Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
by India in 1961; 6. Macau, transferred to China in 1999; 7. Portuguese Timor (now East Timor),
independent in 1975. (Credit: Luciana Justiniani Hees and Wikimedia Commons)
Portugal'slongcolonialcareerentereditsterminalphasein1961.Thatyear,anarmed
revolt shook Angola and India annexed Portuguese possessions on the Indian coast. As
in Angola, guerilla-based independence movements were soon launched in Guinea and
then Mozambique, and Portugal waged three wars in Africa for more than a decade.
In 1974, a coup in Lisbon led by left-wing army officers toppled Portugal's right-wing
dictatorship, and the independence of Portugal's five African colonies— which also in-
cludedtwosmallislandgroups—followedinlate1974and1975.Mozambique,Angola,
and Guinea-Bissau (as it was now called) entered the community of nations as some of
the poorest, most underdeveloped countries in the world. (Perhaps the true end of em-
pire, however, was in 1999, when Portugal's last colonial enclave, Macau, a city near
Hong Kong, was ceded to China, 502 years after Vasco da Gama's first journey past the
Cape of Good Hope.)
PortugalhadbeenthefirstEurope-basedpowertocolonizesub-SaharanAfrica,andit
wasthelasttoleave.Portugal'stenaciousstayingpowerwasatestamenttothedominant
role the colonies played in the imagination of successive Lisbon regimes; the country's
future was said to depend on the preservation of an empire that echoed its heroic “Age
ofDiscoveries” ofcenturies before(Duffy1962).Anoft-useditemofpropaganda,from
the Colonial Exhibition held in Porto in 1934, showed Portugal's various possessions
superimposed onamapofEuropeandcoveringanareastretching fromtheIberianPen-
insula to Russia (Cairo 2006). The map's title: “Portugal is not a small country.” Des-
pite Portugal's past exploits, however, and despite the accumulated landmass flying its
flag, Portugal itself remained a poor backwater, economically dependent on Britain. For
centuries successive Lisbon governments struggled to raise the capital and maintain the
administrative capacity to profitably exploit the colonies to Portugal's benefit. Colonial-
ism often seemed to be an enterprise far beyond its means (Duffy 1962; Isaacman and
Isaacman 1983; Newitt 1995; Castelo 2007).
After World War II, perhaps what most distinguished Portuguese colonialism in
Africa from practices in other European colonies, and which for a time made Portugal
something of a pariah nation, was the institution of forced labor. This was known in
Mozambique as
chibalo
. According to laws in effect since the late nineteenth century,
virtuallyallMozambicanmenweresubjecttolongspellsasplantationworkersordock-
workers or ditch diggers, and with men compelled to work away from home, or to flee
Mozambiquealtogether,womenwereoftenleftwiththesoleburdenofcompulsorycot-
ton cultivation on their own small family fields (Penvenne 1995; Isaacman 1996; Shel-
don 2002).
