Colonial landscapes in former portuguese southern africa a brief historiographical analysis based on the colonial transport networks

ABSTRACT

This article is part of the research project ‘Coast to Coast– Late Portuguese Infrastructural Development in Continental Africa (Angola and Mozambique): Critical and Historical Analysis and Postcolonial Assessment’ funded by Foundation for Science and Technology. Its aims to contribute to expanding the historiographical debate on the repercussions of the decisions taken by the Portuguese through the perspective of transport and territorial mobility during the colonial period, considering the late Constitutional Monarchy; the First Republic; and the Estado Novo dictatorship. The main sources used are related to the Colonial Public Works reports released from the late 19th century onwards.

KEYWORDS:

• Portuguese late colonialism
• territorial infrastructure
• angola
• mozambique
• transport networks

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. The British Ultimatum of 1890 marked the end of Portuguese claims to the unification by land – from ‘Coast to Coast’ – of the colonies of Angola and Mozambique, thus making a single block out of the territories under Portuguese administration. That process became known as the ‘Pink Map’ and was to have strong repercussions in terms of the fall of the Constitutional Monarchy in Portugal and the fortification of the Republican Party.

2. The Estado Novo was a fascist-inspired dictatorial regime installed in Portugal following the May 1926 revolution and enshrined by the 1933 Constitution. Its greatest ideologist was António Oliveira Salazar, who was also President of the Council of Ministers. Salazar remained in power until 1968, being temporarily replaced by Marcello Caetano, who ruled after the former’s death in 1970. The regime ended on April 25^th, 1974.

3. The historian Tiago Saraiva argues that the land occupation strategies at home in Portugal were similar to those used to occupy the colonial territories (Saraiva, 2016).

4. Since the reign of King Manuel (1495–1521), Portuguese military architects had circulated through the different regions of the Empire, transporting European practices to the different regions administered by the Portuguese and absorbing local techniques mainly through the integration of local labor.

5. For a concise introduction to post-colonialism in Portugal see Restivo (2016).

6. As a European power that lack the industrialization of its peers, Portugal was not interested in giving up the colonial territories, which it considered at the time to be its domain for historical reasons.

7. Military control of Southern Angola was achieved at a late stage, at the beginning of the 20^th century to be precise. The local populations traditionally resisted Portuguese colonization up until 1926, when the last military ‘pacification’/occupation campaign was carried out.

8. The General Agency for the Colonies, after 1951, General Agency for Overseas, was set up in Portugal in 1924 and lasted until the Carnation Revolution (Garcia, 2011).

9. The global economic crash of 1929 had an effect on the Portuguese colonial territories due to the breakdown of the raw material trade and was also reflected in successive banking crises. Most of the public works being carried out on Angolan territory were subsidized by bank loans that were no longer paid.

10. The Belgian colonial government decided not to depend on the Angolan railway system but to build its own infrastructure. However, the Benguela railway line has proved to be self-sufficient in terms of its own transport of passengers and goods along its route.

11. Generally speaking, the routes including international connections were based on agreements between the countries and colonial regions involved, as was the case for Angola and Northern Rhodesia in 1937. The processes were referred to in several reports, one of the most expressive being the compilation of information that would be requested of the province of Angola with a view to the preparation for the Johannesburg Conference. (DSOP-VER, 1950, pp. 3–5/154-156).

12. Most of these colonial territories and new countries were to be represented at the Johannesburg Conference.

13. After the Second World War, Portugal made the commitment ‘to open the airports of Luanda, Vila Luso, Lourenço Marques, Beira and Lumbo to international traffic and to organize, both in Angola and Mozambique, a Flight Information Service’. (Barata & Veres, 1952, p. 10).

14. Articles on the development of the renovation works on the Cape Verdean occupied the pages of the newspaper Cabo Verde Boletim de Propaganda e Informação, the archipelago’s official organ published between 1949 and 1963. By way of example, see the articles written by Orlando Levy in the post-WWII period (Levy, 1951).

15. The famous phrase was uttered during a speech in 1965.

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Notes on contributors

Ana Vaz Milheiro

Ana Vaz Milheiro IIAS Fellow (Israel Institute for Advanced Studies, Hebrew University of Jerusalem), from the research group ‘Re-Theorizing Housing as Architecture Research’ (2019-2020). Assistant Professor with Aggregation at the Faculty of Architecture at University of Lisbon, Lisbon, Portugal. Associate researcher at DINÂMIA’CET-IUL and researcher at African Studies Center at University of Porto, Oporto, Portugal.