both of these settings, waves of incoming Portuguese rapidly displaced long-standing mestiço (mulatto) populations, newly occupying low-level positions in the colonial bureaucracies that members of the mixed-race communities had previously held. Prior to these Portuguese arrivals, mestiços had provided invaluable service in the strapped administrative apparatuses that featured in the empire. With Lisbon unable to allocate sufficient human resources to African outposts, Portuguese men had long miscegenated with local women—a combination of libido, human nature, and administrative necessity. As such, Lisbon tolerated this form of intercultural interaction, even if it didn’t actively encourage it. The case of former footballer Hilário, who was born in 1939 in Lourenço Marques to an ethnic Chopi mother and a Portuguese father, is exemplary of these types of scenarios. He explained that his mother “was one of those who have tattoos on the face and on the belly. It was a style that was very beautiful and she had luck with boyfriends. . . . My mother came from Manhiça to the city [roughly 100 kilometers separate Manhiça and Lourenço Marques]. . . . She was a very beautiful girl.”4 Indeed, it was from these mixed-race communities that many of the most prominent members of the community of footballing migrants, Hilário included, emerged.
With the overthrow in 1926 of the Republic of Portugal, a short-lived government that itself had come to power only after toppling the Portuguese monarchy in 1910, the colonies were increasingly eyed as sources of revenue rather than as spaces to develop. With the emergence of the corporatist, authoritarian Estado Novo in 1933, expenditures for the empire were slashed while Lisbon continued to squeeze whatever revenues it could from the territories. With the advent of the new regime, the relative fiscal and political autonomy that the colonies had enjoyed under the republic came to an abrupt end; power was increasingly centralized. As part of the broader political and economic calculus of the Estado Novo (1933–1974), the regime facilitated the relocation of thousands of Portuguese to the colonies, in part to rid the metropole of under- or unemployed members of the population, but also to stimulate the colonial economies, such that the settler communities in both Angola and Mozambique grew more than tenfold between 1930 and 1970.5
Providing a complementary ideophilosophical justification for overseas Portuguese settlement, in the early 1950s the Estado Novo regime formally embraced the Brazilian sociologist Gilberto Freyre’s concept of Lusotropicalism to further explicate the relationship between the Portuguese and the constituent peoples of the empire. Freyre theorized that the prevalence of mixed-race individuals in areas Portugal had colonized was attributable to a form of inherent racial and cultural tolerance that the Portuguese, as a people, uniquely embodied and exhibited. After initially distancing the Estado Novo from Lusotropicalismo on racialist grounds following its promulgation in the 1930s, António de Oliveira Salazar, the dictator who durably ruled Portugal from 1932 to 1968, eventually adopted it as official state ideology. Salazar invoked the theory to justify empire, even if the exploitative treatment of both blacks and mestiços in the colonies experientially undermined any veracity that the dubious concept might have contained.
Even as the regime self-righteously promoted Lusotropicalism to defend its perpetuation of empire, Portugal couldn’t prevent the “winds of change” from blowing across the continent, inaugurated by England’s decolonization of its Gold Coast colony (Ghana) in 1957. By the 1960s, these breezes had turned to gusts, with a steady succession of colonies transitioning to independent states. Yet, while the British, French, and Belgians all abandoned their African colonial projects, Portugal’s dictatorship clung ever more tightly to empire. In a bid to stress the indivisibility of the colonies and the metropole, in 1951 the regime recast these possessions as “overseas provinces,” signifying that they were as integral to Portugal as were the various regions of the metropole. This obstinacy and artifice did not, however, come without cost. With colonial empires rapidly disappearing, Portugal’s political stance was becoming increasingly anachronistic. Moreover, the global left, which by the 1960s also featured a large number of newly independent African states, was openly condemning Portugal for its resolute preservation of the empire and, more specifically, the racist policies in force in its colonies. Even staunch allies of Portugal, such as the United States, were privately imploring Lisbon to relax statutory controls in the empire. In another blow to the regime, the Indian army forcibly annexed the historic Portuguese colony of Goa on the western coast of the subcontinent in 1961; protestations were all the enfeebled Iberian state could muster.
The early 1960s constituted an ominous time for Portugal and its empire. In February 1961, the Angolan war for independence commenced, followed shortly thereafter by nationalist eruptions in Guiné (1963) and Mozambique (1964). These three conflicts would each rage for over a decade, with the Portuguese conceding the most territory in Guiné. With mounting numbers of Portuguese conscripts losing life or limb while fighting in the African bush, the increasingly unpopular wars were crippling an already teetering state. Finally, in 1974, a group of mid-level army officers, tapping the sentiments of the war-weary Portuguese citizenry, staged a largely bloodless coup that toppled the Estado Novo state and thereby ended the colonial conflicts almost immediately, paving the way for the independence of the African territories. Portugal’s colonial adventure on the continent had finally come to an end.
Daily Life in Portugal’s African Colonies
Following the consolidation of control in Portugal’s imperial claims in Africa at the end of the nineteenth century and, in more resistive, “troublesome” spots in these territories in the early twentieth century, indigenous residents newly operated in environments marked by racial violence and exploitation. Consistent with other imperial European nations active in Africa, Portugal’s colonial project was predicated on racial and cultural superiority, cloaked in an altruistic “civilizing mission.” For African subjects, the key elements of this “mission” included the imposition of taxes, the implementation of forced labor schemes, and the daily threat of violence for any actual or perceived incompliance. Africans’ labor was vital for the generation of revenues, but the local populations otherwise constituted nothing more than burdens for a metropole that lacked the resources to develop its colonial possessions, though the realization of widespread social improvements was never a genuine objective for the regime anyway.
Over time, influxes of Portuguese settlers saw sleepy colonial outposts transformed into vibrant urban destinations, most profoundly in Angola and Mozambique. Consequently, the capital cities of Luanda and Lourenço Marques (Maputo), respectively, eventually featured “concrete” city centers populated exclusively by settlers, and concentric rings of suburbs in which black Africans, mestiços, and, complicating this otherwise steadfast racial configuration, poor white settlers resided, though the latter’s numbers were comparatively small. The residents of these hardscrabble suburban or peri-urban areas were typically impoverished and vulnerable, but far from destitute. Testimony from Hilário captures both the tenuousness and the resilience of life in the (Lourenço Marques) suburbs: “Poverty was normal. We had our houses of wood and zinc, we fed ourselves with flour and rice and fish and prawns. . . . There wasn’t so much misery that we would go hungry. No, we lived well within the possibilities that we had.”6 Urban centers in Portugal’s other African colonies, such as Bissau (the capital of Guinea-Bissau) and Praia (Cape Verde’s capital city), featured degrees of social and economic variance due to their smaller settler populations, but the racial conventions that prevailed in Angola and Mozambique similarly applied in these settings.
Following the overthrow of the Portuguese republic in 1926 and the implementation of Salazar’s authoritarian Estado Novo regime soon thereafter, the colonies became even more commercially friendly. Owing to a spate of new policies that reduced Africans to legally marginalized and (violently) exploitable colonial subjects, in rural areas settlers and private enterprises could newly access cheap, bound indigenous labor. Only by achieving assimilado (assimilated) status could Africans in the colonies escape existence as indígenas, a legal and social designation that rendered them extremely vulnerable. Yet the passage to formal assimilation was open to only a scant few. In 1950 in Angola, for example, only 1.38 percent of the over four million Africans and mestiços enjoyed this status, and if the
