Roberts A.D. The Cambridge History of Africa, Volume 7: from 1905 to 1940
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ANGOLA
difficulties when in 1908 the Belgians agreed instead to link the
copper-mines to the Rhodesian railway system and the port of
Beira, but by 1912 the Benguela line had reached Nova Lisboa
(Huambo), which was envisaged as a centre for white settlement
on the Ovimbundu plateau. Meanwhile, a railway had been
advancing slowly inland from Mossamedes since 1905.
The railways were soon to play a large part in freeing Angola
from dependence on the failing rubber trade. But in the first
decade of the twentieth century it was far from clear what could
replace it. During the nineteenth century, a white plantation
economy had grown up, based on coffee, sugar and cotton, but
export prices for these had slumped; besides, most white planters
and farmers were far from efficient. Coffee output steadily
declined from 1895 to 1916, and the 4,000 tons exported in 1910
had all been gathered by Africans from bushes growing wild.
Sugar-growing persisted, but in
a
perverted form; planters mostly
abandoned the export trade in favour of making rum for local,
and especially African, consumption. For the rest, the main hope
of survival in the short run lay in the market for goods and
services created by military campaigns, which between 1904 and
1911 may have cost nearly £im. Besides, it was precisely the
poverty of white settlers which created local 'shortages' of
labour: few could afford to pay wages sufficient to attract African
workers of their own free will. Thus new conquests raised hopes
of access to fresh supplies of cheap labour. It had long been
customary for district officials and chiefs to supplement their
income by conscripting labour for private employers, and taxation
provided a further mechanism of compulsion.
In the far south, Portuguese expansion was also stimulated by
the activities of German traders and missionaries. The Ovambo
nearest the Cunene river were subdued in 1905—7; in 1908 a
military expedition set up posts along the German frontier as far
east as the Caprivi Strip. The economy of Ovamboland had
already been ravaged by rinderpest, in
1897,
and by drought, flood
and locusts. The imposition of hut-tax in 1907 drove both
Ovambo and Nkhumbi to work for wages, while Kwanyama
chiefs, though still independent, made contracts with white
recruiters for the seasonal export of their subjects. Many Ovambo
went south to mine copper or diamonds in German territory, but
up to 1915 perhaps 2,000 each year worked on railways in Angola,
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though they avoided plantations and coastal fisheries. In the
northern hinterland, the Dembo, crippled by sleeping-sickness,
were subdued between 1907 and 1910; in the far north-west,
hut-tax was imposed in 1906 on the Kongo, who resisted violently
over the next five years.
The extraction of labour in Angola, whether for export or for
local use, had for several years been fiercely criticised by resident
missionaries, notably the Baptists in the north, and by visitors who
included the journalist H. W. Nevinson and the cocoa manu-
facturer W. A. Cadbury. The republican government which took
office in Lisbon in
1910
quickly showed some concern, but chiefly
in response to the conflicting interests of white business in
Angola, the cocoa islands and Portugal. A new governor-general,
Coelho, was sent out
to
Angola, and as
a
concession to local whites
he suspended labour recruitment to the cocoa islands for three
years.
In
1911,
however, rum production in Angola
was
outlawed,
after pressure from the wine trade in Lisbon; planters were offered
subsidies to switch from sugar to cotton but were mostly deterred
by inadequate transport. In the same year, labour contracts were
limited to two years and penalties prescribed for employers who
assaulted their workers. But in 1912 Coelho resigned in protest
against continued labour abuses, while the governor of Mossa-
medes, who had also spoken out against them, was removed after
intrigue by local settlers and traders. The new governor-general,
Jose Norton de Matos (1912-15), set himself to replace forced
labour by free labour, but his achievement was largely rhetorical;
if the supply of labour increased, it was due less to improved
conditions than to the decline of the rubber trade and droughts
which afflicted the south in
1911
and
1914-15.
Besides, recruitment
to Sao Tome was resumed in 1913.
Norton de Matos was less effective as a protector of African
workers than as an enemy of those few thousand blacks and
coloured people with
civili^ado
status. In 1911, just before his
arrival, the government had raised the standards for entry to the
upper ranks of the civil service; this handicapped candidates from
Angola and by 1913 most new appointments were made in
Portugal. This was bitterly resented by the
civili^ado
group, and
a number of them, mostly civil servants, formed a Liga Angolana
in 1912 to press for further employment opportunities, equal civil
rights and better access to education. Within a year, Norton de
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Matos had shut down the press in Angola, and in 1914 he exiled
A. J. Miranda, a leader of the Liga, to the Cabinda enclave. The
trend towards racial segregation, in fact if not in name, was
underlined in 1913 when Norton created a Department of Native
Affairs. Its practical importance was very limited, since it lacked
the means to achieve its grandiose ends, but it was a sign of
growing white determination to prevent Africans gaining access
to European civilisation.
The conquest of the far interior continued by slow degrees. In
the north-east, military rule was extended in 1910-11 to Mahungo
and Kasanje, along the Kwango river. In 1912 an attempt was
made to levy tax in the remotest district, Moxico, where a convict
settlement had been set up in 1895; this met with firm resistance
and for many years the district remained largely beyond Portu-
guese control. In 1913 there was a rising in the former Kongo
kingdom against forced labour; it was led by a Catholic
chief,
Alvaro Buta, who called for the removal of the Kongo king and
burned down the old capital, Sao Salvador. Buta was captured in
1915 but resistance continued further east until 1918.
By this time, the First World War had given fresh impetus to
'pacification'. Late in
1914
there were clashes between Portuguese
and German forces at Naulila. The German surrender to South
Africa in May 1915 left the way clear for the Portuguese to
complete their conquest of the Ovambo, notably the Kwanyama,
tens of thousands of whom had starved to death in recent years
due to epidemics and natural disasters. The urgent labour needs
of the Katanga copper-mines, under the stress of war, led to the
recruitment of men from Moxico in 1917-20, though their
conditions in the mines were so dreadful that many deserted and
some fled into Northern Rhodesia. Between 1917 and 1920 the
vast Lunda region east of the Kwango was finally occupied. On
the whole, the world war had the effect of consolidating the white
presence in Angola. The white population grew from about
13,000 in 1913 to nearly 21,000 in 1920; it had been swollen by
soldiers demobilised after wars of' pacification' and by the arrival
of civil servants with their families. Meanwhile, the war also
stimulated African production. Exports of maize tripled in bulk
between 1914 and 1918, and mostly reached the coast by the
Benguela railway; the proceeds helped to offset the collapse of the
rubber trade.
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I92O-I94O
During the first few years after the war, the economy of Angola
finally began to give promise of growth. There was no marked
increase in external trade, but the basis was laid for later
expansion. The pre-war decay of European agricultural pro-
duction was now made good, at least for the time being, by
Africans. Most coffee was still gathered wild, but from 1920 coffee
exports began to rise in response both to closer administration
and to the post-war boom: in 1924 they exceeded the 1895 peak
of 11,000 tons. During the 1920s, coffee was usually the most
valuable export; it was followed either by maize or by a wholly
new commodity. In 1912 a diamond had been found in Lunda
country; mining began in 1916 and exports in 1920. By this time
the area had been brought under Portuguese rule, but the real
power was the Companhia de Diamantes de Angola (Diamang).
This was formed in 1920 as an offshoot of Forminiere in the
Belgian Congo, and the government took a 5 per cent share-
holding. Diamang
was
exempted from taxes and duties on imports
of capital equipment; and in 1921 it was given prospecting rights
for thirty years over most of Angola. Diamang launched a
recruiting scheme throughout the colony and soon had a work-
force of 10,000. Its early success alarmed the diamond trade in
South Africa; in 1922 Anglo American bought a 16 per cent
interest in Diamang and made an agreement limiting Diamang's
sales on the open market; the London Diamond Syndicate
contracted to buy up to 125,000 carats annually.
Meanwhile there was a notable expansion of public works.
From 1921 the Angola government had the power to raise loans,
and Norton de Matos, who returned as high commissioner, lost
no time in doing so. Plans were drawn up for the government
to spend
£13111,
chiefly on ports, railways and the promotion of
white colonisation. During the next few years the quay at Lobito
was
extended; new branches were added to the government-owned
railway from Luanda; and the road network on the plateau was
much enlarged. Nine thousand settlers were brought out from
Portugal, and by 1924 the white population had risen to 36,000.
Private enterprise also made heavy investments in Angola.
Belgian and American capital joined in drilling for oil in the far
north between 1918 and
1931,
though with negligible
success.
The
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Mossamedes railway finally reached Sa de Bandeira (Lubango) in
1923,
and a line was built a short distance inland from Amboim
between 1921 and 1928, to serve coffee plantations. In 1923 work
was resumed on the Benguela railway. For a while it faced new
financial problems: Smuts feared it as a future rival to the
Rhodesia lines, which he hoped to include in a greater South
Africa, and in
1921
he had persuaded Britain to refuse to guarantee
a debenture issue by the Benguela railway company. But Smuts
fell from power in 1924 and Robert Williams began once again
to raise funds to complete the line.
Norton de Matos's ambitious deficit-financing was prompted
by his determination to create in Angola a climate favourable to
the profit motive; so too was his continuing crusade to establish
free wage labour. Once more, however, he failed to achieve this
by decree. He had some success in controlling the flow of workers
to Sao Tome, which had revived after the war and numbered over
5,000
men in 1919. But by enforcing the repatriation of such
workers after one contract, Norton mainly served the interests of
employers within Angola; in any case the price of labour there
remained abysmally low. The widespread production of export
crops by Africans did not represent much advance in economic
bargaining power. Coffee was ungraded, so the price to the
producer was minimal, as was that for maize.
14
The condition of
Africans was still further depressed — as Norton himself
acknowledged — by cheap liquor. What little money they earned
was spent, not on bicycles, sewing-machines or school fees but
on local rum or imported wine and spirits: it has been reckoned
that between 1919 and 1923 Angola imported between 22 and 25
times more alcohol
per capita
than French or British West Africa.
15
It must also be noted that, for all his liberal economic
aspirations, the whole tenor of Norton's regime was decidedly
authoritarian; in several ways it prefigured the age of Salazar.
Ironically, the arena of political discussion was formally widened
just before his arrival: in 1921 a legislative council was set up in
Luanda, comprising government officials and elected represen-
tatives of the main towns and various sectional interests. The latter
14
In 1928, when the export price for maize was relatively high, it was reckoned that
450 kilos had to be sold to pay taxes for one family: T. A. Barns, Angolan sketches
(London, 1928), 103.
15
G. J. Bender, Angola under the
Portuguese
(London, 1978), 146.
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included both the Liga Angolana and another
civili^ado
group, the
Gremio Africano. Early in 1922, however, both groups were
banned, largely as a result of protests by a coloured magistrate,
Antonio de Assis Junior, against forced labour and the confiscation
of African farmland around Golungo Alto. Assis Junior and many
other black or coloured civil servants and journalists were
deported, while several were gaoled. Norton de Matos also
checked the aspirations of
civili^ados
by creating separate branches
in the civil service for Europeans and Africans. Meanwhile, he
took various measures designed to strengthen Portugal's hold
over both whites and blacks. He discouraged German immig-
ration, and new restrictions on landholding by foreigners com-
pounded the difficulties of the Boers in the south, who had already
lost a major occupation, transport-riding, as military campaigns
ceased and railways were extended. Foreign missionaries were also
attacked: printing in African languages and teaching in European
languages other than Portuguese were forbidden. Several Euro-
pean associations were banned by Norton de Matos, essentially
because he feared the aspirations of settlers towards autonomy or
even independence. Finally, Norton tightened the grip of
Portuguese bureaucracy over the African population. Civilian
officials replaced army officers in outlying districts and their
numbers were much increased. Henceforward, the ruler of rural
Angola was the
chefe
deposto;
chiefs lost their judicial roles and
became mainly tax-gatherers and labour-recruiters, while
a
massive
programme of resettlement in new villages broke up old patterns
of ethnic association and sought to prevent contact between rural
Africans and the
civili^ado
clerk or trader.
In June 1924 Norton de Matos was forced to resign. In part,
this was due to intrigues by settlers who opposed his labour
policies, but it was also due to a financial crisis in Angola.
Government borrowing had led to rapid inflation of both
currency and credit; this encouraged speculation which soon
forced the government's bankers to cease their loans. Angola's
crisis was briefly exploited by Alves Reis, who in 1925 founded
a new bank for Angola on the strength of banknotes obtained by
fraud. In May 1926 the Portuguese Republic came to an end, and
the new government soon set up a semi-public Bank of Angola
with a near-monopoly in the colony; its operations were largely
confined to the issue of currency. However, the Angola govern-
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ment was already saddled with a very large debt; in 1928 this
amounted to £5.6m, more than half of which was owed to the
Portuguese government. Interest payments were postponed, for
the economy was scarcely able to support this burden. Between
1924 and 1929 the only exports to increase in volume were those
of maize and diamonds. The diamonds, which by 1929 were the
most valuable export, were all sold in Belgium, but up to 1927
Portugal bought well over half Angola's exports, including
almost all its sugar and cotton; Germany bought a great deal of
maize in 1928-9, when total exports were reckoned to be worth
£2.6m. The shipment of African produce was assisted by further
work on the Benguela railway, which reached the Congo border
in 1927; on the other hand, most of the remaining Boers in the
south accepted the Union government's invitation in 1928 to
return to South Africa.
There was no marked change in Angola's economy between
Salazar's accession to power in 1928 and the Second World War.
Salazar's own caution, and the effects of the world depression,
combined to inhibit further growth until the late 1930s. Diamonds
continued to be the principal export, accounting for between
a quarter and a third of the total value. Output rose steadily until
1934,
when it was limited by agreement with the Syndicate; it was
then about one-tenth that of the Kasai diamond fields across the
Belgian frontier. Belgian financial interests continued to increase
their control of enterprises in Angola, not only in diamond-mining
but in cotton and coffee plantations. But such investment in
agriculture was slow to show results. There was no significant
increase during the 1930s in exports of maize or coffee. This was
partly due to factors which held back African production else-
where: lack of capital and technical innovation, and progress-
ive soil exhaustion. Much coffee was still collected rather than
grown; sales were also handicapped by plant disease and by the
continuing failure to grade the crop effectively, both of which
gave Angolan coffee a bad name. Sugar exports began to recover
from the low levels of the late 1920s, due to imperial protection
from Portugal, and compulsory schemes pushed up exports of
African-grown cotton, though for no commensurate return; sisal
began to make a modest contribution. In 1931 the Benguela
railway finally reached the Katanga mines and until 1940 carried
between one-fifth and one-quarter of their copper exports: in
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PORTUGUESE AFRICA
effect, the traffic thus gained by Lobito was lost by Beira" and the
Mozambique Company.
Superficially, Angola in the late 1930s was not an especially
backward colony. Investment per
capita
may have been higher
than in any other territory between the Zambezi and the Sahara,
except for the Belgian Congo. In relation to total population,
Angola's external trade in
193 5
may well have been more valuable
than that of Nigeria or the Belgian Congo.
16
There was nothing
very remarkable about the lack of local industries for processing
exports, or for manufactures. By African standards, however,
both Angola and Mozambique, like the Belgian Congo, showed
a poor return in the shape of external trade for capital investments,
public and private. And there were obvious differences between
the Portuguese territories and the Belgian Congo. In the latter,
massive investment had been geared, among other things, to the
production and transport of a major export, copper, which was
valued by industrial economies. There was no such congruence
between Angola's railways and harbours and its exports (indeed,
its diamonds were exported through the Congo), while huge sums
had been spent in the vain search for oil. Moreover, there had
been, in the Portuguese territories, scarcely any investment in
manpower, in the form of education and social services for even
a part of the African population: the only significant exception
was the diamond zone in north-eastern Angola, where Diamang
enjoyed virtual autonomy and fought sleeping-sickness through
a network of hospitals and first-aid posts. By and large, Africans
in Angola continued to
be
gravely enfeebled by
sickness,
ignorance
and alcohol: imports of Portuguese wine were if anything greater
in the 1930s than in the previous decade. At the same time, the
real cost of living for Africans, which in Luanda at least may have
risen by 75 per cent between 1913 and
1933,
l7
was further raised
by new restrictions, from
1931,
on non-Portuguese imports. Over
the decade, African real earnings, whether from wages or crop
sales,
declined even below the levels of the 1920s. In 1930—3 the
country suffered not only from trade depression but from terrible
droughts and locust invasions: in 1934 Luanda was described in
a local newspaper as a population of'living skeletons'.
18
It was
16
S. H. Frankel, Capital
investment
in Africa (London, 1938),
202-3,
1O
T>
c
^- '7°-
17
F. C. C. Egerton, Angola
in perspective
(London, 1957), 108.
18
Jill Dias, 'Famine and disease in the history of Angola, c. 1830-1930',
Journal of
African History, 1981, 22, 3, 377.
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ANGOLA
hard for Africans in Angola to escape intolerable poverty by
emigrating, for the South Africans offered no refuge and the
Belgians were reluctant hosts, but between 1919 and 1934 perhaps
3-4,000
people from Angola annually settled in the north-west
of Northern Rhodesia, while in 1932-3 many also migrated there
in search of work.
Meanwhile the government had to reduce its expenditure.
From 1930 the budget was balanced, but only by postponing
payment of interest on the public debt, which thus rose to £8.7m
by 1937. There were cut-backs in staff and salaries. The diamond
industry provided the state, as a shareholder, with a small but
growing income, and also with loans. The improvement of trade
after 1935 encouraged some expansion. In 1936 a development
loan of £1.8m was authorised, but offers of assistance to new white
settlers met with little response; a settlement scheme financed by
the Benguela railway company in
1935—7
was no more successful.
In 1940 the white population had risen, mostly by natural increase,
to 44,000; of these one-third lived in the coastal cities and only
4,300 on farms, compared with 10,000 self-styled traders. Thus
in terms of occupation the white population resembled the Asians
rather than the whites of East Africa. And it was still rather less
than the
civili^ado
population, which in 1940 included 23,200
coloured and 24,000 blacks.
The political aspirations of Angolan residents, already checked
by Norton de Matos, were further curbed under the Estado Novo.
In 1926 the legislative council was replaced by a merely advisory
council which (as in Mozambique) comprised five officials and five
nominated non-officials who had to be Portuguese citizens. In
1928—30 the leadership of the civili^ados was emasculated
by large-scale deportations. Literate African protest survived
primarily in the Liga Nacional Africana: this was dominated by
coloured Catholic civil servants in Luanda but in 1938 it presented
the government with a wide-ranging statement of African
grievances, including
a
request to be represented in the governor's
advisory council.
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PORTUGUESE AFRICA
SAO TOME AND PRINCIPE
The volcanic islands of Sao Tome and Principe in the Gulf of
Guinea were governed as a separate province.
19
By the end of the
nineteenth century, both islands were mainly devoted to the
production of cocoa and coffee. These crops were grown on
plantations which were mostly owned by banks, companies or
private individuals resident in Lisbon. The plantations were
largely autonomous; many had a sea frontage and handled the
shipment of both exports and imports. The labour was provided
by imported contract workers, both men and women. In 1900
there were around 20,000 such workers on Sao Tome and 3,000
on Principe. Their lives were entirely bounded by the plantation
on which they worked; they were housed in barracks and bought
only from the plantation store. There was also a substantial
population of free islanders: about 18,000 on Sao Tome and 1,000
on Principe. Most of these were descended from plantation slaves
who had been freed in the 1870s, but some belonged to the
long-independent community of' Angolares' formed by castaways
in the seventeenth century. The Angolares, who were clustered
on the south-east coast of Sao Tome, contributed casual labour
to the plantations, but the other free islanders avoided such work
and in any case were not allowed to squat on unused plantation
land. Instead, they made a precarious living from their own small
plots,
from fishing, and from trade with contract workers: in 1905
a Portuguese complained, 'The freeman is a parasite on the
plantation; he lives from what he robs from it and furnishes spirits
to the workers in exchange for cocoa, coffee and bananas, and,
what is even worse, in exchange for the rations which the worker
receives from his boss for his maintenance, for the worker gives
everything he has and everything he can rob in exchange for
brandy. '
20
Up to 1914 the plantation owners did very well. Coffee was of
marginal and decreasing importance after 1900, but exports of
cocoa rose from 11,48
2
tonnes in 1900 to a peak of 3
6,5
00
in 1913
— around 15 per cent of world output. Some plantations yielded
10
It also included a tiny enclave in Whydah, a port in Dahomey; this was the fort of
Sao Joao Baptista de Ajuda, a relic of the slave trade.
20
H. de Mendonca, A Ro(a
Boa
Estrada (Lisbon, 1905), 45, quoted in E. J. de Carvalho
e Vasconcellos, Sao Tomt e Principe (Lisbon, 1918), 88.
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