5
The year 1890 was probably the most important turning point in the modern history of Angola. The British ‘ultimatum’, which limited Portuguese expansion to the east, transformed the course of Portuguese imperial history. The dream of a New Brazil, comparable in size to the independent Brazilian empire, or even comparable to the United States, died at the hands of Lord Salisbury. The trauma felt in Lisbon was profound. Portugal had already lost the north bank of the Congo River to King Leopold. The southern frontier of a prospective Central African ‘empire’ was being encroached upon by German advances in Namibia. Now Portugal’s oldest ally, Britain, had vetoed any Angolan expansion eastward. The dream of a rose-coloured map stretching from sea to shining sea had been shot down in one diplomatic dispatch. In British diplomatic history the ultimatum of 1890 does not even merit a footnote. Salisbury’s ‘mild remonstration’ was deemed to be of no particular significance. In Portugal it heralded the end of the old colonial order. The African empire, which had become the guarantor of Portugal’s status as a world power, was now at risk and had been cut back to the trading hinterland of coastal enclaves in Angola and Mozambique. Even these territories were no longer secure. In the east Cecil Rhodes helped to finance the creation of the private Mozambique Company which limited Portuguese sovereignty until 1940. Rhodes also built the Mozambique railway to Rhodesia. A ‘red’ map along the mythical highway from Cairo to the Cape cut a great swathe through the ‘pink’ map which the great Portuguese explorers had aspired to create. Angola was even at risk of being dismembered altogether when in 1898 Britain engaged in secret diplomatic negotiations with Germany. The abortive deal would have granted Luanda province to Britain and allowed Germany a free commercial reign in the rest of the territory.
When news of the British veto on the joining of Angola to Mozambique reached Luanda the authorities desperately set about trying to limit the damage. A dynamic young army officer, half Portuguese and half Irish, happened to be visiting the little plateau communities of Angola’s deep south when he received an urgent coded telegram ordering him to report immediately to Silva Porto’s trading station at Bihé on the Benguela highland. Paiva Couceiro arrived in Bihé shortly before old man Silva Porto, the legendary trader and explorer, lit the fuse on his barrel of gunpowder, killing himself and thereby shaking the whole Portuguese empire into diplomatic action. The young officer assembled a few dozen soldiers, a minimal number of bearers, and set off to claim all the territory he could reach along the western tributaries of the Zambezi in what was to become the Angolan province of Kwando-Kubango. Over the next few years Paiva Couceiro became one of the best-informed voices of Portuguese imperial ambition and in 1907 he was appointed governor-general of Angola. His vision of a future in which Angola would cease to be primarily a slave-exporting market colony and become a settler colony for white immigrants was one that would be carried forward by another dynamic young soldier, Norton de Matos, in 1912–15 and 1921–24. Before the new era of settler colonialism dawned, however, Central Africa went through great turbulence. Angola became engulfed in a storm over slavery that shook the colonial world. In Congo the crisis had been triggered by the brutal attempts of Leopold’s men to generate revenue to cover the cost of running a private enterprise colonial administration. The storm led in 1908 to the confiscation of Leopold’s ‘Congo State’ by the government of Belgium. In Angola the crisis arose out of the on-going sale of indentured workers for the cocoa islands. Indirectly it undermined the Saxe-Coburg monarchy in Portugal and in 1908 led to the assassination of King Carlos. The Portuguese king was succeeded by his young son, Manuel, but two years later he was overthrown by revolutionaries. The last monarchical ruler of Portugal fled into exile in England. This Portuguese mutiny, which was started by the carbonari, working-class Lisbon anarchists, was subsequently captured by middle-class Freemasons, who headed a new, liberal, republican regime.
One of the most bizarre consequences of republican liberalism, designed to strengthen a white settler presence in the Portuguese colonies, was the attempt in 1912 to create a ‘homeland’ for Jews in Angola. Paulo Dias, a grandson of the navigator Bartholomew Dias, was a Jewish coloniser who became lord-proprietor of Angola in 1571. He brought Jewish artisans to Luanda in the hope of building profitable wind-mills to replace the traditional pounding of corn in mortars. Portuguese persecution led more Jews to emigrate in the seventeenth century. Despite a recurrent confrontation between state and synagogue the empire always required Jewish financial and administrative skills as well as engineering ones. In seventeenth-century Angola it was suspected that one ‘chief factor’ responsible for the management of the royal taxes was a clandestine rabbi who conducted services in a secret Luanda synagogue. By the late eighteenth century emigration had become more open and a Jewish heritage was recorded in the river port of Dondo where Zagury Street and Bensaude Street heralded a golden age. After 1910 the new republican regime proposed massively to increase the number of Jews in Angola by inviting in not only Iberian settlers but also a far wider range of migrants from the beleaguered ghettos of eastern Europe. An attempt had been made in 1905 to found a Jewish homeland in the British ‘protectorate’ of Uganda but it had come to nothing. A ‘protectorate’ guaranteed the welfare of native peoples and offered little to attract white settlers. Angola, by contrast, was a ‘conquest colony’ and so ‘native interests’ could be disregarded and imperial interests could become paramount.
The plan for a Jewish homeland in Angola was developed over several years by Israel Zangwill, a British-born Russian novelist who chaired a Jewish Territorial Organisation with offices on Portugal Street in London. In 1897 Zangwill had visited Palestine and deemed it unsuitable for a Jewish homeland since it was dry, rocky and filled with indigenous inhabitants. He was advised by ‘experts’ that Angola was the finest part of Africa for a settler colony since it had a temperate climate, well-watered agricultural land, a high plateau, and above all scarcely any ‘native’ inhabitants. Zangwill naturally queried the reference to the scantiness of the native population, but was assured that there were no more than 200,000 natives on a highland as large as England. It gradually emerged that this mendacious advice came from an engineer on the Benguela Railway who had not been able to recruit African navvies and so had been tempted to rely on Indian coolies instead. What the engineer wanted above all, however, was to attract hard-working white settlers who would establish an agricultural colony along his highland route and thus enhance traffic on his railway. The proposal was enthusiastically backed by the Jewish community on the Witwatersrand gold mines and by Jews on the Congo copper belt. It was assumed that the railway’s all-powerful financier, Robert Williams, would welcome the scheme. Land was cheap on the Angolan highland and a surprising enthusiasm emanated from Portugal, which thought that Jewish settlers would open up the high country and show that it was under ‘effective occupation’ and could not therefore be claimed to be ‘vacant’ by Germany or Britain.
A bill to facilitate the creation of a Jewish colony was presented to the Portuguese parliament on 20 June 1912. It specified that all Jewish settlers would be required to become Portuguese subjects. They would be granted land concessions and permitted to build schools, hospitals and ‘edifices of public utility’. It gradually became clear, however, that there were problems with the legislation, problems that were to illuminate the future history of white colonisation in Angola. It was pointed out that land grants of 250 hectares could not be worked by settlers alone without the recruiting of native labour. Settlers would, moreover, be expected to provide their own tools and investment capital. A Jewish colonisation society would have, at its own expense, to build highways, bridges, sewers, irrigation works and canals. Each immigrant would be expected to obey existing laws restricting mining, quarrying, forestry, hunting and fishing. Failure adequately to develop each individual concession within two years would lead to its confiscation by the state together with any improvements that had been made on the land. Naturalisation papers would be issued, for the price of one US dollar, to all heads of settler families on the specific condition that they were not, like so many Portuguese immigrants, either criminals or convicts. One requirement of naturalisation was that all Jewish children should be taught exclusively in the Portuguese language and would become liable to Portuguese military service. The almost absurd optimism behind the scheme was partially punctured by a Scottish professor of geography who was of the opinion that only the most desperate of economic refugees would choose to settle in Angola. Without mining rights, he said, even a family with a quarter of a square mile of territory would not be able to survive. Despite the cautious warnings Israel Zangwill visited Lisbon, met the newly-appointed governor-general, Norton de Matos, sought advice from Dr Bensaude of the Lisbon Technical Institute, and gained assurances from a Mr Levy that Portuguese Jews would establish a support committee for the Angolan venture. In London, by contrast, all attempts to obtain backing for Angolan colonisation failed in spite of dropping the names of Lord Rothschild, of Sir Harry Johnston, the great Central African treaty-maker, of Henry Nevinson, the anti-slavery campaigner, and even of young Winston Churchill. It was in Lisbon, however, that serious opposition broke out. Portugal, it turned out, wanted individual settlers as colonists, not an ideological scheme to create a Jewish homeland, a new Zion such as the one promised in Palestine by Britain four years later. The problem was compounded when Zangwill realised that anti-clerical republicans would insist that colonists should not be allowed any religious education or the dissemination of Jewish practices so vital to survival. The scheme collapsed and when, a few years later, Catholic nationalists took control of the Portuguese empire, being Jewish became a handicap though covert loyalty to Portugal’s Hebrew inheritance nevertheless survived. A leading dealer in Angolan diamonds conducted his business in Luanda with a Jewish opposite number from Johannesburg. When, in retirement, the elderly Portuguese broker died, his Catholic wife was astonished to read in his will that he had always been a secret Jew and that he would like his old trading partner from Johannesburg to attend his funeral in Lisbon and read a Jewish prayer of mourning over his coffin.
Two years after the Portuguese revolution of 1910, and in the year of the collapse of the Jewish colonising project, Norton de Matos started the first of his two terms as the energetic governor-general of Angola. He was later to become a giant figure in Portuguese politics, commanding an expeditionary force sent to Flanders during the First World War, becoming master of Portugal’s grand lodge of Freemasons, presiding over the League of Nations in Geneva, and standing as opposition candidate for the presidency of Portugal during the forty-year dictatorship of Salazar. As the most dynamic of all Angola’s governors, Norton introduced authoritarian decrees aimed at making the colony at least economically self-reliant, if not actually profitable for the mother country. His concepts of development, like those of the British and the French, inherited some of the nineteenth-century racist and sexist prejudices of old colonial ideologues but with an expectation that Africans would play a positive if subsidiary role in the new republican empire. The great ideologue of empire in late nineteenth-century Portugal had been Oliveira Martins. Martins claimed that ‘documents show that the Negro is an inferior anthropological specimen better described as anthropoid rather than human’. At the height of Social Darwinism Martins thought that the idea of educating Negroes was absurd in view of their lack of mental capacity. The racism he propounded was matched by an equally virulent sexism. African women were said by their detractors to be hedonistic vixens who used their sensuality and obscene traditions to corrupt European men. Norton inherited some of these prejudices and decreed that any colonial official in the Angolan provinces should no longer establish a ménage with his black housekeeper but should instead marry a white wife. Surviving concepts of Social Darwinism preserved a hostility to mixed-race children, and Norton aspired to replace Angola’s old mixed-race élites with a new generation of white Portuguese immigrants. This racism had adverse effects on the Creole élites of Luanda, Ambaca, and the old colonial towns. The new carpet-baggers to whom the republic promised white-collar jobs in the colonies were particularly hostile to black and brown Angolans who had the training and experience which semi-literate white settlers did not possess.
Portuguese governments had long debated the possibility of encouraging white immigration to Angola but decided on balance that sending immigrants to Brazil, from where they could post cash remittances back home, would be more beneficial. After the revolution of 1910 the concept of free white immigration revived and by 1920 the white population of Angola had risen from 12,000 to 20,000. Norton gradually realised, however, that his ability to bring about real change was limited. White settlers would not come to Angola unless they were supplied with cheap labourers. The old white nuclei of the far south, Pernambuco refugees, Madeira peasants, and Algarve fishermen, survived but in the 1920s the Boer communities packed their great wagon-loads of possessions on to lorries and returned to the now independent Union of South Africa. An attempt to replace Boers with Portuguese orphans as apprentice farmers failed. Equally struggling were the initial attempts to get Portuguese migrants to settle on the Ovimbundu highland in the manner previously proposed for Eastern European Jews.
Norton argued that he could only create a white colony if white women as well as white men were willing to become settlers. Social life for a white housewife in the bush was, however, harsh and lonely, with opportunities for gossip limited to conversations with the odd itinerant trader who might pass by on the sandy trails every week or two. The concept of white family life appeared more viable in towns than in the countryside and so a new, segregated, city was planned for Portuguese settlers in the old highland kingdom of Huambo. Colonial dreamers spoke of a New Lusitania as they planned the colonial city. Even the promise of apartheid, the segregation of white peasants and black peasants, did not attract many, and those who were given subsidised ocean passages sometimes finished up as unemployed vagrants wishing to go home. The offer of a fifteen-year mortgage, a one-hundred-hectare farm, and the loan of plough-oxen, was not enough to attract farmers. The optimistic vision of health workers, of educational missions, of cadres of technicians, of ‘secular priests’ to raise the moral standards of illiterate white peasants, was insufficient to stimulate immigration. Norton had failed to realise that little of Angola’s vast territory had the soil fertility or rainfall to make farming viable. He also failed to see that the most productive soils were already occupied by indigenous populations. When immigrants did arrive, conflict between white land-hunters and black land-losers became endemic.
One place where white settlers tried to establish an agricultural colony was a small plateau behind the coastal town of Old Benguela, re-named Porto Amboim. Resistance by peasants growing their subsistence crops in the fertile valleys was fierce in 1904 and 1907, and in 1917 the settlers and their assimilated associates were killed or driven out, while their plantation houses were burnt down. Similar murderous protests took place at the same time in the neighbouring district of Selles. When the settlers returned, with an armed force of some 1,000 soldiers, they found the plateau virtually abandoned and to re-establish their palm stands and their coffee groves they had to recruit reluctant labour from inland. Unlettered Portuguese immigrants from the rough hills of northern Portugal were brought in and taught the art of estate management on 100 small plantations. The poor white managers supervised black bailiffs who summoned the work teams to the fields with the great plantation bell which rang out in the cold dawn and regulated the routine. The heavy work of humping sacks of coffee beans was undertaken by porters recruited from the kingdom of Bailundu. Weeding, pruning and harvesting were done by the unskilled conscripts. Relaxation was sometimes provided on the occasion of an important funeral, and on the birthday of a white landlord a Sunday dance might be held in the district. So valuable was Amboim coffee that Norton de Matos authorised the building of a little railway which eventually reached the groves and was served by four steam engines, sixteen goods wagons and two passenger coaches. The colony was taking root when in 1929 the world financial markets crashed. Poverty struck the planters and hunger struck the workers who had become dependent on maize bought by their employers from the interior. Settlers sought new markets for sugar, for sisal and even for cassava but all agricultural production required the cheapest possible supply of labour. Employers complained bitterly that thousands of Angolans were fleeing the colony to seek better conditions and wages in Congo and Namibia.
Three years before the Wall Street crash, a new regime was established in Portugal when Catholic army officers toppled the republic of the Freemasons. The army was incapable of managing Portugal’s money and so it invited António Salazar, a part-time Catholic journalist with a Coimbra degree in book-keeping, misleadingly known as ‘economics’, and who had once been appointed to a temporary lectureship in financial law, to become its minister for finance. Salazar accepted, but only on condition that the army should give him supreme power. He thereupon cut government expenditure, including colonial expenditure, to the bone and spared only the army’s own budget. A colonial act was passed which effectively reversed Norton’s vision of a colony based on the self-reliant labour of hard-working white peasants. The new plan recognised that the only highland production of real worth was the cultivation of maize and beans by ultra-cheap African plantation workers. Instead of becoming toiling sons of the soil, the next generation of settlers would become shop-keepers. Towns would become service centres in which artisans would make the consumer goods aspired to by a modestly-prospering white working class and its middle-class managers. Critics protested that such colonisation would drain Portugal’s scarce supply of teachers and technicians and bitterly pointed out that the empty lands of North America and Australia had been successfully colonised by convicts, desperadoes and adventurers. New settlers who arrived in Angola were only very modestly qualified but they nevertheless rose up the social scale by employing cheap black workers recruited for them by local district commissioners. As ‘New Lisbon’ grew in Huambo, black peasants from the countryside came into the notionally segregated town as choppers of wood, as haulers of water, and as scullery maids. A few domestic servants lived inside the white city but many more dwelt in the growing suburbs. There they built thatched houses in traditional style and lived much as they would have done in their villages, with poor roads and no sanitation. The least successful of the white immigrants also settled in these rough slums and walked daily into town to find workshop employment. Segregation was far from complete but both black and white communities were acutely aware that whiteness provided a status that could be materially beneficial however poor one’s level of skill or education. A major employer of both black and white labour was the Benguela railway.
The new regime continued to advocate racial separation until the 1950s when its spin-doctors endorsed, in theory at least, the Brazilian concept of ‘Lusotropicalism’. This ideology praised the openness of the Portuguese who, it proclaimed, mixed freely, both culturally and conjugally, with other races, without any prejudice. Reality, however, was rather different. Portuguese society protected the virginity of white women almost as ferociously as Islamic society protected its women. This protection did not extend, however, to black women. The female victims of empire continued to carry mestizo children fathered by their employers, or by the promiscuous sons of their employers, but these children were all too often dismissed as black. The distinction between the theory and practice of race relations in mid-twentieth-century Angola was vividly displayed in the writings of Castro Soromenho, a Mozambican author of Indian descent who lived and worked in rural Angola. The 1930s community described in his novel Terra Morta was located 300 miles beyond the terminus of the Ambaca railway. The district commissioner had a white wife, Dona Jovita, in the style commended by Norton de Matos, but as the only white woman for miles around she was very lonely. The half-dozen white men, traders and clerks, could socialise with one another and met together each evening on the wide verandas of their bungalows to play cards and smoke cigars. They engaged freely in gossip, remembering the suffocating restrictions of Portugal, where every other person might be a police informer. They dreamt of the rich coffee lands of Brazil to which they hoped one day to emigrate. These men felt the loneliness of their remote posting too, and the arrival of a motor car, or merchant lorry, along the muddy trail from the railway was a great event. Later in the evening, when his drinking companions had retired for the night, and extinguished their hurricane lanterns, a man sometimes assuaged his loneliness by discreetly ordering one of the sepoys, who guarded the prison with their muzzle-loading muskets, to bring a young female prisoner to the bungalow bedroom. The girl had to steal herself to tolerate the strange, foul, smell of a white man. Some of the prisoners were women who had been rounded up in the villages which supplied workers to the diamond fields. They were held hostage until men who had escaped from the mine compounds were compelled to return to work. In the dusty little town a significant proportion of the servile population were described as ‘mulattoes’.
Another fictional insight into the racial attitudes of twentieth-century Angola can be gained from the early work of Ralph Delgado, the son of one of the first colonial commissioners to govern the old kingdom of Bihé. In 1935, before he became one of Angola’s leading historians, Delgado wrote a novel on love in the tropics. This featured a young colonial bachelor who arrived from Lisbon in the harbour city of Benguela. His work schedule as an accountant seemed very flexible. The local bureaucracy employed numbers of clerks who supervised the customs house and registered in great ledgers every single sack of potatoes or bundle of garden hoes that came into the colony. The new arrival spent much of his time with other young white lads drinking beer in the numerous bars. The town boasted an electric theatre which showed romantic films and it also had a dance hall. The young immigrant shuddered, however, when he realised that his new colonial friends did not recoil from dancing with black girls. But loneliness gradually eroded his puritanical sentiments and he found himself slyly admiring the young mestizo daughter of one of the grand Benguela households. He began regularly to promenade down the avenue below her balcony on Sunday afternoons. Eventually he met her at a society ball and even persuaded himself that he might bring himself to marry her. But fate intervened, ill-health forced him to return to Portugal, and his horrified family rapidly married him off to a socially acceptable white bride.
It might have been expected that the staunchly Catholic regime of the 1930s in Portugal would advantage Catholics in Angola, but relations between an authoritarian state and the church were not always easy. Salazar had been known in his home village as Father António since he had once taken the minor vows in a tentative, but abortive, step towards the priesthood. He and his colleagues, however, were almost as passionate in their nationalism as in their Catholicism and were reluctant to let the Vatican interfere with their racially exploitative colonial policies. Not until 1940, after the rise of European fascism, did Salazar hammer out a concordat with the Pope. He also signed a missionary accord in which the Vatican gave him control over the church in Angola. Thereafter Catholicism grew rapidly, and education, privilege and status, which could not be obtained through a state hide-bound by racism, could sometimes be sought through the church. In Huambo Protestants were partially eclipsed when catechists, seminarians, teachers, elders, wives, nuns, priests and swathes of other black Ovimbundu crowded into Catholic churches. Like earlier Protestant converts they adopted new names, new clothes, new furniture, new eating habits, and felt themselves to be superior to their kith and kin in spite of remaining ‘native subjects’ deprived of proper ‘citizenship’.
Citizenship was the subject of a core piece of legislation, the Native Statute, introduced into Angola in 1926. The old class gradations of colonial society were legalistically replaced by the simple two-way barrier between ‘citizens’ and ‘natives’. Natives were subject to a poll tax which replaced the old hut tax. Like natives in South Africa they were required to carry a pass-book which limited their movements and their employment opportunities. Those who made the grade as ‘citizens’, whether white, mestizo, or black, became legally entitled to set up businesses and could obtain loans from the Portuguese overseas bank. To be recognised as ‘civilised’ under the new ideology, an Angolan had to prove to a moral inspectorate that he or she was monogamous, spoke fluent Portuguese, ate with a knife and fork, and wore European clothes. Anyone who did not meet these criteria, however loyal a member of the Catholic Church, and however distinguished his or her family history, was deemed to be a ‘native’. And any native, as in the nineteenth century, was liable to be conscripted as a forced labourer. Under Salazar’s New State, a ‘non-civilised’ subject, unlike a recognised citizen, suffered discrimination and remained painfully liable to pay the poll tax. The Native Statute of 1926 was later described as being not a ladder of opportunity but rather a gate which closed off many avenues of social or economic mobility.
The most socially complex part of Angola was Luanda, which remained distinctively different from anywhere else in the country—or indeed in Africa. The closest parallel might be found in the early Dutch settlements at the Cape of Good Hope. The literate community of Luanda city was very roughly divided into three social sections. The ‘old assimilados’, with roots going back to the seventeenth century, were primarily black Catholics. Pepetela’s novel A Gloriosa Familia portrays the history of this almost aristocratic segment of society. A few of them may have acquired the odd white ancestor during the nineteenth century but mostly they remained fairly clannish. Aristocratic Luanda gentlemen married aristocratic Luanda brides. Their family trees can be traced through the records of army officers and school mistresses. ‘Luso-Africans’ of this class were sent out to govern the provinces and so slightly broadened their social horizons but their connection with the indigenous masses remained rather minimal. They spoke Portuguese at home, in their dance halls, at political meetings, and in upper-class bars. Like colonial settlers elsewhere in Africa, they used a kitchen vernacular, in their case Kimbundu, to speak to their servants. By the beginning of the twentieth century some members of the old aristocracy had felt that their status was being squeezed by the protagonists of rampant Victorian racism. In 1901 eleven high-status Creoles published a book of strident essays called The Voice of Angola Crying out in the Wilderness. They called themselves the ‘true natives’ of Angola to distinguish themselves from the black aborigines out in the sticks and from brown mestizos in the city. They complained bitterly about a loss of dignity and of status. They also protested that the law was making judgments which favoured white plaintiffs over black.
A second tranche of educated Luanda society consisted of ‘new assimilados’. This group did not have deep urban traditions, like the old Creoles, but had acquired their veneer of urbanity through an education which became available from the late nineteenth century. They spoke enough Portuguese to seek jobs both in the public sector and in private enterprise, but Portuguese was not their mother tongue. At home they spoke Kimbundu and their family roots remained in the countryside. They established their own institutions and did not share those of the old black Catholics. Many new assimilados were not Catholics at all but the children of Protestant mission schools who worshipped in the Methodist chapels of the city. Their clubs and associations acquired discreet political aspirations that they sought to disguise from the surveillance of the police. The new assimilados were quite distinct from a third ‘class’ segment of upwardly-mobile Luanda residents, the mestizo element. A slowly rising tide of white carpet-baggers arriving in Luanda long remained predominantly male and, despite government disapproval, immigrant men often tied stable bonds with African women and cherished their mixed-race children. The experience of these mestizo children was very different from that of their counterparts in rural Angola who were often neglected and even despised. Luanda mestizos could sometimes aspire to an expatriate life-style with better economic resources than in any other African city. Some were even able to enter schools where they shared benches with white children.
The attitude of successive colonial regimes to the city mestizos was somewhat ambiguous. White politicians debated whether mixed-race children, a ‘coloured’ population in South African parlance, would enhance Angola’s loyalty to Portugal or, by contrast, encourage an awakening of African nationalism. The problem of immigration and miscegenation was accentuated by a vexed question relating to the 2,000 white convicts living in Angola in the 1930s. The colonial minister, when visiting Angola, wrote to tell Salazar how shocked he was by the adverse effects of racial cohabitation. White convicts, he said, were living with black concubines and breeding a new generation which brought out the worst of the criminal element and the most base of the African one. Such intemperate racial views were seen as highly prejudicial by the mixed local populations but they also alienated potential immigrants who saw Angola as a ‘convict colony’ similar to Britain’s old penal colony at Botany Bay. Criminal transportation to Luanda, where in the 1930s white convicts might still be seen wearing their prison chains, needed to be terminated. Portugal considered sending its criminals to the remote island of Timor in Indonesia. In the meantime migration to Angola stalled. The number of Portuguese leaving the colony, including a few repatriated convicts, rose to 3,500 a year and thus exceeded an in-coming migration of 3,000 a year. By the Second World War the attempt to transform Angola into a white settlement colony was far from complete.