1
The modern history of Portuguese colonisation in Angola might be said to begin around 1820. In that year Portugal saw an end to the long aftermath of the Peninsular Wars. A Portuguese king, who had been in exile for thirteen years, returned to Lisbon thereby precipitating a constitutional struggle which resulted in the creation of a bourgeois monarchy whose members were related to Queen Victoria. At the same time there were repercussions for Angola from events in another distant land. In 1822 Angola’s major trading partner, and Portugal’s largest colony, Brazil, declared itself independent. By this time Portugal’s old Asian empire, now reduced to toe-holds in China, Indonesia and India, was little more than a memory celebrated in epic poetry and haunting music. This Asian empire was very gradually replaced by a new African empire. The eastern shore of Africa had a surviving Portuguese presence, notably on the island of Mozambique and in the Zambezi delta. On the Atlantic shore, four centuries of trading in gold, textiles and slaves had left half a dozen islands, fortresses and harbours in Portuguese hands. Two harbours, Luanda in north-central Angola and Benguela in south-central Angola, each had colonial outposts in the hinterland that in time became the nuclei for a new imperial drive. As a Portuguese administrative presence spread slowly inland, about a quarter of a million Africans were classified as colonial ‘subjects’ who were deemed liable to pay tithes or poll taxes. All the while the white population of the emerging Angolan colonies remained small, probably fewer than two thousand Europeans. Nearly all of these were men, with very few women. Men were sent out as convicts, sentenced for serious criminal acts or for engaging in subversive political agitation. Most served out their time as soldiers but some survivors stayed on in Africa as commercial agents and settled down to father large mestizo (mixed race) families. In Europe, meanwhile, poverty and civil disturbance fed a Portuguese impulse to emigrate but 90 per cent of migrants continued to move to South America rather than seek their fortune in Africa. Not until the second half of the twentieth century did large numbers of immigrants freely choose to settle in Angola. It thus took over a hundred years for Angola to become Portugal’s most treasured overseas possession. By 1960, however, the colony’s wealth matched that of the French empire in West Africa and the size of its settler population equalled that of the British in Rhodesia.
The slowly developing politics of the Portuguese presence in Angola often mimicked the African policies of Britain and France and by the twentieth century Portugal also adopted colonial practices from the empire of the Belgians in the Congo basin. One early theme of comparative imperial history concerned attitudes to the African trade in slaves. In the 1770s Britain decided that slavery could not be practised in the British Isles, only in its overseas colonies. The decision was partly driven by Lord Justice Mansfield who had black relatives by marriage. At about the same date Portugal made a similar decision. The semi-enlightened despot then ruling Portugal, the Marquis of Pombal, outlawed the holding of slaves in his European territories. He did so not out of humanitarian idealism but in order to retain valuable slaves on his tropical plantations rather than allowing them to be brought to Europe, for instance as exotic footmen in noble households. In France the law against the holding of slaves was more radical and for a while was even extended to the colonies. It arose with the revolutionary demands for fraternity and equality that erupted in the late 1780s. This French attitude, however, had extremely negative repercussions across the other European empires. Such was the panic that any tentative moves there may once have been to give civil rights to black slaves were eclipsed and the colonial nations came to dread every aspect of French radicalism. When in 1804 Haiti—the world’s richest colony and the home of many slaves from Angola—gained its independence as a black sovereign nation, the imperial panic became endemic, especially in Portugal.
Colonial traders in northern Angola, and in the forest beyond, had greatly profited from being major suppliers of slaves to French Haiti. According to the popular imagination prevalent in Europe, northern Angola was the darkest part of the Dark Continent. Such was the growth of nineteenth-century geographical curiosity that no fewer than twenty-nine explorers from Germany alone set out to be, or so they claimed, the first white men to visit the unknown western spaces of Central Africa. The people whom they expected to meet were assumed to be barely human, living at an early stage of evolution from ape to man. The reality, however, was very different. Wherever they travelled the new breed of explorers found that traders had opened a plethora of trading paths dating back several centuries. They discovered that their guides could use Portuguese as a lingua franca to communicate with interpreters in most of the villages of the deep Angolan interior. Although many of the so-called ‘white men’ who had preceded them on the long-distance trade routes were actually of a blackish hue, they were considered ‘white’ because they wore shoes and trousers rather than travelling bare-foot and wearing loin cloths. Identity was effectively determined by culture rather than by pigmentation. The paths which these explorers followed were busy with porters carrying cargoes of ivory from the elephants they had hunted and of bees’ wax robbed from hives in the high trees. The tracks were also used by coffles of slaves who had been bought in the interior in exchange for bales of calico.
After the hiatus caused by the French Revolution the move to outlaw the Trans-Atlantic trade in slaves began to roll again in Denmark around 1804. A similar law was soon passed in Britain, which hoped to stop all nations from trading in slaves. It feared that allowing colonial rivals to restock their slave pens would diminish any British advantage among the plantation economies. This economic motive was reinforced in Britain by an evangelical one driven by a movement of Protestant revival. In Portugal legislation relating to slavery went through the same stages of change as British legislation, albeit with years of delay. Whereas Britain outlawed the carrying of slaves in 1807 Portugal only began to do so in 1836. Until mid-century Brazil remained a major buyer of Angolan slaves and the numbers crossing the Atlantic actually increased in the 1820s and 1830s. In British colonies the owning of slaves was outlawed in 1834 but in Portugal similar legislation was not passed by parliament until 1875. In the British Empire life-long slaves were replaced by indentured workers whose term of servitude was theoretically fixed although the migrants, sometimes known as coolies, were not always given the opportunity to return home to the land of their birth. In the Portuguese empire indentured workers, known as serviçais, were often recruited for life. In practice modified forms of slavery remained ubiquitous in Angola throughout the nineteenth century.
In Portugal no enlightened evangelical lobby had pushed the anti-slavery agenda and although lay humanitarian sentiments were sometimes expressed little effective action took place. Portugal’s liberals tended to vaunt their attachment to human rights, and even to the rights of colonial subjects, but in practice their political leaders were dependent during the 1830s on the revenues which could be extracted from the overseas territories. By ironic contrast it was the conservatives of the 1840s who were willing to forgo colonial profits in order to enhance their commercial relations with Britain. An anti-slave-trade agreement was drawn up in 1842 between Lisbon and London according to which the Royal Navy would be allowed to join the Portuguese navy in patrolling the coast of Angola to capture vessels which were still attempting to carry slaves to the Americas. A mixed commission of lawyers was set up in Luanda to prosecute slavers and thus it was that by 1850 Brazil had closed its ports and the selling of Angolan slaves there had virtually ceased. Slave ownership, however, remained legal in the American cotton belt and on the Cuban tobacco farms and so slaves were sometimes smuggled to northern America using ships flying ‘flags of convenience’ which made them immune to British searches. In Angola itself many people continued to be treated as slaves. Newly designated ‘apprentices’ were often expected to work for their former owners. Some of these ‘freedmen’ continued to be sold to French colonies in the Caribbean as a relatively cheap alternative to indentured labourers imported from French India. Porters, wives, and labourers in inland communities were often effectively domestic slaves. Men and women who might previously have been shipped to Brazil were taken instead to the cocoa plantations on the island of São Tomé, five hundred miles north of Angola. Once there, their legalistic labour contracts were regularly renewed by administrative fiat rather than by any form of consent. Little real change took place in Angola until after 1910 when the Portuguese monarchy was toppled by a republican regime. By then Portuguese colonial policy lagged years behind the policies of northern Europe.
Labour remained the central theme of Angola’s modern history from the nineteenth century into the twentieth century. Fear and pain were the incentives which drove Africans, who were no longer technically slaves, to work as conscripts for colonial masters. Any economic incentives were limited and unpredictable. Even when remuneration was promised it was sometimes in the form of tokens that could only be used in a plantation store where prices were higher than on the open market. When Angolan planters paid cash, sometimes as little as a few shillings a month rather than the few shillings a day which became the norm in British Africa, the money was regularly clawed back as a hut tax. Living conditions on the inland plantations, and also along the coastal fishing beaches, were cramped and unhygienic. Nutrition was monotonous and inadequate. Only the wealthiest estates, such as the big cocoa plantations, provided even minimal health facilities. The laws governing slavery and conscription may have changed over the decades from 1820 to 1960 but the reality of an African life dominated by the prospect of punishment amounting to torture did not alter. The blood-curdling cries of white settlers calling for ‘cheeky’ workers to be soundly whipped, ‘chicote, bom chicote’, rang down through the years. Victims, tied to the whipping post, were beaten with thongs of hippopotamus hide which each district commissioner kept ready for use in his office drawer. After a hundred lashes even the strongest man was liable to die of the wounds administered while the cowed plantation population looked on in dread. The life of an Angolan caught up in the colonial labour web was usually painful and sometimes short. One Portuguese journalist described the system in the 1920s as the ‘economy of terror’.
The mid-nineteenth-century end of the trans-Atlantic selling of black slaves so curbed the value of African empires that some European powers began to contemplate withdrawing from their spheres of commercial influence along the Atlantic seaboard. Once more it was Denmark which led the way when in 1850 it gave up its great trading fortress on the Gold Coast. Britain had been tempted to do the same but a committee of merchants decided to maintain a presence in a comparable fortress. It was the Dutch who managed to pull out from the Gold Coast where they surrendered the oldest and most prestigious of all the great castles, the once-Portuguese citadel of Elmina. Portugal’s greatest Angolan fortress, overlooking Luanda Bay, had formerly been held by the Dutch but it had been heroically recaptured by a Brazilian navy in 1648. The Portuguese were reluctant to surrender Luanda once more, or to lose international status by retiring from Africa. Their commercial activity temporarily subsided but a toe-hold was held and in the 1870s Portugal, like Britain and France, began to explore new colonial opportunities. The belief that there could be hidden wealth, especially African minerals which imperial rivals might aspire to extract, culminated in the ‘scramble’ for Africa of the 1880s.
Imperial governments, in Portugal as elsewhere, were always anxious to minimise colonial expenditure. As a result the risk investment devoted to empire in Africa was often handed to private companies, or undertaken by individual initiatives. The great magisterial companies in Portuguese Mozambique, in French Congo, in British Rhodesia, and in King Leopold’s ‘Belgian’ Congo, were given almost unlimited sovereign rights. These rights permitted investors to compel African labourers to work for foreign interests to the detriment of their own freedom and well-being. Private-enterprise colonisation of this type was initially very limited in Angola. Benguela was governed by a provincial governor, and Luanda by a governor-general, both of whom ruled on behalf of an imperial ministry in Lisbon responsible for the navy, the colonies and the overseas territories. In the south-west corner of Angola only one company, using French capital, attempted to create a private-enterprise colony around the mid-nineteenth-century Portuguese harbour of Namib, then called Moçâmedes. The region, however, was a poor one and the experiment did not last long. Instead small autonomous communities of immigrants tried to make a living. Some were refugees who fancied that their economic opportunities might be better in colonial Angola than in the rebellious Brazilian state of Pernambuco. Others were Portuguese fishermen from the Algarve who thought that they could gain wealth by exploiting the cold ocean currents coming up from the south Atlantic. Yet another small-scale initiative brought island farmers from Madeira who hoped to make a living by colonising the little upland plateaux of south-western Angola. The most successful of the independent immigrants in the south-west, however, were neither Portuguese nor Brazilian but rather Dutch-speaking settlers escaping British rule in South Africa in the 1880s. These farmers, colloquially known as Boers, had crossed the Namibian ‘thirstlands’ in their great ox-carts and were to play an important role in Angola for the next fifty years. In the meantime, however, no further colonial endeavours by private companies were immediately attempted and when they were, in the 1920s, the focus had shifted from the south-west to the far north-east where alluvial diamonds were found.
The diamond fields discovered on the fringe of the Belgian Congo became a major source of revenue for the Portuguese empire. Diamonds had provided Portugal with great wealth back in the 1730s when gems were discovered in Brazil. Many thousands of imported Angolan slaves spent their lives up to their waists in cold water washing river mud for precious stones. It was Belgian capital and South African technology which opened the Angolan mines two centuries later. The colonial government gave a company, Diamang, virtually all the rights of a state within the state. Although the company’s licence was not quite as comprehensive as that of any Mozambique private-enterprise colony, it was nonetheless extensive. The permission to recruit labour within a concession of several thousand square miles was absolute. To prevent diamond diggers from escaping home to their families and farms, or from smuggling gems out of the compounds, some workers were enclosed in wired prisons. The management of the enterprise was in the hands of white technicians, some of them would-be democrats sent into remote exile for political disloyalty to an autocratic imperial regime. In compensation for the hardship posting, these expatriates enjoyed a privileged life-style of segregation similar to that practised in South Africa. The Angolan mines were not quarried underground but were surface ones where the overburden of sterile soil was removed by huge gangs of labourers with shovels. The company was given a monopoly over diamond prospecting in the whole of Angola. The colonial government ensured that good quality gems would fetch the best price on the cutting and polishing market of Antwerp, and in the retail outlets of London’s Hatton Garden, by giving a monopoly of selling to the De Beers consortium.
While company colonisation thrived in north-eastern Angola the small independent settlements of south-west Angola failed to prosper. The high plateaux were less disease-ridden than most of Angola but they were too remote and inaccessible for crops to be marketed. Subsistence farming rather than cotton planting occupied many white peasant immigrants. Their inland settlements also faced fierce hostility from neighbours. The Kwanyama, of the Namibian borderlands, were a constant source of panic until the region—in the imperial jargon of the time—had been violently ‘pacified’. The coastland of southern Angola was initially rather more successful than the upland as a zone of settler colonisation. It suffered less from indigenous hostility and rather more from a dearth of local people who could be co-opted as workers. The fishing community came to depend on slave-type captives brought down from the Benguela highland to man the boats, mend the nets and cure the sun-dried fish. Conditions for workers were dire, drinking water sometimes had to be brought in by boat, the desert climate fluctuated from very hot to very cold, and ill-clad indentured labourers, living in straw hovels, frequently died of lung disease. The chances of escape were almost as limited as were those of workers who had been taken away to the cocoa islands. In theory conscripts expected to be allowed to return to their highland homes after two years of service, but they could never know when they would be arbitrarily rounded up for yet another lethal spell of service in the desert.
When the European powers began creating modern colonies in Africa it was Leopold of Congo who claimed that the art of colonising was to replace old columns of bearers with modern methods of transport, namely railways. His agents linked several navigable sections of the great river with segments of railway. In East Africa railway-building had been rather successful. The ‘Lunatic Express’ linked Mombasa to the headwaters of the Nile, via Nairobi, and eventually made Uganda a wealthy British ‘protectorate’. The Beira railway opened up the Rhodesian chartered company estates to which Cecil Rhodes had given his name. The Maputo railway replaced Boer ox wagons in supplying coal and dynamite to the Johannesburg gold mines. In contrast to these eastern railways the three railways which were built in Angola had less success. The desert one climbed the great African escarpment to serve the tiny white inland settlements. The abortive dream of the investors, who included Cecil Rhodes, was to find Angolan gold mines deep inland which might match those of the great Witwatersrand reef in the Transvaal. This line was later extended by German iron masters but the iron mines they might have hoped to exploit never materialised. The highland railway out of Benguela took decades to build but eventually did reach the Belgian copper mines beyond the Portuguese frontier. In due course this British-financed railway even ran timetabled passenger services, with ornate brass-handled coaches linked to Central and Southern African lines running all the way to Cape Town. The most notorious of the three Angolan lines, however, was the Luanda railway to Ambaca. It was so extravagant in terms of metropolitan subsidies that Angola was mockingly referred to in Portugal as the ‘property’ of the Royal Trans-Africa Railway Company. For all its pretensions the company never did cross Africa. Since Portugal had neither capital nor heavy industry, the railway had to be built with British enterprise, British investment and British material. This could only be achieved if the Portuguese regime guaranteed a minimum financial return. With profits assured by the state, there was little incentive for the company to operate an effective service or even to supply adequate rolling stock. Worse still, the route ran over such unstable ground that land-slides or bridge failures often disrupted the erratic schedules. One hostile Portuguese politician described the track as a wide-open footpath used by smiling African porters trotting down to the port of Luanda with their head-loads of peasant-grown coffee beans. The contribution of railways to Angola’s economic growth was later supplemented by motor vehicles plying the long sandy trails.
Portugal emulated other colonial powers not only in its railway building but also by claiming that its colonies were not really colonies at all but rather overseas provinces of the mother country. Such assimilation and integration had been most marked in the French municipalities of Senegal which elected members to the Paris parliament. Angola was also deemed at various times to be an overseas province of Portugal and as such was permitted to elect one or more members to the Lisbon parliament. The voters included not merely the white expatriates of the cities but also the more numerous Creoles of mixed race, or mixed culture, in the ports and inland towns. Voting, however, was scarcely an open competition and the imperial government was apt to choose approved candidates some of whom had never set foot in Angola. Nineteenth-century democracy did nevertheless have a local dimension and members of the middle class, white, brown and black, competed for seats on the municipal councils of coastal cities and up-country towns. This French-style establishment of colonial municipalities contrasted with British-style indirect rule by indigenous chiefs. Portugal did seek to make some use of African systems of political authority, but not with quite the panache which Britain gave to sultans and paramount chiefs in ‘protectorates’ managed by its Foreign Office, rather than by its Colonial Office.
Like other colonies, Angola was profoundly affected by the presence of Western missionaries. The roots of world religion in Angola did not date back to the rise of Islam, as they did in both West and East Africa, but to the arrival of Christian friars in the sixteenth century. Black Friars, White Friars, Grey Friars, bare-foot friars, even the blue friars of St John, all brought baptism and the Eucharist to northern Angola. The Jesuits and the Franciscans later brought Christianity to the Luanda hinterland. The legacies, much adapted by local religious practices, survived for centuries but by the nineteenth century religious influence had begun to change. Portugal had traditionally been an arch-Catholic country but in the 1830s the Portuguese church was quite severely persecuted by radical revolutionaries. In 1834 the government of Portugal dissolved the old monasteries in much the way that Henry VIII had dissolved the monasteries of England three centuries earlier. Portuguese monastic lands were transferred to the new bourgeois barons of the revolutionary parliament. In Angola, however, there were only limited church spoils to be appropriated. The great religious entrepreneurs of the eighteenth century had been the Jesuits. They had owned extensive lands, slaves and business enterprises in both Angola and Brazil, but in the 1770s the great dictator, Pombal, had closed the Portuguese chapter of the Jesuit order and allocated its economic resources to his family and to his political supporters. One religious order which initially survived in eighteenth-century Angola was that of St Francis, the Capuchin mission which had done much to bring Christianity to rural communities since the seventeenth century. The Franciscans did not have extensive merchant networks, like the Jesuits, but to survive with minimal subsidies from overseas they had to make their missions economically sustainable. This meant managing vegetable plantations along the rivers, a task which required the employment of slaves. The order dealt with the moral dilemma involved by claiming that Capuchins, unlike Jesuits, did not trade in slaves but, if offered slaves as alms, accepted them and put them to gainful use in their market gardens. When, however, Portugal’s religious revolution hit Angola in 1834 the last Franciscans were driven out and their slaves were heartlessly sold to Brazilian dealers.
In the second half of the nineteenth century new mission influences came to Angola. French missionaries, belonging to the Catholic order of the Holy Ghost, served predominantly in the far south before spreading towards the highland. In the north British missionaries were despatched by a Baptist missionary society which established a politically and economically influential church in Kongo. In Luanda province it was Methodists, led by American bishops, who created the tradition of chapels and schools among Kimbundu speakers. This mission was influential in training a generation of politicians, many of whom later switched from Methodism to Marxism. In the hinterland of Benguela it was American and Swiss Congregationalists of a Presbyterian disposition who brought hospitals and literacy to the highland. Here too churches had a lasting legacy in the politics of nation-building. All three mission traditions, Baptist, Methodist and Congregationalist, were to play a role in creating overarching identities in three broad regions. By the mid-twentieth century each region had developed a distinctive strand of politics which opposed the authoritarian, and largely Catholic, regime constructed by Lisbon.
The forging of a large and complex colony of half-a-million square miles in Angola took a whole century from the 1820s to the 1920s. By the middle of the 1920s the frontiers of the colony were finally fixed. The northern frontier, with Leopold’s Congo, had been established as early as the 1880s. The southern frontier, involving confrontations with Germany and South Africa was eventually agreed in 1926. The complexity of Angola continued to be reflected in the contrasts between its three most populous, western, zones. The city of Luanda, which is described in chapter two, was the urban focus for the whole of Angola but related especially to the Kimbundu lands along the Kwanza River of north-central Angola. The northern lowland of Kongo, and of the deep interior, examined in chapter three, had quite different experiences, influenced by a range of foreign traders, explorers and diplomats. The south-central highland, the subject of chapter four, was extensively traversed by traders of many nations before being occupied by Portuguese soldiers between 1890 and 1902 when the great ‘rebellion’ in the Bailundu kingdom was crushed. Any eastward expansion, which might have been incited by the 1880s ‘scramble’ for Africa, was abruptly halted when in 1890 Britain delivered an ‘ultimatum’ which banned Portugal from pursuing its wider ambitions in Central Africa. The eastern frontier, between Portugal and Britain, was settled in 1905 by the King of Italy who had been appointed to arbitrate between competing claims to the region of the upper Zambezi. Thereafter two successive authoritarian regimes came to power in Portugal, Masonic republicans in 1910, and Catholic militarists in 1926, both of which aspired to transform Angola into a colony of white settlement, the theme of chapter five. Radical change only began to take root after the Second World War when a patriotic style of monetarism, initially adopted by the dictatorship of António Salazar, was gradually replaced by a multinational capitalism. Chapter six explains how this new economic dynamic managed, for a decade, to counter the rise of a multiplicity of nationalistic movements. The last three chapters focus on the battle for control of Angola fought not only between power-seeking indigenous leaders but also between protagonists in the Cold War. The colonial era ended officially on 10 November 1975 when the last Portuguese pro-consul departed. The colonial legacy lasted for at least another thirty years.