ABSTRACT
As an imperial power, Portugal encountered numerous difficulties in seeking to integrate its African colonial territories (Angola, Moçambique, Guinea-Bissau, Cape Verde, Säo Tomé, and Principé) into the empire and the body of metropolitan (geo)politics (Sidaway and Power 2005). The colonial wars fought in Africa by Portugal between 1961 and 1974 were “long, useless, unjust and costly” (Medina 1999, 149), involving nearly one million Portuguese troops (roughly one in five adult men) of which more than thirty thousand were wounded in action (Borges-Coelho 2002). Funding the conflicts cost Portugal close to half of its GNP since it was in Africa that the most substantive and direct challenges arose to Portuguese imperialism with violent uprisings, popular insurrections, and nationalist revolutions rippling out across the continent, involving the peoples of “Portuguese Africa” and Portuguese settlers and conscripts. In Mozambique, for example, the Frente de Libertação de Moçambique (FRELIMO), formed in exile in Tanzania in 1962 from an amalgam of resistance groups, launched a guerrilla war for independence on September 25, 1964. In Angola, a nationalist uprising broke out in Luanda in 1961, and out of a maelstrom of nationalist politics and ideological and ethnonational divisions, three modern nationalist movements emerged: the Movimento Popular de Libertacão de Angola (MPLA), the Frente Nacional de Libertacão de Angola (FNLA), and the União Nacional para a Independência Total de Angola (UNITA).
