11
Portuguese settlement on the West African mainland
The Portuguese who settled in the Cape Verde and Guinea islands in the fifteenth century early developed trading contacts with West Africa. The need to import slaves was probably the origin of this commerce, but soon other commodities were being traded, including foodstuffs, malaguetta pepper, beeswax, bark cloth, cori beads and currency shells, gold and ivory in exchange for horses, European manufactures, iron bars, manilhas, salt, rum (known locally as grogue) and cotton cloth woven in the Cape Verde Islands themselves and known as panos. Portuguese trading ships visited the river ports along the upper Guinea coast from at the latest the 1450s, and a decade later Portuguese from the islands began to settle on the African mainland. Encouraged initially by special privileges granted in 1466, trade with the Guinea coast grew so rapidly that six years later the privileges were partly rescinded in a vain attempt to limit the large numbers of Portuguese who were settling beyond the jurisdiction of the Crown and the island captains. The Portuguese who went to trade in Guinea were called lançados, and the hostility of the Crown towards them was aroused because their trade escaped royal taxation and control. Moreover the lançados were widely believed to be abandoning the church, either reverting to Jewish religious practices or mixing orthodox Catholic rites with local religious customs and beliefs.
It is not difficult to understand why so many of the Cape Verde islanders moved to the mainland. The poor prospects for agriculture in the islands was one good reason, while the society that had taken root in the islands was very hierarchical, and the grants of morgadios and capelas concentrated land and resources in the hands of a few families. Many Portuguese settlers and their mulatto offspring felt themselves excluded from owning land and from the possibility of occupying public office. Moving to the African mainland allowed them to escape the authority of Crown and captain and to trade free of restrictive official regulations. Portuguese settlement was encouraged by most African rulers, who traditionally welcomed strangers who came to trade. However, the Portuguese had to adapt to local African custom. As George Brooks wrote, they had to adopt ‘different modes of barter commerce… settle ashore and travel only where their hosts gave permission; pay tolls, taxes, and gifts; [and] submit disputes to African judicial processes’.1 In the larger, more hierarchically organised African states, the role of these strangers was very limited and they were excluded from all influence in society, except the purely commercial. In smaller African communities, however, they wielded power and influence. Once established on the mainland they were able to acquire clients and slaves and to marry (with either short- or long-term arrangements) into important African clans which gave them access to trading opportunities. Moreover escape from the close attentions of the Portuguese church hierarchy was welcomed by Jews and New Christians who had left Portugal with exactly that purpose in mind.
The lançados were able to maintain a high degree of independence through the freedom that their shipping gave to them. Small Portuguese vessels were very suitable for coastal trade and some lançados owned large fleets—Diogo Henriques de Sousa allegedly owning 22 trading vessels in the 1570s.2 Through their auspices trade links between the African communities of coastal West Africa grew considerably.
It is impossible to estimate the numbers of the lançado community, but by the middle of the sixteenth century there were lançado towns on most of the major Guinea rivers and the numbers in the black Portuguese community had grown not only through natural increase but through the assimilation of slaves, clients and servants—known as grumetes—many of whom became recognised members of the Luso-African community and adopted a creolised culture. Creole culture also spread among the coastal populations—an example being the Sapi ethnic group, which adopted Christianity and was ruled by a king who took a Portuguese name. As Peter Mark expressed it, ‘Luso-Africans maintained an understanding of group membership based essentially on cultural characteristics, and this facilitated assimilation into “Portuguese” society… of individual creolized African men and women.’3
At first there was little formal organisation among the lançados since they settled as individuals among the African peoples, but as their settlements grew an institutional structure became important. Some of their settlements were undoubtedly large, Cacheu in the late sixteenth century containing a Christian population of 700–800, which increased to around 1,500 by the second decade of the seventeenth century, when 500 of them were described as being ‘brancos’, an honorary rather than exactly descriptive epithet since most lançados, whatever their skin colour, insisted on their ‘white’ status.4 Cacheu unsuccessfully tried to establish its independence from the local Papel rulers. Such settlements were usually confined within a stockade and fortified by other defensive works. The communities were usually under the overall authority of an alcaide or capitão-mor whose authority would be recognised by the Portuguese authorities in Cape Verde and by the local African ruler, who would often appoint a member of the lançado community to hold a kind of judicial office within that community. As an example, one might take ‘the alcaide at Cape Verde—a Luso-African named Gaspar Gonçalvo who could communicate in several European languages—[and] asserted that he was a Christian and had four wives and six children’.5
Other institutions of importance were provided by the church. Most settlements of lançados would have a church, even if this was only roughly built of wood and had no resident priest. These churches were served by itinerant mission priests from the Cape Verde Islands who spent short periods in the lançado communities marrying the men and baptising the children. In some communities where there was a large Jewish or New Christian population the place of the church was taken by a synagogue, though these seldom survived for very long.
Although independence from Portuguese control had been a major reason for their emigration, the members of the lançado community had no desire to cut themselves off from the islands. Trading links meant that there was a regular coming and going between the islands and the mainland settlements. Missionaries also visited the lançado communities to try to bring them back to the true faith, while many Cape Verdeans became temporary residents on the mainland when drought was particularly severe. Moreover the lançados and their descendants had a strong interest in maintaining their ‘Portuguese’ identity. Although as Portuguese they had a privileged position within West African society, on their death their property was subject to confiscation by the ruler. Luso-Africans therefore needed to maintain links with the islands so that they could deposit some of their wealth there for their heirs to inherit. Their association with the islands and with Portugal also enabled them to access European trade goods and to benefit from the shipping and credit arrangements of island commerce.
Embedded in West Africa, but maintaining strong ties with the islands, the lançado community underwent a cultural transformation and creolisation. Lançados typically used African as well as Portuguese names and observed social and religious practices which were remarkably eclectic, customarily wearing amulets as well as crucifixes and taking offerings to prestigious local shrines. They built square houses, which were distinctive in a country where round houses were the norm, and they wore European-style clothes and hats. In many respects they became a caste of traders within West African society rather than an ethnic group based on lineage and descent. The language they used was a Portuguese creole language, related to but distinct from the creole of the Cape Verde Islands; for a long time Portuguese and Creole were the languages used in West African maritime trade, so that words such as ‘palaver’ and ‘fetish’ (from the Portuguese palavra and feitiço) passed into European and African languages.
Some of the lançados referred to in contemporary accounts as tangomaos, however, cut themselves off more completely from their Portuguese cultural heritage, ‘for they wore African garments and protective amulets, underwent circumcision and scarification, [and] participated in African rituals such as divination’.6 The term itself appears to be linked to the name given to a lineage which controlled some important shrines, raising the possibility that the Portuguese may have assumed roles of ritual importance in some African societies.7
By the seventeenth century visiting Europeans could see little that distinguished the lançados from the local African community apart from a few cultural symbols, while many of them had fallen into poverty through the operation of African inheritance laws. Richard Jobson described them as for ‘the most part as blacke as the naturall inhabitants … [but] still reserving carefully, the use of the Portingall tongue, and with a kinde of an affectionate zeale, the name of Christians, taking it in a great disdaine, be they never so blacke, to be called a Negro’.8 The Luso-African community described themselves not only as ‘Portuguese’ but also as ‘white’—and with good reason. The term ‘white’ (branco or bidan) was an indication of free status, and there is an irony in the fact that as the skin colour of the Luso-Africans came increasingly to resemble that of the Africans with whom they intermarried, so the prevalence of the slave trade made the assumption of a ‘white’ identity all the more important. Just as in the slave society of the US a single black ancestor, however remote, could be sufficient to give a person a ‘black’ identity, so in African coastal society an equally distant (and possibly imaginary) white ancestor could be enough to confer a ‘white’ and hence a free status.
One notable feature of the black Portuguese communities was the prominence of women in their social and economic organisation. Philip Havik explains how women from important African clans contracted ‘marriages’ with Portuguese traders and were able to act as intermediaries in commercial transactions:
enjoying the confidence of both parties at the point where the interests of Africans and Europeans met, they were able to develop innovative and entrepreneurial strategies… and because of the absences, frequently prolonged, of their husbands they increasingly assumed the role of partners who looked after their husband’s business affairs.9
The importance of women in the lançado community can probably be accounted for by the gradual intrusion of matrilineal structures into the traditionally patriarchal and patrilineal Portuguese community. Through their wives the lançados had access to commercial opportunities and became linked to West African trading lineages. Given that many lançado males were involved in maritime commerce, which made them temporary absentees, and that some died overseas or else failed to return, the gradual emergence of women as dominant in this community can be understood. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries women of the Luso-African community owned property, houses and ships and conducted their own trading expeditions. They also acted as brokers for other European traders. Peter Mark gives the example of ‘the famous trader and courtesan La Belinguere [who] established a series of alliances with several European merchants of different nationalities….’ According to the Frenchman Michel Jajolet de la Courbe, ‘she had a noble manner and a refined tongue and she spoke good Portuguese, French and English, a certain indication of the extensive commerce she had carried on with all these nations’. The term ‘commerce’ clearly indicated an overlap between her professional, personal and sexual life.10
As French, English and Dutch contacts with West Africa grew, the lançados clung tenaciously to their trade. However, increasingly they ceased to be principals in the trade and became interpreters and brokers facilitating commercial contacts between West African states and the visiting Europeans. There are examples of visiting Dutch and French traders taking women from the lançado community as local wives to assist in interpretation and commercial contacts. However, once the Luso-Africans became brokers rather than principals in the trade of the coast, their communities became more isolated and cut off from the Cape Verde Islands or any other source of Portuguese culture. By the nineteenth century Portuguese and creole had been replaced as trading languages on much of the coast by French and English. Moreover, French and English traders in Guinea had increasing problems with the self-identification of this group as ‘Portuguese’ because their black skin seemed to define them incontrovertibly as African.11 Being Portuguese now became little more than using Portuguese names and claiming to be Christian rather than animist or Muslim.
In the course of the nineteenth century a number of Brazilian traders based themselves in West Africa, particularly in the region of Dahomey, making use of the moribund Portuguese trading post of Ouidah (Ajuda). These traders established important links with local African rulers, founded local families and brought about a significant revival of the influence of the black ‘Portuguese’, including the use of the Portuguese language in local correspondence.12
As well as the settlements of the lançados, the Portuguese Crown also established a number of official trading posts on the African coast: Arguin on the coast of Mauritania, founded around 1446; São Jorge da Mina on the coast of modern Ghana, which in 1482 was sited in a large stone-built castle; Axim in 1520 and Ajuda (Ouidah) in 1580. A permanent trading factory was also maintained at the court of the Kongo king at Mbanza, 150 miles from the coast with a linked trading port on the Zaire estuary. These permanent posts housed commercial personnel and diplomatic and religious missions—the most important being the missions that were accredited to the Obas of Benin and the kings of Kongo. The Portuguese fidalgos, soldiers and traders who visited Benin were expertly portrayed by Benin bronze casters who were intrigued by their dress, their firearms and their long European noses.
By the mid sixteenth century a Christian population had grown up among the people who lived around these Portuguese trading factories and forts, and this population merged with the black Portuguese from Cape Verde and São Tomé to form a substantial, partly Lusitanised population, most strikingly in the Kongo kingdom.
While São Tomé evolved as a slave-owning plantation society, drawing on the contemporaneous diasporas of European Portuguese, African slaves and Sephardic Jews, it also became a point from which migration took place to the African mainland. Using the islands as a base, a fruitful commerce grew up with the African states of the Gulf of Guinea and the Zaire region, which often deliberately flouted the commercial regulations of the Crown. Before long there were São Tomean communities settled in various coastal African states in the region. In the Kongo kingdom the São Tomeans were often in direct competition with the Portuguese Crown and, making use of their local knowledge, were able to circumvent the official embargos which tried to channel all trade through the port of Mpinda and the hands of the Kongo king and the Portuguese royal factor. During the sixteenth century the São Tomeans became a rival Portuguese presence in Kongo, frequently taking part in wars in the interior or opening up trading links with enemies of the Kongo kingdom; and it was São Tomé islanders who established the first trading station at Luanda island in order to exploit the shell fisheries there. São Tomé was the nearest sovereign Portuguese territory to the Kongo kingdom and the kings hoped that relations with the island captains would enable them to obtain military support and direct communication with Portugal. However, the islanders had no intention of acting as agents for the Kongo king and deliberately intercepted his messages. When the Kongo was invaded by the Jaga in the 1560s, the São Tomeans used the opportunity to purchase the refugee Kongolese as slaves.
The Kongo and the creolisation of an African elite
As the Portuguese settled the Atlantic islands and established an economy based on sugar and slaves, the diaspora took a direction wholly unanticipated and unimagined by the royal princes who had set the whole process in motion. In 1482 Dom João II had commissioned a knight of his household, Diogo Cão, to explore the coast of Africa south of the equator. Sailing into the estuary of the Zaire River, Cão came into contact with the large kingdom of Kongo. In 1491 a Portuguese embassy was despatched to establish links with the king and, somewhat unexpectedly, the ruling elite of the Kongo rapidly embraced Christianity as a new royal cult. Adopting Christianity enhanced the power of the king and cemented the alliance with Portugal from which prestigious imports would be obtained. By the early sixteenth century the Portuguese formed an influential community in Mpinda. The Portuguese community was made up of trade officials who handled the Kongo trade on behalf of the king, priests and an increasing numbers of artisans, seamen, soldiers and servants. In the capital, Mbanza, called by the Portuguese São Salvador, the Portuguese community lived in its own walled quarter within the city.
When the very survival of the Kongo kingdom was threatened by the Jaga invasion of the 1560s, a Portuguese army was sent to reinstate the Kongo king and many of the soldiers remained in the country, marrying locally and developing commercial ties with the interior. The influence of the Luso-African community in the Kongo was greatly enhanced by the adoption of a creole culture by the ruling Kongo elite. The ruling elites took Portuguese names and wore Portuguese-style clothing. Many Kongolese became literate and Christian ceremonies and customs percolated into Kongolese everyday life. Many Kongolese youths were sent to Portugal to be educated and Kongolese priests were ordained to serve the church. One son of the Kongo king, Afonso I, was made a bishop by Pope Leo X.
As the influence of the Portuguese grew, the Portuguese Crown was encouraged to try to extend this influence in the region south of the Kongo kingdom where the dominant ethnic group was the Mbundu. Embassies and missions to the Mbundu allowed commerce to develop but did not lead to the kind of alliance, underpinned by mass conversion, that had happened in the Kongo. As a result the Portuguese Crown, supported by the Jesuits, decided in 1570 to adopt a different approach. During the 1570s there was a revival of a militant approach to the spreading of the gospel which worked hand in hand with a desire to emulate the success of the Spanish conquests in the Americas and discover the gold and silver mines believed to exist in the African interior. In 1575 a ‘donatary captaincy’ was granted to Paulo Dias de Novais so that he could undertake the conquest and settlement of the region that was to become Angola. Like the captaincies in the Atlantic Islands and Brazil, the Angolan captaincy had as a specific requirement the organisation of a settlement of Portuguese and the creation of a new reino or kingdom.
Paulo Dias began the settlement of his captaincy in 1571 by occupying Luanda. By 1579 he was meeting stiff opposition and had begun a painstaking conquest of the interior. In this he was assisted by soldiers sent from Portugal but also by the Kongo king and by the Luso-Africans settled in the Kongo kingdom. The slow conquest of the Angolan interior continued in the seventeenth century, the wars generating large numbers of captives so that Angola replaced Guinea and the Kongo as the main source of slaves for the expanding Brazilian sugar industry. Brazilian interest in Angola grew and soldiers for the wars were increasingly recruited across the Atlantic rather than in Portugal. The slaves exported through the ports of Luanda and Benguela (founded in 1616) formed the wealth of this Portuguese kingdom, but the trade was almost exclusively with Brazil not Portugal. Soldiers, governors and traders came and went between Luanda, Rio and Bahia. Convicts sent to Angola came as often from Brazil as from Portugal. The Portuguese settlements round the rim of the Atlantic had formed diasporic communities, which held strongly to their Portuguese identity but whose economic and social life was to a large extent divorced from metropolitan Portugal.
Meanwhile Angola was being organised as a new reino of the kings of Portugal. It was another kingdom subject to the Portuguese Crown, like the kingdoms of Portugal and the Algarve and the Estado da Índia, but although governors, convicts, missionaries and traders continued to arrive from Portugal and Brazil, the disease environment was hostile and newcomers from Europe frequently died within a short time of arrival. Increasingly the permanent Portuguese population was made up of black Portuguese—the offspring of the soldiers and traders—and the Christianised populations that lived in areas of Portuguese control. Luanda was given its own town council, and although a bishopric had been created for the Kongo in 1596, the bishops resided in Luanda which also became the site for a Jesuit mission.
During the seventeenth century the creole Luso-African community grew. Although a few Portuguese women degredadas were sent to Angola, most of the Portuguese there married locally with African or Luso-African women. Many acquired land in the conquered regions which they ran as plantations with slave labour, while the frequent wars led to the recruitment of African soldiers, the guerra preta, who played a large part in the fighting. As the century progressed, what was essentially a Luso-African kingdom emerged, based on the twin ports of Luanda and Benguela. This Luso-African community differed from that established in Guinea and the Kongo kingdom in that it was a self-governing domain of the Crown of Portugal and not a community dependent on the goodwill of an African potentate. The Luso-African creole community of Angola not only assumed an important role in the history of the South Atlantic but became a distinctive Portuguese community in south central Africa. The local creole families controlled the port of Luanda and, in partnership with Portuguese and Brazilian interests, also controlled a slave trade which exceeded in volume even that operated by the British and French. The Luanda creoles were major landowners, organised trading caravans in the interior, controlled the church, the town government and the local militias. Inland creole towns grew up, especially along the Kwanza River and in the highlands inland of Benguela. No creole language took root but the creole families used Kimbundu as well as Portuguese for the conduct of their affairs. They were a community integrated by trade both with the world of the Atlantic and with the commerce of the African interior, while their culture derived equally from Portuguese and Brazilian and central African sources.
Since the planting of the first permanent trading posts on the African coast in the fifteenth century, the Portuguese Crown had never entirely abandoned the idea of creating thriving Portuguese communities in Africa. The creation of a ‘donatary captaincy’ in Angola in 1571 clearly had this intention, and in the seventeenth century there were at least two schemes for planting settler colonies in eastern Africa. The regulations surrounding the granting of prazos in Zambesia, whereby they were given to women on the condition that they married a Portuguese approved by the Crown, also appears to have been intended to promote settlement. In the event European Portuguese never came to Africa in sufficient numbers to establish a wholly European society. Most of the Portuguese who settled in Africa were either convicts or discharged soldiers, supplemented by a few officials, missionaries and traders. Most of these married locally and the communities that established themselves in Angola, the Kongo kingdom and Zambesia, were Afro-Portuguese in character, owing as much to the lineages of their African mothers as to their, sometimes tenuous, links to Portuguese fathers or more distant ancestors of Portuguese of Luso-Asiatic origin.
By the nineteenth century Angola was dominated by a group of influential Afro-Portuguese families which effectively controlled the economic and political life of the colony and spoke both Portuguese and Kimbundu. In Guinea there was a creole-speaking population, who were known as Kriston, living in and around the old coastal and riverain trading settlements, and in Mozambique an important group of elite Afro-Portuguese families controlled much of the land and trade along the Zambesi and in the hinterland of the coastal towns of Sofala and Quelimane. These groups were emphatic in claiming to be ‘Portuguese’, a claim which frequently embarrassed the Lisbon government when British explorers reported their slaving activities and their way of life that was very far from that which the British believed should mark a European presence in Africa. The outlines were thus drawn for the image of the sinister ‘half-caste’ Portuguese slaver, a favourite character in Victorian novels and travelogues about Africa.13
Rider Haggard, John Buchan and the Portuguese as moral delinquent
In 1885 Rider Haggard published King Solomon’s Mines, a novel which had an enormous vogue in the last years of the nineteenth century. As has already been mentioned, the Victorians interpreted Portuguese history with a particular racist slant. Portugal had had a golden age in the sixteenth century when heroic conquistadores performed great deeds, but this had been followed by a long period of decline brought about by moral degeneration resulting from intermarriage with Asians and Africans. Haggard bought into this interpretation. In his novel, the search for the mines originated in a document written in Portuguese by a sixteenth-century Portuguese explorer, José da Silvestra, a recognition by the author of the heroic deeds of the early Portuguese conquistadores and, incidentally, a recognition of Portugal’s claims to prior discovery in Africa. However, this was offset by the condition of the Portuguese settlement to be met with in the late nineteenth century. ‘Now I know your Delagoa Portugee well. There is no greater devil unhung in a general way, battening as he does upon human agony and flesh in the shape of slaves.’14 The body of the old Portuguese explorer is found deep-frozen in a cave—a gaunt skeletal corpse symbolic of all that remained of Portugal’s former glory, and the modern Portuguese, the descendant of Silvestra, died in his attempt to take possession of the mines discovered by his ancestor. It was left to the plucky Englishmen to win through where Portugal had failed. As such the book is a commentary on Portugal’s claims made at the Berlin Conference which had concluded its deliberations in February 1885.
John Buchan acquired a great, many would think undeserved, reputation as a teller of adventure stories. The appeal of his books carried him eventually to being appointed Governor General of Canada, and no aspect of his writing was more important than the way his heroes seem to embody the mythology underpinning the British Empire. In 1910 Buchan published Prester John, which was to become one of his best known novels. At the time the British colonies in South Africa, newly united by the Act of Union, were trying to establish a satisfactory relationship with the Portuguese who had emerged from the partition of Africa in control of a third of the coastline of eastern Africa, including Delagoa Bay, the best port of access to the southern African interior. Although a working relationship had been established in the Mozambique–Transvaal Convention of 1908, the desire of South African politicians to gain possession of the bay was frequently expressed and helped to fuel the campaign to vilify the Portuguese which had been, and still was, the stock in trade of much English writing on imperial topics.
John Buchan’s Prester John is set in South Africa and is a tale of a charismatic black leader, Laputa, who raises a rebellion against the whites. In this story the African leader is the noble savage representing all that is finest in native African culture. Alongside him, as the personification of moral corruption, is the Portuguese Henriques. Buchan is using the clichés popular at the time which represented the Portuguese, who ruled the nearby colony of Mozambique, as decadent, cruel and thoroughly unrepresentative of the civilising mission of the white race. For many writers, to be Portuguese was considered as being synonymous with being a slaver, and the epithet ‘half-caste’ was often attached to them to emphasise that they were not really white Europeans at all. Here one might recall the separate status accorded to the Portuguese immigrants in the British Caribbean islands.
Henriques was first met by the hero, David Crawfurd, on his voyage out to South Africa:
he… was a little man… and in looks the most atrocious villain I have ever clapped eyes on. He had a face the colour of French mustard—a sort of dirty green—and bloodshot, beady eyes with the whites all yellowed with fever. He had waxed moustaches, and a curious, furtive way of walking and looking about him.15
This passage is almost a textbook example of racism in which a man’s complexion, hinting at racial mixture, is taken as a sure indication of moral turpitude. Henriques is a dapper dresser but wears yellow shoes ‘to match his complexion’—a thing only a cad would do! ‘“I’ll wager that fellow has been a slave driver in his time,” I told Mr Wardlaw, who said, “God pity his slaves then”.’16
Later, trying to find out more about Henriques, Crawfurd consults a Scot called Aiken: ‘Tut, my man, most of the subjects of his Majesty the King of Portugal would answer to that description. If he’s a rascal, as you think, you may be certain he’s in the I.D.B. [Illicit Diamond Buying] business.’ And Aiken is correct, Henriques is in the business of selling the diamonds that had been smuggled to Laputa who was to head the rising. But worse, Henriques had been responsible for the death of some Boer farmers and, overhearing this, Crawfurd says, ‘My fingers itched to get at the Portugoose—that double-dyed traitor to his race.’17
Henriques, it transpires, is a traitor even to Laputa, his collaborator and the leader of the black rebellion, and wants to get possession of the necklace of rubies which is the talisman of the rising. Crawfurd determines he must at all costs find ‘a means of spoiling the Portugoose’s game’.18 As treachery of the blackest kind is revealed, Crawfurd finds himself in the company of Laputa who thus describes Henriques rather perceptively: ‘The Portuguese is what you call a ‘mean white’. His only safety is among us…. You are too hard on Henriques. You and your friends have treated him as a Kaffir, and a Kaffir he is in everything but Kaffir virtues.’19
Once again a character in a story, one might say a caricature rather than a character, is a metonym for the relations of one nation with another. Henriques and Crawfurd stand for Portugal and Britain, rivals in the colonial field and standing for opposed moral principles. Henriques, the ‘mean white’, has a full house of the vices of his nation; while Crawfurd is the honest, upright Britisher and, by implication, the representative of the force making for civilisation, justice and morality in the world. It is significant that when the two finally meet, Henriques is laid out not by a bullet but by a good straight left to the jaw.
Portugal’s dilemma in Africa
The Portuguese were well aware of the way they were perceived and represented to the Victorian public. The Lisbon government knew that it depended on the private armies and local networks of the creoles to maintain its presence in Africa while, at the same time, it wanted to free itself from the accusations which the behaviour of these elites brought on it. To do this it seemed necessary to increase white settlement in the colonies, so experiments in planting settlers were begun almost immediately after Brazil declared its independence from Portugal in 1822. Before long the idea began to take shape in official circles that Africa might become a ‘new Brazil’, bringing economic benefits to the mother country and leading to the growth of a new society that would resemble that of Brazil.
Most of these early experiments proved unsuccessful. Plans for settlements in eastern Africa came to nothing, but in Angola the establishment of the coastal settlement of Mossamedes in the south of the colony began to attract some settlers, particularly fishermen from Madeira and some Portuguese who left Pernambuco during the anti-Portuguese riots there in the 1840s. Behind Mossamedes lay the healthy Huila highlands, and some Portuguese settled there to ranch cattle. However, these new settlements were modest and did little to divert the flood of emigration bound for the Americas.20 For most Portuguese, Africa still conjured up images of slavery, witchcraft, warfare, disease and famine, and this, added to the lack of amenities and its undeveloped economy, proved profoundly unattractive to would-be emigrants who were easily able to access long-standing networks in Brazil.
In the last years of the nineteenth century there was intense debate about emigration, and almost everyone of note in Portugal had something to say about it. As Portugal’s position in Africa became increasingly threatened by Britain, it was argued that the only way to achieve effective occupation of the colonies was to promote white settlement. This alone would secure Portugal’s status as a colonial power and with it the country’s very survival. However, here opinions differed with some arguing that the object should be to recreate Portuguese society in Africa through colonisation by farming families. The settlement of whole families was deemed necessary because if men came alone to Africa, following the pattern of emigration to the Americas, the result would be a population of mulattos which, in the context of the race-conscious world of the end of the nineteenth century, was seen as highly undesirable. Others argued that Africa should be exploited through capital investment, allowing the Africans to provide the labour force. In this case the existence of the large African population would, it was claimed, leave no room for unskilled Portuguese immigrants.21
Most colonial governors expressed reservations about encouraging the settlement of poor Portuguese families. They would have no skills to help in the development of the colonies and would be a burden on the colonial exchequer. Two twentieth-century High Commissioners in Angola, Norton de Matos and Vicente Ferreira, however, were exceptions and tried in various ways to increase Portuguese settlement. Norton was opposed to Portuguese settlers living off African labour and envisaged largely segregated communities.22 Although he persisted with subsidised passages to Angola for would-be immigrants, his policy had little success.
Meanwhile, the Portuguese government continued with the policy of establishing settlements for convicts. Convicts had been sent to Angola and Mozambique since the sixteenth century and the idea persisted that these forced settlers could be made to form thriving agricultural communities in the interior. The reality was invariably disastrous as there was no support provided and the convicts either starved or deserted. Those who survived did so by slaving or carrying on petty trade, while others drifted to the towns and lived as vagabonds and paupers. The convicts helped to confirm the evil reputation that Angola had in the eyes of would-be immigrants, but the practice continued until 1934 when the 1,500 remaining convicts were repatriated.23
According to Cláudia Castelo, the white Portuguese population of Angola in 1900 stood at around 9,000 and that of Mozambique at under 3,000.24 These figures, however, only tell part of the story of the Portuguese presence, as they do not include the members of the longstanding Portuguese creole communities. Nor do they accurately represent all the non-African elements in the population, people who remained closely allied to the Portuguese even if they did not have a ‘Portuguese’ identity—for example, the Boers who had migrated to Huila in the 1880s or the Indians who had come to Mozambique to trade and the Goans who worked in the administration. Moreover, as the South African economy developed rapidly in the 1870s, a large and very diverse population was to be found in the seaports of the Mozambique coast, which provided the ports of entry to the Transvaal.
Settlement policy 1926–74
Portuguese settlement in Africa grew only slowly in the first two decades of the twentieth century, and was mostly made up of civil servants, demobilised soldiers and men working for the large companies that had begun operations—companies like the Benguela Railway or Diamang in Angola, Sena Sugar and the Mozambique Company in Mozambique. As Cláudia Castelo observes, the Portuguese who came to Africa at this time were few in number when compared with the masses who were leaving for the New World, but among them were people with some education or professional skill who were rather different from the poor and often illiterate emigrants leaving Portugal at this time for the US, Brazil or Argentina.
During the 1930s the government of Salazar stopped sending convicts to Africa and brought the various schemes for assisted passages to an end. Salazar did not want poor Portuguese to go to Africa where they would prove a burden on the local exchequers and would bring Portugal’s ‘civilising mission’ into disrepute. Instead it was held that, as the economy of the colonies gradually expanded, there would be a natural increase in the white population.25 There was, indeed, a slow growth in the numbers of Portuguese in the colonies, mostly due to the increase in the numbers of civil servants and technocrats sent to carry out Salazar’s development policies. By 1940 there were 44,083 whites in Angola and 27,438 in Mozambique, not all of them Portuguese. The census of that year also recorded the people of mixed race, whose numbers were rather more than half that of the whites. Their numbers are almost certainly only a rough figure, as there were very many descendants of the old creole population of uncertain racial status.
During the Second World War Portugal took the first steps towards the industrialisation of the colonies, and this policy was pursued more vigorously after the war as a range of food processing and consumer industries were created.26 These were also the years of the coffee boom in Angola. With the rapid expansion of the colonial economies, the employment opportunities for Portuguese immigrants greatly increased and substantial numbers now set off for Angola and Mozambique. This coincided with both Brazil and the US strictly limiting the numbers of immigrants. In 1951 a Junta da Emigração was created to regulate emigration to the colonies in an attempt to weed out the poor and illiterate.27 From 1950 to 1960 there was a net immigration of over 10,000 a year, and during the 1962–72 period numbers ranged between 14,326 in 1965 and 3,260 in 1971. The year 1961 was exceptional as the outbreak of rebellion in Angola in that year led to a net departure from Angola of 4,971, most of whom returned the following year. Altogether between 1943 and 1974 there was net migration to Africa of 251,446. Although these numbers are not as high as the numbers going to France, they are comparable with emigration to most other destinations during this period. At the end of the colonial period there were 324,000 whites in Angola and 190,000 in Mozambique, 35 per cent of whom had been born in Africa.28 These numbers were higher than the number of British settlers who went to Central Africa and Kenya during the same period.
During the 1950s and 1960s the government invested heavily in creating agricultural settlements on irrigated land. The largest of these, Cela in Angola, was established in 1953–54. These so-called colonatos were supposed to showcase the regime’s policy of creating multi-racial rural communities, and some African farmers were allocated land within the settlements alongside Portuguese immigrants. However, the colonatos never attracted very many people and do not account for the large Portuguese immigration during these years.
Cláudia Castelo has emphasised that the Portuguese who settled in Africa were relatively skilled and well educated when compared with migrants to other destinations. In 1973 I had the evidence of my own eyes when I travelled to Mozambique on board the liner Infante Dom Henrique. There were three classes of passenger on the liner, which represented vividly the Portuguese experience of empire. The very luxurious first class was the domain of governors, generals, senior clerics and the rich; there was a comfortable second class for the professional classes and administrators; and a third class was crowded with poorer emigrants. There women sat all day on deck busy with knitting and crochet work, the men in groups playing cards, with no suspicion of how short their stay in Africa would be.
The typical migrant community, writes Cláudia Castelo, was ‘mostly urban, not too mixed racially, and fairly balanced in gender terms, with a high percentage of young people, schooling levels above the national average, and people working mainly in the service sector’.29 The Angolan Portuguese she describes as entrepreneurial people, attracted by the commercial possibilities of the country, who enjoyed a society that was freer and more open than that of Portugal. Settlers who went to Mozambique were more likely to be in government service. In 1948 10.88 per cent had secondary education or higher and only 6.3 per cent were deemed illiterate. By 1973 16.14 per cent had secondary education or above.30
The settlers in Africa always tended to be resentful of Lisbon, and during the war there had been stirrings of opposition in the colonies that had been prompted by the possibility that Portugal would be occupied by the Axis and the colonies would be left to ‘go it alone’.31 Then in 1958 resentment at the control of Lisbon had found expression in the presidential election when the voters in the colonies heavily backed the opposition candidate Humberto Delgado. The vote for Delgado, Castelo writes, ‘did not represent an anti-colonial stance but an anti-centralist one, following a “Brazilian” path. The small white bourgeoisie was becoming autonomist.’32
After independence
Portugal’s decolonisation, following the April 1974 revolution, led to a rapid departure of more than 90 per cent of the Portuguese who had settled in Africa. This created a new large-scale dispersal which took place in a very short time and can probably find a parallel only in the departure of the Portuguese Jews at the end of the fifteenth century. Around three quarters of a million people are thought to have moved back to Portugal, many of them Africans and Indians as well as white Portuguese, but significant numbers also left for Australia and South Africa.
Although most of the recent immigrants departed from the colonies once they became independent, this was not the end of the story of the Portuguese presence in Africa. Left behind were a high proportion of the creoles, descendants of the Afro-Portuguese, who had lost their power and social status during the high colonial period but who formed the core of the liberation movements and aspired once more to take control of the countries where they had once ruled. The ruling elites of the PAIGC, Frelimo and MPLA were largely made up of members of old Afro-Portuguese families (like the Van Dunems in Angola), and Africans like Agostinho Neto and Eduardo Mondlane who had been educated in Portugal and had married white wives, or Amílcar Cabral and his brother Luís who were creoles from Cape Verde. Independence was very much a transfer of power from the white European Portuguese to the black Afro-Portuguese creoles.
Moreover the successor regimes were in many respects very Portuguese in character, not only sharing a language with the colonial power and taking over its highly bureaucratised legal system and administrative culture, but also inheriting the contacts and networks that had bound the former Portuguese state together. The elites of the newly independent Lusophone states still went to Lisbon for medical treatment, sent their children there for university education or their wives on shopping trips. Angolans and Mozambicans continued to follow the fortunes of Benfica, Sporting and FC Porto. Politicians who fell out of favour went into exile in Lisbon and politicians in favour deposited their money there. Moreover the links between the former colonies that had been created in colonial times, and strengthened during the liberation struggle, survived in the semi-formal PALOP (Países Africanos de Língua Portuguesa) organisation which met regularly and which allowed Angola to act as the patron for little São Tomé and to intervene to resolve political crises in the island. When the CPLP was formed in 1996, the Lusophone African states all joined, reconnecting with the wider Lusophone world.
While Portugal enjoyed the benefits of new European Union membership, large numbers of Angolans and Guineans (and Brazilians) moved to Lisbon to work, and when the downturn of the European economy hit Portugal after 2008, equally large numbers of Portuguese began to return to Africa seeking professional and managerial posts in the expanding, even booming, economies of oil-rich Angola and coal- and gas-rich Mozambique. By 2012 estimates were putting the numbers of Portuguese in Angola at over 100,000 and growing—a number soon to approach the numbers that had settled there in the colonial era.
Cape Verdeans in Africa
As early as the fifteenth century the Portuguese settlers in the Cape Verde Islands began to establish trading settlements on the coast of upper Guinea. These grew into permanent towns during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and the interaction of the Portuguese influence stemming from the islands and the African influences of the mainland helped to create the creole language and culture of the Kriston creole population. Cape Verdean links with Portuguese Guinea continued throughout the colonial period, and members of the Cape Verdean elite formed the PAIGC which brought Guinea (as well as Cape Verde) to independence in 1975.
However, Portuguese Guinea was not the only part of Africa to which Cape Verdeans migrated and where they settled. In one respect the story of the Cape Verdeans in Africa reflects the character of the wider Portuguese diaspora. Emigration from the islands affected all classes, both the educated and the poor and destitute. In the 1930s the Salazar government began to expand the colonial civil service and to give it fresh duties in the promotion of agricultural production. There was a marked shortage of suitable recruits and the government increasingly turned to the Cape Verde Islands to fill the gaps in government service. Cape Verdeans were employed in all the African colonies as teachers or administrators, and some joined the important and prestigious Colonial Inspectorate. As Alexander Keese has pointed out, although these people were for the most part very loyal to the regime and ‘would fully embrace the rhetoric of the Estado Novo’,33 some of them were to be found among the strongest critics of official policy, particularly as it affected the islands themselves’. When Cape Verde became independent in 1975, many of those who had worked for the Portuguese colonial regime found a return to their homeland to be problematic. ‘A majority of those officials would after April 1974 migrate to Lisbon, into a sometimes inevitable, sometimes self-chosen exile.’34
As well as the elite of colonial officials, thousands of ordinary Cape Verdeans also found their way to Africa. António Carreira found the first evidence of labourers being recruited in Cape Verde for work in Africa in the eighteenth century when ‘successive levies of people from Santiago’ were sent to Guinea between 1765 and 1773 to build the fortress of São José in Bissau.35 This proved to be a precedent, for when the crippling cycle of droughts struck the islands after 1855, a cycle that was to last for the next hundred years, contracting the destitute islanders for work in the African colonies was seen as a way of providing famine relief. The cocoa and coffee roças (plantations) of São Tomé and Príncipe were just beginning to become profitable and required large quantities of labour. Cape Verdeans were offered contracts to work there alongside contracted labourers from Angola. Emigration was certainly seen by the islanders as an option when faced by famine, but they preferred to obtain passages to the US or South America, while many made the short sea crossing to seek work in Dakar or The Gambia. São Tomé and Príncipe were not popular destinations owing to the reputation the islands had for disease and for ill treatment of the workforce.
Early in the twentieth century the Portuguese authorities took steps to prevent emigration to Dakar and enacted measures to steer emigrants to São Tomé and Príncipe. Between 1902 and 1922 22,671 Cape Verdeans were recruited under contract and figures show a further 14,845 recruited between 1941 and 1949—years that included the severe famines of 1941–42 and 1947—and 34,530 between 1950 and 1970. In addition some Cape Verdeans were recruited for work in Angola and Mozambique.36
Mortality in São Tomé and Príncipe was high and there was some repatriation—Carreira records 12,150 Cape Verdeans repatriated between 1906 and 1936—but in the course of three-quarters of a century a permanent population of Cape Verdean plantation workers was established. Its position in the islands was anomalous in a number of respects. The inhabitants of the Cape Verde Islands were deemed to be civilisados, that is, they were not subject to the indigenato, the laws governing African natives (indígenas). They had the same legal status as European Portuguese, yet they were performing work contracts alongside the African labourers (serviçais). Cape Verdeans acquired a reputation with the roça managers of being ‘difficult’ and even unruly as some of them had levels of education better than the white overseers. Augusto Nascimento even records that ‘some Cape Verdeans were actually asked to write letters for the white illiterate employers’.37 At the same time there was no love lost between them and the serviçais, and during the disturbances of 1953 the Cape Verdeans sided with the white population.
At independence in 1975 there were around 15,000 Cape Verdeans still in São Tomé and Príncipe, including 6,500 children. They were marginalised by the new ruling elite and in 1990 even lost the right to vote in elections. According to Nascimento they have remained a group ‘impoverished and aged [with] little political leverage’,38 a fragment of the Portuguese diaspora left stranded by the receding tide of empire.
Portuguese settlement in South Africa
The Frelimo leaders who took over the Mozambique government in 1975 made little or no effort to persuade the white population to stay. The nationalisation of businesses, housing, education and health sent a message that the privileged white standard of living was no longer sustainable. The scramble to leave the colony followed rapidly. The easiest means of departure was to drive to the South African border, and the Portuguese troops still in Mozambique apparently provided escorts for these convoys. Once in South Africa the refugees were received in temporary camps before being permanently resettled in the country. Since many of the refugees were professional people or skilled workers, their incorporation into the industrial economy of South Africa was not difficult. According to official figures, 33,000 Mozambican whites and 4,000 Angolans entered South Africa between 1974 and 1980—though the real number is likely to have been higher.39
The Portuguese who arrived from the former colonies found Portuguese communities already well-established in South Africa. The most numerous were Madeirans who had begun to come to South Africa at the end of the nineteenth century when many of their compatriots were emigrating to Angola. Many of the Madeirans established themselves as fishermen, while others made a living from market gardening. One factor which made the migration of Madeirans to South Africa relatively easy was the regular stops at Madeira made by Union Castle liners en route to South Africa. By 1904 there were said to be 1,000 Madeirans in Cape Colony.40 Once communities had been established, the process of chain migration took effect and there was a steady flow of new arrivals from the island throughout most of the twentieth century, at around 200 a year. Another estimate shows 14,000 Madeirans entering South Africa between 1940 and 1981.41 Like the Atlantic islanders who settled in Canada or the US, the Madeirans tended to form closed communities, to marry among themselves and to maintain a low profile. The Madeirans also adopted a lifestyle rather different from other white South Africans. The ‘Madeiran pioneer filled the space around his dwelling, through the small trellis, the backyard with kale and other vegetables, often with a hencoop and sometimes even a pigsty’, as Victor Pereira da Rosa and Salvato Trigo rather patronisingly put it.42 However, although a lack of education held back the social advancement of this group, as it did in Jersey and elsewhere, many of them did very well in their businesses. The same authors calculated that people of Madeiran descent controlled 75–80 per cent of the horticultural market of Johannesburg and 80 per cent of the fruit market.
Although they shared a religious affiliation in common, the Madeiran community remained to a large extent isolated from other Portuguese immigrants. The Madeirans also suffered from the strong prejudices current in racially divided South Africa, particularly in the 1960s and 1970s when the tide of Afrikaner nationalism was running strongly. They were openly reviled as an undesirable element and were even described as ‘white kaffirs’.43 A survey conducted in 1977 showed that between 40 and 45 per cent of Afrikaners thought that all Portuguese immigration should be stopped.44
There was a third group of Portuguese in South Africa: direct immigrants from mainland Portugal. Many of these came with assisted passages to the colony of Mozambique, making their way from Lourenço Marques to South Africa in search of better jobs. Most of these were skilled people responding to the high demand for skilled white labour in segregated South Africa.
As usual with Portuguese migrations, there are widely differing estimates of the size of the Portuguese population in South Africa. As da Rosa and Trigo put it,
we would not dare to estimate their numbers, in the manner of some political and community heads, who state that the Madeirans in the country number 300,000. The data supplied by the South African Statistics Branch on white, especially Portuguese, immigration are both arbitrary and inconsistent’
They go on to quote some estimates that claim ‘that there are 600,000 Portuguese in South Africa, or just as readily that there are 700,000 … The inflation of numbers by some Portuguese living in Johannesburg even borders on the simplistic, when they try to convince us and to convince themselves that they are a million.’45
The more sober statisticians who compile the Observatório da Emigração have arrived at much more modest figures. In 2011 the Portuguese consulate had 70,171 registered, of whom 34,913 had been born in Portugal, though many of these had dual nationality. These figures do not count people with a Portuguese ancestry who are South African citizens, who were estimated in 2008 to be 200,000.46 Whatever the absolute numbers, in terms of proportions it is thought that around 50 per cent are Madeirans or their descendants, 35 per cent refugees from Mozambique and Angola and 15 per cent from continental Portugal.47
The Portuguese community in Johannesburg funded the building of two cathedrals, maintains a number of social clubs and since 1963 Portuguese language newspapers, but the community identity has been weakened by marriages outside the group and by dispersal from the original points of settlement, like ‘Little Portugal’ in Johannesburg. According to Glaser they ‘lacked the kind of cohesion we see in other immigrant groups such as Jews and Greeks’, while ‘most were comfortable with their Portuguese origins [they] were eager to become ordinary white South Africans’. Like Portuguese communities elsewhere, they have kept a low profile and ‘have become a diverse, mobile, transnational group, with often hybrid fluid identities’.48