Pink Map
The Pink Map was a map prepared in 1885 to represent the Kingdom of Portugal's claim of sovereignty over a land corridor connecting the Portuguese colonies of Angola and Mozambique during the Scramble for Africa. The area claimed included most of modern-day Zimbabwe and large parts of modern-day Zambia and Malawi.
In the first half of the 19th century, Portugal held total control over only a small number of coastal settlements in Angola and Mozambique. The Portuguese also claimed suzerainty over other de facto independent towns and nominal Portuguese subjects in the Zambezi valley, but could rarely enforce its claims; most of the territory now within Angola and Mozambique was entirely independent of Portugal's control. Between 1840 and 1869, Portugal expanded the area it controlled but felt threatened by the activities of other European colonial powers in the region.
The United Kingdom refused to acknowledge Portugal's claims in Africa which were not based on effective occupation, including a Portuguese offer in 1889 to abandon their claim to a transcontinental link in exchange for British recognition of other claims. The 1890 British Ultimatum ended Portuguese claims based on the discovery doctrine and recent exploration. The dispute seriously damaged the prestige of Portugal's monarchy among the Portuguese public, which rapidly turned to republicanism.
Portuguese possessions 1800–1870
In Angola
At the start of the 19th century, effective Portuguese governance in Africa south of the equator was limited. Portuguese Angola consisted of areas around Luanda and Benguela, and a few almost independent towns over which Portugal claimed suzerainty, the most northerly being Ambriz. In the late 18th and early 19th centuries, Angola's main function within the Portuguese Empire was supplying Brazil with slaves. This was facilitated first by the development of coffee plantations in southern Brazil from the 1790s onward, and second by the 1815 and 1817 agreements between the United Kingdom and Portugal limiting—at least on paper—Portuguese slave trading to areas south of the equator. This trade diminished after Brazilian independence in 1822 and more sharply following an 1830 agreement between Britain and Brazil by which the Brazilian government prohibited further imports of slaves. To find people for export as slaves from Angolan towns, Afro-Portuguese traders penetrated as far inland as Katanga and Kazembe, but otherwise few Portuguese moved inland and they did not attempt to establish control there. When the Brazilian slave trade declined, the Portuguese began using slaves for agricultural work on plantations stretching inland from Luanda along the Cuanza River, and to a lesser extent around Benguela. After the Portuguese founded Moçâmedes, south of Benguela, in 1840 and occupied Ambriz in 1855, Portugal controlled a continuous coastal strip from Ambriz to Moçâmedes, but little inland territory. Although Portugal claimed the Congo River estuary, Britain at best accepted limited Portuguese trading rights in the Cabinda enclave north of the river, although these rights did not make Cabinda Portuguese territory.In Mozambique
Portugal had occupied parts of the Mozambique coast since the 16th century, but at the start of the 19th century Portuguese presence was limited to Mozambique Island, Ibo and Quelimane in northern Mozambique, outposts at Sena and Tete in the Zambezi valley, Sofala to the south of the Zambezi, and the port town Inhambane further south. Although Delagoa Bay was regarded as Portuguese territory, Lourenço Marques was not settled until 1781, and was temporarily abandoned after a 1796 French raid. In the late 18th century most of the people exported as slaves through Portuguese settlements in Mozambique were sent to Mauritius and Réunion, at that time both French colonies, but the Napoleonic Wars disrupted this trade, and by the early 19th century the Portuguese sent Mozambican slaves to Brazil. As was the case with Angola, slave exports declined after 1830 and were partly replaced by exports of ivory through Lourenço Marques from the 1840s onward.The nadir of Portuguese fortunes in Mozambique came in the 1830s and 1840s when Lourenço Marques was sacked in 1833 and Sofala in 1835. Zumbo was abandoned in 1836 and the Gaza Empire forced Afro-Portuguese settlers near Vila de Sena to pay tribute. Although Portugal claimed sovereignty over Angoche and a number of smaller Muslim coastal towns, these were virtually independent at the start of the 19th century. However, after Portugal renounced the slave trade, these towns continued the practice. Fearing British or French anti-slavery interventions, Portugal began bringing these towns under stricter control. Angoche resisted and fought off a Portuguese warship attempting to prevent slave trading in 1847. It took another military expedition and occupation in 1860–1 to end Angoche's slave trade.
Portugal also initiated the Prazo system of large leased estates under nominal Portuguese rule in the Zambezi valley. By the end of the 18th century, the valleys of the Zambezi and lower Shire River were controlled by a few families who claimed to be Portuguese subjects but who were virtually independent. However, starting in 1840 the Portuguese government embarked on a series of military campaigns in an attempt to bring the prazos under its control. Portuguese troops suffered several major setbacks before forcing the last prazo to submit in 1869.
In other inland areas, there was not even the pretence of Portuguese control. In the interior of what is today southern and central Mozambique, Nguni people who had entered the area from South Africa under their leader Soshangane created the Gaza Empire in the 1830s and, up to Soshangane's death in 1856, dominated southern Mozambique outside the two towns of Inhambane and Lourenço Marques. Lourenço Marques only remained in Portuguese hands in the 1840s and early 1850s because the Swazi people vied with Gaza for its control. After Soshangane's death two of his sons struggled for succession, with the eventual winner Mzila coming to power with Portuguese help in 1861. Under Mzila the centre of Gaza power moved north to central Mozambique and came into conflict with the prazo owners who were expanding south from the Zambezi valley.
As in Angola, during the 18th century Afro-Portuguese traders employed by the Mozambican prazo owners penetrated inland from the Zambezi valley as far as Kazembe in search of ivory and copper. In 1798 Francisco de Lacerda, a Portuguese officer based in Mozambique, organised an expedition from Tete to the interior hoping to reach Kazembe, but he died en route in what is now Zambia. Antonio Gamitto tried to establish commercial relations with Kazembe peoples in the upper Zambezi valley in 1831 also without success. Apart from Lacerda's expedition, none of the trading ventures into the interior from Angola or Mozambique had official status and were not attempts to bring the area between Angola and Mozambique under Portuguese control. Even Lacerda's expedition was largely commercial in purpose, although it was later declared by the Lisbon Geographical Society to have established claim to the area it covered.
Elsewhere
After Brazilian independence and the loss of most Asian territories, Portuguese colonial expansion focused on Africa. In the late 1860s Lisbon had no effective presence in the area between Angola and Mozambique, and little presence in many areas lying within the present-day borders of those countries. By the second half of the 19th century, various European powers developed an increasing interest in Africa. The first challenge to Portugal's territorial claims came from the area around Delagoa Bay. The Boers who founded the South African Republic were concerned British occupation of the bay would threaten their independence, and to prevent this they claimed their own outlet to the Indian Ocean at Delagoa Bay in 1868. Although Portugal and the Transvaal reached agreement in 1869 on a border under which all of Delagoa Bay remained Portuguese, Britain then lodged a claim to the bay's southern part. This claim was rejected in 1875 after arbitration by French President MacMahon, which upheld the 1869 borders.A further significant issue arose in the areas south and west of Lake Nyasa, which David Livingstone reached in the 1850s. In the 1860s and 1870s Anglicans and Presbyterians established several missions in the Shire Highlands, including a mission and small trading settlement founded at Blantyre in 1876. In 1878 businessmen linked to the Presbyterian missions established the African Lakes Company, which aimed to set up a trading venture that would work in close co-operation with the missions to combat the slave trade by introducing legitimate trade and to develop European influence in the area. Later, another challenge came from the foundation of a German colony at Angra Pequena in Namibia in 1883. Although there was no Portuguese presence this far south Portugal claimed the Namibian coast, being the first European nation to have visited it.
Portuguese exploration and early negotiation attempts
Though the Lacerda and Gamitto expeditions were largely commercial, the third quarter of the nineteenth century saw scientific African expeditions. The Portuguese government was suspicious of exploration by other European nations, particularly those whose leasers held an official position as Livingstone had, which their home countries could use to claim territory Portugal regarded as its own. To prevent this the Lisbon Geographical Society and the Geographical Commission of the Portuguese Ministry of Marine—at that time responsible for overseas territories as well as the navy—created a joint commission in 1875 to plan scientific expeditions to the area between Angola and Mozambique.Although Minister of Foreign Affairs Andrade Corvo doubted Portugal's ability to achieve coast-to-coast empire, he sanctioned expeditions. Portuguese soldier and explorer Alexandre de Serpa Pinto led three such expeditions through which Portugal could attempt to assert its African territorial claims. The first was from Mozambique to the eastern Zambezi in 1869, the second to the Congo River and upper Zambezi from Angola in 1876, and the last in 1877–79 crossing Africa from Angola with the intention of claiming the area between Angola and Mozambique. In 1877 Portuguese explorers Hermenegildo Capelo and Roberto Ivens led an expedition from Luanda towards the Congo basin. Capelo made a second journey from Angola to Mozambique, largely following existing trade routes, in 1884–85.
During and after the Serpa Pinto and Capelo expeditions, the Portuguese government attempted bilateral negotiations with Britain. In 1879 as part of talks on a treaty on the freedom of navigation on the Congo and Zambezi rivers and the development of trade in those river basins, Portugal formally claimed the area south and east of the Ruo River. The 1879 treaty was never ratified, and in 1882 Portugal occupied the lower Shire River valley as far as the Ruo, after which its government again asked Britain to accept this territorial claim, without success. Further bilateral negotiations led to a draft treaty in February 1884, which would have included British recognition of Portuguese sovereignty over the mouth of the Congo in exchange for freedom of navigation on the Congo and Zambezi rivers, but the Berlin Conference of 1884–85 ended these discussions which could have led to British recognition of Portuguese influence stretching across the continent. Portugal's efforts to establish a corridor of influence between Angola and Mozambique without gaining full political control were hampered by one of the articles in the General Act of the Berlin Conference requiring effective occupation of areas claimed rather than relying on historical claims based on early discovery or more recent claims based largely on exploration, as Portugal wished to use.
To validate Portuguese claims, Serpa Pinto was appointed as Portuguese consul in Zanzibar in 1884 with the mission of exploring the region between Lake Nyasa and the coast from the Zambezi to the Ruvuma River and securing the allegiance of chiefs in that area. His expedition reached Lake Nyasa and the Shire Highlands but failed to make treaties of protection with chiefs in territories west of the lake. At the northwest end of Lake Nyasa around Karonga the African Lakes Company made, or claimed to have made, treaties with local chiefs between 1884 and 1886. Its ambition was to become a chartered company and control the route from the lake along the Shire River. Its further ambition to control the Shire Highlands was given up in 1886 following protests from local missionaries that it could not police this area effectively.