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ABSTRACT
In 1962, one year after the outbreak of the colonial war in Angola, the Portuguese military forces devised and tried to establish a concentration camp in the northern district of Zaire. This attempt failed to gather sufficient support among metropolitan civil servants, who preferred seemingly softer techniques of population control, such as village-building and resettlement plans. The case represents the first ever documented evidence of a relation between penal concentration and rural development policies in Portuguese Africa. There are competing accounts today on the structural origins and conjunctural aims of the Portuguese policy of population removal, regrouping and surveillance in Angola, mainly because resettlement plans and concentration camps became analytically ambiguous during the last fifteen years of the Portuguese colonial rule. This paper explores this ambiguity by showing that resettlement techniques were linked to penal reforms of the early 1950s. By studying the initial and subsequent plans of rural reordering proposed for the region of Zaire and by following the history of the first native prison experiment of aldeamento (in the penal colony of Damba of Malanje), I argue that counter-insurgency village-building in Angola corresponded to a form of ‘developmental repression’.
Acknowledgements
The author would like to thank Diogo Ramada Curto, Teresa Furtado and Pedro Aires Oliveira for their helpful comments on previous versions of this paper. This is a longer and revised version of a paper presented at the International Conference ‘Colonial Incarceration in the twentieth Century: a comparative approach on the 80th anniversary of the Tarrafal Camp (Cape Verde)’, held on 21 July 2016.
Disclosure Statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1 Cann, “Portuguese Counter-insurgency,” 297; see also, van der Waals, Portugal’s War.
2 Bandeira Jerónimo, “Repressive Developmentalisms”; “A Battle in the Field”.
3 Curto, da Cruz, and Furtado, Políticas Coloniais.
4 Coghe, “Reordering”.
5 It would go beyond the scope of this paper to address white-soldier settlements projected for the northern regions of Angola. For reasons of space, the article focuses on the relation between the concentration camp proposal and new African village-building, bearing in mind that the latter were legitimised and conceived almost on the same (security and economic) grounds as the former. One major distinction was, of course, the penal nature of African-only camps and villages.
6 da Cruz and Curto, “The Good and the Bad”.
7 Bender, “The Limits of Counterinsurgency,” 336; see also his, Angola under the Portuguese, 159–97.
8 The most compelling evidence about the use of ethnic criteria in these late imperial plans is still the one compiled in UN, “Report of the Special Committee,” A/6000/Rev.1, 200–27.
9 Decree No 43896 of 6 September 1961 and the related Legal Diploma regulating regedorias and militias in Angola, No 3253 of 6 June 1962.
10 Maria Helena Samouco, “Relatório,” AHD/MU/GM/GNP/RNP/0322/4519, 16.
11 For a description of that first study, see da Cruz and Curto, “The Good and the Bad”.
12 For written archival evidence of the use of napalm by the Portuguese in Angola, Mozambique and Guinea during the war (at least until 1973), see de Araújo and Silva, “O uso de napalm”. The literature on the early uprisings that triggered the ‘counter-subversive’ war in Angola abounds. See, among others, Marcum, The Angolan Revolution, Paige, Agrarian Revolution, Silveira, “A Baixa de Cassange”, Freudenthal, “A Baixa de Cassange”, Keese, “Dos abusos”, Mateus and Mateus, Angola 61, Nunes, Angola 1961, Curto and da Cruz, “Notas”.
13 SSCIA, “Of. n.° 4496, 23 July 1963,” AHD/MU/GM/GNP/RNP/4267.
14 SCCIA, “Of. n.° 2502, 18 December 1962,” AHD/MU/GM/GNP/RNP/4267.
15 Ibid.
16 GNP, Manuscript information on SCCIA, “Of. n.° 2502,” AHD/MU/GM/GNP/RNP/4267.
17 These large-scale operations included the distribution of propaganda flyers and short truce periods in order to ease the ‘recuperation’ of African refugees. For a detailed account of these operations cf. the military units’ memoirs at AHM/2/2/157/7 – COP 2.
18 CEME, “Notas,” 40–41, AHM/FO/007/B/38/Cx.360.
19 In Tomboco, for instance, distances between the original settlements and the new ones varied from 16 to 60 km. Governador do Distrito do Zaire, “Perintrel-Geral n.° 20,” January 1965.
20 For a collection of war and military references in these civil plans, see da Cruz and Curto, “The Good and the Bad … ”.
21 For the historical appropriations of UN’s ‘community development’ techniques at this time, see, among others, de Sousa, Organização; Desenvolvimento comunitário; de Araújo, Aspectos; Franco, “Da utilidade.” Recent studies on the issue include, Abrantes, “Administradores Coloniais”; “Repertórios”, Curto, da Cruz, and Furtado, Políticas Coloniais, 17–57.
22 On the urgency of police patrolling, see PSPA, “Circular n.° 13983/67,” AHU/MU/GM/GNP/058/Pt.2.
23 Cf. Governor of the District of Huambo, “Perintrel Anual,” 1964, 15–22.
24 SCCIA-Zaire, “Relatório imediato n.° 105,” 7 April 1965.
25 Diploma Legislativo, n.° 3471 of 28 March 1964.
26 For the Angolan cities or ‘concelhos’, see Governo-Geral de Angola, Diploma Legislativo n.° 3447 de 22 de February 1964; for the rural zones, Governo-Geral de Angola, Diploma Legislativo n.° 3819 de 4 de Abril de 1968.
27 SCCIA, “Memorando,” 22 November 1967, AHU/MU/GM/GNP/058/Pt.2.
28 Students who had to leave their residential area during school terms and migratory workers who stayed outside their residential district for longer periods were exempted from residency certificate formalities. Nevertheless, the law said nothing about those who moved back and forth the residency area on a daily basis, as it happened with primary school children and farmers, it is certain that registration of movements still applied to them. “Projecto de Diploma Legislativo,” 1–6, AHD/MU/GM/GNP/RNP/0362/4514; Governo-Geral de Angola, Diploma Legislativo n.° 3819.
29 UN, “Report of the Sub-Committee,” A/4978, 25.
30 See, for instance, Council Administrator of Ambriz, “Perintrel-Geral n.° 14,” 1–31 July 1964.
31 Administrator of Milungo, “Perintrel-Geral n.° 11,” April 1964.
32 In this sense, Angola’s late case of individual and collective constraints on internal mobility bears a very close resemblance to record-keeping policies of totalitarian states, such as the USSR, and of SouthAfrica during the apartheid regime. On this see issue, Torpey, The Invention of the Passport, 164, and Garcelon, “Colonising the Subject”.
33 Village processes started with ‘habitational files’ which depended, in turn, on the numbering of houses, the registration of family members and, whenever possible, a graphical sketch of the habitation. Then followed the village-level sketch, on which houses should be marked, and the village descriptive file, with the names of chiefs, the number of inhabitants subdivided by gender and age-cohorts, absent individuals and their probable destinations, languages spoken, economic activities, quality and access to potable water, nutrition habits, accessibility routes to the settlement and, at last, the locations or individuals signalled as suspicious in the surrounding areas. AHM/F/7/B, S.38, Caixa n.° 359, 1965.
34 For the model of those technical inquiries, Rôlo, Reordenamento, 147–53.
35 This happened in Zaire between 1964 and 1965. On this, see Governor of the District of Zaire, “Perintrel-Geral, February 1965”.
36 Officially, the CVAAR was an apolitical philanthropical agency with refugee assistance goals. However, it functioned both as a platform for the establishment of the MPLA’s structure in Leopoldville and as means to direct refugee flows to the orbit of that movement. UPA also had a similar organisation operating in Congo Leopoldville, the SARA (Angolan Refugees’ Assistance Service).
37 SCCIA, “Of. n.° 2502,” AHD/MU/GM/GNP/RNP/4267.
38 Furtado, “O enredo prisional”.
39 For the 1950s generational circulation within the top overseas political and administrative agencies in Lisbon, the decline of juridical curricula and the emergence of a junior sociology-trained elite, see Curto, da Cruz, and Furtado, Políticas Coloniais, 59–126.
40 João Pereira Neto, “Informação secreta n.º 18: Considerações acerca das Forças Armadas”, October 1960, AHU/MU/GM/GNP/164/Pt.1S.
41 Accordingly, all the previous measures were to be seconded by an indoctrination effort about the Angolan territory and the history and sociology of its ethnic groups. An important episode occurred in Portugal with the non-commissioned officers of the first military companies (the Companhias de Caçadores Especiais) that were about to embark to Angola. The description warrants a longer excerpt:
Regarding the troops, it seems that the preparation in this field is not the best. According to information given to me by another non-commissioned officer, who is also graduated in overseas administration, the overseas formation ministered to the first military companies (…) was limited to some prelections made by him to the soldiers on the eve of the departure. Before they had heard him talk about the situation they were going to find in Angola, the soldiers believed that they would disembark with the machine guns in their hands and would immediately start to shoot blacks dead.
42 “Apontamento n.° 17: A Reconquista das populações,” 20 February 1961, AHU/MU/GM/GNP/058/Pt.2.
43 Afonso Mendes, “Apontamento secreto n°37,” 11 March 1961, AHU/MU/GM/GNP/160/Pt.2S.
44 For such a late imperial appropriation of Wilhelm Dilthey, see Moreira, Relações entre a Técnica.
45 For a full account of this relation between social sciences and colonial administration in Portugal, Ágoas, “Estado, Universidade”; about the influence of detribalisation discourses on village and population reordering see Curto and da Cruz, “Destribalização”; cf. Coghe, “Reordering,” 24–25.
46 See, for all, de Morais Martins, “Os deveres do funcionário”. Accusations of ‘bureaucratic authoritarianism’ became integral to the esprit de corps of the young colonial elite trained during the 1950s. In a sense, this was a reaction to the post-war growing interference of technical experts or ‘modernizing bureaucrats’ in the traditional domain of the ‘man on the spot’. Cf., Cooper, “Modernizing Bureaucrats”. For similar reactions in British Africa, see, for instance, Bissel, Urban Design, Chaos, 194–205 and Headrick, The Tentacles of Progress, 380–2.
47 Silva Cunha, Missão.
48 CPSS, “Relatório e documento de trabalho,” 23 November 1959, 4, AHU/MU/GM/GNP/184.
49 For an overview of the legal underpinnings of these institutions, see Mateus, A PIDE/DGS … , 125–36, 145–8; Medina and Neto, Angola – Processos … ; for a thorough account of archival sources depicting the reform of the prison system in Angola after 1961, Furtado, “O enredo prisional” and her chapter in Curto, da Cruz, and Furtado, Políticas Coloniais.
50 Furtado in Curto, da Cruz, and Furtado, Políticas Coloniais, 213–7.
51 These were the post-war Caconda, Queve Valley, Loge Valley and Damba (of Uíge) Settlements. The source of information on the Belgian Congo experiences, that was verted into Colonial Administration courses in Lisbon, was Pierre Charles’, Le problème des centres extra-coutumiers.
52 Ibid., 314.
53 Blanes, “Da confusão à ironia”; Margarido, “The Tokoist Church,” 42.
54 Felgas, “Relatório,” AHU/MU/GM/GNP/135/Pt.35.
55 A relatively obscure and neglected place, with footnote-importance in contemporary Portuguese historiography, Damba played a major role within the colonial system of coercion in Angola before and during the colonial war (1961–1974) and its history is forever linked to two crucial events of twentieth century, Portuguese colonialism in Africa: the beginning of the counter-insurgency warfare in 1961 and the last ‘pacification campaign’ of the southern peoples of Angola in the early 1940s. In 1961, when the colonial state adopted ‘anti-terrorist’ emergency measures, Damba became a place of detention for anti-colonial protagonists and activists, finally acquiring the epithet of ‘concentration camp’. Detained in the prisons of Luanda, before being convicted to a 14-year sentence in the Cape Verde Tarrafal Camp, the writer Luandino Vieira gives us a description of the sorts of repressive techniques used in Damba:
Was he [another inmate] transferred to S. Pedro? Sent to the concentration camps of Damba (where, as I have been told by the 121, you work with your upper body tied to the legs, with a hoe in your hands, beaten on the back)?
56 de Eça e Almeida, “Colonização,” 77–80, 194–6.
57 Ibid., 79.
58 Ibid., 194–6.
59 Decree No. 20877 of 2nd February of 1932; Bender, Angola under the Portuguese, 92–93.
60 Legal Instrument No 1842 of 13 November 1946; Moreira, O Problema Prisional, 258–9. Correctional colonies conceived for ‘correctional work’ were never created in Angola as separate establishments. Often, this was indistinctly performed in the Central Prison of Luanda or in administrative prisons across the country. Some small number of correctional convicts would also fulfil their sentence at Damba. Wilensky, La Administración, 229.
61 Manuel de Mascarenhas Galvão, Attorney-General in Luanda, “Cadeia civil de Luanda: anteprojecto,” 26 May 1947, 3, AHU/MU/DGOPC/OP02918.
62 Ibid., 3–4.
63 Other instances of undifferentiation included the Fort Roçadas in the South, another military establishment used as Penal Deposit for urban delinquents since 1936.
64 The principle of absolute segregation was codified in the Prison Reform of 1954, Decree-Law No 39.997 of 29 December. On this reform, see Furtado, “O enredo prisional”; Moreira, O Problema Prisional, 259.
65 Wilensky, La Administración, 220.
66 Moreira, A Administração, 178–9.
67 Ibid., 175.
68 Moreira, O Problema Prisional, 262; Moreira, A Administração, 175–6.
69 Ibid., 259–60.
70 Moreira, A Administração, 173.
71 Ibid., 187.
72 Egerton, Angola in Perspective, 173.
73 Wilensky, “Características,” 22.