Portuguese Colonial War
The Portuguese Colonial War, also known in Portugal as the Overseas War or in the former colonies as the War of Liberation, and also known as the Angolan, Guinea-Bissau and Mozambican Wars of Independence, was a 13-year-long conflict fought between Portugal's military and the emerging nationalist movements in Portugal's African colonies between 1961 and 1974. The Portuguese regime at the time, the Estado Novo, was overthrown by a military coup in 1974, and the change in government brought the conflict to an end. The war was a decisive ideological struggle in Lusophone Africa, surrounding nations, and mainland Portugal.
Unlike other European nations during the 1950s and 1960s, the Portuguese Estado Novo regime did not withdraw from its African territories. During the 1960s, various armed independence movements became active such as the People's Movement for the Liberation of Angola, National Liberation Front of Angola, National Union for the Total Independence of Angola, African Party for the Independence of Guinea and Cape Verde, and the Mozambique Liberation Front. During the ensuing conflict, atrocities were committed by all forces involved. Throughout the period, Portugal faced increasing dissent, arms embargoes, and other punitive sanctions imposed by the international community, including by some Western Bloc governments, either intermittently or continuously. The anti-colonial guerrillas and movements of Portuguese Africa were heavily supported with money, weapons, training and diplomatic lobbying by the Communist Bloc which had the Soviet Union as its lead nation. By 1973, the war had become increasingly unpopular due to its length and financial costs, the worsening of diplomatic relations with other United Nations members, and the role it had always played as a factor of perpetuation of the entrenched Estado Novo regime and the nondemocratic status quo in Portugal.
The end of the war came with the Carnation Revolution military coup of April 1974 in mainland Portugal. The withdrawal resulted in the expulsion of hundreds of thousands of Portuguese citizens plus military personnel of European, African, and mixed ethnicity from the former Portuguese territories and newly independent African nations. This migration is regarded as one of the largest peaceful, if forced, migrations in the world's history, although most of the migrants fled the former Portuguese territories as destitute refugees.
The former Portuguese territories in Africa became sovereign states, with Agostinho Neto in Angola, Samora Machel in Mozambique, Luís Cabral in Guinea-Bissau, Manuel Pinto da Costa in São Tomé and Príncipe, and Aristides Pereira in Cape Verde as the heads of state. Devastating civil wars followed in Angola and Mozambique, which lasted several decades, claimed millions of lives, and resulted in large numbers of displaced refugees. Angola and Mozambique established state-planned economies after independence, and struggled with inefficient judicial systems and bureaucracies, corruption, poverty and unemployment. A level of social order and economic development comparable to what had existed under Portuguese rule, including during the period of the Colonial War, became the goal of the independent territories.
Political context
15th century
When the Portuguese began trading on the west coast of Africa in the 15th century, they concentrated their energies on Guinea and Angola. Hoping at first for gold, they soon found that slaves were the most valuable commodity available in the region for export. The Islamic Empire was already well-established in the African slave trade, for centuries linking it to the Arab slave trade. However, the Portuguese who had conquered the Islamic port of Ceuta in 1415, and several other towns in current-day Morocco in a Crusade against Islamic neighbors, managed to successfully establish themselves in the area.In Guinea, rival European powers had established control over the trade routes in the region, while local African rulers confined the Portuguese to the coast. These rulers then sent enslaved Africans to the Portuguese ports, or to forts in Africa from where they were exported. Thousands of kilometers down the coast, in Angola, the Portuguese found consolidating their early advantage in establishing hegemony over the region even harder, due to the encroachment of Dutch traders. Nevertheless, the fortified Portuguese towns of Luanda and Benguela remained almost continuously in Portuguese hands.
As in Guinea, the slave trade became the basis of the local economy in Angola. Excursions traveled ever farther inland to procure captives who were sold by African rulers; the primary source of these slaves were those captured as a result of losing a war or interethnic skirmish with other African tribes. More than a million men, women, and children were shipped from Angola across the Atlantic. In this region, unlike Guinea, the trade remained largely in Portuguese hands. Nearly all the slaves were destined for the Portuguese colony of Brazil.
In Mozambique, reached in the 15th century by Portuguese sailors searching for a maritime spice trade route, the Portuguese settled along the coast and made their way into the hinterland as sertanejos. These sertanejos lived alongside Swahili traders and even obtained employment among Shona kings as interpreters and political advisers. One such sertanejo managed to travel through almost all the Shona kingdoms, including the Mutapa Empire's metropolitan district, between 1512 and 1516.
By the 1530s, small bands of Portuguese traders and prospectors penetrated the interior regions seeking gold, where they set up garrisons and trading posts at Sena and Tete on the Zambezi River and tried to establish a monopoly over the gold trade. The Portuguese finally entered into direct relations with the Mwenemutapa in the 1560s. However, the Portuguese traders and explorers settled in the coastal strip with greater success, and established strongholds safe from their main rivals in East Africa – the Omani Arabs, including those of Zanzibar.
Scramble for Africa and the World Wars
Portugal's colonial claim to the region was recognized by the other European powers during the 1880s, during the Scramble for Africa, and the final boundaries of Portuguese Africa were agreed by negotiation in Europe in 1891. At the time, Portugal was in effective control of little more than the coastal strip of both Angola and Mozambique, but important inroads into the interior had been made since the first half of the 19th century. In Angola, construction of a railway from Luanda to Malanje, in the fertile highlands, was started in 1885.Work began in 1903 on a commercially significant line from Benguela all the way inland to the Katanga region, aiming to provide access to the sea for the richest mining district of the Belgian Congo. The line reached the Congo border in 1928. In 1914, both Angola and Mozambique had Portuguese army garrisons of around 2,000 men, African troops led by European officers. With the outbreak of World War I in 1914, Portugal sent reinforcements to both colonies, because the fighting in the neighboring German African colonies was expected to spill over the borders into its territories.
After Germany declared war on Portugal in March 1916, the Portuguese government sent more reinforcements to Mozambique. These troops supported British, South African and Belgian military operations against German colonial forces in German East Africa. In December 1917, German colonial forces led by Colonel Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck invaded Mozambique from German East Africa. Portuguese, British and Belgian forces spent all of 1918 chasing Lettow-Vorbeck and his men across Mozambique, German East Africa and Northern Rhodesia. Portugal sent a total of 40,000 reinforcements to Angola and Mozambique during World War I.
By this time, the regime in Portugal had been through two major political upheavals—from monarchy to republic in 1910 and then to a military dictatorship after a coup in 1926. These changes resulted in a tightening of Portuguese control in Angola. In the early years of the expanded colony, near-constant warfare was occurring between the Portuguese and the various African rulers of the region. A systematic campaign of conquest and pacification was undertaken by the Portuguese. One by one, the local kingdoms were overwhelmed and abolished.
By the middle of the 1920s, the whole of Angola was under control. Slavery had officially ended in Portuguese Africa, but the plantations were worked on a system of paid serfdom by African labour composed of the large majority of ethnic Africans who did not have resources to pay Portuguese taxes and were considered unemployed by the authorities. After World War II and the first decolonization events, this system gradually declined, but paid forced labor, including labor contracts with forced relocation of people, continued in many regions of Portuguese Africa until it was finally abolished in 1961.
Post-World War II
In the late 1950s, the Portuguese Armed Forces saw themselves confronted with the paradox generated by the dictatorial regime of the Estado Novo that had been in power since 1933; on one hand, the policy of Portuguese neutrality in World War II placed the Portuguese Armed Forces out of the way of a possible East-West conflict; on the other, the regime felt the increased responsibility of keeping Portugal's vast overseas territories under control and protecting the citizenry there. Portugal joined NATO as a founding member in 1949, and was integrated within the various fledgling military commands of NATO.NATO's focus on preventing a conventional Soviet attack against Western Europe was to the detriment of military preparations against guerrilla uprisings in Portugal's overseas provinces that were considered essential for the survival of the nation. The integration of Portugal in NATO resulted in the formation of a military élite who were critical in the planning and implementation of operations during the Overseas War. This "NATO generation" ascended quickly to the highest political positions and military command without having to provide evidence of loyalty to the regime.
The Colonial War established a split between the military structure – heavily influenced by the western powers with democratic governments – and the political power of the regime. Some analysts see the "Botelho Moniz coup" of 1961 against the Portuguese government and backed by the U.S. administration, as the beginning of this rupture, the origin of a lapse on the part of the regime to keep up a unique command center, an armed force prepared for threats of conflict in the colonies. This situation caused, as was verified later, a lack of coordination between the three general staffs.
The FNLA, which was headed by Holden Roberto, attacked Portuguese settlers and Africans living in northern Angola from its bases in Congo-Léopoldville. Many of the victims were African farm workers living under labor contracts that required seasonal relocation from the desertified Southwest and Bailundo areas of Angola. Photos of Africans killed by the FLNA, which included photos of decapitated civilians, men, women and children of both white and black ethnicity, was later displayed in the UN by Portuguese diplomats. The emergence of labor strikes, attacks by newly organized guerrilla movements, and the Santa Maria hijacking by Henrique Galvão began a path to open warfare in Angola.
According to historical researchers such as José Freire Antunes, U.S. President John F. Kennedy sent a message to President António de Oliveira Salazar advising Portugal to abandon its African colonies shortly after the outbreak of violence in 1961. Instead, after a coup led by pro-U.S. forces failed to depose him, Salazar consolidated power and immediately sent reinforcements to the overseas territories, setting the stage for continued conflict in Angola. Similar situations played out in other overseas Portuguese territories.