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ABSTRACT
The colonial judicial system was quite different from ‘the rule of law’ as applied in the European countries. In the history of colonial rule in Africa, collective punishment was among the more brutal and widespread forms of repression, but it has got little historical attention. This is probably due to the banality of those practices but also to the fact that their victims were not distinguished intellectuals, church or union leaders, workers on strike or radical students. They were, most of the time, peasants from places distant from political capitals, rarely mentioned in newspapers, unknown to those committed to defending more ‘important’ political prisoners. And after the independence of their countries those victims of collective punishment and imprisonment have rarely received much attention as part of the anticolonial resistance usually praised in commemorative ceremonies and patriotic discourses. This paper uses an (almost) forgotten episode of Portuguese colonial violence in Angola, involving hundreds of peasant women and their children, to question the way societies selectively remember victims of repression.
Disclosure Statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1 Initially called ‘Polícia Internacional e de Defesa do Estado’ (PIDE), in 1969 it was restructured as ‘Direcção Geral de Segurança’ (DGS), but the old name was normally used. Its archives are kept in the Portuguese National Archives (Torre do Tombo) in Lisbon.
2 Arquivo Nacional da Torre do Tombo (Lisbon) PIDE/DGS, Del. A, P. Inf. Proc. N 13.42.A/6 U. I. 2015, Fls. 146–164 (the lists of names correspond to fls. 151–157).
3 Medina, Angola, 375–77.
4 Two of those women were also interviewed in 2010 by Margarida Paredes during her fieldwork for a PhD on Angolan women and the liberation struggle. Her book was published in 2015. See Paredes, Combater, 175–86.
5 Interviews by Maria C. Neto in Luanda, 22 September 2012. Those video-recorded individual interviews belong to the archives of the Angolan organisation ATD – Associação Tchiweka de Documentação (https://sites.google.com/site/tchiweka). Several other ex-political prisoners from São Nicolau, men and women, were also interviewed. Based on those testimonies a 25’ documentary was produced: São Nicolau: Eles não esqueceram (São Nicolau: They have not forgotten). For more information about the Project ‘Angola – Paths to Independence’ that between 2010 and 2015 recorded near six hundred interviews and produced the documentary ‘Independence’ directed by Mário Bastos, see www.projectotrilhos.com and www.independencia.co.ao.
6 In 1961 violent anticolonial uprisings in northern Angola forced Portugal into a war that later on extended to eastern Angolan and lasted until 1974. See Marcum, The Angolan Revolution.
7 MPLA (Movimento Popular de Libertação de Angola) and UPA (União das Populações de Angola) were the main organisations when the anticolonial war started in 1961. In 1962, UPA and another party, PDA (Partido Democrático Angolano) created a Front, FNLA (Frente Nacional de Libertação de Angola). Later on, in 1966, a dissident group of FNLA created UNITA (União Nacional para a Independência Total de Angola).
8 Official letter from the chief of the São Salvador subdelegation of DGS to the Angola Director of DGS, 5 June 1973. Arquivo Nacional da Torre do Tombo (Lisbon) PIDE/DGS, Del. A, P. Inf. Proc. N 13.42.A/6 U. I. 2015, Fls. 14–17. This confidential letter gives an overview of ‘Operação Robusta’ mentioning the numbers of men, women and children established in each village of the area of São Salvador (Mbanza Kongo).
9 Estado-Maior do Exército, Resenha, Livro 1, 546–50; idem, Livro 2, 482–88.
10 About this relationship see Mateus, A PIDE.
11 All those details and examples came from the above mentioned interviews. See note 4.
12 Pélissier, Explorar, 217–21.
13 See note 3 above.
14 São Nicolau.
15 Apparently, the last Red Cross visit was in May 1973. Presos políticos. Documentos 1972-1974, 124. Images of visits are kept in the Portuguese public television (RTP) archives.
16 Anderson, Histories of the Hanged; Elkins, Imperial Reckoning. For a study about how Germany dealt with the accusations of Herero genocide and the legal questions it raises see Sarkin, Colonial Genocide.
17 Cooper, Colonialism, 34–35; Balandier, “The Colonial Situation”; Balandier, Ambiguous Africa, 169–95.
18 I resume here some ideas already expended in former texts. See Neto, “In Town,” 265–78; Neto, “The Colonial State.”
19 Bernault ed., Enfermement; Chanock, Law; Chanock, “The Law Market”; Anderson and Killingray, Policing the Empire; Burton, African Underclass; Anderson, “Policing the Settler State’; McCracken, ‘Coercion”; Hynd, “Law”; Waller, “Towards a Contextualisation.” East and Central Africa are essential for comparisons with Angola, despite different law traditions in Portugal, Belgium and Britain.
20 Chanock, “The Law Market,” 280–81.
21 Alexander and Kynoch, “Introduction: Histories”; Dikötter and Brown, Cultures of Confinement; Keese, Living with Ambiguity.
22 Estatuto Político, Civil e Criminal dos Indígenas de Angola e Moçambique – Decree 12,533 (23 October 1926); Estatuto dos Indígenas Portugueses das Províncias da Guiné, Angola e Moçambique – Decree 39,666 (20 May 1954).
23 Useful to compare: Mann, “What Was the Indigénat?”
24 The ‘Native Statute’ issued in 1926 underwent several revisions and regulations. Ribeiro, Regulamento. For more details and references see Neto, “The Colonial State.”
25 Among many others, see the essays in Bernault ed., Enfermement; Dikötter and Brown eds., Cultures of Confinement, especially ‘Introduction’ and 55–94; Anderson, “Punishment.”
26 The palmatória in the form of a flat paddle of hard wood which was applied to the palm of the hand was preferred to the use of the whip or the stick in Portuguese colonies.
27 See Neto, “The Colonial State,” passim.
28 Medina, Angola; Mateus, A PIDE.
29 See above note 2.
30 In Portugal an organisation was created in November 1969 dedicated to helping political prisoners (Comissão Nacional de Socorro aos Presos Políticos). Its activity was important in Portugal but they received little information from the colonies, except for a few cases involving professionals and university students. Comissão Nacional de Socorro a Presos Políticos, Presos políticos, passim.
31 For a comparison with different but related spaces, see Loff, Piedade and Soutelo, Ditaduras.
32 Connerton, How Societies Remember, 3. See also a more recent work: Connerton, How Modernity Forgets.
33 See above note 3.
34 Forty years after Thompson's seminal work, developments in oral history are still increasing and the difficulty now is the choice among so many important studies. Thompson, The Voice.
35 Filipe, S. Nicolau; Almeida, Na linha.
36 Documents from the Commission, including transcripts of the recorded interviews, are now in the archives of ATD (Luanda), thanks to one of the lawyers working with the Commission in 1974, Albertino Almeida, who also published a semi-fictional account of the events: Almeida, Na linha.
37 After the Angolan independence the Camp became the ‘Reeducation Camp of Bentiaba’. Now it is the ‘Prison Centre of Bentiaba’.
38 Arquivo Nacional de Angola, Da luta. In 2005, three years after the end of the war, the Angolan National Archives organised a Conference where for the first time FNLA, MPLA and UNITA were given equal space and time to send a number of their people to speak about their experience during the anticolonial struggle. Historians were also invited to submit their papers about the subject and the published book includes all that.