by Guy Arnold
There was a curiously hypocritical reaction to Portuguese obduracy on the part of Britain and the United States. The British who were then decolonizing at speed resented the Portuguese stand almost as an affront: if the greatest of all the colonial powers was obliged to decolonize then surely backward Portugal should do the same. The United States, at that time, still posed as the champion of oppressed peoples who should be freed, though always provided they were freed to the right side in the Cold War. Yet neither Britain nor the United States, despite these resentments, exerted any meaningful pressures upon Portugal; to the contrary, they supported its increasingly impossible stand since this suited their pro-white, anti-Communist policies in Southern Africa. A different view was offered by a Protestant missionary who had spent many years in Angola: ‘Another seemingly universal false assumption that one meets everywhere among the Portuguese, and especially among the better educated is that they, the Portuguese, in their dealings with the Africans are superior to all other colonizing peoples. They wholeheartedly believe that they have a unique natural gift for understanding the African, for establishing rapport with him, and for making him an adoring, obedient and grateful ward.’9 As late as 1969 Dr Franco Nogueira, Portugal’s Foreign Minister, saw Portugal’s future rooted in Africa where there was ‘vast economic potential and political unity’ and this attitude was shared by many Portuguese. Portugal’s support for Biafra during the Nigerian civil war was an attempt to discredit black independence by emphasizing tribal differences, which, as Portugal argued, made an African state without white sovereignty totally unviable.
Portugal responded to outside pressures with inflated propaganda, both as to how the wars in Africa were proceeding and how, on a wider canvas, Portugal had a special world role to play. In 1969, for example, the assassination of Eduardo Mondlane in Dar es Salaam was followed by a number of defections from the upper ranks of FRELIMO and these were presented as being more significant than in fact they were. At the same time Portuguese casualties were carefully played down. On the wider canvas there was something slightly ludicrous about Portuguese claims. Thus, when in July 1969, Caetano went on a visit to Brazil, the Portuguese Diario de Noticias argued: ‘The South Atlantic is a Luso-African-Brazilian sea. Cape Verde is there for the defence of the South Atlantic with the Azores for the communications in the North Atlantic. And as Portugal’s African provinces on the west coast face Brazil, so are they the key to a defence strategy which Brazil cannot ignore at a time when Soviet ships make frequent incursions along the coast of Brazil and Angola and it has been proved that they unload war material destined for subversive elements.’ This extract is a curious mixture of bravado, appeal to Brazilian friendship and portrayal of Portugal as a bastion of a Western stand against Communism.
THE ATTITUDE OF THE WEST
Although over the years 1955 to 1960 condemnation of Portugal mounted in Europe, Asia, Africa and the Americas and liberal non-government organizations in the West became quite vociferous in their attacks upon Portuguese colonialism, the countries that could really bring pressure to bear upon Portugal – the United States, Britain and France – in fact did little other than register occasional protests, while at the United Nations they usually abstained or opposed motions that condemned Portuguese practices. More powerful colonial rivals saw Portugal’s claims to a special relationship with Africa as no more than a smokescreen for ‘excessive colonial ambitions and deficient colonial achievements’.10 What the Western powers really stood for is brought out in Minter’s Portuguese Africa and the West.
The struggle of the peoples of Angola, Mozambique, and Guinea Bissau is not just an isolated fight against an anachronistic colonial power. As they have fought, they have discovered that they fight also against white rule in Southern Africa, from Zimbabwe and Namibia. They have discovered that they fight also against an imperial system, in which many countries are involved and of which the United States is the head. They fight knowing that others struggle against the same enemy, in Asia, in Latin America, in the Middle East, and even in the heart of the system, in the United States of America.11
If this sweeping accusation of what might be described as a worldwide conspiracy appears exaggerated it nonetheless contains the core of many accusations that would be levelled at the West to the end of the century among efforts to explain the manifest failures of Africa to overcome so many of its development problems.
Almost to the end of its African wars Portugal received active British support: by diplomatic means as when the Foreign Secretary Sir Alec Douglas Home visited Lisbon in mid-1961; at the United Nations when Britain abstained or voted against resolutions that were hostile to Portugal; and by the supply of arms, including two frigates, ostensibly for NATO purposes even though the British government was perfectly aware of the uses to which they would be put. Britain, in any case, had extensive economic interests in both Portugal and its colonies and in 1968, for example, its investments in Portugal accounted for 25 per cent of all foreign investment while Britain was Portugal’s most important trading partner. During the 1960s West Germany also became one of Portugal’s most important trading partners and established close diplomatic and military relations with Lisbon. West Germany was a major source of small arms while German intelligence officers reportedly were made available to the Policia Internacional e de Defesa do Estado (PIDE) (the Portuguese security police) and co-operated in the campaign against FRELIMO, which culminated in the death of Mondlane. German firms and capital provided an important component in ZAMCO, the consortium created to construct the Cabora Bassa Dam in Tete province of Mozambique.12
In general, Britain, France and West Germany maintained close business, investment and military ties with Portugal, including its African empire, and their reasons – even at the height of anti-Portuguese criticisms – were a mixture of profit, solidarity (white racism) and anti-Communism. These powers, whose investments were crucial to apartheid South Africa at that time and were also present in the profitable sectors of Angola and Mozambique, helped sustain Portugal in both Angola and Mozambique, as did South Africa whose white minority government had more obviously compelling reasons for doing so. There was little pretence on the part of these Western countries and ‘wars in three colonies did not discourage Western support for a member of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation, whose signatories are “determined to safeguard the freedom, common heritage and civilization of their peoples, founded on the principles of democracy, individual identity and the rule of law”.’13 They were more than willing to shore up Portugal’s military power against African freedom.
The NATO connection was especially important, indeed sustaining, for Portugal. Portuguese officers on training with NATO would subsequently serve in Angola or Mozambique and then return to further service in NATO where they would provide information about what was happening in Africa, always from the Portuguese viewpoint. Although the NATO powers insisted that the range of arms they provided for Portugal were strictly for NATO purposes and therefore should have been retained in Europe, such bans were easily overcome by technical arguments when parts were shipped to the producers’ factories in South Africa before assembly and onward delivery to the Portuguese forces in Angola and Mozambique. Such activities were part of what cynics would describe as a new ‘great game’. Most of the naval vessels employed by the Portuguese, either to move troops and supplies or to operate along the African coast, came from the United States, Britain, France and Germany despite Portuguese assurances that they would only be used for NATO purposes. There was a long-sustained pretence in the West that military aid to Portugal had nothing to do with its wars in Africa. The Portuguese did not reciprocate such hypocrisy. Like South Africa, Portugal constantly emphasized its value to the West in fighting Communism. It had a good ally in Dean Acheson, President Truman’s Secretary of State and later an adviser to succeeding US Presidents. In 1961 he suggested that the Azores bases were ‘perhaps the single most important we have anywhere’, surely somet
hing of an exaggeration. Throughout the 1960s Acheson acted as an apologist for white racism in Southern Africa and, for example, wrote an introduction to The Third World, a book by Portugal’s Foreign Minister Nogueira justifying Portuguese policies. In 1969 Acheson could write: ‘Hostile harassment with our help of three friendly countries in Southern Africa is still going on… these acts of harassment and folly were designed in the United Nations to coerce Portugal into setting adrift territories which it has political responsibility for twice the time of our own country’s independent life.’14 Given the fact of Portugal’s long period of responsibility, just what had the Portuguese accomplished for their African wards? The United States supported the Portuguese stand throughout the 1960s and refused to attack its colonial policies. Instead, as Seymour M. Finger, the US Ambassador to the United Nations, argued in 1969, ‘while such peaceful change remains possible – however slow it may be – we are convinced that such peaceful means are in the best interests of everyone concerned’. Given US support for Portugal, the effect of advice to Africans to have patience and refrain from violence simply allowed the monopoly of violence to remain with the established colonial government, with its police and armed forces.15 The supporters of colonialism always argued thus.
Meanwhile, Portugal was fighting its African wars and each year through the 1960s saw an escalation of costs so that by 1968 defence and security absorbed £160 million, equivalent to 45 per cent of all state spending. On paper only £90 million of this went to Africa but this excluded the cost of training recruits in Portugal prior to their overseas service or the cost of troop movements to Africa. The Portuguese armed forces, integrated into NATO, were not trained for colonial wars although after 1961 they had to operate in three different areas in Africa that were separated by immense distances posing huge transport and logistics problems. In the end the Portuguese began to Africanize their armies: that is, recruit African troops to serve alongside Portuguese forces. The much-feared PIDE penetrated almost all the nationalist movements in Africa to do them considerable damage. (In 1969 PIDE became the General Directorate of Security in the Ministry of the Interior.) Racism, despite the non-racist image the Portuguese had long tried to project, was fundamental to Portuguese colonialism.
With the growing Portuguese population has come a sharpened colour-consciousness; not only has the Portuguese immigrant – himself a labourer from an economically depressed country – sealed off the African’s economic opportunities at the lowest level, but his own insecurities have led him to justify his privilege on the basis of his colour. Any notion of racial integration, of a new Brazil, in Portuguese Africa is fantasy.16
As the two wars in Southern Africa escalated in intensity so South Africa became more deeply involved: in Angola this began with military advisers; in relation to Mozambique Pretoria was to give serious consideration to the possibility of moving into the southern half of the territory in the event of a military defeat for the Portuguese. On the border between Angola and South West Africa (Namibia) a major hydro-electric project was developed jointly by the Portuguese and the South Africans on the Cunene River; and in Tete province in Mozambique a vast dam and hydro-electric project was developed at Cabora Bassa with the principal object of supplying power to the Republic and the further (Portuguese) object of tying South Africa into a defensive alliance against the growing successes of FRELIMO.
An important question in relation to Portugal’s three mainland African colonies – Angola, Guinea Bissau and Mozambique – is why the revolutionary quality of the anti-Portuguese liberation movements was more absolute than elsewhere in Africa. The Movimiento Popular de Libertação de Angola (MPLA) in Angola, the Partido Africano de Independencia da Guine e Cabo Verde (PAIGC) in Guinea and FRELIMO in Mozambique each claimed a revolutionary or Marxist perspective different to what had been tried – and failed – elsewhere in Africa. The most dedicated socialists were to be found in these three territories both during the struggle and long afterwards. In part this may be explained by the fact that the Portuguese held on so long and in doing so with the support of the West left little alternative to the liberation movements other than to turn to the Communists for both support and an ideology that was most obviously opposed to Western capitalism. Nowhere else in Africa during the liberation struggles did the Communist powers have such a clear field of operations. There was, it is true, the long-standing alliance between the African National Congress and the Communist Party in South Africa but the background to this alliance was very different. Certainly, by the time the Portuguese finally quit Africa aspects of Marxism had become deeply entrenched in all three territories.
ANGOLA
Colonial exploitation depended upon not teaching skills to colonial subjects, for once such skills had been passed on they would free the subject races from dependence upon their colonial masters. European exploitation of Africa began with the slave trade, which reached its height between 1650 and 1700 to create a gap between European and African cultures so that when Europeans arrived in Africa after 1850 they believed that Africans had stood still in history. ‘There are at least strong grounds for thinking that the overseas slave trade, itself the very core of the white-black connection, was among the most influential of them. But nowhere else in Africa was its influence so long-enduring and destructive as here in Angola.’17 A regulation of 1899 codified the Portuguese settlers’ assumption that blacks had a ‘duty’ to work for whites and that only when they did so could they be regarded as better than brutes. ‘So they raised to the rank of benevolent doctrine the settler notion that Africans were working only when they worked for whites. They accepted forced labour under the pretence of rejecting it.’18 As Basil Davidson argued, there was a great colonial contradiction: ‘Leave things as they were and there was no “civilizing mission”. Take the latter seriously, and you had trouble on your hands.’
Angola, the largest and wealthiest of Portugal’s colonies, was certainly worth holding; it produced coffee, oil, a range of minerals, diamonds, cotton, sugar and maize. Its main cities were situated on a 1,000-mile coastline and offshore it had rich fisheries. Portuguese aid to this storehouse of potential wealth was almost entirely directed to the needs of the white settlers. Marcelo Caetano, later to become Prime Minister of Portugal, gave a series of lectures on Africa over 1952–53 when he was a professor at Coimbra and then said: ‘The natives of Africa must be directed and organized by Europeans, but are indispensable as auxiliaries. The blacks must be seen as productive elements organized, or to be organized, in an economy directed by whites.’ In the face of such attitudes an explosion was inevitable and by 1959 the Portuguese in Angola expected trouble for they imported large quantities of arms and did so again in 1960. As a British Baptist missionary wrote of the situation, ‘Angola is not only a haven but a heaven for Portuguese peasants and merchants who have come from a land of toil and abject poverty to an affluence of which they had previously only dreamed. The African is the source of their wealth. In Europe they were labourers who barely subsisted. Here the African does the work and on his toil and sweat they have grown rich. But the African with even high-school education is a menace to their privileged position.’19 More than 100,000 white working-class immigrants were to arrive in Angola after 1961 and many, despite the government’s intention that they should become farmers, worked instead in the towns, often at menial jobs, and became slum dwellers; they worked as waiters, bar girls, bus conductors and were better off than they had been at home. As a consequence they resisted any African advance that would threaten their jobs.
The second and most crucial white group, also about 100,000 strong, consisted of small traders and those working in small-scale plantation agriculture who saw their future in Angola. Both groups were geared to resist any African advance. Portugal’s determination to hold onto Angola was reinforced by its unfolding mineral wealth – oil and diamonds, its rich agricultural potential, and its ability to absorb poor Portuguese peasants. The great cause of anger in
Angola was the system of forced labour; otherwise, 80 per cent of Africans remained in subsistence agriculture.
Meanwhile, various radical groups including a Communist party had developed and in 1956 these merged to form the Movimento Popular de Libertação de Angola (MPLA). Illido Tome Alves Machado became its President and Viriato da Cruz its Secretary-General. Other nationalist parties also formed and merged. These included the União das Populações de Angola (UPA), under Holden Roberto, and the Frente de Unidade Angolan (FUA), which was launched in 1961 by Europeans in Benguela. In 1959 Dr Agostinho Neto, whose nationalist sympathies were already known to PIDE, returned to Angola from Lisbon (where he had received training as a doctor). He was arrested in his surgery at Catete in June 1960 for his nationalist activities with the result that many of his patients and supporters marched to Catete from Bengo village to demand his release, sparking off a confrontation in which troops fired on the demonstrators, killing 30 and wounding more than 200. The troops then marched on Bengo and Icolo villages, which they destroyed while killing or arresting all the inhabitants. Dr Neto was imprisoned in Cape Verde, and later taken to Portugal. He escaped and returned to Angola to rejoin the MPLA in 1962.
The Baixa revolt of 1960–61 was launched by labourers, who earned no more than US$20–US$30 a year per family, against obligatory cotton production: they were forced to produce cotton in place of foodstuffs and sell their produce to the government at a fixed price below the world price. In November 1960 the cotton-growers stopped work and refused to pay their taxes. In January 1961 the Portuguese army went on intimidatory manoeuvres that resulted in a major confrontation in which many thousands of Africans were killed – by mid-1961 the British Baptist Missionary Society, then operating in Northern Angola, concluded that as many as 20,000 Africans had perished. On 15 March the Africans massacred whites in the region; the Portuguese retaliated with equally brutal and indiscriminate massacres of Africans. A Daily Mirror correspondent quoted a Portuguese army officer as saying, ‘I estimate that we have killed 30,000 of these animals… There are probably another 100,000 working with the terrorists.’ The Portuguese troops could not leave Luanda because they feared an uprising in the shanty towns that surrounded the city; instead, they carried out arrests and executions and conducted a witchhunt of African ministers, assimilados or other potential leaders. By the end of August, however, the Africans had become increasingly disoriented: they lacked effective leadership and they had no arms. The total African casualties for 1961 have been variously estimated at 8,000, 25,000 or 50,000 with the latter figure probably more accurate than 8,000. Most of these died of disease and famine following the fighting. Portuguese civilian casualties were estimated at 400. In May 1961 the government mounted a big offensive against the rebels. The Observer reported the disappearance of arrested Angolan Africans. ‘Wave after wave of Africans have been arrested, 1,500 of them in the Lobito area alone. There are no known camps in the area. The local prison holds only 100, and the total disappearance of the arrested Africans has given rise to the most sinister fears.’20