One of the great
ironies in the history of European colonialism is that the small country of
Portugal established one of the first colonial empires and then retained its
colonial possessions well after most other European nations had lost theirs.
In the fifteenth
century, Portuguese sailors took the lead in developing the sea route around
the largely unexplored African continent and across the Indian Ocean to the
ports of Asia and to the spice-rich islands of the East Indies (now Indonesia).
Marking their incremental exploration and extension of this trade route, the Portuguese
established a string of outposts along the coast of West Africa at which their
ships could reprovision, refit, and retreat from storms. The earliest of these outposts
included Ceuta in Morocco (1415), Madeira (1419) and the Azores (1427) in the
North Atlantic, and the fortress of Sa˜o Jorge da Mina in Guinea.
In 1482 Diogo
Ca˜o (ca. 1450–1486) reached the mouth of the Congo River. In 1497 Bartholomeu
Dias (ca. 1450–1500) rounded the Cape of Good Hope. And in 1498 Vasco da Gama
(ca. 1469–1524) reached India. Along the eastern coast of Africa, the
Portuguese then subjugated
several largely Islamic port cities in Mozambique and farther north seized the
ports at Brava, Kilwa, and Mombasa. The Portuguese also established commercial
bases in India, in the East Indies, in China, and even in Japan, from which
they were able to monopolize much of the European trade with Asia.
Although that
trade was the chief prize, the Portuguese also found that the shorter-distance
trade in African gold, ivory, and slaves was also extremely profitable.
In 1578 Portuguese
King Sebastian was killed during a campaign against the Moors in Morocco. For
the next six decades, the Hapsburg rulers of Spain and Austria also held the
throne of Portugal, and Portugal’s imperial ambitions were subordinated to
those of Spain.
Moreover, by the
mid-sixteenth century, Spanish power was gradually eclipsed, first by the Dutch
and then by the British, and in that complicated process, the Portuguese lost
many of their commercial bases along the African and Asian coasts.
By the late eighteenth
century, the Portuguese had managed to retain in Africa only the small colonies
of Cape Verde, Guinea-Bissau, and Sa˜o Tome´ and Princıpe in West Africa and
the much more extensive but largely undeveloped colonies of Angola and
Mozambique in
southern Africa.
During the Napoleonic era, the governance of
Portugal again became very unsettled, and from 1808 to 1821 the royal family
even transferred its seat of power to Brazil, Portugal’s largest overseas
colony.
Then, after
Brazil achieved independence in 1822, the Portuguese began to concentrate on
developing their colonies in southern Africa, in large part to protect their claims
in the face of the escalating competition to carve up the African interior into
European colonies. In fact, at the Berlin
Conference (1884–1885), the major European colonial powers insisted that
Portugal demonstrate that it actually controlled the interiors of Angola and Mozambique.
For the next
four decades, the Portuguese conducted an ongoing military campaign to
subjugate the native African populations of its colonies in southern Africa.
By the beginning
of the twentieth century, they had subdued the populous Ovimbundu states in
central Angola. The large kingdom of the Kwanhana in southern Angola was not vanquished,
however, until after World War I (1914–1918). Indeed, although the Portuguese formally
declared in 1922 that Angola had been ‘‘pacified,’’ armed resistance to
Portuguese rule continued throughout the colony, especially among the Bakongo and
Mbundi people of northern Angola. In the process of ‘‘pacification,’’ the
native Africans were displaced, and through a decree
that made it a crime to be unemployed, most were forced to labor on the
extensive coffee plantations that were established by the colonials.
The mixed-race
Creoles who were descended from the earliest Portuguese traders and settlers
and who were centered in the Luanda area in Angola initially prospered under
the more formal colonial regime, but they gradually lost influence as
resistance to Portuguese rule became more entrenched in the farther reaches of
the colony. In Mozambique, Portugal had hoped to subdue the interior through
the establishment of strong colonial agricultural communities. But
when it became clear that Portugal lacked the resources to succeed in this
effort, the Portuguese government sold economic concessions within regions of
the colony to three international consortia.
Commercial
mercenaries, these consortia could exploit the resources and native labor in
the undeveloped interior in exchange for developing a rail system and other
transportation and communication infrastructure that would accelerate European
settlement.
In both Angola
and Mozambique, the rise of the dictatorial regime of Antonio Salazar (1889–1970)
in Portugal meant an increasingly repressive reaction to African demands for
just treatment and political and economic rights. Especially in Angola, the
Portuguese became expert at exploiting longstanding tensions among the dominant
ethnic groups, and in both Angola and Mozambique, the native insurgencies
became proxy conflicts in which the Cold War competition between the United
States and the Soviet Union was played out.
Through direct
military and economic aid and covert operations, the United States supported
the Salazar regime’s campaigns against the largely Soviet-supported insurgencies.
In Angola, three independence movements developed—the MPLA (the Popular
Movement for the Liberation of
Angola), the FNLA (the National Front for the Liberation of Angola), and UNITA
(the National Union for the Total Independence of Angola). In Mozambique, the
insurgency was dominated by Frelimo (the Mozambican Liberation Front), whose
leadership had been trained
in Algeria and Egypt.
After Salazar’s
regime collapsed in 1974 and the new Portuguese government committed itself to
a quick transition to independence in the colonies, the United States and Soviet Union
supported contending African factions in the now-independent states—factions
that they supported through, respectively, South African and Cuban surrogate
forces. For the next decade and a half, both Angola and Mozambique were
devastated by these ongoing and often very anarchic conflicts. By 2006, their economies
had still not become self-sustaining, and large portions of their populations
remained in refugee camps where large commitments of foreign aid provided basic
foodstuffs and rudimentary medical care as a stopgap against mass starvation
and epidemics.
After the end of
the international slave trade in the 1830s, Portugal’s small West African
colonies decreased in importance and became increasingly impoverished.
The Portuguese
attempted to establish a plantation economy, but the fields in the Cape Verde
Islands, in particular, were devastated by cyclic droughts. The Portuguese lacked
the resources to compensate for the crop failures, and in at least seven
periods between the 1770s and the late 1940s, between 15 percent and 40 percent
of the islands’ population starved to death as a consequence.
After 18 percent
perished from 1948 to 1949, the Portuguese government responded to
international pressure and in 1951 designated the Cape Verde Islands as a province
of Portugal. Educational and economic opportunities within Portugal were opened
to Cape Verdeans.
Some of those
educated in Portugal then returned to Cape Verde and went to Guinea-Bissau and
Sa˜o Tome´ in order to provide the nucleus of an independence movement. In 1963
an active insurgency began in Guinea-Bissau, but it would take just over a
decade for the ongoing insurgencies in all of Portugal’s African colonies to
cause the collapse of the Salazar regime and to achieve independence.
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