that reinforced racial divisions and determined how perceptions of race influenced the viewing and telling of Mozambique's colonial history. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 1969, Portugal and South Africa signed an agreement that enabled the apartheid regime effectively to extend its tentacles of empire over the proposed dam at Cahora Bassa. Located in the heart of central Mozambique, far from the South African frontier, the dam became a security project masked as a development initiative. Cahora Bassa, including the massive lake behind the dam, rather than becoming the multi-purpose dam originally envisaged by Portuguese planners, was transformed into a strategic security project designed to blunt the advance into southern Mozambique of the liberation movement the Frente de Libertação de Moçambique (Frelimo) and, by extension, its ally the African National Congress (ANC). In this way, the colonial regime and its apartheid ally hoped to prevent attacks against Mozambique's major colonial urban areas of Beira and Lourenço Marques. From Pretoria's perspective, it was preferable to fight the ANC in central Mozambique rather than along the Limpopo river – southern Mozambique's frontier with South Africa. The hydro-electric project at Cahora Bassa also ensured South Africa's energy security. The 1969 agreement guaranteed that 82 per cent of the electricity generated there would be exported to South Africa at well below the world price. This article examines the vital role played by South African interests in financing, constructing, and defending the dam site at Songo, which resulted in the dam's deterritorialisation and allowed South Africa to incorporate Cahora Bassa as an outpost of empire. It also explores the ways in which Pretoria held the dam hostage after Mozambique became independent, as part of a broader process of destabilising its socialist neighbour to the north. Even after the dismantling of the apartheid regime in 1994, the new ANC-led government resisted efforts to abrogate the colonial agreement, and Songo remained a foreign enclave. Although Mozambique regained sovereignty over the dam site in 2007, even today, most of the electricity generated by Cahora Bassa is exported to South Africa, at a price that remains a state secret. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

What I want to comprehend is how, during Portuguese Estado Novo, colonial cinema "imagined" woman. I lay out in "shot" women representations on the propaganda film Feitiço do Império (Empire's spell, 1940), directed by António Lopes Ribeiro, before I examine, in "reverse shot", the ones presented in forbidden films by the Censorship Commission: Catembe (1965) e Deixem-me ao menos subir as palmeiras... (At least let my climb the palmtrees..., 1972). Finally I will analyse the woman filmic representation when cinema became the "eye of freedom" in militant films such as Sambizanga (1972), directed by Sarah Maldoror. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

At first glance, processes of colonial policy and subsequent migratory flows at the Angola–South West Africa border, in the region of the Kunene river, seem to present a straightforward narrative. In the period between the First and Second World Wars, we find an established pattern of Kwanyama/Ovambo leaving Portuguese Angola to escape repressive practices of forced labour, and as a reaction to the mistreatment of political leaders. Flight movements were encouraged by South African officials stationed in the Ovamboland district of South West Africa, directly south of the border, who practised, notably before 1945, a policy of co-optation of local chiefs. However, it has hitherto remained unnoticed that, between 1945 and 1974, changes in the policies of the authoritarian Portuguese empire had highly practical effects with regard to these flows. Until the 1960s, the comparative advantage of South African border policies lost its impact. In the early 1970s, a more liberal tax policy in the Angolan Cunene district had an even stronger impact on the decision-making processes on the part of local populations. The analysis shows quite clearly that, even under the auspices of late colonial social policies, which favoured grand schemes and more thorough control of populations, the initiative of local groups remained unbroken. In a scenario of colonial policy that favoured the power of the Ovambo chiefs on the southern side of the border, women and younger men used the border to escape social conditions they interpreted as repressive, and locals were capable of constantly reanalysing the advantages present on either side of the border. These results, which confirm the room for manoeuvre of potential forced labourers, also warn us not to generalise too readily about the consequences of under-equipped and authoritarian colonial policies, such as for Portuguese rule over southern Angola. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article examines the implications of the border on the control of East Coast Fever in colonial Mozambique and Zimbabwe. The outbreak of the disease in Rhodesia in 1901 caused much anxiety among Portuguese veterinary officials, who were concerned that the disease could cross the border into their territory and destroy their livestock industry. Resultant efforts to control this and other livestock diseases in these colonies were often accompanied by racial application of veterinary policies which benefited Europeans at the expense of Africans. East Coast Fever, together with the 1896–97 Rinderpest epidemic, thus contributed immensely to the development of veterinary science, the burgeoning functions of the colonial state, and the relations between state and subject in rural areas. Hence, through an examination of English and Portuguese colonial documents, this paper argues that the existence of East Coast Fever in Zimbabwe, and the impossibility of sealing the border to prevent cattle mobility, raised alarm, and contributed to the expansion of veterinary services in central Mozambique. This article contributes to debates on the significance of borders in shaping historical processes, but complicates border studies by demonstrating that the border was powerful not because it was restrictive but because it was porous. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This essay suggests that the East Timorese experience of Indonesian occupation and its aftermath may be more fully understood by exploring the influence of missionary education in the late-colonial Portuguese period. Tracing this influence through the Indonesian period, it examines the case of a Jesuit-established school in which the language of instruction was Portuguese. In this setting, 'comportment' was a part of elite formation, taught and assimilated by association. The significance and problems of'comportment' are addressed through this case by discussing its relation to a colonial idea o f'civilisation', and in the broader social context of colonial educational reforms and changes in East Timor's society across the twentieth century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the present paper I discuss the assumptions and significance of some of the theses and techniques behind Portuguese colonial land policies in Africa between the mid-1920s and the 1940s, and discuss their role in the Portuguese colonial project. I particularly address the extent to which, both in national and international discussion fora on colonial topics, as well as in official discourse, through the voice of politicians in the metropole as well as colonial administrators and experts, arguments in favour of African access to individual property, for different purposes, gained ground. These arguments went against the dominant perspective in Portuguese colonial thought between the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries which dictated the limited access of Africans to the land for instance in the name of economic development of colonial territories, the fight against land speculation and the safeguarding of Portuguese sovereignty in Africa. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In their text published in May 2012, Bruno Reis and Pedro Oliveira proposed six theses on the massacre at Wiriyamu. They claim or imply that as a location of well-developed villages Wiriyamu did not exist; the massacre as reported might not have happened; although an atrocity may have occurred, the events are too complex to accurately unravel even today; lack of an independent or official inquiry makes the numbers of the dead as reported inaccurate; and that the exigencies of the counterinsurgency determined its context and magnitude within the framework of a civil war. This response examines these six theses, and concludes that Reis and Oliveira fail to advance the narrative. They accept at face value the Portuguese propaganda denying the existence of Wiriyamu as a place, rather than consider data that incontrovertibly proved the existence of Wiriyamu, the massacre, its context, and the overall integrity of the narrative. Finally this text sends a mixed message to its readers by contextualizing it as a case study in civil war. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

A response from the authors of the article "Cutting Heads or Winning Hearts: Late Colonial Portuguese Counterinsurgency and the Wiriyamu Massacre of 1972" is presented.

During the cold war, Afro-Asian leaders had been highly critical of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization's (NATO) out-of-area initiatives. This article will focus on the Portuguese strategy to use the North Atlantic Council to pursue national, colonial interests in Asia and Africa. The solicitation of support from the USA constituted a key element in this diplomatic exchange. As a result, at Bandung, the leaders of the newly independent nations challenged not a specific European colonial empire, but transferred their outrage to the entire Atlantic Alliance. In the end, the promotion of colonial interests in the Atlantic Alliance led to several conflicts with the newly independent nations and a loss of face for the Western world. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Drawing its information from documents in Portuguese, French and British archives, this article examines the evolution of Portuguese colonial policies regarding Islam in Guinea and Mozambique. Such policies swayed between an image of the Muslim as foe and a more conciliatory picture, in which Muslims could be presented as potential allies of Portuguese power in the war against nationalist movements. Although the first image prevailed until the end of 1950s and the second one emerged in the mid-1960s as part of the last stage in the colonial wars, ambivalence was their common trait. That ambivalence did not hinder the development of a whole new strategy to address the Muslim communities, based on the ‘psychological’ and ‘sociological’ techniques of counter-insurgency war. The article analyses the transition from governing methods based on the control and repression of colonised Muslims to strategies aimed at co-opting them, sketching a comparison between the results achieved in Guinea and Mozambique. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Quando chegou ao Palacio de Belém para desempenhar o cargo de Presi-dente da República, o general Antonio de Spínola tinha um projecto político claro relativamente ao modo como se deveria processar a descolonizaçâo portuguesa. Esse projecto fora amadurecido ao longo dos anos em que o general desempenhara as funçöes de governador da Guiñé (entre 1968 e 1973) e conhecera a sua expressâo mais coerente e elaborada ñas páginas do livro Portugal e o Futuro, publicado no inicio de 1974. Spínola pretendía pôr em marcha um processo gradual que conduzisse à auto-determinaçâo dos povos das colonias e evitar a todo o custo que a descolonizaçâo fosse levada a cabo deforma abrupta, resultando numa mera transferéncia de poder para os movimentos de libertaçâo. Este artigo analisa os principáis obstáculos que se ergueram à concretizaçâo desta ideia, com especial destaque para o contexto internacional da descolonizaçâo portuguesa. Após 13 anos de guerras em África e de sucessivas resoluçöes aprovadas pela Assembleia Geral e pelo Conselho de Segurança da ONU, a expectativa na maioria dos países, em África e na Europa, e também ñas organizaçöes internacionais era de que as autoridades portuguesas conferissem de imediato a independencia às suas colonias, pondo fim ao mais antigo império colonial europeu. Nos meses que seguiram à mudança de regime em Lisboa, a ONU, a OUA e osgovernos de alguns dos mais importantes países da Europa Ocidental fizeram saber que esperavam uma descolonizaçâo rápida e a transferéncia de poder para os movimentos nacionalistas. Por conseguinte, o contexto internacional näo era favorável a Antonio de Spínola e aos seus planos para o futuro do impé-rio portugués. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents and analyzes the jurisprudence case known as the Naulilaa case involving Portugal and Germany from 1914 to 1933. According to the article, the case concerns the murder of a German civil servant and two officers at the Portuguese fort of Naulila in Angola in 1914 and the counter-attack by the German West-African (SOAA) colonial Army on six Portuguese border forts. Focus is given to the relationship between the development of the international law doctrine and politics during the colonial era.

The article focuses on the work of French-born photographer and ethnographer Pierre Verger on the Aguda community from the Bight of Benin, now modern day Togo, Republic of Benin, and Nigeria, who are descendants of Brazilians that settled in the region between the 17th and the 19th centuries during the Portuguese colonization. Particular focus is given to the relationship between Verger and his Aguda informants from Benin, who helped him to develop a research on the cultural links between the Aguda community and their Brazilian ancestors. Subjects include the African influences in the state of Bahia, Brazil, the Atlantic slave trade, and foreign relations between Brazil and African countries in the 20th century.

In this article I propose to describe some examples of dialectics of repression and resistance between the PIDE and other police authorities in Angola, and an indigenous religious movement, the "Tokoist Church" between the 1950s and 1970s. Firstly, I describe the motivations, fears and expectations of the agents of the pide, contrasted with the reactions of leaders and followers of this church who were subject to the campaigns of "securitization" of the colony. And secondly, I will portrait the legacy of the memory that emerged within this movement in contemporary Angola, in which the experience of colonial repression produced a "history of suffering" that reverberates today through narratives of resilience and the particular reaffirmation of an "Angolanness" that was often marked by reversals and ironies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the last decades of Portuguese colonialism, policies destined to Muslim populations of Guinea and Mozambique turned from hostility to a strategy of seduction, with the aim of promoting a "Portuguese Islam" and using some Islamic groups in the struggle against nationalist African movements. Such a transition included a transnational dimension, as some actors within the Portuguese administration wanted to intervene in a larger strategic space known as the "Islamic world". This article tries to analyze that intervention, focusing on its geopolitical thought and its diplomatic fulfillment, particularly in what concerns the relations with the Arab countries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The April 1974 coup in Lisbon and the ensuing rapid decolonisation of Portugal's colonies marked the birth of the Southern African theatre of the Cold War. It also heralded the steady decline of Pretoria's apartheid regime. This paper seeks to illuminate why South Africa was so profoundly affected by the collapse of Lisbon's authority and the upheaval of the regional status quo that occurred as a result. It argues that in contrast to its creative and formative foreign policy endeavours in Africa, by 1974 South Africa's national security hinged fundamentally on a profound reliance on Lisbon to combat radical black nationalism and on Washington to provide diplomatic cover for their joint efforts. The primary impact of the coup, therefore, was to undermine South Africa's entire security and thereby produce the sense of acute isolation that drove its shift towards the more radical security policies of the late 1970s and 1980s. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the early 1970s, Portugal still held on to the oldest European colonial empire, resisting the winds of decolonization in Africa. In this period, the Portuguese were fighting counterinsurgency campaigns in three of its overseas territories: Angola, since 1961; Guinea, since 1963; and Mozambique, since 1964. This article focuses on the counterinsurgency campaign in Mozambique because it was there, in 1972, that the most serious known atrocity took place, at least in terms of its international impact, from these unconventional wars. The appointment of a new commander-in-chief, Kaúlza de Arriaga (1970–73), to Mozambique intensified the war. Larger airborne search and destroy operations were carried out in an attempt to win the campaign quickly and decisively. It was in this context that the killing of civilians took place somewhere around the town of Tete in December 1972, which was eventually followed by an international outcry in response to its public denunciation by Catholic missionaries. The exact location, even the existence of Wiriyamu, as well as the extent of the atrocities, remain contentious. This article will use multiple sources to clarify as far as possible: what happened, why it happened, and its implications for the dynamics of counterinsurgency and intra-state wars generically. Furthermore, it will address specifically what it meant for the Portuguese way in counterinsurgency, until the rapid end of multiple campaigns as a result of a military coup in April 1974, in which Mozambique and the stain of Wiriyamu loomed large. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the impact globalization and international relations has had on social and political conditions in Africa since the 1960s and 1970s. The author discusses his fieldwork in West Africa, noting the effects neoliberalism and global disasters such as famine and oil shortages have on the population of Nigeria. Examining the trend of historical revisionism in the country, the author cites Marxist and Muslim influences on Nigeria's economic conditions. The lack of development and low standard of living in Nigeria despite a large annual revenue from oil export is also addressed.